Brian and Talia were unconvinced. They seemed to be discussing things between themselves behind closed doors and would occasionally deliver rehearsed-sounding speeches explaining why staying put was the best idea. They’d laid in huge emergency stores of blood pouches and food for the humans. They’d fortified the house and grounds (Bill and his crew had returned and added a concrete moat, enclosed machine gun nests on the top of the house, and enormous spotlights; Reginald wondered what the neighbors thought and if Jehovah’s Witnesses would be deterred) and should stay where they were. War, they argued, was on the edge of a boil. If they left now, they’d be caught in the chaos when it finally spilled over.
Their predictions seemed more and more likely as time dragged on. The Vampire Guard, who had protected the Deacon before Timken’s SA troops had displaced them, had turned into autonomous, vigilante Kill Squads during Charles Barkley’s tenure. The Squads had gone underground when Timken and Claude Toussant had implemented their mainstream, “we’re just like you” propaganda campaign, but had spawned and multiplied in the shadows. For months, Reginald and the others had watched as human news reports painted Kill Squad attacks on humans as various non-supernatural disasters: building collapses, cult activity, mass shootings which, for some reason, never left bullet holes. Meanwhile, Fangbook gloried in every attack; the feed was alive with photos and videos of the Squads doing their thing, draining and ripping humans apart, declaring that this was a motherfucking vampire planet now and they were finally claiming their motherfucking spot at the top of the motherfucking food chain.
But below the surface of human media was the informal chatter they’d heard from the people who’d tried to burn down Maurice’s mansion: that the killings were the work of vampires — movie monsters that, it turned out, actually existed. And as more and more time went on, the tone of those tentative vampire rumors changed from “Haha yeah i’m kidding lol” to “I’ve surrounded my house with high-intensity UV lamps because a lot of people are dying and you just never know.”
Five major channels of information said five different things.
The official vampire media said that relations with humans were improving, that a new spirit of cooperation and tolerance was growing between the two species.
The official human media said that all was well, that there was nothing to see here.
Fangbook said that a revolution was at hand, that the angels had spoken, and that only the strong would survive the coming conflict… and that duty-bound vampires were ready and willing to do their part when it arrived.
Facebook and the other human social networks said that shit was getting real out in the world, that people were encountering lightning-fast intruders who didn’t stop if you shot them and who retreated from sunlight. People were arming with stakes and silver. They were hanging crosses and garlic too — something that Brian laughed about every time he sautéed garlic to go with dinner.
And an ominous fifth channel — something that could only be described as the pulse of the Vampire Nation, passed from lip to ear and existing nowhere other than in the zeitgeist — warned vampires that humans were deceptively dangerous, and that the human AVT troops were developing new and terrifying weapons and were always mere days away from crashing into every nest and exterminating them all.
Right around the time that Reginald and Nikki and Maurice were preparing to head out and leave those who disagreed with them behind in the stronghold, the Kill Squads moved in and the humans rose to meet them… and chaos finally came to Columbus.
It began with a fire.
Reginald was sitting outside on the porch, sipping a blood pouch and snacking, when a house in the valley erupted in a geyser of flame. He called to the others. Nikki arrived first, followed by Maurice. Both had been upstairs, both packing the few items they considered essential for their trip to Europe. They stood beside Reginald, one on each side, and looked out at the flame. Nikki opened the gate and ran out before Reginald could think to stop her, then returned five tense minutes later, rejoining the house’s entire contingent on the porch. She told them to secure the gate. To climb into the machine gun nests. To don their chain mail vests. She told the humans among them to head into the basement, to lock the big sliver doors, to grab the small vials of silver nitrate that Brian had had paid a packaging factory to create from spent pepper spray bottles. Her eyes were wide and afraid. And when Reginald asked her what she’d seen, she told him: War.
But it seemed that it wasn’t war, and after they’d secured the house and manned the towers and hidden the humans and prepared for incursions by either species, they’d waited and watched the fires and, after enough time, had eventually turned on the TV. The local Columbus stations were reporting gas explosions that were now being tended by firefighters, offering a strange lack of on-the-scene reporters or video footage other than that provided by a newscopter overhead. Frustrated, Nikki had turned on the computer to get the other side. She found the Vampire News Network feed reporting the same basic non-war story, only VNN added that several hard-working vampires were on the fire department’s night shift, battling the flames in human homes with no regard for their own more or less immortal lives.
But that wasn’t the way Nikki told it. She said she’d arrived at the burning house to find it acrawl with black-helmeted vampires in Guard (now Kill Squad) uniform. Dozens of them swarmed through the structure like locusts, darting in and out of broken windows, climbing walls and ceilings, emerging with severed limbs in their hands and mouths. She’d hidden behind a hedge to watch and had seen humans arrive with molotov cocktails, ready to finish the job they’d started.
From what she’d been able to gather by stopping a woman and glamouring her, perhaps thirty vampires had talked their way into an invite at the home the night before, had moved in, had killed the human inhabitants, and then had then settled in for the day. They spent the day slashing the bodies to shreds live on Fangbook (the status updates that went with the video feed were all about “eliminating threats” and “restoring the planet to its rightful race”) and were finally discovered when evening came and one of the vampire squatters got hungry. When he seized a human couple who’d been out for a walk, he was spotted. The neighbors, who came bearing both flammables and crossbows, had handled the rest.
