The Product Line (Book 1): Product

by Ian McCain

  Ernie has for some reason expected the fight to be as simple as any other for him. He has tangled with dozens of gangbangers and criminals in the last year and it has never been much of an effort to bring them into submission. Then again, none of them had the Virus coursing through their veins.

  He has anticipated that he will be able to slow time in his mind and take care to move quickly and fluidly. This is somewhat true. His speed is faster than Tayvon’s, but his strength is not equal. In fact Tayvon’s strength seems to be greater than Ernie’s. It makes sense though, as Gideon said, the Virus enhances potential—clearly more of Ernie’s potential lies in affairs of the mind and not in pure brute strength. Besides, this kid has been sucking strength straight from the tap.

  Tayvon moves in a flurry, trying to catch Ernie with the edge of the pipe as he swings it. It whiffs through the air making a high-pitched sound like a bullroarer, each strike narrowly missing Ernie as he deftly steps just out of the way. Finally Tayvon swings the pipe from over his head with both hands, hoping to cleave Ernie in half. The pipe smashes into the ground, deforming the tip into a semi-flattened point. Ernie narrowly escapes its strike and counters by throwing his far leg into Tayvon’s shin, the force of which cracks both of their shin bones, but only Ernie is accustomed to the pain and is able to remain standing.

  Though Ernie is far more familiar with pain, Tayvon is healing significantly faster, the result of having so much blood in his belly. Ernie pushes backwards and then jumps on to him, landing two strong punches to Tayvon’s face, which caves in with each impact.

  Again Tayvon’s focus is shaken from the pain, but he does his best to fight through it, the bloodlust guiding him more than anything. He grabs on to Ernie’s left arm just above his wrist, squeezing like a vice as his face starts to re-inflate to its normal shape.

  Ernie throws another punch to the kid’s face, which would have gone clear through a brick wall, and it again crushes his skull and several of the bones in Ernie’s hand which splinter out through the top of his hand. Almost as quickly as Ernie deforms Tayvon’s face it returns to normal.

  Tayvon lifts Ernie’s arm up and swings directly into his rib cage. The impact bends the iron pipe and forces all the air out of Ernie’s lungs, detaching the left lung from the inside wall of his ribcage and bringing him to his knees.

  Tayvon takes advantage of Ernie’s position by thrusting the jagged end of the pipe toward Ernie’s throat. Ernie blocks the thrust with his left hand, sending the sharp end of the ill-cut pipe through the center of his palm, popping and severing the tendons and bones as it punches out through the back of his hand. Tayvon lets go of the pipe as it protrudes halfway through Ernie’s hand and punches Ernie as hard as he can.

  Even for Ernie the punch undoes him a little. Sure, he has gotten used to pain, but this is like being hit by a wrecking ball. It would instantly kill the uninfected. Ernie can feel as the Virus starts to repair the damage and twist his will to feed again.

  Tayvon believes himself to have the upper hand and eases back slightly. As if he is the alpha male putting down some upstart in the pack, he starts to posture, his self-satisfaction providing an opportunity for Ernie. Already his hand is starting to heal around the pole. Tendons are mending around it in a race to fix Ernie. His skull is reshaping itself from its near pancaked shape.

  Ernie plays this to his advantage and acts as if the pain affects him the same as it does for Tayvon. Tayvon moves in for a finishing blow, not expecting that Ernie is willing to play dirty. As Tayvon gets close enough to do some real damage, he lets his ego eclipse his judgment. Ernie swings the back of his hand toward Tayvon, slamming the pipe into Tayvon’s neck, which sends a thick steady stream of blood coursing through the hollow middle of the metal pipe and pouring out on to the ground.

  Ernie slides his palm off of the pipe, leaving it stuck in Tayvon’s neck, leaching blood out of him like a faucet. Tayvon with all his strength is still learning to master physical pain and master his hunger. He is at a complete stop trying to come to his senses enough to be able to attack Ernie again. Ernie, still crouched on the ground, swings his foot around, connecting firmly with the pipe, drilling it further into Tayvon’s neck. The force sends it out the other side, severing the valuable tubing needed for respiration. Tayvon drops to the ground as Ernie starts to stand up.

