Immortality Is the Suck
Page 18
Almost sickening in its sweetness.
Somebody slapped me, hard, upside the head.
“Not for you, pup.” A big old Angel, braid down his back, worn leather vest
covered with patches, with arms so thick and long he looked more like a gorilla
than a man, grinned at me with yellowed teeth. “Prospects have to drink from
the bottle.”
I raised my eyebrows at Caballo. What?
He grinned and the Angel jerked his chin toward the room from which the
“M” boys had just emerged. “Time for your bottle, baby boy,” and he slapped
my ass.
Just when I'd thought life couldn't get more surreal. The last time I'd seen
an HA in colors, he'd been sighting me down the barrel of his revolver. Now one
was giving me buddy slaps.
“He your new prospect?” said one of the Eme boys to Caballo.
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“Maybe.” Caballo accepted the fat doobie the man passed him, took a long
drag, and passed it back. It was a Polaroid moment. The “M” sharing drugs
with a Crip.
“You train him good now, boy.”
Caballo's eyes flashed, barely perceptible and quickly hidden by his
eyelids. “C'mon, Adam,” he said.
Caballo led me into what turned out to be a large kitchen. A long counter
on one side, where a variety of men and women leaned and sat; across from
that, five full-size stainless steel refrigerators.
It was like a social hour, everyone drinking from milk cartons of blood.
Nobody seemed to mind me reaching into a refrigerator and bringing out my
own carton. It wasn't until I'd peeled off the seal on top and swallowed the first
mouthful that I understood why.
It looked like blood. It smelled like blood. It tasted like crap.
“Newbie!” chortled a few old boys as I spat into the sink.
“You'll get used to it.” The man who spoke was short and dark and the
belly that overlapped his belt buckle was completely covered with an
illustration of a graveyard. His eyes seemed nothing but small, round black
circles in his hairless face. He looked like a brown smiley face. He tipped back
his carton and the Adam's apple in his thick neck moved as he swallowed. It
made me gag to watch.
“I'd rather not.”
“It's better than drying up.” I noticed that Caballo had instinctively moved
to the side of the kitchen where the other black men stood. He and the speaker
punched knuckles and the man said to me, “Until you're full patch this is all
you get. Unless you pick up something on your own outside.” He leaned toward
me and said, low, “Don't let Ozone know you're freelancing, though.”
I sniffed at the carton again and my mouth filled with saliva. It smelled so
much like blood. “Where do they get this stuff?”
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“Home grown,” said Smiley Face. He chucked his carton into what looked
like a recycling bin. “It'll only hold you for twenty or thirty hours, but it's food.”
“They make it from human bone marrow.” He seemed younger than the
others, tall and impossibly skinny. Hair razored off, a big, baggy immaculate
white T-shirt, and a thick golden chain with a dazzling two inch high “C”
hanging from it. He looked nothing like a biker and I vaguely remembered the
tat across his knuckles as one that belonged to a small Compton gang. “More
efficient to harvest the bone marrow than the blood, I heard. Then they use
stem cells to make hemoglobin.”
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
“Studied biology once,” said the man. “They call me Condor.”
I held out my hand. “I'm Snake,” I said. “I—”
“I know who you are,” said Condor. He seemed to hesitate before grasping
my hand. “Adam Bertoni, right? You're the cop who busted those bikers.”
I imagined that a hush settled over the kitchen for just a second. Just a
ripple, like static electricity, it pricked up the hairs on my body and then was
gone. “Caballo here told us all about you,” said Condor.
Like seaweed lifted by an ocean swell, the men in the room seemed to shift
uneasily.
Caballo's hand pressed the center of my back, urging me to keep moving
toward the door at the other end of the long galley. “Never mind, we're all
brothers now.”
That prickle of unease still seemed to float around me, but I nodded.
“That's right.” Nobody said anything else and we passed through, entering
another hallway very much like the one Caballo slept in.
Long white walls, broken only by white doorways with bright brass knobs.
The floor covered with that same white ceramic tile rang out under my booted
feet. There were differences, though, between this hallway and Caballo's. The
red light of surveillance cameras blinked at me from several elevated locations
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and smears of rusty brown stained the walls above the wainscoting. I inhaled
deeply and could clearly smell blood.
I heard loud voices through one of the closed doors. Men's voices. A voice
protesting. That voice grew louder and louder and then one of the men shouted
a curse and “Shut him up.” Whomever he spoke to must have, because the
protests ceased.
