The Product Line (Book 1): Product (25 page)

At almost the same time both rouse from their slumber, assaulted by their expanded senses. Their eyes open wide, the irises lined in deep magenta, just as it is with Antonios. He looks at them closely, seeing the crimson-kissed globes of their eyes filled with the fear of a child. Their adult bodies betray their juvenile minds and fears.

--Children, please stay calm. I mean you no harm.

They are so unfamiliar with their bodies and shocked at the sight of each other’s changed bodies that they retreat from one another. The boy, now changed to a man, calls out.

--Where is Julia?

The unknown woman next to him responds.

--I am Julia… Charles?

--But how?

They look at the changes to their form, taking in the fact that their consciousness is housed in a body that is completely unfamiliar, yet recognizing each other through their new visages.

Antonios holds his palms up, offering a look of sincerity and openness.

--I will share with you all that I know. Please do not be afraid.

***

Antonios’ supposition is correct. The children, or more accurately the former children, are like him. They are able to create others. They are able to impart the dark gift to others. They are strong and smart and deeply conniving, but he views them as his children. He views all of them as his children, save one: Lord Baylor.

Antonios has filled his warehouse with a vast supply of the downtrodden: drunkards, loners, beggars, and gypsies. Those who will not be missed too dearly and whose thoughts will be kept pleasantly dulled with the aid of morphine.

It is hard, however, to keep them alive and still provide enough food for his children. It is true that he has found a way to have food on demand without raising suspicion or requiring constant movement, but it is harder still to keep the food alive. Wounds are constantly getting infected and most of them are too weak to do anything beyond giving up and accepting death. He knows that in the long term this plan will not last.

This makes him increasingly curious about one thing. What will happen if they do not feed, if
he
does not feed? What will happen to any of them? He recalls Eliska—how she was tortured and nearly killed and how it was not until she neared death that the demon was truly loosed. He wonders if this fate exists for all of them. He has gone without feeding before, he has felt how the hunger can twist one’s will, but can it also change one’s being? Perhaps it is because it was viewed through the eyes of a child, or perhaps it is because of the pain and loss associated with the attack, but he recalls that Eliska in her scorched form was more than just a woman, she was indeed a demon: a monster who no longer seemed to hold any humanity. This is curious to him.

So having his lab rat nearby, he begins to starve Lord Baylor. He cuts into him and bleeds him and then withholds the nourishing blood so easily dispensed from the captives in the warehouse. Watching closely as the hunger grows inside him, he can hear the changes deep within Lord Baylor’s belly, the churning of organs and tightening of the viscera as it pushes him to feed. Antonios knows the pain, the cramps that it can cause, how the hunger twists your insides, wringing out every bit of pain possible until you find a source of blood.

The priest protests this action as inhumane. What they are doing is wrong and the work of the devil. Antonios quickly puts him in his place and explains that Lord Baylor is to suffer so that they will not.

--Consider him the sacrificial lamb if you must.

Lord Baylor has long before accepted that he is damned to perpetual suffering, and he has endured pain like none other at the hands of Antonios. But this hunger, this need to feed is crippling. He can see the sinister delight in Antonios’ eyes as he waits to see how this shall play out.

***

It is well into the night when Lord Baylor first starts showing any signs that he is somehow changing. It begins with him simply rocking his exposed torso back and forth, as if in the throes of madness. With each movement the skin on his torso is being shredded by the rough mortar and brickwork surrounding him. Then he lets out a loud breathy exhale that gives way to rapid panting and drooling.

--Please. Kill me. Please!

After a few minutes the clear laces of saliva sliding down the edges of his mouth begin to turn pink and then bright red as blood pours out from his mouth. His voice turns raspy as if his vocal cords have been raked with coarse rock.

--Blood. Give it to me!

Antonios watches intently.

Nearly thirty minutes into his convulsing and cramping, Lord Baylor’s eyes start to fill with blood, as if wine has been added to cream. Moments later they are a reddish-black. Trying to observe as much as possible, Antonios draws closer and closer.

