In two hours, the afternoon news would be starting, and Ally would be tuning in as she always did. When she flipped on the television, she would be tuning to view the man who was now having the final touches of makeup done on him by the news station as he prepared for his interview. He stared at himself calmly in the mirror, he was an attractive man, albeit his hair had turned white giving him an older appearance than reality, a forty-four-year-old man. That signature look had developed when he was twenty, and his fitness regiment he started every morning at four had otherwise maintained a fit and attractive middle-aged man, Hollywood-like with his strong jaw, and jovial looking eyes.

He had a goatee, which matched his zero-cut-fade and short hair in color, and he smiled charmingly with gleaming teeth as his grey eyes lit up the room like the sun. He wore a white shirt with a slim blue tie, too slim to be business formal, and yet had been his signature look as he rose to fame over the years.

Randolph J. Sorensen was a billionaire and was far from the eccentric stereotype instead being a frugal and down to Earth man as he had taken over his company and brought it from the edge of bankruptcy into the fourth richest company on the planet. At least that’s how the PR department had painted him, and he had happily slid into his character with ease. In actuality he was quite bizarre in his beliefs in convictions, but he knew how to mask his truths so that it was sanitized for consumption by the masses.

“You’re ready Mr. Sorensen, you’re on in seven,” the woman with clipboard informed him before carrying on to managing whatever she oversaw in this drab local news station. It mattered little to Sorensen, who despised being called mister. No, that had been his father’s name, and Randolph had no lost love between him and his father. His father hadn’t been particularly poor, as far as fathers went. No, Randolph just didn’t care for his quiet, hermit-like ways. Indeed, it wasn’t until the events that flung Randolph into the real world that he learned the truth of the world. Death was not the end. Life was not the beginning. This revelation, so simple, so powerful, had completely changed the way he viewed the world, had empowered him, and through it he had conquered the world in a way few had done in history. He wasn’t the third richest man on the planet for no reason, and in a decade, he was projected to become number one.

Randolph J. Sorensen walked onto the stage, with its lights baring down brightly in front of him and sat in his prepared seat. The lights were too close, he noticed, a common amateur mistake by smaller news outlets. He would have to be conscious of his blinking so that it didn’t come across as too intense, even if there were lights right in his face.

The interviewer came out and smiled, and explained, “Alright, I know you’re a busy man and want to get this done in one take. I’m ready if you are.”

“By all means,” Randolph nodded with an empathetic smile and crossed his hands comfortably on his lap.

A few moments later, and the cameras were rolling as she asked her first question, “Randy J,” that was the epithet that media had taken to calling him, and his PR department recommended he embrace it. He personally could care less, but if that’s what made him relatable, he would listen. “Thank you for coming out for today’s interview. How was your move down to Indiana?”

“Pleasant. I was terrified of every second I was on the plane, but luckily, I didn’t need to use my personally packed parachute.”

She laughed politely at his joke, “Oh, to think that a man as well traveled as you had such a common fear.”

“I’ve said in other interviews, and I’ll say it here. I am but a common man who’s trying his best.”

“You have, you have. Tell me, why did you move your company, Lamb, which has maintained its headquarters out of Anchorage, Alaska, and down her to Indianapolis?”

“The weather mostly,” he and the interviewer shared a laugh before he explained, “No, it was just practicality. Lamb Incorporated has specialized in e-commerce and logistics since shortly after I took over the company, and while it was founded in Anchorage as a textile company, it has since expanded into so much more. Indiana, known for its logistical infrastructure and is referred to as the Crossroads of America, was a logical location for our headquarters allowing us to work closer to the ground as they say where most of our business is anyways.”

The reporter nodded her head, and then continued to the next question to territory she was better prepared for, “There are some saying that the move could bring more business and jobs to Indiana. Are there any plans to expand on the marketplace here locally?”

“There are. With the pandemic and the cracks in the supply chain left behind, Lamb has proven to be the leader in repairing the economy and restoring jobs both locally and nationally. Next year alone we are opening three distribution centers, a new office in downtown Indiana to expand our web services and are bringing over five thousand new jobs to Indiana alone. On top of this we’ve already secured contracts with IU schools throughout the state for paid internships for undergraduate students trying to get real life experience, while not taking advantage of them.”

“That’s excellent news. So, you recently wrote a self-help book, Success from Failure, which has already become a New York Times bestseller. Could you tell me a bit about it?”

“Of course. I wrote the book to share my life experiences coming from a poor family in Alaska and going on to become one of the most successful men in the world. Much of that comes from my early life experiences, and really bringing the right mindset, the right attitude, that is required for success, for anyone to succeed.”

“So, you believe the principles in this book could allow anyone to be like you?”

“I know it,” Randolph lied a little, as he continued to answer more questions by the interviewer. He wasn’t a fool, life was not that simple, and not that idealistic. His book peddled good self-help advice that could be found anywhere. Hell, half of it was rehashed from How to Win Friends and Influence People, a staple in the self-help genre, and twisted as if that was the reason for his success in business.

Stolen novel; please report.

It wasn’t that the advice was bad, it simply was more nuanced than that. Not everyone can be rich. Not everyone can be poor. In a world of herbivores, a single predator throws the ecosystem into disarray until the population reached an equilibrium, and so it was with the rich and the poor. There would always be people who needed to do manual labor, doctors, police, so on and so forth. His book could never make those people rich; they weren’t willing to do the one thing that so many self-help books leave out if you truly want to prophet as much as he did. You needed to be the predator. This wasn’t a better or worse strategy of being kind, caring, or any other number of feel-good beliefs. It just meant you chose to side on one side of the equilibrium. You can’t have the rich without the poor, society could not function without the working middle class. No, all his book really did was allow someone to shift their attitude to align with his own, and in that way, allowed his own success.

