The Product Line (Book 1): Product Page 7

  Nope, definitely not Claude or Nathan, and definitely not some randoms straggling through the city. One of the men talks into his wrist.

  --I have eyes on the target.

  Then the man signals with his hands to spread out. Ernie thinks it out; they are looking for something. Probably have some people up high and a few on the ground. And to have some sort of closed circuit communication like that they seem tactical—maybe an extraction team? If it is that, then there are more of them, at least four people on the ground sweeping toward each other.

  They move directly toward Ernie. They’re trying to get him separated from the crowd. Probably expect that he will run, take to side streets. Instead Ernie moves further toward the street. They likely won’t try a head-on approach, he reasons. Too many witnesses. Ernie backs himself against the kabob stand. Using his peripheral vision, he plans out grabbing the kabob skewers. He can take out at least two eyes and buy himself some time to head back toward Claude and Nathan. Then he hears it.

  Footsteps. Somewhere up high.

  Gravel.

  Something is on the rooftops, and it is moving quickly. Its pores are pumping out a stink into the air unlike anything Ernie has smelled before.

  The people milling about on the streets below have no idea that anything is going on. Half are drunk, some are tourists, and the rest are simply locals. You can always pick them out; tourists and visitors walk with wide eyes scanning the beautiful skyline, and locals… well, they don’t. They walk with heads down, one foot in front of the other. Getting from A to B.

  The two following him come running down the street, weaving between people like ghosts. One of the men turns toward Ernie as he passes. There is that silent acknowledgement. I know what you are and you know what I am. Like territorial cats. The man is tall and slender. Long lean musculature, blond facial hair, sapphire blue eyes that could have been chiseled straight from a glacier. There is something wrong with his scent as well. Something different. Ernie has noticed the same thing about his own scent. It is unique. It is stronger-smelling than most all the others in the community, except maybe for Gideon, Charles and Julia.

  He laughingly considers it some throwback to his days as a bum, but this man, his smell, it’s the same as Ernie’s. Less floral notes, more venom. It stings.

  The two men turn sharply after they pass Ernie and run down the alleyway. Ernie watches as the blond man jumps to the second-floor fire escape. He circles up the metal stairs to the top of the five-story building in a matter of seconds and disappears onto the gravel top. The other man follows.

  Their footsteps on the rooftop fade into the distance as they chase after whatever the fuck they were chasing. Ernie talks under his breath. What was that?

  --You buy?

  The proprietor of the halal stand signals to his food. Ernie shakes his head.

  --Nah, chief, we’re all set.

  He shoos Ernie away and scrapes the patina from the heating elements warming the meat of unidentifiable origin.

  Ernie takes a final drag on his cigarette and chucks the remainder on the street. A bloom of tiny embers spreads on the ground before his foot extinguishes them.

  Curious as he is and as hard as his mind is working to figure out who these people are and what they are chasing, there is no time to linger. The sun will be coming up. Ernie moves south-east to the back alley that leads up to his building. He climbs up the escape, apparently the preferred way to travel for the infected, and tucks into his apartment.

  It’s a shithole, a tiny efficiency apartment, sparsely furnished and dirtier than it should be. At any given point in time there are clouds of dust hanging in the air like some long-abandoned crime scene. The range, sink and fridge combo take up nearly half the wall space on the main wall. Only a handful of pots exist in the apartment, and all of them are stacked haphazardly in the kitchen sink.

  Minimalist is generous. Even though the Organization provides him with his own housing, and a stipend of money to live comfortably, the interior looks like it’s inhabited by squatters. For Ernie it is more than enough. One of the few things that Ernie has added is the vast library of literature, everything from classical prose to technical manuals, medical journals to ancient lore. They are littered throughout the apartment, with the largest concentration in the bathroom.

  On the small kitchen table that takes up a good amount of the remaining floor space sits a small cross-peen hammer, its blunt and chiseled ends both covered in dried blood. Next to it lies a Sterno burner, a half-empty book of matches, a completely filled ashtray, a couple empty packs of cigarettes and a dirty hypodermic needle.

