Lock straightened in her seat. “I packed the sabre saw, right?”
“Yes, Lock. It’s right here,” said Kathy, patting a duffle. “That’s the fourth time you’ve asked.”
Lock leaned over and adjusted the golden bangs on Kathy’s new hair. “No one’s gonna buy this,” she muttered.
Willa looked at the girl. To say she was uneasy about involving Kathy, who was still a child, in an attempted heist was putting it mildly. It felt like a betrayal of what should be an innocent time – though for Kathy, that window had long since closed. Fearless though she was, it didn’t matter to Willa that Kathy wanted to be involved, the point was that she shouldn’t have to be. Willa mourned the world as it had once been, a world that strove to preserve the happy ignorance of childhood. But what choice did they have? They were flying in a stolen drone to hijack a blood transport because the world was run by vampires. She supposed it wasn’t just the innocence of children that had been lost.
Willa considered Kathy’s getup. The wig was too big, her legs too spindly. “They don’t need to buy it completely, they just need to hesitate,” said Willa, half trying to convince herself that it would work.
Lock shook her head. “I don’t know. She’s only fourteen.”
“I look older though,” said Kathy with an extravagant toss of the hair.
“Look!” Willa pointed to a distant rooster-tail of dust blooming up from the road. “That’s got to be it.” She dipped Llydia to the tassels and accelerated parallel with the truck’s vector, flying to a point several minutes ahead.
She found a bend in the road where they could land unseen and set the drone down at the edge of the crumbling asphalt.
“Places!” ordered Lock, running outside. She unhooked a few panels from the drone and heaved them spinning across the road, cracked a flare and shoved it into the dirt just underneath Llydia’s front quarter. Drones were more catastrophic-explosion risk than fire risk, but they were counting on the truck’s pilot not having time to run the checklist on drone behavior in a crash-landing situation.
Willa took a blood bag from the duffle and for a moment saw the situation from the lens of only a few weeks prior, when her life had been humdrum and predictable. Now she was immersed in a world she’d not known existed, doing things she’d never conceived of doing. She opened a small knife and slit the bag gently, careful not to produce too large a hole, then held it high into the sunlight and let it drain over her face, chest and arms. She squeezed the last dribbles from the poly and chucked the bag into the field.
“Holy shit, Willa, you look like Beelzebub,” said Lock. “Rub a little of that inside Llydia so it looks like you brained yourself genuinely.”
Willa knelt at the door and gathered some of the blood from a glob under her chin, wiped it on the door. Llydia was the wrong size and shape for a medical drone but hopefully the color and badging would do the trick. Willa looked at Kathy, who sat on the bench staring off. “You ready?” asked Willa. Kathy rose and stepped into the road, her face inscrutable.
“He’s about to come around the bend,” Lock called, running into the crop rows with her rifle. “Remember to stay the hell out of my line of sight!”
Willa laid herself half outside the drone and half in it, trying to think of the most natural way to have fallen dead after a traumatic head injury. She settled on a rigid-looking, head turned, arms-to-the-side pose, as if she’d been dead before she hit the ground. She rubbed some grit from the road into her sticky face and tried to slow her breathing.
Lying still now, she watched Kathy take to the road. She was awkward in the kitten heels they’d given her to look taller and her swollen belly was pronounced against the wind, while her dress inflated behind to a diaphanous billow. Everything about the spectacle screamed that this was a child in costume. Except for her face. If they looked at her face, they would believe anything.
The roar of the truck’s giant tires against the broken pavement came nearer and it finally rounded the corner. Tears summoned, Kathy stumbled toward it, waving wildly with one arm, holding her stomach with the other, yelling for the truck to stop. Willa feared they might try to drive right through her, but Kathy was unflinching – exactly as a stranded expectant mother would be. Just a few hundred feet from the decoy, Willa heard the truck’s brakes engage, and it slammed to a halt.
Before it had even settled, Kathy was running into the plume of dust carried forward by the truck’s momentum, screaming hysterically about her water breaking and her nurse being dead, how the drone had malfunctioned, how she didn’t know where she was, and could they please help her for the love of God.
Inside the sleek gray cab were two men, the gold Patriot insignias on their caps tiny points of light behind tinted glass. Kathy hammered on the hood with her fists, stumbled toward the drone as she gestured to Willa’s dead body, and screamed for them to call her another hospital transport. The driver’s eyes ran from Kathy to Willa and back to Kathy. They made no move to exit the truck and instead the horn blared, sending an explosion of crows from the field. Kathy collapsed; ears covered. Willa cringed as her mind was transported back to the sirens that had once sounded the end of the world. When the horn died, Kathy sprang up and continued her ranting. Growing ever more impatient, the driver honked again, nudging the truck a few feet forward as Kathy reeled.
Willa could hear panic edging into Kathy’s voice, not the feigned panic of her imagined situation, but the real deal. And Willa, like Kathy, was having doubts that the plan would work. The truck slowly pushed forward.
