Burial Ground (33 page)

He couldn't shake the mental image of the
way Colton had described Rippeth's remains.

An involuntary shiver rippled through
him.

He turned to the right, toward where he
could barely see the steep cliff that served as the fourth wall of
the fortress and followed the trail through the underbrush. It
became more clearly delineated with each step, suggesting frequent
use. He passed more deteriorating circular huts to either side.
Raindrops assaulted him in waves through the occasional breaks in
the canopy. Behind him, the others called his name, but he made no
reply. He was focused solely on finding any indication that
Hunter's group had been here. Nothing else mattered now.

The buzzing of flies grew louder, their
ordinarily lazy drone frenetic.

Ahead, the trail terminated against a stone
embankment draped with vines. The last row of huts was now at his
back. To either side, wending, uneven stone staircases led upward
to stepped levels with flat sections designed for agriculture. He
remembered the topless women tending to the crops on the hillside
at the back of the fortress down in the valley. Faded designs were
painted on the stone, but he couldn't decipher them thanks to the
overgrowth.

The buzzing sound still came from directly
in front of him.

He walked closer to the granite escarpment
and determined where the noise originated. A scraggly tree grew
right up against the stone, weeping with vines. He could vaguely
discern an area of deep shadows past it. A cut in the mountainside.
Easing around the tented roots, he saw that the vines on the stone
face had been hacked away to expose a dark, triangular opening
formed by a wide fissure in the rock.

The excited buzz of the flies echoed from
the darkness. The stale air reeked of death.

He pointed the penlight ahead of him and
followed the beam into the mountain. Fat-bodied flies swarmed in
the weak light, which did little to illuminate the blackness. The
air was dramatically cooler, and heavy, as though acted upon by a
separate gravity. He smelled rotten meat and the timeless scent of
decomposition.

Colton's voice drifted to his ears as though
from miles away.

The beam faded well before it encountered
any resistance. He directed it up at the ceiling. It was barely a
foot above his head, but felt far lower than that in the smothering
darkness. The walls, which contained pools of shadows at regular
intervals, were so close that he wouldn't have been able to raise
his arms out to either side. He turned the light upon the wall to
his left and let out an involuntary gasp. Arched recesses had been
chiseled into the stone in columns three rows high, from floor to
ceiling, and extended beyond the extent of the light's reach.
Vacant-eyed skulls stared back at him from the front of the rock
ledges, behind which decapitated, desiccated bodies had been
stuffed into the hollows. They'd been folded into fetal position
and lashed into place with frayed cords. Spiders had made
themselves at home within the enclaves. Webs filled every available
inch of space, thick with dust and the carcasses of age-old
insects. Streaks of magnetite and quartz glinted from the curved
stone.

Placers.

This was what Hunter had come to find. He
must have stood in this very corridor as Leo did now.

This had to be some sort of primitive
ossuary. Leo remembered Sam saying that not all of the dead were
deemed worthy enough for burial in the
purunmachus
or the
chullpas
. This must be where all of the others were
interred, not bundled with their prized possessions, but set out on
display.

He flashed the beam from one to the next.
Several of the skulls were fractured or bereft of entire sections
of the cranium and teeth. The bodies behind them were in sorry
shape as well. Some were missing extremities, others entire
segments of their thoraces, while a few were simple piles of
broken, brown bones.

Corpses surrounded him, but they weren't the
source of the rotten stench that pulled him deeper into the
tunnel.

Colton called Leo's name. It echoed ahead of
him into the infinite blackness. He was about to answer when he
noticed the distinctive prints of hiking boots on the dirt
floor.

His heart pounded. This was the first
verifiable sign that his son's party had been here.

Leo picked up his pace and breezed past the
dead with the sound of buzzing growing louder with each step. Black
dots filled the cone of light and tapped at his body. The flies
crawled on his skin and through his hair. He had to fan his face to
keep them out of his eyes and ears. A moment later, he stumbled
upon what had summoned them into the mountain.

