Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse

by Johnny B. Truant

  “How is Claire?’ he finally said. He felt like a hypocrite saying it. He cared how Claire was, but he knew Claire would be fine. What she had was probably mono, but all they could do, with Claire being an unauthorized human, would be to wait it out. He was only asking so he could pretend that he wasn’t wallowing in self pity.

  “She’s okay. She actually told me to apologize to you for not being able to push through a connection while we were traveling. She says she was busy throwing up.”

  Reginald snickered, surprising himself. Then, after a beat, he said, “She was wrong.”

  Nikki’s silence sounded pregnant, as if she might say something vaguely optimistic to contradict him. But instead she just said, “Yes.”

  “Not just about the codex. About me. About the war. About everything.”

  Nikki ran her hand over his head, as if he were a pet. “I’m sorry, baby.”

  “Do you think she did it deliberately?”

  Nikki said nothing, so he turned his head, lifting it from her side, and saw her looking down at him with confusion.

  “To give us a reason,” he went on. “To give us purpose.”

  “Claire is eleven. I don’t think she’s that deep.”

  But Reginald wasn’t so sure. Claire had inherited a kind of mental atomic bomb, and it had made her old before her time. She knew, subconsciously, more about the world than anyone who’d ever lived. She knew intimate details of how empires had risen and fallen. She knew how history had unraveled like a tapestry — albeit not a totally predictable one, it turned out. Prescient or not, she had an unfathomable burden on her shoulders. Reginald wouldn’t have wished it on anyone. And from a well that deep, it wasn’t hard to see that armies fought better when they had a quest — when they had a reason they believed in to fight for.

  “I’ll talk to her,” he said. And he wanted to. But not yet. It was all too fresh.

  Nikki stood, holding out her hand. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk.”

  “Through the garden of vampire Eden?”

  “Come on.”

  But Reginald just shook his head.

  Nikki rubbed his shoulder, then left with an implied promise to return. She’d drag him outside eventually. She and Claire were his only anchors. Well, and Brian. But whether they were blood or not, he barely knew Brian. Not as a brother, anyway. They’d shared a roof for nearly a year, but through that time, Brian had kept to his family and acted as security officer and Reginald had kept to his group. And with that thought, Reginald remembered that he did still have his mother. She was off in the other wing, now underground, hidden as were the rest of the humans. They’d adjust in time; she’d simply swap her human TV shows for vampire TV shows. The day would probably come when Reginald and the others would have to turn all of the humans to keep them safe. But not yet. Not until it was required. It felt wrong to spit in the eye of their mission, to aid the vampire cause by giving it another few souls for the pile.

  Reginald turned on the TV. He caught a glimpse of Nicholas Timken, still looking calm and cool and well-dressed. It was a clip Reginald had seen before. Timken was announcing that it was all over — that once again, vampires could live in safety. He spoke of reconstruction, of dayproof homes and dayproof vehicles. He said that their journey had only begun — and that they had, finally, beaten the Ring of Fire back for good, and done their creators proud.

  But if that was true, Reginald wondered, where were the angels?

  Nobody talked about that. An angel hadn’t been seen on Earth since Santos had vanished from Differdange. Balestro and his ilk hadn’t returned. There had been no divine word, no angelic atta-boy for the proud vampire race. Yet Timken talked in doublespeak as if he were in communion with them, as if they had given Timken himself the all-clear. But they hadn’t, and that meant that after everything — after all the slaughter and misery — there was a possibility that the angels were still not satisfied. Or worse: there was a distinct chance that they had never been dissatisfied in the first place, that the Ring of Fire had all been one big joke. A bluff. A lot of bullshit that had amounted to nothing, like the codex itself. Reginald could already see signs that vampires were forgetting the supposed reason they’d fought. Fangbook had settled down; posts containing gore and carnage and good-natured murder became posts about nighttime gardening. Vampires began to post about their new jobs working for the state, for the few re-established vampire businesses. There was a lot to be done, Timken promised. Lots of cleanup. Lots of construction, and an economy to rebuild. The world had flipped. Vampires were the new tenants, with all the responsibilities that came with it.

