Suck It Up and Die Read online

  ALSO BY BRIAN MEEHL

  Out of Patience

  Suck It Up

  You Don’t Know About Me

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Brian Meehl

  Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Brian Sheridan

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Meehl, Brian.

  Suck it up and die / Brian Meehl. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: Suck it up.

  Summary: On the first anniversary of the historic day in which the vampires of America began going mainstream, the tension between vampire hero Morning’s wish for a simple life out of the spotlight and his mortal girlfriend Portia’s obsession with documenting history escalates to the breaking point when a sinister vampire rises from the grave with a powerful thirst for revenge.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89716-0

  [1. Vampires—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M512817Sv 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011024132

  Random House Children’s Books

  supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Gerri and Richard

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - Late Date

  Chapter 2 - Leech Treats

  Chapter 3 - Neuterhood

  Chapter 4 - Fire Academy

  Chapter 5 - Captain Clancy

  Chapter 6 - Zoë Zotz

  Chapter 7 - Rachel Capilarus

  Chapter 8 - The Shadow

  Chapter 9 - Sister Flora

  Chapter 10 - Dung Beetles

  Chapter 11 - The Parade

  Chapter 12 - Wordus Eruptus

  Chapter 13 - Earth Angels

  Chapter 14 - Paraded Out

  Chapter 15 - Williamsburg Bridge

  Chapter 16 - Mother Forest

  Chapter 17 - Shadow Games

  Chapter 18 - Leeches at Work

  Chapter 19 - Stake Out

  Chapter 20 - Button Down!

  Chapter 21 - Blood Feud

  Chapter 22 - Generation BC

  Chapter 23 - When in Rome

  Chapter 24 - Live Fire

  Chapter 25 - Involuntary Muscle Contraction

  Chapter 26 - Varkos

  Chapter 27 - The Protection Paradox

  Chapter 28 - Meeting Up

  Chapter 29 - Discovery

  Chapter 30 - Vampower.com

  Chapter 31 - Sunset Walk

  Chapter 32 - Strange Bedfellows

  Chapter 33 - Picking Up the Pieces

  Chapter 34 - Ramping It Up

  Chapter 35 - Bad Day Worse

  Chapter 36 - Take Back the Bite

  Chapter 37 - Restless Night

  Chapter 38 - Busted

  Chapter 39 - Crusader

  Chapter 40 - Invitations

  Chapter 41 - Pneumabrotus

  Chapter 42 - Hair Loss

  Chapter 43 - Sire-Spawn Chat

  Chapter 44 - The High Line

  Chapter 45 - The Tasting Room

  Chapter 46 - Bitus Interruptus

  Chapter 47 - Pixel Pandemic

  Chapter 48 - Letting Go

  Chapter 49 - The Secret of Life

  Chapter 50 - Assemblage Required

  Chapter 51 - Repercussions

  Chapter 52 - Pneumabrotus Patrol

  Chapter 53 - Petit and Grand Rendezvous

  Chapter 54 - Millennials Rule

  Chapter 55 - Hunger Pangs

  Chapter 56 - Vampire Up

  Chapter 57 - Things That Go Chomp in the Night

  Chapter 58 - Claiming the Body

  Chapter 59 - Bridge Talk

  Chapter 60 - After Morning

  Chapter 61 - Island Getaway

  Chapter 62 - Warfarin

  Chapter 63 - Morning Message

  Chapter 64 - Rallying the Troops

  Chapter 65 - Leaguer Mountain

  Chapter 66 - Stun, Stake, ’N’ Bake

  Chapter 67 - A Diversion

  Chapter 68 - Awakening

  Chapter 69 - Raising the Dead

  Chapter 70 - Blowout

  Chapter 71 - Rematch

  Chapter 72 - Last Shape-Shift

  Chapter 73 - Fallout

  Chapter 74 - More Fallout

  Chapter 75 - Your Pumpkin Is Waiting

  Chapter 76 - The End Is Upon Us Ball

  Chapter 77 - Last Dance

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Suck It Up

  1

  Late Date

  Morning McCobb sat at an outside table with a latte to go and a ham and cheese croissant emitting curlicues of steam. Neither was for him. He was drinking his beverage du jour, every jour, 365 jours a year: Blood Lite. The coffee and mortal mouthful were for the love of his immortal life, Portia Dredful. While every sinew of his being tingled with the knowledge that Portia was his eternal beloved, he had never uttered the charged words. For good reasons.

