The Phlebotomist

by Chris Panatier

  “No, I don’t. I don’t know anything!”

  She released a petal to the breeze. “What did you always tell me when I came to you with a problem?”

  Willa gave her a look. “I don’t… I don’t remember.”

  “You would say, ‘Elizabeth, look inside first.’” Another petal.

  “Look inside?” Willa repeated, remembering. She’d always wanted to teach her child to be self-reliant.

  Elizabeth stopped walking.

  “Sweetie, what is it?”

  She held the lily with both hands to her chest. “It’s time for me to go now.”

  “No, please. Stay and talk a few minutes longer. I’ll introduce you to–” She turned briefly toward Lock, who was gazing blithely into the clouds, then turned back.

  Elizabeth stood behind them, having stopped in the grass. Willa tried to stop walking herself, to turn around and run back for a final embrace, but her legs wouldn’t obey. Her mind was trapped inside a body that wouldn’t listen. She glanced back a final time.

  “I love you, Momma.” And the daylily’s last petal fell.

  Things were confusing, wherever Willa was. The light was a blackness that shone somehow bright and she tried to blink away the silvering that burnt her eyes, like staring into an eclipse only to be haunted by the afterimage. “Elizabeth?”

  “Who’s Elizabeth? I don’t know any Elizabeths, sweetheart,” said Lock, leaning over from above. “Is Willa in there?”

  Willa’s eyes slowly came back to focus, and she recognized Lock’s giant hair as the freckles on her face rendered in their appropriate constellations.

  “Are you OK? You passed right out, Willa. I dragged you for a city block before Lindon came down Boulware and saw me.” Sweat dripped from the rim of her goggles to hit Willa square in the cheek.

  “Where are we?”

  “Back on the island, dear.”

  Willa swiveled her head to a throng of children who’d gathered. They returned to the living room as if her regaining consciousness was anticlimactic.

  “When’d you eat last?” asked Lock, taking a teacup of oats from Everard, who continued into the next room with rations for the children.

  Willa stretched her neck side to side in hopes of clearing her head and Lindon helped her to sit. Lock sprinkled a handful of vibrant blackberries into the cup, then held it out to Willa in an attempt at spoon-feeding. Willa took the cup herself.

  Warmth returned to her cheeks as she ate. The group agreed that the crowds and protests they had witnessed at the donation stations were consistent across the segment, and that there was no reason to think it any different in North-by, Eastern or Crosstown. It seemed like news of the pirated broadcast had made the rounds.

  “How soon until we know if the boycott worked?” asked Lindon.

  “Based on how fast that old Claude gave up the ghost,” said Everard, doling out portions into crayon colored bowls, “they’ll be hit by the dip in supply right quick.”

  “They’re certain to have reserves, right?” asked Lock of no one in particular.

  “Hmm,” Willa muttered, “easier said than done. You’ve got relatively short shelf life on whole blood and you can’t freeze it without adding in special polymers.”

  “And they eat all the time,” said Kathy bringing over another bowl. “Six times a day, every other hour,” she said. “We have breakfast and dinner. They have two o’clock, four o’clock, six. The Evens. They miss one or two and get hangry real fast.”

  Willa shook her head as if she’d just gotten the punchline of a joke told days earlier. “My God,” she said, palming her forehead.

  “What?” asked Lock.

  “Claude,” Willa answered. “He was always going back into the storage cooler at the precinct. I thought he was just a diligent boss, checking inventory or whatnot.”

  “Snacking,” said Kathy.

  “Seems so, doesn’t it?” she said, taking another bite, and getting a punch of energy from the berries bursting in her mouth. “We collected a lot of blood. Although I can’t say the same for all the precincts, I mean, Donor Eight is in a heavy O-neg patch. Either way, they must consume a great deal.”

  “They do,” Kathy confirmed.

  “Well then, they’ll be feeling the pinch soon, you think?” said Everard. “Octavia, you share with Honey now,” he added, motioning to two of the girls in front of him.

  “Maybe they’ll starve,” Lindon suggested from over by the sink where he appeared to be cleaning vomit or some other such excrement from his shoe.

  “They won’t let that happen,” said Kathy.

