I Wrote The Handbook On Hunting These Things. The One In Alaska Learned From It.

My name is Agent Washington and I have killed four of these things.

That is the sentence I keep coming back to, sitting in what used to be the Walkers Township post office with one working eardrum and a field report I need to finish before I pass out again. Four confirmed kills, multiple engagements, a service record the relevant agencies describe as exemplary. I wrote the operational handbook on these creatures. I taught the three-day seminar. I have a custom rifle case that has been to eleven countries and has the diplomatic clearances to prove it.

I want that on record before I tell you what happened, because what happened is going to sound like the account of a man who did not know what he was doing. I knew exactly what I was doing. I have just never done it in front of one that knew what I was doing back.

The briefing file on the Walkers Township subject ran to sixty-three pages.

I read twenty of them on the plane from Anchorage, skimmed another ten, and spent the remainder of the flight watching the cloud cover close over the Brooks Range below me and thinking about the contract value.

The answer was enough. More than enough. The kind of number that makes a man feel comfortable taking on a solo engagement with a government credit line that raised exactly zero flags at the sporting goods counter in Fairbanks.

I drove the rental out to Walkers Township on a Monday in November, which meant I had about four hours of usable daylight and a temperature sitting at eleven below before windchill. Alaska in November is a specific kind of hostile that you either make peace with or you don't work above the fifty-eighth parallel. I have worked above the fifty-eighth parallel nine times. The cold and I have an arrangement.

Walkers Township sits twelve miles east of the nearest paved road, at the end of a gravel track the county stopped maintaining sometime in the nineties and that has been reclaiming itself from the permafrost ever since.

The town proper is maybe forty structures: residential housing along two parallel streets, a main street running north to south with the commercial buildings, a water tower, a fuel depot with the tanks long since emptied, and at the south end, a processing facility for whatever the local mining operation had been pulling out of the ground before it folded. Population zero since 1997. No active utilities or cell service.

Satellite uplink on my field kit for communication, and a backup radio with a direct line to the coordinating agency.

I parked at the north end of main street at 0630 and got out and stood in the dark and listened.

The silence that these things produce in their territory is a specific quality that I have learned to identify precisely: the absence of birds, of small animals, of insect sound, all the acoustic background that a functioning ecosystem generates and that these things eliminate in a radius around themselves. Walkers Township had the quality. Complete and wrong.

I had identified it first in the British Columbia engagement, after the wildlife biologist I was consulting with mentioned that the area around the sightings had gone acoustically dead for six months. These things clear a radius. They do not like competition for sensory space.

The file said eleven months.

I went back to the rental and started pulling equipment. But before I did I walked the town for twenty minutes with the headlamp and a notepad, which is standard pre-engagement procedure and which I do even when I am confident about the outcome, which I was.

The confident man who skips his pre-engagement survey is the confident man who finds out mid-engagement that he missed the drainage ditch behind the hotel that cuts off his southern exit.

I have learned this through observation of other people's mistakes, and I intend to keep it that way.

The layout was simple. Main street north-south, two residential streets to the east, processing facility at the south end of the mine road. Basin walls on both sides were sheer — nobody getting up or down. Two exits: north to the highway, south up the mine road to a collapsed entrance that went nowhere.

I walked the vehicles: one sedan in front of the hardware store, pickup at the north end of the residential block, a flatbed at the south end that had been there long enough to look geological. I checked which storefronts still had glass which was useful, because these things respond to sharp sound and glass carries it, and which had open fronts, which matter because they have to fit through things and seven feet of this anatomy does not fit through everything.

By the time I got back to the rental I had a working operational map in my head and the confidence level had, if anything, increased.

I will describe the loadout because it matters for what comes later.

The primary weapon is a custom bolt-action precision rifle the coordinating agency had built to my specifications after the second engagement established that commercial options were producing inadequate results. The agency designates the ammunition B-spec blackout in requisition documents. The engineering team developed the cartridge specifically after the second engagement confirmed that standard ammunition produced inadequate tissue disruption on these subjects.

