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The Phlebotomist

Page 2

by Chris Panatier


  The drone traveled through the early evening glow in electric silence, toward the rough geographical center of the Southern City Segment. This was one of four such segments that made up the city, along with North-by, Crosstown, and Eastern. Each had a distribution center that collected the day’s take from the donor stations in that segment. Totals from each were then shipped by transport drone to Central City Collection – CCC – downtown. Set in the middle of an urban forest, Triple-C was a sprawling complex that Patriot media proudly termed “the Heart” because it was the central hub for the circulation of blood to the Gray Zones. From our heart to yours, so it went.

  Willa put her hand to the side of the vault, anxious over the precious cargo warming inside. Her anxiety was double since she didn’t know when the coolant had actually gone out. It was possible the entire load was bad, and a single day of lost pay could break her.

  The drone settled and Willa quickly unclipped the vault. You have arrived at Patriot Distribution, SCS, said the drone. Will you be needing continued service?

  “No, thank you,” she said, her heart already pounding like a countdown.

  Have a most pleasant evening, then.

  “You too.” She rolled the vault onto the concrete apron in front of the building. The drone sped away.

  Set off from the more densely populated residential areas, SCS Distribution stood alone at the center of a magnificent hexagonal concrete expanse, surrounded by a wall with trees stretching up behind it. A single road led out and into the blood districts. As far as she could tell, the place was empty. No people or other drones. Just a speedloop tube descending from the building’s outer wall and into the ground at the far side.

  The transports had not yet taken to the sky, and until they’d all departed, she had time to deposit the vault. She wheeled it heavily to one side of the huge polygonal building where a cutout in the thick concrete had a processing interface that looked like an old automated teller machine.

  Willa’s orthopedics slipped on the moist concrete as she struggled to roll the cooling vault to the connection point at the far end of a ramp.

  Her bangs wicked away beads of sweat as she wrangled the vault. You’re too old for this. Finally, with her legs about to give, a loud click signaled the vault’s successful connection to the interface and it absorbed into the building. She rested against the wall for a moment, letting the cool cement sooth her nerves. Above, the blood transport drones began to filter from the building. They were wider and shorter than human transport drones, more utilitarian, and less refined – shaped like giant cigar boxes with ducted fans powerful enough to carry up to six cooling vaults apiece. Their only embellishment was the phrase BE A PATRIOT illuminated on their bellies.

  She felt for her touchstone at the end of its lanyard and navigated to the screen that would register if the blood had gone through. It still read 00.00. She’d gotten the blood to distribution but wouldn’t receive credit if it had spoiled. Holding her breath, she watched the numbers and willed them to change. They had to change. They had to. Afraid to blink, her eyes started to burn.

  … 47.52 liters

  Relief. A stay of execution. Only two and a half liters rejected.

  She exhaled and stood up. Aside from the exiting parade of blood drones, she was alone. The air smelled like rain. She pulled up the hood on her reaper’s black and began walking. Maybe she’d get home before it really came down.

  She stopped after only a few steps, thinking that she’d heard something like a distant mosquito. It became more pronounced, a high-pitched whining that seemed to emanate from the squadron. One of the drones had fallen below formation. Even if it cleared the wall, she could see it wouldn’t make it over the trees. A tick of panic came at the loss of such a large amount of blood, especially after she’d exerted so much effort to save a single vault. She briefly envisioned herself running underneath to try and catch it. Much as she disliked the Harvest, the Gray Zones needed every drop. Willa drew up her touchstone and alerted Patriot Emergency.

  The motors on the drone struggled as it sank, with one exploding in a torus of glowing shrapnel. It hit the compound’s outer wall and smashed to the ground, sending prop blades into the hull and gashing the steel. Vaults tumbled onto the pavement as the twisted carcass came to rest. Willa felt herself drawn through the debris field, but stopped short of the drone, still showering sparks. Calm down, she thought, there’s no one in there.