  “They’ll break the fiction first, I bet,” said Lock. “Probably just start rounding people up buffet style if they run out. We may have actually just screwed ourselves.”

  “Great,” said Lindon, “so if the boycott works too well, they’ll just drop the whole charade and start killing people in the streets?”

  “Maybe,” said Lock, with an exaggerated sigh. “Econ one-oh-one. We’ve hurt the supply, and soon it will mean a spike in demand. How do we use that to our advantage? That will tell us the second half of our plan.”

  “We catch one of ’em,” said Everard.

  “And how would we do that?” asked Lock.

  “Head into the business districts with a few bags, see who bites?”

  Lindon rubbed his face in frustration. “That’s your plan? Tie some blood to the end of a stick and see if you hook one?”

  Everard crossed his arms “Not precisely… it could be another sort of trap. I’m scattershootin’ here.”

  Willa suddenly began chuckling through a mouthful of oats.

  “How hard she hit her head?” asked Everard.

  “I think she’s having another episode,” said Lock.

  Willa shook her head to assure them she was fine and quickly chewed through the remainder of the pasty grains, swallowed hard, and reached for a glass of water held by Lindon. She took a drink, cleared her mouth with a swish of her tongue. “Look inside first.”

  “Inside what, dear?” asked Lock.

  Willa smiled, feeling Elizabeth’s glow emanating from her own skin. “Inside us,” she said, standing. “Inside us, inside this house, inside this entire neighborhood!”

  “Right,” said Everard. “Well she knows where she is at least…”

  “AB-positive,” said Willa. “Our blood.”

  “Our blood’s inside us,” said Lock. “Yes.”

  Willa steadied herself and stood from the floor. “It’s poison.”

  “Say what?” exclaimed Everard.

  “Poison?” Lock crumpled her eyebrows. “To who?”

  “To the ninety-seven percent of the population that isn’t us,” said Willa. “We’re universal recipient, right? Not universal donor. O-neg, O-pos, AB-neg, B-neg, B-pos, A-pos, A-neg: an AB-positive transfusion isn’t compatible with any of them.”

  “Yeah,” said Lock, “we all know that.”

  “For us – for people – the wrong blood means you get sick, maybe you die. For them–”

  “The Ichorwulves,” Lindon interjected.

  “Drinking the wrong blood… it’s fatal.” Willa crossed her arms.

  Everard straightened. “AB-pos. Our blood? It kills them?”

  They all looked variably confused, except for Kathy, who seemed to perk up. “Venya was AB-positive.”

  “Yeah but she doesn’t have a head anymore,” said Lock.

  Willa interjected, “Look, three and a half percent of the population is AB-positive. The other ninety-whatever percent couldn’t receive a transfusion of AB-positive or they’d be at risk for a transfusion reaction. It’s toxic to them.”

  “Hold up a sec,” said Lock, shutting her eyes in thought. “Back up. How do you know that? How do you know it kills them?”

  “Claude said something the other night. He told me he was dying without his supply. So I offered him my blood–”

  “You what?” burst Everard.

 
Willa nodded. “Yes – OK. I did. He was my friend, I wanted to help.”

  “Jesus H, lady,” added Everard.

  “Anyway,” Willa continued. “He said that I was the wrong type and that taking my blood would only kill him faster. It makes sense, right? A transfusion of the wrong blood could kill anyone. The Ichorwulves aren’t that different from us, I guess. When it comes to blood, the same rules apply.” She shook her head in disbelief that she’d not realized it before. “It’s so obvious now.”

  Lock set to polishing her goggles. “Claude was pretty upset when we took that bag from him. It was all A-neg. His blood type,” she said. “And come to think of it, the Oldens’ supply was similarly curated.”

  Everard leaned in, puffed at his unlit cigarette and blew imaginary smoke over the table. “They eat the wrong blood, they die.”

  “How are we supposed to get them to drink our blood?” asked Lindon.

  “Make them think it’s not our blood they’re drinking,” Willa said.

  “She wants to run a blood hack,” answered Lock.

  “Blood hack,” Willa confirmed, while not failing to register the irony as a loyal former Patriot employee.

