by Warren Ellis
“I just … I don’t know why you need a hammer.”
“Does it matter?”
“I … I want to understand. I think I should understand what’s happening. I should understand the process. If I’m going to do this, I should, I don’t know, I should commit to it.”
Mister Sun was almost touched by this. He smiled. “You want to understand how I do my job?”
“I think so,” Amanda said. “Yes. It will help, I think. Help me to cope. Does that sound weird?”
Mister Sun actually chuckled. “Yes. No. It’s, ah, it’s not a thing I’ve been asked before. Well. The hammer.” He lifted it, and then put it down by his side again, laughing a little, suddenly adrift. “I’ve never had to do this before. It does feel weird.”
He shook his head, laughed again. “Okay then. The process. It has to happen in stages. The presumption is always that we won’t get caught, and we’ll see the process through to its end. But, well, the world is what it is, and surprise or interruption can happen at any time. We have to be prepared for that. So we push the body a bit further down into the bath, like this, and we …”
Mister Sun swung the hammer down into the client’s bagged face. It crunched.
“Oh my god,” Amanda said.
“It is very important,” Mister Sun said, lifting the hammer again, “that we pulverize the teeth and facial bone structure as well as possible.” Crunch. “If we are caught in ten minutes, then, yes, we are standing over a dead body in the bathtub.” Crunch. “But we will, by God, force them to do a DNA test to identify the body. This purchases us useful seconds.”
“What about fingerprints, though?” Amanda asked. “They won’t need DNA. He has fingerprints.”
“Well,” said Mister Sun, as the hammer’s impact reports degenerated from crunches to sounds like glass dust being pounded into pork chops, “that’s why there’s a thirty-dollar brûlée torch in my bag. We might want some air freshener, by the way.”
“That’s clever,” Amanda said.
Straightening up, Mister Sun said, “I must observe that, at this point, you’re dealing with all this very well.”
“It’s interesting,” Amanda said. “I like protocols. I like processes. Checklists. It’s a bit like building code and workflows. I find it calming, somehow. Can I get a chair?”
“Sure,” he said, bringing the hammer down at a new angle, looking to collapse the cheekbones and eye orbits.
At the bathroom door, she turned and stood, head at a quizzical angle. “What do I call you?”
Mister Sun considered her. It was approaching noon outside, and the light from the frosted-glass window looked like diamonds falling on her skin.
“Call me David,” he said.
“Is that your real name?”
“Yes,” Mister Sun lied.
Her face lit up. “David, then. Be right back.”
He went back to smashing his client’s face into powder, oddly happy.
“This does tend to stink a bit,” Mister Sun said as he pressed the ignition button on the small gray kitchen torch. The flame sprang into life like a spike from hell. He held his client’s left wrist in his left hand and swiftly and efficiently blitzed away each of the dead man’s left fingerprints.
“Barbecued pork,” Amanda commented, sitting on a dining chair at the foot of the bath. “I suppose that’s not an original description.” A green can of air freshener stood under the chair.
“It’s common,” agreed Mister Sun. “Although I have met people who insist that humans taste like veal. And one woman from Canada who will swear up and down that people, like most other things, taste a bit like chicken. But she was crazy. And also Canadian. Frightening people. Have you ever seen what they did to Chinese food? The Chinese smorgasbord, for God’s sake. There. All done.” He laid the client’s hands back down, and stoppered the bath’s plughole.
Mister Sun replaced the torch in the toolbox. He liked his tools ordered. He’d previously placed the KA-BAR clone in the toolbox, and retrieved it now.
“Now,” he said, snapping the black blade open, “we have destroyed the teeth, crushed the face, and obliterated the fingerprints. And we have not been caught. We can therefore proceed with the first stage of carcass disposal. Fluid drainage.”
Amanda placed her hands together so quickly that they almost clapped. “Ooh,” she said. “What is the process for that, David?”
“Incisions,” he said.
