Reginald’s deeper mind caught what Ophelia had said right away, but it took his top level of consciousness a moment to catch up. They were walking back toward the elevator by the time her words hit home.
“You got Timken back?”
She shook her head. “President Toussant.”
Reginald realized now why Ophelia hadn’t summoned Brian too, and hence why Brian had been available to keep an eye on Claire while Nikki and Reginald went with the general. Brian could never, ever be in the same room with Claude again. He’d rip the man apart. Forty years wasn’t enough time to heal the grudge Brian would never forget: Claude had killed his maker, and Brian was big and strong and fast enough to do something about it.
“Timken is dead?” Reginald said, feeling like he’d missed several memos.
“It’s de facto,” said Ophelia. “Mr. Toussant was the vice president, so he’s president in the actual president’s absence.”
“So you’re just acting as if he’s dead,” said Reginald. He turned to Nikki. “Like when they hire someone to replace you when you go on maternity leave.”
The move was puzzling without being puzzling at all. Claude could lead the Vampire Nation just fine while remaining vice president. There was no reason to claim the presidency, seeing as he’d just have to give it back the minute Timken was returned. But on the other hand, it made sense because Claude was, in Reginald’s words, “a gigantic cocksucker.” Reginald filed the information for later consideration.
They made their way back to the meeting room, meeting up with Charles at the door. When they walked in, Reginald found the mood and the tableau identical, only with Claude now in Timken’s chair. He suddenly felt like he was in a daytime soap opera that had found itself short an actor: This week, the role of Nicolas Timken will be played by Claude Toussant.
The minute Reginald saw Claude — the big man in his too-small suit, a black goatee on his chin, a vacant and vaguely condescending expression on his face — he charged. He shoved Ophelia aside, vaulted the table with shocking agility (his balance and coordination had improved greatly; he could have beat human gymnasts in the Olympics if he were able to touch his toes), and had his hands around the vice president’s / president’s throat before anyone could react. He squeezed with everything he had. His fangs came out. His blood boiled.
Claude smiled up at him. Behind him, Ophelia righted herself and sat in one of the chairs across the table from Claude — and, apparently, Reginald — as if nothing were amiss. Charles sat beside her. Then Nikki walked up to Reginald and patted him kindly on the shoulder.
“You motherfucker!” Reginald hissed. “I’m going to tear you apart!”
Claude twitched his head. Claude was too fast for Reginald to see entirety of the movement, but he did feel a very sharp pain as Claude’s forehead rammed into his. He felt his scalp split, felt something liquid run across his nose and cheek. Reginald’s hands let go of Claude’s throat and he tumbled from the table and to the floor at Claude’s feet.
Nikki pulled out a chair, then bent down to beckon Reginald from under the table. Above him, Claude gestured toward the chair.
“Give me one fucking reason I should sit in the same room with you,” said Reginald, standing and wiping the blood from his forehead.
“I’m wearing fantastic cologne,” said Claude.
Reginald’s fangs were still out. He looked at Claude’s neck and found himself longing to separate it from his body. Even if he could forgive Claude for killing Maurice (which he couldn’t), the score was too thick to settle. The entire world had a score to settle with Claude Toussant. He’d been behind the murderous V-Crews, behind the war crimes, behind the rumors of death camps. Every vampire had blood on their hands, but Claude’s hands were wrist-deep in an ocean of it.
“Sit down, Reginald,” said Charles, settling in. He straightened first his lapels and then his hair, and Reginald marveled that throughout everything, the one thing that had never faltered was Charles’s wardrobe.
Reginald looked from Charles to Claude. He couldn’t fight them, and it would be pointless to try. And now that he thought about it, giving Ophelia or the others any reason to evict them from USVC was an incredibly stupid idea. First of all, logically, it was in the world’s best interest to solve the situation with Lafontaine and Timken. And second, he wasn’t at all sure that anyone other than he, Nikki, and Brian knew that Claire was here. She’d landed a helicopter on the roof, but the highest floors were unused, and if he knew Claire’s ability, she’d probably scrambled all electronic records of her arrival without even intending to. But if the others found out, it would be one more pinch point. She wasn’t a vampire, and Reginald cared about her. Just one more way for the others to gain leverage, and to put Claire right back in danger she’d so recently escaped.
With effort, Reginald sat. But before he did, he wheeled Nikki’s chair across from Claude and situated himself one chair removed, so that they didn’t have to sit directly across from one another. It was a ridiculous and petty move, but right now, Reginald was willing to take any tiny victories he could manage.
He looked up, and realized that everyone was looking at him.
“What?” he said.
“Well, what do we do?” Claude asked.
Reginald looked at Ophelia. “You’re the general. Where’s your slide show and speech filled with dehumanizing terms?”
