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

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 sobriety 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