Suck It Up and Die (38 page)

Morning, Rachel, Dolly, and several hundred Leaguers, including Sister Flora, had taken refuge in the old administration building as the ruthless stunning and staking continued inside the mountain. The only reason the building had not been laid siege to was because of a spur-of-the-moment tactic Rachel had initiated, and the bravery displayed by the ring of vampires protecting the building’s perimeter. The outermost ring of Leaguers were CDing into vicious and deadly animals, then fighting tooth and claw with the commandos until the beasts were stunned and staked. Then the next ring of Leaguers CDed and carried on the fight. This beastly defense had stalled the siege enough for Rachel and Morning to consider their shrinking options. They huddled over Dolly, who had been laid on a table after being wounded by two warfarin bullets. Sister Flora held her hand.

Despite her weakness, Dolly spoke up. “There’s another
way out … the ventilation tunnel that runs underground. The good news: it’ll get you out of here undetected.”

“How so?” Rachel asked.

“It runs for five miles before it resurfaces.”

“What’s the bad news?” Morning asked.

“We didn’t build it,” Dolly replied, and grabbed another breath. “It’s filled with nuclear waste. It won’t hurt us, but if the Lifers find that rabbit hole and torch it or blow it up, it’ll release a cloud of death.”

Rachel waved her hands in despair. “And you know who they’ll blame for that: us!”

Morning stared at Dolly. “So we need to distract ’em while those who can go down the rabbit hole.”

She nodded weakly. “It would help.”

Morning jumped on a chair and spoke to the jammed room of Leaguers. “I need a flock of volunteers, and I mean a flock. We’ll create a diversion by flying into the fight, and if we can make it out one of the holes in the mountain, we’ll draw as many of ’em as we can to the Mother Forest. If we make it, we’ll have sanctuary there. In the meantime, whoever sneaks out the tunnel can escape to Canada or Mexico.”

As the sound of gunfire and roaring animals drew closer, a dozen Leaguers stepped forward.

Cody’s camera still recorded as a beam of light, bouncing through the brush, raced toward him. Portia emerged behind the light, running flat out. She wasn’t hurdling the sage and greasewood bushes as much as crashing through them. It seemed her fear of rattlesnakes had been overtaken by something else. The last bush proved too much—she sprawled flat in front of Cody.

After making sure nothing was chasing her, Cody looked down. “Nice impression of Cary Grant in
North by Northwest
. What the hell’s going on?”

Portia jumped up. “The mountain’s sitting next to an underground nuclear waste site! If they blow up the mountain it could kill millions!”

“Of sheep and snakes, yeah.”

“No, you moron, of people! It’s called a nuclear
cloud
, and clouds
travel
!”

Cody tried another tack before hitting his own panic button. “Becky-Dell’s gotta know it’s down there, right?”

“Even if she did,” Portia exclaimed, trying to catch her breath, “she’d make America Lifer-free if that’s what it took to make it
Leaguer-free
!” She grabbed the camera from him, hit the off button, and started for the Jeep.

Cody followed. “Okay, we’re done shooting.”

Inside the mountain, a flock of birds sprang from the roof of the administration building. The pigeon in the lead, Morning, snapped a quick look back and noticed how much the building resembled the Alamo. He hoped the outcome for those inside wasn’t the same.

The flock didn’t get fifty yards before the commandos on the ground saw them and opened fire. Luckily, there wasn’t a decent bird shooter in the bunch. A soldier shouted into his shoulder comm device. “Birds outta hole number one!”

Morning heard him but kept beating it for the first hole blown in the mountain. At the last second, he veered hard right and raced toward another hole. His fellow fliers stayed right on his tail.

Outside, the half-dozen gunships that had taken up positions outside hole number one to turn the flock into a ruptured pillow fight veered hard to catch the flock winging it for another hole. But tons of flying steel is no match for hollow-boned birds with millions of years of flight time in their DNA. The flock soared out of the hole and beat wing for the Mother Forest.

Becky-Dell screamed into her headset, “I want that pigeon for breakfast!”

As DeThanatos tracked the flock’s escape, he felt the flutter that often rustled inside his ribs like a caged raptor. His inner falcon had a sudden craving for pigeon.

On the ground, Portia was sitting in the Jeep’s passenger seat as her Mac Pro fired up. She cabled the camera to it and began sending the footage they’d shot to her iDisk.

Cody hung on the open door. “What are you doing?”

“Our only hope is that the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security, or
someone
has been hacking my computer, sees what’s going on out here, and tells the president.”

Cody scoffed. “You don’t think he ordered this?”

“No—c’mon, c’mon”—she exhorted her computer—“I don’t think the president got to be president by not getting the difference between ‘deportation’ and ‘genocide.’ ”

A growing sound pulled Cody to the half-dozen gunships racing toward them. “Down!” he screamed as he dived in the dirt and landed on the lit flashlight.

