Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest

by Johnny B. Truant

  Nikki watched, her hand on her open mouth. Once upon a time, bloodshed hadn’t been shocking to either of them — to any of them, all across the world. But all of the bloodshed these days went into tubes and pouches, and thinking about what must be going on inside the farm’s main building made even Reginald’s prophetic hair stand on end.

  The cameras continued to flip from view to view as the situation slowly unfolded.

  As Nikki and Reginald watched, they saw blurs and blood and fire and smoke. There were several brief interviews with local vampires who told reporters how shocked they were, saying that they used to talk to some of the more intelligent humans through the fences — and, when the guards would allow it, to toss them food. The MorningFresh facility was spacious and clean. The stock there had always seemed so docile. Yet earlier in the day, a troop of humans were being led from their pens to the milking chamber by MorningFresh techs (not even handlers; MorningFresh was a civilized workplace where animosity wasn’t usually necessary) when several of the stock had pulled homemade wooden shivs from their clothing and had staked the techs. The guards had taken a few startled moments to react, and those few seconds had been enough for another group of humans to come up behind the guards and string garrotes made of old silver jewelry around their necks. Using the silver, they’d wrangled the guards to the ground, ripped off their armor, and staked them, too.

  That was all the reporter on the scene seemed to know. The initial report had come from a tech who’d escaped, and what had happened since then was anybody’s guess. From what the camera could see, the vampire guards seemed to have rallied, but Reginald had committed the layouts of MorningFresh (and every other new building he’d been able to find blueprints for) to memory, and he felt less sure that they’d regained control. In the camera’s shot, he could see that only the outer doors of the factory were open. The inner doors, thirty yards further in, were still closed. What they were seeing were only a few combatants dueling it out in an oversized foyer. Anything could be happening in the factory itself.

  “What do you think happened?” said Nikki when the loop repeated again and the reporter began telling them what they already knew.

  “I’d say the humans got tired of being stuck with needles and kept in cages,” said Reginald.

  But before they could think on it for long, more breaking news began to intrude on the MorningFresh story. There had, it seemed, been an attack on a vampire city a hundred miles from the blood farm using a kind of Trojan horse explosive. The explosive, according to reports, had been embedded with silver shrapnel and encased in several nested wooden crates. It had been pushed into an indoor market, disguised as a freight shuttle, and detonated. Several vampires had been impaled and killed instantly, and medics were still attempting to cut silver out of a dozen others.

  But there was more: in Arizona, a second rebellion had occurred at a factory that did pre-processing for HemoByte blood supplements. The factory used human labor (it was a notch above slavery; captive humans could do menial jobs in exchange for credits they could later redeem for small luxuries), and as had happened at MorningFresh, several workers had seized vampire supervisors using old silver jewelry. Early reports indicated that the supervisors had then been shoved into a massive centrifuge the facility used to separate the red blood cells used in HemoByte pills from plasma and platelets.

  And lastly — for now, anyway — the wall of a vampire city that had been fortified in the bones of Detroit was on fire, now being held by humans carrying crossbows. The guards in the city were managing to fight back somewhat, but they had to do so while wearing lead daysuits, and each city only had so many.

  “Claire was right,” said Reginald. “It’s starting.”

  Nikki seemed irritated by Reginald’s vindicated tone. “What exactly, Reginald? What’s starting?”

  “The second phase of the war.”

  Nikki shook her head. “It’s just insurgence. They’ll knock it back.” Which, come to think of it, was a strange thing for her to say. Nikki was part of a vampire resistance that, in theory, should welcome anything that disrupted the status quo. But the way she was reacting just spoke to the group’s irrelevance. It spoke to a group that only protested in order to hear itself protest.

  Reginald pointed at the TV. He didn’t see how she could dismiss any of what she was seeing with a straight face.

  “Four incidents, Nikki. In four cities. At the same time.”