As he comes within just a few inches of Lord Baylor’s grasp a scream, a horrible pain-filled yell comes from Lord Baylor as he drips congealing blood from his mouth. Then Lord Baylor wheels his arm around, slashing into Antonios’ face with jagged nails. The wound is deep, but seals itself up instantly, leaving only a thin trail of red as evidence that it was ever there. Antonios signals to the others to help him hold down Lord Baylor, not wanting to risk any additional injury.

He has seen this iteration of the demon before. This is the monster inside all of them. This is the monster that the blood of others keeps caged.

With the others helping to hold still the thrashing Lord Baylor, Antonios uses a glass jar to gather up some of the blood-filled drool as Lord Baylor spits and leans toward him, frantically trying to bite into him. Even while restrained Lord Baylor is able to fight desperately to free himself.

Antonios wedges a wooden block into Lord Baylor’s mouth as it lashes out snapping at him and, with the aid of some of the others, is able to look deep into Lord Baylor’s mouth. The inside is filled with sores, weeping a steady stream of blood into his mouth. Lord Baylor lets out another scream, now painfully high-pitched, and starts to bite down through the thick wooden block in his mouth, splintering and cracking his teeth while his jaw chomps down. Then the cracked and loosened teeth are pushed out by newer longer teeth, each one coming to a barbed razor-sharp point.

Finally Antonios looks at the hands of the demon, and just as he remembers seeing as a child, the nail bed is split and thick yellowed nails have erupted out from them, more like talons. They are covered in blood from Antonio’s cheek. As Lord Baylor struggles against his restraints, Antonios is able to study, and indeed learns a great deal in the minutes following Lord Baylor’s turning.

The last question that Antonios has is whether or not feeding will restore him. He has the others walk away and send him one of the people who have not recently been drunk from. They are pulled from their cage in the midst of their morphine-filled haze and given over to the demon.

It turns out that feeding does not restore him to his former normal self. Though he sucks dry one of the people in the Farm, devouring his neck like a ripe peach, it has no effect other than to seemingly enrage him further.  This is the first time that Antonios is shocked. He suspects that the outcome will be unpleasant and although he is not entirely surprised when the madness reaches its fever pitch, he is indeed taken by surprise when Lord Baylor starts to struggle against his entombment.

Perhaps it has been loosened over time, perhaps his strength is simply that much greater when in this state of enraged fury, but Lord Baylor throws off the mortar and brickwork that have been enshrining him for months. It unleashes an explosion of foul and acrid scents, the scent of human waste and sweat and rot gathered over such a long time.

As a group they all run toward him and try desperately to subdue him, but it is too late. This iteration of Lord Baylor is stronger and faster than all of them. Even with all their great strength and larger numbers they are unable to capture him. Those who get close are easily tossed away. He scurries up the walls like an insect before climbing out the ventilation hatch of the warehouse. All of them follow him out into the night but he is too quick.

In the distance they can hear the screams of other men as this monstrous version of Lord Baylor lays waste to all that he encounters, murdering and feeding on everyone he comes across in an unquenchable blood lust.

Antonios has discovered a great many things from Lord Baylor. He has learned about the dark gift, what it does, how it works and how it could be spread. Antonios has learned that he can make others like himself and children who are infected are also able to make others. He knows now that the disease is able to restore anyone to a perfect state of health. Limbs can be regrown, damage to brain and organs can be repaired. He has learned also that the blood of the enraged can impart the dark gift. The container of blood that he was able to procure from Lord Baylor’s blood-filled spittle is as potent as Antonios’ blood straight from the vein. This lets him know that somewhere in the city, the monster that is feeding on people is also creating more like them, more infected people blessed or perhaps cursed with this dark gift.

