Suck It Up (8 page)

Snickering laughter darted among the onlookers.

Sister Flora crossed herself. “Dear God.”

A high thin voice announced, “If you're a vampire, then we're Batman and Robin.”

All eyes snapped to the voice.

Morning recognized the newest onlookers bulldozing to the front of the crowd. John and Paul Mallozzi had gotten bigger. They had also gotten tattoos on their huge arms. Their arms read, from left to right:

“Yeah, and besides,” Paul added in a thin voice like his brother's, “vampires can't go out in the sun.”

“That's a myth,” Morning said.

“Listen to him,” John snickered. “He disappears, and comes back with a listhp.”

“A vampire with a listhp?” Paul said in mock horror. “That musth mean he'th a bloodthucking fiend!”

Morning didn't see the twins double over in laughter, or hear the crowd join in. He had dived into the inky labyrinth of his mind, where he chased a serpentine swirl of mist. For his first outing, he had chosen the least threatening form of all: the Drifter.

As the Mallozzi twins straightened up, Morning's shirt and jeans tumbled to the ground. Everyone on the stoop jumped away from the pillar of fog where a skinny teenager had just stood.

The cameraman almost tripped, steadied himself, and kept shooting the ribbon of mist as it drifted toward the twins.

Drake and Penny gaped as the terrified onlookers edged away. Except for the Mallozzi twins. They were frozen in slack-jawed dunderment, riveted to the band of mist as it rose up and tilted into a flat cloud over their heads.

Inside the haze, Morning kept his dim shadow-conscious focused on the most important thing while doing the flimsy and dangerous Drifter: not blacking out. If he did, the story of the first vampire to out himself would end in the H
₂
O equivalent of autoimmolation: autoprecipitation. A watery grave indeed.

Luckily, holding the Drifter for any length of time was not Morning's forte.

As the Mallozzi twins gaped up at the oval mist like extras in
The War of the Worlds,
the cloud thickened. A split second later, it rematerialized into Morning and crashed down on the twins, knocking them to the pavement.

Morning disentangled himself from the screaming boys, popped up, and brushed off his Epidex. It wasn't graceful, but it was convincing. He was out.

10

Spin City

Morning's version of crowd surfing on the Mallozzi twins had numerous effects on the dozen witnesses.

Sister Flora fainted and was caught by Drake Sanders, which was just as well because she covered up the dark spot on his pants where he had wet himself.

Penny finally closed her mouth, opened her mind, and understood why Birnam's playbook had been empty. It was no joke, Morning was uncharted territory. And he was
her
client.

While the terrified onlookers backed away from the monster who had turned into mist and back again, the Mallozzi twins scrambled to their feet and performed a rarity. They ran in opposite directions. “
Dont X
” and “
R Path
” were now a divided highway.

What follows after smooth-sailing reality is abruptly capsized in a freak accident is profound confusion. For some, the chaotic scramble to right the mental ship can take a minute. For others, it can take a lifetime. For Penny, it took seconds. She picked up Morning's shirt, pants, and shoes and hurried into the street. Before Drake could reboot the part of his brain that held terms like “exclusive interview,” Penny hustled Morning away from the scene.

Morning looked back to find Birnam, but he was gone.

When they reached Delancey, Morning scrambled into his pants and shirt as Penny hailed a cab. Popping his head through his shirt, he spotted the Williamsburg Bridge rising at the end of the street. He wanted to run out onto the bridge and celebrate his historic outing, but Penny pushed him toward a cab as it screeched to a stop. They jumped in.

Morning vented the rush of adrenaline charging through him in an explosion of laughter.

Penny eyed him with a mixture of fear and bewilderment. “What's so funny?”

“The Mallozzi twins,” he managed between snorts. “You should have seen their faces.” A thought shut down his laughter. “Oh man, now they're going to be gunning for me.”

“Don't you mean, staking for you?”

He glanced at Penny. She was pressed against the door on the other side of the seat. His best-laid plans of not scaring her, or anyone else, during his first outing hadn't exactly worked out. And if Penny looked like she wanted to melt into the car door, when Portia found out she was going to totally freak. So much for “mi crib es su crib.” But it wasn't his fault, he told himself, it was Birnam who'd given him the green light. He gave Penny a sheepish smile. “I guess you believe me now, huh?”

