THE SHADOW COMPANY: FILES THEY TRIED TO ERASE FROM AMERICA

A classified confession from a soldier who hunted what officially does not exist.

THE COMPANY NO ONE ADMITS EXISTS

I have served in the United States military for seventeen years, worn every patch I earned, buried more friends than I care to remember, and followed every lawful order I have ever been given. But nothing—nothing—prepared me for the assignment I was selected for eleven years ago. Back then, I was a decorated soldier from a special operations regiment, considered “dependable” and “unshakeable under duress,” the type they liked recruiting into units whose names never appeared on paper. I thought I knew the darkest corners of American defense. I thought I had seen monsters—the kind made of war, pain, and human cruelty. What I didn’t know was that I was about to be tasked with hunting literal monsters—creatures that roam the forests, deserts, mountains, and swamps of North America, things that have chewed through folklore for centuries and were quietly labeled as fiction so the public could sleep at night.

My company consists of 110 operators—handpicked from special forces branches across the Army, Navy, Marines, and even a few clandestine agencies I still don’t have clearance to name. We are divided into ten teams, each built like a self-contained beast of war: nine riflemen, one sniper, and one K9 handler with a dog eager enough to track whatever left claw marks on the side of a barn but disciplined enough to not bolt when it finds it. At any time, two teams are stationed on each of the five hidden bases spread across the United States—bases that officially do not exist and yet consume millions in black-budget funding. Our mission portfolio is simple on paper: seek and eliminate hostiles, recover civilians, contain anything that should not have been seen, and erase any physical or digital trace of the incident. The creatures we face fall under categories the public has turned into jokes—Bigfoot, Dogman, Rakes, oddities that crawl out of abandoned mines, pale figures that appear in only infrared optics, and sometimes entities that don’t fit existing categories at all.

Our unit was born decades before any of us existed. In the late 1960s, after the Patterson–Gimlin Bigfoot film stirred national curiosity, President Lyndon B. Johnson quietly authorized a task force under the umbrella of Project Blue Book—the same Air Force project examining UFO phenomena. While Blue Book was eventually shut down, this branch was not. It went deeper underground, funded through obscure channels inside DARPA, the Department of Energy, the National Forestry Service, and a half-dozen contractors who think they are building parts for satellites but are actually outfitting us with equipment designed to subdue creatures that shouldn’t exist. At first, this task force was composed of scientists—biologists, anthropologists, zoologists, even cryptolinguists—but as the deaths increased, as the incidents escalated, the government realized that this wasn’t just a research problem. It was a threat problem. Civilians were vanishing in national parks. Rangers found footprints longer than their forearms. Hunters stumbled into camps torn apart in ways no known predator could accomplish. The scientists were rerouted into advisory roles. The unit evolved into a special forces company trained not for warfare against humans, but warfare against nature’s secrets.

Over the decades, our mission log has grown thick with redacted coordinates and encounters that no official report will ever name. Sometimes, while deployed or killing time between missions, someone will scroll a podcast, YouTube documentary, or “creature sighting” show and mutter, “We were there,” or “I remember that place… they left out the part where it bled on the trees.” There was one episode about British Columbia—the producers framed it as a “mysterious mass disappearance of wildlife.” Those were our guys on loan to the Canadian government. My buddy joked that Canadian Mounties were spoiled—they rode horses while we hiked forty miles with eighty-pound rucksacks or parachuted into total darkness, landing silently in places where even the trees seemed to watch you.

Across the years, we have captured several Bigfoots alive—infants, juveniles, females, and one fully grown alpha male measuring just over eleven feet tall. That operation cost us two soldiers. The first tranquilizer dart bounced off him like spitballs off a brick wall. The second only enraged him. We were ordered not to use lethal force because “the intelligence value outweighed the safety risks.” Those were the exact words from command. Even as the alpha tore through two men like they were plastic mannequins, we were still denied permission to shoot. Only after the third rhino tranquilizer dart did he collapse, and even then, he was only “partially incapacitated.” It took six of us to restrain him with reinforced chains. He was bagged, bound, airlifted, and delivered to one of three undisclosed facilities. I don’t know what happens to them after that. None of us do. We have theories. None of them are pleasant.

