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Who would ever imagine that buying stole organs could get so complicated? And messy...
The Devil Reaps the Harvest by John Oak Dalton
Music by Ray Mattis
http://raymattispresents.bandcamp.com
Produced by Daniel Wilder
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Transcript:
The laboratory at the end of the dead-end road had been closed for so long now that people had
forgotten about it, or tried to forget about it, and now everybody said it was an abandoned factory.
It was there that Peter O\\u2019Day was supposed to meet a guy who had a couple of kidneys in a beer cooler.
So Peter parked in a weed-choked employee lot and walked about a quarter mile into the woods, where
the old laboratory sat. There he was meeting Octavius.
Octavius sounded like a mad scientist\\u2019s name, and as it happens Octavius kind of was a mad scientist.
He had worked at the lab long ago doing things that are frowned upon in the mainstream medical world,
but that gig dried up. He ended up harvesting organs, which wasn\\u2019t much of a step down. He still liked
meeting people there for the handoff, because his greatest triumphs had been at that lab.
Also his greatest failures, but those were buried here and there around the property.
Peter had a bag of money and Octavius had a cooler with organs in it and a New England Patriots sticker
on it, so that went down about like you\\u2019d expect.
Peter was a dot com guy the bubble never burst on so he had plenty of money, and could jump the
transplant list and buy a new kidney for their little girl, Alondra. People with money can pretty much do
what they want.
Just look at celebrities. They do drugs and get married eight or ten times but can adopt all the kids they
want and go on TV talking about various causes. If they did all the same things but lived in that trailer
park on the other edge of town--the one called Morningside but everybody actually called Homicide--
nobody would give them kids, or want them on TV talking for their causes.
When Peter took the Patriots cooler from Octavius, that had a kidney and a spare for Alondra, his hands
were shaking pretty badly, and some blood sloshed out from under the lid and onto his shoes and into
the dirt, and it wasn\\u2019t until that very moment that Peter sort of realized what the hell he was doing.
Octavius stepped back easily and missed the sloshing, but he was used to blood spraying out all over the
place.
Peter nodded and walked away, but Octavius stayed where he was, to his misfortune. He had parked
behind the old lab, on an access road everybody had forgotten about too, because he did not want
Peter or anybody else to see the car he drove.
Peter was hardly out of sight when something just under Octavius\\u2019s feet, where the blood was soaking
in, sniffed and swallowed and opened its eyes.
If this lab had been that good at black science, they would still be in business. But they weren\\u2019t, so they
made the mistake of burying their problems instead of burning them in a big bonfire so that there was
no trace.
Or, in this case, so something could not bite and claw its way with long fingernails and sharp teeth out of
the dirt and grab Octavius by the ankles. Then pull him to the ground and bite him right on his face.
But his face was kind of bony so it started working on some soft parts.
Peter had stopped not far away to call his wife, but never heard a damn thing. It was ironic, because as
soon as that creature\\u2019s hand popped out of the dirt Octavius\\u2019s heart popped like a balloon. All those
times, Octavius had arranged for guys to meet Russian women off the internet for a night of passion,
only for those guys to wake up in the hotel tub packed in ice\\u2026or dumped in a landfill and never waking
up at all. All those times, Octavius never knew he needed an organ for himself. He ignored the
shortness of breath and the tingling in his fingers and all the rest.
Like I said, if they were better at science, they would still have been in business. And if they weren\\u2019t also
lazy, they would have buried these things deeper.
Peter\\u2019s wife was named Stacy, and was waiting in a big McMansion out in the suburbs for news of
Alondra\\u2019s kidney. Do I even need to say this was his second wife, and very young?
\\u201cWe\\u2019re halfway there,\\u201d Peter told her.
\\u201cIt\\u2019s not like a pig kidney or anything?\\u201d she asked.
\\u201cHow would I know?\\u201d
\\u201cI don\\u2019t know,\\u201d she fretted.
\\u201cLook, this guy came highly recommended. And when it comes to Alondra, we don\\u2019t have another
choice.\\u201d
\\u201cI know,\\u201d said Stacy, and there was a lot in those words. In those two words were all the feelings Stacy
had growing for little Alondra and all the feelings Peter lacked. But Peter did what he had to do.
