The Phlebotomist

by Chris Panatier

  She had a point. “How did you get here?” asked Willa.

  “Some they rounded up. Just came into homes and took us. Others they got off the street. But the main way, especially with the young ones… was with candy.”

  “Wait, candy?” Willa asked, dropping three bags of O-neg into the box. “What type of candy?”

  “Just, like, these red lollipops – I’ve tried them. They taste better than anything you’ve ever had. Anyway, they tell the kids to hand them out to their friends. The group gets bigger and bigger until they go back for more and that’s when they’re taken.” She stuffed the last few bags into the boxes and sealed them. “All of the kids from Riversfork got split apart, so I don’t know where they all ended up.”

  One-handed, Kathy folded up each of the poly handles on the sides of the box, pulled them toward the center and nudged it toward Willa.

  “These are too heavy,” said Willa, straining to budge it. “I can’t lift it.”

  Kathy eyed the boxes and thought for a moment. She trotted into the foyer, kicked a large exotic-looking tree from atop a stand with caster wheels, and pushed it over to the refrigeration vault. “That tree was like five hundred years old,” she said. “Jesper loved it.” Working together, they lifted the boxes onto the roller each lending their good arm to the effort.

  At the still-open refrigerator, Kathy dumped handfuls of cheese-tubes, yogurt pods, veggie snacks, and a pile of apples into her bag.

  “Good thinking.” Willa gave her wounds a gentle squeeze. “Anything else we should take?”

  But Kathy was already at a wet bar opposite the kitchen appliances dancing her fingers over the unopened bottles. She selected one each of bourbon and scotch.

  Willa held up a finger, confused, “What are you do–”

  “Are these flammable?” Kathy asked.

  “Why?”

  “Just tell me,” Kathy growled.

  Willa considered the bar, clenching some at the thought of fire, but respectful of the girl’s mission, whatever it was. “Well, sure. But I’d try the silver bottle and the blue one,” she said, identifying some of the ultra-potent stuff she’d regretted drinking as a young woman.

  Kathy scaled the kitchen island, dowsed the floor in booze, and sent the bottles crashing. Willa backed toward the door as the vapors of grain alcohol cleared her nostrils. Kathy took up a blood-spattered kitchen towel and ignited a burner on the range. The towel flared and she tossed it to the merging puddles below.

  Willa hustled the boxes toward the front as Kathy leapt from the island. The liquor accelerant ignited with a muffled whump. Kathy ran to the door and held it open as Willa pushed through.

  Together they wheeled the blood across the lawn, allowing it to buffet against their shoulders and injured limbs. Kathy shot into the drone first, then Willa with the boxes.

  Lock messed with the screen. “How much blood did you thieves nab?”

  “We have to go, lady,” said Kathy.

  “Give me a sec, there, kiddo,” said Lock. “I’ll override old Llydia here soon. I’m still a mite foggy from dying a few minutes ago. Just let me focus.”

  “We don’t have time,” said Willa, pointing at the house through the open door.

  Lock glanced up from the display and did a double take. “Why is the house on fire?” She looked at Willa and then to Kathy, whose face answered the question. “Alright,” she entered a final series of commands and a new screen appeared. “I’m in. Llydia, take us to AB Plus.”

  I’m sorry, Miss UNAUTHORIZED, but only verified Patriot employees with appropriate clearances may pilot.

  “Look, Llydia, I am authorized. Olden gave me a promotion. See? Here’s his old touchstone, oh and look.” Lock pushed her lapel with Olden’s insignia pin toward the Llydia’s camera eye.

  I will consult the directory. Name and identification code please.

  “Fuck!”

  Consulting directory for employee last name FUCK.

  “Guys,” said Lock, glancing at the swelling conflagration outside, “I’m just gonna have to fly her manual-like.” She pulled up on the barrel of the rifle and removed a round from the stock. “Ears,” she said, bolting it. “Llydia, it’s been genuine.” She pressed the muzzle to the ceiling of the drone and pulled the trigger.

