Inhuman Error: Unnatural Perpetrator Department, #1

By Reed Alexander and James Lief

Something has emerged from the lake waters of Houston to slaughter partying campers. A special unit of the FBI is dispatched to investigate and stop the murders. The Unnatural Perpetrator Department, division of the FBI, is a unit of agents that specialize in the mystical, the occult, and the divine. They are tasked with hunting and stopping serial killers of 'unnatural origins.'

Enter Agent Dianna Saferstein, a gifted criminal profiler from a mundane background. She must come to terms with the existence of magic, faerie co-workers, and stop an uncontrollable killing machine that has a taste for the brains of its victims.

Written by James Lief & Reed Alexander

• Language: English
• Publisher: Madness Heart Press
• Release date: Sep 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393949978

Reed Alexander

Reed Alexander is not a pen name used to protect the author from public scrutiny but actually to protect the public from the real weirdo behind the pen name. Getting to know Reed is the social equivalent of getting to know a rabid honey badger with megalomaniacal delusions. It really is better for the public at large to reduce him to a caricature estranged from his actual life. One might otherwise be worried why he’d be allowed to wander unattended without someone on hand ready to administer Thorazine. The focal points of Reed Alexander’s writing is almost always something that “causes him to froth at the mouth,” (in his own words). Whether it’s the politics of the day, uninformed public opinion, what he calls modern anti intellectualism, or pop culture run rampant. Reed always has some level of negative criticism which reduces the public at large to a pack of marauding troglodytes being ruled by used car salesmen. From the perspectives of Reed Alexander, the world is one marvelous catastrophe waiting to happen and this is what motivates him to write. The author attempts to see the world at large from the outside in abstract and uses that as the pinion of his stories. Thus, in essence, Reed Alexander hopes to leave his works behind him as a moral lesson; a sort of “I told you so.” He does this in the hopes that any survivors or intergalactic explorers can look upon his works and hopefully learn a thing or two at the great failed experiment called human society.

Book preview

Boot Up

Houston is the sort of city where you can get anything you want. Drugs, excitement, any manner of contraband. It was a haven for the worst you could ever dream of becoming. It didn't have the glamor of New Orleans or Vegas, and it's not like the cops would turn a blind eye to what you were doing. They were just busy with serious crimes, violent crimes. They didn't have time to fuck around with kids throwing a party where they weren't supposed to be. Kids were, after all, going to be kids.

Erik Shonik had driven by this place a hundred times. He watched the old trail, the lake, and the house pass by without comment so often that it seemed like a fixture no one would ever notice. But that was perfect; he had scored good and wanted to celebrate. He invited his best friends, the hottest girls who were the most fun, and got things in full swing.

Coke in the bathroom, weed, and whiskey everywhere they looked, and things were starting to heat up. Erik stood on the table, naked, the coke fueling his ego and bravery.

I am so fucking hot. I'm on fire! He was so deep into impressing the girls he didn't realize they weren't staring in wonder, they were staring in horror, and they weren't staring at him, but at the uninvited guest behind him.

Search Engine

Agent Dianna of the FBI stood at the edge of a simple sand parking lot, before an old red cabin, surrounded by police cruisers and warning tape. Her black, full-length wafted in the breeze juxtaposed to her black, short, coarse, tight black hair. Hazel eyes scanned the scene from a distance, falling on the subtle details uni's (what the FBI called regular uniform cops) always seemed to miss. A simple path cut through the tall wild grass of the surrounding valley, the sniffer dogs were nowhere near it, and the uni's were utterly blind to it. Stranger than this, it cut almost robotically straight, as though a surveyor mapped it. The agent pulled out her phone and snapped a photo in as high a resolutions as she could. She'd make sure to get forensics to do the same and get some uni's to follow the trail.

The cabin itself looked like the former owner's might have been trying to renovate.  The chipped red paint had been sanded down. Old boards had been removed entirely and the bare spots covered over. The windows were brand new and modern, unlike the rest of the cabin, which could have easily been seventy years old. A section of the roof was tarped, clearly where rotted shingles had been removed.

She pulled out a tablet and thumbed in notes about every detail. The condition of the cabin, the undisturbed path, she even noted that the uniformed officers, but more importantly, the dogs had missed the path entirely. There were more apparent details though to take in. An SUV registered to one of the victims sat in the sandlot at an off-angle. A short but deep groove lay behind all four tires. One of the rear doors was slightly ajar.

Dianna opened the report she'd been sent: Five deceased. One Caucasian female, 23, found face down in the nearby lake, back of the head removed, as though chopped off—one Caucasian male, 23, located just up shore; blunt force trauma to the head. One African male, 22, hung by the head from a cast iron coat hanger. One Korean female, 24, mandible split to the neck, neck broken, face down on the first few steps of the stairs inside. The last was the most chilling. Caucasian male, 25, immolated inside the fireplace. The vic had been stuffed in the fireplace while the perp blocked the fire screen. It looked like a charred skeleton trying to escape hell when the uniformed officers found it. 

Five perfectly healthy, fit, young individuals, had been systematically overpowered and murdered in the most brutal fashions.

Excuse me, Agent Saferstein? a local trooper approached Dianna.

She didn't respond. Her eyes continued to glide over the scene before her.

Ms. Saferstein? the trooper said again.

She looked up at him, scanning him carefully. Dianna was famously bad at first impressions and was forgetting something important. She hadn't thought to respond, even though the trooper now had her attention.

Sergeant Brimley? she asked. She could see the sergeant's badge but was trying to be formal.

Yes, ma'am. The scene is all yours, he gestured for her to enter freely. May I ask what the FBI's interest is?

We've identified a pattern in these killings and are investigating them deeper for a possible link, she said, still taking in the details of the outside.

Ma'am, the vics were all different races, hair color, body types, male and female, different sexual orientations, and the method used was different for each individual.  What pattern could there possibly be? the trooper was genuinely curious but also completely confused.

It's not the way they were killed but the nature of their murders and the location, she explained. "All of them were violently murdered.  The level