The Phlebotomist

by Chris Panatier

  Lock had the goggles over her eyes. “Patriot Report in five minutes, Willa. You excited?”

  “Nervous,” she said. “Did you get the upload from Everard?”

  “Yep, right here,” said Lock, shuffling some files around on a wizened laptop. “Just drop my footage right up in here… aaaaaaand cut.”

  “It’s done?”

  “That was the easy part. Now for the hijack.” On another screen, Lock brought up three windows, minimized and arrayed them so she could see each. “Oh no,” she said. “You turned on the egg, right?”

  Willa’s heart stopped. “Yes, of course I did. What’s wrong–”

  “Just kidding, that’s us right here,” Lock said, poking the middle window on the screen.

  “Why do you do that?”

  “Just introducing some intrigue,” she said. “Lighten up.”

  “You think we need more of it?”

  “OK, see,” continued Lock, “like I said, they’ve kept their peripheral tech rudimentary because they know they’ve got to communicate with the substandard hardware had by the likes of AB Plus if they want to get their Patriot Report seen at all. So we’re just sniffing for packets right now.” She pointed to the window on the left.

  “Packets?”

  “Little collections of data. See this stream here? Lots of packets. Nobody else is generating that type of bandwidth. That’s going to be Patriot.” She selected the stream and clicked on it. “Sniffed you right out, bitch.”

  “What is that over there?” asked Willa, tapping the opposite window.

  “That’s the client,” Lock answered. “Everyone else is already pinging the crap out of the server wanting to watch their beloved Report.”

  “Does this mean the egg is working?”

  “Damned straight.” She tapped out two quick lines of code that looked roughly identical, except that they were the reverse of each other.

  “Are you spoofing now?” Willa asked.

  “That is exactly what I am doing, Willa. I’m spoofing the shit out of these guys,” Lock declared, spinning in her chair. “We’ll make a hacker of you yet.” She whirled back and finished typing on the old plug-in keyboard and hit “enter.”

  Tiny fans buzzed to life within the machines.

  “Thirty seconds to showtime.” Lock consulted her watch and waited. “Five, four, three, two,” Lock said as she clicked an icon. “Engage.”

  The screen went entirely black. Lights came up gradually on a red curtain, with a draped cocktail table in front. On top, a solitary candle burnt.

  “A little dramatic,” Willa muttered.

  “It’s theater, Willa.”

  From off screen came Kathy, disguised as a game show host wearing a top hat, an ill-fitting dress shirt and bowtie, and over that, a hideous green sports coat.

  “Greetings, and welcome to The Patriot Report for Tuesday evening, ten-twenty-five, twenty sixty-seven. I’m your host, Kathy. I don’t have a last name because Patriot took it, but I digress.”

  “I digress?” interjected Willa.

  Kathy continued, “We set new records in collections today. Love my people in B Minus. You guys really came through.”

  A piece of poster board appeared on the table next to her with Everard’s daikon-pale fingers keeping it upright. On it were written the names of each of the four city segments: NORTH-BY, EASTERN, SOUTHERN CITY, and CROSSTOWN. Kathy uncorked a large black marker. “Let’s add up today’s totals! How much precious blood is each segment contributing to the Gray Zones?” She put a thoughtful finger to her lips. “Let’s see, hmm, North-by: Zero!” She scribbled a big circle. “Eastern: Zero! Southern City: Zero! And last but not least, Crosstown: You guessed it: Zero! For a total of…” she grabbed the board and flung it off screen, “Zero!

  “Oh, but Kathy,” her voice thickened with sarcasm, “I watch me and my family’s valuable blood fly to the Heart every night in Patriot’s glorious blood drones!” She pointed to the camera. “Not so fast, fellow blood-slaves. Watch!”

  The scene faded to a shot of the horizon. The camera wobbled ever so slightly and then the narrator, Lock, spoke. “In a moment you’ll see the Patriot drones just over yonder wood on their way to the Heart. We’re going to knock one down and look inside it together. While we wait, perhaps I’ll introduce myself. I’m Janet, but my friends call me Janet – oh, more next time, there they are.” The frame showed a line of lights ascending from distant trees. “We’ll let them get over this field here,” she said, tipping the gun downward. “OK, number one. Cover your ears.” The camera went absolutely still as Lock took aim.

