Chapter 1 of Bad to the Bone by Jeri Smith-Ready

Chapter 1 of Bad to the Bone (Part 2 of 3)

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"Lori said he was weird. Are you sure?"

Shane nods. "A vampire can smell an eager donor a mile away."

"Do I need to forbid you to bite a reporter?"

He slants me a gimme-a-break look. "I'm not that dumb. Anyway, I don't think he thinks I'm really a vampire."

"Because that's insane."

"I think he thinks I'm a wannabe."

Ah yes. In the "real" vampire subculture, some humans believe they need to drink blood to thrive, and there are people lined up to oblige them. Lacking fangs, they use razors or needles to bleed their "donors."

Some of those donors find their way to a real-real vampire, and if they can be trusted to hide the truth, the two form a symbiotic relationship. The donors exchange blood for money or sex or-most commonly-the masochistic thrill of serving a creature who could rip off their heads.

Not for me. The sensation of being stabbed with a pair of ice picks does nothing for my self-esteem or libido.

At a minute to midnight, my boy takes over the stage from Monroe, who tips his hat to the worshipping crowd on his way out. No one dares to follow. Like Spencer and other older vampires, Monroe's charisma holds an edge of menace that sane people wisely avoid. It's why we ask them to wear sunglasses in public whenever possible.

Shane, on the other hand, exudes humanity, giving his admirers a friendly wave as he moves to the microphone. "Ladies and gentlemen, the time is twelve a.m. It is now. Officially. Halloween."

He hits a switch and a low, hypnotic bass emanates from the speaker-the opening moments of Concrete Blonde's "Bloodletting." The patrons writhe and vamp, reveling in the dark magic his music weaves.

Someone calls my name. I turn to see Lori leaning out of the kitchen, holding on to the edge of the swinging door.

"What's up?" I ask as I follow her into the kitchen.

She takes me behind the salad prep area, where an old boom box sits on a shelf. She turns up the volume. Above the clatter of pans and the sizzle of grease, I hear an angry male voice.

"-not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead even expose them,' as Paul told the Ephesians." He lets that sink in. "Don't let the secular media and your children's public school teachers convince you that Halloween is harmless fun. Your tolerance is their greatest weapon in this culture war. Fact: Halloween is a pagan holiday that glorifies darkness and evil and everything God wants us to fight."

I glance past her at the chef/dishwasher, who's searing a pair of burgers on the grill, then at the ceramic white statue of the Virgin Mary above the prep table. "When did Jorge get born again?"

Lori shakes her head. "It's supposed to be WVMP."

"No, it's just mistuned." I twist the grease-encrusted knob, searching for the station. "The antenna probably got knocked."

"I already tried that. I was here when it happened, just now." She points to the wall clock, which reads a minute after midnight. "Regina was giving her usual creepy intro, then suddenly it was this guy."

I tweak the dial again and again, but there's no Regina, no Bauhaus, no Sex Pistols. Just a whole lotta Jesus goin' on.

"I better get David."

The kitchen door sweeps inward, banging into the stainless steel dishwasher. My boss stalks toward us, dressed as Bruce Springsteen circa Born in the U.S.A., cell phone at his ear. As David passes me, I hear a woman's screech from the earpiece.

"I'll call you back." He shuts the phone as he stomps up to the radio, the bandanna around his ripped blue jeans flapping with each step.

"She's not on," I tell him. "It's some guy nutting off about Satan."

David adjusts the knob up and down, only to get another dose of Ranty Man.

He curses under his breath. "Regina said she's flooded with calls."

"It happened exactly at midnight," Lori offers.

"Strange." David stares at the boom box. "It's like another station was just created on the same frequency."

"Isn't that illegal?" I ask him.

"Extremely." He rubs the dark, uneven stubble on his chin, a look he's been working on for a week (and, if I may say, that has been worth the wait). "If it's a pirate operation, the FCC could slap them with a fine and confiscate their equipment, maybe even throw them in jail."

"Then what are we waiting for? Let's report them."

He gives me a patronizing glare, like I've suggested we call up Santa Claus. "Ciara, the FCC doesn't exactly have a twenty-four-hour emergency number. We'll have to file a report during business hours."

