Burial Ground

VI

12:21 p.m.

The path narrowed and Merritt fell in behind Sam. He needed time to think. Too many things bothered him about the situation, and he was running out of time to figure them out. He felt a sense of inevitability, as though they were hurtling toward some unforeseen end. Despite what Sam said, he didn't trust Leo. Perhaps the time had come to have a little chat with Leo and Colton and see if he could determine what they were hiding.

Suddenly, he was hip-deep in the kind of problems he had sought to avoid. He had accomplished what he had set out to after leaving the Middle East. He had vanished from the face of the earth. As long as he kept his head down, the Army would never be able to find and extradite him. So why then had he stuck his neck out and risked drawing attention to himself after finding the body by the river? There hadn't even been any sort of internal debate. He had simply assumed responsibility because it had been the right thing to do. And now here he was, on an expedition he knew nothing about, miles into the untamed Peruvian wilds. The man whose son's effects he had taken to the Consulate out of the goodness of his heart had dragged him along under the threat of handing him over to the military, but had paid him handsomely to assuage his guilt. They had to be nearly fifty miles into a forest where even the animals feared to tread. The natives who had stalked them from the shadows insisted that he was dead already. And to top it all off, his feet were soaked from the blasted storm.

So why was he here? Why had he abandoned his life of comfortable anonymity to join this godforsaken party when he could just as easily have disappeared as he had already done once before?

Sam turned around and smiled.

And just like that, he knew.

He had known on an unconscious level since she had first hopped up into the copilot's seat in his plane and begun to annoy the heck out of him. Since he had first seen the sparkle of the starlight reflecting from her striking blue eyes as she stared past him toward the shores of Pomacochas.

"Crap," he muttered under his breath. He kicked a rotting agave fruit into the forest.

The sound of jogging footsteps and labored breathing reached him from behind. He didn't need to look back to see who approached. It was his new best friend. He rolled his eyes as Galen fell into stride beside him, wheezing heavily.

If nothing else, at least this would prove a welcomed distraction from his thoughts.

"Got a second?" Galen asked. He was huffing as though he'd sprinted up the mountain, instead of stumbling along behind them at a snail's pace.

Merritt sighed. The path through the trees lightened ahead. They were about to lose their umbrella of vegetation. From a dozen paces behind him he heard the crinkle of plastic as Jay weatherproofed his camera.

"There's something I need to show you," Galen said before Merritt could answer. The man's eyes were haunted, his expression pained. He held out two feathers and pressed one into each of Merritt's hands as they walked. "Look at those two feathers and tell me what you see."

Merritt decided to humor the birdman, and inspected the feathers. The one in his left hand was slightly longer and shimmered with green when he tilted it to the light just right. The one in his right had a slightly darker color, more black than brown.

"Other than the coloration, they're pretty much identical."

"Now blow on them."

"What?"

"Trust me, will you? Just bring them close to your mouth and blow on them."

Merritt rolled his eyes, but placated Galen, who grew more agitated by the minute. He puckered and blew on the feather in his right hand first. It shivered between his fingers, but did little else. He eyed Galen, who gestured in a rolling motion with his hands to encourage him to proceed to the other feather. With a shrug, he blew on the iridescent green plume in his left. The feathery portion attached to the quill fanned out slightly, but fell back into place when he stopped to draw another breath.

"There," Galen said. His eyes widened. "Did you see that?"

"What was I supposed to see?"

"Don't you understand? You're a pilot, for God's sake!"

This was growing old in a hurry, and farther along the path, those in the lead had pulled up the hoods of their ponchos in anticipation of stepping back out into the storm.

"Look, look, look," Galen said, snatching back the feathers and holding them where Merritt could clearly see them. "You saw how the vanes spread apart when you blew on them. If this were the wing of an airplane, would it be able to stay aloft? But the vanes on the other feather stayed together when you blew on them."

"Where are you going with this?" Merritt raised the hood of his poncho and braced himself. The path opened onto what looked like a waterfall.

