Burial Ground

I

Andes Mountains, Peru

October 30^th

4:49 p.m. PET

Morton and Webber no longer stood guard over the tunnel into the cliff when they arrived. Winded, Sam slowed to a jog, while Merritt fell back behind her and stopped dead in his tracks. She was soaked to the bone, and every muscle ached from the high altitude exertion. She tried not to think about everything she had seen, but the images of the remains shoved to the forefront of her mind in grainy still-lifes reminiscent of old crime scene photographs. The memories were sterile enough to allow her to distance herself from them; however, the implications assaulted her like fresh wounds inflicted in her gray matter.

Somewhere along the trail, they had passed from the world she knew and understood, through the residua of a past she had until now only been able to imagine, into a nightmare landscape of bloodshed and death.

And even now, she couldn't help but be amazed by the sights that greeted her when she entered the dark crevice.

Jay flicked on the light mounted to his camera and directed it at the walls as they pressed deeper into the mountain. Countless recessed arches had been chiseled into the stone and filled with bones. The skulls faced her, while the rest of the jumbled skeletons had been crammed into the spaces behind them. A quick flicker of gold reflected the light.

"Did you see that?" Sam asked. "Shine your light over there again."

Jay directed the beam back into the alcove. A golden sparkle winked through the optic canal in the skull's eye socket.

"There's something inside," he said.

Sam reached through the sticky spider webs and lifted the aged skull from the centuries of accumulated dust. The occipital portion of the cranium had been cut away to create room for the object that rested on the rock shelf. It was egg-shaped and filigreed with a golden design fused to the rounded surface, a stunning piece of craftsmanship. More obsidian, she realized. The volcanic rock had been smoothed and polished, and decorated with a stylized image that depicted a man made of squares holding a sharp-toothed monster with a plume of feathers on its head at bay with a spear.

"It's an Ica stone," she gasped. Her world had suddenly tilted on its ear.

She replaced the skull over the stone and moved to the next archway. Similarly lifting the cracked skull, she exposed another stone nearly identical to the first, only the man in the design appeared to be riding the back of a dragon as it tried to snap back over his shoulder at him.

Ica stones were widely considered hoaxes, their authenticity refuted by any scholar worth his salt. They were originally discovered in a cave in the vicinity of the coastal town of Ica, Peru in the Sixties. While supposedly created by the Inca, they depicted knowledge and events beyond the scope of their limited comprehension. Everything from open heart surgery and tracheotomies to flying saucers and dinosaurs. All things that should have been well beyond their ability to conjure, even in their wildest dreams, which led to the common conclusion that they had to be fakes. Radiocarbon dating had been useless in ascertaining their age as the test could only determine the approximate era that the obsidian was formed, and not the time when the designs had been carved. And the others were merely etched, not overlaid with gold like these were.

Now here she was, staring at them in an ancient ossuary where they couldn't possibly have been planted by modern man. They weren't just decorative ornamentation either. They were death stones, renditions of something of consequence to the decedent. She moved down the row, raising cranium after cranium to uncover more stones, all of which bore representations of a man in mortal combat with the same fanged and plumed creature. Was this tunnel where their warriors were interred? A quick glance in either direction confirmed that all of the bones were roughly the same size. None of them had belonged to children. Was it possible that these depictions somehow represented their deaths?

The faint sound of buzzing brought her back to reality.

There wasn't enough time to waste any more right now. Lord only knew what was out there in the ruins, stalking them.

From ahead, she heard the distant sound of voices, made hollow by the acoustics, the words indecipherable over the drone of flies. She turned in their direction and proceeded into the darkness. The light from the camera veered to follow, casting her elongated shadow across the ground in front of---

Enormous black flies spun drowsily around her, and a smell with which she was now intimately acquainted crinkled her nose.

Her shoes made a crackling sound as she crossed the tacky floor. She noted the dark, amoeboid shape surrounding her, and then the pile of bones to her right. The sheer amount of flies crawling all over them created the impression of movement.

Jay's beam fell upon them and she had to look away. They had the same characteristics as the ones they had only just found: fractured, splintered...fresh.

"Leo!" she called, and quickened her pace, distancing herself from the carnage and the repulsive insects.

As if in answer, the voices grew louder, more animated.

By the time the buzzing waned behind her, it began anew in front of her. The ground became uneven and slanted downward, and the rocky ceiling lowered, channeling them deeper into the earth toward the now heated voices.

"Leo?"

The argument ceased at the sound of her approach. For a moment, she heard only silence beneath the relentless buzz.

"Sam?" Leo finally asked. "You shouldn't be in here."

There was something in his voice...something she had never expected to hear from him. Trepidation, uncertainty...fear.

"We need to leave this place. Right now," she said, ducking through a narrow threshold and stepping into a domed cavern. "We know what happened to Hunter's party. We found..."

Her words trailed off. It had taken several seconds to acclimate to the bright lights from the mining helmets. At first, she had seen only the five men gathered in the center of the cave and the stacks of supplies behind them, and then she noticed the body parts scattered on the ground.

That made four. All of the members of the previous expedition were now accounted for. All of them identically slaughtered. But there had originally been five of them, hadn't there?

She looked at Leo and tried to glean the truth from his eyes.

"Hunter didn't drown, did he?"

"Sam, you have to understand---"

"Did he?" she screamed.

Leo broke eye contact.

"You willingly risked all of our lives without a word of warning? Look over there. That man wasn't just killed. He was ripped apart!"

"I didn't lie to any of you. Hunter did drown. The medical examiner's report confirmed as much. The only fact that I chose to omit was that he had been stabbed in the back twice prior to immersion in the river. We had no way of knowing that we would find anything like this when we arrived."

"You should have told us," Sam snapped. Her hands shook with rage. "Now we're in the exact same situation and nobody has any clue what happened to these men, what could happen to us!"

"They have a right to know," Galen said. The beam on his helmet washed out his features.

"This is getting us nowhere," Colton said. "We need to formulate a plan and---"

"How's this for a plan?" Sam asked through bared teeth. "We get the hell out of here while we still can."

She whirled and stormed out of the cavern. Whether they joined her or not, she no longer cared. Her thoughts were a chaotic jumble. Her childhood friend had been stabbed and the man she had known and trusted for nearly her entire life had lied to her about it. A slideshow of horrors fueled the rising panic. The carnage all around her, from the ancient remains to the modern. The jaguar carcass in the clearing and the tree surrounded by ruined alpaca bones. The Chachapoya chief's parting words. Let them pass. They are dead already. And they were, weren't they?

Damn the rest of them. She was leaving this fortress right now. And either they followed her or she would have to find a way to live with their deaths on her conscience.

But at least she would still be alive.