“Mom, meet Ange. Ange, this is my Mom, Lillian.” Mom stood up and gave Ange a hug.
“It’s very good to meet you, darling,” she said, looking her over from top to bottom. Ange looked pretty acceptable, I think. She dressed well, and low-key, and you could tell how smart she was just by looking at her.
“A pleasure to meet you, Mrs Yallow,” she said. She sounded very confident and self-assured. Much better than I had when I’d met her mom.
“It’s Lillian, love,” she said. She was taking in every detail. “Are you staying for dinner?”
“I’d love that,” she said.
“Do you eat meat?” Mom’s pretty acclimated to living in California.
“I eat anything that doesn’t eat me first,” she said.
“She’s a hot-sauce junkie,” I said. “You could serve her old tires and she’d eat ‘em if she could smother them in salsa.”
Ange socked me gently in the shoulder.
“I was going to order Thai,” Mom said. “I’ll add a couple of their five-chili dishes to the order.”
Ange thanked her politely and Mom bustled around the kitchen, getting us glasses of juice and a plate of biscuits and asking three times if we wanted any tea. I squirmed a little.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said. “We’re going to go upstairs for a while.”
Mom’s eyes narrowed for a second, then she smiled again. “Of course,” she said. “Your father will be home in an hour, we’ll eat then.”
I had my vampire stuff all stashed in the back of my closet. I let Ange sort through it while I went through my clothes. I was only going as far as LA. They had stores there, all the clothing I could need. I just needed to get together three or four favorite tees and a favorite pair of jeans, a tube of deodorant, a roll of dental floss.
“Money!” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I was going to clean out my bank account on the way home at an ATM. I’ve got maybe five hundred saved up.”
“Really?”
“What am I going to spend it on?” she said. “Ever since the Xnet, I haven’t had to even pay any service charges.”
“I think I’ve got three hundred or so.”
“Well, there you go. Grab it on the way to Civic Center in the morning.”
I had a big book-bag I used when I was hauling lots of gear around town. It was less conspicuous than my camping pack. Ange went through my piles mercilessly and culled them down to her favorites.
Once it was packed and under my bed, we both sat down.
“We’re going to have to get up really early tomorrow,” she said.
“Yeah, big day.”
The plan was to get messages out with a bunch of fake VampMob locations tomorrow, sending people out to secluded spots within a few minutes’ walk of Civic Center. We’d cut out a spray-paint stencil that just said VAMPMOB CIVIC CENTER -> -> that we would spray-paint at those spots around 5AM. That would keep the DHS from locking down the Civic Center before we got there. I had the mailbot ready to send out the messages at 7AM — I’d just leave my Xbox running when I went out.
“How long…” She trailed off.
“That’s what I’ve been wondering, too,” I said. “It could be a long time, I suppose. But who knows? With Barbara’s article coming out —” I’d queued an email to her for the next morning, too — “and all, maybe we’ll be heroes in two weeks.”
“Maybe,” she said and sighed.
I put my arm around her. Her shoulders were shaking.
“I’m terrified,” I said. “I think that it would be crazy not to be terrified.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.”
Mom called us to dinner. Dad shook Ange’s hand. He looked unshaved and worried, the way he had since we’d gone to see Barbara, but on meeting Ange, a little of the old Dad came back. She kissed him on the cheek and he insisted that she call him Drew.
Dinner was actually really good. The ice broke when Ange took out her hot-sauce mister and treated her plate, and explained about Scoville units. Dad tried a forkful of her food and went reeling into the kitchen to drink a gallon of milk. Believe it or not, Mom still tried it after that and gave every impression of loving it. Mom, it turned out, was an undiscovered spicy food prodigy, a natural.
Before she left, Ange pressed the hot-sauce mister on Mom. “I have a spare at home,” she said. I’d watched her pack it in her backpack. “You seem like the kind of woman who should have one of these.”
Chapter 19
This chapter is dedicated to the MIT Press Bookshop, a store I’ve visited on every single trip to Boston over the past ten years. MIT, of course, is one of the legendary origin nodes for global nerd culture, and the campus bookstore lives up to the incredible expectations I had when I first set foot in it. In addition to the wonderful titles published by the MIT press, the bookshop is a tour through the most exciting high-tech publications in the world, from hacker zines like 2600 to fat academic anthologies on video-game design. This is one of those stores where I have to ask them to ship my purchases home because they don’t fit in my suitcase.
MIT Press Bookstore: Building E38, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA USA 02139-4307 +1 617 253 5249
Here’s the email that went out at 7AM the next day, while Ange and I were spray-painting VAMP-MOB CIVIC CENTER -> -> at strategic locations around town.
> RULES FOR VAMPMOB
> You are part of a clan of daylight vampires. You’ve discovered the secret of surviving the terrible light of the sun. The secret was cannibalism: the blood of another vampire can give you the strength to walk among the living.
> You need to bite as many other vampires as you can in order to stay in the game. If one minute goes by without a bite, you’re out. Once you’re out, turn your shirt around backwards and go referee — watch two or three vamps to see if they’re getting their bites in.
> To bite another vamp, you have to say “Bite!” five times before they do. So you run up to a vamp, make eye-contact, and shout “bite bite bite bite bite!” and if you get it out before she does, you live and she crumbles to dust.
> You and the other vamps you meet at your rendezvous are a team. They are your clan. You derive no nourishment from their blood.
> You can “go invisible” by standing still and folding your arms over your chest. You can’t bite invisible vamps, and they can’t bite you.
> This game is played on the honor system. The point is to have fun and get your vamp on, not to win.
> There is an end-game that will be passed by word of mouth as winners begin to emerge. The game-masters will start a whisper campaign among the players when the time comes. Spread the whisper as quickly as you can and watch for the sign.
> M1k3y
> bite bite bite bite bite!
We’d hoped that a hundred people would be willing to play VampMob. We’d sent out about two hundred invites each. But when I sat bolt upright at 4AM and grabbed my Xbox, there were 400 replies there. Four hundred.
I fed the addresses to the bot and stole out of the house. I descended the stairs, listening to my father snore and my mom rolling over in their bed. I locked the door behind me.
At 4:15 AM, Potrero Hill was as quiet as the countryside. There were some distant traffic rumbles, and once, a car crawled past me. I stopped at an ATM and drew out $320 in twenties, rolled them up and put a rubber-band around them, and stuck the roll in a zip-up pocket low on the thigh of my vampire pants.
I was wearing my cape again, and a ruffled shirt, and tuxedo pants that had been modded to have enough pockets to carry all my little bits and pieces. I had on pointed boots with silver-skull buckles, and I’d teased my hair into a black dandelion clock around my head. Ange was bringing the white makeup and had promised to do my eyeliner and black nail-polish. Why the hell not? When was the next time I was going to get to play dressup like this?