More writhed than were upright, their mouths erupting gouts of blood like miniature geysers. Willa and Lock stepped and jumped over them as they raced toward the elevator bank. Some crawled after, screamed and roared, but their words came malformed, indecipherable, reduced to gurgles as they drowned in the blood of the poor.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
ERYPTOSIS
The programmed death of red blood cells.
Lock pounded the elevator button and they rushed in. She kicked the dead attendant to the side and played with the lever until they began upward. Between floors, she disengaged it and the car came to a stop.
“Holy shit, Willa.”
“What now? Where are the children?”
“Hell, if we killed all the bloodsuckers, maybe the kids found a way out already.”
“But the AB-positives are alive for sure. We didn’t get them. You saw MacLaren.”
“Fuck him.”
“What do we do?” asked Willa.
“I’ll go low, you go high?”
“Sure.”
Lock jumped on the lever and took the elevator to the second floor, where she leapt out.
“If you find the kids, roll to the tarmac.”
“See you there.” Willa closed the door and looked at the slot that held the lever. Ten floors. She went to the next floor and the doors opened. It was dark. Absent was the resplendent décor that saturated the rest of the Heart. A short, concrete hallway led from the elevator to another intersection. The setting was tight, claustrophobic. And while Willa didn’t suffer from the malady, she wondered if one might catch it.
She stepped cautiously from the elevator and listened. There were a few utilitarian-looking desks and chairs near one wall and a set of cabinets next to an interface, but no people. She dragged a chair over to prevent the door from closing, then walked to where the halls met and checked down the passages. Heavy steel doors were placed at close intervals. Their purpose was unambiguous. A place to keep people. A prison. Cold and cruel. Designed to sap the hope from anyone unlucky enough to be held within.
Willa hoped that if she found the children, they weren’t here.
A small dot of blood on the ground told her which passage to take. She knelt down and tapped a finger to it. Wet sawdust. A bit further down was another drop, and another. She walked quickly, following the blood like breadcrumbs. Around a corner, another corridor. But this time it was blocked at the halfway point. The portable cell they’d used for Everard sat at an angle, hastily abandoned. She ran as fast as her ridiculous gown would allow. The box was unlocked. “Everard!” she cried, swinging the door to the side. Empty.
To the left, one of the cell doors sat ajar. Willa palmed it open. Images of Claude lying dead poured in like she’d been transported back into Lock’s kitchen. On the floor of the cell, surrounded by small piles of matted fur and hairless tails, lay a second friend reduced to dust. A few feet from where his head had been sat another shining ganglion lying where it appeared to have crawled before the blood dried up. “Oh, Everard,” she whispered.
His clothes lay flat to the ground, filled with dust in the rough shape of the man it had once been. She knelt and ran her fingers through it, pinched a bit, wondering if there might be some magic to it, some retained power or life force. It only drifted to the floor, inert. She picked up the ganglion. It was small. Deformed. The word pathetic flashed, and she felt instantly guilty. The man had suffered. Maybe his ganglion was small because he’d been newly turned. Maybe they’d not fed him, and it had shriveled from starvation. She considered his remains spread across the ground. He would have fought the thing until he couldn’t any longer. Refused to let it win. That’s who Everard was. Right up until they shot him. She held it, almost affectionately, then placed it into her shoulder bag.
Willa stood to leave when she noticed a swatch of white across the cell on a ledge a few steps away. A notepad, no bigger than a touchstone, maybe fifty pages thick, and the stub of a pencil, chewed from the top down. The first, and every page stuffed to the corners with the same word repeated end to end. Hungry.
Taking the pad into her bag, she exited the cell and trotted down corridors calling for Isaiah and the other children until she was certain that no one was in the cells, or, at least, no one was alive.