  “It makes sense in theory, I’ll give you that, Willa,” Lock said. “Tell the computers to register AB-pos as the other phenotypes, the machines stamp on the wrong label. Badabing! – The Ichorwulves get AB-pos, thinking it’s O or A-neg, drink it down and…”

  “Bite the dust,” said Everard.

  “Right!” Willa exclaimed.

  “Hold up, hold up,” said Lock, shaking her head so vigorously that her orange hair churned about like a turn of the century car wash. “Sure, it’s great in theory. But even if we could execute a hack on that scale – a city-wide hack – they know blood type by scent. Claude proved that.”

  “That’s the thing,” Willa responded excitedly, “Claude, Olden, they were the old guard. Ichorwulves are completely reliant on the way the bags are tagged at the donor stations. It wasn’t always that way, but it is now. They got lazy, and it became too easy to just read the label. They’ve lost their sense of smell. Olden said as much.”

  “That’s true,” said Kathy.

  All heads turned.

  “Jesper and Venya, they were like, show-offs,” said Kathy. “They knew all this old Ichorwulf history. Deep. Like, ancient stuff. And Jesper was big, you know, at Patriot. They’d have these dinner parties at our house all the time and they’d set out these giant wine glasses and fill them with different types of blood, even some Jesper said were diseased. And then they’d do these, like, smell tests. And none of the others could do it, not one. Not even the Claret. Just him and Venya.”

  “The Claret?” asked Willa.

  “The Claret… they’re like the top people in the company. Uh… board of directors, something like that. They’d fly in for business from some other cities – I don’t know from where – for meetings and dinners and all that. Jesper would go from glass to glass, kind of bragging.” Kathy mimed along as she spoke, “B-negative, AB-negative, O-positive, A-negative, Ab-neg with factor V deficiency, A-negative with hepatitis, B-positive with leukemia, B-positive with polycythemia vera.”

  “Policimia whatah?” asked Everard.

  “When the body makes too many red blood cells,” answered Willa.

  Kathy continued, “It’d get late and he’d get real serious and start lecturing the others – he’d actually get angry with them – tell them they should be ashamed about how they’d lost their way, lost what made them different – and better than us, than humans. That they should be schooled in the old ways. He’d speak about how traditions aren’t just for show. They’re gifts handed down by prior generations, like, instructions on survival. That you forget the lessons of history at your peril. He would always say doom is a flood that waits for the rift.”

  “Heavy shit,” said Everard.

  “Bit dramatic, I’d say,” said Lindon.

  “You never met Jesper Olden,” Lock answered back.

  “Yeah,” Kathy agreed. “Everyone would get really tense and then he’d just laugh it off and then they’d all laugh with him. But he hated them for it because it meant they were soft. He’d go on these rants after everyone had left, about how their loss of smell made them, like–”

  “Vulnerable,” said Lock.

  “Vulnerable, yeah,” said Kathy, standing up and cleaning away the bowls from the children.

  “So, if we run a hack, they won’t be able to smell the difference,” said Willa.

  Everard shut his eyes in cogitation. “So, we get a bunch of AB-pos–”

  “Of which we have plenty,” interjected Willa.

  “Right,” he continued, “and Lock does a hack to trick them to thinkin’ it’s bona fide highblood. They eat it and drop deader than disco?”

  “What’s disco?” asked Kathy.

  “I’m sorry to bubble-burst, but that’s impossible,” said Lock, silencing the room. “You are talking about a city-wide hack.”

  “It’s not impossible,” said Willa. “You’ve done this before.”

  “Nothing this big. Not even close.”

  Willa felt she was losing the thread. “But–”

  “Let me tell you why.” Lock collapsed into a folding chair at the table while thinking out loud. “Remember: my hacks aren’t centralized. We’d need to hit all eight precincts in each of the four city segments. That’s,” she counted out seven fingers, “thirty-two precincts. Most I’ve ever done was three, and I barely had the firepower for that, to be honest. I’d have to daisy-chain all the islands in our network, hit all the donor stations at once. And we’re already down Hawaii.” She shook her head.

  “Can’t your hacker friends help?”

  “No one in town ever matched my output. And half of them have been pinched,” she sighed. “Sorry Willa, it’s impossible.”

