Dinosaur Lake (33 page)

“It’s okay. I’m a big boy. I can take care of myself.”

“All right, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” A pause.

“Do you believe we’ve been visited on earth by aliens before?”

The bizarre question threw Henry off. “Greer, before this little adventure we’re on now, I might have said: Hell, aliens? And thought you were probably nuts.

“But now, I don’t know. If an extinct dinosaur can come back to life, anything is possible.” Henry’s eyes stared off into the endless pit beyond the lantern’s glow. He could hear something, a shuffling, scratching noise, out there. He just wasn’t sure what it was.

He shut his strained eyes, rubbing them with sooty fingers. He could hear Francis’s snoring. Justin restless tossing in his sleep. Hear water dripping somewhere behind him in the cave. They were in a warmer cavern tonight than last night. Smaller. He wiped a trickle of sweat off his forehead. He’d taken his shirt off, leaving only a T-shirt.

“I believe we’ve been visited by aliens. Many times. As far as I know, it’s still happening.”

Now Greer had captured all of his attention. The thought of sleep was receding.

“These days, Ranger, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to learn my next door neighbors were aliens. Or that the world was populated with aliens and ghosts.” He released the breath he’d been holding. “I’m open to anything. I’m a believer.”

“That the reason you left the Bureau? Aliens and ghosts?” Henry couldn’t help but ask.

“Some of the reasons.”

“Well, are you going to finish your story or not?” Henry pushed.

“Oh, the story. Yes. It was twenty years ago and, as I said, I thought I knew everything. Smart-alecky young FBI agent. College graduate. No one could tell me anything. I imagine I was a real pain in the ass. Enough people told me so anyway.”

Henry chuckled. Greer echoed it. They’d both been there. Everyone had.

“There was this little podunk town in Nevada. I won’t tell you its name. Doesn’t matter anyway. It doesn’t exist any longer. The whole incident is high priority top secret. The bureaucrats have sealed the records tighter than a new soda bottle cap.”

Henry shifted on his sleeping bag, the stone beneath was hard and his hip was killing him.

“You’re not going to believe this, but we were called in to investigate the sinister disappearance of the whole town. Over two hundred people. Men, women, children. It was unbelievable. Everything was gone. Everything. The people, their houses, their possessions, cars, dogs, cats. Even the trash cans and mail boxes. There was nothing but the scooped out dirt holes where the houses had been and impressions of where their possessions had stood. Kind of like that old spooky episode of Twilight Zone, you know? Where a whole neighborhood is snatched up and taken to an alien planet and the people wake up to find themselves surrounded by…nothingness?”

Henry found he’d been holding his breath. He let it out. He remembered the story. His mouth fell open, but he shut it long enough to ask, “What happened to the people in the town? Anyone come forward with an explanation, anyone see anything? Witnesses?”

Greer released a cynical laugh. “Oh, there were witnesses, all right. Three men who’d been on a camping trip that weekend and had, unknown to them, camped very close to the town. When, in the middle of the night, they said they were awoken by a horrendous ruckus of some kind and they went to get a look. Investigate. What they saw scared the hell out of them.”

Greer stopped talking. He was peering past the perimeter of the light’s circle again as if he expected someone or something to come walking into their camp.

“Well, what did they see?”

“They swore, I mean, swore on the bible, that when they got to the town there were these huge silver glowing spaceships all over the place, hovering right above the ground, and they were lifting the people and the houses; yanking them right from the earth like bad teeth and drawing them into their bellies. When there was nothing left of the town except fresh ovals of dirt, they zipped off into the atmosphere. Disappeared in a flash as if they’d never been there.”

“What did the FBI do about it?” Though he already suspected the answer.

“Covered it up, of course. Pretended as if it never happened. Like they do with a lot of cases they can’t explain. Are frightened of. For the public’s peace of mind, they say. Ha. They think every man out here is a superstitious fool. Wouldn’t, couldn’t understand. Would panic. To this day, I don’t know what they did with those three campers. Poor slobs. They whisked them off somewhere. Years later, out of remorseful curiosity I tried to run them down. They’d vaporized from the face of the earth. Even their birth certificates were gone.”