Bigfoot encounters are the bulk of our work—over two hundred captured or eliminated within the past two decades. Dogmen, on the other hand, are fewer but far more deadly. They act like wolves, think like men, move like predators that have never feared anything, and kill like something that enjoys it. I’ve seen a Dogman twist a man’s torso in ways bone is not supposed to move. I’ve seen bullets sink into their flesh like firing into thick mud. I’ve seen the way their eyes reflect infrared light like burning coals. Unlike Bigfoot—which seems to be a naturally evolved species—Dogman feels wrong. Their movements, their resilience, their eerie silence even when injured… it all feels like something unnatural, something bordering on demonic. Many of us believe they aren’t from this Earth or evolved from anything found on it.

One operation in Texas stands out in my memory like a splinter under the nail. We deployed at 0100 hours under strict instructions to stay invisible to the public. The target was a rogue male Bigfoot who had been slaughtering cattle and exotic game animals on a ranch large enough to have its own zip code. The plan was simple: surround him by 0300, tranquilize or eliminate by 0500, extract before sunrise. He never saw us coming. We hit him with canines first—our dogs barked in a coordinated blast to startle him—and the moment he shot upright like a jack-in-the-box, our snipers fired. Clean kill. When we approached the body, we found he had a broken leg and ribs—likely hit by a train or truck, or maybe injured in a fight with another Bigfoot. His injuries probably forced him into hunting livestock. Nature is cruel when you cannot run.

The extraction was routine. A Huey helicopter dipped into the clearing carrying a heavy cargo net, clipped him up, and flew him off like lifting a fallen tree. Before we could even wipe the blood off our boots, command redirected us to New Mexico to deal with “a hostile entity harassing an elected official.” Code words told us everything we needed: extraterrestrial encounter. Anytime a “gray” is mentioned, the entire company deploys. That night, satellite imagery showed nothing. Our drones saw nothing. Our canines scented nothing. But the creature was there.

We tightened our perimeter in a slow, rotating pattern—half the men move while half stay still to maintain constant visual coverage. One handler’s canine must have stepped right on the damn thing, because the creature erupted out of nowhere with a slash that tore through the dog and its handler in a single motion. We opened fire. Our bullets hit it, pushed it back, but didn’t kill it. Its body was wrong—elastic, cartilage-based, able to twist and bend in ways that made my stomach knot. When firearms did not put it down, soldiers drew their KA-BARs. What followed was not a battle. It was a wrestling match with a nightmare. Arms like wet rope. Skin like translucent rubber. No blood. Black eyes like polished obsidian. We killed it only when enough blades were buried into its body that it physically could not fight anymore. Even then, its head had to be severed by hand. We stuffed it into a heavy-duty plastic bag, sealed it, and handed it off to the helicopter crew. For all the horrors I have seen, that is the one creature I pray I never encounter again.

And then there was the Dogman incident in Michigan—2018. A relative of a high-ranking military officer had been found torn apart near a hunting area. The wounds were deliberate. Consumption had occurred. The brass scrambled us immediately. Upon arrival, we found two more victims—a father and son who had likely wounded the creature, triggering retaliation. Tracking it became a chess match. Dogmen are smart. Too smart. They doubled back, circled around, set up ambush attempts. Thankfully, our satellite and IT teams are the real unsung heroes—they tracked the creature in real time, guiding us using heat signatures, terrain algorithms, and predictive modeling. They’re geniuses—quiet, pale guys behind screens who can predict a monster’s next move better than a biologist can.

The Dogman tried to escape through our thinned line. That was exactly what we wanted. We funneled it toward a kill zone, closed ranks, and fired everything we had. For once, we were relieved that command didn’t order us to capture it alive. If they had, half of us wouldn’t be here today. We didn’t stop shooting until the creature collapsed into a mangled heap of fur, bone, claws, and blood.

