Free Suck It Up and Die by Brian Meehl Page A

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 thewaterin’ 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.”

18

Leeches at Work
    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 youngmusician 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