She returned to the elevator, stepped over the chair and kicked it free. The next floor up, the doors opened to an expansive office lobby. Ichorwulves lay where they’d fallen, their heads all aimed toward the elevator. It was like they’d been arranged that way, all facing the same direction, like salmon in a river. Willa guessed they’d panicked when the reaction set in and had made for the exit only to fall shy. She tip-tapped through congealed pools of scarlet vomit and ducked her head into the doors but found no children. Next floor, same story. Finally, on the tenth floor, the elevator opened to an entirely different sort of space. To either side lay Patriot security guards, their shirts glazed with thick bloody mucus, their skin taking on the waxy texture that presaged decomposition. She knelt and pulled a lacegun from rigid fingers that loyally clutched it.
The hall was lined with wall-sized glossy images; the type that she remembered from trips to the museum as a child. Most were early black and whites from the century before her birth, depicting various historical landmarks. Scattered between and around the larger photographs were medical illustrations in simple frames. A pen and ink rendering of the first successful human blood transfusion. The anterior diagram of a human heart. A map of the major veins of the thorax. The photographs were easily recognizable. World War I. World War II. The Vietnam War. As the timeline progressed down the hall, she saw mushroom clouds and devastation from the bombs that had fallen on native soil. 2030: Chrysalis. 2039: Kannikin Redux. 2049: Astrid. 2059: Goliath. The expanding plume of Chrysalis – captured in one blink of a camera’s shutter – recalled the flash from Willa’s memory, the one she’d carried around for months on scarred retinas. A short statement appeared on a metal placard embedded in the frame.
~ Chrysalis ~
Scythe of the Silvered Rebellion; the blade that turned the once barren earth.
A chill ran down her spine like the caress of skeletal fingers. It was as if the death and destruction of nuclear war were being somehow praised. She leaned in close to read a few lines of print embossed on the poster-sized photograph for Kannikin Redux. She remembered it as the bomb that had led the government, or Patriot – or somebody – to establish the first Gray Zone on the East Coast.
Production on Kannikin Redux was five years in the making, but led directly to a renewed vigor in donation programs, helping to quell the first human resistance.
Five years in the making? Production? Memories flashed to the footage from that bomb: flattened cities, scorched countryside, bodies as cinders frozen right where they’d burned. She looked up and down the desolate hallway and read the plaque next to the photographs of Astrid’s aftermath.
M. MacLaren’s directorial debut.
By 2049, donation enforcement was a strain on Patriot budget and resources.
The Astrid program paid immediate dividends when PatrioCast pushed it onto all data platforms in May of 2049.
Willa almost dropped the lacegun. MacLaren?
She rushed to the section dedicated to Goliath, the latest – and largest – nuke to have hit in the Gray Zones. There were the usual images – the explosion, the fires, the carnage. But there was another series of photographs with annotations, sketches, and computer renderings. Set on display such as it was, it appeared to document a plan that had gone from idea to fruition. The renderings showed diagrams of an unfamiliar geographic area, with various angles on the explosion, and the spread of destruction all set out in a minute-by-minute timeline. But it wasn’t a journalistic documentation of a great tragedy. It was a storyboard.
A voice moaned from far down the hall. Willa steeled herself. A set of red lacquer doors capped the end of the corridor, one of them partially ajar. Another moan. Willa
slipped out of her shoes and headed toward it. The floor was slick and she skated across swirling waves of variegated red tiles. The voice came again, low. Miserable.
Willa glanced through the slit of light that came from inside the room and nudged the door with the gun. Around a table that stretched the length of the room lay the executives, or so Willa assumed. The room itself was a shrine to indulgence, all red enamels and gold inlay. The door met some resistance as she pushed it wide. She peeked around it to see a man, eyes vacant and moribund, struggling to belly crawl across the floor. He reached weakly for her ankle, but she kicked him away.
In a supple leather chair next to the head of the table, sat a woman, still somehow upright. Her head was back against the headrest and red tears cut through once pristine makeup. She held her stomach tenderly and glanced to Willa. “Help… please,” she groaned. “A-neg.”
“What’s the matter?” Willa asked, stepping over some of the others.
The woman lurched forward and vomited onto the table.