  “What about another egg?”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” said Lock, sympathetic to Willa’s lack of technical understanding. “We intercepted a piece of a signal. We weren’t in Patriot. That’s not this.”

  Willa stared at the flower print curtains pulled tight, imagined a window with Isaiah playing outside. “A bag hack then.”

  “A do what?” said Lock.

  “That blood bag you showed me in the attic of… what house was that?”

  “Jamaica?”

  “Yes, Jamaica,” said Willa. “The bag that you made. It was perfect. I couldn’t tell it’d been altered. Everard passed counterfeit blood through my line with it.”

  “It was one bag!”

  “You printed it, though, right?” asked Willa.

  “The nanoceramic alone took my printer a day,” exclaimed Lock. “We’d have to print a hundred thousand bags for the type of hack you’re talking about. At least.”

  “How good a printer will twelve k buy?”

  Lock’s eyebrows shot up her forehead as she remembered the tricoins. “Three k would get the best,” she whispered. “Maybe two and a half even.”

  “Then we’ll get four of them,” said Willa.

  “Two would more than do the job. We can use the rest on food,” said Lock, who seemed buoyed by the direction the conversation had taken.

  Lindon finished a cheese tube and raised his hand. “So, we need a hundred thousand bags, a hundred thousand full doses of AB-pos, enough highblood to put into the decoy pockets, and a hundred thousand people to go along? That’s all? Anything else?”

  “The people would do it,” said Everard. “It’s free money. You could drop a bag of onion juice on the sidewalk and someone would try to sell it.”

  “We don’t need to fill the entire bags ourselves,” said Willa. “We just need to distribute them to everyone with the decoy pocket already full. People will add their own blood to the bag, then go donate. The needle probes will register the small amount of highblood in the decoy pocket, and the lowbloods will get paid for it.”

  “And where do we get decoy blood?” aske
d Lindon, irritated. “Just go begging for that much highblood? Tell people to trust us? Come on.”

  “Yeah, I mean, I have friends all over, but not thousands willing to hand over high-grade sauce,” said Lock.

  Willa rubbed her temples and tried to clear her mind. They had a viable course; it was just strewn with immovable obstacles. “Guess we’ll just have to break in and steal it from them during the Patrioteer Conference,” she said sarcastically.

  Bowls clattered onto the counter and rolled across the floor as Kathy spun toward the room from the washbasin. “What did you say?”

  “Patrioteer?” asked Willa.

  Kathy’s face was a knot of anger. “Patrioteer,” she sneered, “is where they select the children.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  LEUCOCYTE

  Also known as white blood cells, leucocytes are immune system cells that attack disease agents and foreign substances.

  Llydia zipped along over endless fields of late season silicorn. A new coat of purple paint, the designated shade for ambulance drones, lay in drip-marked brushstrokes across her hull and putty-filled bullet wounds. Willa piloted. Lock chaperoned the MK13. Kathy cradled her newly rounded belly.

  For the second day in a row, they’d set out hoping to cross paths with a blood transport on the only road into the city. With Patrioteer just days off, and the boycott still in full swing, Patriot would need to secure a large infusion of surplus and then scramble it to Central City quickly and quietly. Squadrons of transport drones would raise questions. All of this pointed to trucking it in. And there was only one city close enough and big enough to supply what Patriot needed: Alliance.

  The road was old and crumbling, hemmed in on both sides by vast stretches of golden silicorn. Without knowing exactly what shortage they’d created, they figured Patriot would need at least a few trucks to make up the difference and hoped to spot one as it made its way.

  Forty miles from the outer boundary of town, Willa brought them to a long stretch of road with good visibility in both directions. It was like they’d been transported across the universe to an entirely different planet. There were no buildings, no homes, no infrastructure, no communication beacons, no blood trade, and, except for Llydia, no drones in the aquamarine sky. Willa swung them low and slow over a glistening swath a mile out from the road just as she had the day before. Anyone traveling the road would be blind to them on account of the towering cornstalks. Silicorn, a genetically modified crop bred to produce a silicon analog within its kernels, were more than twice the height of their namesake plant. She checked back and forth between the window and the display.