A young man with curly brownish blonde hair matted with blood and bits of flesh lay on the operating table. Powerful lights connected to an overhead rack illuminated him and warmed my body.
The young man's forehead, what remained of it, had caved in. His eyes slipped deep within their sockets. The cause of death was a shot to the back of his head. This job was done by one of Bella's snipers, a pretty young girl named Soph, who sat on a stool behind me, chewing gum and flipping through a magazine while I went through the list of what I needed to harvest from this individual.
Soph's brunette hair was held in a raised ponytail. Her face in the past had been chubby and moon-shaped, but after working for Bella for a while, she had gained enough money to afford plastic surgery, and now she looked like a doll with a small, heart-shaped visage. To beat the chill of the operating room, Soph wore a long purple jacket tied at the waist.
I was under surveillance, which meant Bella didn't trust me, and I could be sentenced to death at any moment.
I adjusted my face mask. A biohazard suit kept the corpse's toxins off my body. The stink of the blood was disorientating, and if I breathed in through my mouth, I tasted it; all I could do was hurry and finish the job.
The dead man had been the son of a construction company owner. But he had chosen the wrong woman to drug and rape. Knowing Bella's reputation, his victim, a famous female tennis player, reached out to Bella and placed an order.
A few days later, the young man died, and his body rested on a hard metal table in front of me. I studied my tool tray and picked up a scalpel. Then, pressing two gloved fingers to his throat, I searched for his carotid artery before making a small incision. Since his death was recent, the blood wasn't too viscous. Ignoring how my heart twisted and bile itched the back of my throat, I pushed a tiny plastic tube into the hole and flicked on a switch on a nearby vacuum that sucked blood and fine particles into a glass.
In addition to eating human flesh, some of our customers also liked to drink blood. And some hospitals purchased the clean blood and organs of uppers from the black market to heal patients from higher grids who were sharp-witted enough not to ask questions.
Since uppers tended to live long due to their immunity to most illnesses, murder was one of the few things that cut their lives short. Cold sweat dripped down my neck as I cut the young man's chest open.
As I stared at the mixture of bloody tissue and flesh, the bile climbed higher; I forced it down.
I needed to stay focused, or I would ruin the young man's organs, costing Bella money and worsening my standing in her company. The steady beeping of the vacuuming machine reminded me that time was running out to save the organs. So, I filled a syringe with a preservation solution that would flush the organs of blood while lowering the temperature and allowing essential nutrients to continue to be produced.
Behind me, Soph imitated the sound of a clock ticking, and I did my best to ignore her while I readied the transportation containers.
***
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Chipped Heartz & Broken Smilez
रहस्य / थ्रिलरIn 2160 Kanatah, the grid you're born into determines everything, from your clothes to your haircut, education, and job. Avah's only way out is by becoming a doctor, but with her poor schooling, that's almost impossible. Her life takes a turn for th...
