Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse

by Johnny B. Truant

  But the phone remained silent.

  “We have to get out,” Nikki told him. “That’s all I really care about. I don’t care about the codex. And I didn’t think you did, either.”

  “It’s all I have,” he replied. It was a vague thing to say, but she knew what he meant. The world was dying — not just the humans, but the world itself. It was becoming a mass grave, and all the two of them had been able to do during their quest to save it was to watch more and more people die. They couldn’t fight the vampires. They couldn’t help the humans. They didn’t even know which side they were supposed to be on. If they did get out, should they form a resistance? Or should they just run and hide? The question wasn’t which side to fight for; the question was where to plant your flag and live out your post-apocalyptic life. He wanted to help, but he’d settle for continuing to exist. It was stupid to aid a cause that had no chance, that was doomed from the start.

  He needed to see the codex. Right, wrong, blood, or salvation, he needed to at least see it. And then, if necessary, he would allow himself to die.

  “Let’s just ask them to let you talk to that Malcolm guy,” Nikki said. “Go ahead and tell Claude that the codex matters. Get him to let us go so that we can find it, even. You can bamboozle him, can’t you?”

  “He knows I can glamour him because I’ve done it before. He’ll have a wall up, and I won’t be able to fight him if he does.”

  “Then tell him it’s Chosen One stuff. Tell him you know things he can’t possible know.”

  Reginald shook his head. “I don’t think they believe I’m the Chosen One.” Then he sighed. “Hell, I don’t even think there is a Chosen One.”

  “Claire says you’re important. You stopped the vampire apocalypse the first time by giving the angels her — as another kind of Chosen One.”

  It was almost true, and with that realization, Reginald found himself feeling guilty. Was all of this his fault? He had been the one to prop Claire up for the angels, and doing so had stopped the angels from destroying vampirekind with the Ring of Fire. But had that been a mistake? If the angels had carried out their original plan, he and Nikki would be dead, yes — but so would all of the others. Everyone at Vampire World Command would be dead. There would be no Kill Squads, no Sedition Army, no goddamn V-Crews. The humans would still be alive, still seven billion strong.

  The issue went around and around in his head like a wheel. He remembered what Ophelia had said, about humanity becoming bloated and about vampires forcing them to evolve and adapt. Was that true? Were vampires the sharpening stone that humanity needed? Was that the proper, glass-is-half-full way to look at the situation: find a way to stop the killing now and it becomes a net gain, because humanity would benefit?

  But it was self-serving bullshit and he knew it. But even if he believed it (which he didn’t), the point was moot. The killing wouldn’t stop now. The days of humanity were almost over. The new vampire overlords would turn some of those who remained and leave some as blood slaves, but the final curtain had almost hit the stage’s floor. The earth would soon go back to nature. Ivy would climb skyscrapers as a mere ten million souls spread out across a planet that had once been home to seven billion.

  “Claire had a pedigree as a Chosen One,” said Reginald.

  “So do you,” said Nikki.

  He shook his head.

  “You do, Reginald. The things you can do with your mind…”

  But he didn’t want to hear it. He was a man trapped inside his own head. What good was it to be intelligent in a world where he couldn’t run, couldn’t fight, couldn’t defend those who mattered to him? What use was the ability to read fast in the world that was fast approaching? Earth was going to become a survivalist state for human remainders and vampires outcasts alike, and Reginald couldn’t even feed himself without help.

  Day after day passed in the same routine as the kill total mounted: Situation room. Vague predictions. Go back home to Nikki. Worry.

  He stared at his cell phone, long dead and drained of battery, and willed it to ring. He hadn’t heard from Claire for weeks. She had to be dead. They all had to be dead.

  Claire.

  Maurice.

  Jackie.

  Victoria.

  Celeste.

  Brian.

  Talia.

  And all of the others.