That was only one year. One mission. One creature.

Our work never stops.

And that was only the beginning.

I didn’t sleep much after Michigan. None of us did. We rotated back to one of our “nonexistent” bases, locked up the gear that still smelled like swamp and gunpowder, and spent a week pretending we didn’t all see shredded bodies every time we closed our eyes. The psychologists attached to our company like to talk about compartmentalization, about filing experiences in mental drawers and sealing them shut. The problem is, in this line of work, the drawers never stay closed. They rattle with every new mission, every fresh scream over the radio. And the brass never lets the drawers get dusty for long. Barely two months after Michigan, we were called up again—Texas this time, where the stars shine bright and the cows scream quietly at night when something steps over the fence that doesn’t give a damn about barbed wire.

The ranch in Texas was one of those sprawling properties that rich men buy when they’ve run out of other things to tame. Acres and acres of land patched with grazing cattle and exotic game animals imported from all over the world—everything from antelope to elk to things I couldn’t even name. A playground of prey, all neatly contained behind high fencing and “No Trespassing” signs that meant absolutely nothing to what we were hunting. The reports said the rancher had started losing animals at a rate that didn’t match any known predator. Not just the occasional carcass missing organs or chunks of muscle, but whole animals dragged off, pieces found later in places they could not have been dragged by anything less than a forklift. The local law chalked it up to misidentification and scavengers. The rancher wasn’t buying it. Neither was our chain of command. That’s how we ended up packed into a bird at midnight, flying blacked-out into a situation where the official plan looked insultingly easy on paper: hit the ground at 0100, surround by 0300, neutralize by 0500, home in time for breakfast we’d be too wired to eat.

The night we landed was clear and cold, starlight pricking through the dark like pinholes. We moved through the brush in staggered formation, NVGs painting the world in shades of ghostly green. Our K9s caught scent first—hackles raised, tails stiff, low growls leaking from their throats as if something in their blood recognized a bigger predator than anything they’d ever been taught to track. We closed the circle around a cluster of trees where the rancher’s ranch hands had last heard something heavy moving. Through thermal optics, we could see a massive heat signature sprawled on the ground like a fallen boulder, chest rising and falling slowly. He was sleeping. That almost made it worse. It meant he trusted the darkness. It meant he’d never had to fear being hunted before.

The signal came silent—a hand gesture from the team leader, a quick tap on the harnesses of the dogs. They exploded into barking on command, a wall of noise that shattered the ruined peace. The creature shot upright with shocking speed, like some monstrous jack-in-the-box launched on a spring. Even in night vision, his silhouette was enormous: broad shoulders, long arms, head crowned with matted hair. Our snipers didn’t hesitate. Two suppressed shots cracked almost simultaneously, bullets punching through his chest where a human heart would be. He staggered, roared—a sound that made my chest vibrate—and then toppled like a felled tree. In the after-action report, the brass would later note that it had technically met all criteria: fast, minimal fuss, target down, no civilian witnesses, no losses. On the ground, it felt more like mugging a giant in his sleep.

When we approached, weapons still trained on that bulk, the details came into focus. His right leg was twisted at an angle that spoke of past trauma—bad break that had healed wrong or never healed at all. Ribs on one side jutted oddly, like they’d been smashed inward by something massive. A train, maybe. A semi. Or another of his kind. Injured predators adapt or die. He’d adapted by picking off easy meat—slow cattle, penned exotics, animals that couldn’t outrun even his limping gait. We were just the latest and final link in a chain of brutal cause and effect. We hooked a heavy cargo net around him, the helicopter swooping in low with a downdraft that tore dust devils from the dirt. Watching eleven hundred pounds of muscle and mystery rise into the night sky cradled like a prize fish didn’t give me the satisfaction command probably assumed it would. It just left me feeling small.

