Suck It Up

by Brian Meehl

  He welcomed the break. It had been an exhausting day that had started before dawn in New York and was ending three thousand miles away in L.A.

  After stripping down to T-shirt and boxers, he slipped between the bed’s cool linen sheets. The scenes of the day swirled through his head. Scaring Ally Alfamen. Meeting the old guy in the firehouse. Learning about the Maltese cross and the knights of the fire table. And there was Portia.

  He was surprised how much he liked hanging out with her, tossing words back and forth. It had never been something he was very good at, but with her it came easy. He wasn’t so sure about her take on him. He wondered how much she was faking the friendliness because she wanted something from him: his stories. At least she was up-front about it. He had to give her that. She wanted to make a movie about him. But he didn’t like thinking of her as some story vampire. He pushed her out of his mind by going back to the best part of the day.

  The firehouse. And the crazy idea he had about becoming a superhero and a firefighter. Then an even weirder notion drifted into his head. What if he could CD into exactly that? Like the supersuits he’d imagined earlier. He slipped into the black labyrinth of his mind, and laser-focused on the image of a firefighter’s bunker gear hanging on the wall. A moment later, something knocked his shoulder and flew past him. He’d been tagged by the black and yellow armor of a fire knight. He raced after it, careening through the darkness. As he hurtled around corners and down holes, the blackness began to streak with red. He dismissed the tiny red comets as if they were nothing but neon ladybugs. As he swung around a sharp turn pursuing the fire knight, he zipped past a swarming nest of red bugs. He realized they weren’t bugs; they were glowing embers. His mind-labyrinth was smoldering. As he shot up a shaft after the knight, the red-streaked blackness exploded into flames.

  Morning woke with a yelping start and realized he’d fallen asleep. It was only a dream. His skin prickled with heat; he was clammy with sweat. He threw off the covers and jumped out of bed.

  He opened the nearest window. A breeze pushed through it, cooling his skin. He looked down at the street and noticed that the carnival of press, fans, and protestors had vanished. Either they’d gone home or the End Times had kicked into serious gear and they were earning their first Rapture miles.

  Climbing back into bed, he tried to shut down his senses. But there was a gnarl of tension in his jaw and a dull ache in his gums. It was like a sensation he used to have as a Lifer, after a night of grinding his teeth. Great, he thought, after two days of hangin’ with Lifers again, I go back to grinding my teeth.

  He turned toward the window. The bothersome sensation went away. Just outside the window was a yellow and white awning. Beyond it the lights of the Hollywood Hills twinkled. Over the faint noise of traffic drifting up from the street, he heard a steady ding. He figured it was a piece of awning hardware being blown against the aluminum frame. It sounded like the clang of a pulley against a flag-pole. It became a percussive lullaby as he watched lights snuff out in the distant hills.

  A few minutes later, the gathering darkness claimed his last flicker of thought and buried him in sleep.

  When the window framed just a few scattered lights, an object slid into view. It jutted down like the sharp nose of a spaceship, then it lengthened into a thick cane of twisted wood. Next came the knot of rope it was secured to. It was a massive stake.

  The wind thumped it against the window.

  Morning rolled onto his back. His eyes fluttered open. He stared at the ceiling and listened to the gentle knocking. Dismissing it as the awning, he fell back to sleep.

  A blanket of mist slid down the outside of the window, curled through the opening, and glided down the wall like a stingray. A moment later, a naked figure, facing the window, rose up. He had the wide back and narrow hips of a swimmer. He reached out the window, clutched the wooden stake, and deftly flicked away the knot of rope. Pulling the stake inside, the man turned toward the bed.

  Ikor DeThanatos.

  Morning groaned.

  The vampire instantly crouched to the floor.

  Morning resumed the rhythmic breathing of sleep.

  DeThanatos rose and stepped to the bed. He looked down at the young vampire and sneered with contempt. The boy had violated immortal law. He had made sacred secrets known to mortals. He had endangered the existence of all vampires.

  He clutched the stake in both hands and raised it over his head. He would plunge it through the boy’s heart, impaling him on the bed like a moth with a pin. Then he would fetch the other tools from the roof and carry out the sentence the law demanded for commandment breakers: annihilation.

