Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest

by Johnny B. Truant

  She shook her head. “Not like that. Something weird was ‘waking up’ when it started — when I got so sick. I feel it all the time these days, but now it’s becoming different. I feel something being wound up. It’s changing. It’s starting.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Claire flapped her arms, giving a very adolescent expression of frustration. Reginald watched her with pity. In many ways, she’d never had a chance to grow up. There simply hadn’t been the time.

  “I don’t know, Reginald! I never know, okay? Same as it’s always been. You used to ask me to predict things, but I could never see the information in my head in the way you wanted me to see it. I see everything, every day, as liquid. Things happen and I realize afterward that I’d known they were going to happen all along. I’ll go to an appointment early by mistake, realize I’ve shown up at the wrong time, and then learn that someone wrote the appointment down wrong and that the time I arrived is actually correct. I’ll remember that someone promised me something, get angry when they don’t remember promising it to me, then realize that I’m recalling a promise made three hundred years ago as if it were yesterday — or, in a few cases, tomorrow. Do you know what that’s like? To know everything but not really know that you know it, or how to control it?”

  Reginald thought of the codex. “Yes,” he said.

  “It’s not like that. I’m not a vampire. You can see the information, at least — like it’s in a big jumbled filing cabinet. Not me. For me, it’s like soup. You have control over whether you think about the stuff in your head. I don’t. And so when I call you and tell you that it’s starting, I don’t even know what that means. What’s starting? How do I know? Where will it start — whatever ‘it’ is? Why? Or is it even a real thing?” She began to wipe furiously at her eyes, angry at her own sudden tears of frustration.

  “It’s okay, Claire. If anyone understands what you feel — how you live, I mean — I… well, I’m the closest you’ve got, I guess.”

  She rolled her eyes angrily. “I just wish we knew why I am how I am. Have I found the fountain of youth? Or am I just a freak? What am I, Reginald? Am I human? Am I an incubus? Am I a stilted vampire? If we could just get someone to look at my blood…”

  Reginald shook his head. They’d been having this argument forever, but there was no way they could take Claire’s blood in for analysis. Reginald wanted to understand why she presented as a kind of half-vampire — why she was cold but didn’t burn in the sun, why her cuts healed quickly and why she could bend energy and electricity to her will — but it wasn’t worth the risk. He had no idea what her blood might reveal, but he knew that unlike himself, Claire didn’t require regular infusions of red blood cells to live. For now, nobody was suspicious of her; Claire was cold and dark, stayed indoors, and got regular blood deliveries like everyone else. But if a lab decided that she — or even an anonymous test subject that Reginald somehow had access to — might be human? Well, that would be bad. Very bad.

  “It’s too risky, Claire.”

  “Couldn’t you send it to the people Nikki knows? Those Underground people?”

  “You mean the picketers with vague ambitions to one day circulate a petition?”

  “Underground science labs. ‘Fighting the power’ and whatnot. Those kinds of people must have a few nerds with microscopes who could…”

  “I told you,” Reginald interrupted, “I’ve looked at your blood under a microscope and it doesn’t reveal anything. We don’t need nerds with microscopes. We need nerds with gene-sequencers.”

  “And there are none in the Underground?”

  “No, Claire. Come on. Don’t tell Nikki I said this, but those idiots are mostly just hippies with nothing better to do than rattle their bongs and act like hypocrites. They drink blood just like the rest of us because (let’s face it) we’re all fucking monsters. The only issue they can even hang their hat on is the inbreeding thing lately where the humans keep getting sick. They’re barely worthy of having a Fangbook page. You know that.”

  Claire rolled her eyes — a mannerism that hadn’t changed since she’d been forty years younger, since her face had been fifteen years younger. She’d grown into a pretty young (-ish) woman, petite and lithe and with a charming non-fanged smile that she accented with falsies whenever she went out. But when she did things like roll her eyes, Reginald couldn’t help but think of the little girl in the coat with the anorak hood, content to invite a vampire into her house as long as he kept her company while her mother was too drunk to care.

