Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse

by Johnny B. Truant

  “There’s more, but I won’t go into it.” Reginald tapped his head — the universal sign from the vampire savant that meant just trust me; I know shit. “If the lead suits are in use, they’re being used for covert, off-the-books operations. More likely, they’re just being stockpiled as a rather unpleasant surprise for the human troops when the real blood starts flying.”

  Reginald knelt in front of the chair. Claire continued to spin, giggling. Reginald had to admire her. She’d grown up without a father, with a mentally absent mother, in the ghetto, as a smallish girl who had to learn how to rely on herself. She’d fallen into vampire culture, had almost been killed several times, had had the weight of two worlds heaped upon her supposedly-prophetic shoulders, and had almost lost her mother to a bloody attack. Now she was shut in with those same monsters, waiting for war and being asked about matters that could end or save billions of lives. And yet through it all, she still managed to be an innocent and delightful child.

  “Claire,” he said.

  “Just wait,” said Claire. She kicked at the floor mat, spinning faster, still laughing.

  Reginald looked up at Nikki. So Nikki shoved the chair into the middle of the room, and Reginald reached low to hold the chair’s casters in place. Then Nikki said, “Hang on tight, Miss C.”

  Claire hung on, then whooped in anticipation.

  Nikki gave the chair the hardest shove any office chair has ever received. Claire immediately stretched out, hanging on for dear life. Then something in the chair gave way and Claire flew across the room, toward a bookcase on one wall. Nikki blurred over and plucked her from the air before impact. The chair shattered on its bearings and something plastic hit Reginald in the face. While he rubbed his cheek, Claire laughed and cheered, begging Nikki to do it again. The chair, now just fragments, seemed less enthusiastic.

  After Claire calmed down, Nikki sat her in an overstuffed chair away from the computer, and Reginald again came to one knee in front of her.

  “Good?”

  “Good,” Claire agreed with visible effort.

  “I have a request. One you should feel free to decline.”

  Claire looked intrigued. Reginald, looking closely at her, found himself amazed by how much she’d changed. When he’d met her, she’d been ten. She’d been a child in every way. Now her face was changing, her features deepening, her eyes taking on a sense of maturity that hadn’t been there before. Looking at her, he realized — as if he’d never known it before — that if she was lucky, she’d grow up. Ten years from now, she’d be a woman. The simple fact that a child could become an adult in the middle of a world where nobody Reginald saw ever changed was strangely heartening, like finding a beautiful flower growing in cracked concrete.

  “Sure, Reginald. What’s up?”

  “I want to glamour you.”

  Claire smiled. “What’s it like?”

  “It’s like being hypnotized,” said Nikki, standing behind Reginald. “Like falling asleep.” Reginald turned his head, his eyebrows drawing together. He’d never glamoured Nikki. But then he remembered that she’d known Maurice since she’d been a troubled teenager whose parents had ended their own lives. Maybe there were things he’d helped her to forget.

  “Why, Reginald?” said Claire.

  “I need to see if I can suss out some more of what’s in that melon of yours.” He rapped his knuckles on her head.

  “You could just turn me into a vampire. Then, as my maker, you could use telepathy or whatever to go in there and rummage around yourself.”

  “I’m not going to turn you, Claire.”

  “Why not? Vampires are going to start killing all of the humans. I’d be safer that way.”

  “I wouldn’t count the humans out yet,” said Reginald. “There are a lot more of them than there are of us, and they have daylight on their sides.”

  Claire pointed toward the computer. “Or not.”

  “Seven billion humans is a lot of people to exterminate. Do you think the average, everyday vampires of the world are just going to let that happen?”

  “Yes,” said Brian.

  Reginald gave him a look. Then he turned back to Claire. “So… okay?”

  Claire shrugged — a twelve-year-old gesture that said this was all very annoying but that she supposed she could go along with it… like whatever.

  So Reginald looked more deeply into her eyes. Then he watched something barely perceptible change in them — a kind of loosening, or letting go.

  “Claire,” he said.

  “Yes.” She said it like a drone.

  “Look into all that information in your head. I want you to help me sort it.”

  “It’s not information. It’s life.”

  “It’s life?”

  “Yes. Like, people lived their lives and did things. Other people saw it and wrote it down. I see experiences.”

  “You see records of those experiences.”

  Even glamoured, Claire managed to convey her amazement at how obtuse adults could be. “What’s the difference?”

  “One is the real thing. The other is secondhand.” Then he realized he was engaging in a metaphysical debate with someone who was essentially drunk. He glanced up, met Nikki’s eye. But in front of him, Claire answered before he could move on.

  “There’s no difference. It’s an impression in the stream.”

  “The stream?”

  “The stream of energy. You understand?”

  Glamoured people weren’t suppose to teach or ask rhetorical questions, but most glamoured people weren’t more or less modern-day wizards. Reginald pushed on.

  “Explain it to me.”

  “Once something is done, it just is. Its residue is here now. It’s all that matters. The original action is gone. The residue is all that’s left.”