  When she fired, the image jostled for an instant and she zoomed in on a faltering drone. “Ah hell, let’s go for bonus points.” She fired again, fatally wounding a second drone. Both plummeted, crashing near to each other. “Alright then, fellow citizens,” she said. “Let’s see what’s inside.” She zoomed in, way in, until she had a clear shot of crushed and torn blood vaults strewn across the ground. “Imagine that! Crashed blood drones with no blood splatter, no blood bags, no blood at all!” she yelled. “Worst piñatas ever!”

  The scene cut back to Kathy, who renewed her commentary. “As you can see, there’s no blood in those drones. If there’s no blood in the drones, then where is all the blood that you, the public, so dutifully give? Not the Gray Zones, that’s for sure. Because there are no Gray Zones. The places we call the Gray Zones think that we’re the Gray Zones. Get it? Patriot is collecting the blood and pumping it straight to Capillarian Crest.”

  She approached the camera.

  “Why, you ask?” She thrust Scallien’s ganglion toward the camera, blurring the image in and out. “Because they eat it!”

  She stepped back to the table and set the ganglion down. “These things live inside the rich, and inside Patriot management. Literally. Like, in their brains.” She took up a blood bag and stabbed it with a pair of scissors, letting it bathe the ganglion in syrupy red.

  Instantly, it began squirming. “The only way to stop them is to kill them,” she said. “And the only way to kill them is to starve them.” She lifted the ganglion, its tendrils and roots thrashing against the air like the legs of a crab pulled from water.

  “So, stop feeding them,” she said, allowing the ganglion’s roots to slowly shrivel like a dead spider’s legs. “Skip the Harvest. Boycott the Trade. I’m Kathy. You’ll hear from us again soon.”

  The screen went black.

  “Yeah!” Lock crowed and embraced Willa, then began ripping power cords and jerking cables from the walls by the fistful.

  “What are you doing?” Willa asked at Lock’s sudden flurry.

  “Baby, that signal we just put out is gonna draw more attention than a backyard tire fire! Gotta take down the house.” A drill appeared out of nowhere and she shoved the spinning bit directly through the keyboard of the laptop she’d been using, cackling, “Turn and burn, Willa!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  HEMATOPOEISIS

  Refers to the production of the cellular components of blood and plasma, specifically new blood cells.

  Willa watched Kathy sitting legs crossed at the kitchen table with a tin mug of tea and an easy demeanor. The morning sun came through the blinds, painting her in stripes like the nascent head of a crime family. “Do you think it’ll work?” asked the girl.

  “We’ll know soon,” said Everard, sparking his first cigarette of the day. “I can walk the bottom third of Southern and put eyes on the donor stations there, Lindon can take top segment and I guess–” He took a pull on the cigarette but convulsed into a riotous coughing fit.

  “You’re the last person on the damned Earth who still smokes those,” said Lock. “Maybe your body is telling you something.”

  Everard tried taking another puff with the same result, carefully snuffed the butt, and put it back into his mouth unlit.

  “So, I guess I’ll take middle-Southern,” said Willa.

  Lock sucked on a lemon slice, stra
ined it through her teeth like a pirate fighting scurvy. “I’ll go with,” she said.

  By noon, Willa and Lock had made it to Station Four, the furthest precinct in middle-Southern. Even from several blocks away it was clear that their broadcast had had an effect. A protest had formed with hundreds of people carrying signs and banners, throwing rocks and other detritus. Patriot security were fighting a losing battle to keep them on the far side of the street, and the station became an island in a sea of people. High above, Patriot drones circled like vultures on a thermal.

  “They’re everywhere,” said Willa nervously.

  “If we turn tail now, it’ll look suspicious,” said Lock, guiding Willa forward. “Just chill.”

