Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest

by Johnny B. Truant

  Reginald shook his head. He didn’t want to say what was on his mind, which was that he’d been predicting all of this for decades, and nobody had listened.

  “You’ve apparently done a lot of thinking about this,” he said instead.

  Walker nodded. “We’ve had to. You’ve heard the reports that a lot of the blood stock is becoming sick? Well, we’ve been understating the problem a little. It was starting to reach epidemic levels before all of this happened. The need to have a Plan B has been on a lot of minds lately — mine most of all.”

  “What’s causing it?”

  “We don’t know. At first we just thought it was flu. We were going to institute a vaccine program, but…” He stalled, unsure how to continue. Then Reginald realized why.

  “But you couldn’t synthesize the vaccine, could you?”

  Walker shook his head. “I asked our eggheads. They said they couldn’t. I said that was ridiculous; they were our eggheads. But then I realized that really, they’re just cooks. They need a recipe, and in the war, the recipes for how exactly to synthesize flu vaccines were all lost. It was like a scavenger hunt. They had to look all over, and they already had a handful of vaccines — measles, chicken pox, a few of the biggies — but the flu wasn’t one of them.”

  “The flu vaccine was a dead end anyway,” said Ophelia. “It looks like flu, but it sticks around too long. Unless they’re passing it back and forth. Can that happen, or does the virus eventually die off in a small population?”

  Reginald put his face in his palm. “Jesus Christ, you don’t even know how to diagnose it. Don’t you have any doctors? People who got their training before some asshole drank their blood and killed them?”

  “Of course there are doctors,” Ophelia snapped. “Good ones! It’s just that…”

  “Maybe they’ll all die,” Charles interrupted. Everyone turned to look at him, and his head retreated like a turtle’s.

  Walker glanced at Charles, then looked back to Reginald. “To be clear,” he said, “if you think I’m saying that there’s a human pandemic out there and coming to save us, I’m not. As far as we can tell, the wild population doesn’t even seem to be affected by whatever’s hitting the stock.”

  “Inbreeding,” said Nikki.

  Reginald shook his head. “Not enough generations have passed. Besides, the captive populations are big enough that I don’t think brothers are screwing their sisters quite yet.” Then something occurred to Reginald and he looked at Claude, not Walker. “Why are you bringing this up?” he asked.

  Claude gave a small shrug. “We were wondering if maybe we could weaponize it,” he said.

  “Weaponize it? Are you telling me that you want to use whatever’s affecting the blood stock to create a plague?”

  “A human plague. Sure.”

  This time, Reginald put his face in both of his palms.

  “Why not?” said Claude, a pout in his voice. “They have a plague ready for us!”

  Reginald looked up, using his hands to rub his cheeks, pulling them long in exasperation. He looked the new vampire president squarely in the eyes. “You,” he said, “are so stupid that I literally can’t believe you’ve survived this long.”

  Claude looked around at the others for help.

  “First of all, I think we all know that Larry, Moe, and Curly in the vampire science labs will never figure out how to manipulate a virus. So it’s already moot.”

  “We could capture human scientists and force them to do it,” said Charles.

  “Second,” Reginald barged on, ignoring Charles, “even if you could create a weapon, you’d be like a kid with a stick of dynamite, just as likely to kill yourself as anything else. Third, you don’t know that it wouldn’t cross species and kill off something else that’s vital to the ecosystem. And lastly, if you do manage to kill all of the humans, you will have killed all of the humans. How will you eat then? The worst thing you could do in a plan like that would be to succeed.”

  Claude ignored the insult, tapping the surface of the table with one of the pens from Timken’s desk set. “What weapons do we have, then?” he asked.

  Ophelia ticked off the options on her fingers. “Guns of all kinds. Artillery. A few bombs. We can get their planes flying if we need to, and we know the locations of their missile bases, where…”

  Reginald shook his head, unable to believe what he was hearing. “You’re going to nuke them?”

