The Decaying Dream of America: I Assemble Corpses and Confront Madness

The pale fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, a sound like the flapping of countless mosquitoes' wings, an endless whisper.

The air was filled with a stench of formaldehyde, rust, and the smell of meat.

This is the smell Lin Zheng is most familiar with, and it is also the backdrop to his numb daily life.

Lin Zheng was wearing a waterproof apron stained with blood and medical gloves, his slender fingers moving nimbly.

Preparing for the upcoming "work".

The sound of metal scraping echoed in the empty cold storage.

A deep, hoarse voice broke the silence of the cold storage, accompanied by heavy, dragging footsteps.

"Hey, Doctor, the goods have arrived. You know the rules, sign for it first."

"I haven't even gambled yet, and I might not be able to stand staying in the US for a few more years."

"We don't understand this. Doctor sounds nice. Dr. Lin, how great and prestigious."

"Okay, that name sounds pretty good, it sounds impressive."

The visitor was Jones, nicknamed "Little Bones".

He was thin and bony, with yellowed teeth, and always wore a greasy baseball cap with the brim pulled low, obscuring his eyes, which appeared evasive and wary from years of walking on the edge of danger.

To put it bluntly, he's ugly and skinny, with eyes that dart around everywhere, and looks like a scoundrel no matter where you look at him.

He made light of everything around him, including death, in a glib and witty manner.

It seemed that what he delivered was not a corpse, but a package waiting to be received.

Jones quickly dragged a black, heavy body bag from the back of the truck and threw it onto the concrete floor next to Lin Zheng's stainless steel autopsy table with a thud.

The sound was dull and viscous.

Lin Zheng didn't say anything, but simply took the paper and pen handed to him and quickly signed his name on several crumpled forms.

Jones quickly stuffed the form into his jacket pocket, chuckled, and rubbed his hands together.

He leaned closer to Lin Zheng and whispered, "Dr. Lin, this batch of goods is said to be of pretty good quality, you know what I mean."

"Some clients have 'quirks' that are much more 'unique' than you or I imagine, and my prices are negotiable."

Lin Zheng simply shook his head and didn't reply.

He knew perfectly well what Jones meant by "special"—

It could be some rare organ, or an unusual "souvenir" left on the body.

Those items can fetch exorbitant prices on the black market, but they often also imply deeper dangers.

He didn't want to cause trouble; his only goal was to survive.

He just wanted to earn that meager "assembly fee" peacefully, staying away from all the temptations that would make him soberly aware of the world's madness.

"You'll always run into trouble eventually. Come to me then, and I guarantee I'll give you the price of a regular customer."

Jones grinned, revealing a set of yellow teeth, a smile tinged with cynical mockery.

"Alright, take care of yourself. I don't want to see you again on the dissection table."

Lin Zheng casually responded with a joke, not taking the matter to heart.

Jones just smiled, turned around and got into the truck.

With a roar of its engine, the black van quickly disappeared into the darkness at the entrance of the cold storage.

The cold storage fell silent again, with only the low hum of the fluorescent lights and the occasional sound of the water pump starting in the distance.

Lin Zheng looked at the black body bag on the ground and took a deep breath.

The pungent smell of formaldehyde in the air instantly filled his nasal cavity, trying to awaken his numb senses.

His thoughts began to wander slowly, and he often fell into this half-awake state when preparing for his next "job".

He should be in a lab at Miskatonic University, wearing a clean white lab coat, dissecting mice and rabbits, not here facing unidentified corpses.

That was such a distant and pure "American Dream".

But he soon discovered that his lack of academic expertise was quickly marginalizing him, and the high tuition fees were an invisible knife, slowly slicing away at his future.

He was forced to follow his mentor's instructions, cutting off all respectable escape routes and stepping into the gray industry of "building Gundams".

Saying he was forced was actually his way of justifying himself, like a prostitute deceiving herself.

Telling yourself this in your heart can help him conceal his past as the "Nine Thousand Years Old" serving his mentor and managing his affairs.

Actually, this is a rare and well-paid job, one that can only be obtained by being a close confidant of the mentor.

Fortunately, as a confidant of his mentor, his mentor only needed him to serve people, not to serve his backside.

Ha ha.

Lin Zheng's job is to piece together the fragmented corpses like Lego bricks to restore their "integrity".

This is to satisfy the perverse demands of those secretive clients for "flesh and blood art," or to meet the research requirements of certain pharmaceutical companies.

At first, he would vomit and tremble.

Later, he learned to become numb, to completely detach himself, and to treat each corpse as a "part" in order to protect his crumbling sanity.

