Timken was seated at the large table in the middle of the room, dressed in a conservative blue suit and a red tie. When the group entered, he glanced briefly at Charles (who was covered in plaster dust) and then at the others. He stood, smiled warmly, and came forward.
He went to Reginald first, a broad smile on his handsome face. He took Reginald’s hand in both of his, one on top and one beneath, clasping it warmly as if greeting an old friend. Reginald was almost swayed by Timken’s earnest politician’s eyes and his boyish surfer’s hair, but then he remembered that the last time they’d met, Timken had climbed a wall, ripped a TV from its mount, and smashed it to pieces in a fit of rage. He reminded himself who Timken was back then and still was today — the man who’d spearheaded and championed the largest-scale genocide ever perpetrated. He’d done it with a straight face and a clear conscience, because something within him told him he was doing it all for the greater good, making the hard choices that nobody else had the guts to make. Which, in Reginald’s mind, meant that he was deeply insane.
“Reginald,” Timken said with a smile. “It’s good to see you again.”
Reginald kept his expression neutral. “Mr. President.”
“I’m glad you’re here. We need your help.”
Reginald looked at Nikki, then Brian. He turned back to Timken.
“Let’s make something clear,” he said. “I think you’re one seriously evil son of a bitch, and I am here against my will.”
Timken held his gaze for a long moment, then laughed with buoyant good humor. The sound was rich and light and genuine.
“A Boy Scout to the end!” he said, smiling. “Even after all this time, you’re still holding that old grudge?”
“It’s a big grudge,” Reginald answered.
Timken held the smile, but after a long beat his face fell and became serious. He stared at Reginald. “You still think I made the wrong decision,” he said. It was a statement, not a question.
“You did make the wrong decision.”
“You said the vampires of the world wouldn’t let me make it, if I remember,” said Timken.
“I did,” said Reginald. “But unfortunately, I was the one who was wrong about that.”
“Yes. Which proves that you are fallible. Come on, Reginald; you’re supposed to be the logical one. Can you really say that there was zero chance you were wrong about the war?”
“Correct,” he said, still holding Timken’s eyes. He pulled his hand from the man’s surprisingly smooth and soft grip. “Zero chance.”
“Even after all this time.”
“Especially after all this time. I’ve had forty years to regret my part in all of it, ashamed that I couldn’t do more. But I see you didn’t have any such conflict, and that your conscience is clear.”
The president shook his head sadly. “That’s why you could never lead, Reginald. You think I’m evil. That’s okay, I guess; you wouldn’t be the first. There are fringe groups who think I’m beyond terrible. And yes, Claude Toussant does most of the dirtiest work — I’m so sorry about your maker, by the way; I never got a chance to express my condolences — but I’ll take the responsibility for those dirty jobs because it’s mine in the end. I can take your accusations. But the truth is still the truth: we are here, we are alive, and we are stronger than ever. I would have preferred a harmonious existence with the humans too. I would have preferred to skip through meadows carrying daisies and singing songs about peaceful cooperation, but that wasn’t the way it needed to be. And if I hadn’t made the choice you never would have made, we wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
Timken puffed his cheeks with a burst of laughter, apparently unable to believe Reginald’s statement was serious. So instead of answering what seemed to be rhetorical, he clapped Reginald on the back and motioned for them all to sit. Brian did, causing the chair to protest under his weight. Nikki sat next to Brian, and Reginald sat on Nikki’s other side. Timken sat at the head of the table, behind a blotter and an attractive desk set. The desk set was comprised of two pens in holders with a tiny flag between them: blood red with an eclipsed sun in the center. Charles, brushing himself more or less clean, sat on the other side, near Timken. Then Timken pressed a button on a small intercom near the blotter and said, “You can come in now.”
Both Reginald and Brian seemed to have the same thought at the same time, because they both flexed to rise. But the person Timken had summoned wasn’t Claude after all. It was Ophelia Thax, the stunning general Reginald had met at Vampire World Command.
Nikki watched the men sit and compose themselves, then looked Ophelia over from her blonde head to her high-heeled black boots. She said, “You don’t exactly rotate staff much around here.”