  The wound in Ernie’s hand is closing up, the severed tendons reaching out toward each other as white porous bone fills in the seams between breaks, hugging the fractured pieces together. The muscles and skin follow. As Ernie stands, Tayvon decides to make another effort to try to bring Ernie down, even though his body screams out to him to feed.

  Tayvon lunges, pushing his bony fingers as far as he can deep into Ernie’s stomach. His fingers slide in quickly past his skin and muscle, dropping Ernie to his knees. Tayvon grabs hold and pulls as hard as he can, withdrawing various organs from the wound, intestines, perhaps a lobe of Ernie’s liver.

  Ernie coughs up blood as the pain radiates from his core.

  --Ugh. That’s gonna be bad.

  Ernie fights through the pain and reaches out, placing his hands on either side of the pipe sticking through Tayvon’s neck like he is holding on to the handlebars of a mountain bike. He wrenches the pipe through the front of Tayvon’s neck. Tayvon falls forward with the force of the tug as blood erupts everywhere. Tayvon is starting to go into the Rage, Ernie himself may be right behind him. Ernie grabs onto Tayvon’s head before his neck wound has time to heal and twists Tayvon’s head off his body.

  He tosses the head to the side and slumps down. Tayvon’s head rolls on the ground, his eyes washing over in reddish black and his mouth filled with bleeding lesions. His head comes to a stop just for before the color in his eyes completely drains out.

  The Virus inside Ernie is beyond angry and he knows it must be fed. With his guts spilled on the floor in front of him he reaches into his pocket to withdraw the large vial of product, only to find that the bottle itself has been shattered in his scuffle with Tayvon.

  --Of course.

  He starts to shove his guts back into his body. His intestines are covered in dirt and debris from the floor. He’s not certain if the intense cramps are the result of him starting to go into a Rage, or if it is because more of him was on the floor a few moments ago than actually remained inside of him. He coughs up more blood, he can feel the lesions starting to form in his mouth.

  --Man… What a fucking day.

  Then he pulls out the broken pieces of the vial, starts to lick the contents still hugging the walls of the container. He is quickly hit with a brief sting of pain-filled bliss. His guts twist inside him as the hole in his stomach struggles to pull itself closed.

  --I hope this is enough.

  He doubles over in pain.

  --Ugh!

  When he opens his eyes his gaze is met by the piercing blue eyes of the blond infected man he had seen on the road the other day. He smiles as the cramps in his stomach start to take him and he begins to dance on the edge of the Rage.

  --You again? Might want to put me down. Not sure how this is gonna turn out in a few minutes.

  He grunts, holding his breath, trying to fight against the intense pain.

  --I’m getting mighty peckish.

  The man puts his hand on Ernie’s shoulder and smiles warmly. Even in his compromised state Ernie is still able to connect some dots.

  --You weren’t following the banger, were you? You were following me?

  The man hands Ernie a full blood bag from the side pocket in his tactical cargo pants. Ernie sighs, knowing that the plot, as it were, is going to thicken. He immediately bites into the bag and starts to drink from it. It fills him with pain and bliss. This is the way the Virus was meant to be fed. He can feel its joy at him drinking blood. Feel as his body starts to right the problems with his recently excised organs, pushing and pulling them into place, devouring the contamination, mending the gaping wound in his stomach. It is restoring him.<
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  --Come with me.

  Ernie is still in the throes of the bliss when the man takes the bag away. Ernie is lost behind his desires—he wants to kill this man and get more blood. The man smacks him in the face.

  --Come on. Wake up. Come back!

  Ernie can feel himself in the haze of this bliss. Forces himself to come to his senses. He follows Blondie out of the Big and Tall, not knowing where exactly he is heading, but certain that he is closer to the answers he needs.

  Chapter 25

  London, 1829

  To say his existence has become a living hell is an understatement. Lord Baylor never expected that his choices in life would carry such visceral and long-term impact. It has been months since he was first entombed up to his waist in the cellar of his beautiful home.

  At first he is certain that he will die at the hands of someone barely a man himself. As time carries on, he realizes a much more terrifying truth: that his death seems unlikely, if not impossible.