Now, he stands in front of a "Gundam".

Unzipping the body bag open, an even stronger aura, a mixture of death and frost, instantly assaulted his senses, but Lin Zheng was already used to it.

He lowered his head, preparing to begin his daily routine.

He instinctively raised his right hand, intending to pull back the white sheet covering the corpse, but in the instant he pulled the cloth away—

Time stood still.

The hum of the fluorescent lights disappeared, and the smell of formaldehyde disappeared.

Lin Zheng's breath caught in his throat, turning into a slight, hissing sound.

His knees buckled, and his waterproof apron scraped against the ground as he knelt down.

Under the white cloth were familiar faces.

"Sam?"

He let out a breathy sound, not a call, but a confirmation of a nightmare.

The plaster model, devoid of all color and bathed in stark white light, could not answer him.

But that familiar brow bone, that ever-present, innocent smile—

He was the first friend I met here, a tall, 1.97-meter-tall Black man, as muscular as a small mountain, but now he was stuffed into a body bag, looking unusually cramped.

"Hey Lin, is it another 'a'? Are you sure this isn't 'alpha'?"

Under the dim lights of the library, Sam scratched his fluffy curly hair with his broad hands, revealing his signature honest smile, and pointed to the wrong questions that Lin Zheng had circled for him.

"Sam, you need to look carefully. How can I teach you calculus if you can't even get the symbols right?"

Lin Zheng wore a helpless yet warm smile.

"Haha, as long as you teach me, that's fine, Doctor."

"When I become a doctor, a lawyer, or make a lot of money, I will never forget you."

Sam is always like this, sincerely expressing his dreams, even if they are still far away.

Lin Zheng once asked him, "With such a tall and strong physique, why don't you play basketball or rugby?"

"I don't want to take those steroid enhancers, I don't want to be livestock or gladiators for people's entertainment, I want to be a doctor or a lawyer!"

"Sam's eyes were resolute then, full of longing for the future."

Later, Sam gave everything he had for his brother.

He used his savings of three thousand US dollars, his wages of four thousand US dollars for working at the dock this month, and his advance payment for next month's wages, totaling more than ten thousand US dollars, to send his brother, who was addicted to drugs, to a drug rehabilitation center.

Lin Zheng had advised him at the time: "Sam, you're already doing well enough to keep yourself safe. Why get involved in this mess?"

"I want to save my brother, to make him a human being like me, instead of an animal."

Lin Zheng touched Sam's cheek with his hand. "Sam, wake up."

At this time, they should be taking a nap in the library lounge; all we need to do is wake him up.

A gun pulled its trigger from a great distance—

Pain exploded deep within his consciousness.

An invisible force surged from his fingertips, piercing through his cold skin and connecting directly to Sam's battered body.

dark.

Icy.

And the boundless, excruciating pain, like thousands of steel needles piercing flesh at the same time, or a dull knife cutting inch by inch.

Sam's distorted screams echoed in Lin Zheng's ears; it was a desperate lament he had never heard before.

Everything Sam experienced in the final moments of his life was forcibly implanted into Lin Zheng's mind!

He "saw" Sam tied up in a damp basement, his body covered in blood and whip marks.

A man, his face blurred by the surging blood mist, stood before Sam with a cold indifference.

He toyed with an exquisite dagger in his hand, the tip of which lightly grazed Sam's chest, each stroke taking away a piece of flesh while avoiding fatal blows, prolonging the cruel torture.

The man seemed to be admiring a work of art, enjoying Sam's transformation from pain to despair.

Sam is begging for mercy.

He begged for mercy for his brother, for his family, and begged them to spare his brother, even if it meant letting him die alone.

But the man just laughed, a cold, mocking laugh.

"Sam, tell me, can rehab cure chemical drugs? Your brother was destined to be a part of this great flesh and blood."

"And you, your dreams, your efforts, you could have been a better sacrifice, instead of just low-energy fuel and chemical residue like your brother."

The man's tone was flat.

"Your brother's debts, everything you've done for him, are only to get you and him to your destined end faster."

Sam's struggles grew weaker and weaker due to blood loss.

The man looked at the wall beside him, where there was a dark, blurry pattern, a symbol that did not belong to any civilization.

The symbol seemed alive, writhing like a living thing in Sam's dying vision, emanating an ancient and evil aura that devoured everything.

The smile on the man's lips appeared even more eerie against the backdrop of the symbol.

Lin Zheng suddenly knelt down, a sharp pain shot through him, and everything went black.

What exactly is that evil symbol?