  Ernie originally got the idea from Gideon’s flippant remark about it taking years to learn how to handle pain. Ernie is determined to shorten that timeline, so there will be one fewer thing to lord over him: the fear of physical pain. So for the last eleven months, each morning before he takes his treatment, he practices: usually on his hands, sometimes his legs, once on his testicle—a sort of demented immersion therapy.

  Ernie pulls the vial from his pocket and slips out of his clothes down to his boxers, pulls out the chair to the kitchen table and slides on to the seat. He gently sets the vial down next to the dirty needle; there are visible dots of rust and dried blood on the metal tip of the syringe.

  He grabs the hammer with his right hand, bouncing it, feeling the heft of the metal end. Today it is going to be kneecaps, both of them. He grabs a cigarette from his new pack, and lights it. Takes a long pull and sets it on the lip of the ashtray.

  Then he rears back with his right hand and plunges the peen end of the hammer squarely into his left kneecap.

  His mind explodes with pain and fire of unimaginable intensity. The sensation would have been crippling eleven months ago, and indeed he still feels it with the same the intensity, but something has changed in him. He has learned how to control it, how to recognize the sensation of pain and simply ignore it, push through it. The bones in his knee are certainly shattered: the patella, the articulator cartilage, lateral and medial meniscus, probably the top of the tibia—he might have even torn through the ACL and the PCL. He knows the names of every major system in the body. What it does, where it is, what it’s called, thanks to his newfound memory and assortment of reading materials.

  Blood pumps out from the hole in his kneecap. His mind hangs on to the sensation. He forces himself to truly feel it, to search through the signals from his nerves and soak up every pulse of pain. Ernie pushes back from the table and stands on his feet, working hard to put equal weight on both legs. The Virus hasn’t had enough time to start repairing the damage when Ernie swings the second time and crushes the blunt end into the outside of his right knee.

  He doesn’t fall.

  He doesn’t cry or moan.

  He sits back down and grabs the vial and the needle. He draws out a syringe full and lines up the vein to stick it into. He can feel the shifting tectonics of his bones as the Virus sends its mending ligature to pull the shattered parts together and repair the damage. Ernie’s mouth waters as it works to heal him. It pushes him to feed. To replenish the Virus and its energy stores, to restore his sanguine master.

  Ernie sticks the needle into his arm, rides the wave of pleasure as his body continues to itself. The blanket envelops him, wraps him in its warmth, its love.

  As he starts to returns from his bliss he can hear them again: the sounds of heartbeats. It seems stronger after each treatment. He is able to hear more and more and it stretches further. Over the months he has been able to begin to discern individual heartbeats. The excited heartbeats of the twenty-something neighbors across the alleyway as they engage in unfettered and carnal morning sex. An old man, his heart arrhythmic and damaged, being shocked into a regular beat by his pacemaker.

  Ernie can’t entirely focus on the individual notes, but he can pull out the high and low points from the symphony of pulses. It is simultaneously beautiful and terrifying to him.

  In this year of sob
riety and sleepless existence he has had more than enough time to soul-search, to try to figure out who Ernest Allen Chase really is. Somehow he has always been identified as a category of person: a drunk, a bum, a soldier, a deadbeat father, a whipping post—and now what? A vampire?

  Without those shorthand terms he hasn’t really had a way to identify who he is. He is a category, not an individual. It seems to Ernie that his basal motivation in life has been one of two things: avoiding pain and seeking out pleasure. It’s why he started drinking. It’s why he left his daughter to fend for herself at such a young age.

  Those two functions, avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, have been taken from him thanks to the Virus. Sure, he can try to stay in the bliss all day, but it doesn’t work that way, at least not with the needle. For whatever reason the Virus only provides that surge of joy with the first stick. Follow it up with another needle and you just waste the product. It overclocks your system, sure, but it doesn’t do much beyond that. And he can just about drink a gallon of pure gasoline without even the slightest sense of getting tipsy.

