Part II
One Year Later
By the time Peter Xiang-Li gets out of the Federal Court House in Newark it’s dark outside and he’s exhausted. He’s spent all day filing papers and amendments to corporate documents involving Heinlen’s assets – and physically taking back officially-sealed copies for his records. He’ll store them in his vault. He doesn’t trust Internet-scans of anything. Xiang-Li grabs some take-out Rice & Noodles with Minced Meat Dumplings on the side at a small strip mall restaurant called “Cheng-Du” on Route 22 in Green Brook and heads up Mount Horeb Road to Warren.
He barely has time to sit at his desk and open the folded cardboard food containers when in the far end of his office he hears a – somewhat – familiar voice.
“Are my assets safe?”
The lawyer snaps his head around and before him, seated in the back shadows of the chaotic office, is Heinlen.
Peter Xiang-Li is momentarily speechless. He tries to focus on the dark-clad person about ten feet away from him but somehow cannot. His eyes can’t quite make out the contours of his client’s face or body. It’s like he’s suddenly in a smoke-filled room that he’s unfamiliar with. Even his brain is fogged. The spectral figure slowly gets vague and even more indistinct – then vanishes completely.
The lawyer gets up from behind his desk and walks towards the site of the now-evaporated apparition. There’s just boxes stacked on top of more boxes.
His mind is racing. “Did I dream it?”
Xiang-Li turns back towards his desk – and almost falls down on his face.
Heinlen is seated in his office chair. As clear as day. He’s wearing a hooded cape of sorts, shading his face. He’s working the lawyers’ chop sticks like a master, eating his food from one of the containers.
“Too bad you didn’t order a double portion.”
Xiang-Li staggers a few feet and drops down on a couch across from his desk. He has questions.
PETER XIANG-LI:
“Your wealth is safe. And growing. You are richer than ever. You have over Three Hundred and Fifty Million Dollars in Gold in the Elizabeth, NJ vault. You have another Three Hundred Million Dollars invested in Technology and Defense Industry Stock – held by holding companies and offshore dummy corporations.
Asset growth has been astronomical. I’m slowly bleeding out a regular amount your liquid cash to purchase more Gold bars for transfer to Elizabeth. But we must be careful…discrete. I will send you the Bank Suisse cash transfer codes and account authorizations for each investment vehicle in case you need direct access to your money.
Can you explain where you’ve been? I’ve been managing your affairs pursuant to the Omnibus Power of Attorney you’ve given me – but miss our occasional status consultations. A year is a long time.
And how is Leeds?”
HYNE:
“I call her Lee now. She calls me Hyne. I ask you to do the same. We’re now married. Happily. We have a child – a boy – named Arkan.
I was very sick when we left this world a year ago. My brain was damaged. I was dying. Lee took me to a place that repaired my body and rescued my mind. Today I am more than the man I once was. I am no longer Heinlen. My perspectives have…changed. My abilities have been enhanced. I account to no one. I respect no law but my own.
Answer a question for me, Xiang-Li:
Which Vampyre is more insidious – the beast that sucks blood from the veins of man or the Priest who despoils his spirituality with lies and hypocrisy? The parasite who physically drains the liquid essence of life from a man and ingests it to survive – or the parasite who manipulates a man’s faith from the moment he’s born and perverts his innate yearning to become one with the Deity that created him?
Never mind. That is a conversation to have another time.
I will lift my face to you. Look into my eyes, Peter”.
Peter Xiang Li watches as his client slowly folds back the dark garment from around his face. He stares directly into his client’s eyes – and sees it. Vertical Pupils – like a cat. Or lizard. Intense eyes – the eyes of a predator.
The lawyer is shocked speechless.
Hyne’s face is expressionless. There’s a long, hideous scar on his upper forehead, but around the eyes his facial skin is smooth. Youthful. Unwrinkled. His mouth is narrow – but mirthless. His hair is gray but well kept. His shoulders and arms look jacked – like he’s been working out in a gym. Even his hands are formidable.
