Suck It Up and Die (10 page)

The third device connected to Portia was Morning. He had a leg draped over hers. It was all he could get, seeing how her hands and eyes were otherwise engaged. If her multitasking hadn’t been so vexing, he might have found the situation amusing. He was watching
The Shadow
because it was one of the things they did together, but she was watching her iPhone more than the show, which was turning him into her designated TV watcher. He rehearsed his exit line for later.
Thanks for letting me come over and watch you text
. Like he had the fangs to say as much. No, he was just going to slump on the couch, feign interest in the show, and bide his time until he could blow his EB away with his card and gift.

In California, a carpet of stars stretched over the desert. The only earthly light was the flickering neon of the ca-ne
FILLING SALOON
. It was the lone sign of life in a cluster of buildings that was three people short of a ghost town. The Ca-Ne Filling Saloon got its name from straddling the California-Nevada border and being both gas station and bar. Its one entrance led on the right to the gas station office and on the left to the garage bay, which had been converted to a saloon.

The man who walked into the Ca-Ne was tall and lean, with a cowboy hat and the dusty duds familiar to the desert rats of these parts. Even the man’s coppery skin wasn’t that unusual in the desert, but to have coppery skin that was smooth and grained like a greasewood bench
was
unusual.

The bartender held his tongue upon noticing his customer’s physical oddity. It wasn’t a man’s place to talk about another man’s looks in this part of the world. And since he was the only customer the barkeep had seen all day, he wasn’t going to blow a bar tab by saying something stupid like
Don’t worry, Pinocchio, soon as we get a couple cold ones in ya, you’ll turn into a real boy
.

Before the bartender could say howdy, the man spied someone by the back wall of the bar. He crouched in a flash and almost sprang at the stranger on the other side of the bar, but seeing the threatening stranger crouch in the exact same motion, he realized the threat was actually his reflection in a mirror.

“Whoa there,” the bartender drawled, “you’re wound kinda tight.”

The man said nothing as he scanned his odd reflection. It was him, but different. His hair was darker, curlier. His face was thinner, his nose more pronounced. Stranger still were the lines streaking his face. He’d never had lines before; he’d become a vampire in his twenties. And his once pale skin was the color of a copper pot.

The bartender tried again. “Everything all right there, pardner?”

The vampire parted company with his reflection and moved down the bar. “Yeah, I just need a drink.” He glanced around and shifted the conversation. “Kinda dead in here.”

“Yep,” the bartender said, then smiled with nostalgia. “But it used to be
undead
.”

The vampire arched an eyebrow as he slid onto a barstool. “What do you mean?”

“Six months ago the Ca-Ne was hoppin’. It was the
waterin’ hole for all the vampire fans that visited the Mother Forest. You know, the ol’ country for all vampires. But then all the fang-heads—that’s what the vampire fans call themselves—started carving up the trees, trashin’ the place, ’n’ performing crazy rituals. That’s when the feds ruined it for me. They declared the Mother Forest sacred ground, made it a Leaguer sanctuary, and closed it up tighter than a missile silo.” He looked around his saloon. “Don’t look it now, but for a time this place wet some whistles. Yep, when it was still open, the Mother Forest laid me a golden egg or two.”

“I just came from there,” the vampire offered.

The barkeep cocked his head. “Really? How’d you get in?”

“I flew.”

“Chopper?”

The vampire recalled his violent birth from a pine tree. “Yeah, you could say I arrived by”—he air-quoted with single fingers—“chopper.” He hadn’t finished the gesture before realizing how alien it felt, like some puppeteer was working his strings. Even worse, he detested puns and had murdered people for puns more clever than the one that had shot out of his mouth like unintended spittle.

The bartender clucked. “You must be some kinda VIP.”

The vampire’s eyes had fallen on his hands, as streaked with russet grain as his face. “Yeah,” he said, “but even VIPs get thirsty.”

The bartender slapped his forehead with a laugh. “Listen to me, tendin’ to talk ’n’ forgettin’ to tend bar. What’s your pleasure, mister?”

The vampire gazed at the skin flushing up on the man’s forehead. He tightened his upper lip over his swelling gums and mumbled, “Something with a head on it.”

On the way to the two taps, the bartender picked up a remote and flicked the TV on over the bar. “Being into the Mother Forest and all, you must be a
Shadow
fan.” The bartender flipped through channels. “It’s not on till later out here, but when you get five hundred channels you can grab it early off an East Coast feed.”

The vampire didn’t know what he was talking about, but he kept watching the strobe of channels until the picture stopped on a beautiful woman with long black hair sitting at a table and talking to several young men and women.

“There she is,” the barkeep announced, “Rachel Capilarus, the
Shadow
queen.”

Back in the Dredful apartment, Morning bided his time;
The Shadow
would soon be over. At least Portia had stopped texting Cody and was now only splitting her focus between the TV and the neck rub Morning was giving her.

The episode’s theme was health care. Rachel had shown all but one of her contestants’ adventures as they shadowed a doctor or hospital worker, then CDed into something to help the medical provider in some way. Rachel gave the last contestant, a young Indian man, an adoring smile. “Prasad, last but not least.” She turned to camera. “We won’t give away the juicy details how Prasad found a way to make a sucky health care system even suckier. And that’s a good thing!”

As the show cut to Prasad’s mini-story, Portia broke from Morning’s massage. “Did she really say ‘suckier’?”

