“IT’S FOR THE WEAK!”
“Calm down,” said Reginald. He tried to get inside, tried to get behind Claude’s eyes. He’d glamoured him before, but that had been before Claude had known who Reginald was or what he could do. Reginald’s lips asked Claude to calm down. His eyes asked Claude to calm down. But beyond that, he had no influence, and Claude wasn’t listening. But it hardly mattered. None of what he was saying was for Claude’s ears. It was for the others.
Reginald met Nikki’s eye. She was behind Claude, in front of Walker, still standing. Claude’s leash on her had loosened, but she would never be able to outmuscle him. Reginald considered going into her head, trying to use her like a puppet, but there was nothing he could use. Claude had no weapons Nikki could grab; the human soldiers didn’t carry sidearms and Claude had left his rifle behind when he’d brought her out. She’d have to use her hands, and even if those hands could outmatch a vampire two millennia her senior (which they couldn’t), she was weak from the silver. Besides, Walker was still behind her. Her hands, behind her back, were directly in front of him, and he’d see her move before Claude did. And of course, there was still Charles to think about.
“You think you’re better than us,” Claude said, his eyes boring into Reginald’s soul. “You always have. I know all about you, you know. I know what you can do with your mind. I know how you escaped from the Council, by sticking your hand inside the heads of the others. I know how you and Maurice were always trying to…”
“Don’t you dare mention Maurice,” said Reginald.
“… to enact some meatbag-loving law or another, to create all these inferior, fat, ugly, damaged fucking poor-excuse-for-a-vampire vampires. I know how you tried to save all those condemned wanton creation criminals, like yourself. And I know how, while we were trying to clear the planet of these pests, you were working to save them. Even when you came to Antarctica, you were fighting against us, and that’s why we followed you: because we knew what kind of a pathetic, weak-willed piece of shit you were. And so yes, I killed Timken. Because he was weak, like you. He took the ball most of the way, but as I’d always known he would, he fell short at the very end.”
Claude was bent at the waist, his breath hot on Reginald’s face as his final mask of civility dropped away and his true face emerged. His eyes seemed to burn. Saliva pooled in his mouth and his fangs descended. A line of spit fell from his lower lip as he spoke, unheeded.
“Timken got soft,” he said. “He wanted to talk to the humans when they reached out. He wanted to negotiate. He was even considering letting them go! As a gesture of goodwill. And that’s how he said it, too: ‘A gesture of goodwill.’ As if we had to pacify these animals. As if they weren’t ours to use in whatever way we saw fit. I wanted to tighten human movement within the farms and harvest more from the wildlands to join them, to shake up the gene pool. But Timken? He once proposed giving them a protected furlough once a year. And somehow, he expected them to come back without a fight? He expected the taste of freedom to not incite riots? Can you imagine it?”
“Compassion,” said Reginald, nodding slightly. “Believe it or not, I can imagine it just fine.”
Claude straightened. He didn’t look precisely angry, and that in itself was frightening. It was as if he’d gone beyond anger, as if he’d rolled right into a place where anger was pointless because it was impossible for anyone to disagree.
He turned and grabbed Nikki’s chain. He didn’t grab one of the loose ends. Instead, he grabbed the circle around her neck, the backs of his gloved knuckles against her throat. Then he dragged her closer, holding her at his side in front of Reginald.
“I know about her, too,” Claude said, turning his gaze toward Nikki. He regarded her for a second, seeming to scent her, his mouth open just far enough for his fangs to show. “Nicole Pilson. She was approved by Council before you got your hands on her. I looked up her evaluation, you know. Prime scores. Excellent strength, agility, and cunning. An appropriately dark backstory. Oh, she was made to be a vampire. Except for one thing: her compassion, as you say. She had her whole eternity ahead of her, but then she met you and it all fell apart. Impersonating a vampire. Treason. Murder. She backed Maurice, went rogue. All because she had compassion for the poor man who didn’t measure up. Because of that, she threw it all away.”