She nodded decisively. “Oh yeah.”

The first chords from the
2001: A Space Odyssey
theme sounded from her purse, making her jump. She dug out a cell phone and thrust it across the seat. “It's yours. It fell out of your pocket when I grabbed your clothes.”

He'd totally forgotten about the cell. The four chords sounded again. He took it, flipped it open. “Hello.” He handed the phone to Penny. “Mr. Birnam wants to talk to you.”

She took it and put it to her ear.

Birnam heard her suck in a breath. “Cards on the table, Ms. Dredful. Morning and I are from the International Vampire League.”

Penny was still getting her bearings. “Vampires have their own league?”

“Not as in baseball,” he offered. “We're like a big family.”

“And what do you want from me, Mr. Birnam? To play Marilyn Munster, the normal one in a house of monsters?”

Birnam laughed. “I wouldn't put it that way, but yes, that's what we need. A talented woman with big ideas, big skills, and big hair.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Are you sure that's all you need?”

“Penny, we don't drink human blood anymore.”

“Don't PR a PR person.”

“It's true. But the rest of the world isn't going to believe it.”

“So you want me to make Morning the harmless poster boy for, what did you call it, the International Vampire League?”

“Exactly. If you're successful, we'd be happy to make you an honorary member. That's a nonbiting offer,” Birnam said with a chuckle. “So what do you say, Penny? Are you up to the job?”

Penny did a quick pros and cons list.

Cons:

(1) The client, Birnam, was another smug, ego-riddled powerbroker, the Donald Trump of vampires, whom she would have to suck up to—which was better than the other way around.

(2) The product, Morning, was about as sexy as chicken soup.

(3) The clientele, vampires, had a habit of leaving behind corpses.

Pros:

(1) Birnam seemed to have deep pockets, and the story of the first vampire was a gold rush waiting to happen.

(2) Representing a real vampire might make her daughter use the words “mother” and “cool” in the same sentence for the first time ever.

(3) Repping Morning would make her famous, even put her in the history books. There weren't many PR people in the history books. She owed it to the profession.

This reminded Penny of one more item on the con side.

(4) If she didn't take the gig, one of her competitors would.

That sealed the deal. “Mr. Birnam—”

“Luther, please.”

“Mr. Birnam,” she insisted, “as long as it remains safe for my daughter and me to associate with you and your kind, you won't be disappointed.”

“Excellent.”

“But the second your boy pops his fangs and gets glassy-eyed over Portia or me,” she growled like a mother lion, “I promise, you're the one who will be disap
pointed.
Do you get my meaning?”

“Point taken,” Birnam replied with a chortle. “We're playing high-stakes poker. And you're holding the stakes.”

The phone went dead. She handed it back to Morning and scrutinized him. “Is the world ready for you? Are
you
ready for it?”

He looked past her, at the passing street and the bustle of New York. It felt good to be home. But this time he wasn't a nobody. His suck-it-up days were over. Now he was going to lay it down, vampire style. Okay, Leaguer style. “Yeah,” he said with a wide grin. “I'm ready.”

         

By the time Drake Sanders procured a new pair of pants, interviewed several of the eyewitnesses, and got back to the studio to edit the story, it was midafternoon. The only eyewitnesses he didn't interview were Penny, who wasn't returning his phone calls, the Mallozzi twins, who were nowhere to be found, and Sister Flora, who had retreated inside St. Giles. The group home's spokessister claimed Sister Flora was too busy praying for Morning's soul to talk to the press.

After returning to her apartment, Penny pulled all the curtains and posted Morning in the living room in front of the TV. She told him to call her when Drake broadcast his story and then retreated to her home office to brainstorm a new PR plan.

Morning popped a Blood Lite and drained it. The mist CD had wiped him out. He opened a second can and nursed it as he watched the afternoon soaps.

Shortly after four, Hound TV interrupted
The Bitches of Brunch
and aired Drake's story.

