“We’re ready,” said Ophelia.
Reginald turned to Nikki. She stood and began walking toward her suitcase.
“Five minutes,” said Reginald as Nikki slipped the robe from her shoulders.
He closed the door. Brian, who’d been peering through the closing door and watching Nikki’s bare back, said, “Dammit.”
MENTAL
ON THE WALK DOWN TO what Reginald assumed would be some sort of a situation room, Ophelia gave them an update. Reginald had gone to sleep immediately after returning from their previous meeting, then had gone into his codex trance immediately after waking. Nikki had been surfing Fangbook, but most of what Ophelia had to report wasn’t public anyway.
“There have been two new incidents,” she told them. “One happened just outside New York at another blood farm… and this despite the fact that all of the farms were cautioned to be on high alert.” She shook her head. “Idiots. Somehow the stock still got the best of the guards. We don’t know how. We don’t know if the insurgents were on milkers at the time or locked down in their cells; it’s not a free-range facility. We also have no idea what they’re using for weapons, except that as in the other incursions, they’re using silver for restraint. What’s going on there is totally inside the walls and the public is unaware. The only reason we even know there was an incident is because they told us about it.”
Reginald looked over at Ophelia, trying to keep up with her brisk pace. “They?”
“The humans at the facility. One of them got a phone from one of the guards, took video, and emailed it to us.”
“Here? Directly to the USVC?”
Ophelia nodded grimly. “The president’s classified personal email account. We have no idea how they got the address.” She walked faster. “The other incident was an electronic incursion on Fangbook. A hack. It…”
Nikki interrupted. “I didn’t see anything on Fangbook,” she said.
“They didn’t get far. Fangbook is almost as tight as the USVC itself, with the exception of email, apparently. We use Fangbook as a redundant information archive. Keep that under your hat, though; vampires don’t like to think that the government is harvesting their information. But it’s good that we were, because that’s how we spotted the hack while it was still in progress.”
“Did you trace it?” said Reginald.
Ophelia said nothing and kept walking.
Reginald laughed. “I guess not. Pretty good for a bunch of monkeys, huh? So that means the incident with the Geneva sun blocker was a hack. So not only can they bust your security, but you have no idea how they’re doing it, where they’re doing it from, or where they’re getting equipment that can go toe-to-toe with yours. Or how they’ve gotten the minds together to figure all of this out in the first place.”
He looked at Ophelia’s face as they walked. She seemed vaguely angry, but it was a helpless sort of anger. She mostly looked as if she just wanted it all to go away, and for Reginald to stop talking about it.
“Oh, but that’s not even the whole story, is it?” he said, now chuckling openly while reading her face. “You’ve done a bunch of futile satellite surveys, haven’t you? Because you’ve figured out that all of this would take a lab — a big lab, probably the size of a small city. Because those humans have got a lot to do, right? They’re developing new weapons, creating biological warfare agents, probably hotwiring computers and chips. And that last one is a hell of a task in itself, because given all of the technological advances the vampire government must have had in the past forty years, the humans would need to have some seriously impressive computers if they hoped to even keep up with…”
Reginald stopped because he’d caught a flitting thought from Ophelia’s mind while simultaneously reading a pained expression on her face. The one-two punch of realizations made him burst into rich laughter.
“You haven’t had any advances!” he blurted. The thought was so funny that he stumbled sideways into Brian. “You haven’t! You kept making new computers based on the old models, and you piggybacked on the human internet, and you figured out how to use the humans’ resources to launch and build the space stations behind the sun blockers. But you haven’t changed them at all, have you? You’ve just copied their work, without ever making any improvements!”
Ophelia said nothing and walked faster. Reginald followed behind, feeling strangely vindicated. Something had clicked in his mind, and he felt a handful of pieces of the codex fall into place without effort. He’d known since the end of the war that there was a strong link between the human and vampire species, but he’d never worked out the nature of that link. Now, watching Ophelia, he realized that what the angels had said all those years ago was true: that vampires simply weren’t any good at evolving. When he’d first heard Santos say that in the angels’ anteroom back in Luxembourg, he’d assumed it was a comment on their society — that vampires were so arrogant and complacent that they were content to sit on their laurels, never becoming more than they already were. But now he saw that the truth might be more literal, and that mental improvement might actually be beyond vampires other than himself. Was it possible that what was true of vampire bodies was true of vampire minds as well? Over the course of centuries, Reginald knew he could maximize the limited potential he’d been given and achieve speed and strength relative to humans, but he’d never be able to lose weight or surpass the strength of a vampire currently stronger than him. Was that also true of thought? Were the world’s vampires frozen with a set amount of intelligence at the time of turning and incapable of truly evolving and innovating?
Reginald was still laughing. Brian and Nikki didn’t seem to appreciate the joke (or get it; they had vampire minds, after all, har-har) and stared at him as his eyes started to water. But Reginald found the situation hilarious. Hilaaaaaarious. Here they were, forty years down the road, and nothing had changed. The population looked exactly the same, and they were all still using the same technology — not just in the cities, but all the way at the top, in the military and government. The world had hit a stand-still. Perusing vampire history in the absence of human innovation was like reading the same page of a book over and over again.
