The Phlebotomist

by Chris Panatier

  The men left the kitchen and went to organizing the children. Willa heard their voices throughout the house, rousing and gathering. She stood bewildered and finally got air into her throat sufficient to ask, “Where… Where are you taking them? I don’t–”

  “Bahamas,” Lock answered. “Seychelles.”

  Willa shrugged.

  “Sweetheart, you never use code words? You’re missing out,” said Lock. “They’re safe houses, girl. Time to ’git.”

  “What’s this one called?”

  “Paradise Island.”

  Willa rushed into the front room and loaded Isaiah’s backpack. “Where are we going now?” he asked.

  “Somewhere just like this.”

  “I don’t want to leave my friends.”

  “You don’t have to. A bunch of them are coming with.” She helped double-knot his shoes and shouted toward Lock, “Do you have a plan or something?”

  “Sure, uh, yeah. Hey, can you come on in here for just a sec,” called Lock from the kitchen, “I’ll tell it you.”

  Willa took Isaiah by the shoulders. “You help those other kids get their things together, ’kay baby?” He nodded obediently, like he always did.

  In the kitchen, Lock looked like she’d seen a ghost. “Claude’s movin’.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AUTOLYSIS

  The self-destruction of dead or dying cells.

  He was moving, though not like a person moves; rather like something that had never lived. Like a scrunched drinking straw wrapper dabbed with water. Shrinking and expanding in different places at the same time. His face had melded to the skin of his forearm on which it rested. His back appeared sunken and slack underneath his windbreaker, its fabric drooped over shoulder blades like collapsed tent poles. His features dropped while his body began to slough from the bones. Bits of him drifted to the floor as if made of sawdust. Thickly clumping powder, still moist, poured from his pants legs, into and over his shoes. His sleeves dropped to his sides, drawn down by the weight of his disintegrating arms that spilled into miniature dunes across the tiles. At last, his neck and head slumped onto the table, becoming unrecognizable mounds of dust.

  Willa and Lock shared the moment speechlessly. Willa leaned over and blew some of the dust from where Claude’s head had been, gestured to Lock.

  “What are you doing?” Lock asked.

  “Pen,” demanded Willa, blowing again. A fleck of gold appeared amid the remnants. Using the pen, she lifted yet another miniature fang-bearing skull from the wreckage.

  “Lady,” said Lock, “you know anyone that ain’t a vampire?”

  The thing was identical in shape and appearance to the one that had come from Scallien, but the pointy tendrils were shorter, their barbs less pronounced.

  “Arright,” said Lock. “Put him in the bag and let’s go.”

  Accommodation inside the Seychelles was spartan, even compared to Paradise Island. There was a stove from which Lock siphoned gas from a neighbor, who was probably siphoning it from theirs. The weak flame barely heated a kettle, though something about being able to drink a cup of tea – even if dilute – worked to raise the spirit. Lock had earlier flown a sortie to an associate, the mysterious Jethrum, and sold off Claude’s A-neg at what she labeled a usurious discount. Nevertheless, it earned them enough to feed both of the safe houses for a few weeks, if they were austere, which they always were. Willa didn’t mind her belly growling so long as she had some tea, and she rejoiced that she’d remembered to bring some of the minty stuff along.

  Isaiah and the other children continued to harass Everard in the shared space. He was a natural with them, knowing just when to be firm and when to let them burn off their cabin fever. Sometimes this meant allowing the children to dogpile and pummel him, during which he feigned protest, but couldn’t suppress the joy in his voice.

  “All these years of collecting whole blood,” Willa said, testing the sides of her mug with her palms. “They told us it was because they didn’t have the anticoagulant required to fractionate, but it was just because they only eat whole blood!”

  “Apparently they eat a lot of it.”

  “What do you mean?” Willa asked.

  “Well, your boy Claude, he bit the dust pretty fast like, didn’t he?”