  One, their “eternal” only had a year on the meter. When it came to the big ride in Cupid’s Pedicab of Everlasting Love, that wasn’t even around the block.

  Two, as a member of the International Vampire League, he was forbidden to turn a mortal into a vampire, even if it meant watching helplessly as the girl of his dreams rode the roller coaster of life through the loop-de-loops of youth, the twists and turns of middle age, into the plunge of cronedom, and finally bump to a rest in her grave.

  This inescapable truth brought Morning to the third reason he had never whispered “Be my eternal beloved” in Portia’s ear. It was part of the deal they had made a year earlier on the Williamsburg Bridge. Loving each other forever and a day was a done deal, but skipping through life together as boyfriend-girlfriend was a three-legged race. If Morning was fixed at sixteen and Portia wasn’t, sooner or later their perfect stride would tumble into a bad game of Twister.

  He didn’t know when their romantic run would pretzel into a pileup, but sitting in Caffe Reggio, he was beginning to wonder if this glorious fall morning, October 4, would finally bring the dawn of heartbreak. He had a reason for his gnawing dread. Portia was late: seven minutes late. She was never late. “If you’re on time, you’re late,” she always said. For Portia, early was on time.

  He took another sip of Blood Lite. The metallic tang of the soy-blood substitute was cold comfort. His mind flooded with a vision of Portia waking that morning and declaring, “What am I doing? I just rocketed past my eighteenth birthday, I’ve got the mission of my life ahead of me, and I’m dating a sixteen-year-old!”

  Morning’s head spasmed, shaking away the ghastly thought. He checked his cell phone. She was eight minutes late!

  He fixed his gaze on the corner of MacDougal and West Third and tried to will Portia around the pizza place. A fat lady appeared, walking two shih tzus that looked like self-propelled bedroom slippers. Morning wished he were one of the vintage vampires who gained extra powers af
ter treading the earth for a century-plus. If he were a Centurion, he could visualize Portia at home, put her in a virtual thrall, and make her zombie-dash to the café. Unfortunately, Morning had been a vampire for less than two years and couldn’t thrall a shih tzu to sit.

  He couldn’t thrall, but he could call. He grabbed his phone and hit the number-one speed dial.

  Portia answered. “Hey, Morn.”

  “Where are you?” he asked, trying to squash the worry in his voice.

  “Walking to the subway. Where are you?”

  “At our place. Where else—”

  “Ohmigod! Are we meeting today?”

  He threw up a hand even though his video app wasn’t on. “It’s Thursday; we always meet today. Why would this Thursday be any different?”

  “I thought we were skipping breakfast ’cause we’re seeing each other this afternoon at the parade.”

  He frowned at the reminder of the first Vampire Pride Parade. It was going to celebrate precisely one year since American vampires had flung off their cloaks of secrecy and outed themselves as members of the International Vampire League. Unfortunately, since Morning had been the first nonthreatening vampire to be test-marketed on the mortal world of Lifers, he was expected to be in the parade. Worse, Luther Birnam, president of the IVL and mastermind of the campaign to rebrand vampires as the last minority with special needs, insisted that Morning march at the front of the parade. Morning wanted his fading fame as the IVL’s first poster boy to be rolled up and tossed. After all, there were Leaguer vampires now more famous than him.

