Suck It Up

by Brian Meehl

  Penny sat in the front of the roomy cabin. She was on her cell phone talking to a Night-Night producer about Morning’s appearance on the show the next evening. It was going to be taped at the grand opening of Okeanos, a huge new aquarium in L.A.

  In the back of the jet, Portia returned to her seat with a bottle of water from the snack bar. Morning sat across the aisle. He was wearing The Night-Night Show sweatshirt he’d found in the goody bag that had come with their flight.

  During the limo ride to the airport, Portia had done some multitasking. She had stuck to her starter plan of keeping it to small talk with Morning, even when he’d asked to see her video of his interview with Ally Alfamen. While he had a good laugh over her oblivious shot of a camera cable on the floor, she had brainstormed a new title for her documentary on Morning McCobb, the first outed vampire. Out of the Casket.

  Portia opened her bottle of water, glanced out the jet window, and reminded herself that there was no point in firing up her laptop—which her mother had thoughtfully packed for her—and designing the opening credits to “A Portia Dredful Film” unless her small-talk plan led to more footage of her star.

  She pulled out her Handycam, pointed it out the window, and got a shot of the countryside below.

  Morning watched her. “What are you shooting?”

  “Clouds.”

  “Can I give you a tip?”

  Still recording, she shot him a dubious look. “Oh, so you’re a vampire and a cinematographer?”

  “No, but after the camera-cable-on-the-floor thing, I just wanted to make sure you were shooting more than the wing.”

  She threw up a hand. “Go ahead, make fun, but this video project is going to make or break my college application.”

  “What kind of college asks for a video essay?”

  “Film school.”

  “You wanna be a filmmaker?”

  “Yeah.” She eye-rolled. “Doesn’t everybody?” She stopped shooting and lowered her camera. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  He looked away with a rueful smile. “Maybe you didn’t get the memo. I’m not the growing-up type.”

  “Oops,” she said. “I forgot, vampires are like Peter Pan. They never get older.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wizzywig,” she added.

  “Wizzy-what?”

  “It’s a computer term. Short for What You See Is What You Get.”

  “Yep, that’s me.” He opened his arms in hapless resignation. “What you see is what you get.”

  “But you weren’t wizzywig before a vampire came along and—”

  “Of course not.”

  “Can I ask you about it?”

  His mouth tightened. “About when I was normal, or when a vampire came along?”

  She took a swig of water. “To be honest, I want to know about both.”

  He shrugged away his tension. “They’re both boring stories, especially the one about me getting turned.”

  “Oh really? As boring as the ones about paper boats and the Williams Bird Bridge?”

  “Just about.”

  She lifted her camera. “If it’s so boring, can I tape it?”

  He pulled back. “What makes you think I’m going to tell it?”

  “Well, if it’s such a boring story you certainly don’t want to tell it to Gabby Kissenkauf on national TV. I mean, nobody survives bombing on The Night-Night Show. Not even a vampire. So, here’s what I think we should do for each other.”

  “I can’t wait to hear this.”

  “You tell me all your stupid and mind-numbing stories, like how you became a vampire, and save your best stuff for the spotlight. That way, everyone gets what they want. You become the first vampire superstar, my mother becomes the most famous PR agent since George Bush, and I make a quiet little documentary about you that wins the Oscar.”

  He shook his head over her chutzpah. He also realized how short a documentary on him might end up being. After all, the welcoming committee in L.A. might include a bunch of Loners, armed with stakes, eager to turn his next CD into Cell Destruction. If that was the case, the least he could do was help Portia get into film school by giving her a little more footage. “Okay, fine, but don’t blame me if you and your camera are disappointed.”

  She flashed a triumphant smile. “That’s what I like about you, Morning. Your ‘disappointments’ keep getting bigger and bigger.” She turned on the camera and found him in the viewfinder. “So, Morning McCobb, one day you’re cruising along as a normal teenage kid, the next you’re undead.”