  “Hey!” snapped Willa. “Claude saved me. He may have saved all of us.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” said Lock. “My point is, how long could it have been since he ate? Not long, right? He had a whole cache of the stuff. Fifty-five total units. If they have to eat so often, then how much are they putting down across the board? How many of them are there? How many employees in Patriot? I mean, are we dealing with a couple dozen of these guys or thousands?”

  Willa shrugged. “Patriot is big, it’s everywhere. I don’t know how many employees there are in total. But we collected a lot of blood. Millions of units per year.”

  Lock cleaned her goggles, reaffixed them to her forehead and yawned. “We know the blood drones are bogus. That’s for sure. So the blood goes where that Speedloop tube goes.”

  “I suppose,” Willa agreed, though the revelation was hardly helpful. They both knew the tube might as well have been invisible, as there was simply no way to trace its path. The advent of transport drones had brought with it many unforeseen consequences, not the least of which was the slow extinction of geographic directions, of maps, and even the end of memorized pathways from one place to another. Only the perpetually ambulant – the poor – still had to know and appreciate spatial relationships, learn the compass rose, and actually remember how to get from one place to another.

  The speedloop, a frictionless, high-speed, high-capacity transportation system, was all over and largely underground, making its actual pathways impossible to know. Figuring out where it might emerge, or the origin of any single termination point, was impossible, absent spending the money to ride on it – an option not generally available to the low- or midbloods. The tube that Willa had seen running from SCS Distribution could end up anywhere, and it wasn’t one you could simply buy a ticket to ride on.

  “Do you have anyone over there at Patriot who could help us… preferably someone who identifies as human?” asked Lock.

  “They all identify as human,” said Willa.

  “You know my point.”

  Willa shook her head. Her stallmates at DS8 could hardly be considered acquaintances, and what’s more, they were mostly idiots.

  Lock palmed Scallien’s relic. “And the only two of these creatures you knew are now dead.”

  Willa nodded along and sipped her tea, then quickly swallowed a scorching mouthful as she suddenly remembered. “No!” she said, shooting up from her chair. “There’s another one. He’s a board member at Patriot.”

  “He’s one of these?” Lock held up the relic.

  “He has to be. I saw his PatrioText conversation with Scallien. He’s the one that gave her permission to liquidate me.”

  “That’s what they called it? Liquidate you?” Lock asked. “That’s cold, Willa. What’s the fella’s name?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  AGGLUTINATION

  When cells adhere to each other.

  Willa waited in the middle of the concrete expanse, hardly believing that she had returned. By herself, she was exposed, vulnerable. Her situation stood in stark contrast to the last time she’d visited, then so keenly intent on doing her job, going beyond the call of duty to make sure the blood she’d collected got where it needed to go so that it could save lives. The thought that it was all probably a terrible lie had her brimming with rage and she briefly considered spitting on the SCS Distribution grounds.

  She made her way toward the building, toward the same interface into which she’d delivered her vault a lifetime ago. She’d planned her walk so as to arrive at dusk, only a few minutes before the drones began their skyward march to the Heart. As the sun dropped behind the trees, they came single file from the roofline, the muffled
buzz of their ducted fans hardly louder than an electric razor. A flock of grackles took to the air from a copse of pines behind the wall that ringed the perimeter. She followed the birds as they congealed into a disc with a slight depression in the middle, and thought immediately of red blood cells.

  She counted the drones, read the words on each belly. Sneered at how they’d twisted a message she’d once been proud of. Be a Patriot. And even though she knew what was coming, she still jumped when the first one went down, careening into the concrete wall, its body disintegrating from around empty blood vaults. A second crashed down behind it.

  They were past the point of no return now. Her heart was rocking. Her hands shook. And she realized that sweat had soaked into the shirt at her ribs – despite the cold – as anxiety gripped down. Her mind said run. But that wasn’t the plan.

