The Phlebotomist

by Chris Panatier

  Lock spoke quietly. “That’s not true, Willa.”

  “I should have stopped you the second you brought up letting her go in by herself. You just used her. And I let you!”

  “Don’t give me that. You let her play teen mom in front of a twenty-ton truck just fine. But now that shit’s gone sideways, you’re having second thoughts,” she said. “Stay on task.”

  Willa seethed. “There must have been another way.”

  Lock stared Willa down. “There wasn’t. This was the only way to get those printers out. Get it through your head. Or don’t. I don’t care. But don’t blame me for it.” She eased the stick toward Bad Blood. “Like it or not, Willa, the plan worked. Those printers are how we’re gonna save your boy. And my kids. And get Kathy back!”

  Willa wanted to scream, but stopped herself short. Lock was that awful combination of stubborn and always right. The type of person that never changed their mind, while expecting others to change theirs. And she always had to get the last word. Willa resolved to end it. There was no changing what had already happened.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  APLASIA

  With regard to blood, it is the deficiency of red cell production in the marrow that leads to a low red blood cell count.

  The corner of Lock’s mouth was stretched over the fat end of a carrot and she moved it side to side like an army general with a cigar. Willa observed from a nearby table, disgusted, itching for Lock to bite off a chunk and get it over with.

  One of the printers was already up and running, spitting out poly-ceramic bags into a wicker basket at twenty per minute. Once Lock had the second printer going – and barring any setbacks – they’d have a hundred thousand of them in about twenty hours. More would be better, but they didn’t have time. Distribution had to take place the following evening when they could justify crowding the streets. Halloween hadn’t been celebrated in years, but they figured to resurrect something close to it for one night as a cover to hand out the counterfeits under the guise of trick-or-treating. Anyhow, with so few of the neighborhood’s cameras in operation, it was unlikely to raise Patriot’s suspicions.

  Willa watched everything happen as if she was on the other side of glass. Paralyzed. How many children could she lose and still function? In the rush of activity over the last days, she’d been distracted enough to keep pushing, but now in the stillness, reality was dawning. There was no way for them to get inside the Heart and even if they managed it, they had no way of knowing if the bag hack would work. She was tired. Life was piling up. And now she was trapped, handcuffed to this woman who would treat a child like an expendable foot soldier; a means to an end. Maybe Kathy had been the only way to get the printers. So what? Willa didn’t care; she was a child. There was a line and they’d crossed it. More than once.

  Willa eyed the door at the opposite end of the old supermarket. On the other side of it stood a parking lot that hadn’t seen an actual car in thirty years. Beyond that was the rest of Bad Blood, the edgelands, and finally, endless fields of silicorn that stretched to the horizon. How hard would it be to muster the will to open the door and start walking? She’d never been to the sky wall before. Perhaps she could get close enough to see it with her own eyes before the rest of her gave out.

  They didn’t talk about Kathy. There was nothing to say. The plan was all they had left. Succeed, and they get her and the others back. Fail and they don’t. They had to presume that she was back in the system. A repurposed child that would go back up for adoption at Patrioteer. Privately, Willa considered that the best-case scenario. Because there was another, worse outcome. If Patriot figured out who Kathy was, who she’d been, and what she’d been groomed to be, it was unlikely they would put her out for general adoption. If anyone recognized her as Ellen Olden, she might already be gone, taken into the lair of the Claret maybe, wherever that was. The girl’s unhealed half finger was a giant red flag that could seal her fate.

  Lock entered some schematics on the second printer’s interface, and it glowed to life. She stepped behind it and unwrapped a heavy billet of raw poly she’d obtained, then hefted it into the machine. After that, she dumped a scoop of ceramic powder into a hopper on top. The printer slowly chewed the poly, what looked like a giant, semi-transparent stick of colorless butter and ejected the first bag. Lock inspected it, then cracked the small cooling element installed inside.

  “Oh dang!” she exclaimed, dropping the bag, “that’s chillier than I thought – hey Willa, can blood freeze?”

