They ask me, what's the difference between a man and a monster? To me, there is no difference. I’ve hunted both.
My name is Captain Hedges. Some of the things I hunt, and have hunted, are sometimes partly man, twisted by war and hate, and sometimes partly monster, things that crawl out of the nightmares we try to ignore. My path started in the US Army, a long climb through the ranks to the 75th Ranger Regiment, and then the rarefied air of Delta Force. Fifteen years a soldier, honorably discharged, and then the shadows beckoned – a private US military contractor, a task force built on the recommendations of superiors who knew I could handle the…unconventional.
There were five of us in that windowless briefing room. Gary, a Korean immigrant, Green Beret, top knot, and an aura of not giving a damn about anything. Jack, the Irish bastard, FBI agent turned special forces operator, another climber like me. Charlie 'Marino' from Arizona, a forest ranger turned mercenary, a decade navigating the wilds of Brazil. And Hugo, the old man of the group next to me, a decorated ex-DEVGRU sniper, a hardass from way back.
A man in a black charcoal suit, who introduced himself only as Smith, sat opposite us. Eight figures, he’d hinted, for whatever this was. He laid it out: we were handpicked, the best in our respective fields, for a military program unlike any other. A super-soldier trial, he called it, requiring us to operate as a team, to see if we clicked.
Then came the bomb.
“I was saying that you’re all set and hired to create a task force,” Smith continued, his voice flat, “but this one’s express purpose is essentially to kill or capture supernatural or paranormal entities and creatures. You’ll all be hired as elite mercenaries unofficially working for the US government in a team called Task Force Compass Nova Hunter.”
Silence hung heavy in the room.
“Are you shitting us?” Gary finally drawled, his usual nonchalance momentarily cracked.
“No.” Smith didn’t even blink. He flicked a remote, and a television screen flickered to life behind us.
Gary whistled low. “This is gonna be good.”
The screen showed a rapid-fire montage: a forest littered with the shredded remains of deer, carcasses hanging impossibly high in the trees. Then a blurry image of a colossal, tentacled thing, easily a hundred feet long, in a murky underwater cave. Next, a fleeting glimpse of something humanoid, impossibly tall and gaunt, with an elongated neck and head.
Then it shifted to a grainy video. A gaunt, deformed man, impossibly tall and thin, sat in a stark interrogation room, chained to the wall. When the interrogator left, the figure simply pulled the chains free, the metal links snapping like twigs. Then, with casual, terrifying strength, he ripped a gaping hole in the concrete wall and crawled out. The final image was a huge map of the Appalachian Mountains, dotted with red markers, names scrawled beside them.
The video cut to black.
“Now do you believe this?” Smith pocketed the remote. “Since I showed you classified government footage, none of you can leave this room alive unless you want to cooperate. Please comply.”
“Was this supposed to be some sort of compilation?” Jack’s Irish brogue was thick with disbelief. “Why the hell are they so blurry? Didn’t government officials record this?”
“Nope.” Smith glanced at an obscenely expensive watch. “Well, we’re out of time here. I’ll show you around, get used to this shitty place.”
An hour of more briefings and mind-numbing slideshows later, we found ourselves in the armory. Smith gestured at the array of weaponry. “This ain’t your standard kit and operation. Pick what you’d use best in a mountain or temperate forest setting. I’ll be back when you’re done.”
Old habits die hard. I chose an M4 carbine, familiar and reliable. For anything underground in those cave-riddled mountains, a Benelli M4. A few knives, a combat pack, plate carrier, and boxes of ammunition rounded out my selection. And of course, my worn baseball hat, a gift from a terp back in Kandahar – some things you just don’t leave behind.
Gary and I ended up with matching M4s. Jack opted for an M5 assault rifle, a slight variation. Hugo, ever the professional, hefted a Barrett M82. The next day, we were wheels up, heading for the deep Canadian wilderness, the northern tip of Ontario. A helicopter dropped us into a green hell, our mission: hunt down and kill an unknown entity responsible for multiple deaths and disappearances. A trial, Smith had called it. A little test to see if we had what it took for the “super-soldier monster-killing crew project.”
Guns up, we moved through the dense Ontario woods.
“How the fuck are we supposed to kill something we don’t even know about?” Gary muttered, swatting at a mosquito the size of my thumb.
“Smith said ‘you’ll know it when you see it’,” I replied, a bitter chuckle escaping me. “Reminds me of a shitty NCO I used to have. Anyway, how’d you even end up…”
The question died in my throat. A blur of movement from the canopy above, and then a sickening thud as something massive landed squarely on Charlie.
“Fuck!!” he bellowed, scrambling beneath the weight.
The creature turned its head, and a sound ripped from its throat – a high-pitched, chilling screech. It was huge, vaguely humanoid, but with the unmistakable form of a deer… twisted into something monstrous. A fifteen-point rack of antlers jutted from its head, and its jaw was abnormally large, hinged in a way no deer’s should be, filled with rows of needle-sharp teeth. But the most disturbing thing was its eyes. Beneath each normal deer eye were two more, yellow and reptilian, like something cold and ancient peering out from behind a mask.
