It was quiet in the woods. The campfire had bothered Reginald, just as the mirror tent had bothered him during the day. He kept imagining SWAT scenes from movies. He kept waiting for the authorities to find them, but then he realized the authorities had better things to do. The world was falling apart, and nobody cared about one fat vampire and his girlfriend.
“So you can’t hear my thoughts,” he said.
“No.”
“Have you ever been able to?”
“Just a sense of your mood. Why?”
He was thinking of how, during their escape from Charles Barkley’s council, he’d “talked” to Nikki and Maurice in order to guide them out. He’d actually glamoured Claude, Timken’s right-hand man and Maurice’s brother, to send him off their trail during the TGV attacks. But by all accounts, the vampires whose minds he influenced didn’t hear words. They got impulses and they acted. Nikki had just said she could only sense his mood. So what was this mind-reading ability he’d felt lately? It didn’t seem normal. He couldn’t just sense Nikki’s mood; he could go into her mind and put it on like a suit of clothes. Back at Karl’s, he’d been able to do the same… and he didn’t even think he was related to Karl. Even if blood ties could explain why he’d been able to see full sentences and full experiences before Karl spoke them (which they couldn’t), how was it possible if there was no blood tie?
“It’s nothing,” he said, forcing himself to let it go.
The fire flickered. Nikki shifted on his lap.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said.
“Uh-oh.”
“In the winter, the VWC is at the north pole.”
“Apparently.”
“So that means Santa is a vampire. It’s only logical.”
Reginald snorted laughter. Nothing about what they were doing right now was remotely funny, and what she’d said was stupid. The contrast made it so much funnier than it had any right being.
“Maybe he just lives near the vampires,” said Reginald.
“I think he’s a vampire. Think about it. Don’t you think that only a vampire could deliver toys to everyone in one night?”
“Depends on the vampire,” said Reginald. He was thinking about how he’d get caught in the first chimney he visited. Then, the next morning, the family would light the fireplace and roast his chestnuts on an open fire.
“Well, if Santa isn’t a vampire, I sure hope he’s got one of those big guns like the AVT uses,” she said, her head in his lap. “For naughty little vampire boys and girls.”
He said nothing. The discussion was still stupid, but for Reginald, Nikki’s mention of guns had turned the talk sinister instead of funny. Meaning and intention and the gravity of their situation returned, unwanted. And for the millionth time, Reginald wondered: At the end of the day, which side are we on?
They were going to visit the Vampire World Command while avoiding humans… but then, once they learned what they needed to learn, they’d start avoiding vampires and trying to help humans. But in doing so, they didn’t want to fight vampires. And they didn’t want to kill humans. They were firmly in the middle, where nobody had any right to be. Vampires already considered them traitors, and humans were learning to consider them demons. Nikki, Reginald, Karl, everyone back at the house in America, and most of the dispersed EU Council members were combatants without a cause. They could only lay in the middle of the road and wait to see which line of traffic would be the first to run them over.
“Reginald?” she said.
“Mmm?”
“Is this the end of the world?”
He looked down, disarmed. But she wasn’t looking at him. She was looking out across the fire.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re sure?”
“I don’t know, Nik,”
She looked up. “I thought you were the master brain. The one who knew it all.”
“I know that we need to get moving. It’s been dark for over an hour now. We need to get south. We need to get to the World Command, and we need to find the codex.”
“So that you can stop the world from ending.”
“So that I can do my best.”
She inhaled, then exhaled. The motion, on Reginald’s lap, felt fiercely human.
“You have to do one thing before we start running again,” she said.
“Yes?”
“You have to take me inside the tent,” she said.
“And help you pack?”
She rolled her head to look at him. “If that’s what you call it.”
CROSSING
THE RUN TO THE CAPE took almost two weeks.
Nikki was tireless. She ran, with Reginald on her back, for almost the entire span of darkness each night. The first night they rested often — for Reginald’s benefit, not Nikki’s. He told her that holding on was very hard and made his arms and legs burn. So halfway through that first night, they broke into a construction supply store and Nikki — showing the ingenuity that Reginald loved and was often humiliated by — scouted out the material she’d need to create what was essentially a gigantic baby sling. Working through the course of the next day with a needle and thread, she made a device that had loops for Reginald’s arms and legs and a belt for herself — and the next night when she ran, Reginald was strapped tight to her like an infant in a papoose. It was possibly the most humiliating thing that anyone had done to anyone else, ever, in the history of time. But it got the job done — and Reginald, emasculated, couldn’t bring himself to complain.
They moved southeast through Europe. Originally Nikki wanted to head through Spain and across the straight into Morocco, but Reginald, fearing AVT forces clustered at natural choke points, said they should stick to land travel until they had no other choice. So they went through the middle east, crossing a bridge at Istanbul, and continued into Syria, Jordan, Israel, and then into Egypt. Then they detoured to check out the pyramids and the sphinx because Nikki, who’d never seen either, insisted.