The door banged open and two big bikers appeared, dragging a skinny
blond man between them. His feet barely touched the tile; he was clothed in a
blue smock, tied in the back, like a hospital patient might wear. Ignoring
Caballo and me, they dragged him down the hallway, opened a door at the end,
and shoved him through. When the door slammed, the smell of urine and
ammonia that billowed down the hallway was sickening.
“Where are they taking him?”
Caballo led me down the hallway. “You studied history, man?”
“I slipped through school on a football scholarship,” I said. “Slept through
most of my lecture halls.”
“Idiot whitey,” said Caballo fondly. “The biggest trouble facing a general is
feeding his troops. You lock a thousand hungry bloodsuckers up with nothin'
to eat for too long, they'll be eating each other.”
“That doesn't work,” I told him. “I had some blood from a dead guy and it
made me feel like I'd taken speed.”
Caballo raised his eyebrows. “You drink enough brother blood you'll go
crazy, man. It's bad stuff. But Ozone, he thinks he has a solution.”
“That fake blood is no solution, either.”
“It will be. He has doctors and scientists working on artificial blood.”
“So that man was…a test subject?” Add kidnapping to the probably
methamphetamine production I was smelling. And the illegal arms.
“Maybe. Maybe he's a donor. They donate blood, sometimes bone.”
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We'd reached the end of the hallway and the big door through which
they'd dragged the man. Caballo had his own set of keys, and he fit one into
the door.
“Why bring me here, though? I got nothing to donate.”
“You don't get it yet, do you? Ozone wants all you bikers on his team,
man. I'm supposed to show you how good you're gonna have it once you join
> us.”
We ascended a set of metal stairs to yet another door, which Caballo
opened with yet another key.
“I guess I should take that as a compliment,” I commented.
Caballo shrugged. “If you want. You don't got much choice.” We'd entered
a five by five space. A keypad on the wall beeped as Caballo typed a code into
it.
Seconds later, green lights skated across the top of the door frame and the
door clicked open.
We entered an empty room and the door swung shut behind us with a
heavy, final click and the sound of lock tumblers turning over.
“Did you just lock us in a vault?” I asked him.
“More like a holding cell,” he said. “Someone will open the door soon.”
“Why the security?”
“You'll see.”
It seemed that many minutes passed. Caballo stood, arms behind his
back, staring patiently at a wall. I sensed that conversation was unwanted and
maybe even unwise, so we waited in silence.
The door finally slid open, allowing a thick warm cloud of odor to roll over
us. Something redolent of chemicals and human waste so disgusting I had to
pull my shirt up to cover my nose and mouth as Caballo preceded me into
what looked like a meth lab.
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At the end of a long stainless steel counter on which glass beakers shared
space with an array of computer monitors, sat Ozone. His bulk perched atop a
narrow stool, that black gun still hanging from his hand. He turned from a
conversation with someone in a white lab coat and gestured for Caballo and me
to come toward him.
“Adam Bertoni,” said Ozone. “Meet my doctor.”
She was still human. Small, with strawberry blonde hair and tiny hands
that clutched a clipboard. She looked at me with pursed lips, like she smelled a
lemon. She didn't even acknowledge the hand I proffered and spoke only to
Ozone.
“I've told you I don't want them here.”
Ozone grinned with those big prominent teeth. “Doc makes our blood.”
“I don't make blood,” she said; she pushed bifocals up her nose, her
movements tiny and nervous as a mouse. “I am only trying to find a feasible
suspension medium for hemoglobin which is manufactured quite naturally and
organically from stem cells in the bone marrow of living donors.”
Ozone didn't know any more than Caballo or me what she was talking
about, but he kept grinning, nodding away.
“What do you think?” he asked me.
“Impressive,” I said, carefully. “Where do I fit in?”
Ozone rose and began strolling along the aisles of the lab. Beakers
burbled and computer monitors flickered with numbers and images as we
walked. It looked like a futuristic Frankenstein laboratory, if it smelled like a
sewage treatment plant.
“My bikers will be my front line. I imagine a cavalry of Harleys.” He held a
hand aloft, fingers fanned as if envisioning what he described.
“And the bangers are your infantry?” I guessed. “What are the odds they'll
kill each other before the war even starts?”
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He brushed that aside with a fat hand that glittered with diamonds. “We
are all brothers now.”
At either end of the counter were four five-foot-high metal tanks, about the
size and shape of a water heater, but with more dials, blinking lights, and
tubes coming out of it.
“What's in the tanks?” I asked the doctor. She ignored me so Ozone
repeated my question to her.
“Hemoglobin, currently.” The doctor pushed her glasses up her nose
again. “But next week we hope to suspend stem cells successfully. Excuse me;
you know I don't have time for this.”
