Free Burial Ground by Michael McBride

heavier
equipment and act as her excavation crew lounged against the wall,
seemingly reserving their energy for the journey ahead. They
certainly weren't the graduate students with which she was
accustomed to working. All four were in their late-twenties and
appeared somehow hardened. In their hurry to catch the connecting
flight from Lima to Chiclayo she had only been introduced in
passing, but she believed she remembered their names. Nate Webber
was the man on the end, shorter than the others, yet by no means
small. He stood perhaps five-ten and had Hispanic dark eyes and
skin, yet his shaggy hair was sun-lightened to a streaked auburn.
Tad Morton sat beside him. He was taller and wirier, and reminded
her of a farmboy with his sandy hair and freckles, but his brown
eyes were sharp and always moving. Then there was Aaron Sorenson, a
hulking, stereotypical Swede who could have passed for Dolph
Lundgren from a distance, and Devin Rippeth, who immediately made
her uncomfortable. His leathery skin was pock-scarred, his eyes a
cold shade of blue. His head was shaved bald, but he had thick
black eyebrows and a gruff goatee. What looked like the tail of a
dragon curled around his neck from the tattoo beneath the collar of
his T-shirt.
    Knowing Leo, these men had been hired for
more than their digging skills, but she wasn't about to complain.
They needed to be prepared for anything. There were no hospitals or
police in the unforgiving wilderness.
    The final member of their party was
conspicuously absent. She peered around one final time before
slipping back out into the courtyard. He sat on the edge of the
fountain, cold cup of coffee at his feet, his attention focused on
his lap. She hadn't seen him when she originally entered, perhaps
because he was sitting stone-still, the only movement his hands
turning something over and over between them.
    He looked up as she approached and gave her
a weak smile, then returned his attention to his hands in his lap.
As the only other academic here, she figured she should make an
effort to get to know him. A cursory internet search had yielded a
dozen articles and citations from the late-Eighties and
early-Nineties. She'd been surprised to learn how similar their
fields were, despite the subject matter. She had always pictured
ornithologists as glorified hobbyists crouching in bushes with
binoculars around their necks, but when it came right down to it,
they were both scientists tracking the evolution of species over
time.
    "What's that?" she asked with a nod to the
object in his hands. She sat down beside him on the lip of the
tiled fountain.
    He steadied it and held it up. It was a
brown feather roughly the length of her palm with the faintest hint
of green toward the end.
    "I don't know. There are more than ten
thousand species of birds in the world, just under a third of them
in South America alone. Nearly every one of them is in one database
or other, but this feather doesn't belong to any of them." He
chuckled softly to himself. "That's the most exciting thing about
it. Somewhere up there is a species that no one else has ever
studied before, and I intend to be the first."

IV

    9:08 a.m.

    Merritt sat on the pontoon beneath the wing
of his plane and dangled his bare feet into the lake. He fought the
initial reflex to recoil his legs from the shock of the cold water,
and finished the last of his guava juice, wishing it had been
coffee. God, how he missed the stuff. Not a single day passed that
he didn't question his decision to give it up, but at least he was
sleeping better now, rather than lying awake for hours, a victim of
his waking nightmares. It was a small sacrifice, however. Life was
good again for the most part. Uncomplicated. Just how he liked
it.
    The military had granted him the opportunity
to spread his wings. Unfortunately, it had also sharpened his
talons and trained him to use them however and whenever it saw
fit.
    A bare-chested native rowed his dugout into
the middle of