Suck It Up and Die (13 page)

“Then how did you get it?”

“I was born with it. And once a year, I peel like a birch tree.”

“Don’t that beat all,” she said, getting back to her exfoliating. “I just hope your folks didn’t name you Woody.”

“No, that’s my twin brother’s name,” the vampire deadpanned. “My name is Forest.”

Trixie reared back and jammed her hands on her hips. “You’re pullin’ my leg!”

The vampire’s response popped out of his mouth before he could stop it. “And you’re pullin’ my skin.” As Trixie laughed he silently cursed himself. It was the second time in twenty-four hours his mouth had betrayed him with asinine jokes. To change the subject he nodded at the TV. “Does so much always happen in one day around here?”

“Oh, yeah.” Trixie nodded. “A day in New York is like six months anywhere else. Did you just get here?”

“I came in on the red-eye last night,” the vampire replied. “But I got to sleep all day.”

“Well, once you get over your poison birch, you’re gonna havta do better than that.”

Although the vampire had been visiting Manhattan ever since 1614, when it was a fur-trading post called New Amsterdam, he went with her lead. “What do you mean?”

Trixie leaned back and examined her work. “If you wanna take New York by storm, you gotta go day and night, twenty-four-seven.” Her customer’s skin was now smooth but still showed a hint of streaking. She squirted a dollop of antiaging cream in her palm.

As Trixie applied the cream to his face, the vampire closed his eyes and pondered her advice. In his long past, working nights had provided more than enough time to exercise his brand of death and devastation. But now, given the heap of revenge, terror, and destruction he had planned for certain mortals and immortals, he wondered if it was
time to borrow a page from the Leaguer manual and get over his restricting and irrational fear of sunlight.
Yes
, he told himself,
when in Rome, do as the Romans
.

“All right,” Trixie said. “Anything else I can do fer ya? Manicure? Pedicure?” She fluffed his long, curly locks. “Give your hair a little trim and straighten?”

Whatever pleasure lingered from the face massage he had just received evaporated with the reminder that his once straight hair had mysteriously gone curly. “All I need are some directions.”

“Where to?” she obliged.

“Leaguer Academy Two.”

She stepped back. “Are you tellin’ me I just exfoliated a vampire?”

He glanced down at the skin shavings on his spa robe. “Do vampires have problems like this?”

Trixie laughed with relief. “Of course not.”

Leaguer Academy II sat on high bluffs rising above the Hudson. The manicured grounds rolled down to the river, sparkling in the light of a full moon.

Inside the academy, an instructor was sleeping soundly in her quarters, when she woke with a gasp. A darting scan of the shadows revealed nothing, but she sensed someone. “Who’s there?” she asked breathlessly.

A calm voice came from darkness. “I’m not here to hurt you. My name is Varkos.” The figure stepped into the moonlight piercing the window. His copper skin looked black in the dim light. “I’m in need of your expertise.”

The Leaguer sat up, her forehead contracted with suspicion. “What kind of expertise?”

“I understand you teach vampires how to overcome—how do you Leaguers call it?—solar phobia.”

“That’s right.”

“I need a crash course.”

The Leaguer swung out of bed. “Look, Varkos—if that’s really your name—you need to do like every Loner who comes in from the dark. You need to enroll in the academy and take all the training that transitions Loners to Leaguers.”

He gestured regretfully. “I don’t have time for that.”

“You’re a vampire, you have oodles of time.”

Perhaps it was his impatience, or his ears being assaulted by “oodles”—ears that had heard the premiere of
Hamlet
at the Globe—whatever; Varkos had heard enough. He flipped up a hand and put the instructor in a thrall. He had asked nicely, now it was time for his tutor to tute.

Several hours later, Varkos stood on a bluff overlooking the river. His teacher, Beth, stood behind him with a glazed expression. Sometimes teachers just go through the motions of instruction, like they’re phoning it in. Beth, still in a deep thrall, had done just that as she had run Varkos through the gauntlet of overcoming solar phobia.

