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

the distance, their hearts pumping blood to their limbs, each beat charged with adrenaline. He can smell it in the air. The Virus is truly pushing him. He is having to fight harder to block out the encroaching sounds of heartbeats echoing from the surrounding buildings.
    He knows he has to stay focused on the bangers he is chasing. His vision narrows and he swings to the outside wall of the alleyway. The wind whips past him as he runs. Keeping stride, he lightly places his left foot on the top edge of a back alley dumpster and leaps, moving his body in rhythm, stretching his arms and feet forward to brace his landing. He lands perfectly against a drainpipe that runs down the outside corner of one of the buildings. From his starting point it is a good thirty-foot vertical leap.
    The impact causes the pipe to bend and loosen, but Ernie is only on it briefly before he heaves himself on to the roof of the building. The pipe pulls completely free from the building and clatters to the pavement. In two bounds he has covered eighty vertical feet. When he comes down on the rooftop, he doesn’t stop running.
    The pace of the fleeing bangers comes to a deliberate slowdown. They laugh with one another about how crazy they are and how that
    --fucker got his, rollin’ in here wit’ his Bruce Lee shit, fuckin’ up Chuck’s arm, then blam!
    Ernie stalks closer, fighting back the fire brewing in his veins. He shouldn’t have done so much damage to himself earlier. Sure, he hadn’t expected to get filled with two clips of bullets, but he knows better than to take such a reckless risk. He shouldn’t have exhausted the Virus for shits and giggles. He can feel the Virus compelling him to feed, starting to twist his will, smell it as it pumps sweet venom from every pore of his body. He has very little time before he goes someplace that he can’t come back from.
    He works his way to the edge of the building and looks down at the alley below. The bangers are all shuffling into the back door of some project housing. When the door closes behind them, Ernie casually steps down from the rooftop, falling eight stories straight down into the courtyard of broken concrete. He lands with a muted thud and a crack. His ankles splinter, then heat spreads around the bones as they are quickly mended. The Virus is in overdrive.
    There are only a few things that Ernie truly knows about the Rage. He knows that no one comes back from it. From the stories passed down by the infected, it’s clear that it’s something to avoid. Even people who are not fans of exaggeration seem simultaneously terrified and in awe of the event. It makes sense though; they have all been infected during a Rage, they are all the victims of some angry and bloodthirsty feral beast, they alone are the survivors of the Virus and its fury. Indeed, a heavy emotional weight to carry. It makes sense that they are so intrigued, and cautious, at least more so than Ernie.
    It is the ultimate double-edged sword. Avoid feeding because of your conscience and you will eventually end up a deranged murderer. Feed too much and you become a homicidal junkie, unable to control your hunger, looking simply to score a new fix.
    As Ernie approaches the door to the gang banger’s safe-house, he realizes that no one has heard of an infected in a Rage in decades—other than the one that Gideon claims infected Ernie. Certainly it is quite suspicious to Ernie, since what Gideon has told the others is a blatant lie; Ernie was never attacked to begin with.
    ***
    Ernie reaches out to the handle of the door. It is locked. He gives a slight tug on the handle and completely destroys the lock, causing the handle to hang limply. He listens to see if the bangers are aware of his arrival. They are blissfully ignorant. Ernie readies himself. Based on their laughs and voices, two are near the door, one in the living room, one in the back using the bathroom. He doesn’t hear the other two bangers. There are just the