  “Some resistance,” she said.

  “They shuffle paperwork. You just wait; one day they’re going to rise up with a heinous bake sale fundraiser and will propose lobby reform. It’ll be chaos.”

  Claire sighed, then moved into the kitchen. She opened a cabinet and pulled out a box of Snaco Triscuit clones. She held the box toward Reginald and shook it.

  “No thanks.”

  “I have taquitos, too. The non-blood kind.”

  “Claire, you know I don’t eat that stuff anymore,” he said. “I haven’t eaten human food since the end of the war.”

  “You don’t ever eat it? Even when you’re home alone and nobody is watching?”

  Reginald shrugged. He simply wasn’t interested in those old habits anymore. He was a vampire, and keeping that in mind after the war had seemed important — especially given how endangered traditional vampires were these days. How many modern vampires had ever hunted? How many ran anywhere when they could drive in light-tight vehicles? How many knew how to glamour? There was no point, seeing as few modern vampires had ever seen a human up close and would probably be afraid of them if they did. Vampires these days didn’t even think of themselves as fast or strong because they moved at the same speed as their neighbors. With no basis for comparison, vampiric speed, strength, sight, hearing, vision, and even sex had simply become the norm. Reginald had seen vampire porn. It didn’t interest him because it looked like it was on fast-forward.

  “No, not ever.”

  “But it’s your company. It’s how you made your fat stacks of cash.”

  “Yeah, well,” Reginald said, “sometimes I feel like a disillusioned mother who wonders at the horror of what she’s given birth to.”

  Claire ignored the statement’s implications. “You just get sick of it, being around it all day?”

  “I guess.” He didn’t want to talk about it. It wasn’t that he felt like he was better than other vampires; he just didn’t want to be like them. At all.

  Claire shrugged and popped one of the crackers into her mouth. “Well, for a race that doesn’t need this food, you did a pretty good job of replicating it. And thank God. Because if I couldn’t eat human food openly, I’d have to move out into the wildlands with my mom. And it kind of sucks out there.”

  “How is your mom?” Reginald asked.

  Claire popped another cracker. “Old.”

  “She doing okay?”

  Claire shook her head side to side, pursing her lips in a shit-happens sort of expression. “Not really.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “She’s over eighty in a post-healthcare society. She’s just old, Reginald. It’s okay, really.” She paused, suddenly thoughtful. “You know, the strange thing is that neither of us mind the fact that she’s dying because dying is at least a change. You haven’t changed even one little bit in the time I’ve known you. Neither has Nikki. To tell the truth, I find the idea of getting old and dying one day strangely comforting. It’s funny: I never liked change growing up. I wanted everything to always stay the same forever — other than, of course, getting a little bigger so kids would stop picking on me. But when you spend this long watching perpetual sameness, change starts to look good again. It’s like reading a good book. Good books are only good if they eventually have an end.”

  “Deep.”

  Claire shrugged and ate another cracker.

  “I think it’s funny that you don’t think anything ha
s changed,” said Reginald, suddenly aware that he was procrastinating. Claire’s mind might flit from thing to thing, but Reginald remembered perfectly well why Claire had called him — and he also remembered just how nervous her voice had sounded on the phone. She seemed calm now, but his mind was still clanging with those two simple words that had chilled him to his already-chilled bones: It’s starting.

  Claire shrugged. “Meh. So what? Dark buildings. Dark cars. Sun blockers and UV domes. Blood on the shelves in the supermarket…”

  “… decimation of the world’s population. A takeover by monsters. Mad Max style living outside of the city perimeter…”

  “Like I said, no big deal,” Claire finished. She slid into the big chair opposite him, her posture slumped and terrible. She was chronologically in her fifties, looked like a twenty-something, and acted like a teenager. Reginald half expected her to turn end-for-end on the chair so that her feet were up and her head was down, then pick up a phone and talk to her friends about boys and going to the mall. If, that was, the world had still had human malls and non-feral human boys.