  As if on cue, the reporter onscreen touched her ear. Then she held the mic to her lips, looked into the camera, and said, “I’m being told that a bus filled with photobombs has been left in front of the EUVC parliament building in Geneva, and a human group is threatening to detonate it,” she said. “Going to our Geneva affiliate now.”

  The Geneva reporter — a man with jet black hair wearing a jet black suit — was standing in a kind of long dark tube. The shot gave the impression of staring down a hallway, and at the end of the hallway, in the sun, was a large city bus standing in the middle of a deserted square. The reporter was sweating as scant ultraviolet made its way down toward him.

  Nikki gasped.

  Reginald forgot his irritation as he watched Nikki react. She wasn’t gasping at the bus or the implication of the photobombs — human Anti-Vampire Taskforce blow-and-illuminate weapons that hadn’t been seen for decades. She was gasping at the daylight that was painting the square in the distance.

  “They have a sun blocker,” she said.

  “Apparently not anymore,” said Reginald.

  His keen eyes, peering at the large high-definition TV, picked out dozens of piles of ash visible all around the sun-lit square. Geneva, like the USVC’s home city of New York, was usually protected by the massive, geosynchronously orbiting shield that had been assembled in space twenty years ago. Both cities — the vampire world’s two major hubs — operated 24 hours a day in permanent night.

  Or at least, they used to.

  Reginald’s mind barely registered the deaths that must have occurred already this morning — or already this afternoon across the ocean. It was focused instead on logistics, consulting the collected vampire knowledge that was resident in his brain. Battle gears that had been long dormant began to turn.

  There had been at least five incidents, and more might be in progress or forthcoming. If you counted whatever had been done to the sun blocker (Reginald’s guess was computer-based sabotage; it seemed unlikely that the humans had actually gotten into space), then there were six. The fog of war would mean that until this wave passed — if it passed — they wouldn’t be able to accurately tally the damage because there’d be too much panic and misinformation. The best they could do would be a guess — and right now, a guess wasn’t good enough.

  Reginald needed data. Not gossip, not hearsay, and not second-hand accounts. Data.

  Nikki gripped his arm, the pressure of all five digits suddenly betraying her need for his support. It was strange. There had been frightening times in their shared past, but even when she’d been afraid, she’d always held her own. He hadn’t seen her truly vulnerable since she’d been human. Nikki had lost her parents early and as a result had put up a solid wall for the rest of her human life. Weakness, she’d learned, could be deadly. But now here that weakness was, and Reginald couldn’t fault her one iota for it.

  “It’s a bus,” Nikki said, looking at the TV. “Why did nobody think a bus was suspicious?”

  “They use buses in Geneva,” Reginald told her. “New York too.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “And subways. Why are you surprised? We have a car.”

  “Well…” she began, but didn’t finish. Reginald felt a frown forming on his lips. It was impossible not to sense some of the old feelings returning. He’d been a vampire for longer than he’d been a human, but 42 years (80 if you counted from his birth) compared to a vampire’s potential lifespan was nothing, and he was barely faster or stronger today than he’d been when he was first turned. On hi
s first vampire night with Maurice, Reginald had managed a pushup and a slow jog. Today he could place highly in a human marathon and lift around three hundred pounds, but both feats could be outdone by a fit human. Reginald having a car was like a handicapped person having a wheelchair. It didn’t make him feel any more like he belonged.

  “City-dwellers are apparently as lazy as I am,” he said, a bit more harshly than he’d intended.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” she said, loosening the pressure on his arm and turning it into an affectionate hold. Then she looked at him appraisingly, continuing when she deemed it safe. “But it does seem strange. Vampires taking buses.”

  “A lot of things are strange these days, Nik,” he said with a sigh.