Nikki told them she’d lapped the area, watching the chaos grow like cancer. At first, the house itself had been the focus of the fighting — with the vampires decisively on top — but slowly, as the screams were heard further and further out, it spread. A few of roving vampires were staked and burned. Several humans were killed openly and with malice. Nikki watched Squad vampires doff their helmets and pound on doors in mock panic, then shred those who invited them in for safety. She watched humans wearing improvised armor stalk the intruders, launching incendiaries. When their projectiles missed their targets, she watched those humans’ heads be pulled from their bodies as dark blurs engulfed them like cyclones. Finally, as the violence had continued and continued to spread, she’d backed away. Then she ran, leaving the area to burn.
But VNN and the news reported a few fires on one side of town.
Fangbook reported a small face-off and an inevitable vampire victory.
The human social networks were alive with pleas to never, ever open the door for someone you didn’t know after dark and urges to sharpen stakes — no matter how absurd it all sounded.
Reginald searched the web and found evidence of incursions in other scattered locations. Both sides, it seemed, had had enough. As much as Reginald was able to see through the bullshit, he judged some of the reports to be the work of humans invading vampire dens in the sunlight to watch them burn, and others to be the work of vampire radicals who pledged to fight the plague that had dared to infest their planet. Still other reports (and these required Claire’s help to find and decipher) seemed to be officially sanctioned actions: human AVT troops assassinating targets using new weapons, or secret exterminations by vampire SA troops.
&n
bsp; But regardless of who was doing what and who was reporting which version of the truth, one thing was clear:
It was beginning.
CATACOMBS
REGINALD SPENT THE NEXT 48 hours, while the neighborhood burned, gathering as much information as he could find.
He slept only when necessary. The rest of the time, he spent on the internet. Claire helped him when she was awake, “pushing” connections from his laptop through to police databases, fire databases, SWAT deployment records, Vampire Council records, a few scattered pockets of Timken’s Sedition Army data, and whatever stereotype military access points any of them could think of. True to the fog of Claire’s quasi-omniscience, she could access just about anything… but could only do so if she knew exactly what she was looking for. The human military, the Anti-Vampire Taskforce, and the SA all had to have computer systems out there that would have told Reginald more than he’d ever have needed to know, but Reginald didn’t know what to ask. So he made do with what he could think to ask for and which Claire could find (understanding that “what you didn’t know you didn’t know” was always a dangerous wildcard), and slowly, the big picture began to coalesce in his mind.
And it was not a pretty picture.
Over the past months, there’d been mass unexplained deaths in the poorer quarters of the world, where first-world forces like the AVT paid little attention. That, Maurice explained, sounded just like his brother’s work. You could employ the battle strategy that called for fighting the big dog first, or you could follow the Annihilist Faction’s twisted playbook and opt to clear the clutter first. Right now, Maurice explained, Annihilist forces would be eliminating as many humans as they could manage without attracting undue attention, leaving a handful of strategically placed vampires behind to finish the job when the war became public and the tipping point was finally reached. Claude would be salting troops throughout the world right now, said Maurice. The math was straightforward. If the Annihilist Faction and the SA could quietly kill off a tenth of the human population (not difficult in the poorest quarters of the world) and could simultaneously turn enough of the remaining humans to increase the vampire population tenfold, then the odds would pit only a thousand humans against each vampire when D-Day came.
As it turned out, Team Vampire wasn’t the only group waging a good pre-game scrap. VNN and Fangbook both indicated die-offs in the vampire population — due to Anti-Vampire Taskforce attacks and human vigilantes according to Fangbook; due to accidents according to VNN. Regardless, those deaths were a drop in the bucket compared to the damage being inflicted on the human population. The problem was that while any vampire could fight humans and would do so if they were afraid or angry enough, most humans simply cowered because they didn’t know what they were facing. Until the veil of secrecy lifted and all of the masks came off, most of the human population would remain ripe for slaughter.
“Ironically,” said Reginald, shoving clothes into a backpack, “the best thing for the humans right now would be open warfare. That way, they’d understand what was going on and could at least try to fight.”
Nikki was across the big bed from him, stocking her own backpack. Packing was easier for her, seeing as Reginald’s backpack was half-filled with snack foods. Nikki was packing only clothes and a few essentials, having decided she’d eat along the way.
“You want to talk irony?” she said. “How about the fact that while I’m trying to save lives, I’m hungry for human blood?”
Reginald held up a bag of Cheetos and a bag of beef jerky, decided painfully between them, then shoved the jerky into his backpack. “That’s not irony. That’s not even close to irony.”
“There,” said Nikki, noticing and pointing at something on the TV. “There’s irony.”
Reginald turned to look. On the screen he saw Nicholas Timken standing in front of a bouquet of microphones, reporting the results of his latest meeting with human magistrate William Erickson. He explained that they were forming a taskforce to investigate illegal mercenary activity among both species.