Hardened penetrator core, optimized velocity, maximum terminal energy at close to medium range. The government gave me a budget for the Walkers Township engagement that would have funded a small municipal department for a calendar year. I spent a portion of it on two hundred rounds of B-spec. The rest went toward the field kit.

The field kit, beyond the rifle: a .45 sidearm with standard hollow-point, carried mostly out of habit and partly because it made me feel better, which in retrospect was the wrong feeling; a professional snare trap, the heavy gauge kind used in large predator management, with an anchor system I had modified after the standard anchor failed in British Columbia at a critical moment; a set of avalanche deterrent charges, which is a legal designation for a very loud pyrotechnic device used in Alaska field work to clear slopes before personnel enter, and which I had learned in four prior engagements are excellent at producing a fast, localized acoustic spike in the two-to-five kilohertz range that these things find irresistible; two standard firecrackers as backup bait; and a headlamp that kept dimming on me, which I noted as a procurement complaint I would file upon returning to civilization.

The snare went near the hotel on the east side of main street, in the alley where the behavioral analysis suggested the subject had been denning. I set it with the modified anchor system and ran a check on the tension mechanism and felt good about my work. The snare, in four prior engagements, had produced a hundred percent catch rate. The thing about a hundred percent catch rate in four prior engagements is that the fifth engagement is still an untested data point.

Setup complete by 0815. I noted the processing facility at the south end of town as a potential fallback position: concrete walls, choke points at the exits, geometry that would work in my favor if the engagement moved south. I walked it, memorized the layout, clipped the two fragmentation grenades from the chest rig to the outer pockets where I could reach them fast, and went back to the main street.

Then I took up position at the second-floor window of the old general store at 1015 and felt very good about the situation.

I had two hours, so I used them the way I always do: running the engagement in my head. Sequence for Walkers Township was simple. Bait goes out. Subject responds. I acquire, two rounds center-mass, one at the base of the skull. Confirm kill, document, call in, report on the flight home, collect the bonus.

Four engagements, that sequence had held. Details moved around the edges. The arc stayed the same. I had every reason to think today was engagement number five on the same arc.

I watched main street through the scope for two hours and saw nothing move except a section of rusted awning frame on the hardware store that shifted in the minimal wind coming down off the basin walls. The town was inert. The silence maintained. The light came up slowly from the northeast, the November sun keeping low and flat and useful for the photographs I would take of the confirmed kill before calling in.

I had a long and professionally satisfying two hours at that window.

The briefing file said one creature. Stationary. Territorial. Acting outside standard behavioral parameters, which was the agency's language for a creature observed moving through the town during daylight hours and making sounds in proximity to the road.

A trucker on the gravel track had heard the crying through his cab windows and called it in to the state troopers as a welfare check. The troopers found nothing but flagged the abandoned town as requiring follow-up. The flag reached the agency. The agency produced my phone number.

I had a confirmed kill bonus clause in the contract. It was substantial.

I was, at 1047 on a Monday in November in Walkers Township, Alaska, feeling extremely good about the situation.

I lit the first firecracker and tossed it out the window. It landed in the street roughly fifteen feet from the building, rolled toward the abandoned sedan in front of the old hardware store, and went off with a flat percussive crack that the basin walls sent back twice.

I had the rifle up and the window covered inside of three seconds.

Then, from the building directly across the street and two doors north, the sound of a woman crying.

I want to be precise about this. The sound of a woman in genuine distress, high and sustained, landing in the body ahead of any analytical processing of what I was hearing. I have heard these things produce this sound in prior engagements and I am still not fully habituated to it. My hands tightened on the rifle regardless.

The window of the old saloon came out in a single sheet and the creature was on the sedan.

It took the sedan apart. That is the accurate description: it took the car apart. The front quarter panel peeled back under the impact of repeated blows. The windshield went on the second strike. The roof caved on the third. The sound was enormous in the still air of the township.

I watched it work on the sedan for about eight seconds before I had to acknowledge what I was looking at. In those eight seconds I ran a fast assessment using the framework I'd developed across four prior engagements. Height: consistent with prior subjects. Mass: consistent with prior subjects, possibly higher.