  A metal ring rolled lazily to her foot where it toppled over, and silence returned. She took stock of the scene and began toward the wreckage, careful to avoid the red slick of donor blood that would soon coat the asphalt. But as she neared the drone, her stomach twisted.

  There wasn’t any.

  She triggered her touchstone’s light and flashed it over the ground. Not so much as a drop of red, and no bags whatsoever. Had they remained inside the vaults through the crash? Had they all somehow held? Their poly construction was strong, sure, but those fan blades… it seemed impossible. Nearby, a dented vault laid open on its side, one wheel still spinning. She knelt to look inside.

  Suddenly a white light blanched her vision. Willa turned into the beam eyes closed, her touchstone held aloft. “Willa Mae Wallace!” she yelled. “Station Eight, SCS.”

  The light descended from the sky and settled nearby. She cracked an eye just enough to make out the shape of a Patriot security drone silhouetted against the backdrop of the outer wall.

  “Step inside, please,” came a voice.

  Willa took a final glance at the carnage and headed for the drone. When she was clear of the glare, the door opened to reveal a nice-looking man standing inside. He was in his early forties with a tanned face and a full head of brassy hair. His beige suit set off a bright pink tie and matching pocket square that immediately made Willa think of country clubs – if those still existed someplace. Her eyes were drawn to a gold pin in the shape of the letter “P” with the stem plunged through an anatomical heart that rested against his lapel.

  “Yes, well, the newer insignias are terribly bland, are they not?” He spoke as if already in mid-conversation. “I suppose I flout the corporate message by remaining loyal to the original logo after a rebrand.”

  “I’ve seen you at our station before, I think,” Willa said, “but I’m afraid I don’t recall your name.”

  “Jesper Olden.” His voice had the velvety timbre of wealth. “Patriot security. Please, step in from the cold.” He took her hand and helped her inside.

  “You don’t look like security,” she said, forgetting herself, then quickly added, “I mean – my apologies, it’s been a long day. You just don’t see people dressed like you many times in the year. Especially not out in the districts.”

  “No offense taken, Ms Wallace.” He tapped the control screen. “We should have you home in fewer than two minutes.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that, sir, I’m OK walking.” But just like that, Willa felt the drone lifting off.

  “Nonsense. We don’t need you getting hit on the head by a defective drone.” He gave a tepid chuckle. “Think of the liability.”

  Willa smiled weakly. Liability? The court system had long ago been largely dismantled, now used only to settle financial disputes among corporations and wealthy individuals. Regular people didn’t meet the net worth threshold to utilize the system. His choice of words was perplexing. Maybe he was just using outdated vernacular as a matter of habit. Perhaps he was so out of touch that he didn’t even consider how ridiculous the reference had been. He stared blithely out the window and Willa decided that must be it.

  “Well,” she said, “thank you for the ride.” She stepped to the opposite side of the passenger compartment and took a seat. Relief was immediate. She’d always stored anxiety in her feet.

  Olden considered the viewscreen. “Ah, there they are. The diagnostics on the crashed drone, see?” He gestured to some figures that Willa couldn’t make out and gave the rest a cursory review. “Did you hear or se
e anything odd? Did you note anybody in the area before it went down?”

  “I didn’t see anyone else,” she affirmed. “It just fell, that’s all.” There had been at least one empty vault in the wreckage but she had a gut feeling she wasn’t supposed to have seen that.

  “No one saw you there?”

  “Not anyone other than you, Mr Olden.”

  “Wonderful. I appreciate the effort you made to get your take processed, especially this close to our Patrioteer conference.” Willa knew about the conference, an annual two-day meeting for upper management to do whatever it was upper management did. Jesper played with the screen. “Let me credit you, let’s say, five hundred as bonus for your effort. Is that fair?”

  “Oh, Mr Olden, you shouldn’t do that,” she protested, uncomfortable accepting unearned lucre.

