by Fynn Perry
Luckily for John, all the excitement had made John’s host need to use the restroom again. And club patrons were still using it, despite the blood and broken mirror glass. In fact, a few had probably come in just to see the aftermath of the fight. John’s host headed for the privacy of one of the stalls. After closing the door behind him, he suddenly felt faint, managing to break his fall by leaning against the wall of the stall as he collapsed onto the floor as John left his host and passed through the building’s wall.
On the other side, John found himself in a narrow lane lined with trash containers. It was dark and the only sounds he could hear were the muffled beat of the low-frequency bass of the club and the distant noise of traffic from a main street. There were no mortals or spirits nearby.
He followed the lane to its end and peered around the corner. What he saw was a side street closed off with a high chain-link fence and a rolling vehicle access gate. It formed a secure but dimly lit area between the club and the next building. John passed through the fencing, noticing that part of it had been cut, creating a hole just big enough for someone to squeeze through. Not so secure after all.
Moving along the wall cautiously, he assessed some trash bins ahead to see if they would make suitable cover and a vantage point. He discounted them when he realized his glow would seep out beneath. Suddenly, he had no more time to assess his options as the headlights of an approaching vehicle, coming from the direction of the gate, lit up the area. He looked frantically around for cover and noticed a recessed doorway just in front of the dumpsters. Racing toward them, he ducked into one, illuminating the recess with his soft glow. It was then that he realized he was not alone.
A young man was sitting in the doorway with a crack pipe loosely held in a limp hand. John didn’t wait for a second. He possessed him, his glow immediately disappearing. He was surprised at how easily the possession took place. His new host found it hard to think about anything other than his body aching for another hit of cocaine and where to get it.
There was a sound of tires struggling for grip on gritty, worn blacktop as a vehicle accelerated through the opened gate. John figured it must be an ambulance making a discreet entrance at the club’s request.
The host instinctively turned his head to hide his face as the vehicle passed by, his black coat and hair blending with the shadows. As the addict peered round the edge of the recess and through the gap between the wall and the dumpsters, John saw that a black panel van, not an ambulance, had pulled up about fifteen yards away. He heard a bolt unlocking, followed by a snatch of club music escaping from an open door, and then the bolt snapping shut. Two of the guards from before were carrying what looked like a perfectly still body on a stretcher toward the van. That’s some pretty harsh first aid, John thought. He heard the side door of the van slide open before the stretcher with the body was lifted inside. At the last moment, John saw the dull lighting reflected from a mysterious black box between the occupant’s legs.
A brief blast of dance music indicated the guards’ return to the club. The black van drove away, turned around at the end of the road and headed back toward John’s host, its LED headlights displacing shadow from every nook and filling the surroundings with bright-white light. It rolled past and an electric motor whirred into life, slowly wheeling back a section of the chain-link fencing. If he was to try and get into the van, it had to be now, and he had an idea how to do it.
John spoke to his host, which appeared as thoughts in his host’s mind: “There’re drugs in that van...a huge stash. They were in such a hurry that the back door isn’t locked...Quick! Move now while the van has stopped.”
The craving for drugs overwhelmed any resistance that the addict’s almost slave-like brain could offer. His ability to reason and calculate cause and effect had ceased long ago. The voice in his head said that there were drugs in the van, and that took precedence over anything else.
The addict made his way over to the back of the vehicle. John kept his host’s head down, but his staggering walk had not gone unnoticed. The gate was almost open when the driver got out to confront the intruder. John’s host had now made it to the back of the van. He was desperately pulling at the locked door. Panic overwhelmed him as he heard approaching footsteps.
John departed his host, letting him collapse in a heap, and dived through the van doors into the cargo area. Inside was the body of the man he had seen being carried into the van. He was shocked to see a plastic mask over his mouth and nose, connected by two tubes leading from the black box he had seen earlier, which he could now see was a portable ventilator. It hissed and puffed with mechanical precision as it gently raised and lowered the man’s chest, sending out a periodic beep, presumably to signal all was well with the machine. The visible parts of his face were bloody and swollen. It looked like the guards hadn’t held back in beating on him once he was out of public view.
Something gold caught John’s eye. It was protruding from under a black sheet behind the man on the ventilator. As he looked closer, he recognized that the object was a sneaker, not to his taste, but expensive-looking.
He realized, with increasing trepidation, that the sheet must be covering a second body. He hesitated a moment before making his fingertips interact with the cloth to pull it back. Beneath it was the body of a black youth. It wasn’t just his sneakers—all his clothes looked expensive: a navy silk shirt, designer denim jeans, a gold neck chain, and a gold Rolex. His face was beaten, too, but this guy wasn’t breathing; John was pretty sure he was dead.
Outside, John could now hear two voices discussing the subject of a bum lying on the ground behind the van. Guessing that the voices were those of the driver and another guard from the club, he nervously waited, willing for the doors not to be opened. Either one of them, or worse still, both, could be possessed. He didn’t want to hide in someone on life-support, let alone in someone dead. The voices escalated into an argument followed by a dragging sound—probably his previous host being removed from the yard.