There’s an aura of ruthless power about the man. He’s intimidating. His dark wrap covers what appears to be black tactical clothing. He eats slowly, expertly wielding the chop sticks to scrape clean the container of Rice & Noodles. He then digs into the Minced Meat Dumplings.
PETER XIANG-LI:
“Can you tell me where you’ve been – and what’s happened to your eyes? Your body is healed! You look magnificent! Where are you staying? Is your child a boy? Can I reach you at your old phone number? Shall I continue managing your legal and financial affairs?”
HYNE:
“So many questions, my friend…
I have been far away. Very far away, indeed.
I will share with you my new contact information directly. I will be returning to Cyprus soon. Please continue managing my affairs. As always, I trust your judgment. I have no desire to interfere. Pay yourself whatever compensation you deem appropriate. Make yourself rich. Your efforts are impressive. Your fidelity is touching. I will convey to Lee your well-wishes.
Soon we will meet at “The Cove”. You will have all of your answers then.”
Hyne stands up and adjusts his wrap, replacing his hood around his face. The lawyer catches a glimpse of what looks like a Bowie Knife belted to a chest sling hanging from his pectoral area – a ‘la Rambo. Hyne reaches out his right hand towards Xiang-Li.
Peter shakes his friend’s hand. He doesn’t remember Hyne ever having a grip that strong – or cold. Hynes‘ face remains expressionless. But seeing Hyne standing before him, the lawyer can more fully appreciate his well-proportioned physique. He’s seriously buff. Special Forces buff.
What the Hell has happened to this guy?
Hyne briskly walks out the office door, as silently and graceful as a cat, his cape-like garment enveloping him like a comic-book villain or apparition from Asgard.
Peter Xiang-Li looks out his window to see his visitor leave the building – but there’s nothing. No car in the parking lot or other conveyance. The building has a door but Hyne didn’t walk out of it.
Where did he go?
Chatsworth, NJ
Wharton State Forest
At 3:00AM the inky, moonless darkness presents no visual impediment to Hyne.
He walks the path silently – like a Lenni Lenape Indian scout, his hyper-aware senses viscerally experiencing everything around him. The thousands of insects feeding and reproducing, the bullfrogs leaping into the tea-colored water of the Rancocas River every few minutes. The bright eyes of deer and racoons behind bushes and trees. The air is pungent – redolent with moss, fungus and rotting tree limbs littering the sandy trails he’s wandering. There’re other smells, too – dead things. Animals ripped part, guts piled in glistening humps of putrescent, fly-infested mounds. He is one with it all.
They’re breadcrumbs. A trail leading Hyne to a desperate, twisted murderer that can’t control its deviant hunger and atavistic instincts to constantly feed on whatever it gets its hands on. From freshly killed and gutted forest animals to randomly massacred rodents and racoons. Even a disemboweled coyote – not yet dead two hours – its intestines stretched around its throat like a garrote. A Jersey Jungle-Habitat of death.
Hyne sees movement in the distance. A wobbling, shambling gait. It’s a poor caricature of a Vampyre – a degenerated, degraded thing that still moves but is rotting inside its brain, bereft of reason or awareness, uttering grunts and anguished outbursts.
It is dying. Of Papua, New Guinea KURU virus.
Hyne keeps his eyes on it. “Take me home…” he says to himself, quietly.
The Vampyre winds its way through a swampy, slimy bog and then lets out a howl – its mates are about twenty feet ahead of him. They answer with their own screeching and bellowing. Hyne watches as it hurriedly wades through the brackish tide pools and falls flat on its face at the far riverbank – about forty feet away. It crawls up the muddy incline, groaning and scraping at vegetation, then struggles itself upright again. It lopes and stumbles its way to a clump of Pigmy Pines and gets loud. An Alpha male reclaiming his turf after a hunt.
There’s now a cacophony of voices – all guttural and unintelligible. The timbre and volume builds – like they are arguing.
The time has come.
