When she recognized what her hand was wrapped around, she drew in a sharp breath.
'Show no one,' he whispered. 'Take...take your daughter and go.'
'Why---?'
'Go.'
She pulled the money out and stuffed it into her pocket, rising quickly to her feet.
'Thank you,' she whispered, and turned away. Her pace hastened with every step, and with one final glance back over her shoulder, she snatched her child from the large man's arms and disappeared around the corner onto the street.
Anders rolled over onto his stomach and tried to push himself to all fours, but with as badly as his arms were shaking, he could barely lift his head from the ground. Reaching forward with clawed fingers, he tried to grip the icy cement, tearing the skin from his fingertips and prying his fingernails from the cuticles. He left bloody smears as he dragged himself toward the unconscious addicts abusing the valuable space beneath the overhang. They had one foot in the grave already. All he had to do was pass the disease into one of them and...
He awoke on his belly, a pool of blood expanding around his mouth. Be it from the cold or the rapidly metastasizing tumors that riddled his body, he could barely feel his arms and his legs could only flop uselessly on the ice. He had waited too long...too long...
They would find his corpse in the alley with all of the others and would bury him beneath an unmarked placard. He would no longer be able to take the sickness from the dying. His message would die with him.
No.
The woman and her child. They would continue to pass along the only thing he found worthwhile in this dying land, the one thing the world needed more than anything else...
Hope.
Anders closed his eyes.
'Thank you, sir,' a tiny voice said.
He barely had the strength to open them back up.
The little girl stood by his side. She couldn't have been more than seven or eight, yet her eyes were hardened well beyond her years.
He tried to forge a smile. His trembling hand reached for the hip pocket of his coat.
The girl knelt and removed his wooden case from his pocket for him, holding it tightly in both hands.
'How does it work?' she asked.
'Directions...' he whispered. 'Inside...'
He closed his eyes and drifted into the afterlife while the child opened up the wooden case. At first she saw nothing, but she turned it over and over in her hands until she managed to decipher a faded inscription. Bringing it close to her face so she could read it, she crinkled her brow.
Closing it back up, she stuffed the box into her pocket and knelt beside the man. She leaned over and placed a gentle kiss on the side of his bloody face.
'I understand,' she whispered.
A tear fell from her chin onto his cheek as she rose and ran back down the alley to where her mother waited for her on the street.
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BURIAL GROUND
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Prologue
The screams were more than he could bear, but they didn't last long. Panicked cries cut short by wet, tearing sounds, and then finally silence, save the patter of raindrops on the muddy ground. From where he crouched in the dark recess of the stone fortification, hidden from the world by a screen of tangled lianas and the sheeting rain, he had listened to them die.
All of them.
The signs had been there, but he and his companions had misinterpreted them, and now it was too late. It was only a matter of time before they found him, and slaughtered him as well.
Hunter Gearhardt donned his rucksack backward, and wrapped his arms around its contents. He'd managed to grab a few items of importance once he'd recognized what was about to happen, and he needed to get them out of the jungle. More bloodshed would follow if he didn't reach civilization. With their inability to access a signal on the satellite phone, there was no other way to deliver the warning. It was all up to him now, and his window of opportunity was closing fast.
His breathing was ragged, too loud in his own ears, his heartbeat a thudding counterpoint. He couldn't hear them out there, but they had attacked so quietly in the first place that the silence was of little comfort. They were still out there, stalking him. There was no time to waste. He needed to put as much distance between himself and his pursuit as possible if he were to stay alive long enough to get down off the mountain. And even then, they knew this region of the cloud forest far better than he did.
He wished he'd had the opportunity to find his pistol, but it would have been useless against their superior numbers. His only hope was to run, to reach the river. From there he could only pray that he would be able to survive the rapids and that they wouldn't be able to track him from the shore. It was a long shot. Unfortunately, it was also his only shot.
Tightening his grip on his backpack, his muscles tensed in anticipation.
Through the curtain of lianas, the rain continued to pour, creating puddles in every imperfection in the earth
