Page 54 of Six
Here comes the begging. Gabe remains mute. Cool as a cucumber. He rarely talks to the donors. They usually die not even knowing the reason why.
“Damn, that’s cool.” Michael sounds in awe.
“My Gabe is a perfectly oiled machine. Composed and deadly.” Linda is very proud of all of our…skills.
“Robotic fucker,” I hear Rami mutter.
The donor has snot and tears running down his face. The pain has turned his face red, and sweat and blood from the wounds cover his body. He hasn’t pissed himself, though.
“P-please. I have money. T-take it,” he pleads, his voice breaks a couple of times with pants of pained breaths. He’s looking frantically at the glass wall. He can’t see us, but he can hear us, and I bet he hopes we will accept his monetary offer.
A moment of silence. Then the sudden sound of Raph slurping his Coke from a straw breaks it. Michael looks at him with an exasperated frown.
“Do you want some, babe?” Raph asks him, unperturbed.
“He’s going for another weapon,” Uri says with excitement.
Gabe grabs four axes. Raph whistles. He cut a head right off a donor’s neck with one a few months back. And I fucking missed it.
Michael is now smiling at my brother, love filling his light blue eyes. He got used to all this fairly quick. Ollie will do the same. It’s not like he had a sheltered, privileged life. He grew up in the slums without a mother and with a piece-of-shit father. He’ll understand our ways. I’m sure.
Linda hands me the last burger. It’s cold, but I’m still hungry and nobody wants it.
The tossing resumes, but there’s a hypnotic beauty in watching an axe flying in the air. The rotating movement is elegant and fast, and when the wide blade hits the target, the bumping sound sends a shiver down my spine. I love this shit.
The last axe pierces the donor’s forehead, and his eyes fly open. He makes a gurgling sound, his mouth contorted as blood starts spilling between his lips. Gabe is still in front of him, looking at his work. His expression doesn’t show any kind of emotion, except for the icy coldness in his grey eyes.
The donor has knives and axes sticking out all over his body—his briefs have turned Scorsese-red. His head suddenly drops forward, his whole body would have slumped down if it wasn’t for the chains keeping him to the board. Blood and saliva continue running out of his mouth, but I’m pretty sure he’s dead.
“That was fucking quick,” Uri whines, like he doesn’t know Gabe is the embodiment of fast efficiency. “Whose turn is it to help him clean up?”
Everybody grunts. I’m about to do it when Linda beats me to it. “Me. I need to talk to Gabe, might as well catch the proverbial two birds.” Nobody questions her, happy to have avoided the cleaning this time.
“We should switch to Oxy cleaners. Bleach is tricky,” Sari suddenly states.
“I was thinking about that yesterday. Those Oxy cleaners make even the invisible traces of blood unrecognizable to the most common blood-detecting tests,” Michael agrees.
“Bleach also wipes away any trace of blood,” Rami offers. He puts the code in to the lab door and walks across it to sit behind his desk, where all his technology-related stuff is. One by one, we all follow him.
The lab is where Michael and Sari work on the donor’s samples. On the right, there are couches and a kitchen with a dining table for the rest of us. I take my usual place on the sofa—leaving the file on the coffee table—and Raph and Michael do the same.
“Let me try to explain this to you,” Michael says. “The three standard tests for picking up blood rely on a protein in the blood called hemoglobin. This protein loves oxygen. In the body, it’s hemoglobin’s job to grab onto oxygen and carry it from the lungs to the rest of the body. But the new Oxy cleaners flood a blood stain with a lot of oxygen. Once the protein gets its fill of oxygen, it won’t even bother to snatch oxygen from the investigators’ blood-detecting tests.”
“So, the tests will come up negative,” Raph finishes, earning a beaming smile from his fiancé.
“Precisely.”
“I still think fire is the best way to kill all evidence,” I interject.
“Flame bitch,” Rami coughs into his red gloved fist.
I’m just an eager fan.
“Fire can leave evidence.” Raph sounds bored
“Not the way I do it,” I mutter.
“The torch has spoken, ladies and gents.” Uri throws an arm around Sari’s narrow shoulders. His dreads are high in a ponytail.
