Chapter 169 Body Donation Process

The two cars, one after the other, drove into the open-air parking lot of St. Mary's Sanatorium.

The tires crunched softly on the thin layer of snow that had just accumulated.

Alex's black refrigerated truck stopped next to the innermost ambulance lane.

Lyon parked the Dodge Challenger in a visitor's parking space a few dozen meters away and turned off the engine. He opened the car door, put his hands in his jacket pockets, and silently walked towards the refrigerated truck through the thin snow.

His agility attribute of up to 20 points made his steps as light as a cat's, and even without deliberate control, the sound of his footsteps on the thin snow was minimized.

Alex was yawning loudly, with dark circles under his eyes that seemed to never go away, as he slowly jumped out of the car.

He held a crumpled dispatch slip in his hand, turned around to open the trunk door, and was still grumbling about the damn weather, completely unaware that someone was approaching from behind.

Leon walked up behind him, stretched out his right hand, and gave him a solid pat on the shoulder.

Good morning, Fatty.

"Holy crap!!!"

Alex suddenly lunged forward, dropping the dispatch slip in his hand in fright, and nearly slammed his head into the metal door of the refrigerated truck.

He had just finished a dead mailbox rendezvous last night and was already suffering from neurasthenia. This sudden slap almost killed him instantly. He thought it was an FBI counterintelligence agent pointing a gun at the back of his head.

Alex clutched his wildly beating heart and turned around, still shaken.

Upon recognizing Leon's face, he was so angry he nearly fainted.

"Don't you walk without making a sound?!"

"Do you know that someone can scare another person to death?"

"I deal with dead people every day, so my yang energy is weak and my yin energy is strong."

"If you pat me like that a couple more times, my colleague can just come here and drag me away tomorrow!"

"If you have a clear conscience, you have nothing to fear. What are you so nervous about?"

Leon raised an eyebrow, made a pointed remark, and bent down to pick up the sheet from the ground for him.

"Bang."

Just then, the passenger door of the refrigerated truck was also pushed open.

A figure dressed in bulky dark blue waterproof work clothes and wearing heavy rubber gloves jumped down, holding a steaming cup of cheap convenience store coffee in his hand.

It was Irina, the female student in the biology department at the University of Washington.

Almost a month has passed since she and Alex dealt with the dismembered body of the perverted mercenary in the industrial area.

Lyon looked her up and down.

In just one month, the girl's demeanor underwent a dramatic change.

The naive female college student who used to be terrified by the dismembered body, her face pale and her eyes clear and innocent, has completely disappeared.

Now, Irina's chestnut-brown hair is casually tied back into a ponytail with a hair tie, and she has the same heavy dark circles under her eyes as Alex.

She leaned against the car door, staring blankly at the snowflakes in the parking lot, exuding a sense of despondency that seemed to say, "Life is so tiring, let the world end." It could be said that she had been completely assimilated by Alex's half-dead state.

"Irina?"

Lyon, amused by her deadpan expression, greeted her.

"Long time no see. You look... well, quite experienced now."

Upon hearing the voice, Irina slowly turned her head, glanced blankly at Leon, a clear look of surprise flashing in her pale amber eyes, but she still drawled out her words:

"Oh... Officer Vance, good morning."

She mechanically raised the paper cup in her hand, took a sip of bitter black coffee, and let out a long sigh just like Alex's.

"well……"

Irina's voice was weak and listless, like an emotionless machine reading from a prepared script:

"Don't even mention it. Last week I went with Alex to the sewers in the South Side to fish out a homeless man who had been dead for half a month."

"The man was soaking in the water, swollen like a balloon. As soon as I reached out to pull his arm, his skin slid off like a rag, and the corpse worms crawled all over my sleeve."

She stared blankly at the coffee cup in her hand.

"Now, whenever I close my eyes, all I can hear in my head is the buzzing of greenbottle flies."

"I feel like my soul was washed down the drain along with that corpse. I'm now a walking, embalmed lump of flesh."

Leon's lips twitched slightly as he listened.

"I thought that after last time, you would be like a normal female college student, crying and running back to your biology lab to cut up frogs."

"You haven't resigned yet?"

Irina sighed again upon hearing Lyon's words.

