The Product Line (Book 1): Product by Ian McCain

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