“How about relatives of the people who’d lived in the town? Friends? People who’d visited or had done business there?”

“They told everyone the town had been hit by this virulent and very contagious virus. Everyone had died. No one was allowed to come near. That was why they had to bulldoze the town into oblivion and burn everything. The FBI quarantined the area for miles around. And as far as I know, it still is.

“Because there weren’t any other witnesses, they were able to cover the whole thing up.”

“Well,” Henry huffed. “That’s one thing they can’t do here, can they? Cover this up. Too many people have seen too much. The story will be all over the world news as soon as the gag order’s lifted. Which, as I see it, won’t be much longer. It’s already leaked out.”

“Yes, it’ll be pretty hard for them to cover what’s happened up, won’t it? Maybe, without Ann’s video, and all the press nosing around, they might have been able to. But not now.”

Greer was obviously finished.

“That incident in Nevada really shook you, didn’t it?” Henry didn’t know what to think about it. It was almost too much to grasp. Aliens taking complete towns. Cats and all. He shivered, even in the warmth of the cave. How many times in history had such things happened, and how many times had their government hidden them?

“At the time, no. I believed what the bureau told me to believe. After our job was done, I went on to another case and shoved that weird town out of my mind. Pretended it’d been some great practical joke. Ignored the facts right in front of my eyes. Denied what those campers had told me. Hell, one of them had been a bank president, the other two had been respectable, level-headed businessmen from a nearby town. They hadn’t been some country yokels. Where was my brain? Why would men like that have lied? It made no sense.

“Over the years, that town and its missing population haunted me. More each year. Not that I wasn’t part of lots of other shady situations when I was an agent, I was. But that cover up was one of the reasons I left the Bureau. I finally had to face the truth about that town or it would have driven me insane, you know? Dwelling on aliens abducting entire towns and taking off with them. To where? Why? What happened to those people? Were they subjects of some cruel alien experiments, as a lot of abductees say, or are they living high on the hog somewhere on some Eden of a planet? Fat, happy, and sassy, like in that movie Cocoon?

“And, my worst speculation of all was, were the aliens someday going to return and steal something bigger the next time…like New York? I figured if they could abduct a town, they could abduct a city. And we couldn’t do a damn thing about it.”

“Now that’s a mind-boggling thought. New York nothing but a big earth-black pit.” Henry didn’t laugh. He could tell Greer was disturbed by the whole thing.

“I suppose that Nevada town vanishing into thin air could upset a person,” he offered instead. “A sane person would’ve tried to forget it, but, as you did, probably wouldn’t have been able to. I wouldn’t have. The idea of being so helpless that any extraterrestrial could just zip us away would scare the hell out of any human.”

“It scared, scares, me. I can’t forget that place. Sometimes I want to believe it’s a nightmare I dreamed, or the first blossoming of insanity. To accept that things like that can even happen in our safe little world. I hadn’t been myself at that time to begin with. I’d recently lost Amy. Coming so swiftly after my loss, it pushed me to the edge.”

Henry caught the reference to Greer’s wife and another piece of the man’s life fell into its slot.

“You believe me, don’t you?”

“I have no reason not to. Though I don’t know what to think about it. Heck, I don’t want to think about it at all. I’ve got enough trouble of my own right here. This here’s another one for the book of the unbelievable and strange.”

Greer chuckled, scratched the side of his cheek. “Sorry, but I had to tell someone. After all these years. Someone who wouldn’t laugh.”

“Sure. You wanted me to go nuts, too, trying to figure out where in the hell those damn people went,” said with such humorous sarcasm Greer laughed out loud.

“Get some sleep, Chief Ranger,” Greer finished. “You stand guard next. I’ve already kept you up too long with my crazy story.”

“Wasn’t a crazy story. Interesting, actually. It gives me something to ponder on. But it does sound like our government, always making weighty decisions for the public, whether we want them to or not.”

“That’s our government, for sure.”

“Goodnight, Greer.”

“Henry, can you call me Dylan from now on? That’s my name. All my friends call me Dylan.”

