The Phlebotomist Read online

  PRAISE FOR CHRIS PANATIER

  “Panatier’s world – wracked by war and held together by weary patriotism – seems all too close at hand, and his characters are as real as your next-door neighbors. His unlikely hero, Willa Wallace, takes on mankind’s oldest foes – poverty, prejudice, greed, and things more calculating and predatory – in this exciting and genre-challenging debut from Angry Robot Books.”

  R.W.W. Greene, author of The Light Years

  “With The Phlebotomist, Panatier has created a unique, intricately imagined vision of a divided society, where cash-for-blood is a booming trade and society is split by government sanctioned exsanguination. Rich, bold and visceral, this is a layered, post-apocalyptic book you won’t escape from easily, and one which left me genuinely squirming in my seat.”

  Gemma Amor, Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of Dear Laura and White Pines

  “A compelling dystopian thriller that presents a fallen world and proceeds to dissect it with sanguine enthusiasm using its refreshingly unconventional heroes.”

  Indrapramit Das, author of The Devourers

  “A terrifying tale of governmental manipulation and control, set against the kind of global health crisis that used to be a futuristic “what if” but is now very much a “what might be”… equal parts fascinating and horrifying, and never not entertaining.”

  Dan Hanks, author of Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire

  “In The Phlebotomist, Chris Panatier gives us the unlikely female protagonists – a plucky grandmother, a tech-geek locksmith, and a teenager with swords – we didn’t know we needed, and sets them in a near-future world that terrifies because it feels so possible. Nuclear disaster? Check. Constant monitoring by Big Brother? Uh-huh. Invasion of both men’s and women’s bodies for the Common Good? That, too. At once grounded in legit science, and also so totally imaginative that you have to find out what happens next, this book will take root at the base of your brain, threading its tentacles into your spinal cord and requiring you to keep turning pages until the bloody end.”

  Jessica Hagemann, author of Headcheese

  “A clever, inventive fantasy with a horrific twist that explores whether we are more than the sum of our parts.”

  Tal Klein, author of The Punch Escrow

  ANGRY ROBOT

  An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

  Unit 11, Shepperton House

  89 Shepperton Road

  London N1 3DF

  UK

  angryrobotbooks.com

  twitter.com/angryrobotbooks

  Time to Bite Back

  An Angry Robot paperback original, 2020

  Copyright © Chris Panatier 2020

  Cover by Chris Panatier and Glen Wilkins

  Edited by Gemma Creffield and Robin Triggs

  Set in Meridien

  All rights reserved. Chris Panatier asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Sales of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

  Angry Robot and the Angry Robot icon are registered trademarks of Watkins Media Ltd.

  ISBN 978 0 85766 861 5

  Ebook ISBN 978 0 85766 862 2

  Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my mother and her sisters.

  To my wife, her sister, and mother.

  To my sister.

  To my daughter.

  Doom is a flood that waits for the rift.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER ONE

  HYPOVOLEMIA

  A state of decreased intravascular volume, including as a result of blood loss.

  The sun was barely up, but the hour didn’t keep folks from scrambling in to sell their blood. Early bird donors packed into lines that stretched to the entrance, their collective anxiety like a vapor that flooded Willa’s nostrils when she walked in behind them. After so many decades on the job, she could almost discern the iron tang of it. That they were a mixture of types was obvious by their dress, with some low- and midbloods sprinkled in among the usual O-negs. Willa double-checked the time in case she’d somehow arrived late and glanced around for the station manager. “Claude?”

  “Over here,” he called, rounding the corner from the big freezer.

  Willa held her arms open toward the growing mob.

  “Price boost,” said Claude.

  “Again?”

  “Check your PatrioCast,” hollered Gena from down at Stall D. “Came down thirty minutes ago.”

  Willa slipped on her reading glasses and brought up the alert screen on her handheld touchstone:

  PATRIOCAST 10.19.67

  ***Residual ionizing radiation since Goliath causes latent spike in chronic diseases***

  To answer demand, Patriot offers the following incentives for units donated above the Draw. Valid through 10.21.67:

  ONEG: +40.75

  OPOS: +34.64

  ANEG: +18.75

  APOS: +16.67

  BNEG: +5.7

  BPOS: +5.13

  ABNEG: +1.71

  ABPOS: +1.45

  Patriot thanks ALL DONORS. Your gift matters!

  Patriot called it the Draw, but the people called it the Harvest. It came every forty-five days, a reaping of blood from every person sixteen and up. But it wasn’t the Harvest that had Donor Station Eight packed to the gills. It was the chance to sell. For those feeling blooded enough to give beyond the minimum, Patriot was a willing buyer – that was the Trade.

  Willa hung her jacket and donned her black lab cloak, then brought Stall A online. She buttoned the cloak and pulled its hood snug to her head as the various scanners and probes hummed to life. Each stall had two lanes, corral like, so phlebotomists could handle a pair of donors simultaneously if they were dexterous enough to manage. Willa was.