His business was grown by taking advantage of the poor. He offered a higher wage than his competitors, but he spent less money on his employees by cutting benefits. Layers of business strategies built on this principle, of convincing of the worst to work against their interest, was the core root of his success.

In turn he performed philanthropy as part of egoistic altruism. By investing in the world, he could improve the overall education and well-being of the average person, who in turn could become another employee to exploit, or another paying customer to separate from their dollar. The rift would grow, yet humanity would be better off. This was the core reason for his success, and while his detractors struggled to dethrone him despite his supposed corrupt acts. He recognized the core truth that he lived in a positive sum world, as opposed to a zero sum. He simply played the game better. Even his book was part of it, he knew full well there were enough self-help books out there that his served no actual purpose. But that wasn’t entirely true. Its purpose was to funnel the economy of self-help books into the purse of his own coffers. Better yet, simply by hiring another writer to transcribe in his name had allowed him to make millions already from book sales.

“Thank you, Randy J., I appreciated your time here.”

“Thank you for having me.” Randy ended the interview with a handshake and shortly thereafter walked out with his bodyguard into his armored limousine to take him to his office in their new headquarters, a freshly built office building designed to blend in with the previously existing architecture of Indianapolis and now corrupt their skyline, which wasn’t much for such a small city. The building showed on the entrance side the logo of a white lamb led by a child, the logo used since the founding of Lamb.

They pulled into the garage, and he stepped into the elevator and pulled out his key that allowed him to select the top floors of the building and hit floor twenty-seven. This had been eating at him since his arrival at the news station, and he had hated having to step away from his project to deal with something so mundane. Still, optics and publicity were important, and it was important to establish a positive presence in his new home city so that he could influence public opinion and ultimately government policy.

The elevator opened and he stepped into the control center in charge of his passion project. For years he had been searching for this moment, and finally he was coming close to his lifetime hunt. The readings for the town of Hazelwood were off the charts, and it was the true reason for his relocation of Lamb Inc.’s headquarters.

The room was darkly lit, with blue lights designed to not interfere with the monitors being carefully watched by a crew of twenty trained men and women in lab coats. He walked up to the director and asked for an update, it had been three hours since he had last checked in, and he knew by text that there had been movement. “What happened?”

POI one through four were marked, as you predicted this morning. We sent out teams and managed to gather the four and leave them together in an abandoned barn before leaving them alone and monitoring from a distance with drones.

“Did it appear?”

“He did. Subject Omega emerged from the cornfield after we left from a range of one thousand feet from our test samples. Beforehand as ordered we left behind one cat and one dog in the barnyard.”

“Results,” Randolph asked breathlessly. This was the moment, the breakthrough he needed. Years of wasted income, a team of scientists that thought him crazy, and a PR department desperate to cover up his superstitious nonsense had brought him to this moment.

The scientist hesitated and looked at him, struggling to hold back the horror of the past two hours she had witnessed. “Two dead. He is pursuing the last two as we speak. Sir, if we intervene now, we might be able to save them.”

“Keep monitoring. If you intervene now, you’ll just add to the body count.”

She turned back to her monitor, which was an overhead shot from a drone with two red dots representing the location of the two test samples. Subject Omega was moving slowly after them, and they were currently running through the cornfield. She prayed they escaped, and it appeared they would, when something emerged from the woods bordering the cornfield and began tearing through the corn. “What the hell is that?” she asked, and one of the other scientists turned and said in shock, “There was a hog farm that just had one of their walls collapse… The… The pigs broke out and just entered the field.” Sure enough, as the pigs closed in on the red dots they turned and began running back towards their pursuer, now trying to escape a new threat.

Randolph stroked his goatee, “Interesting, he can control not just the pigs he manifests, but real swine as well. That’s way more power than has previously shown. I wonder if the blessing is growing stronger?”

The lead scientist turned towards him and froze as she saw his look of utter fascination, a smile growing on his face. Blessing? This was a curse, and a terrible one at that. And they had just manually triggered one. For the first time she was forced to believe in this man’s delusions. She had accepted the job purely based on how well it paid, never mind that it was research into literal pseudoscience. But now before was evidence of something much more terrifying than that.

Randolph grinned as he said, “Oh, looks like he caught one.” Sure enough, a red dog met with where Subject Omega was and turned blue, indicating a loss of heart rate. The pigs that had gathered around his body dissipated, as Subject Omega became still. Finally, it turned from the direction and took off at high speed into the forest before it disappeared from the map.

“Sir, he’s not pursuing the final test sample.”

“That lines up with reports. Seems he always lets one get away.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Simple, he’s a failure.”

There was a moment of awkward, stunned silence as the scientists came to grips with what they had achieved with their experiment. Two men and one woman were dead. And they were complicit in it, no they were responsible. Even if they had thought Randolph J. Sorensen was mad, it was their own actions that had resulted in the death of three people.

“Collect the survivor and offer her a job to help with further experiments. If she refuses, terminate her,” Randolph didn’t need to explain what he meant by that. “Collect and dispose of the remains of the other three bodies. Make it out like they died in a barn fire in a neighboring town. We don’t need the media catching on to this being another headless hog farmer kill. There is much, much more work to be done before this nightmare can be over.”

The scientists shared a look as they realized what this meant. The serial killer wasn’t just a simple murderer. He was something supernatural, a force beyond comprehension, and it would be up to them to study, and eventually, stop him. That realization was all the motivation they needed to fall into the dark abyss of their work as they prepared for their next objective.