Burial Ground

I

Andes Mountains, Peru

October 31^st

6:19 a.m. PET

Blackness bled into a pale red glare through her eyelids, and consciousness returned with a fit of shivers. Sam struggled to open her eyes, but barely managed a crack through which she saw glistening mud and flattened grasses. Her right arm was pinned beneath her in the muck. The current tugged at her legs. She retched and vomited a wash of vile fluids into a puddle against the side of her face and nose. Pain pierced through the fugue and she started to cry.

She pushed herself up to all fours on shaking arms, filthy strands of hair hanging over her face, and crawled out of the stream onto the bank. With a groan, she rolled over onto her rear end and propped herself up on her elbows.

The storm had finally abated. Droplets still fell from the dense canopy, glimmering with the pink light of dawn. Through the branches she could see a sliver of blue sky.

How long had she been unconscious? The last thing she remembered was going over the falls and then a sudden rush of darkness when she hit the water. How far had she traveled?

She gasped and bolted upright.

Where was Merritt?

She fought through the pain to stand, swaying as though acted upon by a ferocious gale that only she could feel.

"Merritt?" she whimpered.

She stumbled along the shoreline through waterlogged ferns and tangles of reeds. Nothing looked familiar. It could have been any section of the jungle, every section.

"Merritt!" she screamed.

Several times, she tripped and fell, but managed to rise to her feet again. She screamed her throat raw as she followed the river, peering frantically through groves of trees connected by vines and blooming with epiphytes, scouring the surface of the water for any sign of a body pinned against a rock or crumpled near the bank.

"Merritt!"

Sam crashed through a wall of shrubs and clapped her hand over her mouth.

There was a body, facedown on the muddy bank in a clump of cattails. She ran toward it, tears streaming from her eyes, and fell to her knees beside its hip.

She reached toward it, then recoiled. A sob made her whole body shudder. Gathering her courage, she slid her trembling hands under its shoulder and rolled it onto its side.

Galen stared back at her, his face a mask of mud, his mouth packed with sludge.

She jerked her hands away and he fell back onto his chest.

Rocking back, she screamed up into the sky.

"What's all the commotion about?"

She turned toward the sound of the voice. Merritt leaned against the broad trunk of a Brazil nut tree, soaked to the bone, clothes in tatters. He appeared one step shy of death.

He offered that cocky, lopsided smile.

Sam leapt up from the ground and ran to him. She threw herself into his arms so hard she nearly knocked both of them down.

"I thought you were...Galen..." she stammered.

An avian shriek from above them.

They both flinched as a dark shape swooped through the branches and alighted on the bank.

A tall bird with a broad black body and a ring of white feathers around its bald head hopped across the mud and up onto Galen's prone form. The fringe of rubbery flesh above its ivory beak jiggled.

It seemed a fitting tribute, to in death continue the work to which Galen had devoted his life.