  After a quiet moment, Reginald said, “Okay. So I’m here because you called me. Sounding kind of panicked, by the way.”

  “I did.”

  “Well, what are you feeling right now?”

  Claire didn’t bother to sit up. She remained slumped. “Alert.”

  “Alert?”

  “Yes, Reginald. Alert. Awake.”

  “Hell, I’m awake.”

  “In my head, I mean. In my chest. In my arms. Hell, in my ass. My ass is totally awake now, Reginald.”

  “Ironic,” he said. “Mine is asleep.”

  “I thought you felt this kind of thing too. What with the vampire codex being in your blood and all.”

  He shook his head. “What I have is an archive. What you have is more like a barometer. If I look in my internal files, I can tell you how Cain felt about his breakfast a zillion years ago, but if I look tomorrow, that feeling will be exactly the same. And if I don’t look, I’m not affected by it at all.”

  “Was that really his name? Cain?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, I think so.”

  “But not like… the Cain.”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “You never explained it to me,” she said. “You were always like, ‘I don’t want to talk about it, Claire.’ Well, now you’re asking about my ass and I think it’s only right that…”

  “I am not asking about your ass.”

  “… that you tell me about what you’ve got if you want me to do more fortune-telling for you. Haven’t I done enough fortune-telling already? When will it be enough?”

  Reginald sighed. Claire was being sarcastic, but she was telling the truth: Reginald never had wanted to talk about it. Once he’d had enough time to walk up and down the bloodlines — exploring the real-as-this ability to step into the memories of any vampire in history — the mythical codex had appeared in front of him, plain as day. It had always existed as a million fragments scattered throughout vampire history, but only someone with Reginald’s puzzle-solving mind would ever be able to see it. But he’d already been a Chosen One once, and that experience had ended in the extermination of a planet. He’d had a second shot at it when he’d seen the first assembled pieces of the codex and had dutifully rung the alarm, but the uprising the codex warned of had never come. He refused to be fooled a third time. He didn’t want the codex, and he didn’t want the ability to peep into others’ minds — even if that meant leaving “mental Maurice” in his brain’s shadows like childhood toys stowed under the basement staircase. Every person — and every vampire — deserved the privacy of his secrets. And Reginald, for his part, deserved the chance to be a nobody for a change.

  “Look…” he began. Then he sighed. “Okay, fine. Yes, ‘Cain’ as in the first vampire, but not really ‘Cain’ as in the same bad boy history talks about.”

  “So the way the legend explains the conflict between humans and vampires…”

  “It’s not true. But if you try telling that to anyone in charge — if you can find anyone with enough vampire history to even know the legend — they’ll tell you you’re crazy. The children of Cain set against the children of Abel, yada yada yada. Nobody believed that old story before the war, but now it’s their bible. Almost literally, because they like to think of themselves as winners. ‘We beat Abel’ and stuff. They could put it on a T-shirt.”

  “So if it isn’t ‘Cain vs. Abel, how is it really?”

  “We’re not hunter and prey. The codex says it’s closer to a symbiotic relationship.”

  “Like leeches,” said Claire.

  “No…”

  “Oh! Like a tapeworm.”

  “Gross.”

  “Like one of those things that hangs on sharks?”

  “Claire, all of those things are parasites. Didn’t you ever take a biology class?”

  She nipped the corner off a faux-Triscuit. “Someone destroyed the world before I got to high school. But it’s cool. There’s far less reason for me to know the state capitals or the history of the Civil War nowadays. Just think of all those poor suckers who wasted their time learning about the bicameral legislature.”

  Reginald pointed a “gotcha” finger at her. “But see… clearly you do know about the bicameral legislature.”

  “Right. So, like, two camels.”

  Reginald sat back, settling into the couch. “I shared, so now it’s your turn. I’ll bet if you try really hard, you can do better than ‘I feel awake.’”

  She stared at him, annoyed.

