Reginald realized what he was looking at. Then Nikki’s voice said, “I’m okay!”
Reginald wanted to scream. She’d followed him. Of course she’d followed him. His love for her and his fear for her were temporarily overrun by his frustration with her. She’d never trusted him to lead, and she’d never trusted him to be able to take care of himself. It was sweet until it wasn’t sweet; it was kind until it was flat-out dangerous. Had she really thought she could sneak in? They’d been over this for the entire drive. There were no holes in Lafontaine’s plan. The only way to meet the force in the park would be to go in heavy, with hundreds of soldiers. They didn’t have hundreds of soldiers. They had four ordinary folks, and only two of them were any good in a fight. The idea of this whole thing had been to concede, to be humble, and to try to use brains above brawn. Reginald was never supposed to win this confrontation. Even the best-case scenario would be neutral. He was supposed to roll over and expose his belly, content to die so long as he could convey the truth he needed to convey. But now, Nikki had made that impossible. All that her lack of trust had done was to make sure that Reginald couldn’t even roll over and be heard. She hadn’t saved him, and she hadn’t saved herself. And now everyone, everywhere, was going to die.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Nikki,” he said. Then, knowing it was a betrayal and hating himself for it, he yelled, “I didn’t know she was coming! I told her not to come!” The words felt horrible passing his lips, but the time had come for desperate measures. He and Nikki were goners anyway. He had to do what he could to salvage anything that could be salvaged.
Lafontaine walked closer. Nikki’s captor held her where she was. Reginald could hear the jingle of silver chains around her shoulders and arms.
“What was the plan?” said Lafontaine. “Were you going to kill me? Was she going to sneak up behind me and bite my head off?”
Reginald felt seconds slipping away, felt blood leaking through the world’s cracks. “No!” he shouted.
The human shook his head. “When I first saw you, I was shocked. I’d never seen a vampire like you. My grandfather told me that vampires are like animals. They kill their own kind. Grandpa said that vampires are pure survival of the fittest. They’ll only turn thin, strong, and fast humans and will drain the rest.” He gestured at his own body. “Maybe I’d have joined you once upon a time. But I figured yours was a club that wouldn’t have me.”
He started to pace, his shadow washed out by the multi-directional glow of the field lights and the supplementary spotlights.
“Of course, spending my whole life under the thumb of your superiority, being fed on, being treated like slaves… well, that turned me off to the idea pretty quickly, and by the time I was twelve and my beloved grandfather was killed by a blood farm guard for stealing tools to make me a toy — just one toy for the boy who grew up with an IV in his arm — I’d pretty much decided that if I ever became a vampire, the first thing I’d do would be to kill my maker. Then I’d kill the next vampire I could find, and then the next, and then the next until they killed me. And years later when I escaped, I vowed that I’d see the planet wiped clean of you or die trying. But I’d never again be your… your food.”
He walked up to Reginald and stood in front of him. He squatted, surprisingly agile for a big man.
“But you? You weren’t like the others — and honestly, the fact that you are who you are is the reason I’m even here tonight. I saw you in that first melee. You reacted like a human. You’re slow. You’re weak. You were afraid. I can tell the others don’t even respect you. It’s in the way they look at you…”
Reginald stopped him, unable to help himself. It was Lafontaine’s mention of “looking” that did it.
“What happened to your eyes?” he said.
A small, surprised smile crawled onto Lafontaine’s dark lips. He pointed at Reginald. “And that’s another thing about you, Reginald Baskin: you’re curious. I’ve never met another vampire who was curious. Our scientists have tried to figure that out — to understand your psychology — but it’s hard. Vampires don’t tend to be cooperative when we catch them and try to test them, and when we remove your brains to autopsy them, they turn to ash. We had to study your blood while you were still alive with it still circulating in your veins, or else we wouldn’t have been able to develop our ace-in-the-hole.” He ran a finger up his bare arm, presumably rubbing a line in the disease agent on his skin. “But it’s not just curiosity that most vampires lack. I’ve never seen a vampire who appears embarrassed, or self-conscious, or shy. But you have all of that. You hide behind the others, yet you do things that are selfless. You think beyond yourself. We’ve discovered the bond between maker and made, though we don’t understand it, and we’ve watched V change under our microscopes when a maker’s progeny is in danger…”
“V?” said Reginald.