Ophelia shot Nikki a look, then came to the front of the room and stood between Timken and Charles. She pressed something on the conference table and a section of the polished wood (or possibly synthetic wood, for safety) rotated upward to reveal a small screen. She began touching the screen, dimming the room’s lights and bringing up a projection on the far wall. When the lights were down and the projection was up, Reginald found himself staring at a balding black man with fat cheeks covered in dark stubble.
“Walter Lafontaine,” Ophelia announced, taking a small remote from the table and moving toward the projection. “Human. Known to MorningFresh Bloodworks as Stock 414-352. Twenty-nine years old. He was born at MorningFresh, then disappeared from the facility via unknown means three years ago. His mother is still stock at MorningFresh, designated 002-495. No history of disorderly conduct or defect from either stock.”
“I’m sorry,” said Reginald, staring at Ophelia, “but could you please refer to them as if they were people instead of property?”
“They are property,” said Ophelia. She didn’t say it with animus. She said it like a fact.
“They are not fucking property!” Reginald blurted, suddenly furious that he’d even come. He’d liked humans. He’d tried to save humans. He’d failed humans, and they’d all ended up being bled for a living. The casual way Ophelia was referring to them as if they were toasters suddenly felt like the last straw.
“Do you have any idea what it costs to maintain a human bloodline, especially given the losses the farms have had lately with the unexplained die-offs?” Ophelia retorted. “There is a substantial investment on behalf of MorningFresh in maintaining these assets, all of whom have been screened and assigned to breed so as to develop maximally strong, healthy bucks and fertile females who can…”
“Jesus fucking Christ!” said Reginald. “Have you seriously never read a history book?”
Ophelia looked derailed. “What?”
“Okay, I’ll explain it to you. See, there was this guy named Abraham Lincoln once upon a time. And what old Honest Abe did was…”
“There’s plenty of caucasian stock too, you know,” Ophelia snapped.
“That metaphor wasn’t meant to be taken literally. I meant it allegorically.”
“What?”
“And while we’re talking about books,” Reginald added, “have you ever seen a dictionary?”
“Look, I don’t need your fucking help to…”
Timken patted the air in a pacifying gesture, cutting Ophelia off mid-sentence. Then he nodded, urging her to concede.
“Fine,” she said. “Neither… person… has any past history of destructive or insubordinate behavior. But our reconnaissance at MorningFresh — which as you know is still locked down and under the control of insurgents — suggests that Mr. Lafontaine is the leader of a human rebellion that, through means unknown, has managed to coordinate terrorist attacks across, to date, sixteen separate locations, and…”
Reginald turned to Timken, his animosity toward the president lost to curiosity and disbelief.
“Sixteen?”
Timken nodded. “That we know of. We haven’t officially released news of several events that happ
ened somewhat quietly, but yes. They’ve been happening all over the globe. And it’s obvious that in addition to being highly coordinated in these attacks, they’ve been communicating for a while. Based on some of the weapons they’ve developed, plus the thing with Geneva’s blocker…”
“How have they been communicating?”
“We don’t know,” said Ophelia. “Humans in the farms are stripped of most belongings. They have their clothes and live in small shanties in the free range communities, but they’re not allowed to have any technology, so it’s not like they’re walking around with cell phones. But somehow they all knew what to do and when to do it, and somehow they either got or made weapons. Their use of silver is especially curious. Most of it is old jewelry, but some seems to have been cobbled together from old flatware, like forks and knives and spoons. It’s obviously not material that would be available in the communities.”
“Serves you right for not just tying them down 24/7,” said Reginald, bitterness in his voice. “Serves you right for letting them move around and have lives outside of being hooked to IV lines.”
“That’s what I told them,” said Ophelia, not sensing Reginald’s sarcasm.
“Anyway,” said Timken, “Mr. Lafontaine here seems to be the mastermind. He released a video yesterday afternoon. He clearly has a natural flair for the dramatic, because, well….” He sighed. “Well, we’ll just show you.” He tipped a nod toward Ophelia, and the general pressed more buttons on the small console. The still shot of Lafontaine was replaced by a video.
