Dinosaur Lake (24 page)

The creature seemed to be amusing itself with the submersible. Playing with it.

“Why can’t he get away from it?” Greer’s hands were clenched before him, his expression flat.

“It’s too strong,” Ranger Shore sighed.

“It can’t get to him in that sub.” Francis swallowed. “The hull’s too thick. Made of the best, strongest metals. It’s–”

Lassen’s shaky voice haunted the speakers, “My god, it’s trying to break in. Why won’t it just leave me alone and go away? What the hell does it want?”

You,
Francis answered silently, meeting the panicked gazes of the men around him.

“He’s not going to make it,” Shore said. “And it’s my fault. I knew what the creature was like. I knew it was real. Deadly. I never should have let him, anyone, go down there…without weapons to protect themselves.”

“How can you blame yourself, Henry?” Greer tried to ease the ranger’s guilt. “He was only doing his job. He knew the risks.”

Dr. Harris snapped, “And he’s not dead yet. He’ll get away. That creature is not that smart, I keep telling you. A human surely should be able to outsmart the thing.”

“I hope you’re right.” Francis regarded the monitors, his jaw clenched. He found himself praying for his partner’s safety deep below in the lake.

Suddenly, the beast released the sub and the machine pulled away. It was chugging ahead, leaving the monster behind.

The men on the boat cheered.

The Rover slowly increased its speed, as if Lassen was afraid to recapture the creature’s attention. Then it was a gray bullet flying through the water.

The monster waited for a while and began to follow. Gaining. Gaining.

The submersible ceased moving, falling dead in the water.

“Mark!” Francis cried. “What’s wrong? Why aren’t you getting the hell out of there?”

“I don’t know! She won’t accelerate. She’s dead in the water.” Lassen could be heard panting, pure terror in his words.

The leviathan had caught up to the Deep Rover and was slowly circling it.

“Maybe something’s wrong with the engine…I don’t know. I’ve checked everything. Everything was fine this morning.”

Then Lassen was screaming.

The screaming made Francis’s blood freeze.

The pictures on the camera were going crazy, one moment a view of the lake bottom and the next of nothing but water churning.

“It’s got me again! Got the Rover…tearing at us…
” the man inside the sub rasped breathlessly, his utter terror painful to hear. His words were now gibberish and his shrill shrieks, and pitiful pleas for help, were lost among tearing metal. The microphone and cameras giving a gruesome account of what was occurring, up to the moment Lassen was taken from the Deep Rover.

The beast had him. Like a can-opener, it’d pried the sub open and popped the human out.

The others watched, mouths open in horror, their faces registering shock, as the man in the submersible was ripped from his sardine can and disappeared from view. They watched the screen until it went dead and there was nothing else to watch or to hear but the pounding of their own hearts.

“Oh, god, we’ve got to do something,” Francis cried. “We’ve got to save him!” The others had to restrain him or he would have started the boat and gone to rescue his friend. Hopeless. There was no way he could have saved him. Lassen was gone.

“It’s too late.” Greer’s eyes were glued to the screen but there was nothing left to see. “It’s over.”

Under his feet Francis could feel the sway of the boat, moored to the dock. Outside it was broad daylight. But he didn’t feel safe. As long as he was on the water, he wouldn’t feel safe.

The monster, and that was what it was, had come out early to feed. It wasn’t even dark. Which meant either it was getting bolder, or hungrier. Or both.

Francis stared at the other men. Everyone but Dr. Harris was in shock. Even Patterson.

He collapsed into the chair Maltin had just vacated, his distress a live coal in his gut. He’d really cared about Lassen. He’d been his partner, his friend, for so many years. The man had a family. How was he going to tell them? He felt sick.

How could this have happened? What were they going to do now? He couldn’t think about that, his revulsion, his grief was too fresh.

“Sending that sub into the lake was like sending out a bright fishing lure on the end of a line. Come and get me, monster,” Ranger Shore gritted through clenched teeth. “We as good as sent that man to his death. It’s my fault, I should have known how dangerous the mission was; never sent him. I’m so sorry, Jim.”

Jim Francis, who’d been quiet since his outburst, jerked his eyes towards Shore. “It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know this would happen.”

Shore lowered his eyes but said nothing more.

“At least he didn’t suffer long.” Francis laid his head on his folded arms and Dr. Maltin put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“No, not long,” Henry Shore said gently.

And no one disputed that.

***

The horror of what had taken place was so palpable Henry could have reached out and touched it. No one said or did anything for a long time, not even Harris.

Then Greer began scribbling notes and Dr. Harris, back to his old self, began gushing over the size and power of the monster.

“Did you see it?” Harris kept asking. “I know what just happened was a terrible thing, poor Lassen and all, but, that creature is an astounding anachronism…a prehistoric live,
breathing
dinosaur! Colossal. Did you see the tail, the claws on it? Not webbed feet, like a normal Nothosaur, but claws on appendages that could grip? Evolution at its highest level. Definitely not the Nothosaur we are familiar with, but many steps up on the evolutionary chain, or even an entirely new species never before seen on the earth. Distant kin, but not similar, to those fossils we found at the site. Did you see the fin?”

Jim Francis raised his head from his arms and glared at Harris with hatred. “Shut up, will you? A good man has died horribly. A lot of people have died. And all you can do is rave about that butchering evil creature. It should die, hear me!
Die!
Before it kills anyone else.”

“What’s one human’s life, a thousand lives, against the greatest discovery of the millennia?” Harris declared.

Henry stormed off the boat. If he’d have stayed a moment longer he would have decked that idiot Harris who felt no sorrow over the man who’d just died in front of them. All he cared about was that damn monster…that dinosaur.