No debrief. No downtime. The moment the carcass cleared the treeline, our radios crackled with new orders: stand by for redeployment to New Mexico. High-priority. Full company. Possible extraterrestrial. You learn to read the tone beneath the words. When they say “possible,” they usually mean “confirmed.” When they say “extraterrestrial,” they mean “something the public would rather call a ghost, demon, or hallucination.” We flew straight from Texas to a remote airfield, refueled, rearmed, and lifted off again before the sweat had dried under our armor. Fatigue became a physical weight in my skull, but adrenaline doesn’t care how tired you are. It just kicks your system back into overdrive and hopes your heart keeps up.

The New Mexico target was an isolated home perched on twenty acres of privately owned land, far from neighbors, deep in a stretch of desert where night swallows sound and light like a mouth. The owner was an elected official—no one told us his name, but the level of urgency told us everything we needed to know about his importance. He’d reported “something” watching his property, appearing and disappearing at the edges of his lights. Strange lights. Strange sounds. Something tapping on his windows at night. Local law enforcement went out once, saw nothing, and quietly decided a second call would require them to take him to a hospital instead of taking him seriously. That’s when agencies you don’t talk about started making calls. That’s when we got dragged in.

We set up a loose perimeter first, using natural rises in the terrain and existing structures. Drones circled overhead, their thermal and optical sensors sweeping the scrub and rock. Nothing. Our satellite feed showed nothing. That’s one uncomfortable trait about the so-called “grays”: they don’t reflect heat the way we do, and their bodies often blend right into the background radiation. That means the usual toys don’t find them. You have to rely on line-of-sight and pure, old-fashioned vigilance. We restored an old tactic—moving in a slow, tightening circle, leapfrogging in staggered fashion. When the guy to my left moved, I stayed still. Thirty seconds later, I moved while he froze. That way, there was always a pair of eyes motionless, watching while others advanced, reducing the chance of everyone being distracted at once.

The land was so quiet that night it felt like even the crickets were holding their breath. The K9s weren’t much help either; they sniffed, snorted, whined, but didn’t seem to pick up a solid scent. Grays don’t smell like anything we’re wired to track. Or maybe they don’t smell like anything we’re meant to detect. My nerves were thrumming so hard I could feel each heartbeat in my fingertips. Then, without warning, everything went to hell. A dog yelped, the sound high and sharp and full of pain, followed by the gurgled shout of its handler. Through my NVGs, I saw it—a tall, thin shape bursting out of literal emptiness like a glitch in reality. One moment there was nothing; the next, a pale, elongated figure with skin the color of cigarette smoke was slashing at flesh with long, clawlike fingers.

We fired as one. Bullets stitched across its body, pushing it back, jerking its limbs, but not dropping it. Its movements were wrong—too fluid, like watching a bag of water being kicked and flowing around each impact. Its limbs stretched and recoiled as if made of dense, flexible cartilage rather than bone. One of its arms seemed to bend in the middle where no elbow should be. As I watched our rounds tear through it, I realized something terrifying: there was no blood. Holes appeared in its translucent skin, dark spots that closed slowly, like a punctured balloon half-deflating and then stiffening. The thing flashed across the sand, grabbed another soldier with fingers that sunk deep into his armor, and if not for three men piling onto it, tackling it bodily, it would have sliced him open like an animal.

At some point, someone yelled, “Blades!” Guns weren’t working fast enough. Those closest dropped their rifles to sling and drew their KA-BARs, the world narrowing to a chaotic knot of thrashing limbs and grunts. I waded into it, grabbed what felt like the thing’s shoulder—though it had no clear musculature—and nearly gagged. Its body felt like grabbing a rope submerged in gelatin, dense yet yielding, cold as ice just pulled from the freezer. My knife sank in with too little resistance, like cutting raw squid. We stabbed and slashed, aiming for where we thought vital organs might be if it were built anything like us. It twisted and shrieked—a sound that seemed to bypass ears and stab directly into the brain. Finally, someone got a grip on what passed for its neck, another on its jaw, and with raw, desperate force we tore the head away from the body.