He lifted the client by the neck and expertly stroked six deep cuts into the corpse’s back, like a sketch of wings. He then sank the knife into the side of the body’s abdomen, three times. He thought for a few seconds, shifted his grip, and levered the blade through the bag on the body’s head and under the skull for a single perforation. Lowering him again, Mister Sun turned to his client’s legs and made several deep, angled slashes into the thighs. “Opening the femoral arteries,” he said to Amanda, as he finished scoring the last diagonal.
“I don’t understand,” Amanda said. “Won’t the blood take forever to just leak out of him?”
“Well,” said Mister Sun, “we are still around eleven thousand seconds away from having to worry about rigor mortis. We are still in the phase of primary flaccidity, where the carcass remains entirely flexible.” He went to his messenger bag. The large plastic sheet he’d requested was there, right on top of the two bottles of bleach.
Mister Sun, with the ease of long practice, laid the sheet over the client—it did, as he’d hoped, reach right down to the toes—and cut two hand-sized holes in the sheet over the body’s chest. He reserved the discs of plastic, placing them next to the roll of duct tape by the toolbox. He got one knee up on the edge of the tub, pushed his gloved hands through the two holes, rested them on the dead man’s chest, and said, “Watch.”
He began to compress his client’s chest, on a ten-second rhythm. The ribs flexed, and, after a minute, blood began to squirt from the slashes and perforations.
“The heart, you see, is just a pump, and can be manually operated.”
Amanda giggled. “The heart is just a pump. I love that. It sounds so true.”
“It’s a mechanical fact,” said Mister Sun, bringing the compression to a five-second beat.
“In so many ways,” Amanda said. “I’ve never met anyone who had anything other than a pump inside them.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Mister Sun saw a new line appear on her forehead. “I’m sure that’s not true,” he said.
“I’ve only been able to wash my hair for the last two years,” Amanda said.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“When I worked for other people? Working in big rooms divided into cubicles? They were like human pens for software writing, and the ratio of women to men was maybe, maybe one to thirty. I stopped washing my hair, for years, and wore nothing that wasn’t a Junior Anti-Sex League chastity sack. I met nothing but boys who had pumps for hearts. I’m not great at reading social cues, but even I, after long enough, worked out that if my hair looked like a hobo wig and I wore nothing but thick onesies and lime-green Crocs then they’d leave me alone. The whole point of the start-up, of creating a new business and getting out from working for other people, was that I could start to be myself again. Whatever that means.”
The crease in her brow had gone. Amanda’s face had re-assumed a sort of flat placidity that had informed much of their time together so far. The joy of her smiles and laughs seemed, to Mister Sun, to be in her genuine surprise at their arrival, as if strong emotions traveled some miles to get here and showed up without warning.
“I do understand the pleasures of working for oneself,” Mister Sun offered.
“Well,” she said, gazing at the corpse. “Almost working for myself. He had skills I didn’t have. He had money I didn’t have. He always had money.”
Mister Sun decided not to comment on that, since quite a lot of that money was currently sloshing around in his own bank account.
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��Fucking bastard dogfucker,” Amanda said, all in a rush. “I bet you liked him.” Her expression seemed not to change as she said it.
Mister Sun raised an eyebrow. “I’ve never met him, or directly spoken to him.”
“Oh,” Amanda said. “That’s how the process works? How did you communicate?”
“There’s an app for encrypted self-erasing images with text overlay, made by security experts.”
“I know that one,” Amanda said. “Or, I’ve read about it. It doesn’t work on Android phones yet. I prefer Android. You can get much deeper into the operating system. Men like men with money. Even when they profess to hate them, they respect the money and admire its keeper.”
“Respect,” said Mister Sun, pushing blood out of his client’s body, “doesn’t come into it. I provide a service. I like to get paid for it. I may, perhaps, suspect my clients are not people I’d want to spend time with”—he gave the corpse a harder shove, for emphasis, and there was a pattering rainy noise as blood struck the underside of the plastic sheet—“but, happily, I do not have to.”
