Reginald looked around at the weapons inside the vehicle, stocked hurriedly from the hodge-podge vampire arsenal, then grabbed a belt studded with grenades. He had no idea if they were new grenades or old duds that might blow his hand off, but he didn’t care. He was a vampire. He could take pain. And if his head was severed and he died? Well, then at least it would all be over.
He held up the belt, then pulled every pin. By the time he’d pulled the last, moving as fast as his non-fast body would allow, the first grenade had been armed for long enough to blow. He slammed the rear door open, then tossed the belt out. The first grenade blew before it hit the ground, and the others followed like Chinese firecrackers. Reginald felt shrapnel kiss the flesh of his arm and stomach, then clenched through the pain and watched as the explosion slipped under the tires of the human vehicle, blowing a hole through the floor bright enough to leave an afterimage on Reginald’s retinas. The truck leapt into the air and then canted dead onto its side. And then they were ahead — and the road, to the front and behind, was clear.
As the air fell quiet, with only the purr of the engine violating the solace of the night, Reginald looked anew at the vampire soldiers on the floor of the SWAT truck. He suddenly realized what he was looking at. These men weren’t real vampires. Of course they weren’t; they’d been turned after the war. They’d never really had to fight, had never really been tested. They were too green for the conflict they were facing. They were boys for whom vampirism meant the ability to lift heavy things, nothing more. They’d trained as soldiers because it was a job as good as any other, but they’d never expected to face an adversary.
During the drive back to the city, it became apparent that Lafontaine had sent out word that the vampires were not to be trusted, and that the rebellion had begun. Pockets of humans had emerged from nowhere — armed and lining the major roads like groups of highwaymen, ready with liquid booby traps. They’d blocked the roads with old vehicles. They’d laid spikes on the road. They were a mix of humans in normal clothing and those in armor, all of them equally deadly.
Brian stopped the SWAT truck in an open stretch, then turned to Reginald. The others looked up at him with puppy dog eyes. With his irritation mostly in-hand, Reginald took control, knowing that anything less would leave them all dead. He elected for a pulse reconnaissance strategy: a vampire scout would run forward and report back, and only then would the truck proceed. The humans, luckily, didn’t seem to be looking for them in particular, and didn’t appear to be arranged in such a way as to prevent them, specifically, from traveling back to USVC, which was the only place Reginald could think to go, seeing as Nikki had stayed behind. So they were able to eke around the highwayman groups for a long time, and when they finally got the report that there was an impassable barrier in the road, they left the truck and continued on foot.
They passed the barrier by staying away from the road and well in the weeds, eyeing the obstruction with interest. The roadblock was staffed by at least two dozen humans with guns. Brian wanted to use Reginald’s time-pausing ability to blitz through the humans and kill them all before they knew what was coming, but Reginald argued that their best chance of making it back to the city center relied on not leaving a trail of death behind them. So they dodged and evaded, staying in the deep shadows, running when they could with Brian carrying Reginald in his arms like a gigantic baby. And by the time they made it to the Hudson River, Reginald had one very distinct thought: if the human gangs they’d seen in the wildlands outside of New York were any indication, there were far more humans left in the world than the five million predicted by the census. And all of them, it seemed, were ready to fight.
Reginald wondered if he was locking himself in a prison when they reached the bridge, when they crossed into Manhattan, when they navigated the used-to-be-protected vampire streets and found the rest of the supposedly-sparse city alive with human activity and the scent of human blood. While his spine prickled with fear and prophecy, he couldn’t help but be aroused by all of the humanity he sensed around him. He’d never been a hunter and he’d never been a killer, but there were so many of them. So many of them after so long without them… and their smell, here and now, was so incredibly intoxicating. How had they hidden that smell for all this time? How had the vampires never known?
They entered the building using the access code that Brian had been given, then made their way from the loading dock into the elevators and up to the higher floors. Reginald didn’t want to talk to anyone. He didn’t want to hear from Claude or Charles or Walker, and he didn’t want to find a way to rescue Timken. He just wanted to go to his room. He wanted to sleep, or take a bath, or possibly enter a fugue and talk to Maurice. The sun was finally rising, and the humans were laying claim to their half of the day. And, he thought wryly, just look at all they’d been able to handle during the nighttime, while the vampires were supposed to reign.
