The Product Line (Book 1): Product

by Ian McCain

  Already the vultures are starting to circle. A few punks with yellow gang colors on have started to collect under the street light. A pair of old sneakers hang from the power lines over their heads, a clear symbol that this is where people can score drugs.

  Ernie fearlessly makes his way toward the kids. They must be no more than nineteen or twenty; Ernie calculates that there are six of them altogether at this spot, maybe seven. One on the corner transacting business, two lower downs, one to run the money to the corner boss, one to grab the drugs from the stash house. Probably one to two people guarding the stash house and if they are organized one person on lookout on the rooftop scanning for the fuzz. Considering how quickly there were five people on the corner, Ernie is certain they have someone on the roof. As he gets closer to the corner, he sees the lookout, nested on the top of a building at the north-east corner of the intersection.

  --Hey fellas… Hey… We’re not from around here and it looks like my buddy’s car is running into some issues.

  --You not from these parts? Ya don’t say?

  Ernie pretends to get nervous. Reaches in his breast pocket, pulls out the wad of money, scrapes a few bills from the stack.

  --We aren’t looking for any trouble, guys, just if you know a shop nearby, or a tow company round here that might be able to come out and gather us up, I surely would appreciate it.

  --Oh, surely you would.

  The corner boss is sizing him up. Since he handles the cash, Ernie knows he is trying to calculate how much money could be in the wad in his pocket.

  --I couldn’t help but notice my own self that you got quite a few of them presidents in your pocket.

  --Fellas, all we need is a tow truck. You know what? We… we’re just fine, I’ll call AAA. I appreciate your help is all… Here.

  Ernie takes one of the bills and hands it to the man he was having the dialogue with. The corner boss grabs Ernie’s hand, reaches into Ernie’s breast-pocket and withdraws the rest of the money, pulls off several more bills then puts the rest back in Ernie’s pocket. Ernie could crush every bone in this kid’s body in a matter of moments, but he fights the urge and continues to play his part.

  --For our troubles. Call it a business interruption fee.

  --Sorry for the inconvenience. Thanks, boys.

  Usually that is enough to flip the switch. Calling a black male “boy”… it tickles them in all the wrong places. One of the bangers steps up.

  --Yo, who the fuck you callin’ boy?

  Ernie grins on the inside.

  --Geez, guys, I didn’t mean no disrespect.

  At the far corner, Nathan passes by in the follow van. They make eye contact; Ernie waves him off. He needs more time to ensure that this is going to be a good crop for the Farm.

  The banger who stepped to Ernie pulls the rest of the money out of Ernie’s pocket.

  --I said, who the fuck you calling boy?

  Right on cue Claude steps out from the SUV and starts making his way toward Ernie. The whole event is a well-choreographed farce, a plan to push at every potential hot button: greed, opportunity, rage.

  --Hey, hey, leave him alone. Leave him alone.

  The kid who took the money from Ernie grabs a gun from his waistband and wraps his arm around Ernie, placing the gun against Ernie’s temple. Ironically, because of the height difference between them, it’s more likely that the boy will end up shooting through Ernie’s jaw and into his own forearm if he actually pulls the trigger.

  --What you want, faggot? This yo boyfriend, you coming to save him?

  The next angry black youth walks toward Claude, beating at his own chest and cocking his head to the side to show Claude that he ain’t the boy to fuck with. The one who challenged Ernie is nervously backing away with Ernie in tow.

  --Yo, what you gonna do here, Thor? You gonna step to this? This our house, son. We own these streets, ya feel?

  The group is obviously riled up, but it’s more feather-puffing and chest-pounding than Ernie wants. The gun to his head has the safety on and with each step backwards the boy is changing the angle at which he is holding it.

  Ernie decides to step it up a notch. In the blink of an eye Ernie smashes the back of his head into the lip of his captor, exploding the front of his face with blood and folding back his top front teeth, simultaneously sliding his left hand around the top of the gun and right hand onto his assailant’s wrist. He crushes the bones in the boy’s wrist as if he were crushing a box of dry spaghetti and folds the gun out of the boy’s hand.

