The boy waited, his pulse a steady sixty beats per minute. After a long moment he entered the hall and peeked through the open master bedroom door. He saw his mother spread-eagled on the floor, blood pooling in her mouth, the telltale purple imprints around her collapsed esophagus.
Hearing a noise coming from the master bathroom, he ducked beneath the bed.
Alexander watched through the reflection of the medicine cabinet mirror as Rory Johnston freed a length of chain link from the sky light and fashioned it into a noose. The boy grew excited, waiting until the groan that told him the stranger had stepped off the edge of the tub.
Alexander approached the bathroom gallows, far more curious than fearful. Suspended above the floor was an animated bag of flesh fighting to contain Rory Johnston’s soul. The boy studied everything — his father’s bulging eyes, the pulsating cords of blood vessels popping along the swelling neck, the herky-jerky leg movements…
The internal battle caused the body to sway and spin, and suddenly the former history teacher realized he had an audience. Purple lips mouthed silent objections, flailing arms commanding his son to leave.
The boy held his ground — the Grim Reaper’s protégé intent on counting down the final twitches of life until the stranger’s soul slipped free of its physical purgatory and escaped into the unknown.
His mind intoxicated by endorphins, Alexander spent another twenty minutes examining his parents’ vacant corpses before the police arrived. The night was an education in forensics — the child reveling in what would become his life’s passion: Thanatology: the study of death.
Alexander Johnston entered his teens, moving from one foster home to the next, his hobby of killing stray cats and raccoons tarnishing his surrogate family’s welcome. Seeking human subjects, he lied about his age and enlisted in the army when he was sixteen, the armed forces providing him with a “license to kill.” He quickly worked his way up through the ranks, demonstrating a lethal creativity on the battlefield that impressed his superiors. After enrolling in and graduating from Officer Candidate School, Colonel Johnston was chosen to command a Green Beret unit participating in clandestine operations in Vietnam and Thailand. One of these Special Forces — Project Phoenix — was responsible for the torture and killing of civilians in My Lai and later in El Salvador.
As educational as killing had become, what the colonel really desired to learn were methods of separating the life force from the body, an act which he believed would induce instant death. Believing this hidden knowledge existed among the more primitive cultures, Alexander Johnston resigned his commission and set out to find it, traveling to Tibet to converse with monks and with shamans in the Amazon jungle. He studied voodoo with witch doctors in Togo and feasted on human flesh with the cannibals of New Guinea. From the Russians he learned the art of psycho-correction; from former CIA officers, remote viewing and other paranormal exercises — until he was convinced he could use telepathy to interfere with the brain’s electrical activity and chase the life force from the body.
Three years later, Colonel Johnston presented his “soft option killing” theories to Major General Sebastian J. Appleton, Director of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command. Appleton was enthusiastic, and suddenly the man who had spent hundreds of hours staring at goats had a new position as Director of Non-Lethal Programs working out of the Los Alamos National Laboratories. Here, the colonel was able to focus on mind control and psychotronics while gaining access to black budget projects which used advanced technologies necessary for his project’s success. He worked side-by-side with Dr. Igor Smirnov, a psychologist from the Moscow Institute of Psycho-Correlations who had designed a technique to electronically analyze the human mind — a necessary step in order to learn how to influence and control it.
In 1992, Colonel Johnston married Yvonne Dwyer, a practicing Satanist and self-published author on the occult. At twenty-six, Dwyer was half the colonel’s age, but she saw in his eyes a youthful madness waiting to be exploited.
By day they lived the lives of semi-celebrities as the colonel became a popular TV and radio guest, debunking UFOs while presenting lectures on “non-violent warfare.” They rubbed elbows with billionaires, religious leaders and political power brokers, with the colonel being invited to sit on the boards of several powerful military contractors — allowing him unprecedented access into top-secret facilities and their black-shelved technologies. Behind closed doors, “Dr. Death” and his bride drank tiger’s blood and consumed the umbilical cords of newborns while participating in Satanic rituals — the biggest being the annual festivities at the Bohemian Grove.
Every July, two thousand elitists from all over the world — including former presidents and government officials, CEOs of major corporations, bankers, Big Oil executives, and members of the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, and the Council of Foreign Relations — were invited to the Bohemian Grove, a private compound located in a Redwood forest 65 miles north of San Francisco. On the first night of this pilgrimage, all the invited guests gathered at a clearing by the lake for the opening event, known as the Cremation of Care ceremony. There, guarded by the 45-foot-tall statue of an owl, Bohemians dressed in dark brown robes would pretend to struggle to ignite a bonfire required to burn a human effigy referred to as “Dull Care,” a symbol representing the burdens and responsibilities of the world leaders in attendance. The assembled then prayed to the giant owl, a Canaanite idol known as Moloch, that was used long ago to sacrifice children. Wild applause would erupt from the inebriated crowd as an aura of light appeared around the statue’s head when the pyre was successfully lit, the sound system blasting human cries into the night in a pagan ritual that bound the rich and powerful to darkness.
Admiral Hintzman followed General Cubit inside the conference room, the two men situating themselves in vacant chairs farthest from Colonel Johnston’s end of the table.
Director Solis looked up from his iPad as the two senior commanders entered. “Admiral… General; my apologies for asking you to join us at this ungodly hour, but this is the third night in a row we’ve had activity off the coast of Maine and it’s becoming very difficult to keep stories and photos out of the paper.”
The Admiral pinched the bridge of his nose, too tired to hide his annoyance. “What would you like us to do, Xavier? Ask the ETs to go home?”
“I really don’t see a problem,” General Cubit said. “There’s ten thousand reported sightings a year; almost none of which ever get any traction. With our birds in the area, the ETs will slip back into transdimensional space and that will be that.”
Director Solis powered off his iPad. “That’s part of the problem, General. The governor of Maine is demanding to know why our F-16s are buzzing his coastline. He’s pushing the White House, the White House is pushing the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is pushing me.”
“In a few months we may not have to worry about dispatching fighter jets anymore,” Lillie Becker stated. “From what Dr. Kemp was telling me, the lead engineer working on Project Zeus has discovered a telltale zero-point-energy flux which appears just before these ET vessels pop out of transdimensional space… a possibly telltale indicator we’ve been looking for.”