Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest
Page 13
Reginald had stopped caring. All that mattered were Claire and Nikki, ideally Brian, and, if possible, himself. That was it. As he stood in the dark, headlight-lit parking lot, he realized that he didn’t care about the humans of the world; he didn’t care about the vampires of the world; he didn’t even care about the human community where his mother and Nikki’s sister had lived and died, or the cluster of vampires he knew back at home. In an ideal world, everyone would live. Maybe they’d join hands and sing and braid flowers through each other’s hair. But that wasn’t going to happen, and he just didn’t care. Nikki. Claire. Maybe Brian. Maybe himself. And the rest could go to Hell.
They stopped ten feet from Lafontaine, Timken, and the guard. Timken was at the end of what appeared to be a silver-chain leash. Claude picked up the phone, dialed a number, and put the phone on speaker. They heard Ophelia’s voice.
“The gates are open,” she said, her voice distorted by the phone’s speaker. “The humans are lined up, the guards awaiting your command.”
“How do the humans look?” said Claude. “For the cameras, I mean?”
“Clean and unabused enough. But a lot of them still look sick.”
“Good,” said Claude. “Stand by.”
“Standing by, sir.”
Claude looked up from the phone and met Timken’s eyes.
“How are you, Mr. President?” he said. Reginald couldn’t help looking over. Hearing concern come out of Claude’s mouth was surreal. He tried again to pry into Claude’s thoughts, but Claude still had his impervious wall up.
“Oh, peachy,” said Timken.
Reginald looked at Lafontaine. He was dressed in dirty blue jeans and an old button-up shirt that was whole but well-worn. As before, his empty eyes were looking directly at Reginald and Claude as if he could see them, and Reginald again wondered how. The guard, beside him, was carrying a weapon with a tank under the barrel like a giant squirt gun, but Lafontaine himself was unarmed. Still, Reginald remembered what had happened last time. He thought of the glints they’d seen on the horizon. The unknown element of the building beside them. And Lafontaine’s dark skin, which might again have been covered in the vampire disease agent. They were ready for anything, appearances to the contrary.
“I’ve been watching the news while we’ve been waiting,” said Lafontaine. Then he nodded with satisfaction. “It looks like you’re keeping up your end of the bargain on the blood farms.”
“We don’t really have a choice,” said Claude, a scowl forming on his face.
“Sure you do. You could let him die.”
Claude shook his head, exasperated.
Lafontaine turned to assess the president as if he’d never seen him with his sightless eyes before, starting at his feet and scanning him upward. Then he turned back to Claude and Reginald.
“I shouldn’t let him go,” he said. “I’ve heard the stories about vampires from my grandmother’s day. You used to stay in the shadows. You hid, before anyone knew you even existed. But this one right here —” He shook Timken’s chain. “— was the one who made you come out. He’s the one who planned the slaughter of humanity.”
“Well,” said Claude, “him and me.”
Lafontaine was looking at Timken again. He sighed. “Well,” he said, “a deal is a deal.” He locked eyes with Claude, then with the others. He paused. Then he said, “Do I need to remind you that if you try anything, we’ll kill you all?”
Claude laughed.
Lafontaine ignored the insult. “And do I need to remind you that if you think you can kill us, you’re sorely mistaken?”
This time, Claude didn’t break a smile.
“And while we’re at it, I’ll just go ahead and remind you that we’ve watched you since you rolled out of New York, since you took that wrong turn seventeen miles back and had to turn around. We’ve got eyes in the sky, and eyes all around. Enough to be sure that you don’t have anyone waiting to jump on us this time.”
“Fine,” said Claude.
Lafontaine nodded. “Then go ahead and do your part.”
Claude looked down at the phone in his hand. “General Thax?” he said.
“Yes, sir?”
“Release the humans.”
“Yes, sir.”
They stood for a moment, everyone staring at each other. Claude started to talk, but Lafontaine held up a finger. He looked over at the guard beside him. The guard touched an earpiece, listened, and then nodded. Then Lafontaine carefully, using only his fingertips, lifted the silver chain from around Timken’s neck.
“Wouldn’t want to touch his skin with mine and kill him by accident,” he said, noticing Reginald’s gaze. Then he laughed. “Well… at least not yet.”
The chain came off. Lafontaine nodded at Timken. The guard raised his weapon and trained it on the president’s back, casually, just in case. Claude watched the display, seething. But something was wrong; Claude was too tense. Something had gone sour. They needed to finish this and get out.
Timken walked the short distance and came to stand beside Claude. He straightened his suit coat.
“You okay, sir?” said Claude.
Timken nodded. “I’m fine.”
Then Claude looked directly at Lafontaine, grasped Timken’s head between his hands, and twisted it off his neck.
“Now,” he growled, “you have nothing to hold against us.”
Timken’s body had begun to spark. Claude shoved it hard at the guard. Timken’s corpse, now flaming, struck the guard like a two-hundred-pound sack of flour, driving him to the ground. The guard’s head racked hard on the concrete of the parking lot, and then he began to burn.
Claude had dropped the phone when he’d decapitated Timken. He stooped to pick it up.