  For the first time in days, she thought of what she must look like, or worse, smell like. She’d sponged off a handful of times over the tiny sink inside Paradise Island, but now with the prospect of seeing someone outside of Lock’s crew, she felt doubly conscious of her appearance. She laughed aloud at the inanity of the thought and dug around in her bag for some lipstick. She twisted up a bullet of bold magenta and applied it in a clipped flourish, then smoothed down the pink hair that she had earlier re-donned. She capped the makeup and dropped it into her bag just as the lights of a security drone ascended into the sky from the center of the distribution building. Nervously, she flattened the folds of her reaper’s black. Would it be Jesper or somebody else? She supposed it really didn’t matter.

  The drone landed nearby. Olden emerged and breezed around to where Willa stood. He extended an open hand, which she took instinctively. “We have a kill on sight order for you, Ms Wallace,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her knuckles. “But I confess that my curiosity was too much! I simply couldn’t help myself. I’m dying to know why our lovely blood drones always come crashing down in your presence. They aren’t cheap, you know.”

  “They’re fake.”

  “Well, of course they’re fake, Ms Wallace. I commend you on your powers of deduction. Though to be fair, you had a little help from Scynthia, rest her soul.”

  “You send the blood out through the speedloop.”

  “You know,” he said, carrying on like he did, “I’ve always had an open-door policy. If you’d had questions about our processes, I would have happily answered them for you. At the cost of your mortal coil, of course. Secrets are secrets for a reason; you understand.”

  “And what’s the reason?”

  “Don’t be coy in these last minutes, Ms Wallace, I suspect that Claude made everything known to you. Where is he these days? Carried off a rather large bag of A-negative from his precinct.” Olden chuckled. “That’ll be deducted from his paycheck.”

  Willa glanced toward the pines.

  “Protecting him? I understand. He saved you from liquidation at the teeth of an ambitious junior executive.” Olden removed a pocket square and wiped the corner of his lips. “Your loyalty is so admirable.” He sighed, looked at the fabric. “Can I be honest with you? You just don’t find that in our ranks. It’s every man for himself, nowadays.”

  “You should hire more women.”

  He laughed genuinely, caught off-guard by her pluck. “But I suppose that didn’t work out for either of us did it? You know, it’s a shame I have to do this. You might have been upper management.”

  Willa scoffed. “That’s a lie.”

  “I was being magnanimous,” Olden said coldly, eyes narrowed.

  “If you’re going to kill me, can you at least tell me the truth?”

  “About what, Ms Wallace?”

  She shook her head. He could talk forever when he felt the need to pontificate on the way of things, but clamped shut when it came to answering a simple question, especially when he knew she really wanted an answer. “What are you?” she asked.

  “What am I?” he asked, grinning. “Surely, you’ve figured that out by now.”

  “I want to hear you say it.” She crossed her arms over her chest, looking directly into his eyes.

  “Wouldn’t you rather spend these last minutes talking to your grandson? You can use my touchstone,” he said, handing it forward. “Here.”

  “Answer my question.”

  “Have it your way,” he said, pocketing his touchstone. “But answer mine first – where is Claude?”

  “Dead.”

  “Dead?” he asked, eyebrows raised. “And how?”

  “You got your answer, now give me mine: what are you?”

  “So strict!” he exclaimed, relishing the back and forth. “Come into the drone. I’ll tell you on the way to your final destination.”

  “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  “Far from it, Ms Wallace!”

  “I’m not getting in there with you. You’ll liquidate me on the way. You want to kill me, you’ll do it right here.”

  “Oh, stop being so dramatic.” He stroked his lapels. “This suit is hand stitched. The fabric? Well, I don’t really know where it’s from, but I know it cost five thousand. I’m not going to risk getting it – ahem – stained. Second, liquidation is so… vulgar – an uncivilized way of taking a meal left to neophytes and hobbyists. Thirdly, you aren’t my type.”

  Willa shifted uneasily on her feet. Shot another glance into the pines.

  “Yes, do please stand back. Your impoverished milieu makes my stomach churn.” He fanned himself.

  “Pardon me?”