Portia slammed the Mac Pro screen down on her finger, threw her torso over the computer, and prayed she wasn’t
going to be blown to heaven before the footage uploaded to her iDisk. A second later, she heard the feathery pant of flapping birds. She glanced up as a flock, led by a pigeon, shot over the Jeep. Moments later, the gunships screamed overhead, followed by a fifty-yard dust devil that almost lifted the Jeep and swept Cody under it.

In the command chopper, DeThanatos blinked like the falcon taking shape in his mind. “Call off your warbirds and save them for the mountain,” he told Becky-Dell. “I’ll deal with McCobb.”

She slid him a look. “How do you know it’s him?”

“He’s my blood child. You can feel when they’re being naughty.”

“How do you know where he’s going?”

“You finish here, I’ll finish Morning” was all he said before he snapped into a falcon and banked out the chopper’s side door. The raptor glided toward the nearest Chinook hovering above its load: two bambi buckets brimming with industrial-grade lighter fluid.

In the Chinook’s cockpit, the startled pilot turned as the falcon landed on the back of the copilot’s empty seat. The bird shape-shifted into an exact replica of the pilot with one exception: the new one lacked a uniform.

“Whoa!” the pilot gasped. It wasn’t clear if he was more shocked by seeing his exact double, or if this was his first time flying with a naked copilot.

DeThanatos—that is, his incarnation of the pilot—flicked the uniformed pilot into a thrall. “Nothing to fear. Just borrowing your brain for a flying lesson.” He grabbed the controls and banked the big Chinook in the direction of the pigeon that had flown the coop.

The Chinook and its dangling buckets plowed through the air over the still-darkened Jeep. Portia looked up and watched it pass. She saw the squadron of gunships circle back toward the mountain. The Chinook kept going, tracking the flock of birds into the darkness.

She lifted her Mac Pro screen. “It’s sent.” Cody popped up next to her. She handed him the computer and the camera and scooted into the driver’s seat. “Keep shooting.”

She keyed the ignition as he protested. “Where are you going?”

“Back to where all this started.”

In the Dredful guest room, Zoë lay in bed, still as death. Her eyelids twitched, then sprang open. She sat bolt upright, as if a tendril of scent had escaped one of the bottles on the bedside table and grabbed her like a reined horse. Her head snapped to the blood products. She snatched the nearest bottle, ripped off the top, and chugged it like an overheated engine drinking a quart of oil. She was halfway through another bottle of red stuff before her thirst was slaked enough for her gray matter to register what waking up in a strange bed with an overpowering craving for blood meant. She shot a bony fist in the air. “Yes!”

As the blood ballooned through her immortality-charged innards, her brain popped with questions:
Where is everybody? Isn’t there supposed to be a vampire greeting committee? Or at least an envelope with a letter telling me I’ve been accepted to Leaguer Academy?

She threw off her covers, swung out of bed, and took
her new set of vampire legs for a test-drive. They felt like they could race a pedicab up a pyramid. Hitting the hallway, she enjoyed three first-evers. She could feel the dust on the floor compress between her bare feet and the wood. She heard tiny creaks and groans coming from the boards no mortal could ever hear. She had the sensual radar of a cat; and she had CDing into one to look forward to!

She poked her head into Penny’s bedroom. Penny was on the bed, clothed, sleeping. The cell phone on her stomach rose up and down like a boat on a swelling sea of blouse.

Zoë didn’t wake her. She wanted to keep riding the flood of sensations that came with being a creature of the night. Along with her catlike senses, she was also imbued with feline curiosity. She wanted an answer:
Okay, after Morning finally grew a set and made this girl’s dream come true, why did I end up at Portia’s house?

Zoë padded into Portia’s room and found it empty. With no best friend to answer her thousand questions, she sat down at the desk and woke up the portal that just might provide some answers: Portia’s iMac.

First she read the date on the dock. She had been out of it for three days, which was in line with what she had pried out of Morning about the time frame for a mortal-to-vampire transition. She checked Portia’s email and her Facebook page, but there was nothing of significance. Not surprising, since Portia wasn’t big into email, and she’d often said that if she could write computer code she’d write an app called deFacebook, which allowed you to vaporize Facebook accounts that were totally lame.

Zoë moved to the next source that might yield answers. She clicked on the iDisk icon, clicked on Date Modified,
and stared at the list of docs and downloads, starting with the most recent. There was a file with no name, from just a few minutes before, and it was huge. She clicked it open.

The screen filled with dark, bumpy footage of some kind of battle. Zoë heard a voice that sounded like Cody’s, and then heard Portia say, “Hey, Mom, can’t say we didn’t try.” The shot of the battle went shaky, then resettled as it seemed to move outside of a vehicle.

Zoë turned and called loudly, “Mrs. D.”

In the Jeep, Portia sped through the night and checked her cell phone for reception. She finally got one bar. She slowed enough to dial without flying off the road.

The call went through. Prowler answered. “Big Red’s an hour out from putting down and comin’ round the mountain.”

Portia spoke fast before she lost the connection. “Big Red’s gonna be squashed like a ladybug if it comes round the mountain. Your fire’s at the Mother Forest. I repeat, redirect to the Mother Forest!”