“Well, hell,” said Reginald, wiping his eyes. “That’s your problem. They’re pressing buttons while you’re sharpening sticks and wondering why the moon runs away every month. Oh, you are soooo fucked.”
But beneath the laughter, as it dissipated, Reginald felt himself sober. This had been going on for forty years. Forty years. If the humans had evolved while vampires had stagnated, what surprises might they have in store after forty fucking years?
They made their way to a room in what seemed to be the basement of the building. Then, after Reginald promised to stop mocking Ophelia and their entire race, she gave them updates on the existing incidents.
They’d heard from ambassador Karl Stromm in Geneva. Karl reported that the EU Council had finally gotten back on its feet after the sun blocker incident, in which over five hundred vampires had burned to death. Geneva had gotten used to working 24 hours a day, but the city had once been unblocked like every other city besides New York, and it still had tunnels and tube walkways between most of the important buildings. (They did not, however, have many shielded cars in the city, having deemed them unnecessary. Reginald had to fight not to laugh when he heard it.) Most of the actual Council had survived and was back at work in the way most cities handled business: operating mainly at night, keeping to one location during the day.
There were also some reports of the biological weapon Lafontaine had demonstrated in his video. All of the institutions that had been under siege were still under siege, and several times a sole guard or worker had been released at night, then run screaming for the fences. In each case, the vampire had been discovered with a strange black gunshot wound that wouldn’t heal, and in each case the vampire had been dead within an hour. Rumors of these incidents were beginning to filter onto Fangbook, and several news outlets had gotten
footage of the wounds while covering the human-controlled facilities. A simmering sense of panic was starting to brew.
As he listened to the reports, Reginald’s jocularity turned to frustration. He wasn’t sure whose side he was on — human or vampire — because both sides were wrong. The two species could coexist; they’d done so for millennia with humans mostly being none the wiser. When he and Nikki had been young before the war, they’d always “sipped and shipped,” taking only enough blood from the humans they fed on to nourish themselves and then glamouring the humans into forgetfulness. Yes, they had been parasites, but they had been relatively harmless as far as parasites go. Fewer and fewer vampires had found killing their prey acceptable, if for no other reason other than that improved human police procedures made murder difficult to get away with. And of course, adding in what he’d recently realized, Reginald mentally added that vampire evasion would never keep up with those improved human procedures, because vampires didn’t innovate.
But the failure of innovation would lead to dire consequences here and now, too, and Ophelia seemed to be blind to them. Vampire scientists — if there were such things — wouldn’t be able to crack the human biological weapon unless they managed a peek at the humans’ secret recipe, and they certainly wouldn’t be able to formulate a defense. How could they? Reginald had learned early on that nobody even understood the so-called “agent” that made them vampires. Vampires weren’t curious. They didn’t explore or ask questions. Vampires simply became… and then they were.
Humanity had discovered a loophole. They couldn’t physically outmatch vampires, but they hadn’t been able to physically outmatch mammoths or saber-toothed tigers, either. The strongest muscle on planet Earth had always been the one between a human’s soft, fragile ears.
The vampire codex’s prediction of a human victory — and subsequent extermination of the entire vampire population — was beginning to seem inevitable by the time Reginald, Nikki, Brian, and Ophelia reached the ready room in the basement, but Reginald still had to try — starting with being maximally prepared for Timken’s meeting with the human leader. He looked over all of the intel on Lafontaine, the human resistance network (most of what they knew was what the humans had shown them in their now-eighteen incidents of sabotage and insurgence), and the location that Lafontaine had proposed meeting. The soldiers who would supervise the meeting armed themselves — first with armor and the Freddy Kruger claws Reginald had first seen in use by V-Crews, then reluctantly with sidearms and assault rifles. This was a contested point amongst the proud soldiers, but Reginald, who still didn’t know which side he was on, insisted. Humans were vulnerable to bullets, so the vampires should carry bullets. A spray of machine gun fire could still do things that a vampire couldn’t.
Several times during the briefing and preparation, Reginald caught himself second-guessing his own words and actions. There was no way to win. He didn’t want to help Timken (and, by extension, Claude — Maurice’s brother and murderer), and he didn’t want to kill humans. But he also didn’t want to be exterminated, and he didn’t want Nikki, Brian, or any of the world’s innocents to die from a cruel and painful weaponized virus. Even during the height of the war, there had been many vampires who had sat idly by, hiding in their basements and praying for conflict to pass over them. There were many who took no sides, and many who were complicit without actually doing any killing themselves. Today, that number had swelled. Before the war, there had been seventy thousand vampires in the world, and most of them had been hardened by years as hunters and killers, most having self-selected to train and then become creatures of the night. Today’s vampires were powder puffs by comparison. Many had been turned against their will to swell the vampire population, or had turned voluntarily because they preferred it to death or slavery. Modern vampires had tried to adapt their old human surroundings to their new natures instead of learning how to be vampires. They didn’t know how to hunt, how to fight, or even how to feed from anything beyond a blood pouch. As much as Reginald hated vampirekind, he couldn’t bring himself to hate most of the individuals who comprised it. They were simply too sad to loathe.