The moment of truth in her crash course was close at hand: the moment the sun peeked over the ridge on the east side of the river. Varkos spread his arms and prepared for his fate: to dance like a worm on a hot griddle, or to become what Leaguers called a day-timer.

For a split second, Varkos tasted the bile of fear.
What if
, his mind fretted,
after more than a thousand years of darkness, the light is too much? What if the demon of my
revenge dies in the cradle?
“No matter,” he whispered across the river to the blooming sunrise. “I have been destroyed before and rose from the ground anew. Pierce me with light. I am indestructible.”

The sun peeked over the ridge; the first ray caught his coppery face. There was no bubbling of flesh, no burst of incineration. His eyes simply squinted against the unaccustomed brightness. Varkos had overcome the vampire’s age-old fear of sunlight the same way a fire walker overcomes the pain of fire: mind over matter.

He answered the sun with a beaming smile. “I’ll be damned.” After his eyes adjusted and he took in an illuminated world he had not seen for eons, he turned and faced Beth. He flicked a hand at her.

She jolted out of her thrall. She was so disoriented she was only capable of one word at a time. “What?”

He thrust an arm toward the river. “Sunrise!” he announced with a boyish grin. “My first in ages.”

She blinked at the bluff they were standing on. “How?”

“Night class. You were brilliant.”

She gaped at the man silhouetted by the sun. “Who?”

He lifted his arms slowly. “Got an updraft to catch. Thanks for showing me the light.”

He suddenly imploded into a peregrine falcon and lifted on the elevator of air rising from the sunlit bluffs.

At the fire academy, two trucks—a ladder and a pumper—sirened along the row of cinder-block buildings designed to duplicate the fires New York firefighters faced. The trucks lurched to a halt in front of a four-floor building known as a “taxpayer” because it had a business on the ground floor and apartments above it. Smoke trailed from two top floors. Geared up and ready to fight fire, Morning and his crew leaped from the trucks.

As the crew grabbed their irons, water cans, and various equipment, a bone-chilling cry for help burst from the building’s top floor.

“Whoa, that sounded real!” Armando shouted.

Morning wondered if everyone else on the crew was just as jacked with adrenaline as he was. Another terrifying cry for help banged the probies’ eyes wider.

Captain Clancy stepped out of an operations command truck. “Those are real flames and real screams,” he
informed them. “To get you water lilies ready for the real deal, we’re throwin’ all the reality we can at you.”

Another shriek ripped the air.

“So that’s
real
?” Armando asked.

“Absolutely, as real as recordings get.” Another scream sounded, making Clancy grin. “I love it when they intro a new mix; it even gives
me
the chills.” He got back to business. “Okay, tanker piglets, ready to do a victim search and knock down some fire?”

“Yes, sir!” the probies chorused.

Clancy turned to Morning’s unit: a half-dozen probies near the ladder truck. “Team A, your job’s simple as VES: vent, enter, search.” He turned to the group by the pumper. “Team B, you’re on fire repression. It’s time to see what you hose jockeys are made of.”

“Yes, sir!” the probies shouted.

Clancy pointed at Morning. “McCobb, take the point on rescue, call it as it goes, and don’t screw up. I got cameras all over the building trackin’ every move. After mop-up, we look at game films.” Another scream ripped the air. “Now go eat smoke and bring home the bacon!”

Morning assigned two probies to breach the roll-down gate locking up the street-level entrance and two more to search the ground floor. He led the others through the tenant entrance, and they used a “bunny tool” with a hydraulic piston to kick the door open. As he led the team up the stairs toward the screams, he ordered two more probies to reconnoiter the second-floor apartments. He did the same on the third floor as he, Armando, and Sully kept humping up the stairs to the fourth floor.

