Burial Ground

IV

7:59 p.m.

The walls felt like they were closing in on him, compressing the chamber to such an extent that he could hardly breathe the stale air. A pall of smoke hung over them, but he wasn't about to let the fire wane for even a second. Its light was the only thing staving off the panic.

Merritt paced the room. He had tried to sit in the ring around the bonfire with the others, but the nervous energy had built inside him to the point that if he didn't burn off at least some of it, he was going to explode. The stone walls, the low ceiling, the smoke. All he was missing were the screams, and he would have been back in Afghanistan, in his own personal version of hell. He needed to get out of there, but where could he possibly go?

He tried to occupy his mind by checking and rechecking their preparations. The mound of thermite would last for several more days at their current rate of usage. All of the doorways leading deeper into the heart of the building had been sealed with piles of rubble. He threw a shoulder into them repeatedly to test their stability. Not once did any of them so much as budge. That left only the small gaps in the ceiling, through which the majority of the smoke fled the fire, but none of the holes were large enough to grant entrance to anything wider than the clumps of roots that dangled to the floor. Save the lone entrance, they were completely entombed.

Raindrops dripped through the roof into widening pools on the floor with a metronomic plip...ploop...and mosquitoes whined from the darkened corners, away from the flames.

Merritt stared at the disheveled heaps of bones and wondered if this was how the natives had felt when they barricaded themselves in here. Had they known they were going to die?

"Why didn't they leave when they had the chance?" he asked. "I mean, some of them had to have survived to build the fortress down in the valley." He gestured to the skeletal remains. "Why did these people choose to stay where they were forced to cannibalize each other, only to end up dying anyway?"

"You have to look at it in a historical context," Sam said. Until now, she had hardly said a word since being ushered into the dank, manmade cavern. "These people worshipped the creatures. Viracocha, Kakulcán, Quetzalcoatl. All of the native Mesoamerican tribes had a name for them, and revered them as the strongest and most important within their pantheon of deities. One can only speculate. Perhaps the people who died in here were some sort of sacrifice. Or maybe they feared angering the gods by abandoning them to flee to the lowland jungles. Primitive religions were based upon the natural world as much as superstition. It's possible that these people saw their deaths as an inevitable consequence of their beliefs. Or they could have offered their lives in exchange for the safe passage of their families and the security of future generations."

"Their descendents, the ones in the fortress near the lake, they knew these things would hunt us," Leo said. "That's why they allowed us to cross through their village. What did their chief say?"

"Let them pass," Sam said. And then in a whisper, "They are dead already."

"But they've figured out a way to live in peace with them," Merritt said. "Look at the sheer walls of their fortress and the surrounding torches. And the alpaca pen."

"They sacrifice the alpacas to these things. They still revere them."

"No," Galen said. "Look at it from the most simplistic biological perspective. It's a symbiotic relationship of sorts. They make sure that the raptors are fed, while the raptors protect them from the outside world."

"Like the ants in that hollow tree at the center of their courtyard," Merritt said.

"Exactly. You can't possibly think that these people have remained hidden for so long based solely on geography. They've been discovered on countless occasions. Remember the pistol in that hut from the late nineteenth century? And your son's party, Leo. They've avoided detection and possible exploitation because no one has survived long enough to betray their location. The raptors make sure of that."

"You're the expert, Dr. Russell," Leo said. "What exactly are these raptors?"

"I wish I knew for sure. All we have to go on is that they're feathered, yet incapable of flight, have scaled skin, and the lower appendages of a condor. They don't have beaks, and their teeth are crocodilian. They're nocturnal and they hunt in packs. As an ornithologist, I'm the furthest thing from an expert. I specialize in birds, specifically birds of prey."

"What are you saying?"

"These raptors are like no type I've ever encountered, and, honestly, I don't believe they're birds at all. In fact, I can only think of a few extinct species that are even remotely similar."

"Like what?" Sam asked.

"Archaeopteryx, for one, but it was much smaller and omnivorous. Possibly deinonychus or achillobator. I recently read about the discovery of fossils of a new species in Argentina called neuquenraptor, which was six feet long from snout to tail. Unfortunately, that's about the extent of my knowledge. I merely try to keep up with the evidence as it pertains to the evolution of avians for my classes."

"So you're suggesting these animals are like velociraptors?" Merritt asked.

Galen scoffed. "Fossils discovered in Mongolia suggest that velociraptors were no bigger than turkeys, but a similar concept, I suppose."

"Stop right there," Leo said. He huffed and rose from where he'd been seated beside the fire. "You're talking about dinosaurs."

"Feathered serpent gods," Sam whispered.

"What else could they possibly be?" Galen stood and paced as he composed his thoughts. "Dinosaurs are the predecessors of modern avians. Feathers are simply elaborate scales. They have the same general keratin composition and serve to maintain the body temperature of warm-blooded animals. Who's to say that something like the neuquenraptor couldn't have survived through the eons up here in total isolation from the rest of the world?"

"That's absurd," Leo snapped. "The dinosaurs were all killed by a single extinction event. An asteroid strike, or whatever the favored theory of the day might be."

"Were they? If that was the case, then how is there avian life on the planet? Everything had to evolve from something else. Man came from apes, after all. Crocodilians are nearly identical anatomically to their ancestors from tens of millions of years ago. And birds evolved from dinosaurs."

"That doesn't explain how they could have remained hidden here for millennia."

"Think about that cavern we found. They've been living underground and only coming out to hunt at night. They're the perfect nocturnal carnivore. And they even defecate where no one will find their spoor. There's no way you could track them without blindly stumbling upon them like we did."

"So if we're dealing with a species that has thrived longer than any other in recorded history, and survived an extinction event that wiped out nearly all life forms on the planet," Merritt asked, "then what are our chances of surviving them?"

Silence filled the chamber, broken only by the crackle of flames and the echoing patter of leaking water.

Merritt turned his back on the others and walked into the open doorway. The gentle breeze felt soothing against his face, the smell of ozone vastly preferable to that of the smoke. Where the torchlight died, the jungle was a wall of darkness.

Somewhere out there, death stalked the shadows.

And he could feel it inching closer with each passing second.