Suck It Up and Die (8 page)

Morning was speechless. Not only had he taken a major plunge into humiliation, it was being recorded for the world to see.

Drake pushed his mike at Morning. “Your turn.”

Morning’s jaw clenched, trapping whatever might pop out.

“C’mon,” Drake prodded, “aren’t you gonna bite back?”

Rachel jutted her face in front of the cameraman’s lens,
blocking the shot of Morning. “This broadcast has been interrupted due to negative vibes.”

Drake retreated with a smirk. “No point to a lovers’ spat if one side’s a no-show.” He pulled his cameraman away. “C’mon, let’s go see if the goth girl with the T-shirt saying ‘Drinks on Me!’ has found any takers.” As Drake disappeared, Cody stopped shooting also.

Penny Dredful hustled toward them in one of the light green pantsuits she liked to wear to emphasize her flaming red hair. She immediately noticed the tense faces. “I’d ask who died, but that’s long odds in this group.” She swung into stride next to Rachel. “So who rained on the parade?”

Cody jumped in. “No one, Mrs. Dredful. It’s just that someone did die.”

As they all turned to him, Penny looked the most surprised. “Really?”

“Yeah,” he said sheepishly. “I just gave away who bites the dust in the new
Hunger Games
movie and they’re really pissed at me.”

Morning wished he had come up with such a good cover. He tried to touch Portia’s hand, but she yanked it away.

Penny shook a teasing finger at Cody. “Young man, you need to learn to keep your mouth shut.” Then she apologized for being late and explained why. Diamond Sky Productions had been hit with a lawsuit. The salvage companies that had been searching for the sunken treasure in the Hudson River and had come up empty were suing Diamond Sky and
The Shadow
for using a CDing vampire to find the silver bars. They claimed that CDing vampires should be outlawed because they were as unfair in the business world as bribes and kickbacks.

Rachel was taken aback. “When is everyone gonna get it? We’re here to help the world, not hurt it.”

Morning wanted to tell her that her naïve act was getting scarily believable, but he knew he’d probably just jam his foot in his mouth again. He had cured himself of the fang-popping thing,
dentis eruptus
, but he was still fighting
wordus eruptus
.

The Vampire Pride Parade was approaching Fourteenth Street when two throngs of people poured into the intersection. They filled it, creating a human barricade. The signs they waved bannered messages such as
VRA GO AWAY!
and
AMERICA FOR MORTALS ONLY—IMMORTALS OUT!

The one that bugged Morning the most declared,
UNDEAD = UN-AMERICAN
. You could argue the un-American part, but the undead part was totally untrue. Vampires were never dead: mortals got sick after being infected with the vampire virus, which turned them into vampires. But there was no arguing with people who believed that vampires—whether harmless Leaguers or not—were the source of all evil in America.

At the front of the human blockade was a sturdy woman with frumpy hair and heavy-rimmed glasses. She looked like the science teacher you didn’t want to get locked in a lab with. Becky-Dell Wallace was a U.S. congresswoman
from Wyoming, and the head of the Mortals Only Party, or MOP. Their acronym wasn’t accidental. Becky-Dell and her MOPers hoped to swab America’s deck and wash vampires into the sea. Some of them even wore hats with little mop rags and sponges hanging from the brims.

As the parade came to a halt, Becky-Dell led her MOPers in a ringing chant. “Vampires, vampires, sleazy-sleazy, we’re gonna mop ya, easy-easy!”

Rachel raised her bullhorn and led the Leaguer parade in a counterchant. “VRA! VRA! VRA!”

The gap separating the two groups swarmed with camera crews. Drake and Cody were among them.

Rachel waved her arms like a QB trying to quiet the crowd; the paraders hushed. Becky-Dell whipped a boat air horn from her purse and let loose a blast. Her MOPers took their cue and fell silent.

Rachel keyed her bullhorn and politely addressed Becky-Dell and the human logjam in the intersection. “Okay, made your point. Had your little free-speech workout, but the free-speech gym is open to everyone”—she held up a piece of paper—“and we have a permit to work out today. So, I’m asking you nicely, please step aside and let us free-speech on.”

For a moment, Becky-Dell had the blank expression of a TV reporter waiting for a delayed sound feed. She was still unscrambling Rachel’s metaphor. Then Becky-Dell reached into her purse, pulled up a pointed wooden stake, and jabbed it in the air. “Free-speech on this!”

In unison, the mass of MOPers behind her thrust their own wooden stakes skyward and echoed, “On this!”

Rachel giggled at the sight of the pulsing Maginot Line of stakes. She answered through her bullhorn. “Let me ask
you. When the automobile came along, did you destroy it to protect horses? When the computer came along, did you destroy it to protect typewriters? So now the Leaguer vampires come along and you wanna destroy us? Don’t you get it? We’re the new technology. We wanna help you! Heck, we’re not even ‘vampires’ anymore. We’re
Earth Angels
!”

The parade bellowed its approval, “Earth Angels!”

The MOPers jabbed stakes and screamed, “Vampires, vampires, sleazy-sleazy! We’re gonna stake ya, easy-easy!”