  As the slayer gathered his strength for the impaling, something swirled in his gut. It snagged his attention, but he dismissed it. He had stopped to feed during the journey to Los Angeles; his gut was probably objecting to flying on a full stomach.

  DeThanatos rebraced to plunge the stake. Pain shot through his viscera like a jagged blade of lightning. He defied it, lifting the stake higher. His face contorted. The searing pain sapped his strength, draining his resolve. DeThanatos felt like he was the one impaled. He was. On the stake of confusion.

  Of all the human races, vampires possess the greatest powers of mind over matter. But in one instance, a vampire’s body will trump his will every time. When a mortal is turned into a vampire, one of the biggest changes is in the gut. The gut becomes a second brain. This second brain controls two things: bloodlust and the survival instinct.

  The horrendous realization of why his body was betraying him shifted DeThanatos’s gut-wrenching pain to knee-buckling nausea. He brought the stake to the floor, steadying himself. He dropped to his knees and gasped for air. Clutching the top of the stake, his glazed face fell on his hands. As he caught his breath, the nausea dissipated.

  DeThanatos lifted his head and glared at the sleeping boy. He wasn’t any boy. He was his boy. A blood child he had never known.

  Then the memory came. The previous Thanksgiving. The feast of two adults, and a teenage boy with red spots. He recalled the juicy gluttony. But in his ravenous rapture he couldn’t remember when he had accidentally pushed blood back into the boy, spawning a blood child. A SangFU.

  Only one thing was certain. His gut had stayed his hand and stopped him from breaking the fourth commandment: Thou shalt not destroy thy blood child. The punishment for doing so was swift. Instant conflagration. His second brain had saved him from the fireball of annihilation.

  Staring down at his blood child did nothing to weaken DeThanatos’s resolve. If anything, knowing that this vampire traitor was his, made it stronger. Yes, the boy had received a stay of execution. But not for long. While immortal law forbid the destruction of a blood child by the maker’s hand, it said nothing about a hired hand.

  22

  The Swimmer

  As Penny and Portia ate breakfast in the sitting room, Morning checked out the scene in front of the Babylon. The throng of media, fans, and End Timers had returned and doubled in size. Like a block party, it spilled into the street and stopped traffic.

  Holding a cup of coffee, Penny joined him at the window.

  “How are we going to drive through that?” Morning asked.

  “We’re not,” she replied. “We’re going over it.”

  A half hour later, they rode the elevator to the hotel’s helipad and climbed into Gabby Kissenkauf’s private helicopter. It would take them to the new, state-of-the-art aquarium that had been built on the ocean, north of Los Angeles.

  As they flew over the giant water-spouting gate announcing OKEANOS, Morning asked, “What kind of name is that?”

  Portia was shooting a bird’s-eye view of the new attraction. “According to the Greeks, Okeanos was the great river that flowed around the world and connected all the oceans.” She shot him a smile. “I did my homework.”

  Unlike Wake Up America, which was aired live, The Night-Night Show was taped during the day and shown later the same night. And the
show was always taped in front of a live audience.

  The Aquatorium Theater seated five thousand people arcing around an aquatic stage designed to resemble an ocean cove. Beyond the Aquatorium, the real ocean stretched so seamlessly to the horizon you couldn’t tell where the man-made cove ended and the ocean began. Despite the sunny weather, the retractable roof over the grandstand was closed to contain the balloons scheduled to rain down at the proper moment.

  The double treat of the Okeanos grand opening and seeing Gabby Kissenkauf tape a segment had filled every seat in the house. It overflowed to standing-room-only when the rumor spread that Gabby had a surprise guest: Morning McCobb.

  A crescent of rocky beach created an apron between the audience and the cove. Because it would take so long for the emcee and the animal trainers to walk to the middle of this faux beach, elevators had been installed to deliver them from below the rocky sands.

  When three heads appeared behind a long rock, the crowd pointed and cheered as Gabby Kissenkauf, Morning, and Penny rose into view. The trio sat in high director chairs with Morning in the middle. He wore a jean jacket over an Okeanos T-shirt, tattered blue jeans, and sneakers. Penny had chosen an emerald green dress that jumped out against the watery blue background.

