FIFTY-FIVE
Dylan waited. The smell was starting to get
to him. They had grabbed the cadaver parts before embalming. The
feces and food in the bodies’ intestines reeked. The stink seeped
under his skin, worked its way into his brain. He wondered if he’d
ever smell anything else.
He’d reached his destination a few hours earlier.
The pills had worn off, but he had sheer terror keeping him awake
now. No way in hell he was falling asleep in the back of the truck.
Not with these things in here.
The corpses. Patchwork men, fitted together at the
joints with a metal compound that looked like a shiny kind of mold.
Their muscles burst from rotten skin, engorged and too large. They
had turned a rainbow of greasy colors as decay set in.
The soldiers were still missing the heads—that was
Khaled’s job, to bring the heads. But they looked formidable
enough, even decapitated.
They lay on metal racks, wires and tubes running
from their bodies into chairs, one at each soldier’s side. A bank
of equipment filled the rest of the truck, waiting for someone to
throw the switch.
According to Khaled, the yellow fluid in the tanks
behind the chairs would bring the soldiers back—even stronger than
before. Stringy, dead muscles would turn into something like steel
cable. Bones would become harder than cast iron.
Dylan wondered how it was supposed to work. Then he
checked himself. He wondered if it would really work at all.
Throughout all of this, he’d thought it was a
little crazy. But he wanted the money, so he figured, hey, if
Khaled thinks it will work, let him, just so long as the final
paycheck didn’t bounce. . . .
But a bad thought kept rattling around the back of
his brain. What if—and, yeah, it was crazy, sure—but what if it was
all real?
He didn’t want to believe it, but there was a stink
in the back of the truck worse than the bodies. The whole setup
reeked of—there was no other word for it—evil. He could sense it.
This wasn’t a scam. There was power here. Something tensed and
waited, as if just outside the truck, ready for the moment when it
could come inside.
Khaled believed. Dylan had assumed it was just in
the standard raghead Jihad stuff he was always going on about. But
what if there was more to it?
Suppose he believed in something even worse?
And what the hell were those chairs for
anyway?
Dylan began to hope Khaled would get stopped at
Customs. Maybe even if it meant he wouldn’t get paid.
THE THREE MEN, dressed in medical scrubs and
carrying a large cooler between them, stepped off the chartered
jet.
Customs moved quicker than usual, because of the
big stickers on the sides of the coolers: HUMAN ORGAN FOR
TRANSPLANT—HANDLE WITH CARE.
The TSA inspector working security that night was
named Scot, according to his name tag. He scratched himself behind
the ear with the antenna of his walkie-talkie as he stopped the
men.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I gotta look inside.”
The dark-skinned man in the lead frowned, but
placed the cooler on the table.
Scot opened the cooler and peered through the mist
as the cold-packs inside hit the air.
He jumped back, fully awake.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Satisfied?” the man asked.
“What kind of operation you guys doing?”
“Brain transplant,” the man said.
Scot looked at him for a moment. What the hell, he
figured. The paperwork was in order.
He waved the man through the line. His two
companions followed.
A rented ambulance waited for them at the curb. The
airport police were polite enough to let it idle there until the
men cleared Customs.
The ambulance pulled away from the airport, sirens
wailing.
In the break room later, Scot sat down next to one
of his coworkers, who was nursing a Diet Coke.
“You are not going to believe what I saw tonight,”
Scot said, grinning. “No shit: a human head on ice.”
His coworker grunted and drained the rest of his
soda. A human head. Yeah. Right.