  Lock’s ability to focus on something other than the children was infuriating. Willa ignored her.

  “Hey. Willa. Can blood freeze or not?”

  Willa stared at a line of newly arranged work benches, not wanting to answer, but succumbed to her natural compulsion to provide information where a void existed. “About twenty-six point six degrees Fahrenheit.”

  Lock sucked on her thumb where she’d touched the element. “Well I hope these are calibrated alright. They had to be a little colder to keep the decoy blood from spoiling.”

  Lindon and John took baskets of newly printed bags to an assembly line manned by Bad Blood’s residents, who routed them to the appropriate stations along the refrigerated section. There, the decoy pockets were filled with highblood. Willa found herself wandering down the line, unable to tamp her awe of the operation’s magnitude and organization.

  John came alongside Willa with one of the baskets. “This was all your idea, huh?”

  “Of course not,” said Willa. “I don’t know anything about printers.”

  “Yeah. But using blood as a weapon? That was you.”

  “It was there for anyone to see. I just happened to see it, that’s all.”

  “I have a question,” he said, standing next to a basket as it filled. “The decoy pocket is only at one end of the blood bag. What if the reapers scan some other part of it?”

  “They won’t,” said Willa, chuckling as her mind conjured visions of her lazy ex-coworkers. “Well, some might, but most won’t. Here, look.” She bent to the basket and selected a fresh bag. “You wear the bag like so.” She held it up to the outside of John’s bicep, needle end down, with the decoy pocket inside toward the top. “All phlebotomists pull the bags from the donors the same way, fingers between the bag and the skin, thumb down.” She demonstrated the move. “The most natural motion once you’ve got the bag is to flip it on the way to the scanner, so the top end of the bag becomes the bottom, see?”

  “Mmhmm,” John nodded.

  “The end with the decoy is what receives the needle probes. Now, company rules say we’re supposed to change it up from donor to donor. You know,” she mimed, “scan the sides, the top, all of that. But nobody does that except for new hires and,” she tossed the bag into the now full basket, “stubborn old ladies.”

  “Why didn’t the company crack down, make the reapers change it up?”

  “You need highblood for a bag hack, John. Where would the lowbloods get it? What highblood would give it over so lowbloods might profit? I don’t think it ever happened but once. And that was when Lock sent Everard through my line a few days back. It’s never really been that much of a concern.”

  “So, we’re just hoping they all continue to be derelict in their bag scanning.”

  “And they will,” she said, pushing the overflowing basket to the side and sliding an empty one underneath the printer’s output chute. “Sure as the sun will rise.”

  “You’re that confident?”

  Willa recalled Lock saying that technology was only part of a hack; because human beings were at the front and back of it, everything still came down to human nature. Weaknesses in technology are predictable because humans are predictable. She wasn’t wrong. “I know these folks, John. Plus, they’ll be inundated once people start flooding in. All they’ll care about is getting the lines down. Trust me.”

  “We all do,” he said, taking the full basket down to the assembly line.

  Willa wa
tched him march away and felt a ripple of shame. How long had the people of Bad Blood been sequestered behind that wall? They were the ones with every justification to be paralyzed by despondency and cynicism. Yet they weren’t. There was Lock, moving at full speed and with no sleep, working to make sure they were prepared. Willa, meanwhile, had slowed to a crawl, dwelling in her guilt over the loss of Kathy; blaming Lock, blaming herself.

  She let the printer fill the basket, then hefted it against her hip like laundry. Down at the assembly area she grinned at a boy who couldn’t have been any older than Isaiah. He smiled brightly as he squeezed a bag to test its construction before passing it down the line. At the end of the aisle, the printers, now warm, were spitting out bags at full capacity. She approached Lock. “What do you need from me?”

  Lock tried to avoid spilling a stack of poly butter sticks she held like firewood. “I– we need you back.”

  Willa came closer, offering her arms, and Lock allowed some of the poly to tumble over to her. “I’m here,” Willa said. “Show me how to help.”