The head didn’t bleed. It just slumped in our hands like a deflated rubber mask, then slowly tried to bounce back to shape even as it lay separated. Up close, its eyes were all wrong—no iris, no white, just glossy black orbs that reflected the green swirls of our goggles like twin voids. Its skin was semi-transparent, thin enough that you could see darker shapes moving inside like shadowed organs if you stared too long. That “too long” is the part that gets people—we’ve had soldiers report nightmares just from making eye contact with one of these things. We stuffed the head and body into a heavy-duty plastic bag built for hazardous materials, zipped it, and handed it off to a chopper crew that looked like they wanted to be anywhere else in the world. I don’t blame them.

After something like that, you hope the universe gives you a break. It didn’t. It rarely does. In 2018, we were called up to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, deep in a wooded area where the locals already whisper about things with yellow eyes between the trees. The first body belonged to a relative of a high-ranking officer—ripped open, organs removed in a way that didn’t match any known predator, the kind of mutilation that forensic pathologists politely describe as “unusual” and then go home and drink themselves to sleep over. The second and third bodies we found were a father and son, both hunters, both torn apart in ways that suggested they’d put up a fight. We discovered spent rounds around them and a blood trail leading off into the timber that didn’t belong to either man. They’d hit something. That something had hit back harder.

We knew what we were hunting even before the brief mentioned it. Dogman. The name sounds stupid until you’ve seen one. Calling it a werewolf is closer, but that implies some shared humanity, some cursed man beneath the fur. I don’t think there’s anything human in Dogman. These things stand upright like men when they want to, run like wolves when they need to, and kill like something that has never once doubted it will win. Intelligence shines in their eyes, but it’s not the kind you negotiate with. It’s tactical, feral cunning layered over predatory instinct. You don’t bargain with a wildfire. You get out of its path or die.

Our IT teams—the “guys in chairs,” as some used to call them before we learned better—saved our lives more times than I can count. In Michigan, they used satellites, drones, and thermal overlays to track the Dogman’s movements. Every few minutes, our earpieces crackled with calm, almost bored voices giving us headings: “Target moving northwest, speed thirty-five miles per hour, angle shifting east, preparing to cross your line in three minutes.” They guided us into a funnel formation, stretching our teams thinner than ever before. It was risky. For several crucial minutes, each operator could be completely alone, with no support within immediate shouting distance, no one to cover his blind spots if the Dogman decided to double back. But that was the price of corralling a predator that understood pursuit as well as we did.

The creature must have realized just how close we were; its movements grew erratic on the trackers, changing direction abruptly, doubling back, darting into ravines and then leaping out of them like they were nothing. Each time it tried to slip through a gap, our overhead guardians warned us in time to close ranks, tightening the funnel, pushing it toward a planned kill zone where the greatest concentration of firepower waited. When it finally burst into that clearing, it was already wounded—ragged fur matted with blood, one ear shredded, lips peeled back to reveal teeth slick with what might have been our victims’ remains. If command had changed their minds at the last second and ordered us to try for a live capture, I’m not ashamed to admit I’d have “misheard” the order.

Every man in that clearing knew what would happen if it got close enough to anyone. We opened fire with everything we had. The Dogman jerked and twisted under the impact of rounds, yet still charged, closing distance frighteningly fast for something so damaged. It took an obscene volume of fire to finally throw it off its feet, more bullets than we’d normally expend on a squad of human combatants. Even as its body collapsed, limbs twitching in unnatural angles, we kept shooting. No one wanted to be the one who stopped and then watched it get up again. By the time the last rifle clicked empty, the thing was a shredded mass of meat and fur. You could barely tell where its head ended and its shoulders began. No one complained about “ammo wastage” on the after-action report. No one dared.

