Immortality Is the Suck (23 page)

seemed to be filled continuously with bikers and their female companions.

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155

Sitting in front of the cold fireplace I saw a Latino with bad skin and

“Respect Few Fear None” emblazoned in six-inch-high letters above his

sternum, sitting with his arm draped companionably across the shoulders of a

Caucasian red-haired man with long, scraggly white and blond whiskers

draping to either side of his mouth. HA inked on his neck and the Angels' logo

plastered across one pectoral muscle.

They were sharing the plump, pale brunette who lay across both their

laps.

While puzzling over the enigma of a Mongol and a Hell's Angel sharing a

woman, I saw two men coming through a door opposite, both of whom I knew

as members of the Mexican Mafia. “La Eme,” the “M.” What was curious was I'd

last seen them in photos of the dead after a bust in San Diego. The women with

them hung on the men and stumbled a little as they were led to the seating

area. When they passed, one of the women bumped against me and looked up,

eyes a startling bright green and the smell of her blood a cloud around her.

Almost sickening in its sweetness.

Somebody slapped me, hard, upside the head.

“Not for you, pup.” A big old Angel, braid down his back, worn leather vest

covered with patches, with arms so thick and long he looked more like a gorilla

than a man, grinned at me with yellowed teeth. “Prospects have to drink from

the bottle.”

I raised my eyebrows at Caballo.
What?

He grinned and the Angel jerked his chin toward the room from which the

“M” boys had just emerged. “Time for your bottle, baby boy,” and he slapped

my ass.

Just when I'd thought life couldn't get more surreal. The last time I'd seen

an HA in colors, he'd been sighting me down the barrel of his revolver. Now one

was giving me buddy slaps.

“He your new prospect?” said one of the Eme boys to Caballo.

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A. M. Riley

“Maybe.” Caballo accepted the fat doobie the man passed him, took a long

drag, and passed it back. It was a Polaroid moment. The “M” sharing drugs

with a Crip.

“You train him good now, boy.”

Caballo's eyes flashed, barely perceptible and quickly hidden by his

eyelids. “C'mon, Adam,” he said.

Caballo led me into what turned out to be a large kitchen. A long counter

on one side, where a variety of men and women leaned and sat; across from

that, five full-size stainless steel refrigerators.

It was like a social hour, everyone drinking from milk cartons of blood.

Nobody seemed to mind me reaching into a refrigerator and bringing out my

own carton. It wasn't until I'd peeled off the seal on top and swallowed the first

mouthful that I understood why.

It looked like blood. It smelled like blood. It tasted like crap.

“Newbie!” chortled a few old boys as I spat into the sink.

“You'll get used to it.” The man who spoke was short and dark and the

belly that overlapped his belt buckle was completely covered with an

illustration of a graveyard. His eyes seemed nothing but small, round black

circles in his hairless face. He looked like a brown smiley face. He tipped back

his carton and the Adam's apple in his thick neck moved as he swallowed. It

made me gag to watch.

“I'd rather not.”

“It's better than drying up.” I noticed that Caballo had instinctively moved

to the side of the kitchen where the other black men stood. He and the speaker

punched knuckles and the man said to me, “Until you're full patch this is all

you get. Unless you pick up something on your own outside.” He leaned toward

me and said, low, “Don't let Ozone know you're freelancing, though.”

I sniffed at the carton again and my mouth filled with saliva. It
smelled
so

much like blood. “Where do they get this stuff?”

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157

“Home grown,” said Smiley Face. He chucked his carton into what looked

like a recycling bin. “It'll only hold you for twenty or thirty hours, but it's food.”

“They make it from human bone marrow.” He seemed younger than the

others, tall and impossibly skinny. Hair razored off, a big, baggy immaculate

white T-shirt, and a thick golden chain with a dazzling two inch high “C”

hanging from it. He looked nothing like a biker and I vaguely remembered the

tat across his knuckles as one that belonged to a small Compton gang. “More

efficient to harvest the bone marrow than the blood, I heard. Then they use

stem cells to make hemoglobin.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

“Studied biology once,” said the man. “They call me Condor.”

I held out my hand. “I'm Snake,” I said. “I—”

“I know who you are,” said Condor. He seemed to hesitate before grasping

my hand. “Adam Bertoni, right? You're the cop who busted those bikers.”

I imagined that a hush settled over the kitchen for just a second. Just a

ripple, like static electricity, it pricked up the hairs on my body and then was

gone. “Caballo here told us all about you,” said Condor.

Like seaweed lifted by an ocean swell, the men in the room seemed to shift

uneasily.

Caballo's hand pressed the center of my back, urging me to keep moving

toward the door at the other end of the long galley. “Never mind, we're all

brothers now.”

That prickle of unease still seemed to float around me, but I nodded.

“That's right.” Nobody said anything else and we passed through, entering

another hallway very much like the one Caballo slept in.

Long white walls, broken only by white doorways with bright brass knobs.

The floor covered with that same white ceramic tile rang out under my booted

feet. There were differences, though, between this hallway and Caballo's. The

red light of surveillance cameras blinked at me from several elevated locations

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A. M. Riley

and smears of rusty brown stained the walls above the wainscoting. I inhaled

deeply and could clearly smell blood.

I heard loud voices through one of the closed doors. Men's voices. A voice

protesting. That voice grew louder and louder and then one of the men shouted

a curse and “Shut him up.” Whomever he spoke to must have, because the

protests ceased.