"What if it's not pirates?" I gesture to the radio. "It sounds too high-quality to be coming out of someone's basement. What if it's another real station?" My mind sounds the chaching! of a cash register. "Can we sue them?"

David turns away, dark brows furrowed. "If it's a real station," he murmurs, "I might be able to find out..." He looks at Lori. "Can I use your boss's computer?"

She points to the back of the kitchen. "There's Stuart's office. Sorry about the mess."

David speaks to me as he strides away. "Call Regina, tell her to get the location of everyone who can't hear us."

I return to the bar, where Shane is onstage and on the phone. He pulls his head away from the phone, as if it's delivering electric shocks.

I weave through the crowd to the edge of the stage, then mouth the word "Regina?" to him. Shane nods. Good thing his eardrums are as immortal as the rest of him.

I signal for him to hand me the phone. He shakes his head but obliges. "Be careful!" he shouts.

I move away from the speakers to hear Regina. Unnecessary. Astronauts on the International Space Station can probably hear her.

"Hey, it's me," I say as calmly as I can. "David says to find out the locations of all the callers who can't hear us."

"Don't you think I thought of that?" Regina's voice is even harsher than usual. "They're everywhere- D.C., Sherwood, Baltimore, Harrisburg, every town in between. This isn't some half-assed pirate operation. Someone is fucking with me."

"I doubt it's personal. It's probably just an anti-Halloween demonstration by religious wackos. David says he might find out who it is by looking on the Internet."

There's a long pause before her voice comes back, muted. "Really?"

Regina died in 1987, so her entire experience of the Internet consists of the Matthew Broderick movie War Games. To her, the Web is omnipotent, able to produce tragedies and miracles with a few keywords.

"Go on with the show as if nothing's happened," I tell her, "and we'll be at the station after the bar closes at two."

She gives a tight sigh. "I wish I could figure out how to blame you for this."

I hang up the phone as Jeremy approaches me, notebook in hand. "Everything okay?" he asks.

"Of course. Why?"

"The way you and the station manager were running around, it looks like there's a crisis."

"Nope." I adjust my sunglasses. "No crisis."

"You mean, other than the fact that no one can hear your broadcast?" In response to my stunned look, he holds up his own phone. "My roommate just texted me."

Crap. How many other media outlets have noticed already? How many advertisers have noticed?

He steps closer, a new gleam in his eye. "Let me help you find the pirate."

"I don't think so." That's all we need, for him to snoop around and discover the real truth. "Thanks, anyway." I pat his arm and turn toward the stage.

"This could be a huge story," he says.

I stop. Visions of the station, the logo, maybe even Shane's face on the cover of Rolling Stone form a slide show in my head. Visions of solvency. Visions of survival.

I turn back to Jeremy. "Give us a day to put our own people on it. I'll get you something Thursday morning."

"Exclusive?"

"Through the weekend."

"Good enough." He tucks his notebook back into his pocket. "I'm going to drive back home to College Park and listen myself. I'll call you Thursday."

On my way back to the kitchen, I wing Shane's cell phone toward the stage. He snags it with a deft maneuver.

In Stuart's dim office, I find David leaning close to the monitor, his worried face aglow in the pale white light. He gives me a distracted glance as I pick my way through the piles of papers and stacks of shrink-wrapped Halloween bar napkins.

"Found something odd." David points to the screen. "The FCC keeps a public record of every application. Here's one for a translator construction permit from earlier this month right here in Sherwood."

"A what construction?"

"Translator. It's a two-way antenna that takes a radio signal and transmits it way outside the station's original range. Let's say we wanted to broadcast in Poughkeepsie. We'd build translator stations to relay the signal, and then everyone between here and there could hear us."

"But we couldn't trample on another station's frequency, right?"

"Right. To stay legal, we'd have the translator change our frequency to one that's available in our target area. If we're 94.3 here, we might be 102.1 in Scranton."

I squint at the browser to see what looks like an application from a Family Air Network, Inc. "But these people didn't bother switching."