“Sure thing.” Henry smiled, secretly pleased, and laid his head down into the plumpness of the sleeping bag. “Wake me when your watch is over…Dylan.”

“Will do. Oh, and about that serial killer who murdered my wife? He’s the one I shot to death up in Utah.”

“I’d figured that one out already.”

“I thought you might have, Henry. You would have made a great agent.”

“Thanks. See you in an hour and a half. Don’t forget to get me up.” It’d be like the man to take his shift, too. He didn’t seem to need much sleep.

“I won’t,” Greer droned softly, and went back to checking the grenade launchers’ mechanisms for at least the tenth time since they’d started their quest. He’d told Henry often enough they had to work perfectly, without a hitch, at the moment they were most needed. It could mean life or death for all of them.

Shaking his head over the enigma that was Dylan Greer, Henry shut his eyes and slept.

Late the following day, after they’d crossed a tricky succession of connected chambers, they stumbled onto another of the cave’s entrances and the evidence that something extremely large had been using it.

Justin had begun to behave nervously as they traveled deeper into the cave, but hadn’t said anything to him or the others. Sensitive to what he was feeling through the soles of his booted feet as a few-time survivor of earthquakes; after the gloom and doom warning his seismologist friend had been feeding him for weeks about the big one coming, Henry thought he was extra sensitive to the earth quivering through a series of pre-earthquake tremors. But he felt them, as well. Not wanting to upset the others, he’d kept his mounting fears to himself. And if any of the others had noticed the shakiness beneath them at times, none of them had mentioned it. Could be, like him, they were afraid to. They were so deep into the caves, no matter what happened, they’d have a heck of a time getting out if the big one hit.

But Henry knew he couldn’t remain silent much longer. The tremors were getting worse. If they didn’t stop, they’d have to halt their search and get out or risk being underground when the earthquake came. He’d hate to be trapped underground when and if it did. The cave had been there for thousands of years, but if the quake was massive enough, all that could change in seconds. The cave could become their tomb.

Greer was the first one to see the other opening to the lake. He’d led them into the enormous cavern, which was almost the twin to the entrance they’d come through three days before, and where they’d left the submersible. Once they entered the chamber, there were no other tunnels leading anywhere. Just the water.

“End of the line, kids. By the way the current’s flowing, I’d say down there somewhere,” Greer pointed at the softly lapping water in front of them, “is another entrance to the lake. I suspected there were others.”

The four men stood at the brink and stared down at the dark water.

Eventually Justin walked over to a nearby rock and sat down. His ribs must be bothering him, he seemed to be in pain, but complaining to the others would be the last thing he’d do. He was high on the adventure, so what was a little pain? He’d said that morning, “One day I’ll probably look back at this summer as the highlight of my life. Fossil discovery, monster dinosaur, underwater cave spelunking and all. If I live through it, that is.”

“Let’s inspect the place,” Henry said, “to see if our boy’s been living in here.”

He, Greer and Francis panned their helmet lights into the vast crannies and corners of the chamber. The illumination was inadequate, so they ended up climbing around with handheld flashlights to further dissolve the gloom.

“Here!” Henry yelled, and in moments the others were by his side. “Something big has been in here. Recently.” He was studying where the stalactites had been knocked off to nubs, crushed or shoved to the side, rocks strewn everywhere. There were deep impressions in places where something heavy had tread and broken through the soft rock of the cave floor, leaving clear outlines of an animal’s footprints and different sized puddles of cooling lava.

Henry bent down and lightly outlined one, not touching it, with a gloved hand, cocked an eyebrow up at Justin. They’d seen these before. “We’re in the right place. It’s been here. And by the amount of tracks, often.

“This way.” They trailed him through the haze across the cavern.

“You smell that?” Greer pinched his nose shut with two of his fingers. Like the rest of them, he was drained from the heat they’d been trudging through all day, his eyes red-rimmed, his face bristly with beard and dirt from the volcanic ash that covered everything. They’d been dunked and soaked more times than he could count from wading through watery lakes which had looked shallow but hadn’t been. Earlier, Greer had fallen over an unseen ledge and had scraped himself up. As much as he loved exploring caves, he’d confessed, this cave had about used him up. He said he was relieved they’d come to the end because it meant they’d be turning around and heading back to the submersible. Their underground journey was over.