  “Don’t be foolish, Ms Wallace.” He tapped in the amount. “That drone could have killed you.”

  “It was nowhere near–”

  “Willa. May I call you Willa?” he said without really asking. “I insist on it. Patriot insists on it.” He brightened. “You could buy Halloween candy this year. Five hundred would cover the entire segment, I’d bet. You’d be royalty.”

  “It’s too much, Mr Olden, I’d prefer you didn’t give me any money.” The amount was more than a week’s pay, and easy money came with strings. Aside from that, Halloween hadn’t been observed for at least twenty years.

  “And I’d prefer our drones not endanger top performers.” He tapped the display. “Now let’s not have any further discussion of the matter. With anyone.”

  “I’m just happy to do my job.”

  “I assure you, Willa, we appreciate it.” He flattened his suit jacket. “Ah, here we are at your stack. Do you feel well enough to return to work or will you need some days off?”

  “I’m fine,” she said as the door opened. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “Lovely, then. A good evening to you and to Isaiah.”

  She shivered at the mention of Isaiah. It always surprised her when Patriot managers voiced little details about her life that she considered private. She halfway assumed that the executives received prompts from their implants whenever they spoke with low level workers to make them seem more relatable or friendly. But she never got used to hearing strangers mention her family members out of turn.

  The drone lifted away and her touchstone signaled the arrival of the money. An influx of five hundred would have had her rejoicing and thanking God out loud if she’d actually earned it. Entering her apartment stack, it felt like a chain.

  She greeted Isaiah with a suffocating embrace that made him lose whatever game he was playing on his old viewer and he grumbled an objection.

  Claude, who had come over to keep an eye on Isaiah, politely passed on a dinner invitation. She couldn’t blame him. He was a station supervisor and didn’t have to eat from The Box like everyone else. The Box – a literal box of prepackaged food – was provided by Patriot to residents of the blood districts who maintained one-hundred percent participation in the Harvest. The idea had been sold as a way to streamline subsistence programs. Instead of going to the store and picking out groceries for yourself and your family, the government picked them for you. Processed mystery meats and condensed dairy, sickly sweet canned fruit cocktails, powdered grains. On lucky weeks, a handful of oat cubes or tea. Many lowblood families relied on The Box completely. With her job, Willa leaned on it as a supplement, but few were able to live entirely Box free. She’d pass on it too if she could.

  She and Isaiah ate genmod pasta prepared with a splash of black-market vinegar, topped with the last of some dehydrated poultry cubes that she’d managed to stretch over a full week. She stirred her bowl until they puffed into something that resembled the meat they had once been, and took small bites, chewing deliberately to make it all last. Isaiah devoured without ceremony.

  A thought occurred to her, curiosity in the wake of her encounter at SCS, that she might tune to The Patriot Report. The show, which aired in place of the local news, touted Patriot’s blood collection statistics and good deeds. Willa considered it a painfully tacky program, tortuously drawn out to thirty minutes in length, and cast in the mold of an old lottery-drawing segment complete with a shiny host yammering on through billboard teeth. The company served a vital role but bragging about it in such an ostentatious fashion left a bad taste. The fringes of the country were at war. People were suffering.

  Swallowing her disgust, she turned it on, drawing Isaiah to the screen like a moth to a porchlight. Another reason she rarely watched anything.

  “Isaiah, please,” she said, yanking him back a reasonable distance. “It’s nothing good.”

  Tanned darker than a roast turkey, the host was flanked by two scantily-clad assistants who held up digital posters announcing the statistics for every precinct within each of the four city segments. Willa did a double take. Setting her dinner to the side, she paused the screen and quickly added the figures. Southern City Segment was reporting a full take, highest in the city.