“It’s a transaction,” Amanda said. “No emotional content.”
“No emotional content is required. I’m a dead pig collector.”
Amanda leaned forward, spotting new information. “I don’t understand that reference.”
Mister Sun stood, unkinking his shoulders and back, taking stock of the liquid in the bath. He approved of that useful slight incline in the tub’s surface, helping the blood run down toward the plughole. It was almost impossible to manually pump all the blood out of a corpse. There always somehow seemed to be a pint left in there. But he’d certainly processed out the lion’s share, and, given the unexpected situation he found himself in, he probably had more time to play with than usual. He went to get the bottles of bleach from the bottom of the messenger bag, nestled there around the small roll of heavy-gauge garbage sacks.
Amanda uncapped the green can and gave a few blasts of something synthetic and cloying into the air. “These things fascinate me,” she said. “It’s like what you’d get if you tried to describe spring to a robot. Not remotely authentic but somehow true. What’s a dead pig collector?”
Mister Sun poured one bottle of bleach through the left-hand hole in the plastic sheet. “China,” he said, “is a place rife with pollution and disease. It’s not just that, but that is certainly a part of the landscape. It’s also a place of pig farming. And a part of pig farming—”
The bottle was empty. He stood it by the bath and opened the second bottle. In it went, through the second hole. “There are periods—we’re in one right now, in fact—where serious disease and pollution events will kill the pigs. They will wash up on riversides in their tens of thousands. They will litter fields and pile up in their pens. A small farm—and, in places like Shanghai, they’re all small farms—cannot spend what little time they have disposing of tons of dead pigs instead of maintaining their remaining assets.”
The second bottle was empty. Mister Sun swiftly cut five small sections of duct-tape and fixed them around the edge of one of the reserved plastic-sheet discs. The disc was therefore stuck back on the sheet, closing the left hole.
“The farmers could,” he said, “just sell the infected dead pigs into the food market. But, of course, people get sick. Sometimes they die. The food supply is always on the edge of triggering a pandemic. So it’s illegal. People get sentenced to life imprisonment for selling contaminated pig meat. You can draw your own conclusions about the life expectancy in a Chinese prison.”
The second disc fixed on, Mister Sun busied himself with lightly tacking the sheet around the bath with a few more short sections of tape. “So,” he said, “there are people who have learned how to effectively and safely dispose of swine carcasses. If you have a stack of dead pigs, and you don’t want to go to prison, then you pay for a dead pig collector.”
Mister Sun pulled off his gloves and delicately pushed them into one of the empty bleach bottles. Twisting on the cap, he then went to his toolbox, tugged out another pair of gloves, and snapped them on. He looked at Amanda, and gave her an uncertain smile.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“Not as such. It’s just that this is an unusual situation, and I’m not sure if it’s correct to ask for a cup of coffee while the blood breaks down.”
“You shouldn’t tell me too much about yourself,” said Mister Sun, sitting with a handmade espresso that had been produced by a strange device whose shape suggested nothing but two cubes fucking. He had watched Amanda get lost in methodically selecting, weighing, and grinding the coffee beans, tamping the ground coffee and hand-pumping the espresso out of the device with extraordinary focus and vigilance.
“In case something happens,” she said. “I understand that. It just seems somehow wrong that you shouldn’t know anything about the person you came to kill. Does that make sense?”
“Um,” he said. “Not really. I did say there was no emotional content in the work.”
“But,” Amanda said, “that makes me just a dead pig in a pen.”
“Amanda, you killed your own business partner with a cleaver and are in the process of allowing a complete stranger to dispose of the body.”
“I did,” she said. Her eyes were flicking side-to-side, very fast, unfocused. “I did do that. And when I said ‘help,’ you could have said ‘call the police.’ Because he had a gun, didn’t he? I could have claimed self-defense. Home invasion. Even though he had a set of keys. But you didn’t say that. Because you would have been questioned as part of their process. Of course you would have been. You broke into my house too. And you might be dressed like a generic service employee of some kind, but I bet you didn’t arrive in America dressed like that. So it was in your best interest to help by doing the job you came to do anyway, thereby guaranteeing my silence.”