The walls and ceiling positively crawled
with flies, their shimmering green eyes reflecting his beam. He
swatted at the cloud surrounding him, and pointed the light at the
ground. It reflected back at him from the broken blade of a
machete, beside which were tatters of fabric. Hawaiian-patterned
fabric.

Leo had to pull his shirt up over his mouth
and nose to combat the odor, and even then he retched several times
before having to turn away.

"It looks like Hunter was the lucky one,"
Colton whispered from behind him.

Leo could only nod. He straightened, bit his
lip, and returned his attention to the carnage.

Chunks of cartilage and muscle still clung
to the exposed ribcage, and maggots wriggled through the puddle of
sludge around the severed spine. An arm, stripped to the bone, save
the skin on the fingers, rested against the wall. Its
disarticulated twin was another ten feet farther into the tunnel.
There was a foot covered with black skin and even blacker flies.
The fractured remnants of the pelvis were canted against the
opposite wall. And at the very edge of the light, the head lay on
its side, robbed of flesh, frontal bone torn away, eye sockets
seething with flies. The mandible had been yanked out of the socket
and rested askew to the maxillae.

His obsession with finding the truth about
his son's death had blinded him to the signs all around him. The
jaguar carcass. The alpaca bones scattered at the foot of the
sacrificial tree. The way Colton had described what was left of
Rippeth. They were isolated in the wilderness with a threat that
Hunter's party hadn't seen coming until it was too late.

"Jesus," Leo whispered. "We're all going to
die here."

3:05 p.m.

Merritt leaned over Sam's shoulder as she
studied the mound of bones. She shuffled through the pile and
lifted them out one by one, repeating the same phrase like a
mantra.

"This can't be right."

"What?" he asked.

She looked up at him and blinked as though
seeing him for the first time. She furrowed her brow and seemed to
think for a long time before she finally spoke.

"Look at this bone here." She held up the
broken shaft of the distal half of a femur. "This broad portion
forms the roof of the knee joint. The edges of the condyles should
be more clearly defined, and the cortex should show thin striations
and grooves. This is too smooth, too perfectly rounded, almost as
though it's been ground down and polished." She turned it so the
broken end of the shaft faced him. "And the medullary cavity is
hollow. Do you see that? There should be a crust of marrow and
vessels, not a tunnel that could have been bored by a drill."

"I don't understand the significance."

"In 1964, Anasazi remains were unearthed at
Polacca Wash on a Hopi reservation in Arizona. All of the bones
exhibited these same kinds of fractures, and were similarly
smoothed and hollowed. It's one of the great mysteries of Native
American culture. The prevailing theory is that the ends of the
bones are so smooth because they were boiled. Bouncing around in
the water and bumping against the sides of the pot made them that
way, and the shafts are hollow because the marrow was boiled and
scraped out. And this puddle right here?" She gestured to the small
black pool filled with putrid water. "This used to be a fire pit.
You can tell by the carbon scoring on the floor and wall. There are
even pots right over there. These people cooked their dead on this
very spot."

"Why would they do that when they could have
just buried them like all of the others?"

"Don't you get it? They cooked these bones
with the meat still on them. They were
eating
their dead."
She drew a deep breath and resumed in a less animated tone. "The
Chachapoya weren't cannibalistic. They were primarily an
agricultural society. You saw it in practice on the slopes of the
fortress by the lake. They built elaborate steppes on the
mountainside and filled them with soil to grow everything from
agaves to maize, and were very successful doing it. And they
revered their dead. You remember that cavern we found? All of the
bodies were bundled with great care and placed in
chullpas
nearly as nice as the homes they lived in. They wouldn't have eaten
their dead. Not unless circumstances had become desperate and they
were cut off from all other sources of food."

"So what do you think happened here?"

"I don't have enough information to form a
hypothesis yet, but at a guess, I'd say they were involved in some
sort of lengthy standoff inside this fortress."

"You think it was the Spanish?"

