Blood Money

They tell me I have no choice but to join them in their sick endeavors. They’re blackmailing me just like they are with this Chu character. They say I don’t have any family, no one to report to; my mother died in the car with me, apparently. That was her raw body on the table when I fainted. That was her skin hanging up, being stretched out on a clothes line.

“Sorry ‘bout it,” Ruby shrugs when they break the news. Gemma Bird has left the building.

I laugh when they tell me this because I don’t know how else to react. I wish I felt remorse for my own mother, but I don’t even know who she is. It’s like I woke up in a bad dream. All I can do is brush it off until this all ends. Maybe I’ve lost it. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe this is hell.

“Our friend in the hospital who gave us the bodies told us you had a brain hemorrhage,” Ruby says, “I guess he skipped the part where you were in a coma and not actually dead.”

It’s completely plausible that they’re lying to me, but what else am I supposed to do? I don’t remember a goddamn thing, so I guess I’m Opal Cazmont now. I’m one of The Vultures, learning the ropes of the Red Market.

It takes a while for me to wrap my mind around all of this. It’s like something out of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

“It all started when the annual Red Cross blood drive came to town,” Ruby explains to me like she’s telling a folk tale, “My daddy was a drug addict and I was fucked up in the head—”

“Still are,” Jasper calls from in back of her, slapping on a pair of latex gloves.

“—and we were low on money—” This is the only absolute truth I know about Ruby Ranson’s backstory, for the record, “—and I was gettin’ desperate. I tried sellin’ drugs, I tried sellin’ my body, but nothin’ was workin’ out. So I meet Jasper, here,” she gestures to him with her thumb as he preps the tools he’s about to use on a new inhabitant on the metal table, “while there’s a needle stickin’ out of my arm, and I ask him, ‘How much do you make workin’ for these dopes?’ And he thinks I’m hitting on him. Can you believe that?”

She lets out an outrageous laugh, slapping her knee. Jasper glances at us, rolling his eyes.

“So I ask him if he knows anything about the Red Market,” she continues, wiping a tear from her eye, “And he says…” she thinks for a moment, furrowing her brows before turning around to ask him, “What’d you say, Jas?”

“’Only in my wildest dreams’,” he recites from memory, stabbing the corpse in front of him square in the gut, producing a gruesome squelching sound. I cringe and withdraw, but Ruby doesn’t bat an eyelash.

“Right, so,” she starts up again, crossing her legs, “I tell him to give me the bag of my own blood when it’s done comin’ out of me, and that if I can sell the entire pint for three hundo on my own terms, we can start our own business together, where he supplies the blood from the blood drives, and I sell it.”

“So you were stealing.” I speculate.

“Yeah, but we were giving, too,” Ruby justifies, “All’s fair in love and war.”

“I don’t think you’re using that phrase correctly, B,” Jasper says, making another incision in the body.

“So anyway, long story short,” Ruby waves him off, “Things were going swell and we were sellin’ blood bags left and right to people who were injured and didn’t have medical insurance, and one day, I catch Chu, over here, fuckin’ a corpse. Like, having sex.” She tells me this with wide eyes, leaning forward in her chair. “With an actual dead person. Can you fuckin’ believe that?”

“God have mercy on his soul,” Jasper shakes his head and performs the Sign of the Cross; head bowed, fingers to his brow, his heart, and finally, his shoulders, left and right. Another squelch is heard when he brings his hand back down.

“So I told him straight up, ‘Yo, you run a successful business, and we need blood’, you know, what’s a dead person gonna do with all that blood?” She asks me rhetorically, “So I told him if he didn’t help Jas and me out, I’d give him a bad name and tell everyone that he’d been fuckin’ their dead-ass grandmas.”

I feel like I’m going to hell just listening to this.

“So he’d get the bodies, drain most of their fluids and replace it with formaldehyde, and before we knew it, we were practically swimming in blood,” she grins, and I swear to God, I see a mischievous glimmer in her eye, “Jasper didn’t even have to work at the Red Cross no more. It was all going so great, we figured, why not go the whole nine yards?”