They made their way through Africa at night, crossing the desert (which cost them time; running in sand was slower going) and avoiding all cities. But even when they camped at dawn and ventured out just before sunrise to hunt, they saw signs that the war had gone worldwide — or that the Annihilist’s “exterminate and leave behind” strategy had finally triggered its sleeper cells. They found entire African villages empty save body parts and blood. They spotted clusters of vampires crossing the desert, and steered clear. This part of the world didn’t have high-tech protection like the AVT, and the vampires seemed to be taking full advantage.
Large stretches of time passed in which they didn’t see a single living human. When they did see groups, they watched from a distance, staying out of sight. The humans clustered and huddled in tribes, fires burning in a circle around the edges. Seeing them cower broke Nikki’s heart. The tribes had nothing that would be effective against their foes, save perfectly-aimed spears. All but the poorest of the groups had guns among them, but they would fire lead, not silver or wood. Instead of finding genuine ways to protect themselves, they’d embraced cliches. Crosses and garlic hung in public. And so, one night, unable to watch any more, Reginald walked into a large settlement with his arms up, wrapped in desert garb he’d pulled off of a body. He handed over his AVT rifle, explaining what it was and what it seemed to be able to do. He gave the humans the light grenades he’d confiscated. Then he left, waiting as he jogged away for the humans to try the weapons on his retreating back. But even though the white man had come out of the desert at night and returned to it without so much as a torch, they didn’t fire. There was no way, they seemed to decide, that he could be a vampire.
When they reached South Africa, the air became cooler and the dead people became whiter. They made it to Cape Town, ducking through shadows and dodging the occasional native human peacekeeping force (and the occasional bloodsucker gang) and eventually located the vessel Claire had steered them to: a British titan called the H.M.S. Vagabond, heavily insu
lated and equipped for a polar voyage. The researchers who’d intended to sail it were, in all likelihood, as dead as the rest of the human population of Cape Town. Reginald didn’t think they’d mind if he and Nikki took it.
Learning to pilot the thing was a daunting task. Claire, still bunkered down in America, pushed them the ship’s specs on Reginald’s phone, but the problem wasn’t knowledge of what to do; it was manpower. The huge vessel was intended for use by a crew, not two lone people. Nikki compensated, rushing here and there under Reginald’s direction to perform all of the necessary tasks. And as she did, Reginald got a mental picture of a plate-spinner trying to keep a dozen things going at once without allowing anything to crash.
Once they were underway and the maneuvers required to de-dock were behind them, things became easier. Claire hacked their GPS signal and navigated, yelling at Reginald to put the hammer down and stop treating the rudder like an old lady. Nikki did housekeeping. Before boarding the Vagabond, they’d broken into various locales as needed in order to stock up, and while Reginald minded the dark water, Nikki put their supplies in order: cases upon cases of blood stolen from a blood bank, human food for Reginald’s whims, and a ton of cold-weather gear. Despite being vampires, they were already cold, but there was another reason besides comfort to stay warm: winter antarctic temperatures could drop below 100 below on the Fahrenheit scale, meaning that if they weren’t careful, the water in their bodies and blood would quite simply freeze them solid.
Before steaming, they’d laid in what they’d need to dayproof the ship’s bridge. Once they were clear of the Cape, they begun laying large sheets of OSB over the windows, caulking the seams and rigging a periscope that Reginald coated with an UV-repellant coating. The crossing took longer than it should have because like most people, Reginald had never piloted an enormous ship through perilous freezing water using a periscope. He was terrified of icebergs — something he’d never had much of a reason to research and hence knew little about, save the fact that they were mostly below the surface. When the ship made noises, Reginald flinched. He told Nikki that he kept imagining a Titanic scenario. Nikki volleyed back that he was steering well, that slow-going was just fine, and that slowly turning into vampsicles together in the antarctic water amidst ship detritus would be romantic.
They motored day and night, coming onto the deck once the sun was down — a phase that consumed most of the clock’s 24 hours as they went further south. It took five days to see land, which they finally did once they reached the harbor used by research vessels and cruise ships that Claire had steered them to. It was a summer dock, clotted with winter ice. Nikki jumped down and took up manual icebreaking duty, falling in occasionally and executing astonishing aquatic thrusting motions to spring out when she did. Reginald steered behind her until they were tied down, at which point Nikki, wet and freezing, wrapped herself in five blankets and announced that her nipples were hard enough to cut diamonds.
They disembarked and began walking the ice in their arctic gear. They crossed the continent through the endless night, Reginald strapped to Nikki’s back and Nikki wearing spiked crampons on her arctic boots. The cold, even for two vampires, was horrifying. It was worse for Nikki than Reginald, owing to her low body fat. When they stopped to rest (arbitrary times, seeing as there was no longer any daylight), they zipped their sleeping bags together and he used his bulk to warm her, allowing her daily frostbite to heal and her dead (and sometimes frozen off) fingers to regrow.