A bullet slammed into the window, striking the driver through his hat, and he slumped against the wheel. His partner quickly pushed him over and out the driver’s side door, where he crumpled into an unnatural knot. The truck lurched and Kathy dove into a gulch at the shoulder. A second shot split the air and punched through the cab. The man’s head flopped onto the dash and the truck began to drift. Willa lit up from her spot and crossed in front just as it passed, urging her legs to move faster as she chased the rogue vehicle. She gained ground until she came even with the cab and lunged for a utility handle just behind the door. Holding it with both hands, her feet dragged on the asphalt. The rig crossed the lip of the gulch and began to canter to the side. Any longer and it would topple. Willa pulled her feet onto the running board, jumped in, and smashed the brakes as she twisted the wheel back to the road.
Lock had burst from the field by the time Willa righted the truck and Kathy’d thrown away her baby, a duct-taped cushion inside a pillowcase. Willa tugged the second man from the cab. He was large, but she finally got his belly over the edge of the seat and gravity did the rest. She found his touchstone and pocketed it.
Lock pointed back down the road. “Get them into the field, stat! I’ll take care of the truck.” She leapt in from the passenger side with the sabre saw and started chewing through the roof of the cab. Kathy and Willa worked to drag the driver into the crop rows, a task they did after much toil and an uninterrupted string of cursing from Kathy.
As Lock’s saw buzzed through the nanofiber shell of the truck’s cab, they ran to the second driver, who was lighter than the other, and managed to get him off the road. Willa put her finger to his face, rubbed the blood between her fingers. Wet red sawdust. Kathy collected his touchstone.
Back at the truck, Lock had removed a roughly circular chunk of the roof and was busy securing what Willa recognized as a battery pack to it, the wires running to the disk of material.
“Where’s the taxi?” asked Kathy.
“I called it from a burner and chunked it in the road ahead. That’s where it’ll land,” said Lock, handing down the sabre saw. “Grab this.”
“Patriot is going to notice the truck is stopped,” said Willa.
“If they’ve noticed, they’ll stop caring as long as it’s moving again. Alright, take the brains here, Willa.” She gave the electronics down from the cab. “Don’t let that battery loose. It’s transmitting. Y’all start walking do
wn the road until you see the taxi.” She began to shut the door, then pushed it open again. “Remember what we talked about. Rendezvous tomorrow at the predetermined coordinates. If for some reason I don’t make it back, password is vengeance. I’m out.” She slammed the door and the truck roared ahead.
Willa handed the hardware to Kathy. “Head up the road. That way it’ll look like the truck is still rolling. Patriot will think its slowed due to poor road conditions.”
A taxi appeared on the horizon.
Kathy began walking and the drone set down just ahead of her. Willa checked to make sure the bodies weren’t visible from the road, then caught up with Kathy. They buckled the truck’s brains onto the bench, and tossed both the drivers’ touchstones inside.
Lovely afternoon, said the drone. This is the fare going to Central City Collection, correct?
“It is,” said Willa, “but you can’t go any faster than twenty knots and you’ve got to mirror this road and then only city roads after that.”
That is substantially more expensive than a direct course.
“We’ve already prepaid for a custom route.”
Indeed you have, said the drone.
“Remember to fly slowly,” Willa added.
Please do consider a direct route. Economically–
“Bye, now,” said Willa. “Thank you.”
Thank you for choosing CROW FLIES.
The door closed and the drone accelerated to twenty knots as it traced the prescribed path.
Kathy and Willa trotted back to Llydia, reattached her body panels, and lifted off.
Willa hammered the drone away from the scene as fast as she would go. With the city coming up on the horizon, they steered wide of North-By so they’d come into AB Plus from an angle not obviously tied to the hijacking. It was probably an overcautious move, but they couldn’t risk that someone might make a visual on them. Willa tried to focus on the display but ended up watching Kathy instead, finding herself taken aback by the girl’s unflappable and businesslike approach to things. The kid was an enigma.
“What?” asked Kathy.
“Oh,” Willa said, not even realizing she’d been staring. “I’m sorry, I just… who are you?”
“You know who I am,” said Kathy, tucking the dress under her legs. “What are you talking about?”
“You don’t act like any fourteen year-old I’ve ever known, is all. You seem… older than that.”
Kathy narrowed her gaze at Willa, scrutinizing. “I’m not one of them if that’s what you’re asking.”
“No, I never–” but the thought crept in now that Kathy had mentioned it.
“Apex age like anyone else, Willa.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it. You’re just a unique kid.”
“You think?” she answered sarcastically. “Stolen from home and raised by Ichorwulves for seven years? Groomed by them? You mean that’s not everyone’s experience?”
“Groomed? For what?”
Kathy seemed bemused, like it was obvious, like they’d been through it all before.
“The Claret, Willa.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
PICA
A psychological disorder characterized by a desire to consume non-nutritive substances. It often accompanies extreme cases of anemia.
He was getting hungry now and nothing would stay down. Not fried rice or lemons or protein foam or oats. Ice had worked for a bit, then that stopped. He couldn’t even drink water. First, it’d been the smokes, now nothing sat right. His brain felt like it was changing seasons. His perspective twisted. He was suddenly apathetic about the whole effort, hijacking Patriot and all that jazz. It was hard to tell if it was due to delirium from lack of sustenance or genuine indifference. Whatever it was, he needed to eat.