Though the deer-thing was easily twice Charlie’s size, his training kicked in. He scrabbled for his knife and plunged it into the creature’s side, again and again. The monster shrieked and finally lurched off him, landing on all fours. Charlie kicked it away, scrambling back to his feet, rifle raised.
“Fuck this…” he gasped.
We didn’t hesitate. A thunderous barrage of gunfire erupted as we all unloaded on the creature. It was instantly shredded, a mess of fur, bone, and something viscous and black. But it didn’t go down. Slowly, impossibly, it began to rise, its torso a mangled ruin, until Hugo’s Barrett roared, obliterating its head in a spray of gore. It twitched, and then, unbelievably, began to get back up again, a wet, pulpy mass where its face should have been, a guttural growl escaping its ruined throat.
Gary, ever the pragmatist, walked up to the twitching corpse and delivered a brutal kick, then stomped down hard on what was left of its head, sending brain matter and alien fluids splattering. Finally, the creature stopped moving.
He spat his chewing tobacco onto the dead monster. “That’s what you get, asshole. Wait, I need that.”
With a casual disregard that bordered on the insane, Gary reached down and plucked the soggy wad of tobacco from the creature’s pulped head. He blew off a chunk of something unidentifiable, flicked a piece of the monster’s yellow eye away, and popped it back into his mouth.
“Good as new,” he mumbled, chewing contentedly.
“There is something seriously fucking wrong with you, Gary,” I said, my voice flat with a mixture of disgust and disbelief.
“Thank you, Captain Hedges. You want one?”
I shook my head, reaching for the long-range radio. “Smith, we killed… well, whatever it is you wanted us to kill,” I reported.
“Already?” Smith’s voice crackled through the receiver. “Can you describe it?”
“It looks like a deer Satan’s first bitch gave birth to. Six eyes, two were fake. It walked on two legs, had teeth like fucking needles and a huge, hinged jaw.”
“That ain’t it, Captain Hedges,” Smith said, a hint of something I couldn’t quite place in his tone. “You guys just killed a Not-Deer, or what people get confused with a wendigo. Might be a skinwalker. They’re pretty common around these parts, but they still might be a future problem for us, so good job at killing it.”
My heart sank. “You mean that what we just killed is not the fucking target?”
“Nope. What you’re looking for probably eats Not-Deer for breakfast, lunch, and fucking dinner, based on the corpses we found. But we haven’t gotten a real description of your target, since all the stupid witnesses keep getting killed. But if you see something that can move at ninety miles per hour, around eight feet tall, with appendages and multiple eyes, then that’s the target.”
“Oh,” I said, the sarcasm thick in my voice. “Thanks for the clear, concise intel.”
“By the way, is that asshole, Gary, I think, dead? Pretty sure I mixed the recommendation papers up, we were supposed to have this SAS chick instead of him.”
“No, actually, he’s the one who finished it off.”
“That Smith?” Gary’s voice boomed from beside me, loud enough for the radio to pick up.
The line went dead.
“So what did Smith say?” Jack asked, wiping blood and gore from his rifle.
I stared at the mangled remains of the Not-Deer. “What we just killed is not the target. It’s what the target eats, verbatim, ‘breakfast, lunch, and fucking dinner’.”
“Fuck me,” Charlie groaned. “I should have reconsidered that damn contract. I wanted to work for Blackwater, not whatever the hell this shit is.”
“Aw, don’t be a quitter.” I chuckled humorlessly. “Hugo, you’re our best nav guy. What’s our next move?”
“Well, we need to get moving anyway. It’ll be nightfall soon, and we need to cover as much area as possible,” Hugo said, his gaze sweeping the darkening woods. “I have a feeling that our target will come to us.”
That night, we built a large campfire, the flames casting dancing shadows on the silent trees. The woods were eerily still. Not a bird, not a squirrel, not even the rustle of leaves in the wind. Maybe the earlier gunfight had scared everything off, or maybe something else was at play. An aggressive bear had wandered too close earlier, a stark reminder of the more mundane dangers lurking in the wilderness. We took shifts, one pair on watch while the others tried to snatch some sleep, the cold seeping into our bones as the night deepened. We couldn’t actively track something we knew nothing about. Unconventional threats, Smith had implied, required unconventional tactics. We were bait.
It was my turn on watch, the embers of the fire glowing low. A large movement high in the trees caught my eye. Too big for a bear, too fluid for anything natural. I shook Gary awake, then Jack, then Charlie. Hugo was instantly alert, his hand already on his Barrett.
“Gary!! Dammit, Gary! Wake up!!”
“What the hell?” Gary grumbled, scrambling to his feet, rifle in hand.
“Movement. They’re in the trees.”
Everyone took their positions, Hugo settling prone, his Barrett M82 already tracking the canopy. Then it happened. With a guttural screech that vibrated through the forest floor, the creature launched itself from the trees. It hit the ground with a thud that shook the leaves and began moving towards us at a speed that defied comprehension. It was a blur of motion, easily the size of a Humvee and low to the ground, propelled by powerful limbs.
