You're a US police officer, what are you thinking about going back to the East for?

Chapter 209 The Young Shop Assistant (5k)

Lyon carried the unconscious old man out of the chemical plant ruins and came to the Ford Explorer parked by the roadside. He opened the rear door with one hand and carefully laid the withered old man flat on the leather seat in the back.

The old man was in very bad condition.

Although a tactical tourniquet was wrapped around his thigh and the torn wound was forcibly plugged with a blood-clotting sponge, his ashen face showed almost no color, and the rise and fall of his chest was very weak.

Leon stood by the open car door, frowning as he stared at the old man in the back seat, his mind racing as he quickly considered what to do next.

He brought up the system panel on his retina and glanced at his current data.

"Damn it, I'm too unbalanced in my studies."

Lyon cursed inwardly.

His system shop does indeed allow him to exchange broad-spectrum antibiotics, rabies immunoglobulin, and even tetanus vaccines for very low amounts of Justice Points, but the problem is that he has invested all his points in killing.

Whether it's 20 points in agility, rifle proficiency, or special driving skills, they're all designed to turn people into corpses.

For the old man's severe laceration with outward turning of the muscles in his calf, simply feeding him capsules and applying medication was not enough.

This requires meticulous debridement surgery to remove contaminated tissue, followed by professional vascular and muscle suturing.

As for Lyon himself, at most he could only use brutal methods on the battlefield to stuff his intestines back into his stomach and wrap them with bandages.

If you send him to suture the blood vessels, he'll probably cause the old man's leg to necrotize and die.

Should I take him to a public hospital or a private emergency center in Seattle?

The idea was immediately rejected by Lyon.

He knew all too well the nature of those oligarchic corporations in the United States.

When Bill Gates, the old man who made military gyroscopes, went bankrupt and became homeless, Raytheon didn't say a word and just let him fend for himself in the garbage dump.

As soon as it was discovered that Bill's hard drive data might have been stolen or that he might have been poached, Thor's security department immediately began a frenzied manhunt, offering rewards for information leading to his capture.

This old man in front of me is a researcher at Pfizer's research center. If you take him to the emergency room of a regular hospital, his fingerprints or facial features will be instantly entered into the nationwide networked medical system.

At that point, Pfizer's security chief will definitely follow the clues and come knocking on their door.

After all that effort, not only did the plan to steal the prize fall through, but it also left me with a mountain of trouble that I could never clear up.

"These big companies are full of lunatics. They leave people to rot on the streets like homeless people, but when they find out someone is going to poach them, they suddenly jump out and pretend to care."

Lyon sneered, immediately abandoning the idea of ​​going through the proper medical channels.

He stroked his chin, his gaze gradually becoming somewhat strange, as an absurd plan took shape in his mind.

He thought of Alex.

That biology student who works every day at "Ren'ai Biotechnology" doing outsourced work such as dismembering, packaging, and slicing body parts.

Is there any essential difference between dealing with the dead and dealing with the living?

If Alex could dismantle more than thirty gangster corpses riddled with bullets without batting an eye, then theoretically, sewing up the legs of a living old man should be no problem for him either.

It's simply a matter of using a scalpel to cut away the rotten flesh and then sewing the skin back up with needle and thread. It's all flesh anyway, and the structure won't change.

Although Leon knew very well that it was absurd to ask a forensic assistant who only knew how to collect corpses to perform surgical debridement and suturing on a living person, he didn't seem to have a better option at the moment.

He could exchange antibiotics and vaccines from the system; all he lacked was a skilled surgeon.

Let's get Alex connected first.

Having made up his mind, Lyon slammed the back door shut with a loud "bang".

He walked around the front of the car, opened the driver's side door, and got in.

As he turned the car key to start the car, Lyon took out his cell phone from his pocket.

He gripped the steering wheel with one hand and quickly typed a short message with the other, sending it to Lei, who was maintaining order outside the mosque.

"The situation has changed. Drag that fat man out of the mutton soup stall and make him take his usual tools and wait at the intersection."

After sending the message, Lyon casually tossed his phone onto the passenger seat and floored the accelerator.

The Ford Explorer pulled off a wild drift on the muddy ruins and sped straight onto the main road back to the 10th block.

Tenth Street in the West District, an open space outside the mosque.

The midday sun was blocked by thick clouds. In front of the second-hand trailer food truck, the line for food collection had shrunk to just a few people. The huge stainless steel pot was now filled with only a shallow layer of soup.

Lei stood firmly on the muddy ground beside the dining car, like a black iron tower.

He wore a cheap dark blue work jacket that looked like a tactical vest.

Lei clasped his hands in front of him, his eyes scanning the last few homeless people still queuing for meals with the sharpness of a hawk, maintaining order at the scene.

When the homeless people, restless from hunger, passed by him, they would instinctively hunch their shoulders and quicken their pace.

However, despite maintaining the vigilance of a veteran, half of Ray's attention was now focused on the fat man in the dining car who was wiping the cutting board with a rag.

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The scene he had just witnessed stirred up an absurd pain in his heart, which had long been numbed by opioids and despair.

About ten minutes ago.