  “I was never undead.”

  “No?”

  “It’s one of the things about us that’s not true.”

  “Undead equals untrue,” she chimed in. “Got it. So what are you?”

  “When you become a vampire you don’t die and rise from the grave. You get really sick. You crawl into a corner and wanna die, and you almost do because your insides are being rearranged. Then you feel better, and you think you’re back to normal. But then your gums hurt, and you have this overwhelming thirst for blood. That’s when you go, whoa, this is new.”

  Portia raised a hand behind her camera. “Okay, I got the basics, but can you go back to the beginning, you know, the day or night you got turned?”

  Morning was already there, flashing back on the horrifying moment he realized his body craved blood. That was when he decided not to succumb. That was when he decided to starve himself to death rather than drink blood.

  Through the viewfinder, she saw the change in his face. It was taut, pained. And his eyes seemed to have retreated to a nightmare. She suddenly realized she was asking too much too soon.

  She flicked the camera off and set it on the seat. “Listen, if you don’t want to talk about it, don’t. You don’t even have to talk to me.” She threw a hand toward the back of the jet. “Want something from the snack bar? If you want, we can just sit here, eat candy, throw peanut M&M’s at each other, and get fat.” She cringed. “Oops, forgot again. You don’t eat, you don’t get fat, you don’t change.” Her eyes popped wide. “Ohmigod, you don’t get fat!”

  Her verbal spasms pulled him back to the present. He watched, baffled, as she yanked a notepad from her tote bag and scribbled something on it.

  She ripped the paper off the pad, and shoved the note and pen across the aisle. “You have to sign this.”

  He took the note and read it. “Should I, Morning McCobb, ever be tempted to turn Portia Dredful into a vampire, I promise not to do it until she has a chance to lose seven pounds.” He rocked back in laughter.

  “Not funny,” she mock-protested. “If I ended up seven pounds overweight forever, I’d kill myself.”

  He signed the paper and gave it to her. “Please, turn on your camera. At least when I do the talking I know where the conversation’s going.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure.”

  She grinned. Christiane Amanpour couldn’t have done it better.

  20

  Passing the Deuce

  Portia opened the camera’s flip-out screen, started recording, and tried to keep it light. “Was it a dark and stormy night?”

  Morning chortled and ran a hand through his hair. “No, it was last Thanksgiving. I was living at St. Giles, and there are these host families that invite orphans to come to their home for a real Thanksgiving. I got invited to a house on Staten Island. I took the ferry out there, and the husband picked me up at the ferry landing. When I got to the house and met the wife, I realized they didn’t have kids. I was their kid for the day. We had a huge meal and watched a football game. The couple was about to take me back to the ferry when they noticed I’d broken out in red spots. The woman said it was chicken pox.”

  “You never had chicken pox when you were little?”

  “No. That’s what they found out when they called Sister Flora. And because there were a dozen little kids at St. Giles who hadn’t had chicken pox, Sister asked the couple if they’d keep me for a few d
ays until I wasn’t contagious. They agreed. We made turkey sandwiches for dinner, and they let me sleep in their spare bedroom. It wasn’t just a bedroom. It had a crib, with a mobile over it. The walls were painted with puffy clouds and airplanes, and there was an Elmo night-light.”

  “It was a nursery for a baby that wasn’t coming.”

  “Yeah. It even had those glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. I remember staring at the stars and thinking that if there was a God up there in the stick ’em stars, he was a weird dude. He gave me to a woman who didn’t want me, but he wouldn’t give a kid to someone who really wanted one.”

  Portia zoomed in a little tighter. “So what happened next?”

  Morning searched for the right words. “Thanksgiving isn’t just a holiday for mortals. There are some vampires who like feast days, or nights, as much as anyone. Especially when their human turkeys are fat, happy, and filled to the brim.”

  “You mean with blood?”

