“You couldn’t have done what?” said Reginald.
“Killed you all with the Ring of Fire.”
Reginald looked over at Balestro’s hawklike profile. Then he looked back toward the blush on the horizon, which had brightened.
“I figured as much.”
“Your deaths or your survival had to come from your own decisions,” he said. “We can’t kill anyone. We have to find a way to get you to decide to walk willingly into demise, or fight to live.”
Reginald nodded. Maurice had told him the same thing years ago. At the time, the fact that angels couldn’t circumvent free will had seemed to be just one more datum in a game filled with arbitrary rules and rituals. Can’t enter a human’s house. Piercing of the heart by wood — but not by anything else — will kill a vampire. Can’t glamour humans into letting you into their homes, or into submitting to slavery. It was all so random. But once Reginald had solved the codex, the ritualistic nature of Heavenly decrees had stuck out like a loose thread in a tapestry, and he’d begun to wonder if that big pyrotechnic display had all been for show — a way to push vampires toward conflict so that they could be made to die fighting.
“Dirty trick,” said Reginald, sipping his pouch of blood.
“It was nothing personal. We did it for your own good.”
“Hey,” said Reginald. “All’s well that ends well. The way I see it, seven billion people died horrible deaths due to a fear of something that never existed. And also, we were almost consumed by a biological weapon in dirty bombs, which would have killed both species.” Reginald raised his blood pouch, touched it to the side of Balestro’s soda can in a toast. “It’s all good.”
After a moment, the angel said, “You were dead anyway.”
Reginald turned.
“If we could have exterminated you, we would have, to clear this planet and start over. Spurring you to war was almost as good, seeing as whatever you did in a war would only harden your enemies — who you knew you couldn’t eliminate no matter what — to fight better against you. When you were turned, Reginald, you saw how vampires used to be. They were arrogant and growing stupider by the year. They were asking for extinction.”
“And that justified all those deaths? To stop vampires from being arrogant and fancy and sparkly? To stop Charles’s fashion victim wardrobe and perfect hair?”
The angel turned to face Reginald. His gaze was like an X-ray, and Reginald felt more naked than naked. He felt transparent, as if his metaphysical fly was open and his soul was flapping in the breeze.
“Like I said, you were dead anyway.”
Reginald felt himself becoming angry. “What the hell does that mean?”
“You’d broken the natural cycle. You were bottlenecked. You’d stopped evolving.”
“Is this about Claire?”
The angel laughed. “Claire. The incubus’s daughter.” He laughed again, and the sound rattled Reginald’s bones. He hadn’t seen Balestro smile before; he hadn’t even thought it was possible. “When you live forever and have access to the dominoes of fate, it certainly is nice to be surprised.”
“So it’s not about Claire.”
“She was a pleasant surprise. And proof that not even Heaven knows everything. You’re building an unknown future right now. Even we don’t know what will happen next.” He turned to look at Reginald. “Yet, anyway.”
Reginald didn’t know if the angel was being honest or just screwing with him. Based on what Claire had told him, seeing the future was merely a matter of knowing everything in the universe. Not a terribly big task for an angel, really.
“No, it’s not about her,” Balestro continued. “We may have deceived you about the Ring of Fire, but we told you the truth about the bottleneck. Humans evolved but you did not. Vampires aren’t curious like humans are. They stick in one place. And that was mostly okay, because it was how you were and it couldn’t be helped. But then you started to extend those prejudices into your society. You only turned people of a certain type, and the vampire population — already homogenous — became even more homogenous. But it didn’t stop there. You would only feed on a certain class of people, too. And so the Agent (what your friend Walter calls ‘V’), began to concentrate in certain bloodlines while it waned in others. You were not doing your job as a species. You were not spreading the spark of vampirism — which, ironically, doubles as the spark of humanity.” He turned his head and stared over with his sharp blue eyes. “But, you see, Reginald — blood needs to circulate. It is not enough for it to simply exist as blood.”
“Mmm,” said Reginald. “That’s poetic. But I still don’t think I can let you off the hook for all the human deaths.”
The angel finished his drink, looked at the can with reverence, then set it aside. “We didn’t kill them,” he said.
“For inciting those deaths by frightening a race of murderers, then. The slaughter happened in your name. ‘For the angels,’ and all that. Timken told me that himself. He didn’t even want to do it. He said that he liked humans, but was convinced that this was the only way. Of course, he was a psychopath, but that was his reason in the end: because you’d led him to believe that there was no other way.”