“She’s a vampire now, Claude,” said Reginald. His undead heart was starting to accelerate. He remembered how Maurice had come to his rescue and prayed for strength, but none came. So this would be his final failure: his progeny was in mortal peril, and the vampire agent in his blood wouldn’t even rise to help him.
Claude looked at Reginald, then back at Nikki. Now his mouth opened further, his fangs very near Nikki’s long, smooth neck. Reginald watched her swallow as Walker looked on from behind them.
“She is a vampire now, isn’t she?” he said. “Oh yes. Thanks to an act of wanton creation, because she wanted to be with you — and you, knowing you shouldn’t, had compassion enough to turn her anyway. The lines are fuzzy, following your criminal overthrow, but that’s how I’d judge her. And even if her creation wasn’t wanton, it was tainted. Because you were her maker. You, who should never have been here in the first place. You, who should have been left to die — but weren’t, because Maurice had compassion for you.”
He looked at Reginald, then at Nikki, and then back at Reginald. He shook his head in a way that was almost sad. His eyes were somewhere else, departed from sanity. Saliva dripped from his fangs, then ran down his chin. His fist, holding tight to Nikki’s neck chain, was shaking. He was gripping it so hard that Reginald found himself hoping that the gloves would split against the silver, burning him.
“So many mistakes,” he said. “So many bleeding hearts. No vampire should exist because of pity, because it is our ruthlessness that makes us strong. Lafontaine never should have met you tonight. If he’d blown his bombs out of hand, we’d be on our way to extinct. I won’t make that same mistake. A vampire should never hesitate. When faced with an enemy, he should kill it. Not love it. Not forgive it.” As he concluded, his nose brushed Nikki’s chin just above the chain. His fangs grazed her skin. Reginald saw her flinch.
“Please,” said Reginald, his voice breaking.
“Please is for the weak,” said Claude. “Pity is for the weak. Mercy, Reginald, is for the weak. We are strong. As your human friends are about to learn, all mercy will get you is a knife in the back.”
“Or a silver-lined meat fork pulled from your shoulder,” said a voice.
Claude turned, but not fast enough. Todd Walker had been born to be a vampire. He’d been strong and fast even on his first night, when Nikki had begged Maurice not to kill him after Maurice had impaled him with that fork. Walker’s gloved hands flipped the chain from Nikki’s neck to Claude’s in milliseconds. But it didn’t last for long; Walker, who’d survived through Nikki’s mercy, immediately began to falter. Claude was two thousand years old, and stronger in spite of the silver.
Reginald met Nikki’s eye.
“Get him,” he said.
Nikki, now free and unencumbered, struck at Claude with an outstretched hand, her fingers pressed together and straight. Her nails speared him through the neck, emerging at the back. Her other hand joined the first and she pulled, and a moment later Maurice’s killer’s head struck the dirt. Then Walker and Nikki stepped back as Claude’s body began to spark and burn, and in seconds he was nothing but ash.
Charles turned and ran.
The vampire soldiers around the field began to buckle and twitch as Reginald, still chained to the folding metal chair, reached into their minds. Vampire adrenaline came in the form of a late-stage cavalry, finally flooding his system as he watched Claude burn. He felt his blood’s intelligence grow fists. He saw the mental walls the soldiers had raised and blasted effortlessly through them. Then he had the vampires by their throats, all of them at the ends of arms of thought, all with their rotted brains clenched in his grip, sque
ezing and churning.
Guns turned on their holders. They were re-appropriated human weapons, so when the vampires around the field began to fire on themselves, black blooms formed around the gunshots and they began to light up the night with their screams. Reginald reached inside one of the soldiers and, feeling anger like a torch, made him pull the pin on the UV grenade strapped to the belt he’d stolen. The grenade exploded, setting him on fire.
Then the vampires ran. There was no nobility, no loyalty, no thought given to loathed human compassion. Those who could still run became streaks in the night. Reginald felt them go, watching their thoughts and emotions diminish into the night.
When the vampires were gone, the humans rose to their feet and re-claimed their dropped weapons. Then, one by one, they began to train them on the three vampires still left in the middle of the field.