  “But the truth about the actual event caused things to happen. If an event in the past hadn’t been how it was, the way things are today would be different.”

  “But they aren’t different. They can’t be different. They are how they are.”

  “Right…”

  “So the events in the past were how they were.”

  “Right, but…”

  “So what’s the problem?” She scrunched her nose. It was something Reginald had seen her do over and over while conscious. The expression wasn’t quite one of condescension. It was the look she gave someone when she literally didn’t understand what the hell was wrong with them, or how they could be so dumb.

  “Ask her about Claude and Timken,” said Maurice, leaning against the doorframe.

  “Not yet.”

  “What are you doing, Reginald?” Nikki asked, kneeling next to him and putting a hand on his thigh. She looked at Claire, trying to see what he saw. There was no special bond on Reginald’s side of the glamour; the others in the room were getting exactly as much out of Claire as Reginald was. But Reginald had survived so far on instinct and felt sure that instinct, in the coming months and years, might be all that was left.

  “I’m seeing where this goes,” he answered.

  “We know she’s got superbrain already,” said Brian.

  “Yes, but not how it works.”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Reginald. He’d never looked away from Claire, but now he addressed her again. “Claire, how do you see the future?”

  “As inevitable.”

  “That’s not what he means,” said Brian, talking to Claire. But of course, she couldn’t hear him. Brian was out of place; he should just let Reginald work.

  With a gesture toward Brian, Reginald said to Claire, “I meant, how do you see the future? How can you tell what’s going to happen next?”

  “It’s inevitable.”

  “This is freaky,” said Nikki. “Let her out of it.”

  Reginald shook her off. Then to Claire: “What do you mean, it’s inevitable?”

  “It’s like a puzzle,” said Claire. “The past is what it is. Not wa
s what it was, but is what it is. Today, here and now, the past is what it is. You put the pieces together and you see what the puzzle makes. You can see which pieces have to come next, in the fog.”

  “The fog?”

  “The fog that’s ten steps ahead.”

  “This is pointless,” said Brian.

  “She’s talking about free will,” said Reginald, not breaking eye contact with Claire. “The angels can’t see past one individual choice, because that’s how the game was stacked — the one check and balance working against them and maybe in our favor. Claire can go farther because she can see how the past and the present make the next series of events more or less inevitable, but after a point the collective margin of error imparted by multiple decisions becomes great enough to fog her predictive ability.”

  Maurice took a step forward. “So she’s not really prescient?”

  “It’s more like being a savant. An incredible ability to parse insane amounts of data. Which, apparently, she can siphon directly from the source. It all comes down to manipulating energy.”

  “She said there was a war coming,” said Maurice. “That was the prediction she made almost two years ago, with Balestro. Two years has to be further than ten steps ahead.”

  Reginald laughed. “I think those particular pieces of the puzzle have been stacked that way for quite a while now.”

  “And she said you’d lead us.”

  Reginald nodded slowly. “Given the way things were laid out, I don’t know that I had much of a choice but to take some sort of a leadership role.” Then he corrected himself, remembering that they were talking about the future: “Have.”

  He re-focused on Claire. Something, deep in his own substantial logical mind, had rung a bell.

  “Claire. You said that the past is fixed.”

  “The past is what it is.”

  “And the present is fixed.”

  “The present is what it is.”

  “And that because of that, the future has to be what it has to be. The next few steps, anyway.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s bullshit,” said Brian. “Woo-woo nonsense.”

  “Like vampires existing?” Reginald snapped.

  “This is different. This is crazy.”

  “It’s not crazy. Legend says that if a butterfly flaps its wings in one place, it may cause a hurricane somewhere else — and that the chain of cause and effect between those two events is entirely unpredictable. Too much chaos, they say, and that chaos is baked right into the way the universe works. But what if you had literally all of the information in the world? What if you could sort and make sense of everything that has ever existed? Every single cause and every single ensuing effect in play at any given moment? If you knew everything, is it really so impossible to believe that you could predict that hurricane after all? Wouldn’t it just be a question of extrapolation?”

  Brian didn’t reply.

  Reginald said to Claire, “The vampire legends talk about a game being established. Of rules being set. So based on what you see, is it possible that even the present hasn’t happened by chance?”

  Maurice inhaled. Nikki looked at him; Reginald could see her head move in the corner of his eye.

  “It’s very possible,” said Claire. “That is how it is.”

  “What?” said Nikki, speaking to Maurice.

  “He’s asking about predestination,” Maurice told her. “The idea that what’s happening now was supposed to happen.”

  “How could that be?”

  Reginald answered. “Given the context of everything else we’re talking about here,” he said, “it’s not even difficult to imagine. This is just about flipping causation and prediction. You don’t watch the butterfly’s wings flap and then predict the hurricane. Instead, at the start of time, you flap the butterfly’s wings deliberately… in order to cause the hurricane.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Well, angels, anyway.” Reginald cleared his throat, then shifted his position on the floor. “Claire. The deepest vampire annals I’ve found in all of my research talk about something called a ‘codex’ — a predestined plan set forth by the original powers. The idea of the codex is so old that even scant mentions are nearly impossible to find, and even more impossible to find anywhere other than in recollections by superstitious shaman of the old countries. Even the few people who have heard the legends of the codex — and there aren’t many — think it’s a fairy tale, like they thought the angels themselves were just a fairy tale until recently. But the codex… it’s real, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Claire.

