Burial Ground (36 page)

He debated the prospect that the tunnels
through the mountain might intersect somewhere underground for a
nanosecond before deciding against it. The last thing he wanted was
to further separate himself from the rest of the party, especially
by entering a dark warren of caves where no one would think to
search for him if anything happened. Instead, he headed south,
staying hunched and close to the ruins. As he neared the main path,
he slowed and continued at a crouch, careful to keep his tread
light and silent. The crooked tree appeared through the jungle,
beyond the fallen wall of one of the circular huts, which itself
was nearly invisible under a wild cluster of foliage. He couldn't
see either of the men, but they would have had to have been
standing in the mouth of the tunnel for him to have been able to
anyway.

Slowly, he advanced, gingerly placing each
footfall so as not to make a single twig snap. He sorted through
the patter of rainfall on the canopy and the whistle of the wind,
listening for even the slightest sound to betray the location of
the men. The first whisper of voices reached him when he was nearly
upon the tree. He pressed aside a tangle of ferns, and craned his
neck to see where Morton and Webber now stood, facing east along
the trail as Sam strode toward them with the pilot and the
documentary crew in tow. Webber raised a palm to signal Sam to
stop, presumably so he could recite the same spiel about not
disturbing Leo.

This was Galen's chance.

He dashed out from behind the cover, passed
the tree, and ducked into the crevice. Not once did he so much as
risk a glance back over his shoulder.

Skulls leered at him from the shelves to
either side before vanishing as the darkness swallowed him whole. A
coarse scraping sound echoed from ahead. After several interminable
minutes of walking, during which he struggled to stave off panic
and felt the smothering weight of thousands of tons of rock above
his head, a faint glow blossomed in the corridor in front of him.
The pale light expanded with each step. A handheld halogen lamp lay
on its side, its beam directed at the wall. A dark form knelt in
the center, the source of the grating noise. Details emerged as he
neared. It was a man, laboring to chisel something from the earthen
floor.

"You guys are supposed to be---" the
silhouette started, but stopped mid-sentence when it turned in his
direction.

Galen recognized Sorenson's voice, and a
heartbeat later, the expression on his face.

What Galen saw on the floor in front of
Sorenson caused him to gasp.

Bones.

Sorenson was clearing a festering mess of
body parts into a mound that swarmed with the flies he could now
clearly hear in the absence of the chiseling sound.

3:43 p.m.

Dahlia was positive they must have found
something truly amazing inside that cavern. Why else would they
have posted sentries to keep them out? It infuriated her. Here they
had traveled halfway around the freaking globe to document a
landmark discovery, and they wouldn't even let her commit it to
film. Had Leo not been her principle financial backer, she would
have shoved her way through the guards and let him have a piece of
her mind. What were they going to do, shoot her? No chance of that,
but worse would be the loss of funding for production and
distribution, both of which were integral to the process, probably
even more so than the quality, loath as she was to admit it. So for
now, she would bide her time. When Leo finally saw fit to grant
them entrance, she would be ready.

And there had better damn well be something
absolutely mind-blowing in there.

Fortunately, Sam, who was even more
perturbed than she was, didn't need to kowtow to Leo like she did.
Sam had been up in arms, demanding to see what was hidden in that
crevice, but had ultimately been shunned as well. The only
consolation was that Sam had promised they would return in half an
hour, and either they would be allowed to pass peacefully, or there
was nothing on God's green earth that would stand in their way.

Dahlia respected her all the more for it.
They were cut from the same cloth: ambitious, determined,
indomitable. And there was no one she would rather follow through
these ruins. If there was anything important out here, Sam would
find it. And when she did, Dahlia would make sure Jay committed it
to tape.

Sam seemed only peripherally aware of their
existence as they followed, which was more than Dahlia could ever
have hoped for. All of her reactions would be candid, uncensored.
Even with the mounting tension, Dahlia's heart raced at the
prospect of where Sam might lead them.