If there was one year that convinced me we are holding back a flood with our bare hands, it was 2020. While the rest of the country was panicking about a virus, we were fighting outbreaks of something else entirely. That spring, a young boy went missing in the Land Between the Lakes region on the western side of Kentucky—a place already steeped in stories about “things in the woods.” Officially, he wandered off. Unofficially, we got a call two hours later. Four of our teams happened to be at Fort Campbell. They diverted, geared up, and were in the air before local search-and-rescue had even finished forming a volunteer line.

We fast-roped into dense forest at dusk, the air thick with humidity and the smell of wet earth. Our orders were simple: pressure the abductor until it abandoned the child. Kill if necessary. Recover if possible. As we moved in coordinated wedges, our K9s picked up scent—something tangy and wrong layered over the boy’s fear-sweat. Radio chatter stayed minimal, but you could feel the urgency like a physical weight. A kid changes everything. We were harder, faster, more reckless when a child was involved. We pushed harder than we normally might, cutting off escape routes, driving the creature—later confirmed as another Bigfoot—toward a dead end near a ravine. It must have realized we were closing in, because at some point it chose between fight and flight and picked flight. It dropped the boy like discarded cargo and bolted. Our medics scooped the kid up minutes later. He was alive, shaken, with a story about “a big hairy man who wanted to show me something in the trees,” but no visible harm. We’ve heard that kind of thing before. Bigfoots, especially younger males, have a way of luring children that doesn’t start with violence. They draw them away like predators that know how to use curiosity as bait.

While that was happening in Land Between the Lakes, we got word of another sighting near Mammoth Cave—a place that already feels wrong if you stand at the mouth and look into that dark. Two teams were flown in from Florida, fresh off another mission, barely given time to change socks. They picked up multiple heat signatures along the cave system, tall figures moving quickly along ridges, then disappearing into vertical crevices. When the teams tried to push pressure on them, the creatures did something we hate: they went underground, slipping into the labyrinth of tunnels and chambers like they’d been born there. We are not, and never have been, fond of being tunnel rats against unknown enemies. Underground, radios fail, GPS glitches, and every corner is an ambush point. Too many things can go wrong in a confined space where something bigger and stronger than you knows the layout better. Command made the rare call to abort. “Not worth the casualties,” they said. For once, we agreed.

But the night was far from over. Our IT team—eyes in the sky, fingers on satellite feeds—picked up multiple anomalous heat signatures further north, in the swampy regions of Posey County, Indiana along the Ohio River. Nine large entities, all larger than humans, moving in loose formation through wetlands. If Land Between the Lakes had felt like a rescue op and Mammoth Cave like a stalemate, Posey County felt like walking into a heavyweight boxing ring with both fighters already angry. Over the comms, someone joked grimly that it was turning into a Bigfoot jamboree. No one laughed.

Our orders were as clear as they were brutal: drive these nine creatures toward central zones along the western Kentucky Parkway, specifically into the Peabody Wildlife Area, and eliminate them. Period. No capture, no tranquilize, no “observe and record behavior.” Kill. Our teams fanned out, coordinating across state lines, driving one group of Bigfoots up from Land Between the Lakes and intersecting them with the nine tagged near the river. What happened when they finally collided looked less like wildlife and more like organized warfare. The two groups tore into each other with a ferocity I’ve only ever seen in human combat zones—roars, screams, bodies slamming into trees hard enough to shake branches loose. They fought like rival gangs defending turf, using trees as cover, pushing each other into choke points, targeting weaker members. We stayed back, circling the chaos, letting them burn their rage and energy on one another while our cameras recorded.

When the melee finally broke, the smaller group tried to pull back, retreating from the larger, more dominant troop. That was our moment. As the exhausted stragglers limped away, we opened fire. It felt like shooting into a brawl that had just ended, no honor, no fairness, just cold necessity. The dominant group scattered at the first shot, bolting into the forest, but in their panic they barreled directly into a network of claymore mines our engineers had quietly planted hours earlier. The detonations ripped through the night, ripping through flesh and bone with shrapnel designed for human war. By the time the echoes faded, all but one of the big males lay dead. The last survivor—a leaner, younger male from the smaller group—fled north in pure survival panic, crossing the Ohio River like it was nothing more than a ditch. We spent another three days tracking him into Shawnee National Forest, running him to exhaustion, cornering him at last among sandstone bluffs where the trees thinned, and ending it with a single, clean headshot from our sniper. No one cheered.