“Oh,” said Willa, “you’ve had a bad transfusion.” The woman coughed and gagged on the remnants of her purge, even wiped the edge of her mouth, primly, as if to correct her lipstick – like she might still be able to keep a dinner date.
Willa looked around again at all the dead, some of whom had already begun their disintegration. Each had a single red stripe running down one arm just as Dagen had, and she realized that this was the Claret.
“Please,” the woman mumbled. “I need A-neg.”
“Think that will help?”
The woman pointed to a toppled chalice sitting in a puddle. “I only took… a sip… of that. A-neg… please.”
A sideboard ran the length of the room on which sat a small cooling vault. Willa guessed the Claret must have had their own meal scheduled before joining the others, toasting to their great wealth and power, no doubt. She opened the vault and thumbed through the bags inside until she found a unit of A-neg. Withdrawing it, she let it roll across her finger pads. Either the bag was legit or Lock’s decoy pockets were that good. Well, this way she’d find out for sure. If the woman appeared to regain her strength, she could just shoot her. She selected a clean chalice, returned to the woman, and presented the heel of the bag displaying the label. The woman groaned impatiently.
Willa took up a knife from a pile of emptied bags and wiped it unceremoniously on the woman’s sleeve, then pierced the bag so it poured into the cup.
The woman grunted and motioned Willa forward with two fingers. “Just give it to me.”
She opened her mouth. Her tongue crept out like a serpent, curling at the end to an anticipatory point. Willa held the chalice in both hands and let a thin stream run down the woman’s throat. The scene conjured visions from her childhood, watching baptisms, the priests giving communion. Blood of Christ – not so much.
The woman took large, greedy swallows, letting the corners of her mouth spill rivulets down her neck and into her blouse. When the cup ceased dripping, she sat upright, marginally rejuvenated. Willa drew the gun to the ready.
The woman surveyed the room and seemed to see it with fresh eyes, then set her gaze to Willa. “How are you not dead?”
“I’m AB-positive, lady,” answered Willa. “Where are the children?”
“The… the children?” she coughed.
“You heard me.”
“Wait,” said the woman, breathing deeply. “Wait. Who are you?”
“I’m Willa Mae Wallace.”
The woman’s eyes widened as realization came. “You’re not Ichorwulf?”
“I ain’t.”
Her face was anger and confusion. She shifted uncomfortably. “How did you get in?”
“I had a key.”
The woman clenched her teeth and grumbled defiantly.
Willa reached into the bun on the top of her head and used her fingers to separate the locks of hair. The woman shrieked as a ganglion emerged from within. Willa slammed it onto the table and shoved it forward.
“How did you get that?”
“Did you know Scynthia Scallien?” asked Willa. “Say hi.”
The woman twisted in her chair, burped, and growled, “Impossible.”
“Oh, it’s definitely her,” said Willa. “Where’s Dagen?”
“Gone,” said the woman, forcing a condescending laugh through ever shallower breaths.
“When I was first learning phlebotomy,” said Willa, “they taught us how to diagnose an incompatibility reaction, you know, a bad transfusion.”
The woman squirmed, pawed weakly at her neck. Bloody tears wept from her eyes.
“There are many symptoms, of course. You’ve got them for sure.” She leaned in. “But there is one sign that leaves no doubt. Do you know what it is?”
The woman tried to spit, but the pathetic attempt clung to her chin, a hanging string.
“A sense of impending doom,” said Willa.
The woman angled her head backward and opened her mouth wide. Her bottom jaw came loose and she hacked. Neck veins bulged. Golden fangs emerged, stretching long from the roof of her mouth as if trying to escape. Then all tension left her body and her head crashed to the table, embedding the fangs in the polished grain.
Willa dropped the chalice and checked the room for any others living, but most were no longer recognizable.
Lock was bouncing up and down when the elevator doors parted. “They got no clue what hit ’em!”
Willa reached for a bleeding wound on Lock’s arm.