The driver got in, and the van accelerated forward, allowing John to avoid making a decision, at least for now.
After ten minutes, the van started slowing down and came to a stop. He heard the driver get out and then the sound of several voices at the back of the van. Something to do with the bodies was probably about to happen, and the doors were about to be opened. Any one of the voices could belong to someone possessed. He was going to have to make a split-second decision in choosing a host. Instinct told him to possess the guy on the ventilator––he must be valuable to them; otherwise, he wouldn’t have been kept alive. His bloodied, swollen eyes would also make it hard for any other spirit to detect possession. The downside was, of course, that it would also make John’s own vision severely limited.
Compared to his other hosts, this body was like being in a coffin. He couldn’t sense any brain activity. Nothing. Just a functioning shell with air being pushed in and pulled out. As he lay in his voluntary prison, he let his mind drift for a moment, thinking of his own inanimate, artificially supported body, lying soulless in an ICU in Queens. How would he ever return to it? He longed for it to be a part of him once more. He yearned for the ability to properly hold Jennifer and be close to her.
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming closer and a hand grasping the handle of the side door. It slid open.
John tried to look out through the swelling but could see very little. There was a shuffling sound, and he could sense the body of the black youth being dragged forward by his feet.
“Nice watch,” a gruff voice said.
“Leave it—and the neck chain. I told you, take nothing, then nothing can be traced back to us. You’re paid enough,” a second, stern voice warned. “Wait!” it added. “A few of these pills placed in his pocket will make it look like he was dealing.”
At that point the body with the gold sneakers was lifted out of the van.
Despite the blood in his host’s eyes, John could just make
out that one of the two men had a uniform.
“Over there! On those boxes!” the second voice directed.
A thud. It was the sound of the body being dumped.
“So that leaves our friend here, who’s going to the chop shop,” the first voice snickered.
Clearly, he was talking about John’s host, but John didn’t understand what he meant. It didn’t sound good, that was for sure. He heard the men now approach his host, and he felt the stretcher with his host’s body being pulled out and then lifted into the rear of another vehicle with a brightly lit interior. From what he could make out through the slits of his host’s eyes, it looked like he was inside an ambulance.
There was a switch from one ventilator to another and John felt his host’s body being lifted and transferred to a spine board. A heart monitor was connected and it started pinging with a regular rhythm. One thing John knew for certain—the guards at Mayhem might be animals, but they had medical training.
“All good,” said someone in a uniform. John guessed he was a paramedic.
John had been right in thinking that El Gordito was behind the incidents of people going missing at his clubs. But there was more to this than just El Gordito protecting the image of his clubs. John’s host was being kept alive for some specific purpose, which the other body clearly didn’t qualify for. But why would they want to keep this guy alive?
The other paramedic got in and sat next to the body of John’s host and inserted earbuds connected to his smartphone, as he sat back looking at the ECG readout. The engine started up. After a while, the driver let the sirens rip and the ambulance sped off.
After a twenty-minute journey, the vehicle finally came to a stop. John felt his host being pulled out with the ventilator and ECG still connected. The pulsating red and blue lights of the ambulance bounced off white walls, but barely registered on a brightly illuminated sign with red lettering. John tried to focus on the sign. He could just make out that it read EMERGENCY ROOM. His host had been taken to an actual hospital.
Inside, the paramedic was stopped by someone wearing a white coat over surgeon’s scrubs. Some paperwork changed hands. An orderly took over, and the gurney was pushed down a corridor and into a waiting elevator.
John could feel the elevator car descending. He could see the floor number display panel only as a bright red blur. He couldn’t decipher the digits, but he could count how many times they changed. Three times, therefore three levels.
The steel doors snapped open, and the gurney was pushed quickly down a narrow corridor before being pulled to a halt. John heard a code being entered into an electronic keypad, then the sound of bolts sliding open. As his host was wheeled through, John caught a fleeting glimpse of the top half of a guard. He had a tattooed neck and a black combat uniform and looked very similar to the guard John had possessed at the fulfillment center.
The gurney came to a halt again, and a woman dressed in pale-green medical scrubs peered over the face of John’s host.
“Brain-dead, like the others,” the orderly informed her.
Brain-dead? If his host was expected to be brain-dead, then what was the use of bringing him to this place? John pondered.
“Christ! Do they always have to be beaten up so bad?” she asked, concerned, as she made notes on a form attached to the clipboard she was carrying.
The orderly gave a pathetic shrug. John caught a blurry glimpse of the woman’s eyes. Even with his limited vision, he could tell they were normal––she wasn’t possessed.
“What if any of the organs are damaged? A kidney with internal bleeding or a ruptured liver is no use to us!” she complained then, noticing his blank expression, shook her head dismissively and ordered: “Put him in the prep room with the others.”
John’s host was wheeled into a room with bright lighting. John could just about see, in his peripheral vision, other gurneys carrying bodies. All around him was the sound of ventilators and heartbeat monitors clicking, hissing and pinging, out of sync with each other.
