“Freedom.”
“You’re free,” said Timken. “I’m told you escaped years ago.”
“I did. But I want freedom for all humans.”
Timken shook his head. “We need blood. That’s not negotiable, seeing as we can’t survive without it.”
“And we have our fingers on your key factories,” said Lafontaine. “You play ball and we’ll maybe work something out. But if you won’t, we’ll burn them.”
“We can rebuild. And the humans inside them now will never make it out alive.”
Lafontaine shifted in his chair. “Mister President, let me ask you a question,” he said. “Would you want to keep living if your life consisted of waiting to be bled?”
Timken shook his head — not to say that he wouldn’t want a life of bleeding, but in exasperation. “No deal,” he said. “Lay down your arms, and maybe we’ll let some of you live.”
Reginald looked again at Timken. Now he was being aggressive — a strange breed of aggression that Reginald could feel being born out of fear. He wondered again at Timken’s behavior. The president shouldn’t be nervous. He’d once staged a violent coup on the American Vampire Council. He’d gotten into bed with the murderous head of the Annihilist Faction and been at least half responsible for the ending of seven billion lives. He’d led the USVC for forty years, through the worst turmoil the world had ever seen. So why was he nervous now?
The script Reginald had laid out was straightforward. Lafontaine would ask for the liberation of all of the blood farms, and Timken would counteroffer by giving him two of them. It would be enough to pacify the humans into at least a partial stand-down, and they could handle the loose ends later. Reginald had arranged to have the soldiers at the ready, in two concentric rings. The soldiers would protect their exit if the negotiations went as planned, or be prepared for an extraction if something went wrong. But Timken wasn’t giving in. He wasn’t apologizing on behalf of his people for the humans’ treatment. He wasn’t giving the human resistance leader the nuggets that he was supposed to, that he could take back to his followers as trophies of victory. Reginald tried to probe him, but he couldn’t get any thoughts at all from Timken despite beginning to push. He could only get moods, meaning that Timken was deliberately keeping Reginald out.
Lafontaine leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. It was almost a casual shift in posture, but Reginald saw it for what it was: movement into defense, into closing off discussion. Reginald had pegged Lafontaine as highly intelligent and probably arrogant — the former attribute probably magnified by forty years of unknown human advancement. A personality like that wouldn’t stand for much jostling.
“You know, Mr. President,” said Lafontaine, using Timken’s title sarcastically, “you haven’t come in here like a man who wants his farms or his sun blocker back — or, for that matter, like a man who doesn’t want a pathogen released into his cities.”
Reginald was about to react — to step in if possible — when the sounds of gunshots came from outside. Reginald recognized them as the weapons held by the vampire soldiers; his finely tuned ears could easily tell the report of lead rounds from those of anti-vampire rounds.
Lafontaine’s head perked up. Apparently he could tell them apart, too.
Reginald snapped his head toward Timken. “What did you do?” he hissed.
The answer came in the form of two black shapes that exploded through the building’s windows. A moment later, a pair of CPS Special Forces soldiers (not the men from the SWAT truck; these soldiers hadn’t been on Reginald’s roster) had grabbed Lafontaine by the arms. Reginald could feel the two vampires’ bloodlust. If they’d had their helmets off, he’d see their exposed fangs.
The soldiers threw Lafontaine onto the card table, slamming him hard enough to buckle the table’s legs. Then Timken was above him, and Reginald saw his Hyde face emerge — the face he kept hidden from the public behind his careful Dr. Jekyll.
With his back flat on the table and his arms held fast by the two soldiers, Lafontaine laughed.
Timken’s face, very close to the human’s, was red and furious. His fangs were out, glistening with saliva. His features twisted, turning his usual handsome face horrible. With a growl, he reached down and ripped Lafontaine’s glasses from his face — and found himself staring into two empty eye sockets.
“In the land of the blind, the man beyond influence is king,” Lafontaine laughed as Timken gaped into the two unglamourable holes.
Timken punched him hard in the face.