  In that time he has, under great compulsion, signed over the majority of his wealth and holdings to Antonios, the fair-skinned young man whose meek exterior hides the will and strength of some sort of demon. He spends weeks pleading for his release, begging at first to simply be set free, then for his own merciful death. Finally he turns to the sky, asking the heavens for forgiveness, but in all cases none of his pleading is answered. Instead, he finds himself the subject of some sort of twisted surgical experimentation.

  Since his eyes first set upon the reality of his new existence, he has been met with nothing but pain and the foul odor of bodily waste. All his senses are somehow changed and more acute, and he believes himself to possess more strength than he had previously, but as he cannot move his legs at all because of the hundreds of kilos of brick and mortar set around him, he has little evidence to confirm this. His hands and arms no longer look to be those of an old man, but he lacks a mirror or reflective surface to confirm his sense of youth. The lower half of his body is virtually cooking under the intense heat of the setting mortar.

  His captor introduces himself and explains that Lord Baylor is going to serve an incredibly important purpose. With his help, Lord Baylor will help advance the world of medicine.

  The young man places Lord Baylor’s shackled hands on a thick wooden butcher’s block table. With rapid speed and inhuman strength Antonios presses a thick butcher’s blade on the top of Lord Baylor’s hand, slicing down between the middle joints of the thumb and index finger of his right hand, passing through the skin and tendons and separating the bones from each other with ease.

  The pain is ungodly. A radiating blaze of hurt like nothing Lord Baylor has ever felt before. It’s so intense and horrifying that his screams of agony are little more than panicked breathy rasps. Throughout his writhing Antonios keeps Lord Baylor’s hand pressed firmly to the table, so try as he might to pull his hand back to cradle his wound, he cannot.

  Even more terrifying than having his digits separated from his hand as a butcher would separate the loin of a pig from its ribs is what he witnesses happening to the mangled hand. At first dark red blood spills out onto the wood, filling the grains of wood with an expanding pool of his own essence and filling Lord Baylor’s nose with a sickly sweet and enticing scent. Suddenly the bleeding stops and he watches as the blood on the table starts to congeal and quiver as if it has a consciousness of its own. The blood at the ends of where his fingers used to be hardens into dense scabs.

  Then from the hewn meat of his hand, two white protrusions grow out through the scabs of his finger joints, followed quickly by spindly pieces of tendon and muscle which slide down the white bone. Finally, seeping out from the muscle, new skin forms, connecting together like small puddles of water being drawn together in a rain storm. Once the skin of his fingers settles into place on a perfectly unblemished hand he watches and feels as hard new fingernails are birthed from the quick of their respective nail beds.

  The pain and process is exhausting to him and hunger appears like a punch to the gut. He battles a compulsion to lap at the pooled puddle of congealed blood on the table. Had he not been trapped in his seat he would leap on to the table to lick at his own mess.

  Antonios merely smiles at the outcome and proceeds up the stairs. Immediately Lord Baylor begins trying to loose himself from his entombment but finds that he is not able to move the heavy weight of brick and mortar to free himself. Even more troubling is his realization that the foul scent of excrement is coming from his bricked-up body. In the days since he had initially been entombed he has apparently voided his bowels around him, filling up all the open air spaces between his body and hard mortar.

  He struggles against the weight on him, but to no avail. There is no way to get enough leverage to make any difference, and strong or not, there is no way that he can lift the bricks from his body.

  A short while later Antonios returns to the cellar, dragging with him a burlap sack filled with wriggling and writhing contents. He drops the bag on the ground and sits across from Lord Baylor at the butcher’s table.

  --Tell me, Lord Baylor, do you feel any hunger or thirst?

  --Yes, of course. Please. Whatever I have done to you. I am sorry. I understand now that you are punishment from God, or a demon come to collect my soul. I repent. I do! Please let me go. Please!

  --Demon? Hmmm… We shall see about that. Tell me. Do you feel it? The hunger?

  --Yes!

  --And what is it that you are hungering for?