  He nodded. “He fed on the couple first.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “When I woke up and saw him standing over my bed, his chin was covered in blood.”

  Portia squinted with disgust. “What made you wake up?”

  “I don’t know if I imagined it or it really happened, but I think it was a burp.”

  “He burped?”

  “Yeah. Then everything happened superfast. I saw a flash of fangs, I felt something hit my chest, and I got yanked out of bed like a bag of cookies grabbed off the shelf.”

  “You were dessert.”

  “Pretty much. He struck faster than a snake. I tried to scream, but the air rushed out of me without a sound.”

  “What did it feel like? I mean, having someone drink your blood.”

  “I remember feeling two things. I was terrified and struggling to get away, but he was superstrong. Then there was this other part of me, the like-a-movie part of me, that was just watching it happen.”

  “What did that part see?”

  “It’s like my whole body had turned into a punctured tire. It felt like it was caving in on itself. Even my brain felt like it was collapsing. I knew I was about to black out.”

  “Did you think you were dying?”

  “Yeah, and I probably was. Until the accident.”

  “What accident?”

  Morning frowned at the absurdity of it. “Backwash.”

  “Backwash?”

  “The vampire was so bloated from feeding on the couple, and on me, that he burped in the middle of feeding. Some of the blood that was in his mouth long enough to be tainted backwashed into my neck.”

  Her face scrunched. “Gross. So that’s why you became a vampire, backwash?”

  “Yeah. When it’s done intentionally, it’s called passing the deuce.”

  “What’s the deuce?”

  He touched his neck with two fingers. “The fang marks of a bite, and, if a vampire wants to make another vampire, it’s passing the virus that lives in vampire blood.”

  “You mean like AIDS?”

  “Yeah, or like being bitten by a tick and getting Lyme disease. The vampire virus infects a mortal, makes them very sick while it spreads through their body, and creates a different creature.”

  Portia was mesmerized. “Kind of like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly?”

  “Yeah, but not as pretty,” he said with a twisted smile. “Especially when you’re a backwash accident. There’s even a word for it. SangFU.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Blood flubup, if you wanna be nice about it.”

  “What about the vampire who turned you? Was he around—”

  “When I realized I wasn’t dead? No, he’d disappeared. I never got a close look at him. I wouldn’t know him if he was sitting next to me.”

  “So what happened next?”

  “When I finally came to, I left the bedroom and saw myself in a mirror. I looked like anyone who’d been sick for a few days. And I wrote off the vampire thing as a nightmare, or some hallucination I had from the chicken pox. But then I looked for the spots on my face. They were completely gone. The only spots I found were the two on my neck.”

  “The deuce.”

  “Yeah.” He smirked. “A leopard can’t change its spots, but a vampire can. I traded the chicken pox for the vampire pox.”

  “What about the couple?” Portia asked. “Were they vampires too?”

  “No, they were dead. That’s when I decided I’d rather die than do that to anyone.”

  “But you were a vampire. How did you have the willpower to resist what you’d become? How could you starve yourself to death?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m a SangFU. Maybe I’m missing something.” He slid her a grin. “Maybe I’m bloodlust-challenged. Whatever, I went to the basement, found a hammer and nails, and nailed myself in the room with the ceiling stars. And I stayed there until I blacked out.”

  Two questions popped into Portia’s head: If Morning had been at the couple’s house, why wasn’t he a suspect in their double murder? When she Googled him, why didn’t his name come up in the reporting about the murder? But seeing how tired he’d begun to look, she shelved her questions and kept the focus on his turning. “But you didn’t die. Someone got you out of that room.” A lightbulb flared in her head; she couldn’t kill her curiosity. “And someone must have eliminated the evidence of you being there! Otherwise you’d be a suspect in a double homicide!”

  Morning nodded, impressed. “True.” But telling her who had scrubbed his presence from the crime scene, who had convinced Sister Flora that he’d run away before the murder, and who had bought the Sister’s silence in the matter with a generous contribution to St. Giles was not something he was ready or authorized by Birnam to divulge.