"No, they bothered." David highlights a box on the application. "They specifically requested our frequency." He crumples his Springsteen headband in his fist and glares up at me. "They're after us."

* * *

"They're after me. I knew it!"

Black leather creaking, Regina paces across the small main office of the radio station. As she rants, she stabs the air with a long brown cigarette and shoots hostile glances from her dark brown eyes, outlined in liquid black.

Sitting on either side of my desk, David and I share a glance that mixes relief and confusion. The moment Shane signed on with his Whatever broadcast at 3 a.m., the religious screed ended. Maybe Regina is the target.

Rob Zombie's "Dragula" pounds out of the speaker that sits under the mounted deer head on the opposite wall. I smile, mentally giving Shane points for every time he plays a song that was released after he died. The DJs' stuck-in-time phenomenon isn't a gimmick-it's a sad fact of unlife.

One of their gig posters hangs on the wall above my desk, displaying the six DJs in the garb and attitude of their "Life Times": Monroe, the 1940s bluesman; Spencer, purveyor of 50s rockabilly; Jim, who brings us the dark, psychedelic side of the 60s; Noah, the dreadlocked reggae dude representing the 1970s; Regina, the 80s punk/Goth chick (and the only one who actually looks like a vampire); and youngest of all, Shane, whose broadcast rounds out the twentieth century with whatever music passes his stringent Gen-X authenticity test.

"So they're not going to spend the whole day attacking us." I make an unsuccessful attempt to suppress a yawn. "That's good, right?"

"Good for everyone else." Regina yanks on the silver chain dangling from her belt loop, rolling it over her fingers like rosary beads. "What about me?"

"Maybe it was a one-time thing." David holds up a printout. "Maybe the FCC already shut them down."

Regina scowls at him. "When has any government ever been that efficient?"

"The timing could be a coincidence," I tell her.

"At exactly midnight on Halloween? I don't buy it."

I glance at the clock on the mantel of the bricked-up fireplace next to me, then put my head down on my desk. I have to be back here to work in five hours. Franklin will no doubt want help soothing the tempers of angry advertisers.

David shows Regina the different applications FAN has filed for translators, explaining how this was the only one with a conflicting frequency (ours) and no data on the translator's location. Something's definitely fishy.

I rest my chin on my folded arms. "Have you heard of this Family Action Network?"

David nods. "Religious talk format, some nighttime musical programming. Last year I heard they were going bankrupt, but the FCC's records show them expanding."

Regina sniffs. "Someone funneled them cash, and it sure as shit wasn't pennies from heaven."

The industrial metal riffs segue into the plinky piano notes of Tori Amos's "Happy Phantom."

I drag myself to my feet. "Whether the piracy was on purpose or not, it's over. I'm going home to bed." My feet scuff the rough hardwood floor, because I'm too tired to lift them. I take my jacket off the coat rack, which is currently the hand of a life-size cardboard Elvis.

The song cuts off.

"Like all of Satan's deceptions, the lie of Halloween is subtle." The radio preacher's once raging voice is now soft and cajoling. "It's easy to fool ourselves into believing it doesn't hurt our children..."

David, Regina, and I stare at each other.

The man continues and finally says, "God tells us in Deuteronomy..."

"Oh, no." I put a hand to my forehead. "Here comes the fire thing."

"'...not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft..."

"How'd you know he was going to say that?" Regina asks me.

"I was bathed in that stuff the first sixteen years of my life."

The man's voice takes on an edge again. "For whoever does these things is detestable to the Lord." I can almost hear his spittle splash the microphone. "There's no arguing with the word of God, people. Are we making our children walk through the fire?"

The phone rings.

"Studio line," David says.

It goes silent, which means Shane answered it, no doubt hearing the bad news from a listener. We hurry downstairs, through the employee lounge, and through the hallway door next to the lighted ON THE AIR sign.

To my right is a corridor leading to the vampires' apartment, blocked by a door that says KEEP OUT. In front of me is the studio, which contains an array of equipment-turntables, tape decks, CD players-some of which dates as far back as the 1940s to maintain "cognitive comfort" for the older DJs.

It also contains one pissed-off vampire.

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