Over years of operations, patterns emerged. Most Bigfoot encounters involved family groups—small clans with females, juveniles, sometimes infants cradled in long, surprisingly gentle arms. They avoid humans when they can, melting into the understory long before we blunder into their territory. They travel, forage, and sleep in ways that feel almost peaceful when they aren’t forced into conflict. They will fight, though—God, will they fight—if you threaten their young. I’ve seen an adult male take three rounds to the torso and still slam into one of our guys hard enough to snap three ribs and dislocate a shoulder, all in an effort to create a gap for his family to escape through. They die for their troops without hesitation. There’s a grim kind of admiration in that, even when they’re trying to pulp your bones.

The problems usually start with younger males. Juvenile Bigfoots are curious in all the worst ways. They watch campers from the tree line, approach children, mimic human sounds, and sometimes nudge boundaries just to see what happens. We’ve interviewed kids after rescues who swear “the big hairy man” wanted to play, or “he said he wanted to show me something neat in the woods.” There’s evidence—though science will never publicly admit it—that Bigfoot has some low-level ability to influence human emotions or perceptions. Not full-on mind control, nothing cinematic, but more like a calming aura, a subtle push that makes you less afraid and more willing to follow. Adults resist it, usually. Children, though? Their defenses are different. If a stranger appears in the woods who looks like a character from a story, but somehow doesn’t feel frightening, that’s all it takes. A few steps. A few minutes. A gap in a parent’s attention. And a life can be gone.

The truly dangerous Bigfoots we deal with aren’t the quiet family groups but rogue males. Injured ones. Exiled ones. Younger males who have been driven out of their original troops after challenging or killing an alpha. When a new male takes over a group, he often destroys or runs off the previous male’s sons, eliminating rivals and starting his own bloodline faster. Those driven-out males band together into violent coalitions with nothing left but hunger and anger. They move fast, cover large territories, and target livestock and humans with ruthless efficiency. We’ve seen their handiwork in Pennsylvania—hunters pursued through the dark, one found snapped at the spine and wedged into the fork of a tree twenty feet off the ground. Fish and Wildlife told the press it was a tragic fall from a tree stand. We saw the tree. No stand. Just a body bent at an angle no fall could produce, placed with deliberate cruelty in a location that said: Look what I can do.

One thing that surprised us early on, and shouldn’t have, is how arboreal Bigfoots can be. People think of them as ground-walking giants, thundering through the forest like upright bears. In reality, they spend more time off the ground than anyone would guess—perched in trees, moving along branches, hugging trunks so tightly they vanish into the bark. Our thermal scopes have picked up shapes overhead more times than I can count, big heat signatures sitting motionless on limbs while we passed underneath, oblivious. They use height as an advantage, dropping down or simply watching, always watching. It makes your skin crawl when you realize how many times you might have been observed in forests you thought were empty.

Dogman, on the other hand, is something else entirely. It doesn’t influence emotions; it amplifies fear. It doesn’t lure children with anything like play. It stalks, isolates, and kills. I don’t know if it’s demonic in the literal sense, but I know it doesn’t feel like a natural species. Its ability to withstand bullets, its uncanny knack for taking the most lethal path through any formation, its habit of shredding religious symbols when it finds them in camps—it all points to something that either hates humanity on a bone-deep level or was designed to. The fact that it can be injured but not easily killed, that it seems to take perverse enjoyment in terrorizing victims before finishing them, makes it the number one creature in our unofficial “never again” ranking. If I had to choose between a Bigfoot alpha and a single Dogman in close quarters, I’d take my chances with the Bigfoot. At least there, you’re dealing with something that has rules.

