Spencer took the lead. They set off, now moving considerably more slowly, clutching their weapons, the sense of menace palpable as they moved cautiously forward. A hundred yards farther they came to another skull, this one with a large crack running along the top and the front teeth almost all rotted out. Spencer chambered a round as they walked by, and a bird flapped away in the overhead canopy, the unfamiliar sound of the rifle loading startling it into flight. A troop of monkeys leapt from branch to branch near a break in the trees by the river, their grunts and cries echoing in the forest. Drake checked to ensure his weapon was also loaded and ready for use.
A quarter mile along the bank, Spencer stopped and pointed into the jungle at what appeared to be ruins, much like those they’d found at the outpost — but far more of the mounds, invisible from the river, the rainforest hiding the remains, having long ago reclaimed them. Spencer motioned for them to stay quiet; and then, from the direction of the ruins, they heard voices.
They froze as the sound of soft male voices drifted nearer, though the exact spot they were coming from was impossible to pinpoint. Drake slowed his breathing and crouched low in the brush, hoping that any snakes were taking the afternoon off. Allie gave him a scared glance, and then the voices were moving away, deeper into the jungle. They waited motionless for a few minutes, not daring to tempt fate. Spencer eventually crept back to their position and whispered to them.
“We’ve got company.”
“What do you think? Traffickers?” Allie asked.
Spencer shook his head. “No. Too quiet. My guess is natives. But you can see why Drake’s tribe would view the area as off-limits. Those skeletons aren’t just for display — they came from somewhere, most likely from other natives who stumbled across the city.”
“So what do we do?” Drake asked.
“Try to avoid getting killed while we see what we’re up against.”
Spencer stopped talking, his head tilted at an angle, listening. A faint thumping sounded in the distance, rhythmic, its beat echoing off the trees. Spencer began moving toward the sound in a low crouch, his rifle in front of him, pushing the bushes aside. Allie and Drake followed him, the wet leaves beneath their feet absorbing any noise from their boots as they edged along another trail, this one more defined. Drake saw footprints in the wet mud — bare feet — which confirmed Spencer’s guess that the voices belonged to tribesmen.
They approached a particularly dense thicket, and the drumbeat seemed only a stone’s throw away. Spencer slowed and eased a branch aside to peer into an open area beyond. Drake edged alongside him and did the same, Allie right behind them, and froze at the spectacle that greeted his eyes.
Two dozen dark-skinned men with their faces painted like skulls waited with spears, bows and ten-foot-long blowguns, watching a stone podium where a figure straight out of hell stood gazing at the drummer, who was beating on a hollow log. The figure was naked, as were the tribesman, but white as a ghost, his hair matted with pale mud that coated his entire body. Streaks of black darkened his eyes, giving his face a cadaverous look. Drake’s skin crawled instinctively at the apparition.
Then the figure moved, and Drake could see it was in actuality an old man, his body thin and frail, the mud lending him an even more skeletal aura. The man barked something unintelligible, and the drummer stopped, waiting.
From the edge of the clearing another tribesman entered, dragging a small figure. Drake saw it was a boy, no more than ten years old. The boy stumbled. His ankles were bound with a leather cord, as were his wrists, and another leather tether had been wrapped across his face, blinding him and muffling any cries. His captor pulled him by the arm, and Drake could make out a wound on his abdomen, blood crusted around it. When they reached the stone podium, Drake realized with a jolt that it was an altar.
Allie inched next to him and watched in horror as the boy struggled to stand, obviously in agony, trembling and tiny as the collection of natives observed in silent witness. The white-clay-covered man leaned his head back and emitted a blood-chilling moan at the sky, only vaguely human in timbre, and then spread his arms wide, as if welcoming the boy.
What happened next caused Allie to grip Drake’s arm and press her head against his shoulder, tears streaming down her face.
The captor struck the boy in the back of the head with a heavy wooden club, and he collapsed in a heap at the man’s feet. The man knelt down, lifted the boy ceremoniously, and placed him on the stone altar.
The mud-smeared elder brandished a shining metal blade over his head — what looked like a machete ground down to a sharper point for more sinister duty than clearing brush. The captor took it from the elder and bowed, and then turned to the boy’s prone form and held the blade above it with both hands.
Drake flinched and turned away as the captor brought the knife down in a violent arc, and didn’t need to hear the murmur from the gathered men to know that the boy’s life had been brutally ended. When Drake returned his attention to the altar, blood streamed down its sides, and the men were stomping their bare feet against the ground and pounding it with their spears. The mud-caked old man did a little jig as he moved to the boy’s corpse. With a howl like a demented wolf, he plunged his hand into the new wound gashed wide by the knife, and with the boy’s blood smeared a design on his muddy white forehead.
The eerie ritual went on as the mud-smeared shaman anointed each of the gathered natives with a smudge of the crimson. When he was done, two of the tribesmen approached the altar and dragged the corpse unceremoniously into the underbrush, likely destined for one of the bone piles on the perimeter.
Spencer held his finger to his lips and pointed the way they’d come, and Drake nodded. He put his arm around Allie, whose eyes were clenched tight, and leaned into her.
“We need to get out of here,” he whispered.
He led her carefully back along the track, Spencer guarding the rear. As they arrived at the riverbank they paused, waiting for Spencer to catch up. When he joined them, he shook his head, his expression dour.
“I guess we know why your shaman’s daughter didn’t want to set foot near here,” he said.
“Pretty obvious. Is human sacrifice common with the natives in these parts?” Drake demanded.
“No. This is some kind of an abomination. Craziness.” Spencer paused. “Did you notice that the head of the party was considerably taller than the others? I made him for Caucasian. Hard to tell with all the mud, but he looked like a white man to me.”
Allie’s eyes met Drake’s. “The Inca used to perform human sacrifices. The ceremony was called capacocha. But it was nothing like what we just witnessed.”
“Really? I thought that was only the Aztecs,” Drake said.
“The Aztecs were certainly the most flamboyant, cutting hearts out. But the Incas also had their savagery. Children, often of royalty, spent a year at feasts leading up to their sacrifice, stoned out of their minds on massive amounts of cocaine. At the end of the year, they would go to the highest points in the Andes and be buried alive, left to die.” She swallowed hard. “This is nothing like what we know of those ceremonies. I agree with Spencer. This is some new ceremony that’s only slightly drawing from the capacocha tradition.”