Unsettling Stories

"adrenochrome"

Please help.

Someone close to me may be connected to the disappearance and murder of countless children; most of them refugees or otherwise disadvantaged – all untraceable. All forgettable. And now, all dead.

He told me about a drug called adrenochrome that could produce a high beyond any other. And unlike those other drugs, there are no ill effects. Quite the contrary; there are substantial benefits from consuming it: greater health, increased vivacity, and a host of other, smaller effects.

Combine those with an intense sense of euphoria and you have a substantial demand.

The issue is this: it is a derivative of the chemicals produced by the human body when it is under intense, immeasurable fear.

My former friend, who confessed his involvement during a fleeting crisis of conscience, insisted this was true and cited a number of dubious-looking studies and fake news sites. But then there were the photos.

He didn't allow me to make copies for fear of implicating himself personally, but he'd been to a "farm," he called it, in one of the Baltic states. There were photos of countless people, all seemingly under the age of 15.

They were naked and chained to tables and walls and floors in a windowless room the size of a football stadium. I couldn't estimate how many there were.

As he scrolled through the photographs and I debated killing him, I saw masked men hovering over the victims and torturing them. As they were being tortured, their blood was being drained into containers.

Other photos showed the production facilities – enormous rooms that looked like chemistry labs where the blood was filtered and the compounds were extracted.

The worst, though, were the mass graves.

Men stood around them and laughed as they unloaded truckloads of carcasses into pits. They used pitchforks to gather up anyone who had been left behind.

I asked him why he was allowed to take these pictures. He said no one would believe it was happening. And he's been right.

Rumors about facilities like this have been around for decades. Journalists have tried to report on it, only to be laughed out of their editors' offices. One journalist, a Swede, came the closest to bringing it into the mainstream. He died, along with his family, in a hideous house fire.

Listen to me: the pictures I saw were not faked. They were not staged. They were, without any doubt, real.

And there's one more thing. One more picture. Believe it if you want, I don't care. I need to get this off my chest.

There was an image of adrenochrome users.

I don't know what I expected. Well, I guess I do: strung out, gaunt, miserable-looking addicts with despair and desperation in their eyes. It's what we've all associated with drug users thanks to heroin and crack and whatnot.

This was different.

The image was of a lavish conference room in a skyscraper. Where, I could not determine. Syringes of the drug were sitting on gilded plates on a thick table of polished wood.

I recognized the faces sitting around that table.

World leaders. Entertainers. Religious icons. All grinning. All happy. All ready for their injection.

Seeing those familiar faces was the initial shock. It wasn't the final one.

On the far side of the table, almost too small to be seen but still unmistakable, was an iconic head of state. A recent one. He was laughing as he reached for his syringe, but there was something unusual about his hand. It wasn't its normal, small, pink self. It was green.

It was webbed.

It was clawed.

It was reptilian.

~ Max