Reginald saw immediately what Timken had been talking about. The video, which showed Lafontaine sitting in what was clearly a cave, reminded Reginald of terrorist videos he’d grown up seeing on the human news from the likes of Osama Bin Laden. There was even a hooded figure in a chair beside him, wrapped in silver. Lafontaine was wearing sunglasses, as if he got what Osama had been going for, but thought he could cool it up a little.
Lafontaine stood and began to circle. As the camera pulled back, Reginald got a better look at the supposed human mastermind — and when it did, the man began to look less and less like a traditional terrorist. Lafontaine was carrying a fair amount of weight, somehow sporting a gut out in the wildlands at the end of the world. Yet, despite his heavy frame, Reginald saw that the man was much more limber and agile than he himself ever had been as a human. Lafontaine moved with impatient energy, walking and talking as if time were short.
“This is the beginning of your end,” he told the camera. “By the time you see this, we will have seized several of your farms and at least one of your biggest cities.” He walked over and pulled the hood from the silver-wrapped vampire who, Reginald realized, was wearing a CPC uniform. The officer spat and snarled the minute his hood was removed.
Lafontaine continued. “You have kept us in cages. You have taken our blood. You have taken our planet. So we have taken a few of your people. We know what hurts you. We know what doesn’t.” He gave a disturbing little smile. “And we have something new to show you.”
Someone off-camera handed Lafontaine a syringe. Lafontaine stabbed the syringe into the vampire’s arm, and the CPC officer immediately began to writhe and thrash as if whatever was in the syringe burned. His fangs descended; he started to snap at the black man like an angry snake. Keeping away from his prisoner’s mouth, Lafontaine pulled up the vampire’s sleeve to expose the point of injection. The camera moved closer. The pale vampire’s skin was black in one spot like a bruise, but the blackness was already visibly spreading.
“Back in the war, the human troops had a weapon,” he said. “They put it in bullets. We took it out of those bullets and we made it better.” His face twisted in cruel, remorseless anger. “We made it much, much better, and we put it back into bullets.” Then he paused and made a small, vengeful smile. “Oh, and we also put it in other things — things that are much bigger than bullets.”
Behind him, the vampire’s skin crawled with darkness, the bruise now the size of a grapefruit. Ophelia pressed a button and the video paused. The vampire’s mouth froze open in pain, his fangs down.
Timken shook his head. “Animal.”
Brian’s head snapped toward the president. With his vampire’s speed, it looked like a jump cut in a film, as if his head had suddenly been swapped between frames.
“Really,” he said.
“I could let you watch the rest of the video,” said Timken. “They recorded the entire thing. It takes over an hour for the man to die. Most of it is just screaming.”
“I seem to remember you vowing to eliminate 99 percent of the human population,” said Reginald. “I’d argue that makes you almost as much of an animal as this guy who killed one vampire.”
“I never did anything with malice,” said Timken, his eyes becoming annoyed.
“Well, that makes it better,” said Nikki.
Ophelia flipped the video off, then put the still of Lafontaine back on the screen. “The vampire’s name was Calvin Gregory,” she said. “He was stationed just outside New York, on patrol in wildlands, so we’re assuming the video was taken nearby. That looks like a cave he’s in, but I don’t know of any natural caves outside of New York. Our guess it that it’s something they hollowed out below ground. But that raises all sorts of questions, the most obvious of which is, How? It’d have to be dug out with machinery, so why didn’t we see it happen on the satellites? How did nobody hear it? And how did they reinforce the cave once they’d made it? It’d take materials and knowledge they shouldn’t have access to.”
Reginald shrugged. “Humans are resourceful. Don’t you remember?”
Timken laughed. “Humans weren’t as resourceful back when Ophelia was one.”
“We…”
But as soon as he’d begun speaking, Reginald stopped himself. Despite the fact that he’d been a vampire longer than he’d been a human, he’d just referred to himself as the wrong species. He started again.