Reginald looked down at Lafontaine. The big man was bloody but alive.
“It’s over,” said Reginald.
Lafontaine spat blood, climbing onto his knees. “It’s not over.”
Around the field, guns flashed red dots. Reginald watched as Nikki and Walker’s chests were painted with them, skittering across their fronts like fireflies. He looked down. The dots were on him too. He was still bound, still unable to flee even if he’d wanted to. Nikki and Walker couldn’t even carry him, thanks to all the silver.
Reginald met Lafontaine’s sightless eyes, knowing that the man could see him. “I saved you,” he said.
The red spots clustered tighter. Human soldiers took to their knees, steading their aim.
“You betrayed me.”
“I wasn’t behind what just happened. They betrayed me, too.”
Lafontaine stood. Once he was up, he was steady. He looked strong, even. Determined. “Your kind is always ‘behind it,’ and that’s the problem,” he said.
“We need to talk. I came here to talk.” He felt the mood on the field, realizing that what he’d thought earlier was still true: he was able to feel the emotions of the humans even though he was sure that all of the vampires were gone. The mood he felt wasn’t good, or trusting, or even compassionate enough to give him the slightest benefit of the doubt.
His voice dropped to pleading, making him hate himself as he heard it but knowing that time was running out. “We have to talk.”
Lafontaine pulled a walkie from his belt. He keyed in a code.
“What are you doing?” said Nikki.
“Ending New York,” he said. “Ending Geneva.”
“We just saved you! Look at what just happened here!” Nikki begged.
Lafontaine shook his head. “There’s no other way. We will never be safe as long as you continue to live.”
“Please,” said Reginald. “Give me five minutes.”
“Vampirekind has already had too many minutes.”
“We have to talk! All you have to do is listen!”
Lafontaine’s empty eye sockets met Reginald’s. He shook his head, and said, “I don’t want to listen.”
Then Reginald saw it.
Inside his mind — inside his blood — Reginald saw a vision of 28 opening doors. He saw the doors circling a rotunda at the end of a corridor, and he could feel the corridor as much as he could feel the doors. He knew what was coming. He knew what had changed. He saw the missing piece — the piece of the codex that finally cleared away the fog of indecision. And he knew what he had to do.
Around the baseball field, in exact synchronicity, all 28 of the human soldiers turned their guns around as the vampires had, pressing the muzzles to the undersides of their chins.
Lafontaine watched his troops turn their guns on themselves, their movements as perfectly coordinated as a water ballet. Then he lowered the walkie, his mouth hanging open.
“Now will you listen?” said Reginald.
LISTEN
CLAIRE WALKED ONTO THE BASEBALL field like a lion tamer entering a circle of animals she’s subdued. There was a second folding metal chair near the dugout. She picked it up and dragged it to the pitcher’s mound, set it across from Reginald and Lafontaine, then reached toward the human and plucked the walkie from his unprotesting hand. She gave the walkie to Nikki, who pocketed it, then sat on the chair backward, her chest against the backrest.
“All my life,” she said, addressing Lafontaine, “I knew I was different. At first I just didn’t fit in, and I thought it was just because I was a strange kid — smaller, picked on, smarter than most and with a strange knack for getting my mom and other adults to let me do what I wanted. I was good with computers. I once outran a bunch of bullies who had much longer legs than mine, and I outran Reginald when I first met him.”
“To be fair,” said Reginald, “I was also outrun by several other people that week.”
Claire smiled at him — her too-young face suddenly making sense. Then she looked at his chains, and he felt something in them shift and change, and then the links broke and they fell to the dirt.