Gait: forward-pitched, front-limb dominant, consistent with prior— and that was where the assessment stalled.

It was upright.

The posture was fully erect, the rear limbs taking the full weight of the body, the front limbs swinging free to strike the sedan. Prior subjects used the front limbs for ground contact. This one was using them as arms.

I had the rifle on it and was acquiring the sight picture and processing the behavioral profile: feral, reactive, attacking the site of the sound stimulus, consistent with prior engagements. The behavioral profile was the right one. I stayed with it because the behavioral profile was what I knew and what I had documented, and because the alternative was to look at what was actually in front of me and draw the conclusions that follow from it, and I had a bonus clause in the contract and a sight picture that looked clean.

Then I actually looked at what I had the rifle on.

It was standing.

Standing upright, fully erect, the way a person stands. Seven feet minimum, possibly closer to eight. The body proportioned in a way that the word bodybuilder does not fully capture but is the closest available approximation: the shoulder width, the depth of the chest, the forearm thickness, all of it pushed past any human range and still organized around a fundamentally human structural plan. Two arms hanging at its sides, ending in hands with three fingers each and claws that had punched through the sedan roof panel. The musculature was visible through pale skin that fit the frame without slack.

The head was the same as every prior subject I had engaged.

The same flat featureless oval. The same vertical line of the closed mouth running crown to jaw. The same absence of any sensory feature across the full span of the face. The head of a prior-version subject, sitting on top of a body that had reorganized itself around an entirely different structural plan than any creature in my engagement history.

It was standing there tearing apart a car. Just standing there. Menacingly. I sighed and took the shot.

The B-spec round hit it center-mass, upper right chest, exactly where the penetrator is designed to go. I watched the impact register through the scope: a visible transfer of force, the body taking the energy of the round.

The creature stopped hitting the sedan.

It turned around.

I am going to be honest about what my body did in the next two seconds. I have been to eleven countries. Four confirmed kills, service record exemplary, custom rifle case with diplomatic clearance. My body heard none of it and went straight to the part of the brain that was installed before rational thought was an option.

It had turned around and it was fine.

I put three more rounds into it as fast as I could cycle the bolt. The second hit the sternum. The third hit the upper left chest. The fourth was high, probably shoulder, because my hands were contributing less precision than usual to the process. Each round registered. Each one produced the same result: the subject continued.

It came through the front wall of the general store. The door was still in its frame when I cleared the back.

The second-floor window exit dropped me into the rear alley and I went north, toward the feed store end of town, toward the narrowest section of main street where the structural walls closed the gap.

The subject came through the rear wall of the general store. The pattern was clear: walls, consistently, over doors.

I put four more rounds into it while running and kept moving. The rounds connected.

The subject continued. I hit the north end of main street, went left through the gap between the feed store and the hardware store, realized the subject had gained enough ground that cutting back south on main street toward the hotel alley was my only available option, and turned south.

I have made better tactical decisions.

And, for the record, made this exact category of tactical decision before, where the correct option is obvious in retrospect and was probably obvious at the time if I had taken six more seconds to think about it. The six seconds had not been available. I was noting this for the future version of myself who would be writing the after-action and questioning my choices.

The snare caught it at the entrance to the hotel alley. I heard the cable go taut and the anchor mechanism engage and I turned around. The snare was around both of the subject's lower limbs, exactly as designed. A hundred percent catch rate across four prior engagements.

The subject looked down at the cable around its legs with what I can only describe as mild interest. Then it braced both feet and pulled. The anchor bolt came out of the frozen ground. The snare came away from the mounting entirely. The subject walked out of it.

I stood in the entrance of the hotel alley and watched a modified professional snare system walk away from a body that had no particular use for it and thought about my retirement timeline. Then the subject started toward me again and the thinking stopped.

I went through the alley and across the service road to the hotel rear entrance, a wood door warped in its frame that took two shoulders to open. Inside: the lobby, the front desk with the register still open to November 14th 1996, somebody's pen still clipped to the page, three ground floor rooms off the hall, and the staircase. I went up.

The second floor gave me four rooms and a window at the end of the hall overlooking main street. I went to the window and watched the street below.