Reginald was shocked. In the photo he’d seen of Lafontaine, he’d had eyes. The photo had only been a few years ago. Had he taken out of his own eyes? And without those eyes, how had he navigated the room? Why, when they’d been speaking earlier, had he ticked his head between them as if meeting their eyes?
“How did you coordinate it? How are you doing this?” Timken bellowed, spraying Lafontaine with spit. Timken’s bearing was terrible. An angry vampire could sometimes transcend humanity, becoming more than just a thing with fangs. What was facing Lafontaine now was more monster than man. And still the black man laughed.
Lafontaine arched as best he could with the soldiers still holding his forearms. Then he trained his empty sockets on Timken and said, “You think I’m blind? Look into a mirror with your beautiful vampire eyes some time. All that vision… yet throughout all these years, you didn’t see shit.”
“If you don’t start talking, I’m going to rip you apart piece by piece,” Timken growled.
Lafontaine didn’t answer. Instead, he looked up at the two soldiers holding him, his empty eyes boring into their black visors. The soldiers were squirming, their grip on him suddenly uncertain.
He said, “Hot in here, isn’t it?”
One of the soldiers — and then, quickly afterward, the other — yelled and yanked their hands away from Lafontaine’s skin. The human sat up on his elbows, smiling. The soldiers looked at their palms as if they’d never seen them before. Both of the vampire soldiers were white — but their palms, after touching Walter Lafontaine, had turned jet black.
Lafontaine’s dead eyes turned to Reginald and Timken.
“Thank you for validating my opinion of you,” he said. “I expected shit… and I got shit.” Then he turned toward the soldiers, whose gape-mouthed expressions were apparent even through their visors. “And you two,” he added. “You have an hour. Better make the most of it.”
He surged up from the table, snarling and swiping his hands toward Timken’s face. Timken flinched back, dodging contact with the man’s poisoned skin. Then Lafontaine came for Reginald with his palms out. Reginald kicked at him, caught Lafontaine in the shin. The big man staggered back and struck the table, then lunged again. Reginald dodged. He was faster than the human, but not by much. And despite Lafontaine’s husky build, he seemed to have adrenaline on his side.
Lafontaine crouched. Reginald readied himself to dodge again, but instead he fell back as a great tumult of exploding glass and metal siding heralded the arrival of the vampire troops. The warehouse became a blur. As Reginald stumbled back out of the room’s middle, he caught sight of the two soldiers, now writhing on the ground and screaming in agony, most of their bare arms already turning black. The newly arrived soldiers scampered away from the two infected men, climbing into the rafters, walking along the ceilings.
The humans soldiers streamed in behind the vampires. There were dozens upon dozens of them, and all were dressed in armor like the AVT used to wear, but shinier and more mobile — and, Reginald thought, with no visible weak spots. The humans didn’t hesitate as the vampires had; they opened fire, striking empty air as the vampires dodged. The humans’ gunfire continued, striking nothing. The vampires were too fast. But then, after a minute’s worth of misses, a few bullets began to score hits. Reginald watched it happen, seeing something that stopped his undead heart: the bullets weren’t flying straight. They were acting like lightning-fast heat-seeking missiles, curving i
n the air. With each volley of shots, the bullets came nearer and nearer their targets.
Timken had taken shelter beside Reginald. And now, seeming alien, Reginald found that he could feel the president’s fear after all.
“Those weapons,” Reginald told him. “They’re learning.”
The bullets arced more and more accurately with each burst. And as he watched it happen, Reginald noticed a second thing: the troops were holding their weapons, but the rifles were also attached to the soldiers’ waists by what looked like hinged robotic arms. He could hear motors in the arms whirr as the soldiers moved and fired. The bullets were learning to seek their cool targets, and the weapons’ sights were learning the vampires’ movement patterns. They were outmatched. Desperately. It was only a matter of time before they would all be dying on the ground, infected with the black plague.