Born into all of us is an innate knowledge of what needs must be fulfilled to support life. Failing to drink water or eat food will eventually result in frailty and death no matter the extent of one’s will and personal resolve otherwise. All along that path from health to starvation we are aware of the need to eat. The need to drink blood is no different, except perhaps that the consequence of failing to drink blood results in the opposite of frailty—it results in a furious rage. It is indeed a bit of a quandary.

Antonios learns a final important lesson about trust. It is not something that can simply be shared between one another based on the similarity of circumstance. It can’t be requested from another person nor can it be offered. No, it must be earned over time and in mutual sacrifice. To expect otherwise is foolish. He learns this painfully when his favorite child, his boy priest Gideon, leaves in the middle of the night with no trace or indication of where he has gone. The only thing left behind, besides the lingering sting of Gideon’s self-righteous preaching about morality and their existence being an abomination, is a warehouse absent its contents. No more people left inside to feed off of, no more cattle on the Farm. The well-intended priest liberated the food from their pens.

Some are quickly found staggering about near the warehouse in a morphine haze and they are rapidly devoured. Better to be dead than capable of telling tales of their captivity. Others are not able to be found, which forces Antonios to once again consider his situation and whether it will be required to start
de novo.

He and the remaining infected work swiftly to remove any evidence of the cages within the warehouse, restoring it to its original purpose in the event that authorities are to come to investigate the claims that people have been held captive. Moreover, the title of the property is firmly in the hands of Lord Baylor’s co-conspirator, a man Antonios has already visited and threatened, and who has agreed to take responsibility for whatever actions might take place at the warehouse location.

Though Antonios has grown tired of Gideon’s inability to accept their truer nature, he respects his willingness to share his thoughts even when faced with the knowledge of what horrors Antonios is capable of. Though Gideon has been made anew in Antonios’ image, he still holds on to his faith, a weight that Antonios has long ago shed when faced with the reality of mankind’s constitution. Antonios likes that he could for the briefest of time call the man his friend. Something he has not had for over two lifetimes.

He knows that they will meet again—that the Dark Gift will grow stronger in Gideon, compel him to feed, and force him to accept that he is now a predator. Eventually his eyes will open. The question is not
if
Gideon will accept his true nature, the question is
when
. Regardless of the terms on which they may meet under in the future, Antonios knows that he will not easily forgive this transgression, and certainly can never forget.

Chapter 26

Marie’s eyes are hurting, stinging from spending so much time without blinking. That happens a lot to her when she is on the computer. It’s like her brain stops sending the message to blink. She closes her eyes for a few seconds so that some moisture can return to her corneas.

She has been alternating between staring at the screen for hours and making endless phone calls that never seem to generate results. When she first looked online and found that the insurance company did indeed exist, she was ready to give up on pursuing this angle. It all seemed legitimate. Then she asked for them to send her paperwork so that she could open her own policy and the person on the phone got tripped up, as if they didn’t actually sell insurance. She pressed harder, asking if she could come to their offices, if she could sit with an agent. Finally, frustrated, the woman on the other end said something that made no sense and confirmed for Marie that she was looking in the right place.

--Look, I was just told I needed to confirm his info. They didn’t tell me to do anything else.

A moment later and the phone was dead. She tried calling back and it just rang busy. Not wanting to be stopped by this setback, she plugged into Google Maps the only address she found in the paperwork that was not a PO Box. The address pulled up an abandoned house in upstate New York.

When she told this to Hector, he too got even more intrigued and willing to start digging into things. He said he was going to see if he could find out who owned that property, maybe go down to the county clerk’s office and look into it further. Marie asked him not to go, so instead he just started calling independent insurance agencies asking if they knew about or had heard of Patriot Pines Insurance, to which all of them replied that they hadn’t.

Now time is passing excruciatingly slowly, but although it feels as if they are accomplishing nothing, the truth of the matter is that they have accomplished a great deal. Even though they have learned nothing about the company, they have learned that there is nothing to learn about it. It’s as if the company doesn’t exist for any other reason than to issue checks.