Henry was also aware of the stench. “Smells like putrid meat. It’s stronger over this way.” He gestured towards the right and they went in that direction. He’d never seen a cave as large as the one they were in, though Francis remarked he had. It went on for what seemed like miles with the lake rippling on its left side like a yawning inky pit and lava bubbling through weak spots of the floor, so they had to jump the boiling liquid like obstacle fences.

They hiked across the unstable surface until Francis stepped on something. He dipped his flashlight, bent over and picked it up.

“A bone.”

Henry looked at what Francis held in his hand. “A human bone.”

They searched the black spaces around them until they found the source of the odor, a monstrous pile of bones, animal and human, with rancid flesh clinging to some of them. It was only one of many piles strewn along the rear of the chamber. The freshest kills were human. Henry felt nauseated.

“Now we know where the missing people ended up,” he spoke softly, “or parts of them, anyway.”

“Apparently the creature drags back a large portion of its prey to eat here. Its home,” Justin said.

Francis cocked his head upwards so the helmet’s light skimmed across the back wall of the chamber. His hand covered his mouth and then his nose. He froze, probably terrified he’d discover body parts of his dead friend among the refuse. He strode quickly away from the pile.

“Look at this!” he exclaimed over his shoulder.

The rest of them tore themselves away from the bones.

Henry, Greer and Justin moved up besides Francis, who was standing beneath something, gawking up at it. A solid wall of embedded dinosaur fossils.

“I’ve never seen such complete, perfect, specimens. Never,” Justin breathed. “Not even up above at the dig.”

Heads, feet, all parts of the ancient monsters stuck out at them like a bizarre relief sculpture. The outlines so clear of the original animals Henry was afraid they’d come to life and jump out of the wall at them.

“Nothosaurs, I think. No, Kronosaurs, no,” Justin stuttered in wonder. “No, neither of them.” His voice turned grave with foreboding. “This is some fantastic creature no human has ever discovered or conceived of. It’s a creature from hell, is what it is. Look at the size of the things! They’re much larger than our creature. Much.”

“For now, anyway,” Henry supplied. “Maybe that’s how big our beast is going to get.”

Greer, staring up at the wall like a man in a nightmare, whistled. “We got to find it and destroy it before it gets this big then.”

“We’re trying, Dylan. We’re trying,” Henry sighed. Things were looking worse every day. Now this.

“Henry, this is most likely where the wall you found up above begins. Down here deep under the lake. Astounding,” Justin mumbled, still in shock. “There must be hundreds of the animals captured in this rock.”

“What happened to them?” Greer couldn’t take his eyes off the fossils.

“Perhaps an earthquake millions of years before the one that blew the top off this volcano and created the caldera. The lava was so hot it melted the rock and embedded the creatures in it for eternity. Subsequent quakes, even the ones we’ve been experiencing lately, might have unearthed it.”

“Wow!” Francis mouthed, inching close enough to touch a protruding white leg bone.

“They moved in herds, you know,” Justin was rattling on, probably to hide his uneasiness. “They could have been migrating to some other place.”

Henry’s flashlight had caught something else and he moved away from the wall. That’s when he saw the eggs, clustered near a pool of bubbling lava.

“Justin,” he whispered, “you better get over here. You won’t believe what’s here.”

Justin hobbled over, his aches and weariness forgotten, and with Henry, bent down to study the huge white-shelled ovals. The first moments he smiled like an enchanted child, then his face drew tight under the grime. “Oh, my god.”

The others crowded around and stared at the ovals. There were twelve, nestled together in a lop-sided circle and partially covered in ash. They looked as if they’d just been left there. An hour, a week, a month ago. An impossibility.

“Are they still viable?” Greer quizzed Justin.

