Burial Ground

directly through the flock.

He thought of the creatures' aversion to bright light. It overwhelmed their visual senses, which were enhanced by retinal reflectors that provided acute night vision by which to hunt.

They were shrouded in darkness, which gave the predators every advantage.

He remembered their shrieks, like those of a circling bird of prey, meant to flush their targets from the brush, to instill the panic that would trigger their flight instincts.

The creatures required the element of motion to hone in for the kill.

He remembered the victims all over the ground in various states of slaughter and decomposition. Unlike carrion birds, the raptors didn't eat the flesh of the dead. Did that imply a sense of smell? Taste? Or did it once again play into their necessity for movement?

Thus far, they had only attacked Galen's party one at a time, or as a pair separated from the group. Was there some sort of pack or flock mentality at work? Did they lie in wait to surround their prey and overwhelm it with superior numbers?

The jaguar had been ambushed and run down in the clearing.

The skeletal remains littered throughout the ruins suggested the same had happened to the former occupants of the fortress.

What would happen if they simply didn't run and tried to hide in plain sight?

Were these the neuquenraptors they had recently exhumed as fossils in Argentina? If so, it was speculated that dinosaurs, especially prehistoric, bipedal raptor species, relied almost exclusively on their senses of sight and hearing.

Another shrill scream from perhaps a dozen feet away in the darkness.

There was no more time.

Either they gambled that he understood the nature of the creatures, or they made a mad dash for the outside world and hoped that the monsters wouldn't be able to butcher all of them at once.

And that was a risk none of them could afford to take.

'Listen to me!' he whispered to Merritt. An avian cry echoed through the cavern. 'The creatures...they can't see us if we don't move. Their vision is motion-based. They're like modern birds of prey in that sense. That's why they emit those shrill screams. To force their prey to run. Think about it! All of the remains we've encountered, from the jaguar to the humans, have indicated that they were attacked while running or trying to seek cover. And didn't you notice that they don't completely consume the dead? Our only option is to lie still and pray they pass us by.'

'And what if you're wrong?' Merritt whispered.

A shrill scream answered for him.

'You'll just have to trust that I know what I'm talking about.'

Galen locked stares with Merritt in the dwindling firelight for a long moment, then slowly rolled off of him. He half-expected Merritt to immediately leap to his feet and make a break for it, but the pilot merely stared up into the stalactite-riddled ceiling.

Another horrific screech. The sounds of cracking bones and tearing flesh faded, leaving only the muffled grumble of the waterfall and the drone of flies.

Galen flattened to his back and began piling the feathers from the ground onto his legs and torso. He scattered them over his face so that he could barely see through them and thrust his arms down into the centuries of accumulation.

He felt insects crawling all over his skin beneath his clothing. They started to bite almost instantaneously.

Bird mites.

Motionless, he awaited his fate.

There was one thing that he hadn't considered. Even if his idea worked, they were still right in the middle of the raptors' nesting chamber.

How were they supposed to get out?

VI

10:56 p.m.

Sam's eyes widened in horror as Merritt hurriedly explained Galen's plan. Were they out of their minds? She couldn't fathom the possibility that these evolutionary aberrations hunted solely with their eyes. But what were their other alternatives? She raced through them in her mind, playing out scenarios that all ended with violent and painful deaths.

Without making a conscious decision to do so, she slowly crouched beside Merritt and lay down on her back. In the weak glow, she watched Galen heap feathers over his supine form, and, with trembling hands, began to do the same. The feathers reeked of age and death, and the tiny insects that lived within them made her skin crawl.

There was a sharp cry, then another from off to her right.

Merritt's hand closed over hers under the feathers. She squeezed it for dear life.

Her heart pounded, and she was sure her chest rose and fell like a billows. She had to focus to silence her panicked breathing and slow her respirations, while she wanted nothing more than to scream.

Another skree.

Closer.

The feathers covering her face constricted her vision. She could see the small flames burning only five feet away. They advanced steadily outward as they consumed the feathers, producing a rich black smoke that singed her nostrils and stank of charnel. Only Merritt's eye was visible through the mound beside her. Everything else was either darkness or shadow.

A high-pitched shriek.

Mere feet away.

Every fiber of her being cried out for her to lunge to her feet and run away as fast as she could.

Soft rustling sounds above her head. More to either side.

A shadow eclipsed the glow of the fire.

Her breath caught in her throat.

A thin leg emerged from the edge of her vision. Three long scaled toes. The outer two hung limply, while the inside digit was curved upward to support a sharp, hooked claw the size of her middle finger. They flattened to the floor, save the one bearing the elevated claw, which tapped eagerly. The leg bent backward at the knee, where the slick scales gave way to feathers. Its smooth belly was covered with larger, broader scales reminiscent of those on the soft underside of an alligator, and framed to either side by a fringe of iridescent green and brown feathers. Another step, and she saw its long tail, held parallel to the ground, covered with feathers that hung downward as though parted along its spine. A twig-like arm with longer feathers, which appeared as though they had been draped from the skinny elbow like moss from a bough, reached forward a heartbeat before the creature lowered its head to the ground. Its long neck wavered from side to side in a slithering motion while its head stayed still. Snaggled teeth nestled together on the outside of the scaled lips of a blunt snout. A crown of quills grew over its cranium from a widow's peak between filmy eyes that shimmered with firelight. It had to be nearly six feet long from its finely-scaled nostrils to the tip of its tail. Its jaws snapped open nearly vertically and she glimpsed a pointed gray tongue that trilled when it released a deafening skree.

She pinched her eyes shut and felt spittle on her face. The thing's breath reeked of a slaughterhouse floor, of meat, red and wet...of what she recognized with a start to be Leo.

The cry ended and it nudged her head with its snout. She had to bite her lip to contain a scream.

This wasn't going to work.

She held her breath and prayed to any god that might be listening.

Feathers rustled and a toe brushed against her cheek. The raptor stood nearly directly on top of her.

A whistle of air preceded the strike. Its foot slashed at her chest. Clothing and skin ripped. She felt the sting