  The confined quarters caused the blast to reverberate into their skulls and Willa almost collapsed from the bench. Smoke cleared through the newly formed hole in the drone’s roof.

  “R-I-P Llydia,” Lock laughed, slinging the rifle and digging back into the circuit panel. “The brains are right in the middle of the ceiling on these things for easy maintenance. Not flyable now unless… ha! OK, here we go.” Another panel opened below. A small joystick sprang free. “Whoa,” she said, turning to the other two, “when was the last time you saw one of these? Just antediluvian!”

  Lock pulled up on the joystick and they were off into the night.

  On the descent from Capillarian Crest, they dipped into the wilderness to check for passing authority drones but saw none. “Eight minutes to destination,” Lock quipped.

  “Are we going straight back, then?” asked Willa. “Is that safe?”

  “We’ll grab our shed drone at SCS, then head over to Tahiti to get that blood on ice.”

  Turning to Kathy, Willa explained, “It’s a safe house. They’re all named after tropical islands that people used to be able to go to on vaca–”

  “I know what Tahiti is,” said Kathy.

  “You do? How?”

  “I’ve been to school.”

  “So, they – the Oldens – sent you to school?” asked Willa.

  Kathy nodded.

  “They raised you just like you were their own child?”

  “Not raising. Training,” Kathy said, passively considering her finger stump. “School, riding lessons, drama, violin, cotillion, speaking, Apex history, attack, debate. Everything. But I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere, ever, without a chaperone hiding somewhere. And I always had to lie about who I really am. Even though the other Ichorwulves know the truth. They just play along with the lie.”

  A nauseating confliction sloshed in Willa’s stomach. By all accounts, Kathy, and presumably the other stolen children of the Ichorwulves, had found a better life than they could ever have imagined from inside the blood districts.

  “How long did you live with the Oldens?”

  “Since I was seven.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Did they… love you?”

  The girl’s head whipped around; lips peeled back. “They don’t love anything. Well, except keeping hold of their power. It’s all they care about.”

  “Did you ever try to run away?”

  “No,” Kathy said, squeezing her backpack. “They would have killed me.”

  “So, when you say they were ‘training you’,” said Willa. “Training for what?”

  “When we get old enough, they give us the Choice.”

  Lock glanced back from her piloting, asked, “A choice of what?”

  “To become one of them,” said Kathy. “And if we don’t…” her gaze returned to the blurring trees outside, “they kill us.”

  “Some choice,” muttered Willa, no longer conflicted.

  “SCS Distribution just ahead. Taking us into cloud cover,” said Lock. They accelerated upward and broke the moonlit overcast, then slowed to a hover.

  “What are we doing?” asked Kathy.

  “We got our taxi drone down there, just outside the wall. But it looks like SCSD is gonna be tricky,” she said tapping the view screen, which projected a nighttime view of the building far below, where icons representing authority drones patrolled the area. “Well, we can’t go crashing the party in Llydia, can we?”

  “Won’t they see us anyway?” asked Willa. “Aren’t we on their radar or whatever?”

  “Without a brain, she’s not putting out signal. We’re invisible unless they put eyes or cameras o
n us. And they got no reason to put cameras on us if they can’t see us.”

  Willa considered the swarm of drones already polluting the air. “It’s just a matter of time before they see us by accident.”

  “Willa, I only just commandeered her, y’know. When I get five minutes, I’ll outfit her with a smudge.”

  “A smudge?” asked Kathy.

  “Spectral cloaking device,” said Lock. “To anyone watching through a camera such as what gives us this image,” she tapped the display, “a drone with a smudge distorts the picture, makes it look like a bird fart. But until then, SCS will just have to wait.”

  Lock kept them in the clouds as they moved toward Tahiti on the southernmost edge of AB Plus and dropped them straight down from above into a roofless shed little different from the one behind Paradise Island. The house itself was brick, which meant it was far older than the rest. “This house is unstaffed, so it should just be me in there. You wait here. Shit goes down, just use the joystick. Drone goes where you push it.” She looked at Kathy. “Sorry for cursing.”

  “You already said fuck earlier,” said Kathy.

  “I did?”