The subject came around the south end of the hotel and crossed into the street and stopped there. I had the rifle on it inside three seconds. Clear shot. Center mass. I settled the sight picture and thought about the British Columbia engagement, thought about the third round at the base of the skull that had ended it cleanly. I thought about the commendation letter.

I fired twice.

Both rounds hit. Both produced visible impacts, the body taking the energy, the head coming up, the closed vertical mouth orienting toward the window where I was standing. I stepped back from the glass.

The subject moved toward the hotel entrance.

I had my exit already planned: the end-of-hall window, second floor, a drop to the rear service area below, feet-first, knees bent. Standard exfiltration calculation for a second-floor position. I moved to the end of the hall.

The window frame was empty.

The glass was on the hall floor, interior side, which told me the frame had been cleared from outside, pushed inward. Something had come through from the exterior before I reached it.

I stood in the hall and worked out the timeline as precisely as I could, which turned out to be not very precisely. I had fired twice at the front window. The subject had been in the street when I fired, I was certain of that.

I had stepped back from the glass and it had moved toward the hotel entrance, which I had also seen. The time between stepping back from the glass and reaching the end of the hall was somewhere around twelve seconds. Maybe eight. I had not been counting and I regretted not being counting and there was nothing to be done about it.

Whatever the number, it had entered the hotel, located the rear exit, gone to the exterior rear wall, and cleared the window from outside. In the time between when I stepped away from the front window and when I reached the end of the hall.

I want to be precise about what that means. It had anticipated that I would go for the rear exit before I had moved for the rear exit. It was already going to the rear when it turned toward the hotel entrance, and turning toward the hotel entrance was the visible behavior it had chosen to show me, and it had shown it to me knowing I was watching from the window above.

I stood in the hall and understood that the subject had been modeling my behavior since before the first firecracker. The hotel second floor had been available to me as an option and it had known the hotel second floor would be available to me and it had moved to cover the exit before I reached it.

The British Columbia engagement, where the subject had come out of the tree line in ninety seconds and taken three rounds and gone down: the subject in British Columbia had reacted to a stimulus. It had heard the firecracker and come toward the sound and received the rounds and ended.

This one had watched me take up position at the general store window. It had come out of the saloon when I threw the firecracker, which was the visible behavior it chose to show me. While I was acquiring the sight picture and thinking about the commendation letter, it was moving through positions I had stopped monitoring.

I went back to the staircase and down and out the front entrance and the subject was inside the hotel behind me and I was in the street and I was running south and I was conducting the most honest internal reassessment of my career to date.

I made it forty yards before the subject came out the front of the hotel. I had cut east between two houses on the residential side street to gain an angle on the parallel alley. The alley gave me a clean run south. I had run the plan before I moved and it was a solid plan.

The subject was already in the alley.

I turned hard, went back to main street, fired three rounds at the alley mouth as the subject came through, and ran. Three rounds, three hits. The subject oriented and kept moving and I went through the gap between a collapsed storefront and the barbershop exterior wall and came out on main street going south.

There was a faded advertisement painted on the barbershop wall, some kind of tonic, a man in a bowler hat, and I registered it at full sprint for no reason I can account for.

I had been on this engagement approximately four hours.

I had put, at that point, roughly twenty rounds of government-spec B-spec blackout ammunition into a subject that was operating as if the ammunition was a suggestion it had chosen to decline. I was running low on rifle rounds and lower on confidence and somewhere around a quarter of the dark humor I had started the afternoon with.

I put the feed store wall on my right and lined up a shot as the subject emerged and fired twice. Both rounds center mass.

The subject used the forward momentum of each impact, rolling with the force, and continued.

I ran into the first available building, which was the old township records office on the west side of main street, and went to the floor behind an overturned file cabinet. I braced it against the door with my shoulder and held it there until the door stopped taking impacts, which took about twenty seconds and left a specific impression of force in my shoulder that I noted as something I would think about later.

The subject stopped outside.

I tried the radio. Partial signal, consistent with prior attempts. I got through enough to update my GPS position and confirm active status and nothing else. No cavalry incoming. Just me, the file cabinet, and whatever I had left in the magazine.