  They tried to look nondescript as they moseyed into the fringes of the congregation. The crowd, raucous and vocal, harassed the few citizens who braved the throng to sell or donate, even pelting some with red paint. What on most days was a steady stream of donors and sellers had dwindled to less than a trickle.

  Willa wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but she recoiled at the sight of hostile crowds shouting down their neighbors. Even though every person living in the blood districts was a victim of Patriot’s scheme, their broadcast had – at least for the time being it seemed – further divided the people. Now there were two groups: those that held the line and those that crossed it. And even though Willa knew the boycott was best, she empathized with those who went in to get their money so they could eat.

  There was another concern. She worried that the protests would be written off as mere escalation by activists who had been voicing their opposition to Patriot for decades. If all they’d done was flame the fire of the already suspicious, they risked marginalizing their message. She wanted people to believe what they’d been shown.

  The scenes at Stations Five and Six were no different. They watched as a few would-be donators scurried away under a hail of castigation and garbage scraps.

  Lock spoke up. “What’s the matter with you, Willa?”

  “They all seem like crazies,” Willa said with a tinge of dismay. “We wanted people to believe us.”

  “We wanted people to stay home is what we wanted,” huffed Lock. “Makes no difference to us if they’re doing it to avoid the crazies or if it’s because they actually believed Kathy. If they’re on the couch, that’s all that matters.” She gestured to an ocean of anti-Patriot signage, buoyed on the crowd like ship wreckage. “So long as those guys stay fired up, people are gonna sit it out.”

  He made it halfway back across the bottom third of Southern City before he tried to light another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but figured to try yet again, as the nicotine drive hadn’t let up any despite smoking’s violent new side-effects. The reaction was more sudden this time, and he folded to retch the moment the heat hit the tip of his tongue. He continued in a fit, hacking and spitting, said what the shit, squeezed the soft-pack into a bow and hurled it to the ground. When the attack subsided, he unwound himself tall and stretched his back, looking around.

  The headache, the goddamned brain-crushing headache. It felt like a hangover is what it felt like – though he hadn’t fought a hangover for years and years. There were a few reasons for that. The first was his biblical tolerance for alcohol, and the second was because no one had been able afford the real stuff for at least a dog’s age, and backyard ’shine turned him into a berserker. Maybe it was the pica. Everyone ended up getting some measure of it when anemia reached a point. Blood loses its metal and you start craving wads of old paper chased with dirt. A real affliction heard of by no one until the Harvest came on.

  Eh, this felt different than that. He was hungry for food, just nothing seemed to satisfy. If he kept walking, he’d hit Station Seven, across from which was the little eggroll cart affectionately known as the Roach Coach, where he could load up on Vietnamese fried rice. He was sure the cart’s proprietor, a tiny little pine nut of a woman by the name of Ametrine, owed him a favor, though he couldn’t quite remember from what the favor was due, but figured he’d dig it out by the time he reached her.

  * * *

  Willa and Lock took a circuitous route back to the Bahamas with no drones tailing. It had been years since Willa’d taken a long walk that didn’t end up at work or at home immediately after work. They’d been walking all day now, and she’d forgotten just how the extended activity could clear the cobwebs. It wasn’t that it took her mind off her troubles. To the contrary, it actually made her focus on them. But it stripped away the static, all the interference she had no control over, leaving the root of the problem exposed for contemplation. As her feet found their rhythm on the concrete, her mind unraveled some, like a muscle relaxing. Light-headedness crept in and she realized that, aside from Kathy’s cheese and a wedge of lemon in her tea, she’d barely eaten. Had it been days? Either way, she’d not remembered to, hadn’t wanted to.

  She wanted Isaiah back. A return to the way things were. They’d gotten by. The little apartment. Isaiah’s school. The hallway mirror she’d so often avoided. How she missed that mirror now, and the chance to gaze upon her daughter reflecting back, to say hello again. They had taken walks together when Isaiah was stroller-bound. Willa imagined the sound of Elizabeth’s footsteps in the dying grass alongside her and Lock. Rustle, scrunch, rustle, scrunch.