"The frogs in the lab don't pay me."

She shrugged, her answer quite straightforward:

"You told me back then that in this place, survival and getting money were the most important things. I think you were right."

"I have to pay tuition and ridiculously high rent near the University of Washington. This job is disgusting, but it's incredibly lucrative."

Alex, standing to the side, rolled his eyes and interjected:

"She's my top assistant now."

"I've made rapid progress this past month."

"Now, even if I asked her to retrieve a giant corpse that's been soaking in the sewers for half a month, she could stand by and hold up the body bag for me without batting an eye."

"A promising candidate for working class."

Lyon nodded, acknowledging the girl's adaptability.

"Alright, that's enough of our reminiscing."

Alex rubbed his frozen hands and looked at Leon suspiciously:

"What are you doing at this sanatorium where there are more dead people than living people? You can't be here to check on the patients, can you?"

"There's a patient here with cystic fibrosis. I was asked to come and check on him."

As Leon spoke, he pulled the blue medical mask out of his pocket, tore open the packaging, and hung it over his ears, covering most of his face except for a pair of deep eyes.

He straightened the edge of his mask, then turned to Alex: "And you? Here to collect corpses again?"

"yes."

Alex opened his mouth wide without any regard for his image and let out a long yawn.

"You must come to places like this often, right?"

Lyon asked casually.

In his mind, Alex, as an outsourced corpse collector, should have treated this place as a fixed monster spawn point.

Upon hearing this, Alex paused in his yawning.

"Actually, it's not what you think."

He rubbed his bloodshot eyes and shook his head: "The bodies from the sanatorium are rarely taken away by our company."

Lyon raised an eyebrow, somewhat puzzled.

"Is there any other reason for this?"

Although he had cooperated with Alex many times, and even used him to connect with the country to send old Bill and Arthur away, he was not in the biological resource recycling business and was not really clear about the details of this black industry.

"Alright, let's stop standing here in the cold wind and talk as we walk."

Alex didn't explain immediately. He walked to the back of the refrigerated truck, pulled open the heavy cargo door, yanked out a heavy black body bag, and handed a whiteboard to Irina beside him.

Irina took the writing board like a soulless puppet, and then let out a long sigh.

"well……"

Alex slammed the car door shut, pulled his windbreaker tighter around himself, and led the way toward the back door of the sanatorium. Leon followed beside him, listening as the guy slowly unmasked the industry in the cold wind.

"The vast majority of the corpses I collect are unidentified bodies that no one wants."

Alex walked along, staring at the snow on the ground, his voice muffled:

"Homeless people, people who froze to death under overpasses, or thugs who were beaten to death by gangsters and whose families cannot be found in alleys. These kinds of corpses are excellent unclaimed resources."

"Take them back to the company, put them directly on the autopsy table, slice their heart, liver, spleen, lungs, and kidneys, classify their bones and ligaments, and then go through the black market or gray market donation process."

"Oh, what I mean by donation is taking them for experiments or for some kind of perverted collection."

"but……"

Alex paused for a moment at this point:

"Sometimes when I'm rummaging through the pockets of homeless people looking for identification, I'll also find some broken cell phones that still work."

"If I have emergency contact information or family members in my phone, I will try to call them and inform them that the person has died."

Lyon's eyes, though masked, looked somewhat puzzled.

"Are you crazy?"

"You can sell a corpse for money, provided it's an unclaimed corpse."

"If you proactively contact the family, and they come crying and demanding the body back for burial, then all the money you spent on transportation and body bags will be wasted."

"Are you complaining that you're earning too much and going to work for free?"

"Hehe...sigh..."

Alex suddenly let out a harsh, bitter laugh, followed by a long sigh.

Irina, who was following behind him, also lowered her eyelids in unison and sighed.

No, it won't.

Alex stopped, rested his left hand on his forehead, stared at the smudged, trampled snow at his feet, and his tone became gloomy:

"Basically, no one can take the body out of my hands."

"I called them and told them that the person had died and that we had collected the body."

"Think about it, how well-off can someone be if they can just watch their family members become homeless and sleep on the streets?"

"Most of them are poor people who can't even afford next month's rent, so they don't have any money saved in their accounts."

Alex lowered his hand and continued walking forward, his eyes slightly red.

