“I don’t buy that,” said Nikki.
Karl smiled at her. “Most people do not. But look on the bright side — if you are correct, then maybe the way it will happen will be to your liking. And if that happens, will it matter that it was set from the beginning?”
Nikki pinched the bridge of her nose. “Here comes that headache again.”
Reginald pulled himself from the chrome and leather chair, feeling the weight of the world once again settle onto his shoulders. “Where is it, Karl? How do I read to the end of the plan — whether it’s to disrupt that plan or not?”
Karl shook his head. “I do not know. But if anyone today knows of such a thing, it would be Timken’s bosses.”
“Timken’s bosses?” Reginald had never heard of a power above the individual Councils, but now that Karl had said it, Reginald saw an image inside Karl’s mind: a box within a box within a box. And a seal broken, as if in case of emergency.
“The Vampire World Command,” he said.
“I’ve never heard of it,” said Reginald.
Karl shrugged. “You were not a Deacon.”
“Maurice never heard of it.” He felt suddenly certain of that. He’d tried hard to stay out of Maurice’s mind, but what Karl had just said sent out a tether, all the way across the sea, to Reginald’s maker. He found himself zeroed in on Maurice as if he were standing in the room, and realized the statement’s truth: Maurice, Deacon, two thousand years old, had never known of any such thing.
“Maurice was never trusted to be Deacon, even though he technically was one,” said Karl. He chuckled. “Let us just say that for a very long time, Maurice has been ruffling the feathers of those above him. But trust me, it exists. I would ordinarily be staked for telling you of it, but the VWC stays out of lower affairs unless in the case of crisis. This qualifies as that… and Reginald, not to make the burden upon you worse, but I fear your mind is the best hope we have.”
Reginald looked at the displaced EU Council Deacon, realizing that right here and now, he himself was the one in charge. Reginald was the one who would decide, who would move forward and leave Karl behind. He chose not to point out that Karl, who’d rolled his eyes at the idea of human optimism, had just used the laughable and pathetic word himself: hope.
“Where is it, Karl? Where can I find the Vampire World Command?”
“Where the sun never shines,” said Karl. “This time of year, it is below the frozen soil at the south pole.”
WAR
THEY WERE IN A TENT.
They’d made it as far as the foothills of the alps before the sun began to rise, and then they’d taken shelter inside a tent that Reginald had bought from a vampire survivalist Karl knew in southern France. The thing appeared to be made of normal fabric, but it was actually an opaque, UV-repellant material that the survivalist (his name was Philipe; he had an Errol Flynn mustache and a beret and Nikki had, later, called him a walking cliche) claimed they’d never seen before. In the sun, he promised, it literally reflected 99 percent of solar rays. Don’t leave eet in ze middle of a field, though, he’d told them, or ze glare you make will attract helicopters.
So they’d set the tent in a thicket of Swiss woods, miles distant from the nearest cuckoo clock house. Nikki said that Switzerland made her hungry for cheese, so before dawn, she’d run to town to buy some, later finding it unimpressive and dry. Reginald had her pick up Funions, delighted to discover that the Swiss sold them. They ate their human comfort food with the sun just beyond the special fabric, waiting for the day to end. They were both hungry for blood. They’d forgotten to feed the prior night, so Nikki promised to run out at sunset and wrangle them a deer. She made a face when she said it, but added that even if no permanent harm would be done, she couldn’t bring herself to feed on a human tonight, no matter how repugnant the alternatives.
They would need plenty of blood for the journey ahead of them. The only way they could make their journey was on foot, using whatever back roads they could find.