Nikki met him at the door, her eyes red, then wrapped him in a hug and refused to let him go. They collapsed onto the bed together, Reginald exhausted from exertion and Nikki exhausted from emotion. Uneasy sleep followed. Reginald didn’t enter the codex or his bloodline, but his dreams were haunted by the souls of vampires — souls as his higher mind imagined them, burning in fires and dying screaming. He dreamed that Maurice was there with him as he watched it all happen, and then in the way that dreams are, the two of them were suddenly and inexplicably playing cards in a place where it was dark, sitting on rock, a folding metal chair in the background with a silver chain draped over its back. Maurice laid down all of his cards, then said, Gin. Reginald looked up into Maurice’s face and said, I thought we were playing poker and Maurice replied, That’s your problem. Then Reginald woke up, covered in a sheen of sweat.
He’d slept the entire day. Nikki had slept less, and when he opened his sluggish eyes and saw her, she was across the room, sitting on a padded chair in front of the vanity mirror wearing only a bra and panties, brushing her long, dark hair. She looked haggard despite also looking beautiful; beautiful was on the outside while haggard was in the depths of her eyes when she looked over, seeing he’d woken.
“Tell me I’m back in Columbus,” he said. “There never was a human rebellion. There never was even a war. We’re human. Later we’re going to get dressed and go to work, and Maurice will be there. After work, we’ll visit our ten-year-old friend Claire. I will be tormented by Todd Walker, who will put a Whoopie Cushion on my seat.”
“Maybe just the last,” said Nikki, smiling.
Reginald rolled onto his back and studied the popcorn ceiling. A long, long, long time ago, he used to watch reality TV shows where people bought houses, fixed them up, and sold them for a profit. They always hated popcorn ceilings. Why? This one wasn’t so bad.
“Have you checked the news?” he asked. “Or Fangbook?”
Nikki gave him a look that was kind, and almost protective. He tried hard to keep his mind out of hers, but her look said everything he couldn’t read from her mind or her blood: that it was a question he didn’t want to know the answer to.
“Just tell me.”
“They were all just waiting,” she said, and Reginald found he didn’t need her to clarify who “they” were. “What you told me you saw on your way back is happening everywhere. Fangbook is just sad. Remember how you used to wish Fangbook would just go away, because it was a haven for bloodlust and the glorification of murder?”
He nodded.
“Well, now it’s like a support group. At best, it’s like Facebook used to be. You remember how Facebook was?”
“I was never really into Facebook. It was a haven for douchebaggery and the glorification of stupid internet memes.”
“Fangbook is now just vampires screaming and cowering, as told by status updates and photos. I scrolled back in my feed when I saw what was populating because I was curious. Usually Fangbook is quiet during the day, but today it was more awake than ever. You read through it for long enough, and it starts to s
ound like Night of the Living Dead in reverse. All the monsters hiding in basements, peeking out to see gangs of non-stumbling, non-infected, non-dead human beings walking through their yards with stakes and silver and guns and torches.”
“They’re in the cities?” said Reginald.
“No, mostly just in the wildlands, where the hippies live outside of the government’s ’tyranny.’ But if you ask me — which you shouldn’t because my husband is the genius logician who knows literally everything — it seems like they’re not even trying to get into the cities. It’s like they’re just trying to move their pieces into position at this point, before they strike. Like in chess.”
“Why is this entire thing one big chess metaphor?” said Reginald. “I’m tired of chess.”
“But you’re so good at chess,” she said.
And he was. So in the hour before sunset, as they sat safe (for now) in the well-guarded USVC building, Reginald tried to align his own pieces. He sped through web pages as quickly as he could click and scroll, trying to absorb information into his mind like… well, like Claire could. And with that thought, his head perked up. At first he felt inspired. But another, much more sinister emotion came on its heels.
“Claire,” he said.
Nikki had dressed and was pacing the room, fidgeting with her earrings. Nikki had never been big on jewelry, but when her sister had died, she’d made a trek into the wildlands community where Jackie had lived and died a natural but somewhat early death and picked up a load of Jackie’s belongings. One of the things Jackie had saved and protected throughout all of her tumultuous years was their mother’s gold. What little jewelry Nikki had had when Reginald had met her had been silver; she’d never liked the look of gold. But her turn to vampire had changed that, out of necessity.