More bursts of fire, now carefully controlled. The humans had settled into a diamond-shaped pattern around Lafontaine, who was casually wiping his arms and neck with a handkerchief as vampires began to burst into sparks around him. They dropped like insects knocked out of the air, striking the building’s floor, clutching themselves and screaming. The formation of humans moved into an orderly, unrushed procession across the floor, with Lafontaine in the middle.
The second wave of vampire soldiers arrived, heavily armored as a failsafe measure and intended for deployment only in the case of something catastrophic. The humans’ bullets plinked off the new vampires’ armor. They marched forward, feeling cocksure, their weapons raised. The lead-shooters, stocked with armor-piercing rounds, coughed fire, and humans began to fall. The tables slowly swung; several humans struck the floor. Others dove for cover, scrambling breathlessly away.
One of the humans threw a round device into the middle of the warehouse. Reginald knew it wasn’t a normal grenade and turned away, but the throw had gone to the other side of the room. It detonated in an explosion of brilliant light, and when Reginald took his arm from his eyes, it came away sunburnt. He watched it heal, now pushing Timken backward. He had no love for the president, but right now it was us versus them, and “us” meant vampires.
More vampire troops arrived, all heavily armored. The humans seemed to have exhausted their reserves; anyone who would ever join this firefight was already here. Fewer vampires fell. More humans threw ultraviolet grenades, but they didn’t have enough to make a dent. They’d struck hard and fast, and they’d taken the vampires by surprise, but the humans reached their limit as the battle wore on. There simply weren’t enough of them. Thanks to the redundant ring of troops, it looked like the vampires might triumph after all, but Reginald couldn’t help but wonder about the eighteen places where the humans still had them held tight… and what would happen afterward, when the human leader lay dead.
Lafontaine, watching the firefight around him, looked unconcerned. He looked directly at Reginald and gave him a little wave just as an enormous bus-style recreational vehicle crashed through the building’s far wall, its windows and tires armored. The thing barreled directly at Reginald and Timken, forcing them to dive aside. Then men dove out of the bus, streaming from its doors and top hatch, and as something happened at Reginald’s back, he turned to see two of the newly arrived humans wrapping the president’s neck with silver and begin dragging him away.
The human formation collapsed back into the RV in such an orderly way, it had to have been rehearsed. Less than ten seconds later, most of the humans were inside — save Lafontaine, the two men holding him, and three remaining gunmen fanned out as cover. Then Lafontaine walked up to Timken, who was weakened by the silver, and slapped him on the back.
“Come on in!” he yelled.
Lafontaine laughed, then climbed the RV’s steps. The two humans dragged Timken up behind him, the remaining gunmen followed, and then the big bus’s door closed.
The vampire troops, undeterred, stormed the door. They scratched. They ripped aluminum from the frame. One of them reached inside, past the RV’s outer shell, and was blown explosively backward. He shook his head, confused, and stormed forward. Others reached in, were similarly repelled, then fell to the dusty floor. They recovered, regrouped, and charged again, only to be repelled and knocked onto their backs. And the humans inside the bus, watching the trampoline-like display, began to laugh.
“Goddammit, you assholes!” Reginald bellowed at the soldiers. “That’s a mobile home! You can’t go in unless he invites you!”
Then Lafontaine, holding one end of Timken’s silver leash, waved through the window as the RV backed out and drove away.
ESCAPE TO NEW YORK
THEY TRIED TO PURSUE, BUT there was no point. The RV was unassailable. No vampire could enter without an invite, and it couldn’t be slowed down without artillery owing to its armored wheels. A few of the more headstrong soldiers tried to follow anyway, but the humans, emerging from the RV’s top hatch, easily picked them off. Soon the humans’ mobile home was just dust on the moon-lit horizon, and the president was gone.
But that wasn’t all Lafontaine had in store. He’d expected treachery from the vampires and had gotten their duplicitous best… and that was apparently enough justification to send the cavalry after the remainders, to finish the job.