  He couldn’t call Claire to find out the truth, even if he’d had a cell signal. Claire could only call him. It was Claire’s mind voodoo (which was far more useful than Reginald’s super-mind; he couldn’t analyze or time-stop or read or balance his way out of here) that made the cell phone work without power and without service. He’d made that possible. He’d catalyzed that change in Claire, by revealing Altus the incubus as her father. He had created the oracle. He had saved vampirekind.

  And now she was dead. The vampires he’d saved had killed her, just as they’d killed everyone else. It was his fault. He’d opened Pandora’s box; he’d let the tempest out of its bottle.

  He began to stalk the compound, feeling more depressed and self-loathing than he ever had as a human. He’d merely been a useless fat waste of space back then. Today, he was the cause of armageddon. Nikki wanted to call him a Chosen One? Perfect. It was apt. He was a Chosen One — “chosen” to the benefit of the bad guys. He’d started the gears turning, upsetting the careful equilibrium that had percolated along so nicely before he’d shown up. Vampires had been pompous and pretty and strong and fast before the rise of Reginald the Great, and they’d been bigots who wouldn’t accept those like him. Reginald had forced them to take him seriously — and, by extension, anyone like him. Doubt had percolated. The power systems had shifted; Maurice, an imperfect but ancient vampire, had taken the reins. Then Balestro had come, and then the rest of the chain had followed tidily along afterward. Had it merely been a sequence of random events? Or had it been cause and effect?

  He thought again of Claire, and a revelation hit him like a bolt of lightning:

  I am supposed to find the codex.

  Was he a Chosen One? Did he have an integral role to play? Sure he did, because everyone had a role to play. Claire, when glamoured, having absorbed seemingly all of the information the world had to offer, had portrayed history as a sequence of dominoes that had been set up to fall in a specific way. In the beginning, God had tipped the first domino, and from then on it was only a matter of watching events unfold.

  Yes, Reginald had put Claire in front of Balestro, and yes, his doing so had started a sort of relentless machine. But Claire had also said that Reginald was supposed to find the codex, which meant that he still had a purpose — that there was no way he couldn’t find it. And that meant that despite the way things looked, maybe he could stop the machine again after all.

  He didn’t have to despair. He didn’t have to worry about how he was going to find it. He was supposed to find it. Fact was fact was fact. It was just one more domino in the chain, and it had been set up from the beginning to fall at the right time.

  He was going to find it. It was only a matter of time.

  He paced the stark, industrial hallways of the underground compound, dreaming of the black sky outside. All he had to do was to get past the doors. There was no sun; that’s why VWC was located where it was this time of year. He and Nikki could re-trace their steps. Would the Vagabond still be where they’d left it? Of course it would — and if it wasn’t, a suitable alternative would present itself. Reginald was going to find the codex. Plotting didn’t matter. Scheming didn’t matter. He just had to keep moving forward.

  The codex wasn’t here. Reginald was fated to find the codex. Ergo, he would be able to leave. The notion was so simple that he’d missed it.

  So Reginald played his part. He made himself almost useful amongst the murderers. He did what he was told. And as security around him became less vigilant — because really, where was he going to go? — Reginald started to explore, to see where intuition took him. And then one day while lapp
ing the compound, he passed one of the generals — a woman bearing a nametag that read BELLO who he’d never seen up close before. Her proximity made his blood prickle. He almost wanted to reach out to her; she felt so familiar. She felt, in fact, like Claude had felt before Claude had learned what tricks Reginald had up his sleeves. But despite the compulsion, Reginald said nothing to General Bello. He smiled, and he walked on.

  He knew that this was it — not what “it” was, precisely; he only knew that he needed to be ready for whatever fate might be preparing to deal him. So he and Nikki both packed the scant few belongings they had and raided several weeks’ worth of blood from what seemed to be a titanic blood supply in the commissary storage freezer. And they waited.