“There was no other way.”
Reginald shook his head, then turned his torso toward the angel and put an over-the-top quizzical expression on his face. “Tell me, sage,” he said. “How is that, exactly?”
Balestro stood. He looked down at Reginald, who remained seated.
“Humans are your natural predators,” he said. “If they couldn’t stir your population enough to break the bottleneck, what could? I would have thought you’d have seen that in your bloodline. That’s one of the main reasons I gave you the ability to see the bloodline, you know.”
“I thought vampires were the predators.”
Balestro laughed. “Vampires would think that.”
The angel took a step back, then seemed to pose.
“Are you leaving?” said Reginald.
“I’m standing.”
“It looks like you’re getting ready to vanish or something. Like you’re about to leave.”
The angel nodded toward the side of the porch. “I figured I’d just walk back the way I came,” he said. But then, instead of moving, he stood as if waiting for Reginald to speak — as if he felt Reginald had something to ask and wanted to give him the opportunity.
“Okay,” said Reginald. “I have to ask. Why me?”
“Why you what?”
But Reginald wasn’t sure. Why had he been turned in the first place? Why did he have to be the one to show Lafontaine the light? Why had he been the one to solve the codex? There were too many questions.
“You were in the right place at the right time,” the angel continued when he realized Reginald wasn’t going to speak. Then he added, “… fatass.”
Reginald started to get to his feet, annoyed. But then he saw that the angel was smiling.
The blush on the horizon was much brighter when Nikki walked out of the house and sat where Balestro had been sitting. Mere reds had given way to oranges that painted the entire eastern sky the dull color of sherbet. She hooked her arm through his, then leaned her head on his shoulder.
“This is going to be the most romantic burning alive ever,” she said, looking at the horizon.
“Did you know,” said Reginald, “that it turns out that diversity is important enough to die for? That it is, in fact, important enough to exterminate an entire planet for?”
Nikki asked what Reginald meant. He told her about Balestro’s brief visit and, as he’d sat alone for the past few minutes, his own growing certainty that his outsider status had, for once in his 79 years, finally been an asset.
“An asset.”
“Yes. Mix up the gene pool. Mix up those who the vampires feed on. Mix up the humans by killing most of them, forcing their hardest, most resourceful traits to rise to the surface. Then mix up the vampires with a hard reset — a paradigm shift
of epic proportions.”
“So you’re anticipating more misfit vampires in the future.”
“That, yes. But I was also thinking about Lafontaine. Do you think he would have been as willing to listen to a thin, muscle-bound, stunningly attractive vampire as he was to me? Or do you think the message sounded better coming from an imperfect messenger — someone who, thanks to some heft around the middle, reminded him of himself?”
Nikki moved her arm to hug him more fully. She couldn’t get her arms around him. She’d never be able to. Never, never, never. And finally, for once, that seemed okay.
“Maybe he saw your emotion. Your compassion. Your emotional flaws.”
“I have flaws?”
“Many of them,” she said.
They had a few minutes left before the sun rose. Neither was in a rush to start the first of several very long days, operating for at least a while on the humans’ schedule. Reginald had already blanked humanity’s collective memories through the connection Claire’s turning had made possible — all but Lafontaine and a few dozen hand-picked strategists, anyway — and today millions of people would wake up and invent their own stories for their current situations that didn’t involve vampires. Those stories, although thought up by millions of individual minds, would form a strangely coherent tapestry — almost as if the whole big lie had been coordinated through blood.
Nikki reached up and unbuttoned the top button on her shirt. Reginald rolled up his cuffs. But still they sat, both wanting to wait as long as they could to go inside. The pre-sunrise dawn was too beautiful to leave. It felt like the first sunrise the world had ever seen. And in a way, it was.
“So are you going to do it? Take over the presidency?”
“I don’t want to be president.”
“You can’t be thinking of letting Walker do it.”
“No way. Besides, he’s busy. He’s off having as much sex as possible. He found a group of sorority girls who were all turned at once, but who are still giggly.”
“Who will lead, then?” Nikki asked.
“Why is that my problem?”
“Because you’re the Chosen One.”
He shook his head. “Not anymore. Now I’m just really, really, reeeeeally smart. And also someone you wouldn’t want to play in Trivial Pursuit.” Then, when Nikki didn’t stop staring at him, he said, “I was thinking maybe Brian could do it.”