  He looked at the screen, watching the station flip between the five incidents. The shot of the bus bomb caught his attention, and he wondered if vampire troops had reappropriated the robots that were once used by human bomb squads. There would be little point to robots under normal circumstances; unless bombs flung wood or silver or unless the shrapnel threatened to result in beheading, explosions were little more than annoyances. Even the carnage on VNN was strangely clean. Other than the screaming vampires who’d taken shards of silver, none of the news footage was remotely gut-churning. Vampires were hard to wound. They either died and became bland piles of ash, or they healed instantly.

  As if to prove the point, the shot flipped to show a reporter speaking to one of the wood-bomb victims. The caption at the bottom of the screen read: “Sally Thornton — lost left arm in Seattle blast.” But Sally was currently summoning someone off-camera using impatient gestures of both arms, and where her left side had been blown away, her shirt was torn open and a boob hung out.

  “We evolved right onto the chopping block,” said Reginald, a realization dawning.

  Nikki looked over.

  “Everyone wondered why the angels never showed up to give us a high-five for winning the war,” he continued. “Why was that? Because hey, we’d done what they wanted, right? We tipped the scales on the humans. Then we evolved, as instructed. Look, Nik.” He pointed at the TV screen. “We even took back the day. We’ve got our tunnels, or blackout vehicles, our lead defense suits, our orbiting space shades. We’ve got HemoByte and humanely farmed blood. We’re so damn evolved we don’t have to hunt or kill anymore. And now look at us: right out in the sun when the curtain is pulled back.”

  They both looked at the screen. The station was showing Geneva again, and the piles of ash visible in the square put an exclamation point on Reginald’s sentence. The vampires in the city had gotten so used to going out whenever they wanted that they must have been taken totally off guard when the sun suddenly came out.

  “Wait until night,” said Nikki. “The CPC will find whoever’s responsible.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Reginald. “They’ve grown too dull.”

  Nikki looked at him like he’d shredded her favorite teddy bear. He could sense the tone of her thoughts despite trying not to, and knew that she was starting to believe what he’d said earlier. She was starting to see how coordinated the human actions were, and how this was bigger than five isolated acts of terrorism. Humans were supposed to be watched and contained. Groups in the wilds were supposed to be followed by satellites, tracked, and exterminated when they got too big. The humans were supposed to only have the communities the vampires allowed them to have, and now it looked like they’d found a way to have one much larger. Reginald couldn’t help but worry about the power of human coordination. The vampires had created little themselves; they’d built almost all of what they had on what suddenly felt like shaky, co-opted ground. What might humans know about the vampires’ world that even vampires didn’t know? It was human technology that had launched the New York and Geneva sun blockers, human technology that broadcast vampire television, and human networks that made Fangbook accessible anywhere. The humans had made it all, and now he feared they might be trying to take it back.

  “What do you mean?” said Nikki.

  “We needed the humans,” said Reginald. “They sharpened us. When they were in charge and we were in the shadows, we had to fight and hunt. Today we don’t have to do any of that, and we’ve gotten soft. Now they’re the species in the shadows. Now we’ve sharpened them.” He turned to look into Nikki’s eyes. “And now I’m afraid that our lazy, decadent necks are going to get cut.”

  “You’re making too much of it,” she said. But meeting her eyes, he could tell that she was only saying the words in order to try to convince herself.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Is this opinion coming from the vampire codex?”

  “It’s coming from common sense.”

  “And from Claire?”

  “From inevitability.”

  Nikki tried to sit up tall. “We’re still vampires,” she said.

  “Yes, we are,” said Reginald. His head turned toward the TV. “But what have they become?”

  ASSHOLES

  REGINALD GOT A PHONE CALL. He wasn’t surprised.

  “No,” he told the phone. “No fucking way.”

  The phone rallied back, trying to be passive-aggressive: “You have to. You have to help.”

  “No, I don’t,” Reginald said. “You’ve raised your petard. Prepare to be hoisted upon it.”

  The voice said nothing, clearly failing to understand. So Reginald added, “Would you prefer a metaphor wherein you get fucked up the ass by a dildo that you yourself created?”