  Lock studied Willa’s face like a human polygraph. Seeming satisfied, she gestured for her to follow.

  Over behind the printers Lock said, “Turns out these Patriot models are way better than anything we could have gotten on the black market. Whereas a run-of-the-mill machine would have to print the poly bag and the inner decoy pocket separately, these bad boys can do it in one go. Ceramic powder ink. See?” She leaned in, directing Willa to a small window on the side of the machine. She could see a decoy pocket being printed, while at the same time extruders formed the outer bag around it. Willa nodded and went to add some more ceramic powder under Lock’s supervision.

  “Make sure you keep the little tray there topped up with cooling elements,” said Lock, pulling on her leather vest and watching Willa work. “Yeah, see? You got it.” She turned for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Rendezvous with some criminal types,” she answered. “Meeting with some of the folks I used to hang out with before I met you.” She winked. “Settle a few debts.”

  “Now?”

  “Two birds, one stone, Willa,” she answered, huffing at her goggles and then swirling them with a scarf. “They’ll help us with the logistics of bag distribution throughout the other segments and I get square for a whole ledger’s worth of favors and debts. If this hack takes, then these guys stand to make beaucoup casheesh and I get out of the red.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?”

  Lock became suddenly less animated and shrugged. “If it doesn’t work it means we’ve lost the kids, Willa. My creditors want to come calling for their pound of flesh, so be it.”

  With Lock off trying to get their distribution network in place, Willa toiled with the printers. She had lost count of how much poly she’d fed them, though it was easily enough to fill dozens upon dozens of the wicker baskets. The assembly line had dwindled to a skeleton crew. Others napped on pallets in the building or off in their modules. Her good arm ached from hauling poly billets. It was late. And even though there were no windows, the depth of night somehow made it feel darker inside.

  Someone began hammering at the side door. John and Lindon leapt to attention and rushed down the long row of checkout aisles. Willa raced to catch up.

  John put his ear to the door. “Who is it?” he called. “Lock, is that you?”

  No response.

  He got to his toes and slid a thin metal piece to the side revealing a peep hole. Pressing his eyes to the slot, he surveyed the outside. “There’s nobody out there,” he whispered.

  “Let me see,” said Lindon. Much taller than John, he didn’t need to strain to see out the hole. He looked and turned back. “Whoever it was, they’re gone.”

  Another loud bang.

  Willa dragged over an old plastic crate and stepped on top, careful to keep her balance. Lindon held her hand as she stepped onto it to look through the slot. In the distance were the modules of Bad Blood, lit here and there by small strands of lights, flickering dimly on the dribble of power that fed them. She looked to the sky for the telltale red of Patriot drones but saw nothing. She stepped down and sat on the crate. “I can’t see anyone. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Kids,” said Lindon with a shrug. “Probably playing a joke. Throwing acorns. They know we’re in here working.”

  “We gotta get back,” said John. He shuffled toward the assembly line.

  “You OK?” asked Lindon.

  “I’m fine. I’ll catch up,” said Willa.

  Lindon followed John.

  Willa climbed back to the slot. Seeing nothing, she slammed it shut and pushed the crate back against the wall and sat. She leaned over and gave her calves a rub, massaged her sore Achilles.

  A tiny squeak, like an injured bird, came from outside. Willa froze and perked her ears. Like a wheeze, it came again, slightly stronger. And again. A word. Whispered. Vengeance.

  “Oh my God!” Willa threw open the bolt and yanked the door inward.

  Kathy was slumped tight to the door frame, her face matted with hair and a thick lamina of blood. Willa dropped to the ground and cradled her. “What happened?”

  Lindon and others raced toward them.

  The girl’s eyelids bumped languidly open. Willa checked her over for injuries. “Kathy?” She caressed her cheek and the girl roused slightly. Cradled in her left hand was a blood-soaked rag. Willa gently lifted the folds.