They headed south, the rumble of the
waterfall waning behind them, toward where Sam suspected they would
come upon the main entrance to the fortress. Merritt trailed behind
them, his eyes distant as though lost in thought. More of those
round stone huts surrounded them in various states of
deterioration, overgrown by groves of ceiba trees riddled with
epiphytes and vines to such a degree that it was nearly impossible
to imagine that anyone had ever dwelled in them. It was frightening
the amount of damage nature could inflict over the span of five
hundred years. This entire fortress hadn't been demolished by an
invading army, but by the gentle advance of saplings. Its former
occupants were another story. What forces had annihilated them?

Dahlia peered into the living areas behind
the rubble. Rounded shards of ancient pottery poked out of the
soil, along with the remnants of tattered textiles, wooden and
stone utensils, and the rotted roofs. The former occupants hadn't
even had time to gather their belongings in their final hours. It
was as though those that hadn't been slain had simply vanished into
thin air. Unless there was some stockpile of bodies or a mass
grave, there weren't enough remains to match the number that must
have lived here. Sam's theory was that the lion's share of the
population had relocated to the valley and built the fortress they
had already encountered. However, that still left the most puzzling
question of all.

Why?

Sam appeared hell-bent on discovering the
answer. She hadn't shared any of her preliminary theories, but the
way she combed through the village, she was obviously looking for
something in particular. Dahlia instructed Jay to stay at Sam's
shoulder. Whatever caught her eye, Jay's mandate was to capture it
with his camera.

Sam slowed and stood in the crumbled
threshold of one of the huts. She cocked her head as she
scrutinized something inside. Dahlia had to slide to the side and
stand on her tiptoes to see over the rim. There were more bones
near the rear wall, though these were dramatically different from
the others. They were partially buried by years of amassed dirt
that had blown in through the doorway. The sharp ends of the broken
bones had been smoothed by time and the elements, while the
normally white calcium density had weathered to a muddy brown. But
it wasn't the spider web of fractures transecting the frontal bone
of the lone visible skull or the disarticulated leg that stood
erect like a tombstone that held their attention. A revolver was
partially concealed by the damp, rotting leaves, its owner's
skeletal digit still curled around the trigger. The metal had
rusted to a flaking orange.

Dahlia didn't know the first thing about
firearms, but this one looked as though it had been ripped straight
out of the Wild West. It had to be at least a hundred years
old.

"We aren't the first to find this place,"
Sam whispered. She turned and resumed her trek through the
ruins.

"Jesus," Merritt said. He studied the
carcass for a long moment before hurrying to catch up with Sam.

"Hurry up and get a shot of that," Dahlia
said.

Jay stepped into the collapsed stone ring
and directed the lens first at the bones, then at the revolver. He
scraped away a patch of rust with his thumbnail.

"Colt Frontier Six Shooter," he read from
the inscription on the barrel. "Wait. There's more writing here."
He carved away the rust below the trigger guard and zoomed in.
PNT. Sept. 12, 1870.
He turned to face her, eyes wide, face
pale. The camera visibly trembled in his grasp. "I'm starting to
get a really bad feeling about this."

Dahlia inwardly agreed, but refused to speak
the words out loud.

"You'd better catch up with Sam," she said
instead.

Jay nodded and followed the overgrown trail
toward where Merritt crashed through the bushes behind Sam. After
several more minutes, during which they passed another half dozen
of the round structures in various states of decay, Sam stopped at
the foot of what appeared to be a giant conglomeration of
vegetation that reached up into the dense ceiling of leaves. The
branches of the surrounding trees held it in a wooden embrace. From
their boughs dangled the vines and roots that cascaded over it like
a canopy over a bassinette.

Sam approached it slowly and tugged away the
vegetation with a series of snapping sounds. It was definitely a
manmade construct. At first it reminded Dahlia of the statues in
the cave overlooking the river, but this one was made of limestone.
As Sam revealed more and more of the sculpture, Dahlia realized
that they were viewing it from behind and dragged Jay around to the
other side by the elbow, where she could now see the outline of the
southern fortification through the trees. She noticed a small break
in the obsidian wall where the ground in front of it dipped out of
sight. Was that the entrance to the village?