Nikki nodded. The entire Vampire Nation, now that VNN had suddenly and inexplicably become pro-Reginald, was already starting to look to the former misfit for direction. The world’s vampires had been beaten up pretty badly, and it would take some convincing to not lose their collective cool and strike back at the now-glamoured humans. But the blood farms had been liberated, and the truth — for every vampire alive — was that they would need to start learning to hunt, feed, and then make the humans forget that they existed. There would be plenty of hiccups along the way, and someone needed to call the shots. Brian was used to politics, and Reginald was used to being an advisor. It would work out somehow.
“Was that it with the angel, then?” said Nikki after they’d sat in silence for a while. “He just told you that the Ring of Fire was a farce, but that you’d done well as a Chosen One?”
“He also called me a fatass.”
“What an asshole.” She kept her cheek against his chest, enjoying the moment. It was getting warm. Reginald couldn’t speak for Nikki, but the moment was perfect enough that he was almost willing to risk burns to keep it from ending.
“I think he was suggesting that I claim the title, seeing as people are going to say and think it anyway. Like how gay people claimed ‘queer’ and took away its sting.”
“Interesting. Who knew angels were so morally responsible?”
“Maurice calls me ‘fatass’ too,” he said.
Nikki pulled her head away from Reginald’s chest and looked into his face. His use of the present tense had thrown her. “Calls?”
“In my blood.” He tapped his head. “In here.”
“Oh.”
“But I did ask Balestro about that, after he insulted me. I said, ‘The memories you let me see, in my blood — are they just memories? Or are they something more?’ But he didn’t answer with an answer. He answered with a question.”
“What was the question?”
“He said, ‘What’s the difference?'"
Nikki looked like she was about to respond, but instead she laid her head back on Reginald’s shoulder.
Sometime later, they started to blister, so they walked inside. They pulled the shutters, sealed the cracks, and turned on the lights. The world became as it had always been: four walls and two people. Inside, with the shutters drawn, today could be yesterday, could be the day before. The rebellion could be in full swing, the war could be on, or they could be back in Reginald’s old house in Columbus, waiting for the day to end and another night shift to begin. Back when Nikki was human. Back when Claire was just a little girl.
“You’ve got a call with Lafontaine in two hours. So what now?” said Nikki. “Should we sleep?”
Reginald shook his head.
“Should we check to see if Fangbook is still up?”
Again, Reginald shook his head.
She looked at him, a playful expression on her face. “What should we do, then?”
Reginald took her hand. His blood ran in her veins and her blood ran in his. They were two halves of the same whole, and below the top layer of consciousness, they were barely distinguishable. She blinked, and he saw the blink in his own eyes. Then he blinked, and watched as she jumped, having seen it in hers. Then he closed his eyes as they eased onto the couch, both of them becoming more mind than being, more blood than body.
As the room faded and the internal world began to surround them, he said, “Let’s go for a walk together, and see who we can find along the way.”
SO WHAT'S NEXT?
IT SUCKS FINISHING A SERIES, doesn’t it? Reginald’s journey (as I wrote it, anyway) is now complete, but there’s plenty more great stuff to read. And you can get that great stuff FREE.
Just go here go get your next read for free: http://realmandsands.com/free/
I recommend The Beam if you’re into science fiction and/or thrillers, or Unicorn Western if you like stuff that’s really, really epic… and has the same basic serious/funny vibe as Fat Vampire. But hey, it’s ALL good stuff!
Thanks so much for reading!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHNNY B. TRUANT IS AN author, blogger, and podcaster who, like the Ramones, was long denied induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite having a large cult following. He makes his online home at JohnnyBTruant.com and is the author of the Fat Vampire series and The Bialy Pimps, as well as co-authoring the Unicorn Western series with Sean Platt. You can find a complete list of Johnny’s books here.
Johnny, Sean Platt, and David Wright host two podcasts -- the Self Publishing Podcast and Better Off Undead -- both of which are available in the usual podcast places.
Johnny is also the kind of person who writes his bio in the third person.
You can connect with Johnny/me on Twitter at @JohnnyBTruant, and you should totally send Johnny/me an email if the mood strikes you.
Also, if you liked the book you just read, I would REALLY, REALLY, REALLY appreciate if you’d leave me a review. Reviews make all the difference for independent authors.
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Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest Page 19
