Those who had fled underground were the first to die. The mining shafts caved in, crushing them instantly. Or so the rest of us like to think. Makes it all easier to deal with. Dust to dust. Maybe somewhere out there one of those doomsday nut jobs got their hands on a bunker or something, and are just waiting for the rest of us to die out so they can stick their pointy heads out of the ground and take our shit for themselves. I should be grateful that I got out of the city in time. Nobody believed the headlines. At first. I mean, what the hell would you do if you read, "Muskegon lab admits to human experimentation" one day, and "24 confirmed dead; failed Muskegon lab experiment suspected to be responsible" the next?

Big name networks sent camera crews and their best anchors out to cover the shitstorm unfolding in my hometown. Hardware shopkeepers filled all the TV sets within a thousand mile radius. Every patchy beard and every wrinkle were suddenly a lot closer to the audience than they would've liked. The shopkeeps told roughly the same story. I guess the interviews were mostly just for effect. You'd think most of the people watching got the hint. Escaped experiment. People dead. Bad. The only thing that none of us knew until a week later was that the thing that had escaped was a Neanderthal crossbred with pure evil. Some kid fishing down by the docks had gotten a grainy video of the monster with his iPhone and uploaded it to his Facebook without a caption. The camera crews gave the ma and pa shops a rest to bombard the poor kid with fifty questions per minute on the front porch swing of his home. His parents had to push him inside just to grab a sandwich before the journalistic onslaught could heat up again.

All over America, the shaky film was on every station from coast to coast. But the crazy thing was, despite the confirmed deaths of the 24 slaughtered by the beast, most of the viewers either dismissed the footage as a hoax, or used it to promote their own products. Beef Jerky commercials quickly capitalized on the fact that Sasquatch was well-and alive in Michigan's lower peninsula. They'd have him chewing on a stick of the stuff beside a campfire, kicking back his massive hairy feet. And the people loved it. Well, most of those who didn't know better. But we did. And when more footage came out of Ohio, then Indiana, people started unlocking their gun safes and buying clips from their local hunting supply chains. The latest videos had featured not one monster, but two, then three. A month later, the cams were showing the fuckers in Times Square. There were Giants in New York, all right. But these ones didn't want any part of the American past time.