  But they could only wait for so long, because the antarctic night wouldn’t last forever. In another few weeks, day would come to the south pole and he’d be trapped. So with every day Reginald waited, he felt more and more restless. He needed to act, to slot one more piece into the puzzle. So over the next few days, he played good-little-savant by day in the situation room and stalked the corridors of the compound by night. Feeling insane and reckless, he knocked on doors he shouldn’t knock on. He asked questions he shouldn’t ask. He raised suspicions. But it didn’t matter anymore; time was running out if it hadn’t run dry already, and one way or another, this had to end.

  After he’d knocked on enough doors, he found himself facing a nondescript vampire with brown hair and strong shoulders, and as Reginald looked at the man, he could feel a fog surrounding him.

  It was Malcolm the seer.

  Malcolm didn’t know who Reginald was and was immediately suspicious when Reginald asked about his maker and what he’d seen during his time as a keeper. Reginald’s line of questions was reckless. Malcolm’s hackles went up. He said he wanted to call one of the generals and inquire about this strange fat man who it turned out he’d heard was asking around about him. Reginald pressed him harder. Malcolm picked up an internal compound phone. He dialed. He spoke to someone, and Reginald heard Malcolm describe him. The clock was ticking. Nothing mattered. So Reginald pushed, this time using his mind and blood, careless of what the man might do after this little bit of violation was finished.

  Malcolm fought him, trying to raise a mental wall. But he hadn’t known what was coming and hadn’t had time to prepare, and Reginald’s mind — using that same unexplained connection he’d felt with Karl’s blood back in Paris — slipped through a gap.

  He saw the seer’s blood memories as a fog of colorful emotions. There were limits to what Malcolm could interpret in the fog, but Reginald did not have the same limits. Still, he could only work within the seer’s interpretations at first, and Malcolm’s sense of his maker’s blood was vague. He could feel the maker’s anger as he’d died. He could feel the maker’s desperation at the idea that nobody would know the truth about the codex. Malcolm struggled harder. With Malcolm fighting him, Reginald couldn’t reach an actual visual record of anything. It was a riddle within a riddle within a riddle. Reginald couldn’t solve it, but this was his last chance. So he reached deep like a hand inside a long glove, careless of what he might disturb or break.

  The fog lifted slightly. There wasn’t much more inside the protesting seer’s mind and blood… but there was something. A small thing. Reginald saw a river from above — a shape he recognized — and a statue of an angel with fangs. In all the art he’d studied, he’d never, ever heard of a sculpture of an angel with fangs.

  Complete, he pushed down even harder on Malcolm’s blood. He grabbed one memory and twisted it against others, tying Malcolm’s native memories into a knot with his maker’s. When Reginald returned to reality, Malcolm was unconscious on the floor of his apartment, one leg and one arm stretched out like a dance. The damage wouldn’t be permanent; Reginald had bought himself a few hours at most. Malcolm’s mind would soon untie the knot, and then he’d raise questions with the generals that Reginald wouldn’t want to answer.

  He ran. He found Nikki. Together they grabbed their bags and their gear and ran again, this time toward the corridor through which they’d first entered, toward the back door Claire had originally opened for them. Then they reached the double swinging doors in the seldom-used hallway and stopped, both of them realizing the same thing at the same time: that the door was secured with a keypad, that they didn’t know the code, and that without Claire to operate the lock from half a world away, they were two red-handed criminals without an escape route.

  Reginald turned to Nikki. Nikki turned to Reginald. And Nikki said, “Shit.”

  Then there was a loud, angry voice behind them, yelling for them to stop, to hold it right there. Reginald turned. Nikki turned. And they found themselves staring into the flushed, militant face of General Bello.

  It was just like the first time he’d glamoured Claude, before Claude had learned to stop him. But General Bello had probably never heard of a vampire who could glamour vampires, and Reginald imagined his hand sinking into the grey flesh of her brain, his own mind lining up inside her head like a double-exposure.

  “Go ahead and open this door for me,” said Reginald.

  “Okay,” said Bello, her eyes vacant.