They’d stayed with Karl throughout the day to sleep, then had headed out at dusk with Nikki carrying Reginald on her back, Reginald carrying the tent and a few other supplies on his back. Before leaving, they’d turned on the Vampire News Network and human news feeds and discovered that overnight, a cell phone video of a vampire slaughter had gone viral. It had happened, coincidentally enough, in a Paris nightclub. The video contained a best-of reel of vampire abilities. Clear as day, Reginald, Nikki, and Karl watched as a trio of vampires ripped apart the entire crowd, leaping from wall to wall, blurring across the video’s field of vision with inhuman speed, jumping atop speaker stacks in single bounds. Right before the camera’s operator was killed, the camera saw fangs. Then blood. And then the phone had fallen into a puddle of gore.
It wasn’t clear how the video on that phone had leaked to YouTube, but it had. All of the human social networks were alive with it. Humans jumped in to corroborate the video’s revelations, sharing their own stories in the comments. All day long, while the three vampires slept in Karl’s lush apartment, humans had been adding their own videos to accompany the famous one — all claims that they were fake suddenly absent.
By dusk, the human president had taken to the podium, admitting in the most awkward speech ever given that certain quarters of the government were, in fact, aware of the existence of fanged creatures who drank blood and were supernaturally strong, supernaturally fast, and notoriously difficult to kill or wound. He avoided using the term “vampire,” but nobody failed to read between the lines. Within a half hour, the president’s speech — termed his “vampire speech” in defiance of his careful verbal two-stepping — had gone viral as well.
Reginald, Nikki, and Karl woke up to a city in chaos. The building next door was burning. Looking out Karl’s window in the scant remainder of the day’s light, they saw humans scampering here and there, seeking cover. After the sun was fully set, vampires joined the crowd and began to harvest the scattering humans openly. Nikki couldn’t watch. The streets were quickly littered with bodies; the vampires’ superior speed made killing their way through crowds lawnmower-simple. Shortly after, human Anti-Vampire Taskforce troops were deployed and the streets were dotted with men in armor and helmets. The trio watched as the humans fought back using explosive devices that blew like sunbursts, felling large groups of vampires or killing them outright. The AVT had guns like the one Reginald had stowed in his pack as well. They were shockingly effective. The wooden bullets either annihilated their targets in flames or did nothing. The gray bullets, on the other hand, seemed to slow the vampires but not kill them. When they were struck, they screamed in pain, they retreated if they could — before reinforcements arrived with more guns, silver nets, and UV grenades.
The war had begun. Reginald and Nikki, mission orders in hand, were tasked with leaving the city at the worst possible time.
So they waited, watching intermittently, feeling each wasted hour pass like a knife in the gut. Eventually the chaos exhausted itself and the street traffic thinned, most of the action presumably moving indoors or to other parts of the city. At first it seemed the AVT had won this quarter; human troops began patrolling the streets with their guns out, the beams of projected ultraviolet gunsights spearing the darkness in front of them. But even the patrols were a thin veneer on top of chaos. The AVT was heavily armored, but vampires had no real problem taking them out if they worked in groups. Human stragglers ran through the streets between the tussles from time to time, making chaos, drawing lone predators like roaches to bait.
Around the time Nikki and Reginald had waited as long as they could stand, a window of relative clarity opened. They said goodbye to Karl, and they ran.
Paris had changed overnight, becoming an apocalyptic battlefield. Things were strangely quiet. Cars were abandoned — some empty, some with their windows painted red from the inside. Traffic lights blinked, shepherding no traffic. Crosswalks were empty. Lone vampires skulked through the shadows. Armored
Anti-Vampire Taskforce soldiers marched in formation, aiming their guns.
Once Nikki and Reginald were out of the city, things became easier.
In the countryside south of Paris, Reginald’s uncharged phone rang. They ducked into a ditch and took the call, and Maurice told them what they already knew — that chaos had erupted in Western Europe and almost immediately spread overseas. A state of emergency had been declared in most countries with the infrastructure and wherewithal to do so, and as a result, the humans, who controlled all of the transportation, had shut down traffic into and out of all major cities. No planes were flying, no trains were rolling, no busses or taxis were available for hire, and cars everywhere were subject to search. Transportation might resume in time… but with what new screening processes in place?
