“Scalpel.”
I’m lying on a cold countertop in an even colder room. A bright lamp shines down on me.
To my right, there’s an ice chest with a biohazard symbol. To my left, there are three more, all of them empty.
“Si, cirujano.”
Unlike a dentist’s lamp, the kind that shines in your eyes, this bulb is pointed toward my chest cavity.
“No, I want the longer knife. The serrated one.”
I have markings all over my ribcage: HEART, LUNGS, PANCREAS, and so on.
I’m also naked.
“Yes, excellent. Thank you.”
Two surgeons in medical gear look down at me.
I’m not in a hospital. This is a mortuary.
I try to speak, but nothing comes out.
I’m in a cold sweat, absolutely panicked. Trapped.
“Making first incision.”
The lead surgeon produces a wickedly long steel blade, which is still boiling hot from sanitization.
The skin on my chest begins to sear as the blade makes contact. I want to scream as pain rockets through my torso.
That’s always when my nightmare ends.
***
| **GORDON BECERRO | Tijuana | 8:05 am** |
Maria and I don’t see eye-to-eye anymore, not since her teenage years and the hormones kicked in. Even worse, that father-daughter bond that so many take for granted has yet to take root.
Although, that was expected. Since her mom died, I’ve had to play both good and bad cop. Today, I had to be the bad cop.
I thought it would be piercings, or parties, or boys, or you know, all three, when it came to her adolescent outbursts. But most of the time, Maria wants things she can’t have, in any stretch of the imagination. She shoots for the moon, and when she doesn’t get the impossible, she resorts to the piercings, parties, and penises.
I was identical to her at that age, so it’s probably karma. Doesn’t make it any easier on me now. Today, it wasn’t a car or extravagant vacation that Maria desired, it was something any other parent would probably commend their kid for: she wanted to donate blood.
Tijuana Preparatoria had offered extra credit for any high schoolers who wanted to help the local hospital with their drive. It was a routine thing she’d never thought twice about in years past, except now it was the “in” thing to do, and she’d be socially isolated if she didn’t have a bright blue masking tape band-aid by the week’s end.
And I had to tell her no. I wouldn’t sign the permission slip, or whatever it was she needed.
“Eres un maldito gilipollas!”
I’d heard that one before. This was the first time I hadn’t had a good excuse.
There are great reasons for your sixteen-year-old daughter not to have a sports car in her garage or a boyfriend in San Felipe. But what’s wrong with a kid donating some AB-negative and platelets? Tijuana General needs all the help they can get these days.
Maria didn’t give me another moment to explain. It was another salvo of expletives before she’d slammed her bedroom door and threatened to run away for good. I hoped she didn’t mean it this time. I’m deathly afraid of her leaving.
Unfortunately, my overprotectiveness is the part she doesn’t understand. And I don’t either… not fully.
I think I was eight. Not older than that, at least. My grandmother, a brilliant woman who’d been a scientist in America, forced me to put a vial of her blood in my backpack one morning.
She made me swear that when they did our physicals at school that day, that I’d give them that instead. I don’t think my mom ever knew. I wasn’t a teenager yet, so I didn’t push back. And thank God I hadn’t.
I didn’t remember much of what Abuela told me that day. It was a bunch of mumbo jumbo about what she’d gathered from her final days in Silicon Valley. Some years later, I remembered enough to start digging.
I found answers, and they horrified me.
I would do whatever it took for Maria not to inherit my waking nightmare.
***
| **EL CARNICERO | El Paso | 2:22 pm** |
The native Hawaiians believed, much like the Egyptians and their pyramids, that if one’s site of burial was disrupted, their afterlife would be too. For that reason, the natives chose sites of burial with strict secrecy. The poor would undoubtedly be found my wild animals. The working class was always excavated by scorned lovers or rival merchants. So the royals wisely chose Pali Kapu o Keoua, on the Big Island, for their burial rites.
The site isn’t a flat cemetery, like you and I know. It’s a cliff. Straight drop to the bottom once you’ve over the side. And that’s where the rich were put to rest. And still are.
Volunteers from the tribe, usually poor men, would be the peons sent over the side of the cliff to bury their deceased royals. It was a great honor to do so! Once the volunteer buried their elder, it was critical that no one find out where those bones had been placed. For that reason, the tribe would release the man, once the deed was done. It was a few hundred feet before the volunteer met his own untimely end, yet one that would bring the utmost honor to his survivors.
Trouble is, no one thinks that way anymore. Our modern world ran out of willing volunteers. And while we don’t have royals or burial rituals, there are members of the modern nobility who wish to avoid their inevitable march toward death.
Sometime in the mid-21st century, we had so many of those self-driving autos on the road that the world changed. First, it was parking lots getting turned into playgrounds. Then, it was global temps dropping for the first time in generations. And at last, death rates from vehicle collisions zeroed out.
That helped, but it didn’t make everything better. There was still disease, death, and what have you, and for plenty of other reasons. Some of them new, and others centuries old.
The effect of that global adoption of self-driving software (not hardware, mind you… the software spread faster) decreased vehicular death quite literally everywhere, from Miami to Mumbai to Mogadishu and even Malawi. The unintended consequences of new playgrounds and bankrupt accident attorneys would be debated in academia for much too long, and the effects of decreased death on our streets was more immediate.