"Okay. Here's a quick lesson on the anatomy of avian flight. A feather is composed of a hollow, tubular main shaft called a rachis toward the tip, and a calamus where it inserts into the follicle on the skin. Vanes branch out from the rachis to form the majority of the feather. The vanes themselves divide further into barbs, then barbules, and finally into barbicels. These barbicels serve as miniature hooks to bind the vanes together. Without them, the wind passes through the feather on the downstroke, and the bird simply can't become airborne. There are other contributing factors, obviously, like the alignment of the β-keratin fibers and the orientation of the feathers, but that's flight in a nutshell. On the other hand, flightless birds like ostriches and emus have feathers that lack the interlocking barbicels."

"So you're saying that the bird with the greenish tint to its feathers can't fly." Merritt bowed beneath the ferocity of the torrent as he stepped out of the protection of the trees and onto a sheer slope with a deadfall beside him. The path ahead veered to the right onto a jagged crest of rocks that connected this mountain with the one to the west. A series of waterfalls tumbled over the slick stone in uneven steps toward the valley floor. The air around them was hazy with spray. "What's the big deal?"

"You were the one who found Hunter Gearhardt's belongings. This is the same type of feather that he had considered important enough to pack. Only I found this one at the site where the jaguar had been slaughtered. And there were even more of them in that awful clearing with the alpaca bones. You see, they may look like the feathers of a carrion bird like a condor, which is what I initially suspected, but they're not. They belong to an avian from a different order---if not class---entirely."

"Get to the point already." Merritt had to shout to be heard over the drum roll of rain and the thunder of the waterfalls that carved a shallow valley between the peaks up in the clouds. The world had become mist and water.

"All birds of prey are capable of flight. Every single one of them. The iridescent feather has the size, shape, and structure of a raptor feather, minus the microscopic barbicels that hold the vanes together during flight. We're dealing with a carnivorous bird that can't fly."

"So what does it do, hop really fast?" Merritt smirked. "Thanks for the warning. If I see this terrifying bouncing bird of yours, I'll guard my kneecaps and toes."

"Think of ostriches and emus. They can run up to forty-five miles per hour."

"But you said this thing is the size of a condor."

"Its remige feathers are the size of a condor's. That only means that the wing size is the same. Ostriches have disproportionately small wings compared to their body size." Galen threw up his arms in frustration. "That jaguar was run down and torn apart. And those alpacas were butchered."

"You're suggesting that birds were responsible for that carnage? Flightless birds?"

Merritt shook his head and hastened his step, but Galen sped up to keep pace.

"Nearly seventy percent of the area from the Amazon basin through the Andes Mountains remains unexplored. There are hundreds of thousands of acres upon which few humans have ever tread. Who knows what could have survived through the eons out here without the intervention of mankind? Heck, there are species of plants in this jungle that date back to the Mesozoic Period."

"You've been hitting that flask of yours a little too hard, my friend."

Galen continued as if he hadn't heard.

"It all makes sense."

"No," Merritt said. "It doesn't."

"Feathers are the one thing that has remained untouched by evolution. Intact feathers have been extracted from amber dating to the Albian stage of the Cretaceous Period, and their structure is identical. We're talking about one hundred million years of mutations and adaptations, and yet in that amount of time, the feather has not changed one iota. And the Cretaceous Period was the last time that this planet knew a feathered, flightless predator."

"So you think there's a species of predatory bird that has survived out here in the jungle for millions of years without being discovered?"

"Yes. And we need to warn the others. If this species could overcome a jaguar so easily, imagine what it could do to us."

"The people in the village didn't seem overly concerned."

"What are you talking about? They live behind thirty-foot fortifications and keep their livestock inside an impregnable stone pen. Don't you remember how those alpacas screamed when we approached?"

"Tell you what," Merritt said. "Why don't you run ahead and warn the others while I hang back and have a good laugh at your expense."

"You don't believe me," Galen said. He appeared genuinely hurt. "Look around you. Where are all of the animals we saw in the forest several days ago? Where are all of the monkeys and the deer and the flocks of birds?"

Merritt's stride faltered. Galen's insinuation struck a chord with him. He'd been wondering the exact same thing.