  “Why not?” she said. “As long as we don’t strike near a vampire population center, we’re impervious to the radiation, and…”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” said Reginald. “Let’s try this again: if you poison the Earth and kill them off, what are we going to eat to survive?”

  “They won’t all die,” said Walker.

  “Just be horribly poisoned and mutated, I guess,” said Reginald. “Hey Todd, when you were human, did you like eating rancid steak?”

  “No nukes,” said Claude.

  “Guns, then,” said Ophelia. “And of course, our hands and teeth.”

  “And when they shoot you with their smart bullets?” said Reginald.

  “Or hit you with that poison shit that turns your skin black?” Nikki added.

  “Fucking hell, they’re animals!” Claude blurted, standing. “We’re stronger than they are! Faster! Better! You’re telling me we can’t get near them?”

  “Hey, be my guest,” said Reginald. “Just don’t be surprised when your dick rots off.”

  Claude paced, shaking his head. Fury radiated from him. “Can we wear some kind of protection?” he asked. “Something that will keep that shit off of us?”

  “Sure,” said Reginald. “Get a raincoat.”

  “Like at a Gallagher show,” said Nikki.

  “What’s Gallagher?” said Charles.

  “Not to be a downer,” said Reginald, “but they’ve also got ‘that shit’ in their bullets. I saw it blow out of a rocket of some kind, too. And given that it doesn’t seem to harm them, there’s no reason they couldn’t make bombs out of it. Drop one right on us, from a missile bunker you missed. Forget nukes; conventional explosives would be plenty to spread it far and wide. Whoever’s hit dies an hour later. Maybe they even find a way to make it communicable, which so far, thankfully, it doesn’t seem to be, and then once we’re gone, they party on our ashes. Game over.”

  Claude paced. “This is intolerable.”

  “Payback’s a bitch, huh?”

  Claude shot Reginald a look that was full of venom. So Reginald, already at the edge, decided to press further. He added, “Guess you shouldn’t have killed Maurice either, huh?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  There was a cup filled with hot, blood-spiked coffee in front of Reginald. He threw it at Claude, scoring a hit. Claude’s skin turned red, then rapidly healed. Reddish-brown coffee soaked into the white shirt under his suit.

  “Because your mother,” Reginald answered, realizing it wasn’t one of his best zingers.

  They sat for a moment, everyone looking at everyone else as the truth settled in: there was very little they could do. They couldn’t touch the humans and the humans could push in and touch them plenty. They might receive the emergency blood shipments that Walker said were coming and they might not. They might be able to keep the population fed for a few more weeks and they might not. It was all up to the humans. They couldn’t fight back one-on-one for fear of the humans’ biological weapon unless they wore biohazard suits, but something told Reginald that the humans would be prepared for that contingency. Somehow, a man without eyes had found a way to see, and somehow, an oppressed, decimated population of savages had managed to arrange their pieces across the game board in stealth, ready to pop up and strike all at once. They would have ways around something as mundane as bloodsuckers in baggies. Even suit-slitting knives would be an effective offense.

  The door opened again and a vampire in uniform rushed into the room. He conversed briefly with Ophelia
, and she ran off behind him. She returned five minutes later, then turned to face the others, all of whom were eagerly waiting.

  “Lafontaine just called,” she said.

  Claude jerked his head around. “Put him on!”

  “He just talked for a few minutes,” said Ophelia. “He did all of the talking; I just listened. Then he hung up.”

  “Then get the recording. Play it back!”

  Ophelia shook her head. “He called my cell phone. I left it at reception to charge.”

  “He called your cell phone?” But immediately after saying it, Claude waved his big hand to indicate that the point was moot. If Lafontaine’s people could email the president, they could snoop out a general’s phone number. Of course, the fact that he’d called a private number would also mean that the call couldn’t easily be traced, which may well have been why he’d done it. So Claude changed his question. “Well, what did he say?” he asked.