  “And after you’ve let us out and locked the door behind us, you will forget you saw us, or that any of this happened.

  “Okay,” she repeated. Then, as Reginald pulled back, Bello moved to the number pad. Keys lit. The door opened. And they were outside.

  They stood on the ice in the dark, months-long night. There were no alarms, nothing at all to indicate anyone knew of their departure.

  Nikki met Reginald’s eye and said, “Well, that was lucky.”

  But Reginald shook his head and said that there was no such thing anymore.

  They donned their arctic gear and ran. Nikki’s crampons dug a rut in the ice. They crossed the continent in days, pausing when she needed rest and blood from their stores. They used the same tent from the southbound trip, finding its constant, violent flapping frightening in the katabatic wind that streamed ceaselessly from the continent down toward the ocean. The tent beat around them, giving them the thinnest of shelter. Night and day and night and day passed, if night or day meant anything in the land of no sun.

  They reached the coast as the first true morning was threatening to dawn. Over the past few days, the sun’s zenith had come dangerously close to rolling over the horizon, and Reginald realized that they’d wasted over a month and that up north, fall was beginning.

  Soon, he imagined, Vampire World Command would begin its relocation to the arctic ice up north.

  But they’d do so without their strategist, who had other plans.

  IT'S NEVER SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA

  REGINALD’S PLAN WAS TO TAKE the ship back to Africa, retrace their steps to the north, and pray that planes were still crossing the Atlantic when they reached Europe. According to what he’d learned at Vampire World Command, the biggest cities before the war were still the most active cities today. He wanted to try for Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, reasoning that if anyone was still flying west, they’d be flying out of de Gaulle. Reginald and Nikki had to find a way to stow away and make it to New York, and from New York, they had to make it to Philadelphia. Because not far outside of Philadelphia, the Delaware river made a shape that Reginald had seen once when he’d memorized an entire wall of atlases… and then had seen again in the mind of Malcolm the seer, paired with a statue of an angel with fangs.

  By the time they stopped south of Vienna, the nights were becoming cold. The days were beginning to shorten and equal the days as the equinox dawned. It was strangely appropriate. There were equal amounts of night and day — equal amounts of time given to the two warring species.

  The world had changed. They avoided cities on the trip north, but still encountered vast fields of death. They found several thousand dead humans in the desert — perhaps a traveling tribe that vampires had razed through like a scythe. They mostly drained animal
s for sustenance once their blood pouches ran out, but couldn’t resist peeking in when they passed towns and settlements, searching for something human to feed their parched and tired muscles. There were few lights in any of them. What lights they did see came from either individual oil lamps or heavily fortified strongholds. The humans (those that remained, anyway) had adapted amiably. Many had created forts, their walls made of wooden stakes and pocked with sharp, sheared pieces of silver jewelry harvested from the dead. One fort they passed was using a chain of generators to power outward-facing ultraviolet tanning lamps. In theory, the idea was perfect… but Reginald couldn’t help but recall the V-Crews and their handy EMP device. An electromagnetic pulse would turn off the lights no matter how they were being powered, and then the monsters would come out of the shadows.

  They passed encampments that had formed over the shells of human towns as victorious vampires gathered to celebrate and gloat. The new hybrid towns had the feel of rustic moors villages. The pubs in these places seemed to always be alive when the sun was down, always lit and overflowing with rowdy patrons who dragged victims inside and then left with blood on their chins. The vampires were drunk — drunk with power, and drunk on humans who they forced to imbibe before being slaughtered.

  And there was another change, too — one that shocked Reginald the first time they camped in an abandoned but powered hotel and turned on a TV: the vampire networks were now in place where the human networks had been. Where there was power (something they saw more and more often as they moved past Europe’s larger cities, where vampires seemed to have taken over the old human utilities), they saw the VNN feed where ABC had been. Finding a European charger and accessing his phone, Reginald also found that the cellular network was strong, and that Fangbook and the rest of the vampire internet was still alive and kicking.