  An oblong hole trickled red from the center of her palm. Lace wound.

  They carried her inside to a cot and dressed the wound as Kathy watched passively. Willa checked her for additional injuries. None. Her pulse was strong even though she was painted from head to toe in blood. Like she’d showered in it.

  Willa used wet cloths to scrub the grime from the girl’s body until there was a seeping red pile on the floor. She rubbed Kathy’s skin until it couldn’t take any more, but it held a pinkish tint.

  Willa lay down on the cot next to her, warming her in an embrace, though she realized the action might have been more for herself than for the girl. Kathy was safe and alive and Willa’s conscience would get a second chance. In the morning, she would find somewhere to get Kathy a shower and go looking for some clean clothes.

  Kathy’s breathing steadied until she was deep in the trough of slumber. Now and then, Willa thought she heard her uttering the password as if she was still outside, pressed to the bottom of the door.

  vengeance

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  METAPLASIA

  An abnormal change in the nature of living tissue.

  It was somewhere black. Like sitting under the skirt of a weeping willow blindfolded in the swamp on a summer night. Except without biting flies or skeeters. He had a distant recollection of a man who would have been up at the door, wherever it was, beating the sap out of it and screaming about his rights, and kicking asses until he got someone’s attention. Would have raised Hell, that other man, made them regret underestimating him. But not the new man. The new man was starving again, headache grinding like cinderblock teeth, flashing pain in imagined colors swallowed by the dark.

  It was like being buried alive, the blackness. Until he saw the rat, that was. For some reason it stood out, glowing red-orange inside the chamber they both occupied. Like his eyes were doing him a favor, telling him where the thing was that couldn’t see him back.

  He was surprised at the amount of muscle in the little thing and how long it fought while he clamped it in his teeth. It kicked and scratched even after he pulled the backbone free, giving the animal a dorsal fan of its own flesh. He became instantly sick, bathing the struggling animal in his acrid and watery vomit just before it keeled, the sounds of his dry heaving its last perceived experience of the world. He watched it twitch, and as it died, felt jealousy at its freedom.

  The whole event had confused. If the rat was toxic to his newfound constitution, why had his eyes called it out to him? Was tha
t part of the curse?

  He supposed he’d known somewhere deep down that the varmint wouldn’t quash his hunger, but as with the marooned sailors of the Whaleship Essex who knew not to drink of the salty ocean, they did so anyway when thirst got to a point. Some urges push till they win.

  His brain was crawling. His stomach was empty as a viper’s gullet. Other things moved about the cell, highlighted in their telltale glow. Most were small rodents and insects, but he dared not fall upon them, for the curse had given him false vision.

  His captors said they would feed him once he’d surrendered over the identities of his co-conspirators, and left him a paper pad on which to turn state’s evidence, but he wasn’t the surrendering type, and so he told them to kick pebbles along with a barrage of other unpleasantries. He’d tried eating some of the paper, but when it failed to satisfy, he tossed it into the corner of the cell. When they’d left, he’d begged in whispers to be fed.

  If those cops meant to kill him, well they best get to it.

  The thing inside was eating him, he knew it to a certainty. Tiny pieces of who he was, slowly chewed and swallowed, then forgotten. Knowing he was forgetting but not knowing what was lost was a new type of torture. Until he forgot that he’d forgotten, of course. Worry gave way to confusion, only to be replaced by a sense of vague desolation and finally, indifference.

  He tried to remember details of the man who had been, to recall some of the things that might have brought that man pleasure. With enough effort he found some vestiges that were almost too buried to access. He smelled and tasted cigarettes, winced at the heat of a well-earned sunburn, heard the bravado in his voice as it spouted off to authority, felt the joy in providing for and protecting those children. What were their names? The memories, if that’s what they were, brought him nothing. Not a flutter of emotion or whiff of nostalgia. None of it was real anymore. They weren’t his stories. They were someone else’s experiences told by somebody else about somebody else – stories of the man who had been before. Myths. Maybe it was all made up.