  Before anyone knows exactly what has happened, Ernie has incapacitated one of them and now holds a gun to the head of the person who was attempting to threaten Claude.

  --Boys, this doesn’t need to get nasty. All we wanted was some help.

  Ernie makes a “we-give-up” hand gesture and moves to set the gun down gently on the pavement.

  --We don’t want any trouble.

  The banger whose wrist Ernie shattered is in hysterics. His hand is flopped over against his forearm as if it is only attached by skin.

  --You may want to get that paw looked at.

  Ernie smiles and both he and Claude start to back away. They turn to head back to the car.

  This is the part that Claude hates. Ernie isn’t a huge fan either, but deep down he always hopes that the kids will make the right choice. Almost never happens though, so he prepares himself.

  He can already hear the gun being picked up by the time they take their second full step. By the third he can hear the rest of the guns being un-holstered. They prepare themselves for the bullet storm about to come at them.

  The first round clips Ernie in the meat of his left shoulder. It stings, but otherwise doesn’t even register—Ernie was already prepared and focused on not feeling the pain. The next two rounds hit Claude center mass, blasting through his chest, sending a plume of red into the air.

  Both men drop to the ground, acting as if they are incapacitated. Claude shoots a look at Ernie.

  --I fucking hate this part.

  Ernie rolls over as another three rounds find his stomach. A foul scent of bile and bacteria from his gut puffs into the air, though Ernie is sure he is the only one able to smell it. He starts begging for mercy.

  --Please, please. Don’t kill us. We didn’t want any trouble, just some help.

  --Well, mothafucka, looks like trouble wanted you.

  A hail of sixteen more rounds is fired into both men. Ernie does well fighting through the pain, though having used the Virus to repair him earlier, he is starting to feel the hunger. The push to replenish himself. Ernie fights to keep it in check, to swallow down his growing embers of a Rage. He and Claude lie back. Dead.

  At least dead in the eyes of a normal person. A normal person cannot survive twenty gunshot wounds to the gut. When a normal person lies back after something like that, you would not expect that deep inside them an army is at work repairing every injury, closing every hole, mending every break. No, to anyone not in the infected community these two men have breathed their last breath.

  In the few moments it takes for the Virus to knit them back together Ernie can only focus on one thing: his disappointment. These men have failed the test and in only a few moments they will be sedated and on the way to the Farm, or dead, depending on how things work out.

  Ernie doesn’t hear anyone reloading, just the hurried footsteps of men running off, the clap of their loose-fitting shoes echoing off the pavement, creating a sonic map in Ernie’s mind. After a solid thirty seconds, Ernie is recovered. The holes in his gut have closed up and the slug in his leg is being wriggled around and pushed out by the Virus. He’s not a hundred percent but he is restored enough to move on to the second stretch of the recruitment process.

  Ernie pulls himself up from the pavement. His blood has pooled beneath him and congealed into thick clots. The Virus inside the puddle is working hard to heal itself, not knowing it has been spilled from Ernie’s body.

  Claude gathers him
self and stands a few moments after Ernie.

  --Still hate that part.

  Ernie smirks, shooting Claude a knowing smile.

  --Ehh. I am getting used to it.

  They quickly split up. Claude heads toward the building with the spotter nested on it. He catches a glimpse of the boy still sitting up there. He can see clear as day the disbelief and panic on the boy’s face. It’s as if he had climbed a tree when being chased by a lion. Nowhere to turn, nowhere to run.

  As Claude begins to make his way up the exterior of the spotter building Ernie cuts down the alleyway where he heard the boys running off. He can still hear their footsteps in the distance, their hearts pumping blood to their limbs, each beat charged with adrenaline. He can smell it in the air. The Virus is truly pushing him. He is having to fight harder to block out the encroaching sounds of heartbeats echoing from the surrounding buildings.

  He knows he has to stay focused on the bangers he is chasing. His vision narrows and he swings to the outside wall of the alleyway. The wind whips past him as he runs. Keeping stride, he lightly places his left foot on the top edge of a back alley dumpster and leaps, moving his body in rhythm, stretching his arms and feet forward to brace his landing. He lands perfectly against a drainpipe that runs down the outside corner of one of the buildings. From his starting point it is a good thirty-foot vertical leap.