  He dropped an elbow on the table too hard and almost toppled Portia’s unclaimed coffee. “C’mon, Portia, seeing you at the parade isn’t seeing you for breakfast.” Hearing needy creep into his voice, he reversed field. “I mean, the only parade I wanna see are the flickers and quirks that march across your face when we talk.”

  “Ahhh,” Portia cooed, “you’re so sweet I wanna bite you.”

  Morning smiled. “But then I’d have to bite you back.”

  She laughed. “We already tried that and you guzzled all of me but the fumes. No more vein-busting for you, buster; this neck is hickeys only.”

  “I’m good with that,” he said playfully. “Let’s see if my phone has a hickey app.” He gave his phone a perfunctory look. “Oops. The hickey app hasn’t been invented yet. So, do you want your morning nibble over breakfast or at the front of the parade?”

  She laughed at his bad joke and gave in. “All right, I’ll be there. But it’ll have to be quick.”

  After hanging up, Morning shooed a fly away from Portia’s cooling croissant. He opened a paper napkin and covered it. Big mistake.

  The sight of the napkin over the croissant resurrected the memory of the night he had almost pulled a sheet over Portia. That terrifying night had been twelve months earlier, but sometimes it felt like the night before. When the horror replayed in his head, he clung to Luther Birnam’s advice like a life ring. The night he had plunged his fangs into Portia he had dived into the “forbidden well of bloodlust,” and it was not a memory to be repressed, it was to be embraced. The horrific memory was the guardrail around the forbidden well, and he was to hold on to it so he wouldn’t fall in again. It was the warning Birnam drilled into all Leaguer vampires: “You can take the vampire out of the darkness, but you can’t take the darkness out of the vampire.”

  2

  Leech Treats

  Morning grabbed a breath and exhaled. The past couldn’t be undone, but knowing Portia was coming banished his haunting thoughts. In a few minutes, she would appear around the corner like a second sunrise.

  He checked out the street scene. People were in the full-tilt hustle of getting to work. Some carried coffees procured from the West Village’s ubiquitous baristas. Others waited in line at the Nosh Cart for their a.m. brew and chew. On the opposite corner was a food cart that wouldn’t have been there a year before. It was called Leech Treats and served leeches engorged on animal blood. While grocery stores now stocked animal and synthetic blood drinks for Leaguer vampires, Leech Treats was one of the trendier ways for a vampire to get his daily dose of red stuff.

  Since Leaguer vampires had removed humans from the drink pyramid, the term “bloodsucking fiend” was no longer politically correct, and the past year had seen an evolution of what to call Leaguers’ dietary habits. “Veinitarian” had had a brief reign but was shot down by vegan vampires, like Morning, who didn’t drink humanely milked animal blood. Other than Blood Lite, vegan vamps quaffed vegetable-protein blends like Gourd Gorge, V-Sate, and Suckilicious. After “veinitarian” didn’t stick, the term that did came from the prefix for blood: “sang.” A “sanguivore” is a creature who survives by consuming only blood.

  Whenever Morning observed one of the street carts that catered to sanguivores, he liked to play a guessing game. Was the customer buying a carton of Leech Treats really a Leaguer vampire? Or were they one of the vampire wannabes doing everything in their power to pass as a vamp?

  A gothy-looking girl with magenta hair stepped up to the cart. Morning noticed she had already conquered the first error goths make when trying to pass as vampires: they can’t give up their multiple piercings and jewelry array. Anyone who knows vampire basics knows they don’t pierce. What would be the point? The piercing would heal itself in a minute. Even if they made sure the piercing healed around a piece of jewelry, the vampire’s super-concentrated biochemistry would soon dissolve the metallic invader like a nail in acid.

  Morning watched the young woman swap some bills for a small carton of Leech Treats. She passed test number two: she didn’t squirm or freak from the hand massage you get from a carton of fat, happy leeches. Her expression remained fixed with the right mix of boredom and gloom, she had learned from watching The Vampire Diaries, and by perfecting the look of gaunt vampires obese with melancholy.

