Chapter 4 : Table Scraps
[Meat Cute Charcuterie, Loading Bay — March 2015, 7:42 AM]
Watkins drove his own van. No employees, no assistants, no paper trail with a second pair of eyes attached. The man had criminal instincts buried under that crooked-glasses funeral director exterior — or maybe burying the dead for thirty years just taught you when to keep things quiet.
He backed the white panel van into the loading bay and killed the engine. I opened the bay door from inside. The morning air cut through — March in Seattle, wet and gray, the kind of cold that settled in your joints and stayed.
"Four this week." Watkins set a black duffel on the prep counter, the same way he'd done three days ago, except now we had a rhythm. A professional transaction between two men doing something the state legislature hadn't imagined when they drafted mortuary law. "Three elderly, one younger. Heart attack, thirty-six. The rest were natural causes — renal, stroke, pneumonia."
I unzipped the duffel. Four specimen bags, each tagged in Watkins' careful handwriting. Edna Krause, 78, renal failure. Gerald Simmons, 81, stroke. Marjorie Vos, 74, pneumonia. Daniel Park, 36, cardiac arrest.
"Same arrangement?" Watkins asked.
"Same arrangement." I handed him an envelope. Twenty thousand dollars — five per brain, four brains. The envelope was thinner than it should've been, which meant the safe upstairs was thinner than it should've been, which meant I had about seventeen thousand left to my name and a weekly expense that would eat that in five days.
Watkins pocketed the envelope without counting. Trust, or the understanding that a man who paid cash for human brains probably didn't shortchange his supplier. Either way, he was out the door in under three minutes. Clean. Professional.
I stood over the duffel and did triage.
Daniel Park — the youngest, strongest neural tissue — went to Jackie. She'd held it together since the diner, but five days of brain hunger left marks even a nurse's discipline couldn't hide. The texts she'd sent overnight were short, controlled, and spaced exactly two hours apart — the kind of rigid scheduling that meant she was rationing her own willpower on a timer.
I called her. She picked up before the second ring.
"I have your delivery."
"I'll be there in fifteen." Click. No small talk. No questions. Jackie ran on efficiency, and efficiency didn't waste syllables.
The three elderly brains went to the top-priority clients. Julian first — his daughter's recital was Saturday and the man needed to be functional enough to sit in a gymnasium without calculating the caloric value of the parents seated nearby. Mrs. Chen second — she'd graduated from breathing voicemails to texts that contained just the word WHEN in all capitals, repeated six times. Adler the corporate lawyer third — he'd pivoted from voicemails to sending courier-delivered letters on embossed stationery, which was either the classiest or most insane way to demand illegal goods I'd ever encountered.
That left three clients unfed: a dentist in Ballard, a retired firefighter in Wallingford, and a woman named Priya who worked at a tech startup and whose texts suggested she was the calmest of the group, which made me trust her the least. Calm people were either genuinely stable or masterfully hiding the moment they'd snap.
I sent the three of them the same message from Blaine's phone: Partial delivery this week. Full resupply by Monday. Hang tight.
It was Wednesday. Monday was five days away. Five days of three zombies rationing whatever reserves their last meal had left. The math said it was possible. The biology said it was a coin flip.
Jackie arrived at the back entrance in exactly fourteen minutes. Same green scrubs. Same hospital lanyard. She took the specimen bag, checked the tag — Daniel Park, 36, cardiac arrest — and looked at me.
"Thirty-six. Young."
"Cardiac arrest. Genetic condition — his intake form listed hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Nobody missed the signs until he dropped dead in a grocery store."
"And you chose this one for me."
"Youngest brain, strongest tissue. You've been starving the longest."
She held the bag against her chest. The same gesture as before — protective, almost tender, which was a hell of a thing to feel about a dead man's brain in a ziplock.
"What did you keep for yourself?"
"Edna Krause. Seventy-eight. Renal failure."
Jackie's mouth twitched. Almost a smile, if you were generous. "You gave yourself the worst one."
"Boss gets the scraps. Keeps the troops fed."
"That's—" She stopped. Recalibrated. Whatever she'd been about to say — something about the old Blaine, probably, who'd have eaten the youngest brain himself and let his clients fight over the leftovers — she folded it away. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Thank the taxpayers of King County for their indigent cremation program."
This time the smile broke through. Brief. Gone before it fully formed. But real.
She left. I locked the back entrance and carried Edna Krause's brain to the office.
The old woman's brain tasted like dust and diminished returns. Thin tissue, degraded neural connections, the flavors muted compared to the chef's brain from day one. My body accepted it the way a car accepts low-grade fuel — it ran, but without enthusiasm.