“But when I got older and I realized that my father was an incubus, I started to develop new skills that were beyond ‘strange.’ I got good at moving energy around. I became a hacker who didn’t need to hack. And I got all this noise in my head. And then I got sick for a while, and I really remember that because, looking back, I never got sick before then. Literally never. I had never had a cold, the flu, a stomach ache, an infection… not even a cut that lasted for long. I looked into it later — after the war, after I found my skin growing cold and realized I could pass for vampire. I decided that I had exceptional mind-body control, like a yogi. So I tried to manipulate myself consciously and found that I could slow my heartbeat, warm my skin if I wanted. All sorts of things. I looked back on that sickness, more curious than ever, and realized that it had happened right after all of my other abilities had started to show and right before my aging slowed down.” She put her hand beside her mouth and whispered at Lafontaine as if she were conveying a secret. “I’m 51! But don’t tell anyone, okay?”
Lafontaine looked from Reginald to Nikki to Claire. He even looked up at Walker, who seemed dumbfounded. Then he looked around the field, at the humans still holding guns to their throats.
Reginald met Claire’s eyes. Inside, with a connection they’d never shared before, he asked her if it would be safe to let the humans go. Her mind told his that the men with guns wouldn’t — and, in her presence, couldn’t — hurt them now. So Reginald dropped his mass-glamour: a new kind of glamour that reached up from inside, through the blood, like walking the vampire family tree — now available for humans, too. The soldiers lowered their weapons, then turned to watch the events unfolding in the field’s middle.
Claire opened her mouth and licked her upper row of teeth. Two of them descended into fangs. Reginald looked at Nikki, who said nothing.
“Now, today,” Claire continued, “I realize that I was always kind of a vampire. But I was something else, too. I could walk in the sunlight. I wasn’t as fast or as strong as true vampires. Even though I aged slowly, I did age. Right up until the moment Nikki turned me, just tonight, it never really made sense. But now I see it. I see how the potential to become a vampire — a half vampire, anyway — was always there. It was always inside of me.” She turned to Lafontaine. “The same as it’s inside of you,” she added.
Lafontaine, seemingly unwilling to trust his feet, sat on the dirt of the mound. “What do you mean?”
“I have the ability to manipulate energy. At first, it was just a neat trick. Reginald said I could tell the future. But of course I couldn’t tell the future. I made it up. I told the angels — do you know about the vampire angels? — that I knew a war was coming and that Reginald would lead a great change in the vampires of the world. The angels wanted to kill them all. But I think we showed them another way things could unfold, though we got lucky in that they couldn’t tell I was bluffing. But the thing is, I wasn’t bluffing; I just didn’t know it. Soon after I realized I could make computers do things. Anything ele
ctronic. I could push signals anywhere I wanted. I could float into the most secure computers. My hands would make this neat blue lightning. But what I realized, once I put two and two together with the way I could change my body as I needed, was that I had been healing myself all along. It was mind over matter, very literally. I was surrounded by vampires. I always wanted to be one. So my body made me one — or at least, half of one.”
“How?’ said Lafontaine.
Reginald stepped in, putting what Lafontaine had told him together with what he’d just learned from the codex’s final piece. “It’s not just a virus,” he said. “It’s a retrovirus.”
“V? You mean it’s…?”
Reginald nodded. “It’s part of you, yes. In vampires, it makes us what we are. But in humans, it’s dormant. Unless, of course —” He gestured to Claire. “— you can manipulate your own body through force of will.”
“Or desire,” Claire added. She resituated herself on the chair, crossing her arms over the backrest. “What I’ve realized about vampire blood, now that my veins are full of it, is that it’s conscious. It’s not just a bunch of machinery. It holds memories and desires, and all of those things are passed from maker to progeny. That’s why Reginald can access it within himself, and how he was able to put together an ancient puzzle. But for me, I didn’t realize that I’d woken up those genes before being turned. I just knew that I was manifesting vampire traits. I got cold. I aged slowly. I was somewhat faster than normal, somewhat stronger than normal. I didn’t get sick, and when I got cut, it healed quickly. It was my ability to change my body combining with the awakening consciousness of my vampire blood.”
Nikki squatted beside her, and Reginald was touched to see how motherly the gesture was. Nikki had been on the planet for 79 years to Claire’s 51, but right now they looked the same age. They’d outgrown their mother-daughter appearance in the past years, but the bond had never left Nikki’s heart.
Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest Page 17