“That’s not irony either,” said Reginald. “That’s hypocrisy.”
“Timken told you that he was doing what needed to be done, but this is just grandstanding,” said Nikki.
“Then fine; it’s not hypocrisy. It’s psychosis. Or megalomania.”
“Is that an excited reaction to mega-malls?”
“This is serious,” said Reginald.
Nikki became a blur. She appeared at Reginald’s side, her slim arms wrapped around his sizable waist. She kissed him on the cheek. “Yes. It is. So you and I had better not make an effort to enjoy each other’s company,” she said.
“You’re making jokes.”
“You used to make a lot of jokes,” she told him, her arms still around his middle.
Reginald continued to shove items into his backpack. “I used to do a lot of things.”
“So you’re no fun anymore?”
“I’m just trying to make the plane,” he said.
But as they finished packing, as Nikki sprinted through the gate (which Brian slammed and locked behind them) with Reginald riding her piggy-back style, as they screamed toward the airport, and as they were packed into a shipping crate by humans who they should by all rights be at war with, Reginald thought about what she’d said. He did used to make a lot of jokes. He did used to hate and doubt himself. He did used to feel like a victim. But now the world was disintegrating, and it seemed predestined to do so, and he and Nikki were literally the only chance to… well, not necessarily to stop it, but to get a sneak preview into just how bad it was going to get. He didn’t even have Maurice along this time to share the burden.
“Nikki,” he said, once the crate was sealed and he could feel the forklift moving them into the plane’s cargo hold.
She looked over, her face lit from below by a flashlight.
“I’m sorry that I’m no fun anymore.”
“You’ve got a lot on your mind,” she said.
“I should still be fun.”
“Okay,” she said.
It wasn’t really an answer, and Reginald wasn’t sure if she was forgiving him for being short or if she was still mad. But five minutes later the flashlight returned to the underside of her chin and she started telling ghost stories and making MU-HA-HA-HA! noises, so he supposed it was okay. He played along. He took the flashlight, placed it under his own chin, and told more ghost stories. In the stories, most of the monsters were vampires. Nikki took the flashlight back and turned them into sexy vampires. This somehow made her horny and, because they were traveling alone, they proceeded to rock the cargo hold.
Reginald missed Maurice (and, perhaps more importantly, he missed the illusion that he could pass the buck to Maurice from time to time rather than shouldering the entire burden of finding the vampire codex himself) but there had been no logical alternative to he and Nikki going alone. Given the neighborhood’s pot starting to boil and the simmerings across the nation and world, an outbreak of open war between humans and vampires seemed moments away. Maurice was the oldest, strongest, and fastest among them. The horrors Nikki and Reginald had seen on their mad dash from the mansion (two vampires shredding a dozen humans as if they were confetti, a human militia chasing an armless vampire with stakes and crossbows, an AVT regiment almost cornering them and turning UV lights in their direction) made the world unsafe outside the house’s walls… but also made protection inside the walls more necessary than ever. Someone had to go and find the codex, but someone else had to stay and protect those who remained. That honor fell to Brian — and to Maurice.
Reginald pulled his cell phone from his pocket. He’d brought his charger with him, but Claire had shown him how she could push power to it wherever he was (“how I can make the energy dance” was how she put it) and how she could similarly push signals between them even in the absence of a cellular network. He looked at the black brick, wishing he could use it now. But like everything else with Claire these
days, she could only know what she specifically focused on, and that meant that while Claire could use her spooky powers to call Reginald any time, she could never know his intention and see if he wanted to call them.
He pocketed the phone, then leaned back and tried to sleep while the ocean raced by beneath them.
They landed in Luxembourg, then retraced the same path they’d taken the first time they’d visited the Chateau to meet Karl and the EU Vampire Council. Reginald felt deja vu the whole way. Nikki, seeming to sense his weighty mood, said nothing. He watched her, thinking yet again that when this was all over, he wanted to take some relaxing time to simply be with Nikki and appreciate her — if there was still a world left in which to appreciate her, that was.
The mood of their trip to Differdange could only be described as tense. Maurice’s human friend Jimbo, who ran the smuggling operation that sent them through customs in a shipping crate, had been uneasy. The human workers who unpacked them in Paris seemed nervous, or on edge, or both. When they walked through the Luxembourg train station, dozens of eyes watched Nikki with a sense of waiting. While Reginald didn’t look like a vampire, Nikki did. She was dark and supernaturally beautiful and moved like a cat, and the locals acted like they didn’t know for sure what she was… but that they had their suspicions. The only thing that saved them from outright attack, perhaps, was human shame. Until the world officially agreed that vampires were real, people simply felt too dumb about their fears to act.
In Luxembourg City, while they strolled the streets between trains, Reginald and Nikki passed human bodies that had been discarded and ignored, as if they were problems that would eventually go away on their own. They could smell smoke. The nighttime world felt like a pot waiting to boil.
Differdange, on the other hand, was (save the nude human corpse lying barely concealed in a hedge) empty and still. They walked to the Chateau without seeing anyone. Once they left the main street and started walking upward as the sky began to brighten in the east, they were alone.
Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse Page 5