“We'll discuss our plans later,” said Ozone grandly. “Show him the vault,”
he said to Caballo.
Out of earshot, I said, “What's her deal?”
“County cutbacks. They canned a lot of scientists last year and Ozone
talked them into helping him. It all looked legit, I'll bet, and then they found
they couldn't get out. There's a few computer geeks here and a lab technician.
A couple Angels got back here once and scared the crap out of all of them, so
now they have security.”
“It stinks like a meth lab,” I said.
“Ammonia and some other shit; I don't know the names. They use it to
keep the blood alive. They don't cook drugs here; the doc won't allow it.”
Caballo stepped through a narrow door into a freezing cold room.
This room was full of refrigerators. Their doors were a clear glass, fogged
with cold, but clearly holding bags of blood.
“The vault,” said Caballo. “Doc has a way to keep the blood viable for
almost a year. That's the other problem Ozone has to solve. We might have to
have stored food supplies at some future date.”
Images of Waco, Texas, were starting to flash in my head. Only multiply by
one hundred and add bloodsucking fiends.
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“Is that what Freeway was doing? Experimenting with storage?”
He seemed not to hear me. “We'd better get back.”
“So,” I asked him as we walked back through the kitchen. Most of the
crew had left. A couple of women made out with each other in a corner and the
empty cartons filled the recycling container. The smell made me dizzy with
hunger. “If they have so much blood, why are they feeding us this crap?”
Caballo's gaze jerked to the two women, and he made a silencing motion
with his hand. We moved into the living room. Music still thumping from every
corner and masses of bodies writhing and heaving together on every available
surface.
“Feeding hour,” said Caballo. “Soon the sun will set and then we ride.”
The smell of testosterone and blood was hypnotic. Caballo had to slap me
upside the head again. “Shit, man, they'd kill your gay ass.”
“Why?”
“Prospects don't get nothin' man. No blood cows, no pussy.”
Not what I'd been drooling over, but I got the gist. “High motivation for full
patch status.”
“You know it, bro.” Caballo had found a woman who seemed unattended
at the moment. He gripped her chin, studying her face, then pulled her to her
feet, dragged her down the hall behind him.
I figured he was done with the tour, so I reconnoitered a bit and found
myself just around the corner from the doors through which I had been initially
dragged. There is never any reason not to try the obvious, so I walked up to the
doors and reached for the handle.
I saw the door handle. I reached for it. And then I was looking at the
ceiling tiles, and a big demonic face with a bloody mouth scowling down at me.
“Ola!” I said, as best I could with a swollen lip. I touched it gingerly with
the back of my hand. “You could have just said 'stop.'”
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I rolled before his hand could contact my face again, but the boot of his
friend caught me anyway.
“Stay the fuck where you're told,” said one of them.
I crawled to my feet and was abou
t to make my way down the hallway to
Caballo's room when there was another commotion at the door. A great deal of
activity with walkie-talkies and cell phones ensued and then one of the bikers
worked a series of locks (from where I crouched I could see that they were
locked with individual keys and a fingerprint ID pad) and swung the doors
wide.
A cadre of heavily armed Bandidos and a couple of particularly rough
Mongols carrying assault rifles preceded a small clot of men, one of whom,
wearing a suit and tie and looking impatient, was Stan.
Holy shit.
I recovered so that by the time his room-scanning gaze caught on me, I
was rubbing my face with my hand in a signal that was universal among the
UC, meaning “I see you, don't give me away.”
Stan either didn't know the signal or chose to ignore it, because he hailed
me openly, big hand out. “Adam!”
Holy shit to the tenth power.
“Oh, mierda, you know this SOB, sí?” And behind Stan came Freeway,
looking more like a Tijuana bandit than any of the rest of them. He even had
found a big black sombrero someplace, with half dollar-sized round silver
medallions decorating its band and long braided black horsehair chinstraps
hanging down to either side of his broad tanned face.
“You fucker, you still a homo?” he shouted across the room.
“You still a two-faced lying bag of shit?” We indulged in a lot of
backslapping and such until I grabbed Freeway by his collar and hissed
against his ear. “They think I killed you, you son of a bitch. Where the hell have
you been?”
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Freeway twisted and jerked and pried himself loose, looking a little peeved.
“Ozone, he wanted a man in Tijuana. We have recruits down there. The cartels
are forcing people to stand between them and the policia. Nobody's happy. It's
easy to talk a man into it when his family is at risk.”
“So you, what? Line 'em up, drain 'em, and hand 'em their leathers?”
An easy shrug. “The ones that live. Sometimes it don't work.”
Freeway wore the new leathers I'd seen on Caballo and Albert. Other than