Morning called Penny out of her office. They watched the interview on the stoop, the taunting Mallozzis, the moment Morning seemed to disappear, him floating over the twins, then returning to human form and falling on them. The story cut to Drake standing on the sidewalk, looking solemn. “What this reporter and more than a dozen people just witnessed was the first vampire to come out of the casket.”

As Drake began interviewing a wild-eyed onlooker, Morning glanced up at Penny. “What happens next?”

“We wait for the spin.”

“The spin? What do you mean?”

“Did you literally ‘come out of a casket'?” she asked.

“No.”

“See, Drake's already got the story wrong. Now it's everyone else's turn to do the same. That's spin. After they've all gotten the story ass-backward, we'll set it straight.”

         

Penny was right. Over the next two hours, the story of a missing orphan turning into a misting vampire kept shape-shifting in the fog of news.

During the five o'clock news, the local stations each twisted the “vampire story” in their own way. WABC reported it was a hoax concocted by special effects wizards at Hound TV. WNBC claimed it was a publicity stunt by an unknown magician making a grab for fame and fortune. And WCBS, after discovering that the street where it took place had been sealed off by the police, turned it into a story about freedom of the press and America's slide toward authoritarian rule.

The truth behind the WCBS story was less dramatic. Sister Flora had called in her markers at the local police station, and had the media circus in front of St. Giles swept off the street.

         

By six o'clock, about the only person in the city who had not heard a version of the vampire story exited a viewing booth in the Paley Center For Media on Fifty-second Street. Having calculated that Morning would not emerge from his room until after sunset, Portia had gone to the museum after school to knock off some homework for her Twentieth-Century Television class.

As she stopped at the security desk in the lobby, she jumped when she heard Morning McCobb's name. She looked around. There was no one else in the lobby but the half-dozing guard and a bank of television sets. As she scribbled her name on the sign-out sheet, she went into worst-case-scenario mode. Either Morning was capable of some kind of voodoo ventriloquism, or she was having a Joan of Arc moment, or—and this was the worst possibility—the image of Morning that had danced through her mind all day was now
talking.

Hearing his name again, Portia spun toward the only source of sound in the lobby: the bank of TVs.

All of the screens showed the same grim-faced anchorman delivering the network news. “Once again, the barrier protecting hard news from the flood of infomercials packaged by PR firms and sold as news was breached today.” The show cut away to footage of Morning a few seconds before he turned into a mist. “We've all seen the footage by now. Morning McCobb, the alleged vampire, supposedly shape-shifting into a mist.”

Portia gawked as the anchorman droned on. “After conducting our own investigation, we learned that the collaborators behind this trumped-up story include Hound TV, a public relations firm known as Diamond Sky PR, and the Archdiocese of New York, which is about to launch a major fund-raising drive for the church's foster care program.”

Portia stopped listening. She felt like her brain had just been hit with a double-barreled stun gun.
Assume the worst?
This was surpassing all previous worsts. Not only was Morning's geeky goth act just the tip of the iceberg, but her mother, the freak magnet, had finally gone too far. In the past, she'd always let her creepy clients do the TV time, but now there she was, front and center, part of the whole charade, part of a
media scandal
! At least the Greek child slayer, Medea, had the decency to kill her children quickly, Portia lamented. But her mother, Medea Dredful, was going to kill her with a thousand cuts of humiliation!

On the bank of TVs, the anchorman continued. “But why quibble with the story?” he asked with a smirk. “Everyone's a winner. Hound TV gets a ratings boost, the PR firm gets a fee, and Morning McCobb gets his fifteen minutes of fame.” His voice dropped to funereal. “The only loser is the truth. And everyone who still believes in reporting it.”

Portia's swelling rage over her mother's infamy dashing all hopes of her getting into any film school, ever, careened in a new direction. The only way to recover from the curse of having a mother who was a whore in the temple of journalism was to do the Jesus thing: Clean out the temple! Her video essay wasn't going to be a little
60 Minutes
segment. It was going to be a kick-ass exposé of the media-industrial complex! A story of how two forces of blatant self-interest, Hound TV and her mother, had plucked Morning McCobb off the street and turned him into the newest fake of the month. It would be so Michael Moore!

As Portia hurried out of the museum, she flashed on a title.
Sucko.