FROM THE JOURNAL OF
Cross, Nathan
CHIEF OF THE Las Vegas
Metropolitan Police Department

Today the world became a different place.

I was dispatched to assist the Searchlight, Nevada, police department when an animal attack led to a suicide, a missing child, and the discovery of a desert cave that locals believe appeared overnight. The initial attack took place behind a gas station where a clerk was hosting his very own petting zoo before two exotic lizards got out and chewed a pregnant woman and her six-year-old boy half to nothing. The woman and child are both circling the drain in ICU while the woman's other son has yet to say a word despite our best efforts. The only other witnesses, the gas station owner and an unlucky tourist, have been little to no help, the tourist because he left the scene, immediately checked into the El Rey motel here in Searchlight, started himself a little web cam chat before he bit the end of a Mossberg 500 and put all his thinking juice on the walls. When we play the web cam footage back, he's going on about walnuts and talking lizards. The owner of the gas station is as nutty as you'd expect from a guy who grabbed a couple of reptiles he'd never seen before and put some chicken wire around them.

When I first got the call, I told them they had the wrong number because last I checked the ASPCA didn't write my paychecks. The city of Searchlight barely racks in 600 total population, and the police department reflects the kind of Podunk inadequacy you'd imagine out here in the desert. Police get called in to deal with the suicide and find out where the tourist had just come from, and then there's a whole mess of officers wandering around looking for the boogey man. First unit in, one of the officers didn't know his kid was a stowaway in his back seat. Kid gets out and starts mouthing off about dinosaur tracks in the sand, and his dad lets him have it before the kid decides to play desert explorer. Next thing you know, Mommy's calling in a missing person report, and if cleaning up this idiot's brains off the hotel wall or telling the other boy his mommy and little brother might not ever wake up aren't dandy enough, now we've lost a kid.

When I get here, we're combing through the same garbage the local cops and first unit have already milked dry before we organize a search party to find the kid who wanted to conquer the desert. Several miles out, we find a hole that could swallow a couple of semis without a cough. Doesn't have to mean anything, only the sound of crying children (not just one kid, but several) is wafting up from the hole, and the locals are telling us this hole wasn't here before. Wonderful.

You throw a rock in this hole and never hear it hit bottom. No one knows how deep the thing is. The sound of the kids keeps coming, only sometimes it sounds like laughing, and everyone is starting to feel a little loopy. The higher-ups go and call a cave expert in, and they rig up all their spelunking nonsense and we're lowering him down that hole. No sooner than he can tell us a single thing about what's going on down there, this noise comes barreling up out of the mouth of the cave so loud it almost knocks me over. Then, I swear to God, that hole starts cackling. I yell to get him out of there quick, but Mr. Cave Brains finds a tunnel in the wall of the hole and thinks that that's where all the ruckus is coming from. All is quiet for a moment before we hear some God-awful screech and that poor jerk is screaming bloody murder while the cables are going crazy like something has got hold of him down there. We get to pulling him up, and by the time he's out of there, all we got left dangling on the end of the cable is a bloody corpse.

Watching the footage from the helmet cam makes the whole thing even more confusing. No one knows exactly what we're looking at, but some honest-to-God monster jumped on that kid and ripped the bejesus from him. I'm yelling for someone to get the medic, and everyone goes pale imagining what must be down there in that hole.

At this point, I'm at my wit's end. We've got such a mess of specialists crowding us that I don't know who, is who and every piece of evidence we got has been leaked to the press. The world starts to nut up when they get a look at the "cave monster" recorded on the helmet cam, and next thing I know I'm knee deep in every kind of lizard expert known to man. We decide to send the big boys in when we hear the voice of Joseph Phinney, the missing kid, calling for his dad. Takes everything I got to keep Officer Phinney from diving right in, but I tell him wait, let's get armed and go make whatever might be down there look like that poor sap back at the El Rey.

My specialists are arguing with the other specialists, and the God-forsaken heat is so bad I can barely put a rifle together without all the parts slipping from my greasy palms. Myself and two other officers are strapped in to be lowered to the recess in the cave wall. Among my teammates is Officer Phinney, who tags along against my better judgment. Any officer stressed to the breaking point over a lost kid he scolded into the desert is not a guy you want carrying a gun behind you. Everyone has got these floodlights zigzagging all over the cave walls making me dizzy enough before all the vertigo sets in. Every one of us has a camera mounted on his head so the media can scare the world with our snuff movies. I point my light underneath me and see nothing but black. Twenty or so feet down, and I see the tunnel that was the last thing the cave diver ever looked at. It looks just like it did on the video, and just like him, when I look in I don't see a thing except more dark. I manage to get a footing on the tunnel's ledge and a good grip on my rifle, and I take point while the others file in behind me.

I start calling the kid's name, and my voice just echoes around in that tunnel like a rubber ball. Walkie hisses and voice from the surface wants to know what we see and says we don't have enough cable for the three of us to discover the new world. I ignore the walkie, keep walking and keep screaming for the kid. Suddenly, my light goes from hitting the tunnel roof ten feet over my head to shooting a good forty feet over my head, and we realize we're somewhere else.

The very next second is when I first see it. Our lights are frantically searching the new area when my beam hits something in there with us. This thing, looking right at me, standing on its hind legs, it must be 7 or 8 feet tall. It looks like something out of a movie. It looks like an honest-to-God dinosaur. I freeze in my freaking boots and a few seconds go by before the others see what I'm seeing, and then it's just the three of us taking a good long look at this nightmare-crocodile-man.

"Jesus Christ..." Phinney whimpers. Then, God as my witness, cave gas in my brain or whatever, the creature holds a hand up in a "Wait a minute" gesture and starts to talk. The only thing I hear is "Listen" before there's a loud crack in my ear and the muzzle of Phinney's rifle lights up the cave and the shell splits the creature's head wide open.