“We’re blind,” said Ophelia, shaking her head. “You know as much as we know. Even our satellites are starting to blink out. All we know is that there are pockets of human hostility everywhere. The incidents we had a handle on earlier have totally degenerated because troops had to retreat when they were approached from behind.”
Reginald saw something in Ophelia’s eyes. He met them, challenging her.
“Or when, in a few cases, those troops were assaulted and killed,” she admitted.
“So you got pantsed,” said Reginald. “They walked up behind you — all of you — and just yanked. They had us pegged all along. They were just waiting.”
After a moment, Ophelia said, “It seems that way.”
“Did you get an idea of how many of them there were? Do you have any data at all?”
Ophelia popped up the same screen she’d used before, dimmed the lights, and projected a satellite map of New York onto the front wall. “All we really have is this,” she said.
Reginald leaned forward. The map showed heat signatures, with notes and tags overlaying the projection. There were large red and orange clusters across Manhattan and the boroughs. Outside the city, beyond the bridges and tunnels, were smaller, more isolated clusters.
“Jesus,” said Nikki.
“There’s at least a quarter million on that map alone,” said Reginald. He looked closer. The entire “abandoned” section of the city was lit up to some degree, but amongst the chaos, Reginald could see a pattern. They were mostly around the bridges and tunnels, clustered on both sides of each. At the main corridor — the blocked-off roads they’d used to enter the city’s core — the red heat signatures were positioned along its entire length. It was an excellent deployment map. If Reginald were in charge of the human army, he’d have done the same: notice the single logical choke point, then mine it.
“We estimate three hundred thousand,” said Ophelia. We have similar reports from Geneva, but no visuals. Obviously it’s worst around the capitols. The outlying areas won’t be anywhere near this congested.”
“So you assume,” said Reginald.
“Well, yes.”
He looked at the map again. It was bright enough to be a lit Christmas tree. “How didn’t you see all these heat signatures before now?”
“We’re working on the theory that they were in the tunnels,” she said.
“Don’t you patrol the tunnels?’
“Some. In fact, some of them are the CPC’s main arteries. We actually use the tunnels. They’re also mined, in areas where a collapse wouldn’t weaken parts of the city we nee
d for our infrastructure. But there are a lot of tunnels under New York. It’s not just subways. There’s sewers, utility corridors…”
“You knew this, but you didn’t patrol them all?”
“We did what we could. We can only stretch so thin. There are a lot of tunnels here, and a lot of tunnels and hidey-holes in the rest of the world. We only have so many troops.”
“In other words,” said Nikki, “you thought you could step in and occupy enemy territory with your small peacekeeping army.” She turned to Reginald. “Because that strategy has a history of working well in warfare.”
“We didn’t have a choice,” said Claude.
Reginald stabbed an angry finger at Claude. “See, that’s where you’re just a big fucking fucker,” he said. “That’s all you’ve been saying from the beginning. You, Timken, Charles, even Logan. But you don’t even hear yourselves. It’s like you’re stuck in a loop, like your brains died when your body died. I’ve got a theory. Do you want to hear it?”
“No,” said Claude.
“I think that the mind isn’t like the body. I think it can’t be idle and unchanging. I think that a mind either grows or atrophies, so if you think you can just have an ‘unchanging’ mind for millennia while your body stops aging, you’re deluding yourself. In the case of the mind, I think that standing still is decay.”
Charles rolled his eyes.
“You caused this, you know,” said Reginald, turning his anger on Charles. “It’s right here, in the vampire codex.” He tapped his head. “Humanity didn’t have the edge it needed to fight you back when there were only seventy thousand vampires and seven billion humans. They had the numbers, but they were soft and complacent. They’d stopped evolving. They let everything else do their thinking for them. But you had to push them, didn’t you? Your little apocalypse forced them to adapt or die. And guess what? They adapted. And now, you’re going to die.”
The conference room door opened. Reginald’s head turned to see the oiled hair and bright white tombstone teeth of Todd Walker enter the room. This time, Nikki flinched to rise, but Reginald put a hand on her knee to hold her down. It was the first time either of them had seen Walker in the flesh since they’d left him chained to a pipe in the old Council building in Columbus. Since then, he’d had many titles, and most had implied that he’d finally found his niche. He’d become a professional bully and asshole.
Walker straightened his suit coat, then walked to the table and made himself comfortable beside Charles, on a slight diagonal from Nikki. Unbelievably, he winked at her.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said.
Claude nodded toward Charles and Walker. “These two were both in Timken’s cabinet: secretaries of something or other that I don’t care about and that don’t matter. But now they’re like my vice presidents.”
“You’re not the president,” said Nikki.
Claude smiled, his sinister teeth emerging from behind his black goatee.
“I stand corrected,” he said. “But let’s just play pretend, to keep the titles simple.”
