Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense by Fynn Perry (audio ebook reader .TXT) 📕

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