Hyne silently makes his way around the voices and can clearly see four Vampyres – all tottering on uncertain legs like drunks, pushing and shoving each other. Slurred and viscous, phlegm-choked gasps erupt from their throats – they’re clearly drowning in their own body fluids. The KURU Virus has them coughing and hacking up clogs of de-congealed brains and flesh.
The smell grows more and more repulsive to Hyne. The things are rotting in front of him. They’re fetid and decomposing – oblivious to their surroundings, consumed by disease and hurling aggressive insults at each other.
Hyne inches closer and closer to the feculent abominations before him, drawing his Bowie knife.
He leaps up and spins midair, sweeping his knife blade in an arc across the throats of two blood-sucking fiends. The others are stunned – blindly clawing at the night air for the attacker who is dancing among them like a curling whisp of smoke. They can’t see what they’re dealing with – they can’t defend themselves.
Hyne drops to a knee and sweeps another arc with his blade hand – slicing the Achilles tendons of the remaining beasts. They scream and collapse in a chaotic, writhing mound – like snakes swarming in a pit. Again and again, Hyne plunges the Bowie deep into their throats, ripping the blade sideways to sever windpipes and cervical vertebrae.
The moans die out. Filthy, putrescent heaps of diseased carcasses lie at his feet. Hyne hacks the heads off the bodies and heaves them into a clearing nearby so the dawn sunshine can kiss this them good morning – and then ignite them into the flames of Hell.
Hyne is content. It’s been a good night’s work. He picks a strategic spot and leaves a 6 inch X 6 inch leather patch with a fire-branded image of the famous “Monarch of the Glenn” Stag majestically standing guard in all its glory, like the sculptures at the gates of James Bond’s ancestral home in Scotland – Skyfall. Under heroic Stag is branded one word: Hyne. It’s from the Old Norse, meaning Heathen.
A handful of the Chatsworth Coven of cursed and KURU-infected Vampyres are gone – but more remain. And leaving his leather patch on the pile of steaming filth that he just butchered here tonight will trigger a response. Once a Vampyre Archon gets wind of Hyne’s calling card, he’ll know that a challenge has been issued – and send reinforcements into the Pine Barrens to shore-up their “business interests” – which are?
Adrenochrome. Harvested from abducted children and young women, tortured until they go insane from terror and generate a powerful, priceless substance in their body chemistry that the Forces of Darkness craves. A chemical that can only be produced by babies and pubescent female subjects in the throes of depraved, unremitting agony immediately before death. The greatest volumes of this sacrilegious “juice” are emitted seconds after the heart stops but while the mind is still aware of what is happening to it.
Adrenochrome can’t be chemically synthesized. It is a foul and damned business Frederica Goode and her brothers in Chatsworth have been orchestrating for decades. Satanic Rituals are an integral part of the Adrenochrome harvesting underworld. Persons of wealth, politicians, the Clergy and every stratum of human society have partaken of this forbidden blasphemy. When consumed with wine and strips of cooked human flesh – during the so-called “Rite of Black Communion” – Adrenochrome is said to release mind-bending hallucinations and physical congress with Satan.
Why Adrenochrome? It is the perfect elixer to destroy morality and enslave mankind. Heroin is little more than a sugar-high compared to it. The ruling class of Earth is hopelessly addicted to it. This is all about leverage and control. Adrenochrome is the “secret sauce” that allows the Dark Forces entre into the corridors of power. It exerts a brain-warping power beyond Dopamine. When free-will is neutralized, the body is a husk. An automaton. A slave – to Lucifer.
All involved in this infamia have sold their souls. And all will be slaughtered.
The Stag is embroidered on all of his clothing. It is his Insignia. His Cartouche.
Tonight he has accomplished his purpose.
War is coming – and Hyne is ready.
He silently prays his mantra:
- The Old Ones Created me;
- The Old Ways Sustain me;
- There Is No Law but My Own;
- I am Heathen. I am Hyne.
*NO PART OF THIS WORK PRODUCT IS AI*
Copyright, 2026 – Jon & Jedediah Croft
www.bogironfoundry.com
Email: vlchek1@gmail.com