  All of Patriot’s collectors carried the title of “Phlebotomist,” a point of unvoiced contention for Willa, since she was the only one who’d ever actually been a genuine phlebotomist. Sure, the others could pull a blood bag, spot-check it for authenticity, and dro
p it in the preservation vaults, but they wouldn’t know the cubital vein from the cephalic. Especially Gena. Decades before the world went sideways, Willa had been trained in the old ways of venipuncture. Not that it mattered. True phlebotomy was an antiquated practice, irrelevant, like driving a car, another thing she used to be good at. The new ways were undoubtedly more efficient. It was for the best, after all. People in the Gray Zones needed the blood.

  Willa’s first two donors, a man and a woman, stepped into the lanes and lowered their shoulder-zips, exposing ports in their skin onto which blood bags were connected through a small siphon and needle junction. She quickly removed and processed the man’s bag, then turned to the woman.

  The man interrupted, “I got extra,” and presented a second full bag from a satchel.

  “Where’d you get this one, Tillman?” Willa asked. He was in so often that his sourcing had to be black-market. Most likely blood muggings. The cash-for-blood trade had created an unseemly underground economy, and it was booming.

  “It’s mine, reaper,” he answered with a devious grin.

  He knew that she had to take the blood if it scanned clear. It was company policy to accept any blood offered, so long as the phenotype, or blood type, matched the donor’s profile. That didn’t guarantee it was actually the donor’s blood – far from it – but it gave Patriot a veneer of deniability if they were ever accused of being a market for questionably-sourced product. She ran it over the needle probe, which analyzed for phenotype, as well as other immunoreactive antigens and antibodies, the organism of origin, diseases, and the percentage of red blood cells in eryptosis, or cell death. If the readings were off, the bag would be rejected.

  The probe cleared the unit and she dropped it curtly into her booth’s cooling vault. Tillman smirked and scanned his touchstone for credit. “See you tomorrow,” he said.

  “You’d better not,” said Willa.

  She rotated to the woman. “Sorry about that, ma’am.”

  The woman was rough, wearing her thirty or so years like fifty. She held her sleeve open loosely, eyes drooping. Willa sighed and reluctantly removed the blood bag from her port. “Ma’am?”

  The woman’s eyelids fluttered as she struggled to say something. Her head flopped forward and she collapsed against the stall, her thin legs and arms in a tangle.

  “Claude! Gelpack!” Willa rounded her station into the narrow corral. “Ma’am?” She tapped the woman’s cheeks.

  When Claude arrived, Willa traded the woman’s blood bag for the gelpack, a small syrette filled with carbs and epinephrine used to jumpstart folks who sold more than their bodies could give. She broke its cap, pushed the two tiny needles into the skin on the inside of the woman’s arm, and squeezed the contents into her basilic vein.

  Claude looked at the woman, shaking his head. “Crazy. An A-neg in here trading like a lowblood.”

  Willa applied a small bandage over the wound and gave a touch of pressure. “How do you know she’s A-neg?”

  “Just a hunch.” He leaned into the stall and scanned the bag on Willa’s console. “Mmhmm. A-neg.”

  “The incentives are too high, Claude.”

  “I hear you, Willa Mae, but…” he dropped the bag into her vault and took the chance to whisper “…what can you do? Rules are rules.” He gave a helpless shrug.

  Willa helped the woman to a bench along the wall opposite a screen tuned to the Channel. She let her eyes blur over it while the stranger went in and out of consciousness on her shoulder. Back before the war, before Patriot, the medically recommended wait between donations was fifty-six days. This was to ensure that people fully recovered between donations. The absolute earliest that the human body could replenish a unit of blood was twenty-eight days, with many people taking up to three times that. The Harvest had lopped eleven days from the interval, mandating one donated pint every forty-five. If you wanted your government food rations, you showed up. If you didn’t, you starved.

  The Harvest alone was enough of a strain. But Patriot had gone a step further, offering cash to people willing to sell even more than the Harvest minimum. Of course, people were drawn in. Robots had taken most of the jobs and the Trade was regarded as something like basic income. Except folks were paying for it with the fruit of their veins. It never ceased to amaze Willa how much people could adapt, walking around in a constant state of hypovolemia just to get a little more coin, wearing symptoms so long that they eventually became character traits. Weakness, fatigue, confusion, clammy skin. Eventually anemia or shock ended the cycle. To Willa it was like state sanctioned Russian roulette, and folks were just spinning the cylinder.

  Claude looked at her sideways. She was violating company policy by vacating her stall, but Claude tended to give her wider berth than the others. She had quickly worked her way up to Stall A – the equivalent of first chair in an orchestra – and had never relinquished it. Her gaudy production numbers brought her a certain amount of leniency.

  The woman’s hands lay folded against the bench like possum claws; skeletal and dirty, the dwindling meat beneath the skin a ticking clock. Willa had seen it all before, a cycle of destruction that churned through the districts to touch every family.