Mister Sun sipped his espresso, quietly calculating space and seconds. He didn’t require a weapon for his job. His intent had been to steal into the room, silently approach her, stamp a foot into the back of her knee, and cleanly snap her neck as she collapsed.
He could still perform a similar operation from this position.
“You are a very intelligent woman,” he said.
“I’m good with problems. Breaking things down. Step by step. It’s how code works. Logical procession.”
He gave her a smile whose warmth was not entirely false. “Would you like to finish learning how to break down a dead body?”
Amanda’s head cocked to that querent angle again. “There’s more?”
“Amanda, we haven’t even gotten him out of your house yet. Shall we follow the process all the way to the end, before we go our separate ways?”
“I don’t like that.”
“Don’t like what?”
“The way you said that last part. Like we’d never see each other again.”
“We won’t.”
“I don’t like that.”
Mister Sun’s phone vibrated in his pocket, just once. He realized that that would be his girlfriend, responding to last night’s text. He elected to ignore it, and smiled at Amanda again. She smiled back. He liked her smile immensely.
In the bath was a white body and a couple of gallons of pink muck. Mister Sun reached under the sheet and tugged the plug out. The bath began to drain, sounding like an extended and ugly strangulation the whole time. He gave the cold faucet a half-turn and suggested to Amanda that a couple more blasts of the robot-perfume air freshener might be in order.
“So why have we drained all the blood out of the bastard?” Amanda asked.
Mister Sun had torn one of his heavy sacks off the roll and was shaking it open. “Because it’s going to make it much easier and cleaner to joint him.”
Amanda just looked at him. “I wouldn’t have expected that.”
“Well, we need to make him simpler and more discreet to transport. Also, every step has the intent of making him harder to identify in case of an
interruption. You know what you might also find interesting? It may seem that I brought a lot of gear in here, but it’s all very inexpensive. If you shopped around, you could probably dispose of a body for under a hundred dollars.”
He pulled the sheet off the bath. Amanda was moved to give another long spray from the can. Mister Sun folded the sheet as best he could, and stuffed it into the open sack. He tied the sack off and put it to one side, and then pulled another one off the roll.
“Right, then,” he said. “Head first.”
There was always a little extra blood during this part, which is why he left the water running as he put the KA-BAR clone to his client’s throat and began to slice through meat and ligament, all the way around the neck until he met his first cut. Putting the knife down, he grabbed the head under the jaw and began to twist. He was rewarded by a little crepitation. With a tight smile he twisted the head the other way, working it, and then pulled. The client’s head, contained inside the sack, came free with a loud smack where the spine parted company with the skull.
This time, Amanda did actually clap her hands, as if she’d been shown a mysterious and spectacular magic trick.
“Did you want your knife back?” he grinned, cradling the head and its thin run-off over the bath.
“Please say we can stay friends, David,” Amanda said.
Amanda’s dishwasher thrummed away in the background. The Chinese chef’s knife was terrific, and had gone through the client’s head without a notch, nick, or scratch. It would continue to perform admirably for years to come, and throwing it away had seemed to Mister Sun like a terrible waste.
The stupid gun was in there, too.
The head was in a sack, liberally sprayed with a cheap aerosol oven cleaner whose active ingredient was lye, and Mister Sun was working with the KA-BAR knife and a hammer on a shoulder joint. He was making short, careful strikes, as he didn’t want to spatter the place with bone chips.
Amanda was talking about her business. It appeared to be the sort of classic mismatch that kept Mister Sun self-employed. The business didn’t exist without her skills and perceptions, but it didn’t move without his client’s money. This tension torqued until it became clear that the whole machine of the company had locked fast and was beginning to smolder.