  There was a time before. A time that felt impossibly distant, like an alternative reality. But even with the wars, Patriot and the Trade, there had always been family to lean on. There had been three of them. Now two. Or was it one? The thought of losing Isaiah was… too much. Her heart felt weak. Hollow as a glass bulb. She needed to focus on the task at hand.

  But try as she may to shake away her fears, the more memories poured in to remind her of what she’d lost. Elizabeth’s birth. Her childhood. The joy she felt in every molecule of her body just being around her daughter – and her guilt for bringing her into the world when she did. It was that world, after all, that had taken her away. She wished to talk to her again. Wondered what they might share.

  More than anything she wanted for Elizabeth to see Isaiah, and the mature, sweet boy he’d become. The imagined footsteps in Willa’s mind persisted – rustle, scrunch, rustle, scrunch. And then she heard them. A beautiful young woman in a denim jacket and black frame glasses had come up alongside them. When did she arrive? Willa wiped her eyes.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Elizabeth?” she gasped. “Is it really you?”

  “Of course it’s me.”

  Willa worked her eyes open and closed a few times and tried some deep breathing. It couldn’t be Elizabeth. Elizabeth was dead. She looked back to the woman. “I’m imagining you.”

  “Yes.”

  “My baby,” Willa said, embracing the hallucination. It was like she was lucid dreaming; aware of the fantasy, but consciously deciding to back-burner her rational mind for the sake of the experience. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  “I know, Mom. I miss you too,” she said, furrowing her brow. “You look thin.”

  “Hmm. Not much appetite.” A tear tracked to her chin.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  Willa tried to keep from breaking down completely. “I’m going to get him back. I promise. I will. I’ll do whatever I need to. Even if it kills me.”

  “Mom, it’s not your fau–”

  “It is!” cried Willa, jabbing her finger into her chest. “I lost him!”

  “No you didn’t. Don’t say that. It wasn’t your fault. You have raised that boy by yourself better than I ever could have dreamed.”

  They continued on past driveways overtaken by the cancerous yellow grass, staying near to the curb to avoid the crumbling sidewalks. Elizabeth stooped to pick a flaming yellow daylily, her favorite flower. Willa hadn’t ever seen one just growing by itself in the open like that. Then, the lily was hallucinated too.

  “We were together, Elizabeth. The three of us. We could have survived as a family,” Willa said, her voice cracking. �
�Why did you have to go?”

  The young woman pressed the flower to her nose and inhaled deeply, then plucked a petal. “Thought I was stronger than I was, Mom.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you ask for my help? I would have given you my entire paycheck, sold my own blood for you.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that. I knew it then… I just thought I could handle it.” She pulled another petal and let it drift. “I made a mistake I can never fix.”

  “I died when you did,” said Willa.

  Elizabeth put her arm around her and pulled her close.

  Willa looked at her daughter and admired her skin; dark and deep like heartwood. She’d gotten it from her father – his one positive contribution. Her gorgeous skin always glowed, until she’d sold every last milliliter her body could manage, and it had yellowed with anemia. But now, as they walked together, the sickness was gone. She was the very picture Willa kept in her mind.

  “Saw you flying that drone around,” Elizabeth said, sniffing at the flower again. “I bet you’re real proud of yourself.”

  Willa, recalling the chase, pushed her smile modestly downward. “Maybe some.”

  “And I thought that was smart, what you and Lock did with The Patriot Report. Oh!” She poked a finger into her mother’s shoulder. “That girl Kathy? Where’d you find her? Wouldn’t want to get in her way!” Another petal fluttered.

  “I stay clear,” said Willa. “A force of nature, that kid.”

  Soon they were laughing, an interlude like they’d had from time to time in days past, when good conversation could erase the world.

  They walked together for another few blocks. Willa’s voice pinched in her throat. “I’m lost now, Elizabeth,” she said. “I can’t think of the next step. Patriot will move Isaiah soon if they haven’t already, and he’ll be gone forever. I don’t know how to get to him.”

  Elizabeth nodded her head in thought, her shiny black hair hanging down over her chest, the sides splayed like long bristles on the softest brush. “You already know the solution, Mom.”