“I don’t know,” the scientist replied, lifting one up in his hands. It was heavy. Warm. He put it to his ear. “Something’s moving around in there. I think this one’s close to hatching. The lava’s incubating them. Now we know where our monster came from.” He looked up at Henry with dread in his eyes. “They’ve probably been down here somewhere for–who knows how long–thousands, millions of years, locked air-tight in a rock pocket, perhaps, or coated in hardened lava that the recent earthquakes uncovered and melted as the heat grew in the cave. It set them free.” He caressed one of the eggs gently as if he were afraid it’d break.

“These eggs would be worth a fortune in the outside world. A monumental scientific discovery,” Justin announced. “We’d all be filthy rich if we brought them back.”

“You want to take them back? To civilization?”

Justin shook his head after just a slight hesitation. “No.”

“No,” Greer concurred solemnly. “Can you imagine more of those monsters roaming the earth? Eating every living creature in their path? Some men would think they could control them, outwit them…but I don’t think they could.”

“No,” Francis sided with the others, gazing at Justin. “Your colleagues would try to hatch them, raise them as pets to put in zoos. As amazing as that’d be. We can’t allow that to happen. They don’t belong in our world anymore.”

In a fleeting wisp of memory Henry recalled Ann’s face as the monster had hulked over her. He saw the disbelief, the horror, that’d frozen her into a helpless rabbit in its path. George’s death cries joined the memory. The cries of all the other victims. No!

“People wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t believe,” Justin spoke, “how damn smart they are. People are so arrogant. And if there’s money to be made–they’d be like lambs to the slaughter.”

The men looked at each other. The same expression of fear on each face.

“We have to destroy them,” Justin pronounced sentence. “Because if one of them hatched then others could. It’s too dangerous to leave them. Intact.”

The others watched Justin, a look of absolute loathing for what he had to do, pick the eggs up one by one, walk a ways into the chamber and throw them into a lava stream. The ovals quickly sunk, burning, into the fiery quicksand.

After he’d disposed of three the other men helped him finish the job.

This is for you, George,
Henry thought as he dropped an egg into the lava.
None of these will ever hatch and grow into the thing that killed you.

They uncovered other nests and dealt with them in the same manner.

As a devoted paleontologist, it was the hardest thing Justin had ever had to do. Henry caught tears in his eyes more than once.

Afterwards, exhausted in mind and body, they settled down to rest and plan. Time was running out and they knew it.

“Since this cavern appears to be the creature’s home base, I’m hoping we can lure it back here.” Justin propped his chin in his hands. His face was flushed.

“Whatever we do, we need to do it quick,” Henry decided. “None of us can take much more of this heat.”

The chamber the eggs had been in was like an inferno, a giant incubator. The men had retired to the further corner, as far away from the lava as they could get. It wasn’t far enough. They were all dripping in sweat.

Justin looked as if he was about to pass out. “There must be a large river of active lava somewhere not far beneath us.”

“We can’t leave,” Greer reminded them of something they didn’t want to hear, “until we try summoning the creature. This is its home.”

The others groaned and grumbled, but knew Greer was right. They had to call the beast back to its lair. They’d come all this way for that reason.

“Let’s rest first,” Henry suggested. “Eat something. We’re going to need our strength.”

And they sat and talked among themselves for awhile, comrades now, to fight their growing fears of not ever returning.

“It’s time,” Henry finally announced, “Now or never. Let’s do it.”

Justin took the boom box and set it on the ground. Popped in a CD. Heavy metal. Volume up full blast, loudest it’d go. Francis pulled out the fire crackers and lit the tied together bundles.

Combined, the noise was horrendous.

They found hiding places nearby, staying close together, and doused their lights. Covered their ears. Greer mumbled, “I should have remembered ear plugs, too. Too late now.”

They waited in the eerie reddish glow the live lava gave off, drenched in heat and fear sweat, their hearts beating as loud as the CD. Their launchers at the ready. Their eyes glued to the placid body of water before them. If it came, it’d probably come from the water. From the lake.

They waited. Hours.

The fire crackers were used up. The heat, the tension, and the increasing earth tremors that soon all of them could feel, finally wore their patience and courage down.