  “Where is it?”

  “In the place where it is.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “Slap her on the side of the head like a busted television,” said Brian. “She’s stuck.”

  “It must be somewhere,” Reginald said to Claire, ignoring Brian. “Somewhere real, and specific.”

  “In a way, yes,” said Claire.

  “So where is that place?”

  “Everywhere.”

  Brian flapped his hands — a big blur of movement in Reginald’s peripheral vision.

  “Okay,” said Reginald, changing tacks. “The codex. Can it be found?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can it be held?”

  “Yes.”

  “So she’s talking about a real object,” said Maurice. “Like a scroll or something?”

  Reginald held up a finger to Maurice. To Claire, he said, “So if the codex can be found, how do we begin the sequence of events that will lead us to find it?”

  “What are you doing?” Nikki whispered.

  “I want to flip to the end of the blueprint,” Reginald answered. “I want to peek ahead. Cheat.” Lower, he added: “See how the war ends… or if possible, how to prevent it.”

  “You go to Luxembourg,” said Claire, her eyes still vacant.

  “Karl,” said Maurice, behind Reginald.

  “Then what?”

  “Then you do what’s next,” Claire answered.

  “What happens after we go to Luxembourg, I mean?”

  “Then,” said Claire, “what’s next happens.”

  “This is stupid,” said Brian. “She can shoot sparks from her fingers and can hack like a motherfucker. But are we really supposed to trust the glamoured ramblings of one little girl, abandon our home base here, and run off to Europe so that you can find some mystical blueprint and try to short-circuit our pre-planned future?”

  Claire smiled. Glamoured people weren’t supposed to smile. They weren’t supposed to hear other voices around them, either, but Claire turned her catatonic eyes toward Brian before answering.

  “Oh, it’s not short-circuiting anything,” she said. She turned back to Reginald and said, “You solving the codex is a vital step within the codex.”

  OUTBREAK

  THE VAMPIRES IN THE HOUSE had known Claire was significant ever since the day she’d gotten Balestro to call off the Ring of Fire, but there was a huge leap of faith between that factual knowledge and the idea — here and now — that Claire was an oracle. And in the days following her glamouring session with Reginald, it became apparent just how reluctant many of them were to make that leap.

  Reginald, however, fully believed what Claire had told him. He couldn’t not believe it. Reginald’s talent at glamouring was so far beyond that of most vampires that there was no way the skeptical others could understand just how deep his influence went. Humans, when glamoured by most vampires, became suggestive. When glamoured by Reginald, they became downright transparent. It was impossible for a human to hold anything back from him when he pried. So while the others doubted, Reginald didn’t just believe that what Claire had said was true; he knew it was.

  Nikki and Maurice, who’d grown accustomed to trusting Reginald’s mind, believed Claire second-hand (believing her because they believed Reginald), but the others in the house were a hard sell. Claire spe
nt most of her time wandering around Maurice’s mansion in Hello Kitty pajamas, playing video games, and loudly chasing Brian’s kids down the long hallways. She ate Cheetos and got crumbs in the couch cushions; she cut gummy worms into bite-sized pieces and impaled them with toothpicks so she could offer them around like a cocktail waitress. Squaring the Claire they’d seen day in and day out for months with the idea of Claire the Prophet (or Claire the Doomsayer) was difficult for Brian, Talia, and the others. So instead of discussing plans to go to Luxembourg to find the mysterious vampire codex, Celeste baked Claire cookies. Brian pretended Claire had never been glamoured and kept asking her for her snacky additions to the grocery order. It was as if they thought that she was just a kid, and that by feeding her junk food, they could keep her just a kid.

  Reginald told Claire everything she’d said during her trance — down to the minutest detail, thanks to his photographic memory. In the past, he might have tried to hide the grandest, most “save the world” bits from her, but to do so now seemed unfair. Claire was in just as much danger as the rest of them, and Reginald reasoned that even if her own dire predictions troubled her, the fact that a plan was at hand might at least give her hope.

  For his own part, Reginald felt a strong sense of urgency and wanted to leave immediately — to head to Europe and meet with Karl Stromm in order to learn what came next — but in the first few days, he had to fight the will of half of the house. If Reginald was going, then Nikki was going — and that made the debate Jackie’s business. She argued that her sister shouldn’t head out into the wild, unprotected world on the word of a little girl… and then made apologetic “no offense” faces in Claire’s direction. And if Reginald was going, then Maurice was also going — which of course brought Celeste into play. Celeste, despite her small, matronly appearance, was an even more fierce debater than Jackie. Only Reginald’s mother, Carol, didn’t argue. It wasn’t that she didn’t care what happened to Reginald. It was more that she wasn’t entirely sure that vampires even existed, and had important television shows to watch in her room in the slightly burned west wing.