And sitting here now, seeing it in his mind black and deranged and invidiously alien, Bell felt cold sweat bead his brow.

It’s not right, a voice said in his head. Nothing about that fucking place is right. I don’t care how smart those monsters were, they were evil. Maybe the very seed that inspired what we think of as evil.

Nothing ever hit him like that before. Nothing had ever kicked him so hard physically, mentally, and even spiritually.

That city is a nightmare, it’s a fucking pestilence. And the memory of it is still in you, still in everyone, the ghost that haunts the bones of the race.

Whatever interactions humans—or what might become humans—had with those creatures and that city it must have been horrible beyond belief to still linger on so strongly.

Because Bell knew a little something about fear reactions.

As a sailor involved in a profession that was extremely dangerous and outright suicidal at times, he had been gone over by the best psychologists in the business. The DSU allowed no one in their ranks that were remotely nervous or indecisive. He knew that there were two kinds of fear: learned and inherited. You learned to fear nuclear radiation, shotguns pointed in your face, and terrorists because you were taught they were dangerous. But no one had to teach you to fear a growling dog or a hissing snake or the depths of a dark cave…it was inherited. It was part of your preprogrammed survival kit developed by countless generations of experience from your ancestors. Growling dogs could bite you; snakes could be poisonous; dark caves hid predators. And like that, no one had to tell him that the city and what lived in it was dangerous: he knew it. The memory was ingrained in him.

He wanted to destroy it.

And although the orders to do so were still sealed, he knew that’s what this mission was about. They all did. For stored safely in lockboxes were enough hybrid RDX Comtac explosives to flatten Midtown Manhattan. And, honestly, Bell had all he could do not to use them.

As if reading his mind, Hubbs said, “Let’s not dick around, people. When we find that anomaly and document it, we’re going to destroy it. Simple as that. I don’t know what this is all about, but I can guess. And my guess is that the Pentagon wants to borrow some of the…bogies’ technology to be used as weapons.”

“You can’t know that,” Javonivic said.

“No, but it’s my guess.”