  “The poor. They have a smell. Inside the nose of my kind it is the olfactory equivalent to rotting flesh. Just a whiff makes me want to wretch out my insides and have them purified by fire.”

  Willa shook off his insults. “You’re avoiding my question, Mr Olden.”

  “Do you know,” he said, placing the pocket square over his nose and mouth, “that every drop of blood in your entire body wouldn’t buy a single component of that newly crashed drone?”

  “Answer me!”

  “Rich!” he exclaimed with panache. “What I am is rich.”

  “Rich?” she asked. It wasn’t the answer she’d expected.

  “So many centuries, so many monikers, who knows which was the original, biologically correct name.”

  “Vampires.”

  “That term,” he said, tensing some, “we of course despise. No such thing. Fantastical creatures like unicorns and satyrs. I adore the smell of garlic, Willa. Love strolling about my estate on days when the sun shines. I own three tanning beds. I’ve tested the legends, naturally – bathed myself in holy water for Christ’s sake – and guess what? Same as regular water. And how could we forget mirrors?” He framed his face with his fingers and smiled. “Do you think I could throw all of this together without one? But I digress. In answer to your question, Ms Wallace, we are both rich and also something else. And we are nothing without both. Most prefer the ecologically accurate taxonomy, ‘Apex’. A crisp description, and entirely apt, but I prefer the oldworld nomenclature: ‘Ichorwulf.’”

  “Ichorwulf?”

  “I know. A bit visceral, perhaps. Animalistic even – but it reminds one that you come from somewhere, and not to lose yourself in the present.” His eyes flashed. “You’re not losing yourself in the present, are you?”

  “I’m not lost.” Another glance to the pines.

  “Perhaps. But so many are. Lost to convenience, the ease brought on by technology.” He shifted and made his face look thoughtful. “I’ll let you in on a secret, if you promise not to tell anyone.”

  Willa only sneered, her disgust for the man deepening.

  “Well,” he relented, “since you won’t be around long to spread it, I’ll tell you anyway. Do you know that virtually none of my kind would be able to detect your blood type by scent? That nearly all of them have completely lost their sense of smell? Decades of neatly labeled blood bags, prepared like baby food, coming from donor stations like yours, telling them what’s what. Amazing, i
sn’t it, how technological advancement works against us, how we are dulled, made stupider by our own achievements.”

  Willa found herself agreeing, but countered, “Claude hadn’t lost his sense of smell.”

  “Claude was old school. Grounded. I liked him. His demise is a pity. I take it you sold off the stolen blood he was carrying?”

  “The blood doesn’t even go to the Gray Zones, does it?”

  He let out a true bark of a laugh. Then composing himself, said, “The Gray Zones–” but he stopped, feeling the MK’s cold muzzle pressed to the base of his skull.

  “Take me to your leader,” said Lock from behind.

  Olden went rigid, sucked at his top row of teeth with his tongue. Willa felt an adrenaline surge at the success of their gambit.

  “Mr Olden, meet the Locksmith,” said Willa, smiling. “She’s the one who’s been shooting down your lovely drones.”

  “You can invoice me,” said Lock.

  Olden dabbed the pocket square to his forehead and adjusted a piece of hair that had come free. “You were stalling.”

  “You don’t shut up.”

  “Can you blame me?” he said, mustering a salesman’s confidence. “No one converses anymore. So, I see the dynamic has changed. How may I be of assistance to you ladies? Money? I can have a teller drone brought down. Twenty-five hundred sound appetizing?”

  “You said your suit was five thousand.”

  “I did,” he said. “How astute. Well, what would you say to ten then?”

  “We don’t want your money,” said Willa.

  “No?” He held his arms out to the sides. “You must want something.”

  “We’ll be taking that drone,” said Lock, nudging him.

  “And your touchstone, please,” said Willa.

  He handed it over and Lock guided him into the drone with the rifle’s muzzle pinned squarely between his shoulder blades. “Take it off network,” she said. “Go on.”

  Olden brought up the screen and scrolled to a settings panel.