“General Thax,” he said, “tell the farm guards to kill the humans.”
“Sir?”
He raised his eyes to stare at Lafontaine. “Do it.”
Claude pocketed the phone, then marched slowly toward the human.
“Stay back!” he said, raising his hands. “I’m contaminated!”
“Oh, don’t worry,” said Claude, a smile surfacing beneath his black goatee. “I won’t kill you. I want to be sure you’re able to see them die.”
EVIL
REGINALD WAS SHELL-SHOCKED. OF all the ways the exchange could have unfolded, this was the one he hadn’t seen coming. But after Lafontaine ran from the parking lot to his presumably waiting troops, Claude turned and marched unhurriedly past the burning guard, stopping just long enough to drive his boot into the man’s face and end his misery. Then he began to walk back the way they’d come without a word. Reginald, after a pregnant moment, followed. He was in a dream. What would happen now? And how had he — Reginald Baskin, protector of Nikki and Claire — failed them all?
Claude waited for Reginald to catch up. The humans, who’d obviously been watching, were already descending on the parking lot and the running figure of Walter Lafontaine. Reginald came up beside the new president and looked over, feeling that if he’d never done it before, he was now looking into the face of pure evil. Claude didn’t turn. Reginald found himself no longer angry at the big man. He couldn’t be angry because he felt so many other emotions in anger’s place: disbelief, terror, ejected from reality.
The whole game had changed in the span of thirty seconds. Anything could happen now. He could imagine the blood farm guards gunning down the retreating humans, wasting bullets and lives and stock, decimating the blood supply through the Nation’s own volition. Reginald could almost understand if Claude had sacrificed Timken in the Vampire Nation’s best interests, as Timken had always seemed to think he was doing. But if that was Claude’s intention, wouldn’t he have recaptured the humans instead of executing them? Now the Nation would be just as short on blood as if they’d gone free — but now, the humans would be twenty times more driven to unleash everything they had.
“You’ve killed us all,” Reginald said, his mouth wanting to hang open.
But milliseconds later, Claude half-squatted and grabbed Reginald’s left calf, casually straightening up and dropping Reginald onto his back with a thud. Then the world became a blur of dust and pain as Claude ran, dragging Reginald behind him. Reginald could feel his skull opening, could feel the skin ripping off his back.
It went on forever. Reginald let his mind go, turning inside, finally finding voluntary control of his internal pain switch — or maybe just rediscovering traumatic shock. But then sometime later, he was thrown roughly through the door of the USVC building’s loading bay, left to bleed and heal in a pile on the floor. Claude didn’t bother with pleasantries once he’d delivered Reginald like so much incoming freight. He blurred away, and then Reginald was alone.
Reginald ran upstairs to find Nikki, Claire, and Brian. He didn’t need to tell them what had happened. They knew that the humans had been executed; they’d watched it unfold live on VNN. They hadn’t, however, known that Timken had been killed, though they’d assumed from what they’d seen publicly that the deal had gone bad. The propaganda machine, however, was already hard at work, trying to turn the slaughter of the blood stock into some kind of a necessity, or possibly even a victory.
“He’s done,” said Nikki. “They’ll lynch him. His own people.”
Reginald shook his head. “They won’t. There’s only room for one enemy in the public eye, and right now, the bigger enemy is the humans.”
“But Claude…”
“… will be the man in charge when the dust settles, if it ever does. And the vampires of the world will become convinced that whatever happened at the farms had to be done once Claude explains how the humans killed the president.”
“Nobody will fall for that,” said Brian.
Reginald turned to his brother with a small smile. “I wish I could still believe that,” he said.
Reginald demanded that they leave, and nobody argued. He began packing the room, barking at Nikki and Brian to do the same. Claire, who’d only brought a backpack, followed them around in turns, sticking mostly with Reginald because he moved at a speed she could keep up with. They had the room cleared in just over a minute.
Once they were packed, they trotted to the elevator. They began moving upward. Then the elevator shuddered to a stop, and the emergency lights went on. It could be Claude clamping them down and trying to keep them in place, or it could be that the power was out, that the US Vampire Council building had finally fallen under the weight of the human population of New York.
Reginald shoved Claire to the front of the elevator. Claire looked over her shoulder once, but he only nodded. She put her hand against the panel, and the elevator’s overhead light immediately lit and the box began to move. It reached the top floor, and Reginald nodded at Claire again to take the lead. She did, taking them to the stairwell and then to the roof, where the sky overhead was gray, still glowing from below with the lights of the city. The helicopter was still where Claire had left it, landed askew like the world’s worst aerial parking job. Reginald wanted to crack a joke to loosen the mood, but before he could, on the street far below, they saw an explosion of bright light — a bit of ultraviolet flash preceding a conventional explosion as the wall around the protected section of the city was breached. And perhaps, Reginald thought, that bomb had been a dirty one. Why not? Maybe they’d even made their biological weapon airborne by now. They had the brains and the vampires were forty years out of practice. And the humans, who owned the day and the open land, were slowly buying themselves all the time they’d ever need.
