You Suck: A Love Story

get whiplash from those mood swings, Red,” Tommy said quietly as he climbed into bed with his clothes on.
    Then he lay there beside her thinking about all that they had to do, about how they were going to have to find a place and move without going out during the day, and beyond that, just exactly how were they going to survive and stay hidden? The Emperor could tell. Tommy could tell he could tell. And as much as he liked the Emperor, it wasn’t a good sign. And so even as he worried, and listened to his girlfriend yell at him, C. Thomas Flood became the first vampire in history to actually pray for the sun to come up.
    A few minutes later, his prayers were answered, and the two of them went out.
    S ince becoming a vampire, Jody had always hated the way consciousness came on at dusk like the streetlights coming on. There was no groggy twilight between sleep and wakefulness, just “bam, welcome to the night, here’s your to-do list.” Not to night. To night she got her twilight, her grogginess, and a headache as well. She sat upright in bed so fast she nearly somersaulted off the end, then, when her head didn’t seem to follow her, she lay back down with such force that her pillow exploded, sending out a snowstorm of feathers to whirl around the room. She moaned and Tommy came bounding into the room.
    “Hey,” he said.
    “Ouch,” Jody said, grabbing her forehead with both hands as if to hold her brains in.
    “That’s new, huh? Vampire hangover?” Tommy waved some feathers out of the air in front of him.
    “I feel like death warmed over,” Jody said.
    “Cute. I’ll bet you’re missing coffee right now.”
    “And aspirin. I’ve fed off of you when you’d been drinking. Why did it affect me now?”
    “I think maybe the huge cat guy had a little more in his blood than I did. Anyway, I have a theory about that. We can test it later, when you feel better, but right now we have a ton of stuff we have to do.
    We’ve got to figure out the move. Clint called me from the store last night. Wanting me to work. Then he called back all freaked out, saying I shouldn’t come in.”
    Tommy played the message for her. Twice.
    “He knows,” Jody said.
    “Yeah, but how does he know?”
    “Doesn’t matter. He knows.”
    “Fuck!”
    “Little bit softer now,” Jody said, holding her hair like it was hurting her.
    “Too loud?”
    Jody nodded. “You know, for your notebook, Tommy. Vampire senses when you’re hungover? Not so good.”
    “Really? That bad?”
    “Your breath is nauseating me from across the room.”
    “Yeah, we need toothpaste.”
    “There’s someone at the door?” Jody covered her ears. She could hear sneakers scraping the sidewalk from all the way downstairs.
    “There is?”
    The door buzzer sounded.
    “Yep,” she said.
    Tommy ran to the front windows and looked down to the street.
    “There’s a Humvee limo out there that’s about a block long.”
    “You’d better answer it,” Jody said.
    “Maybe we should just hide. Pretend we’re not home.”
    “No, you need to get it,” Jody said. She could hear the shuffling at the door, the rock and roll playing in the limo, the bong bubbling, lines being chopped on a CD case, and a male voice repeating the phrase “sweet blue titties” over and over like a mantra. She grabbed the pillow from Tommy’s side of the bed and pulled it over her head. “Answer it, Tommy. It’s the fucking Animals.”
    D ude,” said Lash Jefferson, a wiry black man with a newly shaved scalp, wearing mirror shades. He pulled Tommy out of his doorway and hugged him furiously-crazed, back-slamming, good-to-see-you guy hugs. “We are so fucked, dude,” Lash continued.
    Tommy pushed away, trying to reconcile that he was glad to see his friend with the fact that Lash smelled like a beer-bar urinal filled with mackerel.
    “I thought you guys went to Vegas,” Tommy said.
    “Yeah. Yeah. We did. Everyone’s in the limo. It’s just that I need to talk to you. Can we go inside?”
    “No.” Tommy almost said that Jody was sleeping, which had been his excuse for keeping the Animals out of his loft in the past, but Jody was supposed to have left town. “Step in the stairway, I’ve got something happening upstairs.”
    Lash nodded and looked over the top of his shades and bounced his eyebrows. His eyes were bloodshot and glazed over. Tommy could hear his heart racing. Coke or fear, he guessed. Both maybe.
    “Look, dude,” Lash said. “First thing, we