"No. The conquistadors had vastly superior
firepower. None of the tribes were able to hold them off for long.
Even the Inca, who were known as the most ferocious warriors, were
able to muster precious little resistance against the Spanish with
their armor and muskets."

"What about the Inca themselves?"

"The design of the building reflects Incan
design. They had already assimilated the culture."

"Then if you're right, who could they have
possibly been holed up in here against?"

The question hung in the air between them
for an interminable moment before Sam abruptly rose and headed for
the doorway.

"I don't know, but the answer has to be
around here somewhere."

Merritt climbed over the rubble and followed
her out into the rain. After so long in the darkness, even the gray
day was blinding. Thunder crashed overhead and rumbled down the
rocky slope like an avalanche. The rain intensified in
response.

His mind flashed back to the theory Galen
had put forth earlier. He shook away the images that the birdman's
words conjured.

Jay hustled to keep up with them, the camera
jouncing in his grip. Mere minutes ago, he had been grinning from
ear to ear like a kid on Christmas morning, but now a note of worry
had diminished his smile and crept into the corners of his eyes.
Dahlia and Galen brought up the rear, while the three remaining
armed men abandoned the crate and struck off in the opposite
direction toward where Merritt heard Colton calling for Leo.

"That was their palatial structure," Sam
said. "Using it to defile the deceased would have been the ultimate
sacrilege." She looked from side to side. "But it was also the only
building with a stone roof."

"It makes sense. They wouldn't have wanted
to ignite those flimsy thatch roofs directly above their
heads."

"You don't get it. They could easily have
made a bonfire out in the open."

"Unless they'd barricaded themselves inside
that chamber."

"Exactly."

"So you're saying the stones piled in front
of the entrances weren't the result of the building crumbling over
time."

"I'm not saying anything. All I know is that
something awful happened here, something so terrible that these
people were forced to eat each other to survive."

Merritt could tell they were heading east by
the sound of the waterfall to his left, toward the clearing where
they had emerged on the trail from the jungle. The stone-tiled path
was wider here, and accommodated trees with trunks that had to be
as wide as he was tall. Huts lay in ruin to either side, overgrown
by vegetation. Saplings erupted from every crack in the stone.

Sam shoved through shrubs covered with ants
until she finally stopped dead in her tracks.

"What is it?" Merritt asked. He stepped to
her right and followed her gaze to the ground.

A skeleton was sprawled facedown at her
feet. One arm was stretched out above it, the other nowhere to be
seen. Roots from the bushes had grown through the ribcage. The
skull was so dirty and ravaged by age it had turned the color of
brass, and the occipital bone was shattered to such an extent that
he could see through to the the eye sockets on the underside. Only
half of one of the legs remained attached to the cracked ilium. The
rest of the parts were absent.

"He was left to rot where he fell," Sam
whispered.

"How do you know it's a 'he'?" Jay asked. He
rounded the remains to get a better view through the camera.

"The inlet of the pelvis is too narrow for
childbirth, and the angle between the pubic bones is less than
ninety degrees."

With one final glance down, Sam continued
walking. Ten yards farther, she shoved aside the branches of a fern
to reveal the skeletal profile of a badly fractured face. It looked
like someone had taken a hammer to the temporal bone and collapsed
the lateral aspect of the orbit. Both arms were stretched out above
its shoulders as though it had been trying to drag itself forward,
a task it had been unable to accomplish without the ends of its
arms and its hands.

Sam barely paused before continuing onward.
They passed what was left of several more bodies before they
reached a small clearing at the edge of the fortification. The
village had been built on a short, angled plateau in such a way
that the outer wall was only four feet tall here, while the ground
on the other side was nearly thirty feet below. Lianas and vines
crawled all around their feet, scaled the bricks, and descended the
face of the fortification. In their midst were a good half-dozen
skeletons. These were in far worse shape than the others they had
encountered on their way. They were so severely broken and
disarticulated that it was impossible to tell which bones belonged
to which individual. A snapped spear poked out of the underbrush,
and a quiver brimming with arrows rested under a nest of ferns.