I’m afraid to know where she’s going with this.

“We did some research and you would not believe how much people pay for organs and shit,” she nods her head emphatically, “It’s a little trickier because we only deal with, y’know, corpses, and by the time we get our hands on ‘em, they’re dead and gone. Everything’s shut down, so nothin’s functional. That’s why we tried somethin’ new and got our friend at the local hospital to smuggle us these fresh new bodies and teach us how to slice ‘em up. Jasper was in med school, anyway, so we were already one step ahead of the game. I’m tellin’ ya, that car wreck was like a fuckin’ godsend.”

I beg to differ.

“So he told us we only had a certain number of hours to get specific organs out until everything shut down. That’s where you came in.”

“We were gonna take your liver,” Jasper speaks up, tossing something bloody and gelatinous into the waste bin.

“We decided not to skin ya,” Ruby’s—or should I say Gemma’s—Southern accent is back, and with a blink of astonishment, I wonder how the hell she does it so quickly without me even noticing, “because you’re just too darn purty, darlin’. Plus, ya got too many dang freckles. People who get their skin grafted don’t pay for freckles.”

Oh, well, lucky, lucky me.

“We just chopped your hair off instead,” she shrugs, “People pay top dollar for human hair wigs and extensions.”

Well, that explains the unfamiliarity concerning this short haircut.

“Isn’t this…illegal?” I almost feel childish asking a question with such an obvious answer.

“Well, yes,” she sighs, “but completely, unrightfully so.”

“This is wrong,” I shake my head, “It’s immoral.”

Jasper snorts with laughter. More squelching ensues.

“Honey, if this were immoral, blood drives wouldn’t exist. No one would sign up to be organ donors. What we’re doing is helping.”

No matter how she phrases it, it will never stop sounding fucked up to me.

“Besides,” she raises an eyebrow at me, “You’re supposed to be dead. You don’t even exist anymore, and you know you’re eventually gonna die from that brain hemorrhage if it already put you in a coma.” She lays out the plain truth, sitting up smugly.

I blink, realizing that what she’s saying is right. I hadn’t thought about it, but now that she brings it up, it seems reasonable enough to agree with.

She smirks at me.

“So what’ve you got to lose?”

Nothing but my moral compass.

“I got a proposition for ya, sweet pea,” Ruby-Gemma flutters her long, black eyelashes at me, and for a moment, I am captivated by her beauty, “You can join the business or you can venture out into the lonesome world with no one.”

“Such a tempting offer,” I say sarcastically.

“We can teach ya everythang we know,” she continues trying to convince me with her Southern twang, “You can help us make lots of money, darlin’. We need more than one pair of hands doin’ the work.”

“Why don’t you help?” I ask her in genuine confusion, referring to Jasper as he cuts open the body on the table. He immediately drops his knife on its surface with a loud metallic clang, making me jump.

“Ruby never does the dirty work.” Jasper rapidly turns around and looks at me seriously.

“Jaspah, darlin’, my name is Gemma,” she tells him. He ignores her.

“Never.”

“I’m a delicate Georgia peach,” Ruby, Gemma, I can’t even keep up anymore, directs this towards me, but I know there’s more to it.

“If you’re going to work with us, you need to know the one rule,” Jasper points at me, “And that rule is don’t ever let Ruby cut the bodies.”

“Ruby this, Ruby that,” Gemma-Ruby rolls her eyes, “Ruby, Ruby, Ruby.”

“Why not?” I question him, fully ignoring her.

“Just. Don’t.”

I turn to Ruby, knowing she must have something to say about this. She doesn’t, however, as I forget that she’s not Ruby at the moment. Jasper turns back to his gruesome experiment as we sit and silence. With a final squelch, he faces us again with a bleeding, beating heart in the palm of his hand.

“Gemma Bird, I do believe we’ve struck gold.”