I noticed at some point that the file cabinet I was braced behind had a label on the top drawer that read MUNICIPAL RECORDS 1971-1979 in block letters and that someone had drawn a small cartoon bird next to the label in blue ink. Whoever had drawn it was probably dead by now from natural causes. I thought about that for a second and then stopped thinking about it because that line of thinking had nowhere useful to go.

The subject began moving along the exterior wall. I tracked it by sound: north face, east corner, south face, west corner, back to the front. Full circuit. Then it did it again. In the British Columbia engagement the subject had circled twice and moved on.

It completed a third circuit and a fourth. I was updating my prior assessment of the behavior as I listened.

I lay behind the file cabinet and controlled my breathing and held position and made a running inventory of my remaining assets.

Eleven rounds in the primary rifle. Eight in the .45. One grenade, now on the outer pocket. The second firecracker in the chest rig pocket. Headlamp at partial charge. No food since 0930. Water in the pack, somewhere under a thousand milliliters. Temperature in the building: cold enough that my breath was visible in the headlamp beam when I exhaled.

There was a coffee mug on the floor about three feet from my head, upside down, handle intact. I kept looking at it. I don't know why.

The subject stopped at the front entrance and the crying started again.

I timed it on my watch, more or less.

Around twenty-two minutes from when the crying started to when it shifted register. Maybe twenty, maybe twenty-five — I kept losing the count.

Twenty-two minutes is a long time to lie behind a file cabinet in an abandoned building in November in Alaska with a subject outside that has demonstrated it can move through structural walls, anticipate exit angles, and walk out of a professional snare system with mild interest. I spent the first seven minutes running through the engagement tactically: rounds fired, effects observed, snare outcome, hotel sequence.

I spent the next five on the hotel sequence specifically, which required time because the hotel sequence required revising everything I had built my operating framework on.

It had been upstairs before I got there. It had gone through the rear of the hotel while I was lining up the shot from the front window, which meant it had known I was at the window, known there was a rear exit, and moved to cover the rear exit while I was still at the front calculating the shot.

That is not how animals work. That is how something else works.

I spent the next six minutes on this and arrived at a conclusion I would rather not have arrived at, which is that the subject had been running that model since before the first firecracker. Every position I had tried to hold, it had known I would try to hold it. The hotel had been available as an option and it had known the hotel would be available and it had moved accordingly.

I spent the final four minutes thinking about the bonus clause in the contract and whether any number was sufficient compensation for lying on the floor of a records office in Walkers Township, Alaska, while a seven-foot upright creature that could attempt human speech performed perimeter laps outside.

Then the crying shifted.

I could hear it changing register in real time, the high sustained sound dropping and distorting, the frequency range moving. Four prior engagements, and this was new. My recorder was running in the chest rig pocket. Whatever came out of this, the agency was going to hear it.

I need to describe this accurately because the agency needs to know. The crying shifted register. What came out of it at the end of that shift was something different from the crying.

Syllables. Distorted, produced by anatomy built for other functions, the mouth reaching toward sounds it had only recently begun to approximate. The result was damaged and wrong and it took me several seconds to parse it.

"Human bad."

Those were the syllables. Stretched, the vowels pulled past any natural length, the consonants produced by something that was finding its way toward them from the outside in. Human bad. Said with the cadence of something that had heard the phrase repeated in its territory and was now reaching toward it with equipment built for an entirely different purpose.

I lay behind the file cabinet and my hands were not entirely steady.

I have killed four of these things. I wrote the handbook. The entire operational framework I built over six years of engagements rested on a foundational assumption that is standard across the field: these subjects are simple. Large, dangerous, behaviorally predictable predators with unusual anatomy. They respond to stimuli. They have territories. They operate on instinct, on reaction, on appetite.

Human bad.

I lay behind the file cabinet in the Walkers Township records office and updated my foundational assumptions in real time, with the urgency that the situation required.

The crying resumed outside. I reached into the chest rig pocket and found the second firecracker.

