✦✦✦ ─────── DAMP AIR ROSE against the high ceiling of the basement, partially sucked out by the vent whirring loudly in the back of the room, partially swirled around with the cold air sputtering out of an air conditioning unit. Howard was thankful he was dead for the most part, looking and feeling rather cool despite the numbers screaming in the weather station on his desk.
He tightened a tourniquet around an arm, then trailed a knowing finger down the sussurrating bloodstream. A palpated vein now found, he swabbed an alcohol wipe, told the donor to relax, and pushed a needle in.
Fresh, hot blood rushed through the tubing and into a prepared blood bag. This one is in the clear. The other two in the other seats? Not so much -- he could smell the problem. Sickened, weak, almost unusable. The one with the bird tattoo: born that way, broken chains within her body, somehow keeping her alive still. The one with the scar on his cheek? Circumstance. BLOOD, five pitiful litres of them, swirling round and round and round in the body; so insignificant in weight against the rest of the flesh and bone, and yet, all it took is a puncture to realise that it is the most precious five litres of anything anyone could possibly own.
Needle out, plaster on; a bottle of water, an energy bar; and five 20-dollar notes for their trouble. Some will get eight, some ten. It depended on how good the supply was, of course. Mr Pike just knows how to pick them, they'd say. And no matter how much anyone wanted to argue that their blood is worth more than they were paid at the end of each donation, they always walk out grateful for what they were given. Odd feeling of nausea. Terrible dream. Chalked down to the side effects of losing blood, of course.
One pouch filled, warm in Howard's hand. It went straight into storage, chair wiped down with Sanicloth, a hygiene roll pulled over the surface, and he would call out the door, poking his head out as he swapped his twentieth set of gloves for today.