  No, his situation is different now, a sort of overall reset, an opportunity to be defined by his own actions and not by how other people would describe him. Like it or not, Ernie has been making the slow crawl to change who he is, ambitiously hoping to gain a sense of pride in himself.

  The bliss drips its final drops from his system. His body is completely restored. Ernie gets up from the table, tucks a medical journal he recently picked up from the used bookstore on Seventh under his arm and heads over toward the bed. It’s really just a second-hand mattress on a floor, but it has sheets and pillows. On some days Ernie opens the blinds to the room, letting in the early morning light, and reads until he needs to start making his deliveries. After enough time lying there, the blades of light cut lines of age into his skin, making him a man with tiger stripes of wrinkles and liver spots. It is just one more component of his immersion therapy. He often jokes with Claude that he still likes to go tanning and keep his youthful glow. Claude never really gets the joke, but Ernie sure thinks it’s a good one.

  Today is different though. They are collecting “volunteers” tonight, so he needs to stay fresh and keep the Virus fed and happy. The more effort the Virus has to put into repairing him now, the greater the chances that he will find himself in bad shape during recruitment. Who knows how much work it will have to do tonight? Typically they get a little banged up, maybe shot once or twice, but nothing more than that.

  Chapter 11

  Claude pulls into the alleyway at 9pm sharp. Following in the van behind him is Nathan. Ernie is waiting there for them. He snubs out the remains of his cigarette and steps towards the vehicle. When the SUV slows to a stop Ernie opens the front passenger door and slides into his usual place. A sawed-off shotgun rests against his left leg; it’s mounted in a quick-release holster against the center console. It is a brutish weapon that has never been used, but is kept as a sort of last resort.

  --Claude. How we doing tonight?

  --Fine.

  --Yeah, my day was good too. Got a lot of reading in.

  --That’s nice.

  --Such a conversationalist you are.

  --Thanks, Ernie. Let’s just stay focused.

  The car rolls off into the main road heading north. Tonight they are collecting “volunteers.” It’s Gideon’s perverse moral stance on how the Organization grows its farming numbers, and for nearly a decade it has been the most effective way of rooting out the true scum of the community, the violent opportunists. Ernie has been a valuable component to the recruitment efforts, using his own deep-seated hatred for the gangs in New York.

  The tactics are quite straightforward—entrapment. Two affluent-looking young men in their twenties drive a nice car into a bad neighborhood, where they experience some sort of trouble with their car. It’s overheating. A tire is flat. Whatever. To the outsiders there is simply a problem. Then they wave a little too much money around and ask the youths in clearly identifiable gang colors to help them out.

  The bangers don’t know it, but in reality, it is the most important test they will ever take. Help the young men out and live. Try to harm them and you become one more crop in the Organization’s people farm—or worse, you just end up dead. In the last year Ernie has been on dozens of these recruitments. Only once have they come across a group that was willing to help and didn’t try to rob or kill them in the process. Who knows why the kids helped them. Maybe the rumors of the SUV that takes people have spread around, or as Gideon hoped, they aren’t all bad. Regardless of their reasons, they are currently the only group not to “volunteer.”

  The gang territories are pretty well spread out in the city. Most congregate in areas where there is very limited foot traffic, where the bridges and tunnels come into the city, where the thoroughfares are less traveled. The further north you head on the island, the darker the skin color gets, and the more desperately dangerous the gangs are. Cross over into the Bronx and you are in a totally different place, a concrete jungle, where the bangers can rule with relative impunity.

  Claude picks up his cell phone and makes a call while Ernie looks out at the road passing by. He peeks up at the roof where he witnessed the extraction team chasing something on the rooftops.

  --You been with the Organization for a while, right?

  Claude points to the phone and shakes his head. When the party on the other end picks up he gives a quick order.