“That’s what we call the organism in your blood.”
“What is it?” said Reginald, suddenly forgetting that he was bound, in a hundred gun sights, and that Nikki was being held captive. This was the question he’d asked his own kind over and over and never gotten an answer to. It was so strange to think that his curiosity about himself might, in his final hours, be sated by a human.
Lafontaine’s strange little smile became larger and again he pointed at Reginald.
“See? There’s that curiosity again. To answer your question (because I’ve got an investigative mind myself, and because you’re not going anywhere), it looks like a virus. Not quite alive and not quite not dead. It’s almost undead, like you.”
“A virus?”
He nodded. “And to answer your other question, I lost my eyes to cancer a few years ago, after escaping the farm. But every cloud has a sliver lining, because it makes me impervious to your little mind tricks.”
“But you can see.”
Lafontaine touched a small device pinned to his earlobe that Reginald had taken for an earring. “Sonar,” he said. “Like a bat. With a bit of training, I can see nearly as well as you can. Well… as well as a human can see, anyway.” He sighed. “Though I do miss colors.”
Behind Lafontaine, Nikki struggled. The sound of her chains seemed to remind Lafontaine of her presences, and of what it meant.
“I wanted to hear what you had to say,” he told Reginald. “But every time I try to listen to vampires, someone gets killed. But it’s okay. Silver lining, see. Because you were so unique that I was beginning to question my conviction. I was afraid I might be making a mistake, and that you weren’t all worth killing. And that made it hard, because you make it impossible for us to let you survive. So in a way, I’m glad that it has turned out this way. It makes me feel so much better about what we need to do.”
Reginald swallowed. “Your weapon,” he said. “You have a way to deliver it.”
Lafontaine nodded. “Again, I don’t want to kill all of you, Reginald. I really don’t, even after your species killed my entire family after they’d gotten too old to milk for quality blood. I don’t want to kill you after you killed almost every human who once walked this planet.” He squatted again, his empty sockets meeting Reginald’s eyes as if they were the source of his sight. “My grandfather told me that once upon a time, there were human cities so full that the sheer number of people created disease. That there were countries that limited the number of children people could have, because the Earth was too full. Was that true?”
Reginald nodded. “It’s true.”
Lafontaine stood. “It’s an amazing thing to think of, all those people. I’ve seen the old bibles: ‘Go forth and multiply,’ they said. We did it once. You drove us back, and now we’ll have to do it again. And still, I don’t want to kill anyone. But in my shoes, what would you do?” He stood, now looking down at Reginald. “I’m told that your logical mind is unmatched. So I’m actually asking: what would you do, if there was an intelligent, vengeful group who wanted to kill you and suck you dry, who would hunt you forever and never relen
t? You’d have to eradicate them, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t have any choice, if you wanted your own kind to survive, but to kill them all.”
Reginald found himself recalling his encounter with Timken all those years ago. So much was the same between that meeting and this one. Reginald had been in a jail cell, held in place by silver. Timken had been asking Reginald’s opinion on a difficult decision, plumbing him for input. Like Lafontaine, Timken hadn’t wanted to do what he felt needed to be done… but what choice was there?
“I understand,” said Reginald.
Lafontaine turned to the guard holding Nikki. He gestured with his head and the solider dragged Nikki forward. She started to say something to Reginald, to apologize, but Reginald told her with his eyes not to bother. What was done was done. She had probably doomed them both — had, in fact, probably doomed them all — but it was what it was.