His eyes welled up with tears, but he forced them back and they didn't fall.

"In the United States, even the cheapest funeral, with the worst urn and cemetery fees, would cost at least several thousand or even tens of thousands of US dollars."

"When these poor families hear that someone has died, their first reaction is not sadness, but fear. They are afraid that the exorbitant funeral expenses will fall on their shoulders."

"At this point, I have to start fooling them."

Alex's voice trembled slightly. He took a deep breath and mimicked his usual professional yet compassionate tone on the phone:

"I would tell them: 'Sir/Madam, I know you are going through a difficult time. Our company has a charitable program that can cremate your family member's body free of charge, handle all the troublesome follow-up procedures, and even provide you with a condolence payment of eight hundred to one thousand dollars to help you through this difficult time.'"

"All you need to do is sign a document."

Alex wiped his eyes and gave a bitter laugh:

"A thick stack of documents, all written in obscure legal and medical jargon."

"Those poor bastards see that there is money to be made and that they can dispose of corpses for free, so they don't bother to read the terms and conditions carefully. Even if they did, they wouldn't understand them. They would just sign their names directly."

"But in reality, it wasn't a cremation consent form at all. It was a full body donation agreement, the highest level of agreement, that completely relinquishes the right to dispose of the body."

"After signing the consent form, the body will absolutely not be taken away for cremation. Instead, it will be openly and legitimately sent to the autopsy room."

"With this legally signed document from the family, the value of this body in the open medical market can at least double, or even triple!"

"Because many medical schools openly conduct experiments, large medical device companies, and even military bulletproof testing centers pay high prices to acquire cadavers, and they must be cadavers with such legal donation agreements."

"They can't use those black market corpses of dubious origin."

Lyon, walking beside him, listened to these words and fell completely silent.

Eat dry wipe.

Even the last bits of blood and bone of a poor person after death can be packaged as a legal donation and then sent to the operating table to be exchanged for US dollars.

"What if the family doesn't buy into your approach?"

After a moment of silence, Lyon continued to ask:

"What if they actually had a good relationship with the deceased, and regardless of whether they were simply unable to afford it, but now they've scraped together a sum of money and insist on taking the body away?"

"hehe……"

Alex let out another, even more desperate laugh than before.

"There are ways to deal with that. Our damn company, they have ways to deal with that too... Sigh..."

He shook his head, and finally, tears welled up in his eyes, sliding down his chubby cheeks and into his collar.

"We will produce another bill."

"Since you're not donating, then we're providing body collection services."

Alex started counting on his fingers, rattling off various items like a menu:

"Basic vehicle dispatch fee: $2,000. On-site biological hazard cleanup fee: $1,000. Special high-strength leak-proof body bags: $600. Body cryopreservation fee: $100 per hour, plus administrative processing fees..."

"A series of combined punches can easily result in a bill of six or seven thousand US dollars."

"We told the family that they had to pay the money first before they could take the body away."

"Think about it, what can a poor person who can't even afford a thousand dollars do when they see this bill?"

Alex spread his hands, sniffing self-deprecatingly:

"They could only give up in despair and eventually had to obediently sign the donation agreement."

"Even if we encounter a tough customer who's willing to sell everything to claim the body, the company will definitely not lose money after earning that high service fee."

Irina, standing beside her with her writing board, listened to these familiar business procedures and sighed again, her face expressionless.

Alex hastily wiped the tears from his face with his sleeve, then suddenly shook his head, snapping back to reality.

"Damn, we've gone off on a tangent."

He sniffed his nose, which was red from the cold, and steered the conversation back on track:

"That's why I said earlier that I don't come to places like nursing homes very often."

"Those who can be sent to a private nursing home like St. Mary's to be kept alive by machines are not necessarily extremely wealthy, but at least their families have some spare money, or their medical insurance coverage has not been completely exhausted."

"Most importantly, the fact that they sent their loved ones here shows that the family members still care about the deceased."

"These bodies belong to someone. Once a person dies inside, the family will contact a reputable funeral home they know to handle the funeral arrangements. It's not our place to get involved, since we're a biotechnology company that picks up unclaimed trash on the streets."

"So, the probability of getting an order here today is really low."