Dinosaur Lake

by Kathryn Meyer Griffith

  ***

  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.

  “Because I’d be damned if some fancy lawyer was going to get him off on a technicality, or plead him insane. That man was never going to walk the earth another day or be allowed to ever kill again. That human monster had to die. I had to rid the world of him forever. Because that’s what you do when something is so maliciously evil. You exterminate it.”

  Henry glanced behind at Greer as if he’d never seen him before. Most people wouldn’t have understood or approved of what the ex-FBI agent had done. Henry didn’t one-hundred percent, either, but he understood. Fully. And he understood what Greer was telling him.

  Greer didn’t always follow the rules. And the guilty, the evil, must pay for what they did.

  “Sounds like he deserved it,” Henry offered simply.

  Greer smiled, as he reclined back against the seat, and Henry returned it. He was starting to really like the man.

  He slowed the vehicle down even more. He was sure they’d put enough distance between them and the lake. For now.

  “You know, though, this case is different, the perpetrator isn’t human,” Greer went on. “I’ve dealt with some strange cases, but this is the first one dealing with a…dinosaur. Because, that’s what my eyes tell me we saw in the water back there. Or something like it.

  “I’ll tell you something, Shore, I never liked going to the zoo when I was a kid, either…and those creatures were all in cages.”

  “And they weren’t as big,” Henry tossed in.

  “No, they weren’t. This is going to be a pickle to deal with. We’re going to need really big guns for this one.”

  “You’re telling me,” Henry shot back. “Can you and your friends get us any hand-held missiles? That’s what Maltin here thinks we’ll need to kill it.”

  “I can get you anything we need.”

  “Good. Bigger the better. Sooner the better.”

  “I’m working on it.”

  Dr. Harris had stopped listening and with squinty eyes was avidly searching the road and forest around them.

  “You hear something?” he kept insisting of anyone and everyone. “I thought I heard something.”

  Henry speeded up again.