  “He wants to meet again,” said Ophelia. “Tomorrow at midnight. He gave me a location, not far from the last meetup. He said that if we try to pull anything again, he’ll be ready again. He said to remind you how easily they’d anticipated everything the first time — how he knew you’d try to grab him and so had covered himself with the disease, how he’d known our troops would come in armed and how they’d been prepared for it. He said…” She swallowed. “He said to be sure to tell you that he is smarter than you — and that humans, as a species, are smarter than all of us.” She stopped, then swallowed again.

  “Okay,” said Claude, trying to appear in control. “What does he want?”

  “He wants us to release the prisoners at the farms they have under siege. Every single one of them, non-negotiable. He says he’ll give us Timken in return, so that we can ‘save face and run off with our tails between our legs.’ Then, after the stock are all safely away from the farms and under their protection, he’ll pull his men out and let our guards and technicians go.”

  Claude shook his head. “That’s 75 percent of the blood supply. We can’t just give them all up. There has to be another way.” He turned to Walker for confirmation.

  Walker sighed. “Honestly, those farms are lost anyway,” he said. “Once we solve this — if we solve this — we can get new stock and rebuild, but we can’t do anything until they release the facilities. Plus, those standoffs are using up a lot of CPC manpower. There’s no way, at this point, to force a solution with that stock. They’ve had a taste of revolution. There will be nothing but problems if we don’t find a way to start fresh, with fresh humans. Right now, giving up the stock might be doing ourselves a favor. It’ll at least flush the system.”

  Claude took a long moment, looking around the table.

  “Fine,” he said. “Make the arrangements.”

  COMPROMISE

  REGINALD FELT DEJA VU.

  ONCE again, he suited up. Claude, who was the only other person going on the mission, prepared beside him. This time, they were suiting up just enough to protect themselves but not enough to fight… which, in the end, made the deja vu that much more intense because Reginald hadn’t known his companions had planned to fight the first time. So as he prepared, he wondered at the intentions of those around him. Would Claude and Ophelia try to mass troops in secret to assault the humans as they’d done last time? Or had they actually heard Lafontaine’s message and accepted that whatever extra troops they tried to send, the humans would be more than prepared to meet them?

  Suspicious, Reginald asked Claire to sift through the building’s computer network to see if she could find any secret plans pertaining to the mission. Were there charts and troop assignments on any of the hard drives? Had there been unexpected gun or armor deployments? Were Claude and Ophelia sending communications back and forth that looked like plotting for anything beyond what Lafontaine had allowed?

  But there was nothing. Claude seemed to accept that he’d been outmatched, and that the Vampire Nation’s best (and possibly only) chance would be to take what they could get, fall back, and then reassess. Claude had heard what Walker said about the farms the same as Reginald had: they were already lost. Fighting for them now would be an act of ego instead of logic, and would do more harm than good.

  So he suited up, donning a set of body armor as Lafontaine’s directives seemed to allow, watching as Claude did the same. With only two of them going, there was no room for funny business. But he still made sure to pocket his phone, then asked Claire to watch whatever satellites were in the area and call him if she saw anything funny. He wanted to be the first to know if more vampire troops arrived, if there was any sign that Claude wasn’t playing fair. And if that happened, Reginald would blow the whistle himself. Then he’d change sides if the humans would let him — or die if they wouldn’t.

  Nikki asked Claire what would happen on the upcoming mission, seeing as she’d intuited danger before and during the earlier mission. Claire told Nikki that she could see nothing. Reginald said that Claire’s blankness proved there would be no foul play, but Nikki pointed out that Claire’s predictions were far from predictable, and that hearing her prophecies was a bit like trying to tune into a distant TV station whose reception popped in and out of clarity depending on the weather.

  Nikki hated that Reginald was going and that she wasn’t, but Reginald told her that there was a hierarchy of importance at work here, and that as much as he loathed Claude, keeping the vampire population alive was now at the top of that hierarchy. Other than Claire (who was barely human, if at all), there were no humans left that he felt any real attachment to; everyone else he cared about had fangs and drank blood. So he had to do what he could, and right now, that meant making the exchange work. It meant walking in beside Claude, and it meant walking out with the mastermind of the global holocaust on his other side. The entire endeavor was beyond repugnant, but it was, at the moment, what needed to be done.