“Do you?” said Lafontaine. “Because I see how you are. We have eyes everywhere. It’s easy once we see how to piggyback on vampire communications protocols — a trick, by the way, that you used on us at the beginning, but which we improved on — and I’ve been watching you, Reginald. You and her…”
“My wife Nikki,” he said. It didn’t matter if Lafontaine knew Nikki’s name, but Reginald wanted to take any opportunity he could to humanize her in Lafontaine’s mind. He was already calling Reginald by his name, and Reginald could feel Lafontaine wanting to like him, wanting to find a solution. His thinking of her as “Nikki” rather than as a nameless assassin could only help.
“Well, you and Nikki and a few others seem different. But how am I supposed to pick out the good ones from the bad ones? My first duty has to be to my species. So what can I do?”
“I know what you can do,” said the guard holding Nikki, loud enough for only the two of them to hear.
The voice was familiar. And when Reginald looked up, he realized that the shape of the soldier was familiar, too. He was big, with broad shoulders.
Brian.
But when Reginald realized that his blood could almost see Lafontaine through the eyes of the vampire behind the visor, he realized that it wasn’t Brian after all.
It was Claude.
MERCILESS
IT ALL CLICKED.
WHY HE could feel so much emotion at the gathering, and why he’d thought he could inexplicably look into the minds of humans. Why he was getting a vague, spotter’s eye impression of the entire baseball field. What Charles had been doing on his phone while Reginald had been talking to Walker. Why, beyond mere visual similarity, he’d thought how much vampire and human troops looked alike in uniform. Reginald’s mental abilities were sticky; sometimes he had to be staring directly at an issue and asking exactly the right questions in order to see the obvious. But now that Claude had spoken, his mind asked the questions and got all the answers. He sent his mind out to the crowd of humans, recognizing the now-obvious fact that they weren’t all humans. His blood found Charles, Walker, and at least two dozen of the most elite, former V-Crew troops the USVC (and formerly the Annihilist Faction) had to offer.
Lafontaine turned, not understanding why the big guard had spoken. Reginald tried to warn him, but Claude had the human in a body lock in less than the blink of an eye, his big arm cocked around Lafontaine’s neck. Claude was dressed head-to-toe in armor, including gloves and boots. As he moved, Reginald could see that his gloves were doubled and that every seam and crack and crevice in the armor had been sealed. Claude held Lafontaine for ten, fifteen seconds without reacting in pain, without indicating that the humans’ weapon had sneaked past his defenses.
Claude’s movement happened so fast that the humans, who’d been looking outward rather than among their own for threats, didn’t react. By the time they caught a sense of what might be happening and began to stir, the other vampires in human armor had moved to strike, each subduing one or two humans each. The entire thing happened so quickly that it seemed rehearsed. It almost certainly had been. The movements were precise and practiced — the actions of seasoned experts. The exchange took two beats. One-two, and the balance of power had flipped.
Keeping Lafontaine restrained, Claude used his free hand to remove his own helmet.
“Hot as hell in there,” he said. “You’d think they’d make this shit more comfortable, seeing as they’re warm-blooded.”
Two of the soldiers walked forward. When they were halfway to the pitcher’s mound, one of the two pushed the other back, placing a hand on his chest. The snubbed soldier made a pouty little motion with his body and Reginald immediately realized that it was Charles. Which would make the other…
“Walker,” said Reginald. Then he added, “You titanic piece of shit.”
Walker removed his helmet and stood beside Claude. He whispered something into the big vampire’s ear, and Claude nodded. Walker waved Charles forward. Charles removed his own helmet and then, taking a cue, several of the undercover vampires around the field removed theirs. They’d executed the maneuver flawlessly. Every single human had been covered and neutralized, already disarmed and laying in the dirt with their hands behind them. Not a single shot had been fired, and not a single punch had been thrown.
Nikki, still bound, spit at Walker. A blob of white saliva landed on his cheek. He wiped it away and smiled a smile that was the exact opposite of his normal one.
“Hey,” he said, “it’s like this guy said.” Walker pointed at Lafontaine. “We’re between a rock and a hard place. What did you expect me to do? What did you think was going to happen to us if he found out that I’d helped you, which he absolutely would have?”