“Okay,” said Reginald. He pointed toward Walker. “His title is ‘cunt.'"
“That’s not playing pretend,” said Nikki.
Walker faked a frown. “I’m hurt. All those years working together. We’re friends, you and me.” And as Reginald stuck his fingers into Walker’s mind — he didn’t care about being improper when the subject was Walker — he saw something amazing: Walker really did consider them to be twisted kinds of friends. Reginald decided that people like Walker probably didn’t have any genuine friends, so this was the best they could do. They probably had people they made fun of who “knew it was all in good fun” instead. And hey, thumbscrews made for strange bedfellows.
Nikki started to reply, but the exchange was pointless. Reginald gave her a look and she fell silent. They were outnumbered by douchebags. There were only two sensible people and four assholes, and just like that Reginald realized that he’d landed in a triage situation. He’d never get a sensible outcome out of these four, so the best he could do would be to get by and get out. He would need to figure out the easiest, most non-offensive way to do what they required of him, do it, and find a way to escape — keeping in mind that “escape” would probably still mean a life on the run from someone. His job was to protect Nikki, Claire, and Brian. Everything else was secondary, including his own life.
Claude extended a hand toward Walker. “Todd is our blood marshal,” he said. “That basically means that in addition to being my vice president — I’m sorry, I mean my ‘vice vice president’ — he’s been in charge of monitoring the blood stock at the farms.”
Reginald understood now why Walker was here. There were two primary tasks on the table, and Claude had nailed both of them. They had to appear to be doing something to improve PR (ideally something symbolic; rescuing Timken or killing Lafontaine were at the top of that list) to give the population the appearance that everything was under control, and they had to keep the vampires of the world fed. If the blood supply dried up, panic would quickly follow.
All eyes turned to Walker. He sat back.
“We’ve lost control of or access to seventy-five percent of the state-controlled blood farms,” he said. “It looks very intentional. Before we lost imagery, we were beginning to get the distinct impression that the biggest clusters outside of New York and Geneva were around the farms.”
“How the hell did they coordinate all of this?” said Charles.
Reginald looked into Charles’s eyes. “Their leader removed his eyes and could see,” said Reginald. “Clearly, they’ve figured a few things out over the past forty years.”
“But how?”
Reginald could only shake his head, suddenly wishing he could put his big brain to use on the other side. He’d already formed a mental image of the human world as it had actually existed over the past decades, as opposed to the way the vampires had imagined it existing. There had to be huge underground manufacturing facilities and research labs. Wet benches and medical equipment capable of growing a biological weapon able to preferentially attack the vampire agent but not human cells. The humans, Reginald had already realized, clearly knew far more about vampires than vampires did.
“I doubt we could understand their methods without years of prerequisite background,” said Reginald. “How would you explain a cell phone to a caveman?”
“Ooga,” Nikki suggested.
Walker cleared his throat and resumed. “There are only a handful of farms that can still operate, produce, and ship blood without incident. We’ve ordered emergency protocols, and…”
“You’re going to drain them dry,” said Nikki, realization dawning.
“Close to dry,” said Walker. “But we can’t kill them, because then that would be it for our blood supply. Oh, there’s plenty more blood out there in the wetsacks who are attacking us, but it’s like fresh water in the middle of the ocean, seeing as we can’t get near it. We’ve spent a lot of time experimenting to find the ideal drain point in situations like this, where we drain them enough to get as large of a batch as possible without impairing our ability to, in a day or two, get more.”
“We’ve also increased CPC presence around the remaining farms,” Ophelia added, bringing the room lights back up.
Walker nodded. “Now, in addition, there are the small private farms. A lot of vampires keep their own humans, and a few have a small herd and re-sell as organic or all-natural or some other horseshit. We keep records of all of them, and we’re moving out now, to seize what we can, under order of national emergency.”
“What about HemoByte?” said Nikki.
Walker nodded. It was the simplest of gestures, but Reginald marveled at how odd it was coming from Todd Walker. The nod had acknowledged Nikki’s point, no more and no less — but it also meant that Walker was speaking to them as equals. It was strange to remember the way he’d tortured them both at the office, and that they were all sitting around a table to d
iscuss the stealing of people’s blood.
“We do have HemoByte, yes. But taking pills isn’t the same as drinking, and while it will keep vampires from starving, they won’t like it. It won’t keep them from panicking. But we’ve pulled in all of the stores we can find and are already distributing rations in the city. But it’s a fragile balance. The more we look like we’re in emergency mode — I mean, standing in line for a ration of fucking HemoByte instead of going to your fridge for the real thing? — well, the more people will panic, and then it just gets worse and worse. We want to prevent riots by acting like all is well, but all isn’t well, and we need to keep them from starving.”
Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest Page 11