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

I've got the governor, every Nevada senator there is, as well as officials in Washington, D.C., coming through the phone at me every time I turn around. I can't get a handle on my men. The few flimsy Searchlight officers left over and all the God-forsaken educated idiots are littering the desert. We've got people who have more authority in their little finger than I have at all on their way via choppers and private jets, and I just want to get out of this sand trap, but the powers that be tell me I'm not going anywhere. Lucky me. Sir, yes sir.

So many different minds and opinions surrounding this spectacle, and I don't know what to say to whom. I've got cameras belonging to every major network swallowing up the area, and I don't know whether to set up a perimeter or start arresting these science wackos. In the midst of this great big mess, I've lost control of the moral majority and all the manpower has gone into getting that great big lizard up to the surface, the one that Phinney blew away. My vote was to leave it down there. I don't know why it talked, and I don't want to. I don't care to know what else it had to say. Got me a royally bad feeling about the whole thing, and I'd just as soon fill this hole in, seal up this cave and not know why in God's good graces a hole in the desert has literally been laughing at me for the last 24 hours.

I'm on the phone with the senator, screaming at the doctors, on the phone with the governor, hearing the thunder of helicopter blades in the distance. Dusk is on us, and if there's one thing I hate more than the desert in the thick of day, it's the desert at night. Scares me stupid. Being that I'm exactly where I don't want to be exactly when I don't want to be there, I'm in precisely the incorrect mood to see what I see next.

The mouth of the cave is vomiting a great big gurney with our great big friend from down under all strapped up on it. Now that the daylight has begun to wane, a shadowy blanket is creeping over the landscape, and the thing on the gurney makes my bad feeling turn into a terrible feeling. Half lit by our flashlights it was scary, but out here in the open in full view of everyone it's outright terrifying. Even incapacitated, even with that crater in the middle of its head, I don't like that thing at all. My gut tells me to forget orders and forget everyone and go put a few more bullets in that thing before I cut the cord to that pulley and send it packing to the bottom of that hole if that hole has a bottom. But I don't move; I just answer the phone when it rings again.