  On the other end of the line, Charles Barkley cleared his throat. This had to be difficult for Charles. Reginald had been an outsider with the vampire government from the start, and he’d been an outsider with Charles from the moment they’d laid eyes on each other, back in the bowling alley where Reginald had first been turned. Charles had probably drawn the short straw to have to make this call — or maybe Timken had made him do it, reasoning that Reginald and Charles shared a connection. Bygones, after all these years, would surely be bygones. Sure, Charles had tried to kill Reginald a few times, but at the end of the human world, weren’t they all ultimately on the same team?

  “Look,” said Barkley in a pouty voice. “Just do it.”

  “Oh, well, after a persuasive argument like that, how can I refuse?”

  “We’ll pay you for your time.”

  “I don’t need your money,” said Reginald. “I’m incredibly rich. Turns out, fat sells.”

  “Come on. This is the future of our race we’re talking about.”

  “Is it?” said Reginald, switching the phone to his other ear. “Well, then whoopity fucking doo; I’d better snap-to and help out! Vampirism has been so great to me. I was turned into a vampire against my will, then tried and persecuted, then almost executed. I saved the world and everyone hated me for it, and when I tried to make peace after being chased out and almost killed, everyone laughed at me. I tried to stop your fucking regime and ended up causing the apocalypse instead, and…”

  “I don’t think you can take credit for that,” Barkley interjected.

  “… and when it was all over, your buddy’s right-hand man killed my best friend and maker. And then what happened? Well, as a final insulting capper, I finally embraced my nature as the world’s big fat joke and found out that junk food sells… but when I saw all of you fuckers starting to eat it, I lost my taste for it. Now I only drink blood, and I run. Everyone else eats junk and does nothing all day, and somehow I’m still the outcast. And surprise, surprise… 180 degrees later and here we are again with you fucked and me expected to save the day. So what can you possibly offer to tempt me, Charles? What will make it worth my while to humiliate myself further? Because I’ve been telling you all for years that a human uprising was coming and that you’d better prepare — ‘watch them closely,’ I said; ‘don’t get complacent and assume they’ll lie down forever,’ I said — but nobody’s ever listened… and now, when you finally do want to listen, do you re
ally expect me to believe that the ‘solution’ you want from me won’t involve killing and torturing a bunch more people?”

  “To be clear, we don’t believe your bullshit about the human revolution,” said Charles.

  “Really.”

  “Not at all. We want advice on how to quell an insurgence.”

  “Do it your motherfucking self, Charles.”

  Charles clucked his tongue on the other end of the line. “You sure have grown up,” he said. “Such a mouth you’ve developed. You weren’t like this when you were Maurice’s pet.”

  Reginald felt his face redden. Charles had managed to insult both him and Maurice in one backhanded comment, and he’d done it while asking Reginald’s strategic mind for help. But rising to his bait wouldn’t be the right choice. In over forty years of dealing with Charles — and almost another forty years before that of dealing with people just like Charles — he’d learned that you couldn’t actually fight fire with fire. Snapping back at Charles would only make things worse.

  “Have a nice life, Councilman Barkley.”

  Charles huffed, but then Reginald heard activity on the other end of the phone. A voice in the background told Charles to let him try, and Reginald prepared himself to listen to more bullshit from some other loudmouth government asswipe.

  “Re-gggggie,” said the voice that came onto the phone, drawing his loathed nickname out into two long syllables.

  “Who is this?” Reginald asked. But it was just a stalling tactic. He knew exactly who he was talking to. He remembered vocal patterns as perfectly as he remembered everything else.

  “I’m hurt,” said the voice. As he said it, Reginald could imagine a cleft chin and tombstone-white teeth curling into a dramatic frown.

  “I die, and then the world ends,” said Reginald, “and still somehow I have to deal with you.”

  “Hey. We shared a coffee machine and glances at chicks in working-girl stockings. Am I right?”