  --Stay back a block at least… Uhmm… Yes, you circle by once when we get there. Then wait for the noise.

  Ernie understands the importance of knowing the plan, but it’s always the same, and Nathan knows it just as well as Claude and Ernie—it seems a waste to go over it again. But Claude is not a fan of getting shot. Who would be? So he always double-checks the same orders. Ernie guesses that Nathan just plays along to keep Claude happy.

  As soon as Claude hangs up Ernie chimes in.

  --So what do we do again?

  --Funny.

  --I was saying before, you been with the Organization for a while? You know of any other group of infecteds running around the town? Real organized-like?

  --Why?

  --Cause the Bronx is fucking forever away, and I am making conversation. Seriously, we’re the only show in town, right?

  Claude nods half-heartedly, and in no way convincing Ernie.

  --As far as I am aware.

  --Hmm.

  --Why?

  --Just conversation. So, you going with the confused foreigner thing tonight?

  --What are you talking about? I don’t act confused.

  --OK.

  Ernie reaches for the radio. When he clicks it on it plays the same music that can be heard in the back of a gypsy cab: sitar, finger cymbals, Middle Eastern moan-sighing.

  --You’re kidding me, right?

  --What? I like it.

  Ernie clicks the radio back off, tilts his seat back and closes his eyes as if he is going to sleep.

  --Let me know when we hit the jungle.

  --What are you doing?

  --I’m fucking meditating or something.

  Claude clicks the radio back on, bobs his head and hums slightly as the car rolls on. Ernie, eyes still closed, pulls out a cigarette and throws it in his mouth, lights it.

  --Come on, Ernie, no fucking smoking.

  --You fill my ears with shit, I’m filling your lungs with smoke.

  --I thought you were meditating.

  --And smoking.

  Claude rolls the windows down a crack to let the smoke out, turns the music up.

  --OK.

  Ernie keeps his eyes closed, lingers in the darkness behind his lids, his mind poring over the gravity of what they do and of what he is now. Thanks to the Virus, Ernie is never again without thoughts in his head. Associations and connections constantly form and create other associations and connections. Hardly the luminary in his pre-infected life, now that he has the Virus reworking his grey matter
, he has an unavoidable internal system of debate. But he can just as easily be thrown onto another tangent of thought if something else enters his mind.

  His current situation, the idea of “volunteers,” is often the source of some interesting points. Somehow it always ties back to the same thematic ideas, the idea of right and wrong. Is doing something bad to someone who is themselves bad a zero-sum game? Does it absolve the infected community’s collective conscience to only do bad things to bad people? Surely the cattle on the Farm are being absolved or punished for their transgressions, but what of the infected?

  Ernie doesn’t really give a shit either way, it’s just one more way his supercharged brain likes to mess with him, to pull into play thoughts on normative ethics and relative morality.

  The sounds of the roads change as they make their way into the Bronx. Even without looking he can tell they have reached Morris Heights. When they passed out of Spanish Harlem, the reggae ton and trumpet jazz sounds died down. Now the thumping beats of souped-up stereo systems echo off the brick façade of the tenements.

  They have reached the bad part of town. Harlem is rough, it has more rapes and robberies than the whole of Manhattan, but the Bronx is rougher. Violent crimes have peppered every corner of this area of the city. These are the best fishing waters when you are hoping to catch evil fish. You don’t really even need bait—hell, you don’t even need a fishing pole. Just stop the boat for a moment and they’ll jump right in, then shoot you and push you into the water as they sail off.

  Claude pulls the car to a stop just under the crosstown overpass. He pops the hood to the SUV and gets out of the car to investigate. Now it’s Ernie’s turn. Ernie opens the glove box and pulls out an envelope with a few hundred dollars in it. He takes the cash out, folds it in half and sticks it in the front pocket of his button-down shirt. He gets out of the car, brushes himself off slightly, then starts walking toward the nearest street corner.