  From the front row of the grandstand, Portia captured their entrance on her Handycam. Behind her, cameras flashed like metal in a microwave.

  Gabby possessed a Humpty Dumpty face, a paintbrush of salt-and-pepper hair, and the impish air of a class clown who’d never grown up. His cranberry-colored sports coat was offset by a yellow and purple tie. He began the show with his standard opening line. “So, where y’all from?”

  The audience answered on cue, shouting their home states.

  After Gabby made a few opening jokes about his network exiling him to an island and “putting him out to ocean,” he transitioned to his guests. “Until yesterday, I thought I was gonna do the Moses thing, part the waters and open Okeanos solo, but it turns out there’s a new guy in town who can out-Moses Moses. And here he is, Morning McCobb.”

  The crowd erupted.

  Startled by the noise, Morning glanced down at his sneakers on the chair’s footboard. His left foot was tapping nervously. He stilled it, then waved at the sea of flashing cameras. It was one thing to be stared at by the cyclops of a TV camera, it was another to feel the roar of a monster with ten thousand eyes.

  “Morning is going to assist me in the grand opening,” Gabby continued, “along with his publicist, protector, and hopefully not his pincushion, Penny Dredful.”

  The audience laughed and gave Penny a round of applause.

  “But before we cut the ribbon on this amazing aquarium, I say we cut to the chase.” Gabby leaned toward the audience with a wink. “I don’t know about you, but until yesterday I thought I knew a thing or two about vampires. But now I’m really in the dark. I mean, when I think of vampires, I think Dracula, Lestat, Michael Jackson.” The audience laughed and he kept up his befuddled act. “But when I look at Morning, and what he’s done in the last twenty-four hours, I’m thinking, this guy is a vampire version of Rosa Parks.” He paused, then continued his setup. “You know, the African American woman who refused to ride in the back of the bus. But Morning refuses to ride in the back of the hearse.” Gabby rode the wave of laughter to his next punch line. “I mean, I don’t even wanna call him a vampire. I wanna call him an Undead American.”

  When the laughter died down, Morning found his voice. “Can I say something?”

  “Please!” Gabby encouraged.

  “There are undead people in the world, but vampires aren’t undead.”

  “Oh, really?” Gabby said with singsong curiosity. “Who’s undead then?”

  Morning wiped his palms on his jeans, and hoped he could remember all the answers he had rehearsed with Mr. Birnam. “People who die, like on an operating table, and then get brought back to life are more undead than vampires.”

  Gabby nodded, impressed. “Okay, that makes sense. But if you didn’t die, how did you become a vampire?”

  Morning was glad he’d rehearsed this one with Portia. But he had to make it shorter. “When you’re bitten by a deer tick and get Lyme disease, it changes how your immune system works. When you’re bitten by a vampire and get vampire disease, it changes how your whole body works.”

  Gabby leaned forward and cleared his throat. “And one of those changes is a thirst for blood.”

  Morning nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Aha!” Gabby exclaimed. “So that part’s true.”

  “Yes.” Morning reached into his jacket. “But I only drink an artificial blood substitute made from soy.” As the crowd hooted in disbelief, he pulled out a magenta-colored can. “No, really, it’s called Blood Lite.”

  The crowd convulsed with laughter. Portia zoomed in for a close-up of the can’s curly white letters spelling BLOOD LITE. It was the first one she’d seen with a label.

  Gabby stared at the can in bemused disbelief. “Where do you get that?”

  Morning shrugged. “You have to know where to shop.” For the first time the eruption of laughter that followed didn’t jar him. In fact, he liked it. They were laughing at his joke, not Gabby’s.

  “Okay, okay, we’re on a roll here.” Gabby dug something out of a jacket pocket and flipped it to his guest. “What about garlic?”

  Morning caught the garlic bulb and held it up. “Doesn’t bother us one bit. I still like the smell of it.”

  “So you don’t fear it?”

  “We’re scared of garlic for the same reason everybody else is. It can give you wicked bad breath.” The ten-thousand-eyed monster laughed again.