Right now was the least logical time to fuss with jewelry, especially for Nikki. But she was doing it so she’d have something to do — so she wouldn’t just have to sit and wait and pray to a God she never really believed in, and that she wasn’t sure would want her now anyway.
She stopped pacing. “What about Claire?”
Reginald had been talking to himself. Now he looked up and answered her anyway.
“She’s in a vampire city.”
“She’ll be okay.”
“That’s not a given,” he said.
She walked over, then stooped and wrapped her arms around Reginald’s torso. “No, Reginald. She’ll be fine. When you came back this morning, after I woke up, Brian came in and showed me his cell phone. It had been lying on his nightstand, and it was full of text messages. Non-network text messages. I’m no genius, but if you were to look at the network they came from, I’d guess it’d say something like ‘The Lollipop Network,’ or whatever else Claire had thought was amusing at the time.”
Reginald felt himself relax. All Nikki had told him was that Claire had sent Brian some messages — meshing her mind with electrons as usual, pushing messages directly from her brain to the closest mobile device to her friends, or so she’d thought — but Reginald could feel pacification rolling over him like a comfortable blanket. The feeling wasn’t coming from facts; it was coming from Nikki. It felt like she was casting a calming spell on him without even meaning to do so. Or maybe she did mean to do so. Maybe their blood bond had simply made a quiet activity between a couple feel more real.
“The first few messages were warnings,” she said. “Disturbingly specific warnings about Walter Lafontaine — which is a name that, as far as I’ve seen, isn’t known by the general population. She knew you were going to meet with him, and she warned you not to. She warned us that it was a trap. If only we’d seen that phone, Reginald.”
It didn’t matter. They’d made it back alive. All they’d lost was the architect of the world’s murder.
“You can’t take a cell phone on a raid,” he told her.
“It wasn’t supposed to be a raid. It was supposed to be a negotiation.”
“Well,” he said, gesturing vaguely, “I guess that shows what we know. Me being a genius vampire mastermind and all.”
“Don’t do that.”
Normally he’d wave her away when she told him not to deprecate himself, but this time her words felt particularly poignant, and he let them settle. He wasn’t the same man he’d been. He wasn’t the same vampire he’d been. He didn’t look any different, but he was a little stronger. A little faster. He didn’t eat junk food. He drank a healthy amount of blood. He ran and he trained despite the fact that it couldn’t help him, just to prove to himself that he could. And he didn’t wallow in self-pity. Self-pity did nothing. It was the purest form of self-indulgence: self-important egoism disguised as penance. But self-pity had never helped anyone, ever, and he knew it.
“The later texts read like a live recap of your journey back, also oddly specific. She was able to tell where you were and how you were doing, right up until you got back here. Honestly, I wish I’d known so that I could follow along. I was worried sick. As usual, I have no idea how she did any of it.”
“She probably plugged into the satellites. Or extrapolated what had to happen next from the information she already had, assuming she had the visibility she can’t always count on having. Or maybe she extrapolated from the things that she could see easily, or glean from news reports. Or all of the above.”
Nikki shrugged. It hadn’t been a real question.
Reginald sighed. Maybe she would be fine. In a literal sense, Claire knew almost everything, assuming she could access the information. She was the closest thing to omniscient that the mortal plane had ever known. He imagined her dodging threats as she saw them coming, always staying one step ahead — not unlike what Reginald could do with his hyper-awareness, when he stopped time and analyzed his choices. He imagined Claire doing much the same, and felt better.
“I guess she’ll be okay,” he said. But that was only half of his Claire thoughts. Half of the reason his head had popped up and he’d said her name.
“I want to call her,” said Reginald. “I need her mind. I need her to help me analyze the human activity.”
“You can’t call her,” said Nikki.
Reginald ignored her, picking up his cell phone. Claire didn’t have a cell phone because she didn’t need one, but the house she lived in had a phone, and she’d had it activated. There was Skype. There was even email. He began to dial.
“I said, you can’t call her,” said Nikki.
“Why not?”
“She left. She’s not at home.”
Reginald’s sense of temporary peace broke like a dropped plate. “Oh.”