  Willa nodded.

  Lock began to push the boxes. “They both full?”

  “Yes,” said Willa. “Almost forty liters, probably. I’ll help.”

  “No, nah, you keep by Kathy, I’ll do these,” she said, with another grunt.

  Lock opened the door and pushed the cargo from the shed. Kathy turned and presented something from within her backpack. “Cheese?”

  Willa couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten. “Yes, please.”

  Lock returned shortly and slammed the shed door. Kathy extended another cheese tube to Lock who took it with a wink. “Tahiti secure. Blood safe. I can send Lindon over from the Bahamas tomorrow and he’ll launder it up,” she said, plopping into the captain’s chair and biting into the food.

  Silence settled over them as they chewed, and Willa could feel all three of them decompressing. Willa watched Kathy, curious about the girl who had just killed her adopted father and only shortly thereafter insisted upon the amputation of her own finger. She was big for fourteen, nourished. Strong. Auburn braids framed a heart-shaped, freckled face. Despite the infusion of Lock’s homemade narcotics, there was a confidence in the girl’s countenance, in those focused ochre eyes. They suggested everything was going according to her plan, as if she’d always been ready to rid the world of the Oldens and had been simply biding her time until the opportunity arose. The amputated finger was a speedbump, a toll tax given willfully for freedom.

  “Hey, uh, Willa?” said Lock, breaking from a reverie of her own.

  “Yes?”

  “How did you know Venya was about to attack?”

  “She took her shoes off.”

  “She what?”

  “Took her shoes off. Scallien did the same.”

  “They go barefoot when they eat the Old Way,” said Kathy.

  “You’ve seen that?”

  Kathy took another bite and started chewing. “I’ve seen a lot.”

  “Why do they go barefoot?” asked Lock.

  “I don’t know,” answered Kathy, “ask one next time it’s about to eat you.”

  Lock looked at Willa. “I like her.”

  “Me too,” said Willa.

  “Let’s get back to the Seychelles,” said Lock. “ETA two minutes.”

  The door had been ripped clean from the hinges.

  “Oh God!” screamed Willa, sprinting from the shed and tossing aside the torn screen. The kitchen was smashed to pieces, splintered wood and old silverware strewn throughout. The children’s emergency go-packs sat at random spots across the floor.

  “Isaiah!” she cried, pushing through the entryway to the small living room. She tripped through a smattering of toys and into the back room, also empty. Lock yelled something from the other kitchen, but Willa wasn’t hearing. She was underwater. Drowning. Rushing back to the front, she noticed a pair of legs sticking out from behind the deflated old couch and scrambled over.

  Everard’s chest struggled to rise. Breath sounds came hoarse as the angle of his head and neck against the wall pinched his throat. Blood wicked out from defensive lacerations on his arms and hands into the filthy carpet. Willa struggled to pull him to a sit in order to free up his airway, revealing a gash on the side of his neck.

  “Everard!” she exclaimed, slapping her hand to the wound. “What happened, Everard? Where are the children?”

  His eyes were slits. A word croaked out, “Took.”

  “Who? Who took them?”

  He only groaned in response.

  Lock rushed in, put a dry rag to his neck to stem the bleeding, but the low pressure made only a trickle. “Kathy, go in the drawer next to the fridge and grab my suture kit. I got to sew our boy up.”

  Willa asked, “Do you have any blood in this house?”

  “Nah. Fridge is out.”

  Willa knew the fix but had never performed it. “Lock,” she said, “where did you hide our bags before we left?”

  “Pantry.”

  “Kathy!” called Willa. “Fetch my bag from the pantry, please.”

  Kathy stormed through the kitchen, her own hand still in a bloody towel, gathering the requested items.

  “Everard?” said Willa. “Double checking: you’re AB-pos, yes?”

  Head slumped to the side, he mumbled, “Mmhmm.”

  Kathy returned with the supplies. Lock pulled out a cutting needle, then rushed to the stove and sterilized it. She drew a length of thread, looped it through the still-warm stitching hook and went to work on Everard’s injury. “Looks like they just nicked you, son,” she said. “Any deeper in and you’d be the artist formerly known as.”