Lock brushed her off. “It’s nothing. Bit of lace. He got me and I got him. And then I got this.” She held up a gun.
Willa presented hers.
“Attagirl. Hey, we gotta roll. The AB-positives skee-daddled. I tagged a few of ’em, but you know I’m only one lady. They’ll be back for sure.”
“The children?”
Lock shook her head
They ran through the lavish corridor.
“Lock,” said Willa, panting as she followed. “All the bombs were fake.”
“How? I was there for Chrysalis just like you.”
“Yeah, that was the only real one. It was what gave them the idea for the others. People volunteer to give their blood when there’s a tragedy. So they just kept doing it, except as movie productions. Astrid, Kannikin, Goliath – all fake.”
“Those motherfuckers.”
In the now-quiet main corridor, ambient music could be heard. New Age synthesizer played over the sounds of waterfalls and babbling brooks. They came to the giant crystal cathedral doors through which they’d arrived.
Willa pointed outside. “Lock!” On the lawn a small group of conference-goers limped and shuffled away. She tried the doors but couldn’t budge them. Lock ran to a panel and began messing with the electronics. She yanked wires from inside, unclipped and re-clipped them, pulled some out wholesale, but the doors held.
“The Locksmith, huh?”
“It’s figurative!”
A noise came from down the hall behind them. Willa turned to see a man stepping into the far end of the corridor. He held a short sword. “Lock!” said Willa, pointing. “Hurry!”
He started toward them, his pace quickening.
“Now!” Willa screamed.
Lock struggled with the wires.
Willa aimed the gun and sent a barrage of lace into the doors, spilling glass across the floor. She swung around. The vrae launched into a dead sprint. She fired. He dove to avoid the shot, sliding ahead on his stomach, then leaping to full gallop in one smooth motion. They retreated through the door and onto the grounds. Running, Willa aimed backward and pulled the trigger. Nothing. A blue light flashed on the butt of the gun. She tripped and tumbled into the grass. Lock stood a few paces behind, gun raised. Steady. Three shots fired, evenly spaced. Piff. Piff. Piff.
The vrae’s momentum carried his limp body across the threshold before sliding to a stop.
“How come that one was still alive?” asked Lock, lowering the weapo
n.
“Either he didn’t eat or he’s AB-pos.”
“Well he’s AB-dead now.”
Just down the path, a dying Ichorwulf zombie-shuffled away. Lock fired a shot into his dome. He twitched forward and faceplanted onto the concrete steps. She strode into the night and finished off the few others still standing. “Let’s find the kids,” she said, turning back toward the building.
Willa didn’t move.
“What is it?” asked Lock.
Willa pointed overhead as dozens of lights coalesced in the sky over the Heart. “Someone’s coming!”
Drones poured over the rim of the building.
Willa and Lock took off down the hill. The first drone to reach them slowed as it came overhead, pacing them as they ran. Looking up at it, Willa could tell it wasn’t a personnel drone at all – just an average commerce drone. Lock yanked her to the side as another smashed into the ground where they’d just been, exploding in a spray of Chinese food. Another dove into the turf just ahead of them, this one full of paint.
“What is going on?” Willa screamed.
Lock helped Willa up and pulled her along. “Someone took control of all the drones in the area! They’re just throwing them at us.”
“Who?”
“Who? Patriot!” Lock stumbled along with her head craned to the sky. “That one.” She pointed to a set of lights high above the rest. “Someone’s up there, controlling all these.”
Another drone hit right in front of them and they split apart. Lock veered from the path and zigzagged through the primrose.
They continued separately onto the tarmac as drones of every kind pelted the ground. Delivery drones, catering drones, dry-cleaning drones, grocery drones, medical drones, and lawn care drones bombed them from all sides. They ran into the maze of parked personnel drones and used them for cover as they worked toward Llydia. Others began to drop randomly upon the tarmac, a sign that the controlling drone had likely lost sight of them.
The Phlebotomist Page 29