All of this—the decades of missions, the hidden casualties, the lies told to grieving families about “falls from tree stands” and “bear attacks”—has been carried out under one simple oath: to protect the United States from threats foreign and domestic. Most people hear that and picture terrorists or enemy states. I used to, too. Now, when I hear the phrase, I see amber eyes reflecting infrared light from the tree line. I see black, lightless eyes on a face that feels like putty in my fist. I see claws that have never touched a trigger but still play our species like a game. We are the thin, invisible line between those threats and the civilian world, and no one even knows to thank us for it.

Yesterday, they flew us to Andrews Air Force Base, the kind of place that can be busy as hell but still feel eerily quiet when you know you’re the only ones there for this reason. We were told, in a briefing that used a lot of words without saying anything, that our company is being deployed to Europe. The order came through from high enough up that no one in the chain below dared question it. They spoke of “an emerging pattern of incidents,” “unusual disappearances,” and “non-traditional threats.” If you’ve been doing this long enough, you learn to translate. It means Europe has its own monsters, and they’re getting bolder. Maybe they’ve always been there—hidden in Black Forest legends, Eastern European folktales, whispers from the Alps. Maybe someone woke them up. Maybe something else followed us over on ships and planes generations ago and is only now making itself known.

They gave us the weekend on leave to “get our affairs in order.” Some guys went straight to bars, determined to squeeze as much alcohol and noise into forty-eight hours as their bodies could handle. Others went home to hold their kids a little too tightly, knowing that hugging them too long might be the last tangible memory they ever have. A few buried themselves in base gyms, lifting like heavier plates could somehow anchor them to this side of the ocean. Me? I ended up in a public library a few miles off base, of all places. Sitting at a dusty computer terminal with a sticky keyboard, typing this out while a kid at the next station plays some pixelated game and a librarian reshelves books about dinosaurs and Greek myths—stories about creatures that used to be considered real.

I don’t know what waits for us in Europe. I’ve heard rumors whispered in our barracks: things moving in the Carpathian Mountains that don’t cast shadows, gigantic shapes glimpsed in Norwegian fjords, old castles with basements no one enters after dark. Some of our scientific advisors have grown almost excited in that cold, clinical way scientists do when faced with something new to dissect. The rest of us are less enthusiastic. We know what “new” usually means: casualties, confusion, and the inevitable realization that the world is far stranger, darker, and more crowded than we want to admit.

The library loudspeaker has just pinged a warning that they close in fifteen minutes. The overhead lights flicker once, like a polite threat. In a few days, I’ll be stepping onto a transport plane with my rifle, my gear, and a stomach full of dread, flying into another patch of map where the official story will always be something simple and false. Plane crash. Wolf attack. Gas leak. Missing hiker. People will shake their heads, feel bad for a few minutes, maybe post something about it online, and then move on. That’s fine. Maybe that’s how it should be. If everyone knew what stalks the treelines, what occasionally taps politely at windows, what watches from branches overhead, I don’t think society would survive the panic.

If I make it back in one piece, maybe I’ll find my way back to this same library. Maybe I’ll sit at this same terminal with this same sticky keyboard and type out what we saw overseas—what crawls in European forests, what clings to castle walls, what lives under alpine lakes. I have a feeling it will be worth writing down. I also have a feeling that, like everything else in my life, it will never be believed by the people it’s meant to protect.

But for now, that’s enough. I’ll log out of this ancient computer, step back into the fluorescent-lit quiet of the library, and walk past people who have no idea that, somewhere out there, things with teeth and claws and black, empty eyes are making their own plans. They don’t know about our company—about the ten teams, the 110 soldiers, the dogs who have more courage than any human deserves to ask of them, the IT wizards guiding us from a bunker full of screens. They don’t know how many times we’ve already stood between them and the kind of truth the human mind isn’t built to hold.

They don’t know anything about the shadows we hunt.

But the shadows know about us.

And they are starting to look back.