  Reginald fell into a doze, thinking of angels and fire and death.

  As he slept, he had a dream. In the dream, Maurice was sitting beside him. They were playing chess — Reginald behind the black pieces and Maurice behind the white. Reginald won, checkmating Maurice, then waited for Maurice to tip his king. But Maurice just said, “You don’t understand.”

  Reginald awoke sometime later. He didn’t know if it was day or night. The house was quiet. The couch was disheveled, as if he’d spent his entire naptime kicking and thrashing. He sat up. Took a drink of the room-temperature blood in front of him, grimacing and forcing it down. And then he realized that Maurice was still sitting beside him, as he had in the dream.

  He snapped his head to look, but there was nothing.

  Reginald took another drink, shaking his head. Maurice was beside him again. He felt sure of it, but he didn’t want to look. So he turned slowly, as if afraid of frightening a ghost. Reginald could feel Maurice’s blood so close, his presence was like heat. He felt him. Felt him. But then all of a sudden he realized his head was fully turned and that again, he saw nothing. So he looked down at his small hands with a sigh, his eyes drifting toward his pair of thin legs. And he realized that he couldn’t see his gut.

  Instead he saw delicate hands. A narrow chest. Black hair at the periphery of his vision. And the hilt of a sword on his belt.

  He blinked. He saw his own fat gut, his own missing lap.

  “Jesus,” he mumbled aloud, rubbing his eyes.

  “No,” said a voice. “Guess again.”

  He felt a queer sense of doubling — of stepping outside himself, yet remaining exactly where he was. He realized that he wasn’t precisely seeing; he was feeling. It was like a dream but not a dream. Like a vision but not a vision. Maybe it was a trance. He was on the couch, in the house, in reality, for real. But still he could hear Maurice in his head, feel him as if from the inside, as if he were squeezed into a Maurice suit. His body felt strangely strong inside of that suit. Small. Lithe. Agile. Powerful. It was the opposite of how he normally felt. But he knew that it was just an illusion, that he was recalling an echo of Maurice, not the real thing. In real life, he was Reginald. But somehow, right now, he was also Maurice.

  “It’s blood,” said Maurice’s voice. The voice was in his ears but not in his ears. In the air but not in the air. The voice had to be inside of his head. But he heard it like lips on his ear — or perhaps on Maurice’s ear, seeing as he was somehow Maurice. It was like he was talking to himself.

  “What’s blood?” He said it out loud. It felt ridiculous. He waited for someone — in the real world, in the house, beyond the thin veil of whatever kind of strange trance state this was — to walk in and ask him who he was talking to.

  “I told you you’d feel me forever,” said Maurice’s voice.

  “I thought you meant while you were alive,” said Reginald, using the same pair of lips.

  The voice chuckled. Maurice’s own good-natured, light-hearted chuckle.

  “You’re not really here, are you?” said Reginald.

  “I’m in your blood.”

  “But you’re not you.”

  “I am you. You are me.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Again, that chuckle. It was the same way Maurice had greeted the dawn of Reginald’s vampire abilities: with patron
izing optimism. Of course he’d never figure out what was going on — same as he’d never be truly strong or truly fast. But that didn’t mean he had to give up on trying. He could do what he could do, and it would be good enough because it had to be.

  “You’re an echo,” said Reginald.

  The Maurice voice didn’t answer, but it didn’t have to. He wasn’t seeing and being and feeling and hearing Maurice. He was hearing what was left of Maurice. Maurice was gone. Reginald remained. This had to be a manifestation — the history Maurice had given him and that would forever circulate in his blood like a biological archive, come to odd new life.

  “This isn’t normal, you know,” said Maurice’s voice.

  It wasn’t. It wasn’t normal at all. Vampires were supposed to have blood ties like the seer’s — vague impulses and feelings given to them by the bond they’d forever have with those whose blood they shared. Nikki felt it as hunger and occasional anger, drawing on vampires in Maurice’s line. But over the past few months, those same blood ties had begun to feel like a window to Reginald. Or maybe a door.