  “Look, you called me. Should I go home? Nikki had just gotten up and was starting to do nude yoga when I walked out the door, and…”

  “Oh, gross.” Coming from Claire’s fifty-something mouth, the statement sounded bizarre. But Reginald and Nikki had always been like a second mother and father to her, so maybe her reaction was that of imagining her parents having sex — a “gross” proposition for a child of any age. Reginald’s own mother had died fifteen years ago, having remained safely hidden away, and had spent her final years happily watching vampire sitcoms over a wireless connection while eating ice cream that he’d never told her was blood-flavored. But even still, after all this time, Reginald didn’t want to imagine her doing nude yoga.

  “I’ll talk more about it if you don’t tell me what you called me over to talk about,” said Reginald. Then, when Claire hesitated, he said, “When she does ‘downward dog,’ she sticks her…”

  “Fine! Okay, whatever. I don’t know really how to describe it other than to say that I’m starting to know things in a way that’s more conscious. I feel it like something jutting further and further out of a fog, as if it’s emerging.”

  “Are you still scooping up new information from the internet? You used to be like a sponge when you turned on a computer.”

  Claire gave a sad little frown. She held a hand in the air. Her palm sparked with blue lightning, which then crawled over her skin like a living glove. Small tendrils of blue plasma reached up into the air from her fingertips, snapping out as if grabbing for something.

  “A vampire named Clark just posted on Fangbook about finding an old human-era quarter on the street,” she said. “The first reply comment was, ‘Cool story, bro.’ That post was liked by three people within the first minute. Elsewhere, a new blog was launched, just now, about vintage Star Wars figurines modified to make the creatures into vampires.”

  “People are still blogging?”

  “Out in the wildlands, a human named Ben Kirkman was expected in WL-14 two hours ago. He’s traveling from one underground settlement to another but is running late, and is worried about a woman named Candace fearing for his safety because of it.”

  “Where are you getting this?”

  “Off the air. I don’t even need a connection. Haven’t for years.”

  “You never told me that,” said Reginald.

  “It’s not a normal conve
rsation topic,” she said. “Besides, I made your dead cell phone talk to Maurice from Antarctica during the war. How is that any less ridiculous?”

  “You just seem sad about it.”

  “I can’t shut it out,” she said. “Back then I at least needed a computer if I was to get new information. Today, it just comes to me. I’m like an antenna. I hear everything. Anything transmitted electronically is very easy, but I can often pick up random thoughts at closer distances. Signals on the other side of the world are harder to hear than anything in this country or especially inside the city, but I can hear them if I try. I don’t even have to use satellites. I feel as if I’m bending the energy around the curvature of the planet.”

  “But how?”

  “How can you see into the thoughts and memories of the entire vampire family tree?”

  Reginald nodded. “Touché.”

  They sat for a minute — the vampire who’d made his fortune by treating vampires like humans and the girl who seemed to be something other than human.

  “Reginald?” she finally said.

  He looked over at Claire, her long, light brown hair stubbornly trying to make its way in front of her delicate features as she fought to keep it back behind her ears. She was regarding him with a graveness that looked almost innocent. She’d grown up too damn fast. She’d never had a chance to just be a girl — to play with other girls and run around giggling about boys she liked. It wasn’t fair. But at least she was here and alive, which was more than could be said for the girls she might have done that giggling with.

  “What is it like for you? When you do… whatever it is? Is it as swimmy and indistinct for you as I describe it is for me?”

  He considered demurring, but then found himself sighing and simply answering the question.

  “I can go into their memories. And when I do, it almost feels like I’m in their bodies.”

  “Can you go into Nikki?”

  Reginald resisted making a joke.

  “I try to stay out of anyone who’s alive now. Walking the blood memories of ancient ancestors feels different from peeping into the thoughts of living vampires. I can usually only do that close up, only if I feel I have to, and only if they don’t try to keep me out. It seems to be easier with vampires I’m closely related to.”