The Old Town Butcher

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  "I can't believe there's so much blood."

  Administrator Mayfield's black notebook remained blank. He couldn't start to describe the carnage discovered behind the residential cubicle.

  "It's a terrible shame," sighed Administrator Wilson. "How do we register the sheer waste of the scene in our notebooks? The insult of it all? There were people trained to care for the man. People were counting on his sickness in order to make a living."

  Administrator Mayfield shook his head. "The most recent medical records on Mr. Wuebbles say he weighed around a hundred and sixty-eight pounds. So where did the rest of him go? And how could so much blood be in just one man?"

  "We should have checked on Mr. Wuebbles more often," sighed Administrator Wilson. "We'll make it a practice to visit those in Old Town more often. Whatever happened here is such a shame. Mr. Wuebbles would've gotten sick sooner or later. And now, to think it's all lost."

  The Administrators shook their heads and continued to chew on the nubs of their pens while they struggle to think what to write into their notebooks. Shards of bone and scraps of flesh littered the patch behind the residential cubicle. Blood stained the ground, had been splattered against the plastic, white walls of the nearby cubicles. It was as if some terrible monster of claw and fang had fallen from the sky, shredding muscle and feeding upon gristle. A more alien scene could not be smeared upon Old Town, where the residents of those blocks had sacrificed all they had ever owned during their youth so that in age and sickness they might be installed into the modern economy's medicine. The death found behind Mr. Wuebbles' residential cubicle was a blasphemy in that world sustained by the harvest of another's sickness.

  The Administrators the next morning assigned a new tenant into Mr. Wuebbles's old residential cubicle. The young woman was scheduled for a dual mastectomy, followed by a year's worth of chemical and radiation treatments. Neighbors greeted her with a cardboard box of trinkets, donated items the woman might offer in her future barter negotiations. The Administrators noted each of those gifts in their black notebooks. She had become a resident of Old Town. She had been assigned a doctor, a nurse, a pharmacist, an agent, a salesman and a technician, and so much care could not avoid coming with a cost.