“Rest assured,” Maurice told Reginald, “they’ve had contingency plans in place for years, maybe decades. They’ll load vehicles in direct sunlight. They’ll scan all passengers’ hands under a tanning lamp. There will be armed troops waiting for those who fail the screenings.” Maurice’s face, on the tiny screen of Reginald’s phone, locked eyes with Nikki, who was the more reckless of the two. “Seriously,” he said. “Don’t even try it.”
None of this surprised Reginald. He’d run through scenario after scenario in his mind since the day Timken had let him go free, with Timken assuring Reginald that taking the planet from the humans was the only way to survive. And once Reginald began to think about the way things were unfolding, it had seemed that Claire was right: there really was an underlying order to everything. There really was a best logical way for the pieces of existence to have unfolded. He could imagine the preparations the AVT had made. He could see the weapons they inevitably would have developed. He could picture the ways the humans would use their armies, how large those vampire-educated armies may have grown, and how they’d institute triage to save the largest numbers of humans while being willing to sacrifice the least. Humans owned the day. They had their weapons ready and waiting. And now that the genie was out of the bottle, they’d be using them.
So Reginald and Nikki sat in their tent in the Alps, waiting for dusk to fall. And when it did, Nikki ran out with an empty gallon jug and a funnel, slaughtered several deer, fed, and filled the jug with the blood that remained. Vampirism had turned Nikki into a killer, but killing still wasn’t in her nature. Nikki was a human first and a vampire second. And what was more: she wasn’t just a human; she was human. And that left her in the middle, conflicted. She didn’t even like the idea of draining deer. She’d needed blood to live for over a year, but she’d always taken it in the kindest way blood could be taken. And now, at the end of the world, she was being hunted by those she fed on — and loathed as a traitor by those who took blood with more malice than she did.
She slid the jug in front of Reginald. He knew better than to make his usual protests about how blood — and especially deer blood — was disgusting. He took his drink from a camp mug, forcing it down.
“Can you really do this?” he asked Nikki.
“Do what?”
“Run.”
“I’ve been running my entire adult life,” she told him.
“Run to the cape of Africa,” he clarified.
“I’ve never done that,” she admitted. “But I know that we stopped for rest because the sun rose, not because I was tired. I know that I’m technically dead already. And I know that if we stay in one place for too long, we’ll be slaughtered.”
“That’s what they think we’ll do. Slaughter them.” He didn’t have to explain who he was talking about. Humans. Anyone. Everyone.
“Well, there ain’t no good guys,” she said.
“There ain’t no bad guys,” Reginald answered.
“There’s only you and me, and we just disagree,” she finished.
Reginald smiled, because smiles were precious now, and needed.
“When we get there, we’re going to need a boat,” he said.
"'We’re going to need a bigger boat,'" Nikki quoted from the movie Jaws. You couldn’t mention boats around Nikki without hearing this line. When Philipe had warned them about the tent being seen by helicopters, she’d said another of her stock lines: “Get to the choppa,” a Schwartzenegger line from Predator. Philipe hadn’t gotten it.
But it was okay. There had to be somewhere in South Africa where they could get a boat. Any boat would do. If Nikki could row like she could run, they could cross the ocean to Antarctica even if all they could find was a dinghy. And if they fell in? Well, they were dead anyway. And with that thought, Reginald wondered if they could swim the rest of the way if they capsized. But the thought made him cold even while he sat in front of the warm fire they’d made outside the warm tent in the warm Swiss evening air. No, they’d need a bigger boat after all, he decided, and made a point to have Claire read him the location of any possible polar-equipped vessels docked at the Cape of Good Hope the next time they spoke. Nikki wouldn’t shut up when he made the announcement that they were going to need a big boat. Then she’d quote other dumb lines, because she was Nikki.
Reginald realized, yet again, that he wasn’t being any fun. It was regrettably something that happened to him when the world ended.