  “Well?” Portia exclaimed, exasperated with the long silence. “Who got you out of the room?”

  He answered with a weary smile that he didn’t need to fake. Telling his story of being drained and rearranged had sucked him dry. He opened his silver case on the window seat, slid out a label-free can of Blood Lite, and pulled the tab. “I promised to tell you the boring stories. Don’t you think I should save some of the good stuff for Gabby Kissenkauf?”

  She wanted to punch him in the shoulder. Hard. But maybe punching a thirsty vampire wasn’t a good thing. She turned off her camera, even though she was still in the throes of story-lust. “You’re right. I mean, we’re flying on his jet and all. I guess he deserves something.”

  Watching him take a long swig from the unmarked can, she had a million more questions about what he was drinking, where it came from, and on and on. But another thought cut to the front of the line. If vampires weren’t dead or undead, her new title, Out of the Casket, had just kicked the bucket. She needed a new one. The Accidental Vampire, An Inconvenient Tooth, and Thanksgiving Bites! came quickly to mind. But they were either too retro or too flip. She needed a title that sounded good with “Oscar-winning.”

  * * *

  VAMPIRES VS. HUMANS

  THE BIG DIFFERENCE

  Our minor differences—drinking vs. eating, immortality vs. mortality, fangs vs. retainers—get down to one big difference. Cells. No, not cell phones.

  STEM CELLS

  You’ve heard of them. They’re the supercells you begin with when you’re a speck of life in your mother’s womb. Your stem cells divide, differentiate, and explode into the complex human organism you become. But during your transformation from fetus to full grown, your stem cells change from miracles of morphing to monsters of monotony. If cells in a grown-up could talk they might sound like this: “You want me to divide into a brain cell? Fuhgettaboutit! I do nose hair cells, dat’s it!”

  But vampires never lose these miraculous morphers. We are walking pillars of stem cells. It’s why we possess the ability to “differentiate” into so many forms. It’s why we can regenerate ourselves for as long as we chose to live.

  You are clay, mo
lded in childhood, dried in youth, and fired in the kiln of aging. We are clay that never dries, that never solidifies.

  However, this hardly makes us a superior race. It only makes us different.

  * * *

  21

  The Night Visitor

  After arriving in Los Angeles, Morning, Portia, and Penny were whisked off to the luxurious Babylon Hotel and escorted to the presidential suite, compliments of The Night-Night Show.

  The penthouse suite consisted of a palatial central sitting room flanked by two bedrooms that needed a dozen Persian carpets to cover the floors. Morning took one bedroom, while Portia and Penny shared the master bedroom.

  From the moment they arrived, security was provided by the hotel’s version of the Secret Service. Which was needed because word had gotten out that “the vampire kid” was staying at the Babylon. Besides the media trucks and news crews in front of the hotel, there were paparazzi and an array of vampire fans, from black-clad goths to a vampire-themed cheerleading squad called the Blood-curdling Screamers. There was also a group of protestors from End Times Community College. While half the students loudly accused Morning of being the Antichrist, the other half worked the crowd trying to sell memberships in the school’s Rapture Miles Program. It promised mileage points to the chosen ones who would be shuttling back and forth between earth and heaven during the End Times.

  To avoid contact with the fans and foes down on the street, Penny and Portia ordered room service for dinner while Morning downed another unlabeled Blood Lite. Between mouthfuls of filet mignon, Portia peppered him with questions about his mysterious drink of choice and the locked case he kept it in. While he dodged most of her questions, he admitted it was an “artificial blood protein drink,” and the only beverage he had ever liked as a vampire. When she asked to taste it, Penny told her to finish her steak or she wouldn’t get desert.

  After Penny briefed Morning on their appearance with Gabby Kissenkauf the next day, she sent Morning to his bedroom, and insisted that Portia come with her to theirs.