  The woman straightened as if she’d been suddenly plugged back in.

  “Ma’am?” Willa asked with a gentle touch to her wrist.

  “What do you want?”

  “You passed out. You’ve given too much.”

  The woman’s pupils tightened on the screen, where a scrolling chyron flashed yet another incentive bump and she sprang from the bench. Willa latched to her arm instinctively. “There’s no need. You’re A-neg. The price will be the same tomorrow. Please, don’t.”

  “Get off me,” she growled. Willa knew it wasn’t who the woman really was, but the Trade had a way of exposing the nerves. Ripping her arm away, she returned to the back of the line.

  Willa stepped into her stall and got her line moving. She processed bags, checked for fakes, but her eyes stayed on the woman. In short order, she was next in line, a new bag on her port, filling red pulse-by-pulse. “I’m feel good,” she mumbled in anticipation of Willa’s objection.

  “No, you don’t,” said Willa. “That’s the gelpack talking. It’s just adrenaline. Please don’t do this.”

  The woman leaned heavily on the side of the stall. “You haffto I got kids.”

  She was technically correct. Willa did have to. Grudgingly, she removed the half-full bag and processed it. It was a brutal thing, the blood trade, but here she was stuck on the receiving end of it; a cog in a runaway machine.

  Just before close, a notification glowed orange on her display. She deactivated her stall, sending glass barricades across the lanes and flagged Claude in Stall B. “Coolant.”

  Claude summoned Willa’s donors to his line and they grumbled their way over.

  Willa angled a panel open and dipped her hand into her cooling vault. Her toes curled anxiously inside her orthotics. It was warming. “How much room do we have in the big cooler?”

  “Topped out after lunch.”

  She had almost fifty liters. Blood couldn’t be transfused after four hours in warm conditions due to bacterial proliferation. It would go bad long before morning if she couldn’t get it cooled and her pay would be docked. “I’ll call a technician.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  Willa tapped the support button and sat helplessly as donors side-eyed her from the long lines in front of Claude. Sorry she mouthed.

  Closing time came with no technician responding. Normally, all of the vaults would be taken to the distribution hub after hours, but with no way to cool hers, it had to go now. She wheeled the vault, about the size of an old hotel refrigerator, from under the console and unhooked the cables from the processing interface. Having taken all of the extra donors, Claude’s line was still out the door.

  “I’m taking this to SCS,” said Willa.

  “Sorry, Willa, I’d do it, but…” The station s
upervisor couldn’t leave with donors present and Patriot didn’t turn away willing supply.

  “I know,” she said. “When you’re done… do you mind… can you fetch Isaiah from school?”

  “Sure. He’s at the same spot?”

  “He is. Thank you, sweetheart.”

  “My pleasure,” answered Claude, swiping blood bags from the donors nearly as fast as she.

  Outside Station Eight the sky was purple on one side and orange on the other, with clouds like gray icing layered between. The type of weather Willa described as soon-to-be. Mid October cool, soon-to-be cold. She shivered preemptively and hailed a taxi drone.

  Drone rides were an absolute luxury in the blood districts and Willa felt guilty in summoning one, even if it was necessary to help her ferry the vault. After half a minute, a taxi drone in mustard yellow broke from the low-hanging clouds.

  The sight of a drone descending from the sky to land right in front of you was something Willa would never get used to, even though they’d been around for decades. They seemed alien. Aside from helicopters, things that could fly were supposed to have wings. And drones were not helicopters.

  To Willa they looked like flying gumdrops. Aside from some aerodynamic ridges that pinched out from the sides, they were rounded at the edges and slightly narrower near the roof. The motors were mounted in an array around the top rim, giving them a crownlike appearance. They were called “ducted fans,” though the term meant little to Willa. They resembled giant rolls of toilet paper with propeller blades tucked snuggly against the inner walls. Independent articulation allowed them to control not only lift, but direction and altitude. With small alterations to the blade shape over the years, they were hummingbird quiet. Another eerie feature.

  The taxi landed and the door swept open from the bottom. Welcome aboard CROW FLIES, it said.

  “Patriot Distribution, SCS,” said Willa. “Quickly please.”

  We will arrive at Patriot Distribution, Southern City Segment, in two and a half minutes.

  Once she’d buckled into the bench and secured the vault to the cargo clip against the wall, the drone lifted off. A screen around the inner perimeter created a false three-hundred and sixty degree window, interrupted only by an actual window, set like a porthole in the door. She’d flown in plenty of drones but, much like their appearance, she had never gotten used to them – how they felt, how they took away all control. She longed for the solid predictability of a steering wheel and the responsiveness of an accelerator. Before the war, before the Harvest, before Patriot, when the asphalt was still good and cars could be afforded, Willa owned the roads, collecting tickets like blue ribbons. Speeding – her one real vice. But that was then. Nowadays, a car would appear every so often near the business district, but only the rich had money for such extravagances.