The operational logic: I needed the subject moving toward the south end of town. The processing facility was there, and the south exit corridor was there, and the corridor was twelve feet of concrete on both sides. If the subject followed me into that corridor, the geometry worked in favor of whoever was throwing the grenade rather than receiving it.

I found the lighter in the left chest rig pocket and lit the firecracker and held it for two seconds and threw it through the window opening on the west side of the building, into the gap between the records office and the adjacent structure.

The firecracker went off.

The crying outside the entrance stopped.

I went out the entrance at a run and turned south.

The subject came around the west side of the building faster than I had anticipated.

I heard it before I had covered thirty yards. The upright gait on frozen ground has a different signature from the forward-pitched gait of prior subjects: more force per stride, the full body weight loading into two contact points on frozen gravel, the sound of it transmitting up through the ground and into my boots as I ran.

I fired twice behind me without turning and kept going.

Main street in Walkers Township is four hundred yards north to south. I had covered roughly a hundred and twenty yards from the records office when the subject started gaining. The processing facility was two hundred and fifty yards ahead.

The subject was accelerating.

I went off main street to the east, between the collapsed wall of a residential structure and the old vehicle yard fence, looking to gain distance through geometry. I heard the fence come down behind me. I cut back to main street south of the vehicle yard. The processing facility entrance was eighty yards ahead.

The subject was thirty yards behind me. I could feel the ground impact through my boots on every stride.

My right hand found the first grenade on the outer pocket as I ran. The processing facility had concrete walls and a narrow south exit corridor. If I could get the subject into the corridor behind me and get enough distance, the grenade would do the rest and the concrete walls would do what concrete walls do to the overpressure of a contained blast.

I hit the facility entrance at a full run and went through the main floor past the primary crusher and into the south exit corridor, twelve feet of concrete on both sides and the exit door at the end, and I went through the exit door and kept running twenty yards and turned and the subject was in the corridor, filling it, coming fast.

I pulled the pin and threw it.

The grenade went into the corridor and the subject was in the corridor and the exit door was still swinging on its hinges and then the grenade went off inside a twelve-foot concrete channel and the resulting event was substantial in every direction.

I felt it through the ground as a single enormous physical fact.

The pressure wave came through the open exit door and hit me before the sound did, and the sound arrived as pure pressure, and my right eardrum went in a way I identified as a distinct sensation before the rest of the information caught up. The rest of the information was that I was on the frozen ground and the underside of the Alaskan sky was above me and a tone had replaced the right side of my hearing that I understood, even in that moment, was not going away.

Then I stopped processing information for a while.

When I came back online the light was different. Lower angle toward the southwest, which told me I had been down for somewhere between one and three hours. I was in the ditch beside the south road. My head was producing the interior symptoms of a concussion in a way that was informative and unpleasant.

The right ear produced its tone without interruption. The left ear was working, muffled and underwater in quality but present. The chest rig was intact. The rifle was six feet north of where I was lying.

I sat up slowly and ran an injury assessment because that is what you do before you move. Right ear: gone, producing a tone I already knew was permanent, nothing to be done about it in a ditch in November. My head probably concussion, which has guidelines about movement and unconsciousness, both of which I had already compromised.

Hands 75% working. Legs definitely working. Rib on the right side, loud about itself when I breathed deep, which I decided was bruising because I was the only doctor available and that was my ruling.

Overall assessment: ambulatory, compromised, operational.

I sat up slowly and looked at the south road.

The subject was in the road.

What remained of it. I sat in the ditch and looked at the confirmed kill and felt the professional satisfaction that four prior engagements had taught me to expect at this point in a successful operation. Fifth kill. I thought about the bonus clause in the contract. I thought about what the next entry in the file was going to look like.

I also thought, sitting in that ditch with my right ear producing its permanent tone and a rib making its case for attention, about the twenty-two minutes behind the file cabinet listening to the subject circuit the records office.

I thought about the hotel sequence. I thought about the subject in the alley before I had gotten there. I thought about how a subject operating on instinct and appetite circles a position twice and moves on. This one had run four circuits and held its position and held the cry and waited.

I thought about two words and what two words means when the animal that produced them had been filed, until yesterday, under dumb animals.

