The little girl’s name was Kay. She was eight years old and some son of a bitch had killed her dog. And that wasn’t the worst of it.

The son of a bitch in question had injected Peter–what must have been an adorable beagle in his life–with a hypertrophism serum that we’ve been tracking with our counterparts in the Asian Arcane Task Force. Our friends in Tokyo tell me that the name of the serum translates literally into English as “God Food.”

Once injected, the poor beast grows to roughly five times its normal size. This is not what kills the animal. The dog’s body is built to be roughly the size that it is. The size that God made it, a religous person would say. However, increased to a much larger size, the dog’s bones cannot withstand its new size and weight and thus, the dog fractures itself with devastating results the moment it tries to do anything. If it manages to stay still during the transformation–which is highly unlikely–it will break itself where it sits.

When Kay found Peter on the front lawn after coming home from school, Peter had luckily only suffered for an hour or so before his body finally gave in to the massive trauma his growth had brought on. Kay is utterly devastated and has no idea why this has happened to her dog. If only someone had come home ahead of her, they could have kept her away. Instead, she found Peter forty-five minutes into his ordeal, and the dog’s reaction to her, trying desperately to wag its tail and moaning to her plaintively for help–convinced her that the strange enormous creature on her lawn was indeed Peter, changed in a way she couldn’t understand.

Still, none of that is the worst part. The worst part is that this is the eighth such act of animal cruelty in the last month, and the bastard is working his way down the west coast. So far there’s no leads, nothing to indicate how he’s picking his targets. They’re not even all dogs. A zoo elephant was injected in San Diego two weeks back, and they still haven’t figured out how this bastard pulled that one off without being seen.

I’m convinced–and the psych guys in the unit agree–that eventually he’s going to try this on a human here. In Osaka, I understand that whoever had the God Food there hid a needle in the seat of a public bus. There wasn’t much that got into the man’s system, but it was enough to send him growing into the ceiling and then breaking against it, all between stops. His growth crushed five people and a young girl was impaled on a piece of bone jutting from a compound fracture.

We have no leads. And I’ve warned my superiors that unless we get a break on this, it’s only a matter of time. My personal nightmare involves the sick bastard doing the bus needle trick on a commercial plane flight. I’m just grateful it won’t work if snuck into the food or water supply. I only hope he doesn’t get any more creative than he already has been. Of course, that’s never how it works out.