The top floor was filled with smoke and the flash of flames. They lowered face pieces, connected their SCBA
air-tank hoses, and pierced the increasing heat and smoke as Morning sent Armando and Sully to search the front apartments for victims.

Crawling through the smoke toward the rear of the building, Morning could see the grilles and pipes discharging smoke and fire. The emergency was staged, but the smoke and flames were plenty real. Another scream came from the end of the hallway and to his right. He dodged a jet of fire, and the sprays of water now coming through the windows and a hole newly opened in the roof.

Down in the command truck, a technician was trying to figure out why all of the cameras were down and the dozen video screens were black.

“How can I bust my probies’ butts,” Clancy yelled at the tech, “if I can’t see ’em screwin’ up?” The tech protested that everything had been working fine the day before, but he got shouted down by Clancy. “Fix it!”

As Morning heard Armando and Sully banging open doors with their Halligans, he made it to the last apartment. Another scream came from inside. He wondered what horror movie the fire academy had gotten the screams from and figured Cody would probably know the answer.

He stood up in the swirling smoke and pulled back his Halligan to ram it into the doorjamb. Then he remembered one of the first rules of firefighting: try before you pry. He turned the knob and pushed the door open against the cushion of heat. He lowered his head into the heat blast, hit the floor, and crawled into what looked and felt like a fiery, smoking oven. That or the mouth of the red dragon.

Crawling and feeling his way around the perimeter, he hit a pile of clothes. His ax got tangled in it and he fell, almost impaling his face piece with the blade.
Great
, he
thought,
when everyone sees that, they’re gonna have a laugh over the probie who could even screw up a crawl
.

Through the billowing smoke, the shape of a bed appeared as a strangled scream choked to coughing gasps. Morning was startled by the lengths the academy went to re-create the sounds of a smoke-inhalation victim before he or she passed out. He could just make out the silhouette of the dummy on the bed. But it was seated with its back against the bed frame.
Something’s not right
, he thought.
Why isn’t the mannequin on the floor, where any victim would be as they tried to stay below the heat and smoke?

The dummy’s body slumped forward and the realization hit Morning like backdraft. It was no dummy. It was a young woman with long dark hair. It was
Portia
.

In an instant, the fiery oven of the room became the red dragon. And he was in the grip of the crimson terror. He yelled into his comm device for Armando and Sully, then sucked in a deep breath. He yanked off his face piece and jerked it onto Portia’s head. Then he saw why she wasn’t on the floor. She was duct-taped to the metal bed frame. He ripped at the tape. Her head lolled into him as she groaned back to consciousness.

He yanked her away from the frame and they rolled to the floor. For a second he saw her terrified eyes through the face piece. He pulled her onto his back and turtle-crawled toward the door.

As soon as they reached the hall, now clearing of smoke and fire, he gulped a lungful of air and rolled Portia off his back. She started to get up, but he pushed her back down, shouting, “On your belly!”

Smoldering lines zebraed the back of her jacket where the metal frame had become so hot it had started to melt
and burn the fleece. Morning threw off his gloves, grabbed the jacket’s back, and ripped away the smoldering panel.

Armando and Sully ran up. “Holy shit!” Armando hit his comm device and barked into it. “Status change: it’s no dummy, it’s a live one! Abort the exercise!”

Morning and Sully helped Portia down the stairs and out of the building. Her lungs were too busy trying to purge themselves of smoke for her to answer Morning’s frantic questions. When they hit the stoop, the technician ran past them into the tenement, now free of fire but still trailing smoke. Two EMTs rushed up to Portia. Between coughs she waved them off and sat on the steps. “Just give me some air.”

Clancy pushed the EMTs aside and stood over Portia. “What the hell were you doing in my building?”

Morning answered. “She wasn’t there by choice. She was tied up.”

“Tied up?”

Portia coughed, and rasped, “I’m okay.”

Clancy thrust out an arm. “Well, I’m not! I need some answers. You could’ve died in there. Who did this?”