I had been telling myself since the snare failed that I could document this and update the framework, and that updating the framework was the important thing, the professional thing, the thing that made today useful beyond the bonus clause.

That had been the story I was running in my head for the second half of the afternoon.

Sitting in the ditch with a confirmed kill in the road in front of me, I did a brief audit of that story. The audit result was: the entire operational architecture I had built and taught and published was a response to old-version subjects, and whatever was in this township was a next-version subject, and I had killed one next-version subject after using approximately four times the ordinance I had budgeted and sustaining a permanent hearing loss and a possible rib fracture.

I sat there for a few minutes. The right ear maintained its tone. The left ear produced a muffled version of the still morning.

That was when I heard the crying.

From the north end of town. From the direction I had come from, from somewhere past the records office and past the hotel and past the general store. High and wavering, the frequency range I knew, landing in the body before the analytical parts caught up.

Two distinct sources, separated in position, producing the same cry from the north end of Walkers Township. Then a third source joined from further north, possibly at the edge of the township or just beyond the first buildings.

I picked up the rifle and checked the magazine. Eleven rounds remaining.

I looked at the confirmed kill in the south road. I thought about the sixty-three page briefing file and the twenty pages I had read on the plane. I thought about the foundational assumption I had updated while lying behind the file cabinet. I thought about two words produced by a mouth that was reaching toward speech from a direction I had never considered possible.

Human bad.

The crying from the north end of town continued. Three sources at minimum.

I said the word I felt the situation called for. One word. It covered the situation completely.

I sat there for a moment after.

The word hung in the cold air and dispersed and the crying continued from the north and I noticed, for the first time, that my left boot was untied. I had no memory of it coming untied. I tied it. It took longer than it should have because my fingers were doing their own thing at that point and I had to focus on the loops in a way I had not had to focus on loops since I was approximately six years old.

Then I sat in the ditch and worked through the arithmetic of what I had available against what was waiting for me at the north end of the only road out.

The arithmetic: eleven rounds of B-spec blackout, each round having produced on the current subject a visible impact and the same forward intention throughout, until the grenade solved the problem terminally. Eight rounds of .45 hollow-point, whose contribution to the afternoon I will characterize as informing the subject of my general direction. One grenade remaining, which is a one-use solution and requires close range and a confined space, and the north end of main street is four hundred yards of open ground with no confined spaces between me and the trailhead.

Three sources, minimum, at the north end, and the arithmetic came out the same every time I ran it.

I sat in the ditch and thought about what a man with a concussion and one working eardrum does next when the math comes out wrong, and the answer I kept arriving at was: the same thing he would do if the math came out right, which is stand up and go north, because north is the only direction that has a road and a rental car and eventually an airplane and a very long conversation with the coordinating agency about the forty-three pages of the briefing file I had left unread on the plane.

I thought about the commendation letter from the British Columbia engagement and whether the coordinating agency sends commendation letters for engagements that end in a ditch with a blown eardrum. I thought about what new categories I was going to need for the vocalizations section, and that I was going to have to survive the next several hours to write them, so.

I thought about all of this while listening to three sources of the cry I now know is a subject establishing its position, and then I stopped.

I have killed four of these things. I taught the seminar. I wrote the handbook.

The handbook does not cover this.

My name is Agent Washington and I am thirty-eight years old and I am sitting in a ditch outside Walkers Township, Alaska, listening to at least three of these subjects produce sound from the direction I need to travel to reach my vehicle. My right eardrum is gone. I have a concussion. I have eleven rounds of B-spec blackout and a .45 with eight rounds of standard hollow-point that has produced, across six years of engagements, approximately the same effect on these subjects as a stern expression.

The light is going. In Fairbanks in November, once the light goes it goes completely, and I want to be clear about something: I have worked in the dark before, across eleven countries, and I know what normal darkness feels like.

This is not going to be normal darkness.

This is going to be Advanced Darkness. Capital A, capital D. The kind you need a special designation for because regular darkness does not cover the situation I am about to walk north into with eleven rounds and one working ear.

I am choosing to find that funny.

A man with my record probably owes himself that much.

Starting now.