  So Reginald would go. Claude would go. Everyone else would stay behind. Lafontaine had allowed for a party of two only, and had added that spotters would be looking out for vampire backup for miles around. If they saw any, the deal was off. He’d kill Timken; he’d kill Claude and Reginald; he’d burn the blood farms and the other points of siege.

  As Reginald double-checked the straps on his vest, he looked over at Claude’s large form. He met his eyes, trying to prod without prodding. Since their first encounter on the TGV, Claude had always kept a firm mental wall up around Reginald, but feeling the edges of Claude’s emotions now, Reginald found nothing alarming. He looked at him evenly, his gaze trying to remind the big man what was at stake.

  And then they were off.

  They drove to the site in a Lincoln Town Car exactly like the one they’d used the last time, parking at a much smaller building in the middle of a large, unobstructed field. As they approached, they’d seen movement all around the horizon — small flickers in every direction. Somehow, they’d been surrounded. But that made sense and was even okay with Reginald, seeing as the humans were already holding all of the cards.

  Lafontaine and a human guard were already there, already out of their car and waiting, their headlights on and pointing toward the vampires. Reginald could see a shape in the back of the car that had to be Timken. There was also a fourth man in the group, unarmed and unarmored, wearing a tattered suit. He approached Reginald, who’d been driving, and held out his hand. Reginald, guessing, gave him the keys. The man climbed into the Town Car behind them, started it, and drove away. The move struck Reginald as funny, but he decided not to comment. Instead, he looked at Lafontaine and his armed escort across the parking lot, then at Claude.

  “I’m glad you understand the need to help the Vampire Nation resolve this,” said Claude. “Despite… you know.”

  “If you talk to me again,” said Reginald, “I will try to kill you. I’m sure I’ll fail and you’ll kill me instead, but then you’ll be short one fat genius brain.”

  Reginald was sure that Claude would retort — was
almost hoping he would — but the big man only looked at Reginald and then closed his mouth with a sense of “fair enough.”

  Lafontaine, who hadn’t bothered with his sunglasses this time, dragged the shape from the back seat and began walking with it toward the center of the parking lot, back-lit by the other car’s headlights. The guard followed on Lafontaine’s other side. As they came nearer, Reginald could see Timken’s face. His hair was disheveled but he looked otherwise pristine, almost ready for a photo shoot.

  Then they stopped, and Reginald suddenly realized that nobody would be entering the building. The exchange would be conducted in the open. That, too, made sense, but Reginald couldn’t help but look over at the building, wondering if it was filled with human snipers.

  Lafontaine beckoned. Reginald and Claude walked forward to join them.

  Right now, all of the humans at the besieged blood farms would be lining up at the gates. The vampire troops guarding the gates would be allowing them to do so, lowering their weapons. It was all being televised by news crews, and the whole nation was watching. That, Reginald thought, was the hidden reason behind this exchange — the reason Lafontaine had insisted on it. It wasn’t just about freeing the captive humans; it was about changing hearts and minds. The public would see the Vampire Nation regain its leader, but it would also see the Nation allow 75 percent of its blood supply walk away unmolested. The surrender of sustenance would demoralize the vampire world to the point of breaking while simultaneously giving the humans unbridled new levels of hope. In the minds of the watching humans, the righteous would have won. Their cause would have become not just possible… but really just a matter of time.

  On his belt, Claude wore a cell phone. This was intended to be straightforward; Claude would use the phone to tell the vampire troops to allow the humans to pass the gates, then Lafontaine would hand Timken over, and then when the blood stock was safely away, Lafontaine would order his troops to retreat. But until those events actually took place, anything could happen. There were guns aimed in every direction, creating a giant Mexican standoff.