I swung my Benelli M4 up and fired a wide spread of buckshot, aiming where I thought it would be. The shot went wild. The monster was closing rapidly, its form still largely indistinct in the chaotic movement, now within fifty meters, illuminated in the flickering beams of our headlamps and weapon lights.
As Hugo fired, the massive .50 caliber round slamming into the creature’s side with a sickening thud and a spray of dark fluid, causing it to momentarily stumble, I caught a glimpse of its underbelly. There, nestled amongst thick, corded muscle, were several clusters of glowing, faintly pulsating sacs, a sickly yellow light emanating from within.
“Underbelly! Glowing sacs!” I roared over the gunfire. “Shoot the glowing sacs!”
Hugo immediately adjusted his aim, the powerful recoil of the Barrett echoing through the trees as he fired again. Jack and Gary unleashed sustained fire from their M5 and M4 carbines, aiming low. The air filled with the roar of gunfire, the snap of branches, and the creature’s enraged screeches.
The monster, wounded and furious, lashed out with a massive, clawed limb, swiping at Charlie. He yelped, diving behind a thick pine just as the claws tore through the bark where he’d been standing.
“Fucking hell!” Charlie yelled, firing blindly around the tree.
The concentrated fire began to take its toll. One of Hugo’s shots struck a glowing sac, which burst in a shower of luminescent goo and a sharp, acrid smell. The creature shrieked louder, its movements becoming more erratic. Another sac ruptured under Gary’s relentless assault.
I noticed the creature’s immense size seemed to make navigating the uneven, root-choked terrain difficult. “Fall back towards that ravine!” I yelled, pointing towards a dark gash in the earth about twenty meters behind us. “Use the terrain!”
We scrambled back, firing as we moved, trying to lure the creature onto the broken ground. The monster, driven by its rage and the instinct to kill, followed, its massive form occasionally stumbling on the tangled roots.
As it lumbered closer to the ravine, Hugo fired another precisely aimed shot, hitting a joint in one of its massive forelimbs. The creature roared in pain and its movement became even more labored.
Just as the creature reached the edge of the ravine, Gary, with a wild yell, charged forward a few steps and tossed a couple of fragmentation grenades he’d been carrying. They detonated in a deafening blast right in front of the creature, sending chunks of earth and monster flesh flying.
The creature recoiled, momentarily stunned. Seizing the opportunity, I switched to the Benelli M4 and, at point-blank range, unleashed two devastating blasts into the creature’s chest where more of the glowing sacs were visible.
The effect was immediate and grotesque. The sacs exploded in a shower of light and viscous fluid. The creature spasmed violently, its screeches turning into choked gurgles. It took a few more ragged breaths, its massive body shuddering, before finally collapsing in a heap at the edge of the ravine. A strange, oily smoke began to rise from its cooling flesh.
The silence that followed the deafening gunfire was heavy. We stood there, weapons still raised, chests heaving, the smell of gunpowder and something acrid and alien filling the air.
Gary walked up to the still twitching remains and spat his chewing tobacco onto its flank. “Well,” he said, wiping a smear of glowing goo off his arm with a grunt. “That was different.”
I radioed back to Smith, my voice rough. “Smith, we killed… the big one. The fast one. The one that eats Not-Deer for breakfast.”
There was a pause on the other end. “Copy that, Captain Hedges. Describe.”
I looked at the massive, grotesque corpse. “Imagine a Humvee had a really bad night with a spider the size of a minivan, and then someone dipped it in toxic waste and gave it too many teeth. Oh, and it had glowing yellow sacs on its belly.”
“Glowing sacs?” Smith sounded intrigued. “Interesting. Alright, Captain Hedges. Get some samples if you can. And try not to touch anything without gloves. Cantonment unit is inbound.”
“Cantonment unit?” I echoed, a new term in this bizarre vocabulary.
“Yeah, they clean up the messes you guys make. Extraction team is inbound right after. Good job, Compass Nova Hunter. Looks like you passed the little test.”
The thrum of the approaching helicopter grew louder, and soon a heavy-lift aircraft, marked with unfamiliar insignia, descended into a nearby clearing. A team in sterile-looking hazmat suits disembarked, their movements precise and efficient. They approached the creature’s remains with caution, deploying specialized equipment to analyze and secure it.
We watched in silence as they meticulously documented the scene, taking samples and carefully loading the massive carcass into a reinforced container. The air crackled with the hum of their equipment and the low murmur of their voices, a stark contrast to the chaos of the preceding battle.
Once the creature was secured and the team gave us a curt nod, signaling their departure, the helicopter lifted off, the downwash kicking up leaves and debris before it disappeared back into the dense Canadian wilderness.
“Alright,” I said, breaking the silence. “Let’s head back to base.”
The walk back was quieter, the adrenaline slowly receding, replaced by a weary exhaustion and a dawning sense of the bizarre reality we now inhabited. The image of the glowing sacs and the creature’s unnatural speed was burned into my mind. Whatever Task Force Compass Nova Hunter was truly meant to do, it was clear that our definition of "monster" was about to be stretched far beyond anything we had encountered before. The "little test" was over, but the real mission had just begun.
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