By the time she returned her attention to
the statue, Merritt had helped Sam completely expose it. The
contours had been dulled through the ages, and what little paint
still clung to it looked more like curled flecks of lichen, but it
was still easy to decipher the details.

"Quetzalcoatl?" Sam whispered. The surprise
in her voice was evident. She did a double take before stepping
back to appraise it as a whole. "This doesn't make sense."

"What do you mean?" Merritt asked. "It looks
just like the faces that were carved into the walls in the village
down in the jungle."

Dahlia scrutinized the monolith. It had to
be close to fifteen feet tall, and chiseled from a single block of
stone. As with the
purunmachus
, the style was more abstract
than anatomic. The body was smooth and contoured, and tapered to a
long, slender neck with a broad head and elongated face that
reminded her of a blunted crocodile's snout, filled with triangular
teeth. A crown of what at first looked like thorns adorned the
crest of the cranium and the sides of the face. She stepped closer
and realized that they were feathers like those sculpted onto the
golden headdress. They tapered down the short forehead into a
dramatic widow's peak that terminated in a point between two
recessed eye sockets. A bluish-green gemstone glinted from the left
orbit while the right was filled with shadows. Raindrops rolled
down its form, shimmering like a serpent's scales.

"I didn't make the connection at first," Sam
said, "but the similarities are undeniable. Quetzalcoatl was the
Aztec god of the morning star, their creator. He had the body of a
serpent and the brightly-colored plumage of a Quetzal. The Aztec
civilization flourished at roughly the same time as the Chachapoya
and Inca, from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries,
thousands of miles from here. They couldn't have come into contact
with one another, especially this far south. And the Maya had a
similar deity hundreds of years earlier. Kakulcán, the feathered
serpent of the sun. While our understanding of the Chachapoya is
limited thanks to a lack of archaeological evidence, we know much
more about the Inca. They had a similar feathered serpent god
called Viracocha, but even post-conquest, it's hard to believe that
the Chachapoya would assimilate another culture's deity."

"Common threads run through all of the major
religions today," Dahlia said.

"But not to this degree. Buddha doesn't have
a beard and I haven't seen any renditions of Jesus with a
potbelly," Sam said. She lowered her brow and stared holes through
the sculpture.

"Oh God," Merritt said from somewhere behind
Dahlia, who turned at the sound of his voice.

He stood twenty feet away through the maze
of vegetation, nearly hidden by the overgrowth of ceibas, halfway
to the point where the southern wall met with the mountainside.

"What's wrong?" Dahlia asked, shoving her
way through the masses of shrubs that grew from the broken stone
tiles of what once must have been a courtyard of some kind. She was
nearly to Merritt when she heard a buzzing sound. It was faint at
first, but grew louder with every step until it filled her ears
even over the tumult of the rain and the ruckus of their
passage.

She followed his gaze toward the overhanging
stone cliff, beneath which she could see arched swatches of forest
green and khaki. A furious black cloud roiled around them. Ebon
arcs streaked the granite wall, visible even from afar. She reached
Merritt's side and could now clearly see the details through a gap
in the trees. Two tents had been erected under the stone ledge, and
had partially collapsed onto their contents. The fabric was torn in
sections, through which she could see a jumble of belongings
crawling with flies and---

Dahlia caught a glimpse of a disembodied
torso and had to avert her eyes, yet the image persisted.
Blood-crusted ribcage knotted with the cartilage that still held
the broken bones in place. Acutely fractured cervical column capped
with only the base of a skull.

"What in the name of God happened here?"
Merritt whispered, and struck off toward what was left of the
tents.

4:03 p.m.

"What are we going to tell them?" Leo asked,
waving away the flies swirling around his head to keep the bats
from knifing from the ceiling toward his face.