  He pushed, trying to get a feel for Maurice inside his head. And when he did, he realized he could dive deeper, below the surface of the Maurice within him. He let go of his vision, let himself see what he wanted to see. And a moment later he was looking down at a new man’s torso. This new man was dressed in something ancient, like an ornate robe sewn with golden thread.

  He was in Maurice’s maker — in the blood memory Maurice had of the vampire who’d made him two thousand years earlier, courtesy of the blood memory that Reginald himself had of Maurice. He could feel the maker’s thoughts. Tendencies. Desires.

  Then he blinked, and he was Reginald again, sitting on the couch.

  “What is this?” he said to the empty room.

  “A gift,” said Maurice’s voice on Reginald’s lips, “awoken by a willing sacrifice.”

  But because Maurice was dead, Reginald was pretty sure it was really his own mind doing the reasoning. He had Maurice’s memories and history, but there was no Maurice left. The only being here was Reginald. He seemed to be able to put on other vampires like a man could put on other hats. It was strangely disorienting, as if he might get lost. The idea of becoming lost was strangely appealing. There was little left to live for anyway. So: vanishing down a rabbit hole? Not so terrible.

  “A gift,” Reginald repeated.

  He said it, then chewed on it. It wasn’t a conversation. It was Reginald talking to Reginald. What Maurice’s echo was saying was something Reginald already knew. The mental trick of slipping into Maurice’s blood and then from Maurice into his maker’s blood was getting easier. From the outside, if Nikki or Brian walked by, this would simply look like Reginald sitting on the couch. But for Reginald, he was trying on new clothes, new emotions, new memories, new minds. He was Maurice. He was the maker — whose name, he realized, had been Jean Paul. Jean Paul was dead. And with that realization, it dawned on Reginald that he didn’t just have the maker’s memories up until the day he’d transferred his blood to Maurice. Reginald had them all. Then, feeling this, he slipped backward, wanting to see if the same was true of Maurice’s memories within him. He realized it was. In the space of a second, he felt Maurice’s desperation as Claire fell sick and he lost touch with Reginald and Nikki in Antarctica, knowing they were in danger. He felt the pull when Reginald had been threatened in the graveyard, and how he’d come to the surface with Brian in tow. He felt the surge that had let him fly. And finally, he watched himself die.

  He came all the way back, becoming Reginald again.

  “A gift,” he repeated, speaking to nobody. So the angel Balestro, on that hilltop after the Ring of Fire, had given him something of value after all.

  Reginald closed his eyes, then breathed deeply, centering himself.

  He started over, putting all of the bits of information in order.

  It made sense that he’d be able to visit the blood memory of all of the vampires in his family tree. He’d known he could do that (but apparently not how unheard-of the talent was) for a while. He’d been inside Nikki’s headspace on the TGV when it had derailed, and in the moments before the derailment, he’d found himself staring at the train through Claude’s eyes as he prepared to take the TGV’s impact like a tackle. He’d found himself trespassing in Maurice’s mind and in Nikki’s mind. He realized, now that he knew of their brotherhood, why he’d had to fight so hard not to slip into Brian’s mind and see his thoughts. But in Paris, he’d also gotten the flavor of Karl’s thoughts, and that hadn’t made a bit of sense. He wasn’t related to Karl… was he?

  We’re all related.

  The thought was his, but it came with Maurice’s sense of authority. Of course they were all related. Once upon a time, there had been a first vampire, and he’d been father to them all. Legend called that first vampire Cain. Cain had spread the vampire agent in his blood, and the agent had changed the blood of those he turned, and so on down the line to every vampire in existence. Cain’s blood told its stories to the blood of his progeny. His progeny’s blood had told stories to the next generation. And so on and so on. Every vampire was related to every other. There didn’t need to be a direct line between Karl and Reginald. Somewhere in history, they shared a common ancestor.

  Reginald went deeper. Now that he knew what he was experiencing, he allowed himself to feel it, to be it.

  He was a tall man with dark black fingernails.