  Impossible. With a crashed drone – carrying what were most likely empty vaults – SCS should have been dead last. They were either mistaken or they were lying. She reached for something to write with and jotted down the numbers, thinking she’d discuss it with Claude, but her pen scratched to a halt. Jesper had been clear. She couldn’t tell Claude, couldn’t tell anyone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  PHENOTYPE

  The observable physical properties of an organism, determined by the combination of that organism’s inherited genes and the environmental influences upon them. Within the ABO blood group system, phenotypes are expressed generally as A, B, AB, and O.

  Sleepless nights were the norm. Only now there was a new reason for her insomnia. The crashed drone and its incongruence with The Patriot Report had Willa’s mind aquake. Why would they offer her such an obscene amount of money to stay quiet? Why would they lie about the number of units they’d collected?

  The morning’s cool light filtered in from the window. She sighed deeply, opting to lie in bed just another minute to let her bones acclimate before forcing them into action. She rolled to the side and reached to the nightstand for her hair. It was just thick enough to look good, but not so heavy that it went crooked whenever she knelt or bent over. It was hot pink, her favorite color, but she chose it so that Isaiah could always find her in a crowd. It also didn’t hurt that it looked good against the reaper’s black. She rotated it until the mark on the band fell in line with the center of her brow and pulled it snug. It’d been thirty-seven years since Chrysalis first took her real hair. When it had finally begun to grow back, she found she actually preferred a bald head. A well-kept straight razor was cheaper than shampoo anyway.

  She twisted up from her bed underneath the apartment’s lone window, taking care to keep her nightgown from hiking, and put her feet in her slippers. Across the room, Isaiah snored soundly in his nook. The apartment’s second room was technically his, and he wasn’t a baby anymore, but she felt better being able to see him from her bed.

  In the kitchenette, Willa dropped a pair of oat cubes from The Box into a pot to boil, then doled them into bowls and began eating as Isaiah stirred. He rose zombie-like, climbed into his chair, and spooned the bland porridge into his mouth, eyes still closed.

  “Good morning, ’Saiah.”

  “Gramrrr,” he mumbled back.

  “We say ‘good morning’ in this house.”

  “Good morning, grandma,” he said.

  “That’s it,” said Willa, cleaning the last chunks from her bowl and taking it to the sink.

  From a carton over the counter she grabbed a fresh blood bag, tore the security seal, and peeled away the shrink-wrap. She removed the backing paper, flicked the cap from the needle, and slipped it into the port implant on her upper bicep. Her eyes wandered to Isaiah as she pressed the sticky bag to her skin and pulled on the tiny tab that triggered a chemical coolant pod in
side. At sixteen he’d be subject to the Harvest.

  They walked hand-in-hand down the street of their largely B-positive neighborhood, known as B Plus. Even though she was AB-positive, she could afford the modest upgrade in location on account of her job. B Plus was lowblood to be sure, but anything was better than AB Plus. Her daughter, Elizabeth, had hoped to send Isaiah to school in B Plus because of its success in placing children into the few available trade practicums, and Willa made just enough, with the extra blood sale here and there, to afford it. She remembered the days of her youth when college had been a goal of most parents, but nowadays it wasn’t something that regular people thought about. College was for another class altogether – the upper crust – those in wealthy neighborhoods like Capillarian Crest, far removed from the blood districts. And rich enough to bribe their way out of the Harvest.

  Willa sent Isaiah up the steps with a kiss and stayed on the sidewalk outside the school to make sure he made it to the teacher waiting just inside. He disappeared behind the glass and she watched until his shadow’s shadow had faded. All she hoped for was to stick around long enough to shepherd him to adulthood. That had been her promise.

  Back in Stall A, shorter lines told Willa that prices had dipped, and with the lull in donations she dwelled on the five hundred sitting in her account, lead-weight money she had no way to un-take. She never accepted anything from anybody unless she’d earned it, and the years had taught her that there was no such thing as free money. Sometimes a buyer simply paid in advance for a future thing unnamed. She scoured her mind for Olden’s motives, for what he might ask of her in the future, but other than keeping her mouth shut about the crash, she came up empty.

 

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