  As goth girl ambled away Morning concluded she was really a vampire and not a wannabe trying to fool her fellow mortals or hook up with a Leaguer at the leech cart. Then he saw something fall off the front of her leather jacket. Even with his enhanced vision, the thing was too small to identify. He didn’t have to guess. A pigeon flapped over and sucked up what had fallen: a bread crumb. The girl had already had breakfast, a solid breakfast; she was a wannabe after all.

  Morning didn’t get Lifers like her, or any goth who wanted to sacrifice their mortality to become a vampire. Sure, mortality was life-shortening, but the alternative was being frozen at the same age forever. Besides vampire wannabes, Morning had heard about “wanna-bleeds”: Lifers who hooked up with backsliding Leaguers who popped fangs once in a blue moon and tapped the human keg for a pint. But the Lifers and Leaguers who supposedly practiced this “consensual bloodlust” had to do it in secret because it broke the Leaguers’ second commandment: “You shall not drink anything but properly milked animal blood or artificial blood substitutes.”

  Whether the tales of consensual bloodlust were fact or urban legend didn’t matter to some Lifer extremists. They were convinced that Luther Birnam and his Leaguer army were the Trojan horse at America’s gate. They trusted Leaguers like they trusted a pack of rabid coyotes. They claimed it was only a matter of time before Leaguers turned all the wannabes into vampires, spawned legions of bloodsucking fiends, and laid siege to the mortal population until red-blooded Americans had been corralled into feedlots for fattening and bleeding by “the vampire empire.”

  It was these anti-vampire extremists who motivated Morning to wear a baseball cap and sunglasses or fake glasses in public. He didn’t want to be recognized and martyred by some hate-mongering zealot armed with a stake, screaming, “Die, mothersucker!”

  Morning took another drink of Blood Lite and glanced up the street. The second sunrise came around the corner.

  Portia.

  VAMPIRE PRIDE DAY

  We greet the first anniversary of American Out Day with great joy. A year ago, on October 4, the world witnessed the first ma
ss outing of vampires. On this historic day, it is only fitting that we recount our triumphs and setbacks in our ongoing march from darkness to the full light of freedom.

  TRIUMPH #1: The first outing of a Leaguer vampire, Morning McCobb, led to the announcement of Worldwide Out Day.

  SETBACK #1: As we know, this announcement triggered some international riots, mostly in countries possessing dark and long histories with vampires. The riots in Transylvania were the worst. Fortunately, the finer points of vampire slaying have fallen through the cracks of human history, and those who went on staking rampages gave up after their targets kept bouncing back to life. In the aftermath of these riots, I went to the UN and negotiated an interim step: American Out Day. Given America’s tradition of welcoming all races, creeds, and colors, it followed that the United States should be the first to embrace a people of different mortality and dietary habits. If vampires can make it here, we can make it anywhere.

  SETBACK #2: As much as America is “the land of the free,” there are forces that consider some citizens less free than others. These forces went to the U.S. Congress and established the Bureau of Vampire Affairs (BVA). Despite having enjoyed the full rights of citizenship before we outed ourselves, on American Out Day laws were passed limiting our rights as citizens.

  • We had to register with the BVA so our identity and whereabouts would be known.

  • Our right to vote was suspended. Some fear we will steal drivers licenses, shape-shift into whoever’s picture is on the license, and vote multiple times.

  • We are forbidden to own businesses. Some believe we will use our shape-shifting skills to gain an unfair advantage over our mortal competitors.

  • We are forbidden to join sports teams, break world records, or take part in any competitive gaming in which our hyperacute senses might create an uneven playing field.

  Our full freedom has been put on hold until, as the BVA decreed, “Leaguer vampires prove they will not abuse their inalienable rights by doing unholy things.” However, even though the door to the American dream has been partially closed to us, Leaguers have much to celebrate!