A thin figure squeezed through the line to collect a meal.

It was a mixed-race Black child with Middle Eastern features, who looked to be no more than ten years old.

He was wearing a tattered hoodie that was clearly an adult's, the hem of which dragged down to his knees. He was so thin that he looked like a stick of firewood covered with a layer of black skin.

The child tiptoed and handed a plastic bowl to the window, looking timidly at Alex who was ladling soup.

"Sir—could I have a bowl of soup?"

Alex was sweating profusely from the steam in the pot. As he stirred the lamb at the bottom of the pot with a large, long-handled ladle, he casually asked a question.

"Where are your parents? Why are you leaving a little kid like you begging on the street in the middle of the day? This neighborhood isn't safe these days."

The child, holding the bowl, answered in a chillingly calm tone that was completely out of character for his age: "I don't have parents. They both died in the Middle East."

Alex paused noticeably as he scooped the soup. He frowned, about to press for more information, when the child spoke up to explain.

"My dad and mom used to participate in a cooperative project between the U.S. military and the U.S. military there."

"Later, when the US troops withdrew, there weren't enough seats, and my family couldn't get on the plane in time. The Taliban said my parents were traitors and hanged them in front of the villagers."

Alex froze on the spot.

He was still holding the spoon dripping with mutton soup, looking at the calm orphan in front of him.

"Then how did you, an orphan, end up in America?"

"Later, another US military refugee reception program took me on the plane."

The child looked at the soup in the pot and swallowed.

"But after I got to the United States, they said I had no relatives to rely on. After the receiving agency finished the form-filling process, they kicked me out. I couldn't find any food."

There was a few seconds of silence in the dining car.

After hearing this, Alex's lips moved, but a standard Chinese curse got stuck in his throat.

They kill without burying the dead—this perfectly reflects the nature of these white politicians.

When you are needed, America is a beacon of democracy; when you retreat, you are just a burden that adds to the weight of the helicopter.

When they need you again as material to promote American democracy, they'll bring you back; when they don't need you anymore, they'll discard you.

Although Alex is usually a chatterbox, he works at Renai Biotechnology, disemboweling the dead every day. He's seen all sorts of gruesome corpses and can't stand seeing kids who should be in school lying on the street like stray dogs waiting to die.

Alex took a deep breath and let out a muffled sigh.

"If you have no food, eat more."

Alex flipped his wrist and plunged the iron ladle into the deepest part of the pot, scooping out two of the largest pieces of bone-in mutton, broth and all, and slammed them into the child's bowl with a clatter.

Soup splattered onto Alex's greasy apron, but he didn't care. He turned around and grabbed three or four unleavened flatbreads from the box next to him, stuffing them into the child's arms.

"Go eat over there, don't let others take it," Alex waved his hand.

Hassan Imam, who was standing to the side distributing pancakes, froze in mid-air when he heard the child say that his parents had been executed by the Taliban for treason for assisting the US military. He was about to hand out a religious pamphlet.

Judging from Hassan's religious stance and Middle Eastern background, the child's parents are undoubtedly traitors who have abandoned their faith and ethnicity.

In Islamic doctrine, this is a more serious apostasy than that of a non-believer, and one will definitely be sent to Hell after death.

Just days earlier, Hassan had used the same doctrine to severely intimidate and drain the entire fortune of a former US military translator named Abdullah.

But when Hassan looked at the child who was so hungry that his hands were trembling, he ultimately chose to remain silent.

A complex struggle flashed in his deep eyes. Then, he put the leaflet with Quranic verses back on the table, silently turned around, and began tidying up the empty basins. Without saying a word, he let Alex stuff all the meat from the bottom of the pot into the traitor's descendant's hands.

Lei, standing a few steps away from the food truck, took in the whole scene.

Ray looked at the black child huddled in the corner, wolfing down his food.

His left leg was aching slightly.

It was damaged by an IED (improvised explosive device) in Iraq.

He was a veteran who risked his life and bled for the American flag in the desert. After returning home, he was treated like a football by the Department of Veterans Affairs and eventually became addicted to drugs and ended up on the streets.

That child was a war orphan whose entire family died because of a worthless American project. After being brought back to this "land of freedom," he was simply abandoned on the street to fend for himself.

Now, the two of them, one a "hero" of the United States and the other a victim of the United States, can only eke out a living together in this Seattle slum that reeks of urine.

The child survived on lamb soup given to him by an overweight Asian man and an elderly Muslim man.

As for myself, if I hadn't met that mysterious boss a few days ago, I'd probably be wrapped in a tattered blanket right now, queuing up with this kid for a bowl of hot soup.

Lei clenched his fists instinctively, his knuckles making a "crackling" sound as they rubbed together.

His last illusions about this vast national system were shattered to dust before this orphan of the Middle East.

Lei closed his eyes, took a deep breath of the air mixed with car exhaust and the smell of mutton, forcibly suppressed the frustration in his chest, and brought his attention back to the reality of his vigilance work.

He opened his eyes and resumed his aloof, towering demeanor.

Just then, he felt his secondhand cell phone vibrate in the pocket of his dark blue work jacket.

Lei immediately took out his phone and turned on the screen.

