Excerpt
Through a listless gray dawn, he spotted the brilliant halogen spotlights of an approaching roadsweeper efficiently sucking away the bodies littering the street. A mobile cannon hose snaked around the reinforced yellow vehicle, its glowing digital eyes ceaselessly scanning the road. A powerful jet of recycled water washed the bodies toward several circular steel brushes. The corpses ghoulishly flopped as they were impaled by rotating needle shaped bristles and swept into bellowing vacuum chutes. He flinched at the sound of the momentarily straining engines. The extra power was required to feed each body through an internal pulper, the unforgettable sound not quite masked by the sweeper’s roaring engines.

Though he had observed the routine countless times, he could never get used to the brutal disposal of what had once been living beings. Yet his own interest in the bodies was equally callous. Hard currency awaited those who dealt in body parts, the underground labs offering a fortune for usable organs in their quest to find a cure for the pox. He shook his head and grimly watched the roadsweeper thunder by, the water cannon’s icy spray a rude shock against his face. He gasped and almost lost his grip, his swollen fingers barely able to grasp the decayed rung. Bitter with frustration, he painstakingly pulled the grating shut—its echoing resonance hammer blows in his ears. Slowly, haltingly, he descended into his twilight world.