What Peter had to do next was walk out to the edge of the overgrown parking lot and wait for a guy
from the transplant organization he had paid off too. Actually this guy, whose name was Rollo, knew
Ocatvius quite well, but neither man wanted anyone to know they were connected. Rollo had worked
at the lab too, back in the day. Not so much in the sciences, as in the more\\u2026nebulous parts of the
organization.
Octavius could have just given the organ to Rollo, but Octavius and Rollo always wanted a middleman. It
wasn\\u2019t foolproof, but it was better than nothing.
\\u201cLook, just go to the hospital and wait,\\u201d Peter said. \\u201cThe guy is on his way here, and then he is going to
be bringing the kidneys within the hour.\\u201d
\\u201cOkay,\\u201d said Stacy, but there was so much she could not face she knew she was staying right where she
was.
\\u201cOkay.\\u201d And Peter hung up.
Peter had only taken a few steps before he saw something moving in the trees, just out of the corner of
his eye.
Of course, Peter was thinking it was a cop, or the FBI, or maybe an investigative reporter trying to entrap
him and put him on TV with all the pedophiles.
So Peter stepped off the road and hid behind a tree, which was stupid because unlike cops and FBI
agents and reporters, what was shambling towards him could smell the blood on his shoes.
Peter peeked around the tree and realized he was wrong about the cops and the reporters because how
this person was dressed\\u2014how this shape was dressed\\u2014was in things Goodwill would not take. They
looked like clothes somebody took out of a compost pile.
Peter started moving quickly through the trees, trying not to slosh the beer cooler too much, and cut
cross-country towards the parking lot.
All the bones and muscles and ligaments in the thing sniffing along behind Peter, which seemed barely
connected to each other, still let the thing move faster than you would think.
But it would not have mattered if Peter had watched where he was going, which he did not, so he
overshot the parking lot and thrashed deeper into the woods.
And the thing that could smell his bloody footprints, who saw the shoe prints glowing like fire, kept on
coming.
Peter saw the bland gray concrete block of the lab building looming in front of him and he realized he
had been a dumbass, and circled back on himself. He was ultimately a tech guy. He had never been
much out in nature and did not really know how to navigate even a small forest of trees, much less tell
one from another.
And he had never seen a dead body, but he recognized that Octavius was dead when he saw what was
left of him in the small clearing where they had met minutes ago. The chewed parts and the parts that
should have been tucked inside but were glistening in the sun.
The thing behind Peter was getting closer, so close now Peter could hear a slurping noise, and Peter
turned and looked.
And what he saw sent his heart plummeting, and his balls scurrying up inside himself to meet it, and his
butthole slammed shut with the finality of a coffin lid.
Peter dropped the beer cooler, and this time a lot more blood sloshed out than was good, and the thing
moved faster somehow.
Peter grabbed the cooler back up and started running.
Peter was running, and the only place he knew he was running was \\u201cAway,\\u201d wherever that was. And he
was bouncing off of trunks and getting whipped in the face by branches and all that, because instead of
joining Boy Scouts he had taught himself computer programming. He was richer, but very close to being
dead, so some of his life choices seemed poorer today.
He kept splashing blood out of that cooler and that wasn\\u2019t great for Alondra but more importantly for
Peter, it wasn\\u2019t great for him at all.
So Peter stopped, and opened the cooler. He plunged his hand in and grabbed out a kidney that was in a
leaky sandwich bag, and he flung that kidney in a long red arc that hit the thing\\u2019s chest with a wet sound
and plopped into the grass.
And the creature looked down at it with yellow eyes, and it gave Peter a chance to catch his breath.
Then the creature showed broken teeth, and reached down with those long nails and grabbed the
kidney up, and it went down in one gulp, and Peter threw up in his mouth a little.
When Peter ran this time he didn\\u2019t even pick up the cooler.
The thing tipped the cooler back and gulped the other kidney down, and that bought Peter a little more
time.
Peter ran and looked back, ran and looked back, and sure enough in a minute or two he saw that
raggedy shape moving between the trees again.
Peter was looking back when his foot touched asphalt and he was out on a county road.
The woman driving the minivan was leaning over pushing the Hocus Pocus DVD into the dash, for her
kids in the backseat to watch for the millionth time. So she did not even tap the brake before she hit
Peter head on.
Rather than explain what that looked like, it\\u2019s simpler to say the kids never asked to watch Hocus Pocus
ever again.
As it happens, Rollo was not too far behind the woman in a truck that looked like a medical vehicle but
really wasn\\u2019t.
Rollo was very quick on his feet and looked l'