So they armed and they planned. It was all they could do, unless they wanted to wait to be eradicated by default.
Ophelia gave them bulletins as the time leading up to the meeting drained away: vampire populations in large cities looting stores, vampires rioting for vengeance, hippies clamoring for understanding and the cessation of hostilities, yelling that two wrongs didn’t make a right. At the sites of at least three demonstrations, the two sides clashed, leading to bloodshed, and buildings burned.
Eventually the time to depart arrived. Reginald and Timken climbed into an armored Lincoln Town Car and the soldiers loaded into an old human SWAT vehicle wearing armor much like Timken’s SA used to wear, save the bright red helmets. Then, with the car in front and the SWAT truck well behind, they made their way to an abandoned utility warehouse in the middle of a rolling section of upstate New York. The SWAT truck fell back while the car headed to the station, parked, and waited.
A short while later, a similar black car arrived and parked twenty yards away. Reginald told the two guards who’d ridden with them to keep their weapons down and their teeth in check, then advanced halfway with Timken at his side. The other car’s doors opened and Lafontaine stepped out, flanked by two guards. The guards were armored. Each was holding a weapon similar to the ones Reginald had seen the AVT use in the war, now streamlined and somehow different. Then, as the two guards remained rooted, Lafontaine advanced alone, into the space between the two parties.
When he was fifteen feet from Reginald and Timken, Lafontaine gestured toward the door of the warehouse. Reginald had already sent a crew to check the building for traps, and while the crew had been checking it out, they’d reported seeing humans on the horizon, watching through (and here, they’d laughed) binoculars. But Reginald, who didn’t laugh in reply, was sure they’d also be watching through the scopes of rifles filled with gray bullets.
They walked in.
Outside, the humans crested the hill. The vampire soldiers arrived on foot. And the two species began to cover the area like a swarm of locusts.
SIT-DOWN
BOTH THE GUARDS AND LAFONTAINE — tall, overweight, balding, seemingly in his thirties despite records that placed him in his twenties — were wearing mirrored sunglasses in spite of the darkness. Reginald’s vampire eyes could usually see through mirroring, but he couldn’t see through Lafontaine’s glasses at all. They weren’t normal sunglasses. They had to be another human innovation, intended to keep things on the level and to keep the two vampires from meeting his eyes.
There was a simple card table (plastic, not wood) in the middle of the room. On each side of the table was one folding metal chair. Timken sat in one and Lafontaine, with a glance at Reginald, sat in the other. Reginald stood beside the card table, feeling like a waiter.
“You were supposed to come alone,” said Lafontaine.
“You’ll be glad he’s here,” said Timken. “Reginald is the best mind we have.”
Lafontaine glanced at him again. “That’s exactly why I’m not glad he’s here.”
“This was the only way it made sense.” Timken shrugged good-naturedly. “I’m just a figurehead. He’s our best negotiator. Not that I want him to bamboozle you, you understand. Just that we owe it to everyone to have the best minds on this.”
Lafontaine took a third look at Reginald, but this time he looked him over very slowly, starting at his feet and working his way upward. He spent a lot of time on Reginald’s face, trying to read him. The only other place he lingered nearly as long was Reginald’s huge gut.
Finally he turned his head, with its sparse hair, toward Timken. “Did you just say ‘bamboozle’?”
“You know what I mean. I just mean we’re not trying to trick you.”
“I know what it means. It just doesn’t sound like something a vampire would say.” He glanced
yet again toward Reginald. “Are you two really vampires?”
“I could drink your blood if you’d like,” said Reginald.
Lafontaine stared directly at him, his mirrored lenses locked on Reginald’s eyes. Reginald had extended his fangs, but he was wielding them in the least threatening way possible. He was standing beside the table with his the two white teeth resting over his lower lip and wearing a nonplussed expression on his face. Given the look, he’d only have been threatening to a buffet.
The tension broke, and Lafontaine laughed. Reginald retracted his fangs.
“Should it bother me, that there are two of you and only one of me?” said the human.
“No,” said Reginald. “Seeing as you still have us by the balls.”
Timken shot him a look. It was never good practice, in a negotiation, to admit to being at a loss, but Reginald could read the human like a book despite their lack of eye contact. Lafontaine had come into this negotiation equally arrogant and desperate — a combination that came off to Reginald like Napoleon as a suicide bomber. Neither Lafontaine nor humanity as a whole had anything to lose beyond what they’d already lost. They couldn’t intimidate Lafontaine and they couldn’t bulldoze through him, so the only way to lower his guard was to concede, roll over, and expose their bellies. It would be the last thing the leader of a human insurgence would expect from vampires.
Lafontaine nodded, smiling slightly. “That we do.”
“What do you want?” said Timken. This time, Reginald was the one who shot a look. They hadn’t exchanged enough pleasantries. Timken was a seasoned politician and knew better than to barge on so bullheadedly. But Reginald could feel his mood, and what he felt was interesting: the vampire president was nervous.
Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest Page 8