Eventually Claire called them again. The phone was sluggish despite having been stashed in Reginald’s man-cleavage, and Claire said that operating the thing from half a world away felt like shoving through slush because the cold made the signals so slow — and hence was why she’d switched to calling them audio-only. Maurice came onto the line and gave them a report: they were still in the house, still bunkered in, but now repelling regular attacks with more and more difficulty. An AVT contingent had broken through the gates using a reinforced vehicle, but the neighborhood was rife with vampire activity and the AVT soldiers hadn’t lasted long. Maurice, Brian, and the others had stripped the AVT of their weapons, then turned them on the invading vampires. When night came, they repaired the perimeter themselves and reinforced what they could, taking up stations and waiting. Maurice said they’d started to see Sedition Army troops on the street — organized and highly-trained vampires now present to augment the unarmed feral vampires who were already swarming. There were still pockets of humans around, but they were being systematically rooted out and destroyed. Most of this was being done with explosives, because although a human had to invite a vampire into his house, the same was not true of a grenade or a molotov cocktail.
All of the “we’re all friends here” masks were off, Maurice told them. What news was still on the human airwaves told humans to fight the monsters among them and told them the most effective ways to do so. It urged them to reinforce their homes, then to use the daylight hours to burn any nests they could find. Some humans got their hands on AVT weapons and enjoyed brief sprees before being dismembered. Most were simply rooted out and slaughtered.
Maurice’s house, being a vampire house, fell into equilibrium. There was no love in the vampire community for Maurice Toussant and those he protected, but Maurice was a lesser target than the many humans still out there to kill. The vampire news stations had the exact opposite tone of the human stations. VNN and the other outlets sounded like enthusiastic telethons: tallying wins, highlighting best-of attacks, tracking body count. Maurice said he could see Claude’s influence behind the reports. Timken kept his appearances professional, talking politically (and while wearing a tie) about doing what needed to be done in order to ensure survival of vampirekind, but the non-Timken media pieces were rife with sinister overtones. A few public service announcements (which aired in Fangbook sidebars and as intros to all Fangbook videos, as well as on the VNN feed) warned vampires that humans could be deadly, and that any left alive and unbound after the war would multiply… and then come after their families. Slogans about rooting out and eradicating disease were developed. Jingles were written. Maurice said it made him sick, but that it seemed to make others feel secure. “All very Claude,” he added with a retch.
Reginald asked Maurice if he knew the extent of the human body count, but it was Claire who answered. The human internet was dying or dead, she told them, but the vampire infrastructure was strong. The information she’d been able to siphon from available sources suggested that the human population might have diminished by as much as sixty percent, with human populations in underdeveloped nations being disproportionately high. Entire lower-income regions, she said, seemed to be decimated. She said it coldly, appraisingly, as if it meant nothing — as if her own species wasn’t becoming more and more endangered with each passing day.
They wished Maurice and Claire good luck and hung up. Reginald sat with his legs hugged to his chest and pondered. Nikki cried, and her tears froze like icicles. Then they packed the tent and moved on, half convinced that anything they could still manage to do would be too little, too late.
They didn’t know where they were going.
They didn’t know where they were going.
They didn’t know where they were going.
Until one day, they did.
Reginald could only follow his nose, reasoning that if his finding the codex was the logical result of a trillion causes in the universe, all he had to do was wait for those things to cause his next action. And so eventually, one endless night while they were both on foot, scoping the area within a few miles of the pole in concentric circles (staying away from the human research stations), Reginald’s crampons scraped something under the ice. He fell to his knees and began clearing snow with his gloves, working by the light cast from his headlamp. He’d scraped the top of what appeared to be a handle, and it was attached to something else that appeared to be a trapdoor. And just as he was wondering how to open the thing — and totally unsure as to
what it might be — the door began to tilt upward from one end, revealing that it had sides like the spout on a container of salt. It rose further, revealing a long, downward-sloping hallway into the ice.
Reginald looked at Nikki. Nikki looked at Reginald. Then they both looked at the open hallway, which was silent above the endless wind and was illuminated with red lights.
“Is this it?” said Nikki.
“I don’t know.”
“It could be a human place,” she said. “Like a secret military base.”
“It could,” said Reginald.
“I don’t want to go into a human place,” said Nikki. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but they don’t like us much right now.”
But Reginald was already walking, already plodding down the long hallway into the ice.
The tunnel went down and down. Eventually it leveled out and they walked horizontally, soon arriving at a nondescript metal door. Reginald pushed and found it unlatched; it swung freely like a door in a hospital’s hallway. Nikki followed. When the door closed behind them, it made an audible clicking sound, latching where it hadn’t latched before. Reginald turned to see that the door had a security keypad next to it, and while they watched, it seemed to arm. Keys on the pad lit in a rapid sequence, one after the other, as if following one another in a line. The numerical sequence the lights made was 0-7-4-1-5-3-6-9-0.
Nikki was watching the keypad with horror.
“It’s an alarm,” she said, looking around. They were totally alone, standing in a well-lit industrial-looking hallway with doors along both sides. It had an unused, basement look, as if this were the backstage area of wherever they were — somewhere that nobody used except for storage. And judging by the feel, they weren’t supposed to be here, either.
Reginald ran the sequence of lights back in his mind, watching the buttons light.
“No,” he said. “It’s Claire. Claire let us in.”
Nikki looked at the keypad, then at Reginald.
Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse Page 9