The door banged open and two big bikers appeared, dragging a skinny

blond man between them. His feet barely touched the tile; he was clothed in a

blue smock, tied in the back, like a hospital patient might wear. Ignoring

Caballo and me, they dragged him down the hallway, opened a door at the end,

and shoved him through. When the door slammed, the smell of urine and

ammonia that billowed down the hallway was sickening.

“Where are they taking him?”

Caballo led me down the hallway. “You studied history, man?”

“I slipped through school on a football scholarship,” I said. “Slept through

most of my lecture halls.”

“Idiot whitey,” said Caballo fondly. “The biggest trouble facing a general is

feeding his troops. You lock a thousand hungry bloodsuckers up with nothin'

to eat for too long, they'll be eating each other.”

“That doesn't work,” I told him. “I had some blood from a dead guy and it

made me feel like I'd taken speed.”

Caballo raised his eyebrows. “You drink enough brother blood you'll go

crazy, man. It's bad stuff. But Ozone, he thinks he has a solution.”

“That fake blood is no solution, either.”

“It will be. He has doctors and scientists working on artificial blood.”

“So that man was…a test subject?” Add kidnapping to the probably

methamphetamine production I was smelling. And the illegal arms.

“Maybe. Maybe he's a donor. They donate blood, sometimes bone.”

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159

We'd reached the end of the hallway and the big door through which

they'd dragged the man. Caballo had his own set of keys, and he fit one into

the door.

“Why bring
me
here, though? I got nothing to donate.”

“You don't get it yet, do you? Ozone wants all you bikers on his team,

man. I'm supposed to show you how good you're gonna have it once you join

us.”

We ascended a set of metal stairs to yet another door, which Caballo

opened with yet another key.

“I guess I should take that as a compliment,” I commented.

Caballo shrugged. “If you want. You don't got much choice.” We'd entered

a five by five space. A keypad on the wall beeped as Caballo typed a code into

it.

Seconds later, green lights skated across the top of the door frame and the

door clicked open.

We entered an empty room and the door swung shut behind us with a

heavy, final click and the sound of lock tumblers turning over.

“Did you just lock us in a vault?” I asked him.

“More like a holding cell,” he said. “Someone will open the door soon.”

“Why the security?”

“You'll see.”

It seemed that many minutes passed. Caballo stood, arms behind his

back, staring patiently at a wall. I sensed that conversation was unwanted and

maybe even unwise, so we waited in silence.

The door finally slid open, allowing a thick warm cloud of odor to roll over

us. Something redolent of chemicals and human waste so disgusting I had to

pull my shirt up to cover my nose and mouth as Caballo preceded me into

what looked like a meth lab.

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A. M. Riley

At the end of a long stainless steel counter on which glass beakers shared

space with an array of computer monitors, sat Ozone. His bulk perched atop a

narrow stool, that black gun still hanging from his hand. He turned from a

conversation with someone in a white lab coat and gestured for Caballo and me

to come toward him.

“Adam Bertoni,” said Ozone. “Meet my doctor.”

She was still human. Small, with strawberry blonde hair and tiny hands

that clutched a clipboard. She looked at me with pursed lips, like she smelled a

lemon. She didn't even acknowledge the hand I proffered and spoke only to

Ozone.

“I've told you I don't want them here.”

Ozone grinned with those big prominent teeth. “Doc makes our blood.”

“I don't
make
blood,” she said; she pushed bifocals up her nose, her

movements tiny and nervous as a mouse. “I am only trying to find a feasible

suspension medium for hemoglobin which is manufactured quite naturally and

organically from stem cells in the bone marrow of living donors.”

Ozone didn't know any more than Caballo or me what she was talking

about, but he kept grinning, nodding away.

“What do you think?” he asked me.

“Impressive,” I said, carefully. “Where do I fit in?”

Ozone rose and began strolling along the aisles of the lab. Beakers

burbled and computer monitors flickered with numbers and images as we

walked. It looked like a futuristic Frankenstein laboratory, if it smelled like a

sewage treatment plant.

“My bikers will be my front line. I imagine a cavalry of Harleys.” He held a

hand aloft, fingers fanned as if envisioning what he described.

“And the bangers are your infantry?” I guessed. “What are the odds they'll

kill each other before the war even starts?”

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161

He brushed that aside with a fat hand that glittered with diamonds. “We

are all brothers now.”

At either end of the counter were four five-foot-high metal tanks, about the

size and shape of a water heater, but with more dials, blinking lights, and

tubes coming out of it.

“What's in the tanks?” I asked the doctor. She ignored me so Ozone

repeated my question to her.

“Hemoglobin, currently.” The doctor pushed her glasses up her nose

again. “But next week we hope to suspend stem cells successfully. Excuse me;

you know I don't have time for this.”

“We'll discuss our plans later,” said Ozone grandly. “Show him the vault,”

he said to Caballo.

Out of earshot, I said, “What's her deal?”

“County cutbacks. They canned a lot of scientists last year and Ozone

talked them into helping him. It all looked legit, I'll bet, and then they found

they couldn't get out. There's a few computer geeks here and a lab technician.

A couple Angels got back here once and scared the crap out of all of them, so

now they have security.”

“It stinks like a meth lab,” I said.

“Ammonia and some other shit; I don't know the names. They use it to

keep the blood alive. They don't cook drugs here; the doc won't allow it.”

Caballo stepped through a narrow door into a freezing cold room.

This room was full of refrigerators. Their doors were a clear glass, fogged

with cold, but clearly holding bags of blood.

“The vault,” said Caballo. “Doc has a way to keep the blood viable for