No immediate skill transfer. No visions. Edna Krause had lived seventy-eight years and whatever she'd accumulated — recipes, phone numbers, the name of every grandchild, the muscle memory of crocheting or gardening or balancing a checkbook — was locked in tissue too degraded to yield much.
But the hunger stopped. The jaw ache faded. The peripheral blur cleared. And that was enough.
While my body processed Edna, my hands did something interesting.
I stood at the kitchen counter with the Wüsthof knife and three onions from yesterday's purchase. Brunoise — quarter-inch cubes, consistent depth, clean cuts. The blade moved without conscious direction. My wrist rolled at the exact angle, the exact speed, with the exact pressure that a trained chef would use after a decade behind the line.
Five days. Five days since that first brain, and the chef's skill hadn't lost a single degree of sharpness.
I set up a proper test. Four techniques, timed. Brunoise: thirty seconds flat, uniform cubes across the board. Julienne: forty-two seconds, matchstick-thin strips that could've passed inspection in a professional kitchen. Chiffonade: twenty-one seconds, basil ribbons so fine they looked printed.
Then I tried something new — a recipe I'd never made in my old life, something the chef brain knew but I'd never consciously accessed. Gremolata. Parsley, garlic, lemon zest. My hands assembled it without hesitation — chopping the parsley to a specific fineness, mincing the garlic with the flat of the blade, zesting the lemon in long strokes that avoided the pith. The proportions were instinctive. The timing was automatic.
Two brains consumed. The second — Edna — hadn't yielded noticeable skills yet, might never yield much. But the first was still burning bright. Five days of undiminished, fully integrated cooking ability that should have faded three days ago.
I opened the ledger to the hidden page in the back and added a line:
Day 5 update: Chef brain skills — full retention confirmed. No measurable degradation. Knife work, recipe recall, flavor instinct, technique timing — all intact. Hypothesis: absorption may be permanent. Need more data points. DO NOT DISCUSS.
The pen hovered. Then I added:
If permanent: every brain is an investment, not a meal. Choose carefully.
I closed the ledger. Locked it in the desk drawer. The key went into my pocket — not Blaine's usual jacket pocket, where Don E or Chief might check out of habit, but the watch pocket of my jeans, the small one nobody used because it was designed for pocket watches in a century that didn't carry them anymore.
Don E knocked on the office door.
"Come in."
He stepped inside carrying a roll of masking tape and a marker. "Hey, so I reorganized the walk-in. Figured we needed a system — stuff was all over the place. Client inventory on the left, prep stock in the middle, incoming on the right shelf."
"Good thinking."
"And I, uh—" He shifted his weight. "I made a spot in the back corner. Labeled it." He looked at the floor. "'Boss Only.' For your... you know. Your stuff."
My stuff. My brains. A shelf in a walk-in freezer with my name on it, organized by a man whose previous boss would have backhanded him for showing initiative without permission.
"Don E."
"Yeah?"
"That's solid work. Really."
His face did the thing again — the brief confusion of a dog that expected a kick and got a scratch behind the ears instead. "Cool. Yeah. Cool." He backed out of the office, then stopped. "Oh — the pork order for the front case is short. Distributor says maybe Thursday."
"Handle it."
"On it."
He left. The masking tape and marker stayed on the corner of my desk. Boss Only. Two words in block letters on a strip of tape, and somehow they were the most human thing anyone had done for me since I'd landed in this body.
Across town — miles from Meat Cute, in a basement I'd never visited but knew from three complete rewatches of a television show — a morgue drawer opened under fluorescent lights. Inside: a seventeen-year-old named Eddie Torres, found in a drainage ditch off Aurora Avenue three weeks ago. Brain partially extracted. Skull fracture consistent with a hunting knife and a steady hand.
Eddie Torres. Page one of Blaine's ledger. The line through his name drawn by someone else's fingers in someone else's life.
The medical examiner's assistant — a woman with platinum hair under her spray tan, a woman who ate brains and saw the dead — would find Eddie tomorrow morning. She would catalogue his injuries. She would take a sample. And she would see a face.
My face. Blaine's face. Holding a knife.
But I didn't know that yet. I was in the office, counting cash and running numbers that came up red no matter how many times I rearranged them, listening to Don E whistle off-key in the kitchen while he labeled shelves for a business that sold pork sausages in the front and human brains in the back.
Seventeen thousand dollars left. Six clients, plus Jackie, plus me. Four brains per week at twenty thousand dollars per delivery.
The math had an answer, and the answer was: not enough.
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