Genocidal Organ by Project Itoh Read Free Book Online

that humans are really just physical objects. By which I mean just a mass of raw ingredients. When it comes down to it a dead body really is just a thing, like any other thing.
    The soldiers pushed the crumpled bodies further into the hole. A dead body isn’t exactly light, and with the corpses that didn’t conveniently fall backward into the pit, it took the soldiers much more than the couple of light kicks you’d imagine it would to push the lifeless bodies over the edge. In many cases, the soldiers had to kneel down and really put their backs into it.
    Now, it’s not as if I was unaffected by the scene in front of us, even if I had seen it all before. This was a blatant mass murder of innocent townsfolk, plain and simple—nothing can ever desensitize you to that completely. But the fact was that I’d seen so much casual, meaningless death in my life that I no longer felt the impulse to stop it at all costs. After all, it wasn’t as if we were much better equipped than the soldiers here. We might have been able to take them, or we might not. Anyway, we weren’t here as stakeholders. We were here as outsiders, neutral observers who had but one single-minded purpose: to kill our target.
    Not only that, I was carrying the responsibility for both the mission and my three subordinates on the team. We might have been able to rescue some of the people dying in front of our eyes, but it would mean the mission would end in failure for sure, and the crazed ex-brigadier general would escape to kill and kill and kill again—creating more innocent victims that would otherwise be saved if we took our target out now.
    Sure, some people might have called it a moral crossroads. All I knew was that now wasn’t the time to meditate on the finer points of ethical semantics.
    To be thick-skinned is to be enlightened. So, develop a thicker skin than the next man.
    So, as usual, we hardened our hearts, thickened our skins, and proceeded with the mission. This was made easier by the fact that our target was approaching, or rather our two targets were about to have their rendezvous. We finished the necessary emotional adjustments so that we could cope with the tragic scene in front of us, and in an instant we were ready for action.
    The ex-brigadier general who now styled himself defense minister led a peripatetic existence. He was always on the move, precisely to reduce the threat of assassination. Similar to what Saddam Hussein had done for many years to avoid capture. They say that Hitler too used to change his plans and his movements at the last minute, also to reduce the risk to his person. Once the sheer scale of the humanitarian disaster in the region became known to the world, the US decided to consider assassination as a tactic to help curb the chaos, but by that time the defense minister knew what to expect and what precautions to take to minimize the risk. After all, in his former incarnation he had been the beneficiary of training from the very same US intelligence apparatus that was now trying to assassinate him …
    Which was why it was only dumb luck that allowed our people to happen upon the intelligence that our targets would be meeting in this former mosque at this time. If we let this opportunity slip, who knew when the next opportunity would come about to stop the murderous yet prudent ex-brigadier general? We simply couldn’t afford to fail. And that was why we were able to abandon the dying people in front of us to their fates.
    “I guess we’re all going to hell,” said Alex. Young, devout Alex, with his master’s degree in Catholic theology. How he managed to cope with seeing hell on a daily basis in his work I never could work out. I guess he must have had some sympathetic—and very discreet—padre to whom he could make a copious confession after every mission.
    “As an atheist, I don’t really have a reply to that, I’m afraid,” I said.
    “You don’t have to believe in God to know that hell’s