  Gabby whipped out a crucifix and pushed it at his guest. “What about this? Do anything for you?”

  Morning eyed the cross. “It’s a nice cross, but it doesn’t bother me. I mean, as a Christian symbol the cross has only been around for a couple thousand years. Vampires have been around a lot longer than that. Why should we suddenly start getting creeped out by a cross? And besides, if we recoiled every time we saw one, we’d be a dead giveaway in the library.” He answered Gabby’s quizzical look. “We’d be the ones getting jiggy every time we looked at the letter t.”

  The crowd piggybacked their laughter with applause.

  Morning grinned. This was getting more than easy, it was fun.

  Gabby shoved a hand mirror toward him. “What about mirrors? Can you see yourself?”

  Morning found his face in the mirror and checked his hair for cowlicks. “Yeah, I can see myself.”

  “Okay, but what about the thing about vampires avoiding mirrors?”

  “It’s true,” he acknowledged. “We avoid them.”

  Gabby raised his arms in triumph and turned to the audience. “Hey, we got one right!”

  “Yeah,” Morning interjected, “but the only reason we avoid mirrors is because we’ve lost the main reason for looking in one. We never change. It’s not like we’re going to discover a pimple or a new wrinkle.”

  Gabby lifted his hand dramatically. “Ah, but what if you look in the mirror and discover a stake through your heart? Do you crumble and turn to dust?”

  “Well,” Morning hesitated, “destroying us isn’t that simple.”

  Gabby leaned closer, pretending to share a secret. “C’mon, Morn. Between you and me, a peg in the ol’ ticker is worse than a splinter, right?”

  Morning’s foot began to tap again.

  Penny jumped in. “Maybe we should change the subject.”

  “But I have a thousand more questions,” Gabby protested.

  “I thought you had an aquarium to open,” Penny said with a reproachful smile.

  Gabby’s face lit up. “Water! I forgot about the water thing. Vampires hate it, right? Especially holy water. It’s like battery acid.”

  Morning threw a look over his shoulder. “If I hated water, would I be here?”

  Gabby laughed. “Good point.”

  “Actually,” M
orning added, “we need water more than you. If we couldn’t stand water, we couldn’t survive.” He answered the host’s puzzled look by raising his Blood Lite. “All blood, even soy blood, is eighty-three percent water.”

  Gabby hopped out of his chair and started down the fake beach. “Okay then, if water’s no problem, let’s get to what everyone’s been waiting for.”

  Morning and Penny left their chairs and walked down the crescent beach in the opposite direction from Gabby.

  Gabby addressed the audience. “It’s time to take our positions, cut some ribbon, and open Okeanos with a splash.” Arriving at one end of the cove, he reached into the water and pulled up a yellow ribbon.

  At the other end of the cove, Penny lifted her end of the ribbon. They both pulled until the one-hundred-yard stretch of yellow popped out of the water and wavered above the surface.

  At the cove’s outermost point, Morning stepped off a rock and appeared to walk across the water.

  The crowd gasped and reveled at the wonder of it. He was walking along the far edge of the cove, but the seamless illusion between the huge tank and the real ocean made it look as if he were water-walking. Reaching the center of the horizon, he turned to the crowd.

  Holding the ribbon taut, Gabby pointed at Morning dramatically and exclaimed, “Look! It’s a fog! It’s a tree!”

  Morning dove into the still water. In the middle of the expanding circle of ripples, his clothes floated to the surface. A moment later, a bottlenose dolphin shot out of the water in an arcing leap.

  “It’s Morning McCobb!”

  The crowd roared.

  Morning performed two more leaps and worked his way back to the center of the cove.

  “Drumroll,” Gabby called as he raised his end of the ribbon high in the air with the help of a pole.

  Joining Penny at her end of the beach, a dozen drummers began a drumroll. Having secured her end of the ribbon to a pole, Penny raised it fifteen feet above the water.

  The dolphin shot out of the water in the middle of the cove and soared toward the yellow ribbon. At the apex of his leap, he snared the ribbon in his mouth and broke it. As the severed ribbon fluttered to the water, the dolphin knifed below the surface. Balloons rained down from above. The Aquatorium exploded with applause.