It took John a moment to realize what the woman was getting at. The only use his host’s organs and the organs of all ‘the others’ would have is for sale. What else could it be? Human organs were just another commodity, like drugs or guns. Now, he got the joke about his host going to the chop shop. His host was about to be butchered and taken apart like an old car for spares.
The woman in the pale-green scrubs came in. After looking him over, she cleaned his host’s face and John’s field of vision immediately improved. It seemed like an act of kindness more than duty, and John wanted to think she had some good in her. Maybe she even regretted her involvement in this butchery. She reached for a pair of surgical shears and started cutting off the clothes, starting at the base of the jeans and making her way up the legs.
John felt it was time to leave this very accommodating host. This time it would be easier—he didn’t have to worry about rendering this man temporarily immobile. So, he stepped out of the body on the gurney and straight into the nurse. She was his first female host, and he immediately appreciated the difference in gender. The thoughts and emotions were much more profound and, as a result, he was sure to get a much fuller picture of the state of her mind.
No sooner had he finished this thought than he was deluged by a sea of the woman’s moral guilt. He learned that the nurse planned to continue here only until she had enough money for everything she wanted, but she was now realizing that ‘enough’ had become a moving target that was hard to hit, and she was beginning to question what she was having to do here.
The nurse focused back on inspecting the naked body of John’s former host. There was profuse bruising to his back, arms and face. John listened as she concluded in her mind that, despite her initial concerns, the location of the bruises was such that the major organs would be undamaged and harvestable. The large amount of bruising and signs of overexertion brought on by the drug rarely affected organ quality.
She checked the time of brain-death on the paperwork. At least the goons had remembered to fill it in this time. It was a critical reference point because it was the moment from which the heart would continue to beat, even if there were no brain activity, keeping the major organs harvestable for several hours if the lungs were provided with a mechanically supported flow of oxygen. She moved the trolley into a position between two other bodies to ensure, John guessed, that the correct sequence of harvesting, according to time of brain-death, was maintained.
The next body in line was that of a young black girl. The host wheeled her and her ventilator toward the surgical suite. This will provide life for someone else, she repeated to herself.
John steeled himself. He was about to witness organ harvesting.
The OR looked as sterile and modern as the one where John had witnessed his own operation. But this theater was filled with many more people, all dressed in green scrubs. John guessed four of them were surgeons by their brash and authoritarian manner and their distinguishing, multi-colored skull caps. John’s host—Dr. Catherine Schwartz, he now knew from the name on her locker in the scrub room—wheeled the gurney alongside the operating table. The body of the girl was transferred onto it and lay naked beneath the surgical lamp, which hung like a flying saucer of brilliant light.
Schwartz cleaned the donor with alcohol, prepped the operating sites with iodine, and laid sterile drapes over the remainder of the body. The four leading surgeons with their distinctive caps closed in on the body. Like vultures, John’s host thought as she took two steps back. Each wore a strange head apparatus: a small camera mounted between the eyes and connected to transparent tubing, the ends of which were left dangling uselessly down their backs.
“Light!” shouted an irritated voice as nurses attempted to couple the free ends with other tubes emitting light. The connection immediately lit up the tubes along the surgeon’s headgear and a circle of bright white light appeared around each camera lens. At the same time, overhead monitors flashed up real-time images of
what each surgeon was looking at.
One of the four, who had a surgical cap with a repetitive skull pattern on it, set the sequence of harvesting. “My team will take the heart and lungs, as usual. Greg, your team, liver and pancreas. Rick, kidneys. I will then take the corneas, if they’re salvageable. OK! Start the clock. Let’s do this.”
John had no intention of staying around to watch the girl’s organs being plundered and was about to leave his host when there was a clang of metal hitting the floor. The chief surgeon swore and spun his head round to glare at who was responsible. John’s host did the same and focused on the scrub nurse, who was to blame. As she returned her gaze to the body, John caught a fleeting glimpse of an orange glow in the lead surgeon’s eyes, visible in the gap between his face and the magnifying loupes attached to his glasses. Fuck! He’s possessed! John thought and realized he would have to stay, for now, inside his host.
Dr. Catherine Schwartz suddenly felt an inexplicable urge, generated deep within her, to keep her head down more than usual. She kept her gaze fixed onto the harvest site, where an incision was being made in the chest of the donor. She handed the surgeon the oscillating bone saw––like a carpenter’s jigsaw, but sleeker and able to cut to a specified depth.
“Spreader!” The surgeon barked.
She took the saw and handed him the rib retractor. The surgeon jammed the closed claws into the cut in the sternum that he had just created, and cranked the jaws open. The ribcage slowly opened without cracking, as if made from tough rubber, exposing a bloodied, beating heart and lungs.
“You’re doing a fine job, Cath,” he growled, not looking at her. John figured that if he could recognize the sign of possession in the surgeon’s eyes then it would be reasonable to assume that the spirit inside the surgeon could tell that his host’s assistant was also possessed. She nodded in compliance, thankfully still keeping her head down. She was so used to the routine that she could work on autopilot, no matter the speed required.