Karl hadn’t been able to give them more than the most vague information about the Vampire World Command. He’d said that it, like the old American Council, moved — but that it did so only twice each year. When it was summer in the northern hemisphere, the VWC was at the south pole, safe from human incursions due to the extreme, eternal nighttime temperatures. Just before the sun finally crested the south pole horizon each year, the VWC moved north, to a network of reinforced tunnels in the arctic ice — and there it remained until the sun set in the south.
“How will we find it?” said Nikki.
“We’ll find it,” said Reginald.
“But how?” she said.
“By finding it.” He looked at Nikki, her pretty face dancing in the flickering light of the campfire. “I’m not trying to be obtuse or annoying. But that’s the way fate works, it seems. Claire said I’m supposed to find the codex. If we need the VWC to find the codex, then we’ll find the VWC. That’s the ‘how’ of the matter.”
“So it’s fate?” she said.
“The way Claire explained it, it doesn’t sound like we’re bound from the outside. It’s not that things are forced to happen, per se. It’s that there is really only one main logical way, once you know enough of the available information, for things to work out.”
“What’s the difference?”
“It’s more like Claire predicted exactly what will happen than somehow cosmically requiring that we do certain things. Or saying that the angels required we do certain things.”
“But the angels or whoever set it all in motion… so that certain things would occur.”
He shrugged.
“So it’s fate. So it has to happen.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s splitting hairs.”
Nikki shivered. “I don’t like the idea that everything has been planned out for me.”
“But maybe nothing has really, really been planned out,” said Reginald. “Maybe someone just knows exactly what you’re going to do.”
“Because I don’t really have a choice. Because, despite appearances to the contrary, there’s only one thing I can do in any given scenario.”
Reginald shrugged.
She moved closer, put her thin hand on his large one. “If that’s true,” she said, “does that mean was I fated to meet you?”
“Seems that way.”
She smiled, then hugged herself against his arm. “Well, then I guess it’s not all bad.”
But something was bothering Reginald. He’d had a sense of unfolding from the very beginning, since the day he’d masterminded their escape from the American Vampire Council — the day Maurice had assassinated Deacon Logan. Back then, Nikki had pretended to be a vampire and Reginald had pretended to be a helpless victim. Both Nik
ki and Maurice had doubted that first plan, but Reginald never had. He’d known, without question, how the vampires would behave. The longer Reginald lived with his expanded vampire mind, the more things he began to see as inevitable — or, to put it another way, the more things he couldn’t help but think of as fated. But even that sense of logical predestination had become easier and more transparent lately, because he’d realized he had an edge. He no longer had just his own perspective from which to collect data to feed the grand equation. It was another new ability that he alone seemed to have, and its implications were troubling.
“Nikki?” he said.
She looked up.
“Can you feel me?”
She felt him.
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I can sense your mood,” she said. “When you’re away from me, I can feel you calling to me. Like when I went out to investigate back at Maurice’s, I could feel your worry.”
“But you can’t read my thoughts.”
He was looking directly down her shirt. He couldn’t help it. She was wearing a tank top, and it hadn’t been designed for running at the speeds Nikki had been running. Before dawn, she’d said she was going to break into a store somewhere and pick up five sports bras, which she’d wear all at once.
“I can read them now, yes,” she said, looking up and following his gaze.
“Normally, I mean.”
She shook her head, still nuzzling his arm. “No.”
“What about your hunger pains? When you couldn’t stop feeding, and were draining dozens of humans a month? Maurice said it was due to blood ties, and that you were sensing the hunger of other vampires in his line.”
“That’s not reading thoughts. It’s certainly not reading your thoughts.” She paused, then held up a finger. “Wait. One time I couldn’t stop thinking about a meat lover’s pizza, and then I got a boner. Was that your thought?”
“You can’t get a boner.”
She grabbed his crotch. “Got one,” she said.
Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse Page 8