The helicopter lifted off under Claire’s touch, and the chopper full of vampires began lumbering through the sky over Manhattan. Reginald half expected artillery to bring them down, but there was too much excitement and light and fire below; neither the humans nor vampires were concerned about one lone helicopter out about its business. The thundering of the rotors was deafening. The ride was jarring; they kept pitching up and down, lurching either with the breeze or under Claire’s inexpert piloting. He wished he could fly without assistance — just fly through the breeze like a bird or Superman. Maurice had flown, once, when he’d come to save Reginald and die in the doing. But what had Brian said? That the vampire agent was like human adrenaline, that it responded in times of extreme duress to give vampires strength and new abilities. But how was that possible? Nobody knew. The very thing that made them them, and nobody knew anything about it. Was it a germ? A virus? Reginald had asked, but the reactions he always got were almost perplexed. How could anyone know such a thing? And really, why would anyone care?
Curiosity wasn’t a problem for humans, and it had never ceased being present in Reginald when he’d turned. So why was that? But that, too, was something nobody seemed to know.
They crossed the sky in their giant mechanical bird, a middle-aged woman who looked like a college student piloting the craft without knowing how she was doing it. Reginald wondered if Claire had thought to check the gas, then wondered if it mattered. Could she turn the rotors herself? Could she run the engine? Could she make sparks in the cylinders, driving the pistons by the force of mental incendiaries? But ultimately it didn’t matter; they made it back and unloaded, leaving the copter at the converted hospital where Claire had found it. Then they located the car she’d taken, found it blessedly dayproofed, and drove into the wilds, into a thicket, and waited for the daylight to arrive.
MADE
“PUT IT RIGHT THERE, FATASS,” said Maurice, pointing Reginald to a spot where he could slot another piece into the codex puzzle.
Inside Reginald’s mind — his brain working as his body slept in the shielded, dayproofed car — he sat his imaginary self on a chair. The room around him became a study, responding to his mental desire to have a studious discussion. Then he said, “I’m not a fatass, Maurice.”
“Really.”
“Really. I’m Reginald Baskin. You’re Maurice Toussant. Or at least, you were. I’m not fat and I’m not white and you don’t have the acne of a teenager. I’m not a vampire and you’re not a vampire. We’re just Reginald and Maurice.”
Reginald’s mental projection of Maurice sat in an imaginary leather chair across from Reginald’s. “This is fascinating,” he said.
“Nobody wants to see Reginald, except for Nikki and Claire. They all want me for what they think I am. But I’m not those things. I’m more than those things.”
“But you are also those things, Reginald,” said Maurice.
“I refuse to be defined as fat. I refuse to be defined as a mastermind, or a strategist. I definitely refuse to be defined as a leader, as Claire said once upon a time that I was supposed to be. And I also refuse to be defined as a vampire or a human. I hate both of them. I want out. I want to be my own thing.”
“I see. And how do you plan to do that?”
“I’ll stay in here,” Reginald said. “In here — and nowhere else — I am only Reginald. I am only myself, and nothing else.”
Maurice leaned forward and poked Reginald in his big imaginary gut like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. “Then tell me,” he said, “why are you still fat in here?”
Reginald looked down, seeing his imagined body with his internal eyes. He hadn’t thought about that.
Maurice continued. “Do I have to point out that I’m actually mostly you, and that hence it is you who keeps calling you ‘fatass?’ Do I have to point out that if you are you in here and nothing else, then it is you who has chosen to present you to yourself as a fat vampire?”
As if on cue, Reginald’s fangs popped out. He put his hand over his mouth.
“You are who you are, Reginald. The decision you have to make isn’t whether you are going to be what and who you are, but whether you can accept it. And this?” He gestured out at the mostly assembled vampire codex, which was inexplica
bly still visible through the wall even though they’d sat down in a mental study. “This tells all of us who we all are. Only you could solve this puzzle. You understand that, right? After forty years of living with this puzzle in your head, that has finally sunk in, hasn’t it?”
Reginald shrugged. “I guess.”
“Then that means that you really are a kind of Chosen One. Nobody wants to think about that — especially the Chosen Ones themselves, because it sounds so douchey — but it’s true. Only, you weren’t really chosen. You were made. You were a statistical eventuality. Nobody handpicked you to decipher the codex. The codex was always there in plain sight. That piece in your hand? I could have noticed that particular memory when I was alive. Hell, it’s from my own memories! And I had access to the thoughts of my maker to some degree, so there are other pieces I could have seen. But only you, who were special enough to see it all, could have put the entire puzzle together.”
“Because Balestro gave me that blast back in Germany,” said Reginald. “If he hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t be able to see the entire vampire bloodline. And if I couldn’t see the bloodline, I couldn’t put it all together.”
“True,” said Maurice. “But Balestro only chose you after you were already here. Maybe he gave you the ability to bloodwalk after he realized who you already were — that you were the only mind ever created that could have seen order in all of these memories… that could have looked through all of that vampire history and seen the pattern in it.”
Reginald felt exasperated. Something had bothered him from the very beginning, but he hadn’t yet verbalized it even inside his own head. It came out now, as he looked across the codex puzzle and saw how close it was to completion — how close this whole adventure was to being over, for better or for worse.