How he felt hunger had changed. It was no longer an emptiness in the belly, but a yearning, a desire to fulfill a drive that centered itself deep within his psyche, like instinct. He paced the Bahamas while the children played, secretly tasting various materials for something that would trigger an instinct that would tell him, Yes, this is your food, eat this.
Just down the steps from the back door, he touched his tongue to a blade of grass, peeled some of the tissue-thin bark from a birch sapling in the far corner. Back in the kitchen, it was thread from the drapes, paint chips, the tine of a plastic fork. Nothing worked. In the children’s room, he rummaged through the home’s toolbox, a sorry mishmash of finishing nails, wood screws, liquid poly, a big hammer, a child’s starter box saw, and a four-inch level. He smashed the plastic housing of the level with the hammer and withdrew the capsules of greenish fluid, eyed the oblong bubbles within. A quick check on the children and he pushed into the corner, biting a capsule and letting the fluid twine down his throat.
An explosion of spittle and phlegm burst from his mouth, coating the wall over the toolbox, followed by another round of rocky coughing. Reeling, he stumbled to a nearby table and propped himself up while getting control of the fit. He gathered the tablecloth – still stained from where Kathy had doused the ganglion – and pressed it to his mouth to muffle the sound. Each cough was thick, deep, and he could swear his rib meat was vibrating straight off the bone. He set his head to the table, heaving, trying to get calm. There was a visceral quality to his breathing. Wet. Labored. And he felt the twin forces of desperation and exhaustion pulling at each other – the prospect of starvation versus succumbing to it.
What else was there to try? Maybe he could weasel into one of the food markets over in the highbloods and start eating things till they kicked him out. Exotic fruits. Peaches maybe. There had to be something that satisfied. Plumes of his animal breath steamed the red-stained tablecloth and a pocket of vapor was created. An iron tang wafted from it like a narcotic and suddenly he was intoxicated. His pupils dilated and his pulse quickened. His mouth watered and his nostrils flared, their hollows filling with the potent aroma of life itself, an oasis for him among pools of dried blood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
PATHOGEN
Anything, such as a bacterium, virus, or parasite that can cause disease.
The hardest part of the blood bag hack was getting past the two needle punctures that came at random, followed by the phlebotomist’s own sense of feel. A would-be hacker had a choice to make: either enhance the inner bag’s strength to prevent the needle probes from puncturing through the decoy pocket and into the large pocket of lowblood, or sacrifice inner bag integrity in order to get past the phlebotomist. In the first scenario, the phlebotomist wins, in the second, the needle. Only by sheer luck would a poorly crafted bag get past the needles and the phlebotomist, a thousand-to-one, or worse, proposition.
Now it seemed they’d solved the problem of the bag. Willa hadn’t let on when she had first held Lock’s attic prototype, but she knew as soon as she’d touched it that no phlebotomist would suspect a thing. And if Lock was also right about the strength of the decoy pocket, that it would rebuff the needle probes, then they were on their way. They just needed highblood to fill the decoy pockets, and now it seemed they had it.
On the day after the heist, Willa and Lindon flew to the set of coordinates Lock had provided, leaving Everard and Kathy behind to watch the children back at the Bahamas. Dressed in a new coat of ubiquitous yellow, Llydia set down in a strange urban wilderness, under strict instructions not to exit the drone until Lock came to meet them.
Willa considered the display and took in their surroundings through the tiny window, but couldn’t place their location. It was densely, and diversely, wooded, though the ground was less dirt and more crumbling asphalt, with faded parking stripes and an old shopping cart corral. Taking the place of toppled lampposts were towering softwoods, Trees of Heaven, maybe, hackberries, and some conifers. In the distance was a building, spread long and low, painted in battleship gray with a single bold blue stripe sandwiched between two red ones running its length. Further to the southeast, along the border of the parking lot were countless m
odular homes, the type used for temporary housing after floods or hurricanes, piled on top of one another, white, with green-black moss infecting their seams and corners. Willa had a distinct recollection of them from her youth, when they’d been deployed as field hospitals and morgues at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
At this point in her life, Willa assumed she’d been down every street in the blood districts, knew every neighborhood and the buildings within, but this place wasn’t ringing familiar. She processed her confusion and her lips formed the shape of a question to be asked, “Where–”
“Bad Blood,” said Lindon, staring out.
That was it. Bad Blood. The place where people went and never left. A camp for the infected. The place where those with bloodborne illnesses came to live until they died.
“Lindon,” asked Willa, “you know this place?”
“Sequestration – Diagnosis – Inoculation – Elimination,” he said, tapping a rhythm to the window.
Like a flashbulb, Willa recalled what Claude had told her – that he could smell that Lindon was ill. “You’re sick, aren’t you?” she asked gently.
“Mmhmm. HIV.”
Willa nodded and turned back to the display. What could she say? The world had decided that anyone with HIV, AIDS, Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, malaria, coagulation disorders, syphilis, or any of a number of viral fevers, weren’t worth saving. That it would be better to let them die out in a leper colony in the parking lot of a petrified big box store.
The Phlebotomist Page 21