But as his head was sagging, he heard a knock on the door. He looked up. Nikki started to rise, but she didn’t make it past a partial crouch. The door had an electronic swipe lock. It clicked, and the door opened. And there in the doorway was a young woman with long, light brown hair, dressed in jeans and a red top.
“Hey,” said Claire.
MEET THE NEW BOSS, SAME AS THE OLD BOSS
REGINALD WAS FURIOUS WITH CLAIRE for crossing the country on her own, but Claire waved him off as usual, assuring him that it was fine. She’d sneaked out of her house in full light, making her way across the city and darting through the gate. Once outside, she’d been safe. She was walking in the sun, probably developing a sunburn owing to her pale skin and lack of regular sun exposure, so no human would think she was a vampire unless they scoped her and found her cold — and even if they did scope her, they wouldn’t know what to think. She’d then stolen a car and made her way to a converted hospital on the periphery of the wildlands that she’d seen helicopters fly out of in the past, presumably to scope the wildlands for the Vampire Nation. She’d found the helicopter fueled, had climbed inside, and had flown it.
When Nikki, aghast, asked how the hell she’d flown a helicopter, Claire just waved her hands mysteriously in the air. The television came on, then turned off. Brian’s cell phone, in the other room, rang. The lights turned on and off, and the e
lectronic door clicked open and closed. The air conditioning came on and off, and in front of them both, Claire’s palms glowed with a strange blue light. Then everything stopped and she lowered her palms, and she answered Nikki’s question: “I just flew it, and now it’s on the roof.” Then she pointed up, a small, innocent smile on her wide, pretty lips.
Reginald yelled at her. He said that she could easily have been killed — not just by vampires looking for humans, but also by humans looking for vampires. Claire was neither. The vampire community she’d lived in knew her as vampire, but when she used to go into the wildlands to visit her dying mother, the few vampire-friendly humans they knew had treated her as human. She didn’t have fangs and she couldn’t move like a vampire (or could she? Reginald suspected she might be sandbagging; getting out of the city walls wasn’t simple, and Claire had glossed over it as if it were), but she was cold under their sensors. She could walk in the sun. And she could manipulate energy — an ability that Reginald, to this day, believed she’d only scratched the surface of. But as Reginald watched Claire come into his room at USVC and sit on the bed beside Nikki, all he could see in his mind were all of the dangers she had faced. And it made him angry.
Claire’s response was simple and direct. “I’m 51,” she said. “Get off my back, mom.”
It was true. Claire hadn’t had a mother in any real sense until she’d been old enough for a mother’s influence to barely matter. Between the addling inflicted by Altus the incubus and the damage the vampire agent had done to her following her attack, Claire’s mother hadn’t returned to normal until Claire’s aging had slowed, until after the writing was already on the wall. Reginald and Nikki had made decent surrogate parents (“decent” other than repeatedly leading her into apocalyptic peril), but they weren’t her blood, and their influence and authority over her could only stretch so far.
Once Reginald accepted that Claire had, in fact, taken her ill-advised trip whether he liked it or not (and once he realized that all of his fears for her would go away now that she was with them), he settled down and began pumping her for information. She was only moderately helpful, but she nudged his piece further ahead on the game board than it had been before. Claire’s omniscience was almost subconscious. She got impulses of foreknowledge in the way some people reacted to new events based on incidents in their past, and when she’d begun to fear for Reginald, Nikki, and Brian, a sort of window had opened into her archive and she’d seen it all unfold, watching the information as it funneled to her through the internet’s wires and across the air. Her mind had collated and delivered that information right then, when she was in need, quite clearly. But in the absence of a traumatic event to re-open that window, Claire could only speak vaguely about the world of facts around her: Yes, human clusters were appearing worldwide, strategically placed as if by a master plan laid out years ago. Yes, there were many more humans than vampires had thought. And yes, all those humans out there had been playing dumb while their innovation and technology had, in fact, been growing by leaps and bounds. But beyond those vagaries, Claire had nothing. Nikki suggested glamouring her as Reginald had done before, but Reginald didn’t want to do it. Glamouring a vampire always felt invasive — and Claire, he said, felt more and more like a vampire with every passing day. Nikki pushed harder, and Claire said that it was okay, that she’d do it. But still Reginald hedged, and finally the debate was short-circuited when Ophelia knocked on the door and told them that the president needed to see them. She didn’t make it sound like a request.
Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest Page 10
