The Vultures are the GLMZ's body-pickup-and-disposal layer — the men who arrive after the shooting stops, before the blood has finished pooling, with unmarked refrigerated panel trucks and the specific bored efficiency of people who do the same job two or three times a night. Officially they are licensed corpse-removal contractors, registered under the bureaucratic shell name Carrion Logistics LLC, holding municipal hauling permits and chain-of-custody paperwork that would survive a routine audit if anyone ever ordered one, which no one does. Unofficially they are a federation of ghouls with overlapping jurisdictions, mutual non-aggression treaties, and an internal economy denominated in flesh, chrome, and gold.

Their history begins in the late 2180s, when GLMZ's collapse-era municipal services stopped collecting bodies from the Tier 1 streets and the corponations declined to fill the gap. Independent operators stepped in — first as scavengers stripping the dead for resaleable cyberware, then, as the volume scaled, as something resembling a sanitation infrastructure. By 2195 the trade had professionalized enough that the surviving syndicates began hiring Vultures on retainer for cleanup after their own work, and by 2210 the city itself was paying them per-pickup fees out of an unmarked sub-budget. The arrangement was not formalized into anything anyone would be willing to put their name on. It still is not. The Vultures continue to operate in the legal grey because the legal grey is the substrate they evolved in and they would not survive being moved to clean ground.

The primary trade is body removal. A Vulture crew arrives within twenty minutes of a notification — sometimes faster, depending on which district and which channel called them — and processes the scene with a checklist that has been refined over four decades: confirm cessation of vital signs (a formality, occasionally relevant), identify the body if possible (often they do not bother), tag the body with their internal manifest barcode, load, depart. The destination depends on the contract. Most bodies go to the contracted client — usually a crematorium, a research facility, an organ processor, or one of the corponation specimen-intake channels that accept unclaimed dead. Some go to the morgue and the dignified municipal end. Some go to buyers the Vultures find on their own, after they have stripped what they can sell off the body in transit.

Which is the second trade. Every Vulture crew pre-processes the body before delivery. Cyberware is harvested — anything tier-2 or above, anything with a resale market, anything that comes out cleanly with the equipment they keep in the truck bed. Jewelry, weapons, the contents of pockets. What goes onto the delivery dock is a body that has been culled of value. The clients know. The clients have always known. The clients pay the Vultures' rate because the alternative is doing the pickup themselves, which is not a thing anyone wants to do, so the skim is priced into the relationship and nobody talks about it. A body delivered to a research facility arrives with its NeoCortex array intact (the array is the product) but without the Tier 4 cardiac regulator and without the chrome jaw and without the watch on the wrist. The skim is structural.

The third trade is the one the Vultures are most known for in the residential sector and most denied in their official communications: organ repossession. When a citizen finances a replacement organ — kidney, liver, retinal array, cardiac valve — through one of the consumer-credit BCI lenders, the contract specifies a payment schedule and a default clause. If the citizen falls behind on payments past the grace period, the lender contracts the Vultures to repossess the asset. A two-man crew arrives at the residence in matching gray uniforms with the Carrion Logistics insignia stitched in matte black on the left chest. They knock. They present the paperwork. They are calm and professional. They are not police but they are licensed contractors and the law permits them to enter under the financing agreement's cooperation clause. The citizen has the right to call counsel. Counsel will not arrive in time. The procedure is performed on the citizen's kitchen table or living room floor with portable surgical equipment and analgesic that is administered at the technician's discretion. The organ is recovered. The citizen, if they survive, is left with a referral to a charity clinic and a balance-due notice for the remaining principal. The phrase *Vultures on the doorstep* is GLMZ shorthand for the worst day of someone's life.

The trade has scaled. The Vultures employ approximately four hundred field technicians across the GLMZ, organized into twelve dispatch nodes corresponding loosely to the city's territorial map. Each node has a senior Vulture who runs the schedule and arbitrates disputes. There is no central leadership — the federation operates by treaty between the nodes, with periodic cross-node meetings to rebalance jurisdictions and adjust the internal market in salvaged parts. The closest thing to a head is an elderly woman called Elder Marrow who has been arbitrating inter-node disputes since the late 2190s and whose actual name and residence are unknown to the technicians who work for her.

The Vultures do not kill anyone. This is the line, and it is a real line. Killing creates rivals and disrupts the supply chain; arriving after the killing keeps the supply chain reliable and the rivals minimal. A Vulture crew that initiates a homicide is dispatched by the federation itself, and the offending crew becomes its own pickup. This has happened seven times in twenty years and the seven times are how the rule stays a rule.