As the surviving troops (plus the dying ones; it seemed cruel to leave them) were loading up to leave, a row of human vehicles summited the rise and began screaming toward the warehouse. They were shooting the minute they cleared the horizon, and they were carrying weapons much larger than those the human troops had just displayed. Something like a rocket struck the Town Car Reginald had arrived in just as the driver was reaching for the door handle, and Reginald, who was behind the SWAT truck with Brian, leapt back as the car erupted in flame. But the explosion wasn’t the worst of it; the driver emerged from the blast intact but speckled with black spots as if he’d been hit by a balloon filled with ink. So Lafontaine hadn’t been bluffing; the bio weapon could indeed be put into ordnance. A relatively safe form of ordnance for those using it, as it turned out — seeing as the weapon didn’t appear to harm humans.
The human trucks rolled on, firing their guns, re-aiming their rockets as the Town Car burned.
Reginald shoved Brian into the SWAT truck, then shouted for the remaining troops to haul ass. They were inside and had the rear doors closed in an instant, just as a second blast rocked the vehicle on its tires. Reginald stumbled past the jumbled and shell-shocked soldiers, yelling at the driver to MOVE, but a UV grenade flew through the still-ajar front door like a molotov cocktail and they all turned away, hunched in duck-and-covers. The blast incinerated the driver and severed Brian’s left arm, but Brian shouted that as long as he had one arm and one leg, he was getting them the fuck out. He dove into the driver’s seat atop the ash, slammed his foot onto the gas, and took off along the bumpy road, his arm slowly regrowing as the truck bounced sickeningly with gunshots and impact.
As they drove, two other SWAT trucks joined them like a caravan: the extra troops Timken had sent in order to ignore his strategist and get them all killed. The humans turned to pursue the three vehicles while the vampire trucks fought for roadspace, firing at their rear. Brian jostled for position, his shameless self-preservation quickly moving them to the front of the line — something Brian would be able to justify later because he didn’t want either side to win. Then another of the huge shells struck the truck at the rear, but the new shell must not have been laced with poison because Reginald, looking through the cracked rear windows, watched as black-clad vampires boiled out and leapt onto two of the human vehicles. As the trucks churned dust on the road, the crawling vampires punched through the human vehicles’ plated sides, crawled in, and painted the insides with the occupants’ blood.
Only one human vehicle remained, but it was bigger than the rest. It surged forward, then turned on a set of enormous ultraviolet lights mounted to its top. The driver of the rear vehicle caught fire and the truck careened sideways, crashing into a ditch. The soldi
ers in Reginald’s vehicle ducked down, but the light was intense enough that Reginald still caught a reflected burn, winced, and had to crawl into a corner to heal. While he crouched and waited for his skin to repair, he looked around the truck’s interior, exchanging looks with the other vampires. As he locked eyes with them — with the big, strong, balls-out soldiers who’d tried to take what wasn’t theirs and had gotten burned — he realized that they were all terrified. Their looks and their fear made him furious. They were the ones who’d started this. They were the species who’d struck first in the war, who’d driven the humans to fight back. They were the ones who’d betrayed the plan they’d asked Reginald to form — the plan they’d threatened him all the way to New York in order to get. And now they wanted to cower and stare at him with desperate, panicked looks as if he were their mommy? It made him want to grab them by the necks and rip out their voice boxes — and right now, they might even be weak enough for him to do it.
“GET THE FUCK UP!” he yelled as the truck bounced over the rutted, seldom-used road. The SWAT vehicle was jostling like a contained earthquake. Bodies were being tossed from side to side; things were falling on Reginald’s head; the ride was unseating his feet as he stood to watch the rear door. The inside of the truck was covered with blood, and so was Reginald’s shirt. But still the fighting men who’d begun this stayed down, hiding.
Something inside Reginald snapped. In their weak-willed state, he could make the men at his feet do whatever he wanted — mass-glamour them into fighting, make them jump out and clog the road with their bodies. But he was too furious. He kicked at one man along the wall, but the soldier just cowered, his world shaken. Humans had always been like sheep. Now they were biting back, and nobody knew how to handle it.
Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest Page 9