  The impact causes the pipe to bend and loosen, but Ernie is only on it briefly before he heaves himself on to the roof of the building. The pipe pulls completely free from the building and clatters to the pavement. In two bounds he has covered eighty vertical feet. When he comes down on the rooftop, he doesn’t stop running.

  The pace of the fleeing bangers comes to a deliberate slowdown. They laugh with one another about how crazy they are and how that

  --fucker got his, rollin’ in here wit’ his Bruce Lee shit, fuckin’ up Chuck’s arm, then blam!

  Ernie stalks closer, fighting back the fire brewing in his veins. He shouldn’t have done so much damage to himself earlier. Sure, he hadn’t expected to get filled with two clips of bullets, but he knows better than to take such a reckless risk. He shouldn’t have exhausted the Virus for shits and giggles. He can feel the Virus compelling him to feed, starting to twist his will, smell it as it pumps sweet venom from every pore of his body. He has very little time before he goes someplace that he can’t come back from.

  He works his way to the edge of the building and looks down at the alley below. The bangers are all shuffling into the back door of some project housing. When the door closes behind them, Ernie casually steps down from the rooftop, falling eight stories straight down into the courtyard of broken concrete. He lands with a muted thud and a crack. His ankles splinter, then heat spreads around the bones as they are quickly mended. The Virus is in overdrive.

  There are only a few things that Ernie truly knows about the Rage. He knows that no one comes back from it. From the stories passed down by the infected, it’s clear that it’s something to avoid. Even people who are not fans of exaggeration seem simultaneously terrified and in awe of the event. It makes sense though; they have all been infected during a Rage, they are all the victims of some angry and bloodthirsty feral beast, they alone are the survivors of the Virus and its fury. Indeed, a heavy emotional weight to carry. It makes sense that they are so intrigued, and cautious, at least more so than Ernie.

  It is the ultimate double-edged sword. Avoid feeding because of your conscience and you will eventually end up a deranged murderer. Feed too much and you become a homicidal junkie, unable to control your hunger, looking simply to score a new fix.

  As Ernie approaches the door to the gang banger’s safe-house, he realizes that no one has heard of an infected in a Rage in decades—other than the one that Gideon claims infected Ernie. Certainly it is quite suspicious to Ernie, since what Gideon has told the others is a blatant lie; Ernie was never attacked to begin with.

  ***

  Ernie reaches out to the handle of the door. It is locked. He gives a slight tug on the handle and completely destroys the lock, causing the handle to hang limply. He listens to see if the bangers are aware of his arrival. They are blissfully ignorant. Ernie readies himself. Based on their laughs and voices, two are near the door, one in the living room, one in the back using the bathroom. He doesn’t hear the other two bangers. There are just the four heartbeats in this room, each one pumping the stink of adrenaline into the air like a fog machine.

  Ernie pulls back on the door and shears it from its hinges. Without pausing he runs from room to room, a wraith, a blur of fury. The shocked faces of the men are priceless. Ernie grabs the two near the door and smashes them head first into the wall, knocking them out. He turns to the man in the living room, who reaches for the gun on the makeshift coffee table, still in pain from his already broken wrist. Before he has time to take his first step, Ernie is on top of him. He shoves the palm of his hand into the center of his back. Vertebrae crumble under the force of the impact. The man collapses, spitting blood onto the floor.

  Ernie turns toward the bathroom where the last banger is still located. The toilet flushes, and he walks out mid statement.

  --I was like, well, trouble wanted you, some cold-ass John McClane shit…

  The boy sees Ernie and falls back against the wall. Ernie watches as he takes in the scene in the apartment, the silent carnage that happened in moments. Ernie can begin to taste the metallic flavor of blood as bleeding lesions start to form inside his mouth. His mind and mouth salivate. He doesn’t have much time. He shoves the man against the wall, then with one hand whips his body onto the ground and straddles his chest, placing one knee on his arm and his other knee on the man’s throat. He quickly fumbles through his back pocket and pulls out his works. A shit needle he has used far too many times.