Did global population skyrocket? Sure. We’ll see if folks starve or run out of shit. That’s not why I give a damn. Fatalities in car accidents had another purpose, one that was far less considered when the tech went global overnight…
Organ Donors.
When some sad sap checked a box on his DMV form prior to 2043 A.D. and ended up splattered across the 405 freeway weeks later, he got everything worth salvaging sent to folks who were still alive. Livers, hearts, lungs, and all the organs that aren’t like kidneys or bone marrow are the bread-and-butter of why the donors were so important.
Car crashes were the only way to die and still have good organs, the kind that weren’t riddled with disease or shrapnel. When the driverless autos came along, it was night-and-day. Suddenly, the transplant waitlists shrunk. The ill weren’t organ recipients anymore, they were the walking dead with a lotto ticket. Frankly, they were fucked, and that was in the rich countries. The other parts of the world, where transplants had just started to catch on, well, they got kneecapped. It was over.
That should be where the story ends, but let’s be honest: human nature is what it is. The mega-rich folks still get cirrhosis of the liver, failure of the heart, and well, all that stuff that comes from the excesses they so enjoy. Those rich fuckers have got the money to throw at a problem like organ failure.
No need to buy a lottery ticket when you can already afford the prize.
Do they pour their billions into research for brilliant people who can help future generations? Of course not! They drop tens of millions on me, so they’ll have decades to spend the cool billion and change that’s left over.
They, the few that know of my work, even have a nickname for me… The Butcher.
I think that’s a little rich, personally. I’m more akin to a surgeon. Though, no one cries for mercy from a surgeon. They beg for mercy when they come face-to-face with the Butcher.
I should say right now, I didn’t get into this line of work to be a killer. It started small, on black markets, going out and finding merchants with a pancreas or small intestine for sale. The prices were ludicrous, and those markets didn’t exactly offer a reliable one-to-five-star rating of these sellers. It was a crapshoot, despite my best connections.
My clients didn’t get to be socioeconomic heavyweights by playing Russian Roulette. So I had to move on to better sources. And when I say had to, I mean it. When the chairman of Bank of America-Merrill-Goldman asks, it’s not optional. He’s still alive, and I wouldn’t be if I’d quit his order. He made that clear.
I start by finding a match. That means getting access to registries of blood typing, disease history, age, and on and on. That part’s not easy to do in the United States, and too easy to do in other countries. Once I find a match, I track the target, figure out their routine, and find the most opportune moment to kill them.
Sure, it’s horrendous. Having a target on your back for some intangible biological cocktail of traits that you never knew about? It’s fucked up. And the classism is just… dystopian.
But the pay is good. Good enough that someday I’ll fund my own research lab that can grow transplants from pig tissue or stem cells or whatever. That’s what I tell myself to sleep at night, at least. The visions of gutted victims just get overwhelming, otherwise.
“Flight 322 to Tijuana is now boarding,” an attendant announces over the airport intercom.
I got a hit this morning on an AB-negative family, and there’s a country music magnate back in Nashville with an achy-breaky heart.
***
| **Tijuana | 3:15 pm** |
The call came while I was at work.
“Su hija se ha desmayado y necesita irse a casa por el día.”
It took everything in me not to start shaking uncontrollably and absolutely collapse.
Maria had been sick at school before, but she’d never fainted. That’s when I knew she’d done the blood drive, and that I was fucked.
She would be too, if I didn’t act quickly.
I don’t think I told the floor manager I was leaving. It’s probably better he doesn’t know. When the call inevitably comes from someone pretending to be the cops (or from the cops themselves), they’ll start their search at the factory. I’ll take any head start I can get.
It took me an excruciating twenty-six minutes to reach the high school and pick up Maria. For all I wanted to speed today, I don’t think I’d ever obeyed traffic laws more religiously. I couldn’t risk any delay.
As soon as she got in my truck, she burst into tears, legitimately apologetic, and for the first time since she was probably six or seven. Maybe it was her frontal lobe neurons finally starting to activate, or what felt like a near-death experience for her, that brought on the crying. But it came too late. No newfound maturity could undo this mistake.
I wasn’t angry. I didn’t raise my voice or talk her down. She was already sorry as hell, and what came next would be both her penance and mine.
“Lo que está por suceder se sentirá como un castigo, pero te juro que no lo es.”
Within minutes, I’d taken a wrong turn off the traffic circle, hopped a curb onto a dirt road, and had us parked in front of a cartel depot. Maria had figured out what was happening, and her resurgent tears helped me choke back the sobs I’d hide for when I was alone again.
She begged me to let her stay, promising she’d obey from now on, swearing to me. I muscled her to the front door, handed the guard a thick cash envelope I’d hidden in my truck for years, and hugged my daughter one last time.
“María, corre tan lejos como puedas lo más rápido que puedas. No se detenga en California, Arizona o Nuevo México. Ve a algún lugar donde nunca te encontrarán. Y empezar de nuevo.”
I’d saved for years, hoping I’d have the funds to get us both to safety in America, but I came up short. It all happened too fast. She would be OK. She would live a full and happy life without the fear I lived with daily.
She would live.
As I drove toward the barren desert, loaded the pistol in the glove compartment, and smelled Maria’s perfume still lingering in the cabin, I realized I’d forgotten to tell her just how much I loved her.
I might have another chance some day, but the odds weren’t good.
No one had ever survived the Butcher.
_ _ _