Butcher's Cleanup Service

By D. Clarence Snyder

Spies and corruption have always been problems for governments and corporations. When corporations became sovereign nations, those problems did not go away. They became intertwined and compounded until they landed on Senator Saul.

One of his employees stole the most valuable prototype in the history of a nation-status corporation, but that isn’t a problem. The thief was arrested and a freelancer recovered the prototype. When a spy is caught, scrutiny follows. A decade of operations and actions would be questioned. Saul sponsored the thief’s citizenship, but that could be explained. What no Senator wants to explain is a captured spy’s role in election fraud.

As a freelancer, Butcher specializes in only one thing. He does it well. He does it efficiently. It also happens to be the one thing a corrupt Senator needs done to avoid explaining what his former employee might reveal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: D. Clarence Snyder
• Release date: Feb 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370649778

D. Clarence Snyder

D. Clarence Snyder is a retired Master Sergeant and unabashed nerd. His previous work includes uncredited technical articles; several issues of the comic book series The Tick; and an infrequently updated blog and web comic.

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Butcher’s Cleanup Service

A Short Story in the Bright Future

by D. Clarence Snyder

Copyright 2016 by D. Snyder

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

Butcher’s Cleanup Service

About the Author

Also by D. Clarence Snyder

... the opportunity for defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself. -Sun Tzu

Butcher’s Cleanup Service

Have you ever killed anyone before? Saul asked with labored breath. Proximity to a direct, physical confrontation had reduced him from a powerful corporate senator to a sweating, disheveled man in a shirt and tie.

Never the same guy twice like that, Butcher answered. He was shorter on words than breath. He seemed relaxed even though he had done all of the heavy lifting.

Saul leaned weakly against the open door of the van. The inside was messy – overwhelmingly messy. It looked like someone had made a pomegranate and blood orange smoothie without securing the lid on the blender. Instead of a yogurt base, the errant dietician selected raw and expired hamburger. The smell drew forth food-poisoning-like revulsion. Everything inside of Saul wanted to escape from him all at once.

Saul had seen a dead body before. He could not have reached his position in a corporate state without that experience. Through the years, other men – men who had held important positions – had passed on. Politics demanded that he show respect and attend their funerals. Those bodies were different from the one on the floor of the van. Most of them had also been murdered, committed suicide, or succumbed to some fast moving, violent, and horrific illness contracted on an eco-tourism adventure. Synthetic organs and cloning technologies could replace damaged and failing organs and; age lacked the teeth to end life that it once had. With the advanced technology and excessive wealth of the corporate nation, death came only from messy causes. At funerals, the bodies were all cleaned, dressed, and posed to give the appearance of life. In Saul’s experience, dead bodies were serene, resting comfortably in their best suits – except for one woman who insisted she be cremated nude so that her smart fabric clothing could be recycled and sold for the good of the corporate coffers.

Saul had known most of them only by reputation. This body had been Nestori Alih. Saul knew his nickname was Nestea. Saul had met his mother and had a recurring reminder on his calendar for her birthday. Nestori didn’t work in Saul’s department anymore. That was partially because he betrayed his company – their country. Saul had officially terminated Nestori’s employment an hour earlier. In totality, Nestori would not be working for anyone, ever again, because what remained of Nestori was lying on the floor, twisted and broken, with his perforated face caved into a gaping hole in his hollowed-out skull. It wasn’t serene or calm; it barely looked like a human being.

Butcher had worked quickly to remove all of the body’s synthetic parts that included information storage modules. Nestori’s cell phone and computer terminal were mostly destroyed by the bullets, so Butcher only needed to reach in with his bare hands and scoop out the few bits that had remained. Like many hardware developers, Nestori had synthetic hands, which contained interface contacts and power ports to aid in his work. The memory modules in the hands usually contained only short-term information and some firmware for operating their special features, but Butcher was thorough. He had filleted Nestori’s arms with a knife in his fingernails and pulled out the chips.

Butcher stood, decorated with spatters of blood and an evil curl of a grin. He dropped the dead man’s synthetic parts into a pouch on