  Lord Baylor stops. A tear rolls down his cheek from the corner of his eye. He knows the answer that Antonios wants, and somehow he knows that this hunger, this thirst for blood, makes him the same as Antonios. A monster.

  --Blood.

  Antonios’ face lights up as more of the puzzle of his own circumstance comes together.

  --Excellent. I was hoping you would say that!

  Antonios gathers up the bag and pulls it closer to Lord Baylor as if it was full of feathers. He looses the twine tied around the opening and slides the bag down around its contents.

  Inside the bag is a woman, who looks to be in her forties. Her hands and feet are bound and her mouth stuffed with a cloth secured in place by another gag tied around her head. Lord Baylor immediately recognizes the woman.

  --Angelica?

  The woman is tired and hurting but, though quite confused, still has her wits about her. Antonios pulls the gag down from around her mouth so that she may participate in the dialogue.

  --Angelica? Please. Please let her go. Please, demon. Not her, let her go!

  Antonios does not respond, but Angelica is aware of her peril upon seeing the man walled up in brick and having been brought to this cellar in a bag. She does not know or recognize either man, but the one partially entombed is strangely familiar.

  --Please, I don’t know what either of you want. Please. I just want to go home. I have a family.

  --Indeed you do. Do you not recognize the man in front of you?

  Lord Baylor’s eyes plead with her and with Antonios.

  --Angelica, run, as fast as you can.

  She knows this voice. It is her brother, but somehow not. He is young and filled with vitality. She turns to run as instructed, but is quickly snatched up by Antonios before she takes her first step.

  --Come. Sit with us.

  He lifts her and sets her on the table directly in front of Lord Baylor. Even in her fear she is struck by his youth, and then by the horrible foulness of excrement and waste oozing out from the mountain of brickwork.

  --I will let her go, following one simple test.

  --Please. Stop. I have money, you can have anything you want.

  --Lord Baylor. You have nothing to give that I cannot simply take for myself. But I am a man of my word. So, as I said, I will let her go following one simple test.

  Antonios withdraws a small blade from his pocket. He cradles her hand in his, turning her palm into the air. He gently pushes the blade into her wrist, just nic
king the vein, but not severing it. Hot delicious puffs of enticing scent pour out from the wound as thick red blood bubbles to the surface. The smell calls to Lord Baylor, even as his sister weeps in terror.

  --Drink.

  --No. No, I will not.

  Antonios watches as Lord Baylor struggles to fight the growing thirst, his mouth and mind salivating for just a taste. He pushes Angelica’s wrist so that it is just under Lord Baylor’s nose. The urge to consume is too strong, and try as he might Lord Baylor cannot hold back his desire to drink from his sister’s weeping vein.

  He latches on to her wrist. As the first drop touches his tongue the whole of his being explodes in ecstasy. His teeth dig into her skin and he pulls her in closely as he begins chewing through her wrist to allow more and more joy to pour forth from her veins. Her screams are hidden behind a veil of intense warmth and bliss.

  When he finally returns to his senses Lord Baylor is completely broken. His body is charged and alive, but his heart is wounded irreparably. Even for all his schemes and malicious choices in life, he still held onto some softness, some small seed of love for his little sister, his only family. His Angelica, who lies dead on the table in front of him, her wrist virtually chewed through. The delicious taste of her blood is still painted on the insides of his mouth. Lord Baylor turns to sobbing at this thought.

  Antonios is seated in a chair across from Lord Baylor, noting his emotions. Noting how he has reacted to the blood lust. He is learning and understanding more and more about his condition and is now certain that he is not a demon. That his condition, this illness, it is not a failure in his willpower. That the desire to feed can break any bonds. If Lord Baylor can kill the only person in his life that he loves because of his thirst, then this disease is clearly a powerful master.

  ***

  Many in the community have at one time called Lord Baylor friend, though he has always worked to have the upper hand. This is due more to their fear of him than to any actual feelings of attachment and connection to the man. He is, as everyone knows, a scoundrel. He is petty and quick to scorn, so it is easier to call him friend and be taken advantage of than to call him enemy and endure his scheming and active contempt. So, when he no longer begins to show for social functions or to oversee the operation of his shipping business, no one truly cares.