  --You got something I need. You don’t mind though, right?

  His voice rumbles and crackles. Blood drips from his lips on to the boy’s face and chest. Ernie finds a vein on the boy and draws out a full needle’s worth of deep red. Ernie’s nails shred through the skin of the boy’s arm as he holds it steady. The boy’s pulse thumps through his head like a drum, its terrified adrenaline-filled beat pushing Ernie to drink deeply.

  Ernie fights it using all his strength and personal resolve. He lines up his own vein and pushes the needle into his arm. As the first drops enter his bloodstream, his body convulses and cramps in a mix of pure agony and ecstasy. This is not the bliss he has felt before, it is stronger and more potent—it is not only pleasure, it is pain.

  Ernie slumps over, awash in this painful joy. So much so that he does not notice when the boy pushes him off and on to the floor. He does not notice when the boy runs out and into the night, covered in Ernie’s blood. Ernie remains there, unable to move, the Virus finally pacified by blood.

  ***

  When Ernie finally comes to, Claude is crouched over him, pulling what remains of the needle from Ernie’s arm. Apparently in Ernie’s haste he crushed the syringe in his hand as he shot up, leaving the shattered remains stuck in his arm as the bliss put him on the nod.

  Ernie’s return from the bliss is jarring. He falls into reality as if dropped in ice water while in the midst of a dream. He sits up with a gasp, his mind bombarded with senses a hundred times stronger than before, his muscles and senses screaming.

  --I told you, you needed to take your treatment. The fuck are you thinking?

  --Stop it. Stop shouting.

  --I’m not, you asshole.

  The room is alive with sounds and smells, waves of synesthesia, crashing on him with overwhelming sensory input and emotion. He can smell cooking food at the end of the complex, rotting trash from the dumpster a block down, hear television programs, crying babies and whispered phone calls. He can see dust glinting off the moonlight cutting in through the window, smell the mold and mildew and cocaine particles in the carpet, the dog piss stains from the previous tenant.

  Time has almost stoppe
d; it has no meaning. Each second that passes sends a lifetime of sensory input.

  It is almost crippling…

  Almost.

  Ernie takes a deep breath, tries to get ahead of his senses, shut them out from his mind. He turns to Claude.

  --What happened?

  --We got them. Well, we got all of them but one.

  Nathan chimes in.

  --Come on, we need to go.

  Ernie pushes himself to his feet. He is stronger than before and he ends up pushing so hard he almost falls back over the other direction.

  --You OK?

  --I’m fine. Let’s get out of this slum.

  Ernie’s equilibrium is shit, his body is buzzing and unfamiliar to him. He walks as well as he can toward the door, becoming more familiar with his appendages after each step. As he approaches the front door he catches his reflection in a mirror. He looks like hell. Blood-drenched shirt, bullet-riddled clothing.

  The men all exit through the back door, quickly maneuvering between the dark shadows of the buildings until they reach Nathan’s parked van. Six bangers are inside, their hands bound behind their backs and canvas bags over their heads cinched at the neck. Nathan has already gone through the motions to sedate them, but most are so injured they wouldn’t have had much heart for struggling anyway.

  --Ernie, you sure you OK? You really look like shit!

  --Yeah, I’m OK.

  Ernie hops into the back of the van. Nathan closes the door behind him and latches it. Ernie can hear each footstep as Nathan moves in to the driver’s seat, feel the engine rumble to life and the van lurch forward toward “intake.”

  Ernie reaches into his pocket and withdraws his now mangled pack of cigarettes, takes out the least smashed one, with only a small circle of blood on it, and lights up. As he draws the smoke in the scent is almost overwhelming. He swallows his disgust and forges ahead, equating the process to just more of his own brand of immersion therapy.

  He sits in the back of the van as it rolls quietly out of Morris Heights and starts to take notice of more peculiarities. His night vision, already amazing, is even more improved. The men in the back with him all give off a luminous glow, and with each heartbeat Ernie sees what can only be described as the pulse of their blood. Millions of illuminated channels flowing like incandescent estuaries out from a pulsing hub in the center of their chests, branching out into capillaries in their limbs.