“They have a tendency to find a way if you give them half a chance. You killed most of their population, but you didn’t go around and burn the planet. Vampires took a lot of the obvious conveniences and technology, but there’s a lot of world still out there that you never touched. All those houses with all those supplies in them? The humans have obviously scavenged better and figured out more than you gave them credit for.” Then he thought of Lafontaine’s gut and added, “They’re even eating well.”
Ophelia shook her head. “How?” she said, clearly dumbfounded. Despite being military, Reginald had noticed that the general had a big a blind spot in her ability to reason. She’d underestimated her opponents for so long — and had mistakenly relegated them to the intelligence and docility of sheep — that their biting back was almost offensive to her worldview.
Reginald shrugged. “Canned foods. Twinkies. I don’t know, and the details are irrelevant. But what’s key here is that you aren’t considering some of the more obvious questions.”
“Like what?”
“Well, how was that video recorded?”
Ophelia looked at Timken. “We could figure it out. I’ll get back to you.”
“It doesn’t matter. But whatever they took it with required power. So how are they generating power?”
Again, Timken and Ophelia looked at each other.
Reginald shook his head. His brain was operating faster and faster, plans and strategies and permutations beginning to string together like the inevitable series of actions in a clockwork mousetrap. Unlike in the war, the vampire power structures weren’t remotely prepared for any of this. They didn’t understand what they were facing because they were willfully blind, having never considered it possible. It made them so vulnerable as to be laughable.
“You’re like people who’ve decided to shoot down a plane with a slingshot,” said Reginald. “I don’t know where to begin to tell you what to do because you’re not capable of knowing the right questions to ask. You’re going to ask me how to build a bigger slingshot, but the
slingshot isn’t the answer and never has been. Your entire premise is flawed from end to end.”
Ophelia stared at him, insulted.
Reginald raised a hand, ticking off points on his fingers as he spoke. “You don’t know where they are, and that’s just this one community. You don’t know how they’ve been communicating, which it’s clear they’ve been doing nearly in real time. You don’t know how they hacked the Geneva sun blocker. You don’t know how they got the silver or the weapons — were those things sneaked in, or were they somehow made on-site? But even that is just the tip of the iceberg. The bigger problem is what you don’t know you don’t know. For instance: if they could sabotage the sun blocker, what’s to say they couldn’t breach a major city’s gates? You’ve only left one major entrance in each city, because hey, we’re the top dogs! No need to worry about the wild humans or have a Plan B, because they’re just animals, right?” He shook his head. “You don’t know what kind of weapons they might have. They seem to have dug up some of the old AVT rifles, if they got to the AVT’s bullets. So did they just strip dead soldiers for old weapons, or did they build new weapons? And if so, what will those new weapons do, and can they make more of them? Are they training assault groups? Armies, maybe? Did you figure out where the major AVT deployments were, and hence where they might have found the bio agent they seem to have made deadlier over the years? Did you even look?”
“We just assumed…” Ophelia began.
Reginald shook his head. “You’ve always assumed. Do you know the story of how I first escaped from the Vampire Council? Nikki here helped me. They assumed she was a vampire because she acted like one and flashed some fake fangs at them, and so they tried to execute her like one. They assumed I’d either futilely fight back on my own or let myself be killed, not that I might think of a third strategy they’d never considered.” He scooted back in his chair, crossed one leg over the other. “Well, now you’ve assumed that because the contingents of AVT soldiers were gone, that the human threat to you was gone. You left all of that land out there, with whatever rich deposits of goodies were waiting to be found. Or maybe not even found; maybe the humans have always had bunkers filled with smart people and smart weapons. Maybe they’ve just been biding their time, multiplying in number out of sight, and making those good weapons better. Like the weapon they used to have in those gray bullets.” Reginald put a hand on his chest. “Now, I know I watched a vampire take all day to die from some sort of a biological weapon during the war. So if I, as a regular Joe, saw that, then obviously you smart leader types saw it too, and of course you investigated and found out exactly what that weapon was, and how to protect us against it in the future.” He looked mildly at Timken and Ophelia, who looked slapped. When they didn’t react, he shook his head and continued, almost sadly. “But of course you didn’t, did you? Because you’re vampires. And you’re on the top of the food chain.”
Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest Page 6