Morning grabbed Portia’s hand. “This is gonna get ugly. Let’s get outta here.”

“No way,” she countered as her eyes gleamed with excitement. “This is history!”

Rachel waved her parade permit at police officers on both sides of the street. “Men and women in blue, it’s time to do the Moses thing and part these troubled waters!”

The men and women in blue backed up, evaporating into the crowd of spectators mesmerized by the confrontation.

As each side pumped up the volume, Rachel walked back to Morning, Portia, and Penny. Cody kept filming. With a put-on expression, Rachel singsonged, “Guess they wanna play by the old rules.” She lifted her necklaces over her head and handed them to Penny. “I just hate fighting in a dress.”

“Rachel, don’t,” Morning implored. “It’ll make things worse.”

“Not what you’re thinkin’,” she said with a cheerful head wag. “I’ve been checkin’ out my past lives, and in one life, I wore Gandhi.”

Portia was the first to ask, “How can you
wear
Gandhi?”

“I was his mistress.” Rachel spun, facing the chanting MOPers. She looked left-right down the front of the parade and shouted a command. “Earth Angels, step up!”

Two dozen athletic-looking Leaguers stepped forward. Following Rachel’s lead, they all shut their eyes, leaped forward in unison, and imploded. Behind the falling curtain of Rachel’s tattered dress and the other Earth Angels’ outfits, a phalanx of white doves rose in flight.

As the paraders cheered, the MOPers recoiled, choking on their chant.

The doves wheeled into a flock and swooped across the red banner announcing
VAMPIRE PRIDE PARADE
. As they swarmed past, each dove plucked an olive branch from the banner. The flock wheeled high, then dived in tight formation toward the stunned throng of MOPers.

“Hold your ground!” Becky-Dell yelled as she lifted her stake against the bird attack.

MOPers jabbed stakes in the air and shrieked. It was unclear what they were more afraid of: their protest being turned into a bad hair day by a flock of birds, or being infected by the avian disease that vampire doves surely carried. Protestors swatted at the diving doves with stakes and signs; the birds slalomed through their flailing attempts and dropped their payload: a dozen olive branches.

Rachel’s olive branch stuck on Becky-Dell’s outstretched stake. Her peace offering was a bull’s-eye. Becky-Dell furiously shook it off as the doves wheeled again and prepared for another dive.

The MOPers, fearing what the birds might drop next, surged out of the intersection in a scattering panic.

Across town, in Times Square, a Jumbotron carried a picture of the doves clearing the intersection at Fourteenth and First.

A traffic cop stared up at the screen and nodded in approval. “Dat’s right, don’t block da box.”

Also riveted to the huge screen was Zoë Zotz, frozen on the pedals of her pedicab. In the cab behind her was the “badass vampire” she had picked up after school: a frail old man with a scraggly beard.

The old man crooked a finger at the Jumbotron. “Is that part of the tour?”

From her booth overlooking the intersection, Ally Alfamen gaped at the scene until she remembered “speechless” was not part of her job description. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she intoned, “
that’s
crowd control.”

The doves swooped toward the middle of the cleared intersection and transformed back into human forms. Rachel and her Earth Angels, sheathed in black Epidex, touched down with the grace of ninjas as the jubilant parade celebrated.

Rachel shouted past the only MOPer still in their path: Becky-Dell. “Earth Angels, ho!”

The parade surged forward, streaming around Becky-Dell like a rock in a river. But this rock, red-faced with rage, white-knuckled her stake.

Morning stopped next to her. “Ms. Wallace, are you all right?”

“Go away,” she hissed.

He hesitated as he watched Portia being swept along by the parade. He turned back to Becky-Dell. “I apologize for what they did. We’re not supposed to frighten people. Leaguers are law-abiding—”

“I know what you are,” she growled. “And I won’t stop till you’re all back in the ground, where the dead belong.”

“But, Ms. Wallace, we were never dead.”

“You will be when I’m done with you!”

Two MOPers rushed into the flow of paraders and rescued Becky-Dell from the vampire who had started it all.

Morning watched the thinning parade move past him. A ringtone sounded in his pocket. It was John Lennon singing “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” Morning pulled out his cell and answered it. “Hey.”

“Are you coming or not?” Portia asked.

“I was hoping you’d circle back. Right now, all I want is to give you your Out Day card and a present.”

“We can do it tonight,” she said. “
Right now
, Cody and I gotta cover whatever else happens.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry for what I said about your mom.”

“It’s okay, Morn. I know you didn’t mean it.”

His chest collapsed with a sigh of relief. “You know I love you.”

“I know. Back atcha. Gotta go.”

He hung up. The parade had been a disaster, but he was done with it and Portia still loved him.… Okay, it was “back atcha” love, which was better than nothing.

A pedicab raced toward him. Zoë glided to a stop. “I can’t believe I missed the fireworks!”

“You’ll be able to catch ’em on the news tonight. What happened to your badass vampire?”

“Wasn’t badass, wasn’t a vampire, so I gave him a refund and promised him a rain check.”

Morning looked toward the retreating parade. “You better get going if you wanna catch it. Who knows what fireworks Rachel will set off next.”