“You could have just not helped us,” said Reginald, feeling genuine anger boil inside himself. He began reaching out — not just with tendrils of thought, but with fists. He wanted to claw his way inside Claude’s and Walker’s and Charles’s minds, then do some damage. But Charles seemed to feel that they’d done the right thing in alerting the president to treachery, and both Walker and Claude had raised solid mental barriers against Reginald’s intrusion. His only hope was finding a way to distract them. Keeping Reginald out seemed to require constant effort. With their attention focused on his intrusion, maybe they’d miss something else.
Like Nikki, who was bound in silver.
Or Reginald, who was weak and slow.
And that was it. Just the two of them. There was no other help to be had.
The humans were all down, all literally under the gun. Claude had thought of everything.
“They have bombs, Reggie,” said Walker. “Big bombs filled with black tar.”
“It’s actually an antivirus,” said Lafontaine. Claude raised a boot and kicked him in the head.
Walker continued: “Once we picked off a few of their troops on the way here, we found one of their walkies with the security code still entered while we were putting on their armor. There’s a bomb in New York and one in Geneva, but they were talking like there are a bunch more. We don’t know where they are, but we know they’re there. And after you got done with your little chat, he was going to kill us all.”
“Still can,” Lafontaine croaked. Claude kicked him again.
“We’ll find them,” he said, glancing at the human. “Especially if you can’t phone home and tell them that we spoiled your party.”
“The bombs are set off unless the others hear from us,” said Lafontaine, smiling around a mouthful of bloody teeth. “Is this your first tangle with someone willing to use a dead man’s switch?”
Claude shook his head. “We’ll find them,” he repeated.
Lafontaine spat blood into the dirt. “This doesn’t matter. Kill everyone here or let us live. Either way, we win.”
But they didn’t win. Nobody won. Reginald felt his panic return, now exacerbated by the presence of yet more people who wanted to kill first and listen to what Reginald had to say later. Claude and the others had signed their own death warrants. Even if they found every single bomb, what would come next? They couldn’t ex
terminate humanity, and they wouldn’t be able to subdue them this time. The edge of that particular knife had become too sharp. At this point, the remaining humans would rather die than bleed.
“You assholes,” said Reginald. “I came here for a reason. None of you have any idea what you’re messing with.”
“They can’t kill us all,” said Claude.
“Oh yes we can,” said Lafontaine.
Claude looked down. His eyes flashed. He used his fist to strike the man very hard, suddenly incautious about whatever infection he may have slathered on his skin. Lafontaine’s head reeled, his movements conveying a swimminess that his lack of eyes couldn’t. He didn’t reply. He was lucky that the punch hadn’t killed him.
Claude picked Lafontaine up by the collar, lifting him off the ground, and bellowed into his face.
“YOU ARE NOT IN CHARGE! THIS IS NOT YOUR WORLD! THIS IS OUR WORLD!”
Lafontaine smiled slightly and mumbled, “The meek shall inherit the Earth.”
Claude dropped him, leaving the man to sputter in the baseball diamond’s dust and chalk. A bloody spit bubble came out of his mouth and popped, leaving a ring of red residue. Claude, above him, put his hands on his hips, looking around. The other vampires watched Claude. Then Claude turned and kicked Lafontaine in the ribs, making his body jump. He stooped down, again yelling in the resistance leader’s ear.
“WE ARE ON TOP! YOU ARE FOOD! JUST MOTHERFUCKING FOOD, DO YOU HEAR ME?”
Reginald looked over the top of Claude’s head. Walker was watching Claude. Charles was watching Walker.
“This is your president,” said Reginald.
Claude’s head snapped up. His wide eyes met Reginald’s, and his tirade turned from the human to the fat vampire in chains.
“DON’T YOU MOTHERFUCKING MOUTH OFF! YOU WITH YOUR FUCKING HUMAN-LOVING, COMPASSIONATE BULLSHIT!”
Reginald looked Claude in the eye. He kept his voice calm, pitching it so the others could hear. “Compassion isn’t only for humans. The problem with you is that you’ve never had any loyalty. Not to your president. Not to your so-called friends and allies. Not even to your own brother.”
Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest Page 16