Burial Ground

VI

10:56 p.m.

Sam's eyes widened in horror as Merritt hurriedly explained Galen's plan. Were they out of their minds? She couldn't fathom the possibility that these evolutionary aberrations hunted solely with their eyes. But what were their other alternatives? She raced through them in her mind, playing out scenarios that all ended with violent and painful deaths.

Without making a conscious decision to do so, she slowly crouched beside Merritt and lay down on her back. In the weak glow, she watched Galen heap feathers over his supine form, and, with trembling hands, began to do the same. The feathers reeked of age and death, and the tiny insects that lived within them made her skin crawl.

There was a sharp cry, then another from off to her right.

Merritt's hand closed over hers under the feathers. She squeezed it for dear life.

Her heart pounded, and she was sure her chest rose and fell like a billows. She had to focus to silence her panicked breathing and slow her respirations, while she wanted nothing more than to scream.

Another skree.

Closer.

The feathers covering her face constricted her vision. She could see the small flames burning only five feet away. They advanced steadily outward as they consumed the feathers, producing a rich black smoke that singed her nostrils and stank of charnel. Only Merritt's eye was visible through the mound beside her. Everything else was either darkness or shadow.

A high-pitched shriek.

Mere feet away.

Every fiber of her being cried out for her to lunge to her feet and run away as fast as she could.

Soft rustling sounds above her head. More to either side.

A shadow eclipsed the glow of the fire.

Her breath caught in her throat.

A thin leg emerged from the edge of her vision. Three long scaled toes. The outer two hung limply, while the inside digit was curved upward to support a sharp, hooked claw the size of her middle finger. They flattened to the floor, save the one bearing the elevated claw, which tapped eagerly. The leg bent backward at the knee, where the slick scales gave way to feathers. Its smooth belly was covered with larger, broader scales reminiscent of those on the soft underside of an alligator, and framed to either side by a fringe of iridescent green and brown feathers. Another step, and she saw its long tail, held parallel to the ground, covered with feathers that hung downward as though parted along its spine. A twig-like arm with longer feathers, which appeared as though they had been draped from the skinny elbow like moss from a bough, reached forward a heartbeat before the creature lowered its head to the ground. Its long neck wavered from side to side in a slithering motion while its head stayed still. Snaggled teeth nestled together on the outside of the scaled lips of a blunt snout. A crown of quills grew over its cranium from a widow's peak between filmy eyes that shimmered with firelight. It had to be nearly six feet long from its finely-scaled nostrils to the tip of its tail. Its jaws snapped open nearly vertically and she glimpsed a pointed gray tongue that trilled when it released a deafening skree.

She pinched her eyes shut and felt spittle on her face. The thing's breath reeked of a slaughterhouse floor, of meat, red and wet...of what she recognized with a start to be Leo.

The cry ended and it nudged her head with its snout. She had to bite her lip to contain a scream.

This wasn't going to work.

She held her breath and prayed to any god that might be listening.

Feathers rustled and a toe brushed against her cheek. The raptor stood nearly directly on top of her.

A whistle of air preceded the strike. Its foot slashed at her chest. Clothing and skin ripped. She felt the sting of the wound and a trickle of blood rolling down her side from the laceration beneath her left clavicle.

It took every ounce of her concentration to keep from screaming. She squeezed Merritt's hand so hard her fingernails gouged into his skin.

The creature leaned in again and huffed a gust of foul breath onto her face that blew away most of the feathers. Its jaws snapped wide and it cried out again. A wash of saliva slapped onto her closed eyes and trailed over her cheeks, thick with chewed meat that slid through the fluid like slugs.

It recoiled and slashed at her again with its hind leg. The nails sliced through her upper arm over the biceps. Another unheralded strike, and blood flowed from her chest, just above her right breast.

The pain was more than she could bear.

More and more footsteps approached. She felt weight on her right arm before another talon clawed into her shoulder.

Merritt's hand tightened over hers. His blood spiraled around his wrist and into the union of their palms.

Another wicked slash, and pain bloomed from a gash on her right thigh.

Her thoughts turned to the extant Chachapoya in the valley below. The black-painted men whose bodies were so heavily scarred, as though they'd been attacked with straight razors. She had thought the scarring was ritualistic, but it wasn't, was it?

This was how they survived.

Another slice across her lower left leg.

Tears flowed freely from her eyes, and somehow she managed to bite back a whimper of agony.

The creatures shrieked all around them now. They appeared to be feeding upon one another, growing louder and more frantic.

Claws slashed, filling the air with a mist of blood.

She no longer prayed for escape, but for an end to the mounting pain, knowing that all she had to do to make it stop was scream.