That was the latest text message sent from the boss's mobile number.

Lei's eyes instantly focused as he quickly scanned the text on the screen: "The situation has changed. Drag that fat guy out of the mutton soup stall and make him bring his usual tools to wait at the intersection."

Just as Ray saw the urgent instruction on his phone screen to "have Alex stand by with his tools," and put his phone back in his work jacket pocket, preparing to turn around and walk towards the food cart window to find Alex, a chilling sound of vomiting suddenly came from the side corner.

Ray, Alex who was preparing to wipe the cutting board in the food cart, and Hassan Imam who was tidying up empty basins not far away, all glanced at the sound at almost the same moment.

The Middle Eastern orphan wearing a baggy hoodie was kneeling painfully on the muddy ground.

He was clutching the plastic bowl containing mutton and flatbread tightly in his hands.

However, his stomach, which had shrunk severely due to prolonged lack of food, was unable to withstand the sudden influx of large amounts of high-fat mutton and indigestible dough, and was experiencing violent contractions and acute reflux.

"vomit one"

The child's thin back suddenly arched downwards.

A murky liquid, mixed with stomach acid, undigested chunks of meat, and paste, gushed uncontrollably from his nose and mouth, directly into the plastic bowl he was desperately protecting.

A pungent, sour smell instantly filled the air.

But what really sends chills down your spine is what the child did next.

After vomiting the disgusting contents into the bowl, he did not push the bowl away.

Instead, his bloodshot eyes were fixed on the scraps in the bowl, and tears mixed with snot streamed down his face uncontrollably.

He didn't know when he would be able to eat such hot meat again; it might be tomorrow, or it might never happen again.

Driven by this pure survival instinct, the child let out a beast-like whine. He buried his face directly in the plastic bowl full of vomit and frantically stuffed the sour, stinking semi-digested matter back into his mouth.

Alex stood in the food cart, and the greasy rag in his hand fell with a "thud" onto the stainless steel cutting board.

As a biology student, a series of deadly medical terms flashed through his mind, such as "acute gastric dilatation," "esophageal tear," and even "aspiration leading to suffocation."

Even Alex panicked when faced with a child who was practically pushing himself to the brink of death.

"Holy crap! Stop eating!"

Alex roared in desperation, his massive body bursting out of the back door of the food cart as he strode toward the child.

He reached out his hands, trying to snatch the plastic bowl that the child was clutching tightly in his arms.

"You'll rip your stomach apart! Let go!"

Just as Alex's fingers were about to touch the plastic bowl, the child who had been kneeling on the ground suddenly curled up into a ball, his back pressed firmly against the mottled brick wall, and his arms pressed the bowl tightly against his chest.

Alex was terrified by this extreme stress response, and his outstretched hand froze in mid-air.

He didn't dare to rob it by force anymore.

He was afraid that his nearly 200-pound weight, combined with the intense physical conflict, would break the fragile, skeletal child on the spot.

Just as Alex was caught in a dilemma, a thick, black hand reached out from the side, grabbed his shoulder, and yanked him back two steps.

It's thunder.

"Step back, don't touch him."

Ray's voice was low, his sharply defined black face tense, and the veins on his forehead throbbed.

As a veteran who had served on the front lines in Iraq, Ray had seen too many refugees starving in the ruins. He knew very well that for people in such a state of hunger stress, any attempt to take away their food would be seen as the most deadly threat.

"If you forcibly restrain him now, or take the bowl away, he will bite off his own tongue in panic, or suffer cardiac arrest."

Ray stared intently at the child who was still stuffing vomit into his mouth, and explained to Alex in a very fast voice.

But he himself was at a loss.

Ray tried to lower his voice and use a calm tone to soothe the war orphan, but his imposing physique, over 1.9 meters tall, became a huge negative factor at this moment.

If Lei took even the slightest tentative step forward, the child would tremble even more violently, the reflux in his stomach would become more intense, and large mouthfuls of acidic fluid would flow down the corners of his mouth.

At this moment, Hassan Imam also walked over quickly.

This religious leader, who was usually so dignified in the mosque, now looked at the child, who was defined by Islamic doctrine as the descendant of a traitor, suffering inhuman torture, and his deep eyes were filled with a profound sense of powerlessness.

Faced with the hardships of survival, any profound scriptures and threats about the afterlife appear pale and laughable.

Hassan abandoned his plan to recite the Quran to appease people. He grabbed a handful of his hair in frustration, then turned abruptly and ran quickly toward the side entrance of the mosque.

He couldn't help, so he could only try to pour a cup of warm sugar water or find a few clean towels, hoping to do some peripheral support in this desperate scene.

At the edge of the open space, a few withered yellow leaves were swept up by the cold wind.

Ray, a former army infantryman who can subdue street thugs with his bare hands; Alex, a 1.9-meter-tall medical assistant and body collector; and Hassan, an imam with great prestige in the West End.

These three grown men, who together could easily take down several street gangs, were now vomiting violently...

Faced with Middle Eastern orphans desperately guarding their food, I had absolutely no idea what to do.

Just then, the sound of brakes came from outside.

Lyon's car has arrived.

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