Denny finished and looked at Mossy. “Why did you come back this time? If you believed it then, why not now?”
Mossy wouldn’t meet his gaze for a long moment. When he finally did, Denny saw such pain in his eyes that he wanted to turn away, but he didn’t. “I just had to. There are only a handful of times in every person’s life that he has a chance to make a difference. I had one of those thirty-five years ago and I blew it. Because of me not coming forward, all those people back in 1961 died and another man went to prison for it. Now I have another chance. I’m an old man, Denny. This is my last chance. There’s probably a nice spot by the fireplace reserved for me in Hell no matter how this turns out but I have to try. I have to do what’s right. I don’t know what else to say.”
Denny felt tears in his eyes. This was his grandfather. He reached over and put his hand on the old man’s shoulder, feeling him tighten as he did so. “There was nothing else you could have done. You or anybody else. Right, Billy?” Billy was looking pretty confused. Like he wanted to stay angry but couldn’t. Denny knew they would have to work together. Billy would have to trust Mossy as Denny had trusted Paul.
Billy slowly nodded his head. “Right. I’m sorry you had to go through all this alone, but you’re not alone anymore.” Billy downed the last of his lemonade, uttered a loud burp, and said, “What’s it gonna take for us to kill this thing, anyway?”
(70)
Mossy sipped another glass of lemonade and tried to hide the tremors in his hands from the boys. He realized the absurdity of his little soap-box speech about doing the right thing as he was about to involve two children in a very dangerous undertaking. But he’d thought it through over and over and could come up with no other way of fixing this. McCauley was a more able-bodied ally, but he didn’t know how to find the entrance to the tunnels. Once he was in, Mossy was sure he’d be able to find his way around, but to find the entrance he needed the boys. All of the other scenarios ended with him being arrested or thrown in an asylum. “For a while, we thought the experiments were valuable to both science and the security of the country. We were so caught up in Gunlinger’s patriotic hype we almost didn’t realize just how crazy he was.” He picked up his glass to take a drink and realized it was empty. So was the pitcher. Billy got up to make a fresh one.
“There were signs, sure, but we were caught up, like I said. We actually created a life. You have to understand the magnitude of that. But eventually we started to see the cracks. It was like Gunlinger wasn’t human, like there was something else wearing a human costume. At times we’d get a glimpse of the real Gunlinger. It was mostly his eyes. You can learn a lot from a person by reading their eyes. He fooled us for a while, like I said, but the times we saw through his mask were frightening.” Billy came back to the table and filled his glass.
“When we finally realized that Gunlinger was insane, we knew we couldn’t let him have full control of the experiment. We knew we couldn’t stop him, he would have made us disappear and found other scientists to finish his madness. Instead, we made sure we could stop the creature if it came down to that. We engineered a weakness that Gunlinger didn’t know about. A manufactured birth defect, if you will. It had to be simple enough that it could be accomplished without any hard-to-get poisons, but obscure enough that the creature wouldn’t be killed accidentally. We were smart guys back then, good scientists, it wasn’t that hard. The end result is an easy-to-make poison that is lethal to the creature but harmless to humans.”
Denny interrupted for the first time since Mossy had begun. “How do you know it will work? I mean, did you guys build more of these things and test it?”
Mossy took another long drink. He fleetingly thought how good a shot of vodka or some rum would go down with the lemonade, but somehow the urge wasn’t as strong as it should have been. “No, Denny, we didn’t build any more of them. Gunlinger would have been on to us. Sometimes you just have to trust science. I know it will work. I know every cell that comprises that thing. It will work.”
Mossy saw Denny and Billy exchange a look, and in that look he saw doubt. He couldn’t blame them.
“Things progressed and Gunlinger’s facade began to erode. I guess the real facade was his attempt to cling to his sanity. Anyway, I finally decided I had to do something. Tony wasn’t convinced. I’m not sure if he was scared, or if there was some part of him that still believed in Gunlinger’s vision of creating an army of these creatures. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to be a part of it. I had been using my off-base privileges to make contact with a local reporter here in Haven. I hadn’t told him much, but I’d been hinting that there was more to the base than an ammo dump.”
“Is he still alive? In Haven? He could help clear this up!” Denny was excited, hopeful.
Mossy shook his head slowly, sadly. “No, he’s dead. Either Gunlinger was on to me or it was just shit luck, but he was on the base the day of the explosion. I’d decided that I was going to tell him everything but my timing was off, I was too slow…” He couldn’t keep his emotions in check and the tears began to flow. He put his face in his hands and cried. Finally, he was able to go on. “The creature got a taste for blood, human blood. That’s when I knew it had to end.”
“What do you mean?” Denny asked.
Mossy looked thoughtful, a hint of a sad smile creeping across his face. “Throughout history, there have been several documented cases of animals attacking humans. Sharks, lions, tigers, even dogs. In some cases, the animal seems to acquire a liking for the taste, a blood lust. Have you ever heard of the Tsavo Lions?”
Both boys shook their heads.
“In 1898 close to 100 workers were killed building a railroad bridge across the Tsavo River in Kenya.”
Suddenly Billy looked up. “Wait, I watched an old movie with my dad about that. Bwana something. I thought it was made up.”
“It was very real. More recently, from the early 1930s until 1947, an entire pride of lions killed several hundred people, maybe as many as a thousand in Tanzania. They were called the Man-Eaters of Njombe.”
“I don’t understand,” Denny interrupted “what does this have to do with the thing in the lake?”
Mossy again got a faraway look in his eyes. “I guess I better back up. To really understand, you need to know what the creature is. Gunlinger was a molecular biologist, and a brilliant one. He had theories that back then were considered crazy. The military was the only place where he could gain the power to test them. He recruited the top biology graduates from colleges across the country to perform his experiments. His goal was to develop a cross-species creature that could be used by the government as a weapon. It had to be intelligent and instinctual, violent and emotionless. And amphibious. His vision was to drop small armies of these killers off-shore and have them infiltrate coastal bases. No air attacks, no bombing, just a mindless army of silent killing machines.”
Billy looked ready to either laugh or start screaming. “Mossy, no offense, but you’re sounding a little crazy again.”
“Not crazy at all, really. No crazier than Columbus thinking the earth was round. Look up the names Cohen and Boyer, and Paul Berg. They are research scientists forging the way for tomorrow’s medicines. Recombinant DNA and gene splicing are all over the news. Gunlinger was way ahead of his time, that’s all. It was the result of our experiments, I think, that drove him to madness.