  Willa groaned through the pain of her own injuries and she tore her bag open, restacking the contents beside. On top of her workbooks, she piled gauze, needles, catheters, vacutainers, surgical tape, and syringes. She handed the tubing to Kathy, said, “Please boil this, quickly,” then dragged over a chair from the other side of the room to Everard.

  “Stay awake, kid,” she said, garnering a weak grin. While he was twenty years her junior, he was at least forty years old.

  Kathy returned with the tubing set out on a cloth. Willa popped an eighteen-gauge needle from a sterile pack and slid it onto a catheter. On the other end, she placed a cannula rig with a control valve. Tore a length of tape. She felt the antecubital space in her elbow crease and guided the cannula’s needle into the cephalic vein. Kathy’s eyes went wide. Willa nodded to the roll of tape. “Help me get this in place?”

  Kathy ripped a piece of tape, set it over the cannula, and pressed it to Willa’s skin on either side.

  “What are you doing?” asked Lock, still sewing.

  “Something that probably nobody has done in seventy years,” Willa answered, twisting the valve on the cannula. “Anastomosis. Direct transfusion.” Her blood pushed through the tube toward the needle at the base, which she handed to Kathy. “Keep it off the ground. When you see a drop, tell me.”

  “Why don’t we just go back and get some of the blood we stole from Tahiti?” asked Kathy.

  “He needs it now,” said Willa.

  “Can’t risk flying Llydia again until she’s disguised, anyway,” added Lock.

  “I see a drop,” said Kathy, focused again on the tubing coming from Willa’s vein.

  Willa closed the valve, stopping the blood on the far end, and knelt beside Everard. She took the free needle from Kathy, then tapped Everard’s forearm lightly at first, then with increasing urgency. “Lord, he’s got no veins left.” She would have preferred the cephalic, but it had sunken from its spot in the skin’s usual topography. The median basilic, to the inside of his elbow was available, and she angled the needle in and nodded to Kathy, who secured it with tape. She sat in the chair and opened the cannula, starting the blood flow from her vein into Everard’s. “Say a prayer.”

  “Are you
some type of doctor?” asked Kathy.

  “No, baby,” said Willa. “I’m a phlebotomist.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ANTIBODIES

  A protein produced in plasma that is used by the immune system to attack pathogens such as bacteria and viruses. If a person has type B blood, it means they have the anti-A antibody. If type A blood is introduced, it will be attacked by the body as foreign.

  “How’s his pulse?” Lock asked, her voice faint.

  “Stronger,” Willa said, touching Everard’s wrist. She turned to Lock, who sat with the line now running to her arm, supportively adding, “You’re very brave, Lock.” She checked the tubing. “Two units were the minimum he needed.”

  His eyes blinked open, no longer glassy as they’d been thirty minutes earlier, and followed the tube in his arm to the needle in Lock’s and finally to her face, where she looked down on him heavy-lidded. He’d been resurrected.

  Willa knelt down. “What happened to you?”

  “They landed in the back,” he grunted, eyes gently weeping. “I was out for a smoke. Hoped maybe it was you lot. Couple-five of ’em. I pushed the kids out the front and tried to hold them off. They did me and got the little ones.”

  “How did they find us?” asked Willa.

  Everard sniffed. Shook his head loosely, wiped his eyes.

  “We don’t even know if they were looking for us specifically,” said Lock. “Though it seems mighty coincidental.”

  “Came straight out of the sky. Landed here, purposeful.”

  Willa peeled the tape from Lock’s arm and withdrew the needle. She held the tubing high, allowing the remaining blood to flow slowly through the tubing and into Everard, then clamped it when the pressure equalized and the blood halted inside the catheter.

  “How you know to do all that?” he asked as Willa retracted the needle and pressed some gauze to the wound.

  “She’s a phlebotomist,” Kathy answered.

  He considered her practiced movements. “Never seen a phlebotomist can do this.”

  Willa wound the catheter and walked to the kitchen where she brought the water back to a boil.