Sending the Deep Rover into the lake had been foolish, he brooded, as he stared out over the lake, the sun shining brightly above it. It was a lovely early August day. Warm. Clear. Great weather for hiking the rim, cruising the waters, or picnicking in the woods. Except there were no one on the lake and no one in the park. The visitors were gone. Everyone but them.

Henry studied the line of bobbing, empty vessels and the placid lake covered with that creepy mist which lately hovered everywhere all the time. Ironically, the heat from below the caldera meeting the cooler air above was creating a prehistoric environment. The monster must feel right at home.

Children’s laughter and the salty jabs of the boats’ absent captains whispered like phantoms on the warm air.

He thought he heard Justin’s voice. But Justin, seconds after the tragedy, had muttered a few trembling words of sympathy and had gotten off the boat as if it were on fire. Henry saw him on the dock about thirty feet away hunched over the water. Throwing up.

Standing there, the earth quivered under his boots. For a moment he was afraid they were having another earthquake. But then nothing. The earth calmed. He breathed a sigh of relief.

Great.

So not only did he have the lake monster to worry about, he also had the unstable earth. What else could go wrong?

He squeezed his fists at his side and fought dark thoughts.

The beast was down there devouring Lassen, but soon it’d be up there with them again looking around for more appetizers. The park now belonged to it. Not the humans.

And here they all were sitting on a docked boat on the water, easy pickings.

Henry ran back to the boat and scrambled inside.

“Everyone get out. Now. Unless you want to be the monster’s second course.”

They obeyed, and dragging Harris with them, they piled into the park vehicle Henry had borrowed for the day and he aimed it for park headquarters.

Reality had sunk in. The creature could emerge from the water any time and attack. One human snack wouldn’t be enough, if, as Lassen had inferred, the lake’s fish were gone, and it was starving. They’d seen the creature’s immense body, its head with the gigantic fanged mouth; its glowing hungry eyes, through the sub’s cameras. It’d take a lot more to fill that beast’s belly.

Henry glanced at Patterson in the back seat. As tightly as he clutched them in his lap, Patterson’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

Greer’s hair was mussed, and he hadn’t checked his pocket watch once since the incident, yet he kept peering behind the moving jeep towards the lake.

“Can’t this thing go any faster?” Dr. Harris demanded, looking behind them, too.

They were going fast enough. The scenery speeding by like in the movies. Henry slowed down for a sharp curve.

“So now, at last, you’re scared?” Henry snapped at Harris, sitting up front with him and Justin. Harris grunted, keeping watch.

Patterson was mumbling in the back seat, “I didn’t think
it
really existed. Until it got Lassen. Never believed in monsters under the bed, as a kid, either.” The man was shook up. “Lord, that thing was big. Fast. And Ranger, you say it can travel just as well on land as it does in the water?”

Henry swung his head around to look at the man, and before he could stop it, he laughed. It wasn’t funny. A fine man had died, right in front of their eyes. But the way the usually taciturn Patterson had said what he’d just said forced it out of him. It was only a release of tension, but it still felt disrespectful. But a human being could only take so much horror then it had to be disposed of somehow. Humor did that. It was either that or cry. Henry knew crying was a waste of time and energy. Lassen was dead. Nothing would change that. They had to take care of themselves.

“It can.”

“My, my, my,” Patterson was moaning behind him. “We’re in trouble now.”

Henry got them miles away before he slowed down. Just a little.

Behind him Greer leaned forward and said loud enough to be heard, “When I was still FBI, I had a macabre case, oh, about a year ago. Serial killer. Loathsome. He stalked and meticulously butchered young women. All his victims had to like classical music. All had to be short, with dark hair and blue eyes. They had to be good girls. No whores. Most of them honor roll students. Talented. Young women who might have been impressive adults.” In the rearview mirror, there was a look on Greer’s face that Henry couldn’t place or describe. Rancor, perhaps.

“I won’t go into details of what he did to those girls when he caught them, it was bad. Real bad. He liked to see them suffer. He was a monster. Pure and simple. Malignant to his roots. Like most serial killers.

“I tracked that bastard for months and months. He was so damn smart. Used to send me packages with body pieces in them. Dirty letters. Taunting me; telling me what he planned to do next. Sometimes, even where. Just never gave me much time to get there. I had to beat him to the location or a girl died.

“No matter how hard I tried, I never made it in time. As the months went on, and I didn’t catch him, I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. I became obsessed. I had to find him. Rid the world of his bloodthirsty evil. But,” Greer confessed, “I couldn’t stop him. Or the killings. He got eight girls before I cornered him in Utah. I only caught him, in the end, because of an anonymous tip and pure dumb luck. I was close by. He’d planned on killing two at once, changing things up I guess, and had finished with one young woman already. Her remains were still warm when I found her. He quickly killed the other woman, when he sensed I was closing in. I missed saving that one by seconds, I think. Seconds. I’d been so close. So near. He’d mocked me with those girls. Calling me up and saying vile things to get a rise out of me. To make me doubt myself.” Greer’s eyes were diamond chips in the mirror as he looked at Henry, his smile self-hating.

Dr. Harris was listening closely to what Greer was saying. Henry could see the little weasel in the corner of his eyes.

Jim Francis was staring out into the woods, his expression unreadable. Patterson acted as if he’d heard the story before and knew the ending.

Then Greer leaned even closer to Henry’s ear so only he could hear what he said next. “But I made sure I was in the house first when we finally cornered and caught him months later, before the police closed in…and I shot him in cold-blood as he grinned at me over another poor girl’s mutilated body. I won’t lie. His hands were empty and held up in surrender, the knife on the floor next to him. I shot him eight times, for every girl he’d murdered, and I shot not to kill until the final bullet. He screamed a lot. I put the final one dead center in his brain. And later, I claimed it was self-defense. It wasn’t. I executed him, and I was glad I did, for all those girls.