  He was a woman who liked one human food — steak, cooked, but very rare.

  He was a gay man who’d wanted to be turned so that he’d have the power to fight those who’d once tormented him.

  One after another after another. He went deep in Maurice’s line, hopping from blood to blood to blood. Then he went back upward, feeling the chain of ancestry deliberately. Instead of moving from progeny to maker, he began moving from maker to progeny. He found Nicholas Timken. They shared an ancestor thirty generations back.

  So this was what Balestro had given him back on that mountaintop. But why?

  As soon as he’d asked the question, his mind — or some ancient memory within him — answered. It said simply, Because blood must circulate.

  He went up ancestry. Down ancestry. He had no idea where he was in time. He saw a cup in front of his lips as he relived an inconsequential memory of drinking tea. Was this yesterday, or had this cup of tea been drunk a thousand years ago? He saw blood on a bitten neck, then a woman’s lips. Who was he feeding on? The sense of untethered abandon he felt was liberating. He didn’t have to be Reginald anymore. He didn’t have to have responsibilities anymore. He didn’t have to miss Maurice anymore. He could stay in here forever. He could be anyone. There were enough lifetimes of blood memories to keep him happy forever.

  You could get lost in here, he thought. And the idea sounded tempting.

  He went faster. Deeper. Harder. The sensation was like driving a car very fast on a dangerous road. His dead heart wanted to skip a beat. Something told him to stop. The chains of ancestry were like a maze; he could easily forget where he was, when he was, maybe even who he was in real life. But it didn’t matter. The surface of the present was all horror and pain. Down here, in the archives, it was quiet with the death of time. Everything down here, in the forest of memories, had already happened. There was no destiny. No responsibility. There was no sense of duty or “should.” Nothing could go wrong here, because the past was what it was and nothing could change it. Nobody would look to him down here to change the future, because there was no future. Nobody would blame him for anything. He wouldn’t be a hero or a pariah. He wouldn’t be a success or a failure. He could drown inside the tree and the sea of blood. But it would be worth it.

  Some part of whoever he was on the surface (and who was that? The thought had little meaning to him) remembered the face of a beautiful woman with dark hair. He remembered the face of an eleven-year-old girl who’d been called an oracle and was burdened with the knowledge
of millennia. But then those foreign memories were gone and he went deeper. Faster. Faster. Faster.

  Then, with a jolt, he struck the bottom. There was nothing more. He could not go deeper. There were no more makers. There was only progeny. His mind gave him an image like a funnel, with himself sitting at the base.

  He was Cain.

  In this deepest blood memory, he saw the face of an angel. An old man with a hawklike nose and piercing blue eyes. He felt disoriented. Cain felt disoriented. Or was his name even Cain? He didn’t know. He knew he could see far. That he could hear new things. That he felt strong. That he wanted to run. And that he was hungry.

  Blood must circulate, said the angel Balestro.

  Cain understood.

  And all of a sudden, Reginald understood, too.

  Humans and vampires.

  Vampires and humans.

  His mind showed him the image of a shattered vase, moving backward, slowly reassembling.

  The codex.

  Reginald realized why he hadn’t found the codex. It was because the vampire codex wasn’t a thing. It was many things. It was a distributed series of truths — fragments of knowledge spread throughout the vampire lines that, when uncovered by the right mind (a mind that was unlike any vampirekind had ever seen before, but that evolution was destined to one day create) would fit together like a key sliding into a lock. He watched the bits come together in front of his internal eyes. He saw a random document on the desk of a vampire in 1781 in America slide next to a childhood memory of a vampire who lived in Mongolia in the days before written words. There was a system out there. A pattern. You had to have the entirety of vampire knowledge in front of you to see it, but once you saw it, it was as plain as day.

  There was a reason vampires existed. There was a reason humans existed. There was a pattern to it all, just as Claire had said.

  He hadn’t found the codex because the codex wasn’t a thing to be found. It had been right there all along, in plain sight, shattered and spread to the corners of experience. His mind was already putting the pieces together, the same as Claire had, before sending him on his futile errand.