Prasad’s segment showed him watching over a difficult surgery. Doctors were reattaching the scalp of a young
musician named Skid who had gotten too close to the backside of a huge wind fan onstage, and the fan had ripped his long hair and scalp off. The scene cut to Skid recovering from the surgery as Prasad explained to viewers that one of the big problems with reattachment surgeries is that healing gets slowed down because the artery side of healing—the side that’s delivering oxygen-rich blood to the wound—works faster and more efficiently than the vein side of the healing—the side that disposes of the used “garbage blood” that has been depleted and needs to be moved away from the wound to make room for the next delivery of fresh blood. Because the vein side is slower and less efficient, blood builds up in the wound and can stall the healing process. So all that garbage blood becomes a speed bump to healing, or, as Prasad called it, “a blood bump.”

The shot cut to a patient recovering from a hand reattachment as Prasad explained that the black squirmy things on the patient’s wrist were leeches. They had been placed there by medical technicians to suck up the garbage blood, to remove the speed bump to healing.

A grinning Prasad explained, “These aren’t plain old leeches you’d find in a pond. They’re laboratory-raised ‘medical devices’ approved by the FDA, and they’re very expensive, which really adds up when a scalp reattachment requires hundreds of these little suckers.”

As the show cut to a shot of a woman with a hundred leeches attached to her head, Morning recoiled. Not only at the sight, but also at the thought of where this was going.

Prasad announced he was going to save Skid thousands of dollars in medical bills. “But,” he claimed, “I’m not going to get all creepy, fang up, and suck on Skid’s head. I’m gonna do it the
Shadow
way.”

The TV cut to a doctor placing a toaster-sized black leech on Skid’s head. As the leech’s front end pivoted on Skid’s reattached scalp and sucked up small buildups of blood with its mouthparts, Skid pointed at the leech and drawled. “Check out my new pet. I call ’im Prasad.”

While the TV cut to the other shadow contestants and Rachel applauding Prasad’s solution, Penny came out of her home office on the way to the kitchen.

“Mom,” Portia said, “did you know about this?”

“Of course, and I’m ready for the fallout. My lawyers are preparing for the lawsuit that’s bound to come from the company that breeds medical leeches.” She feigned a freaked-out CEO. “ ‘You’re putting leeches out of work!’ ” Heading into the kitchen, she added, “They’ll probably send a couple of leech goons to suck my kneecaps.”

Portia laughed as Morning used the remote to kill the TV. “Don’t you wanna see who gets staked?” she asked.

“After Becky-Dell Wallace gets ahold of this,” he said with a scowl, “we all do.”

In the Ca-Ne Saloon, the vampire sat with his untouched beer and glared at the TV. The shot panned across the
Shadow
contestants as a voice-over pondered who would get staked. The vampire wanted to stake every limp-fanged vampire who had ever turned Leaguer and abandoned the old ways.

His building rage was interrupted by the bartender. “Whoa, that’s the first time a Leaguer’s tapped human blood. On TV, anyway. What do you think of that?”

The vampire grumbled under the blast of a TV ad. “I’m ashamed of my race.”

“What was that?”

The vampire answered with a flip of his hand. On the way to silencing the TV with a thrall, his fingers caught the rim of his glass, knocking it over. The beer shot across the bar like a foamy wave crashing on a beach.

The bartender’s eyes darted to the spill, missing the flick of fingers that killed the TV. More distracted by the spill than the sudden silence, the bartender mopped the wet bar with a towel. “Don’t worry. I always say, ‘If the first hits the bar, the second’s on the house.’ ”

Besides being incensed by
The Shadow
, the vampire was equally perturbed by the betrayals his body kept throwing him. First, he looked like someone else. Second, he did idiotic things like air-quote and make puns, and now he spilled a beer! He had never spilled
anything
, not counting blood, of course. There was only one explanation for his catlike reflexes being dulled, his mannerisms being affected, and his skin looking like cheap wood paneling.

The bartender, feeling the vampire’s eyes, glanced up from his beer-soaked towel. “Mister, are you all right?”

“Nothing a stiff drink won’t fix.”

“Don’t you get it?” Morning implored Portia and Penny, who had come out of the kitchen with a mug of tea and a cookie. “Prasad crossed the line. He broke the Leaguers’ second commandment: ‘You shall not drink anything but properly milked
animal
products, or artificial blood substitutes.’ ”

Penny took a sip of tea. “Our argument’s going to be that he didn’t do it as a Leaguer. He did it as a leech. And it was for a good cause.”

“A good cause?” Morning exclaimed, jumping up from the couch. “Sure, if it’s for the good cause of helping Becky-Dell Wallace turn millions of Lifers against us. Of totally destroying the chances of the VRA passing!”

“Perhaps,” Penny offered calmly, “Rachel and I decided that Birnam’s strategy of compromise, compromise, compromise isn’t working. Maybe we decided that going on the offensive would draw out the hatemongering and bigotry of Becky-Dell and her MOPers.”

Morning flapped his arms in exasperation. “And having a guy turn into a leech and suck blood out of some rocker’s head is gonna do this?”

“It’s a start. Now, do you want me to sit down and explain the intricacies of political strategy while I finish my tea and cookie, or do you want to finish your date with Portia on a more pleasurable note?”

Morning flopped down on the couch. From his
wordus eruptus
at the parade to hearing himself spout off like a mini-Birnam for the Leaguer cause, the day kept delivering downers. All he had wanted was a moment with Portia—just the two of them—to give her his card and present.