Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse (13 page)

They wished Maurice and Claire good luck and hung up. Reginald sat with his legs hugged to his chest and pondered. Nikki cried, and her tears froze like icicles. Then they packed the tent and moved on, half convinced that anything they could still manage to do would be too little, too late.

They didn’t know where they were going.
 

They didn’t know where they were going.
 

They didn’t know where they were going.
 

Until one day, they did.
 

Reginald could only follow his nose, reasoning that if his finding the codex was the logical result of a trillion causes in the universe, all he had to do was wait for those things to cause his next action. And so eventually, one endless night while they were both on foot, scoping the area within a few miles of the pole in concentric circles (staying away from the human research stations), Reginald’s crampons scraped something under the ice. He fell to his knees and began clearing snow with his gloves, working by the light cast from his headlamp. He’d scraped the top of what appeared to be a handle, and it was attached to something else that appeared to be a trapdoor. And just as he was wondering how to open the thing — and totally unsure as to what it might be — the door began to tilt upward from one end, revealing that it had sides like the spout on a container of salt. It rose further, revealing a long, downward-sloping hallway into the ice.
 

Reginald looked at Nikki. Nikki looked at Reginald. Then they both looked at the open hallway, which was silent above the endless wind and was illuminated with red lights.
 

“Is this it?” said Nikki.
 

“I don’t know.”
 

“It could be a human place,” she said. “Like a secret military base.”

“It could,” said Reginald.
 

“I don’t want to go into a human place,” said Nikki. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but they don’t like us much right now.”
 

But Reginald was already walking, already plodding down the long hallway into the ice.
 

The tunnel went down and down. Eventually it leveled out and they walked horizontally, soon arriving at a nondescript metal door. Reginald pushed and found it unlatched; it swung freely like a door in a hospital’s hallway. Nikki followed. When the door closed behind them, it made an audible clicking sound, latching where it hadn’t latched before. Reginald turned to see that the door had a security keypad next to it, and while they watched, it seemed to arm. Keys on the pad lit in a rapid sequence, one after the other, as if following one another in a line. The numerical sequence the lights made was 0-7-4-1-5-3-6-9-0.
 

Nikki was watching the keypad with horror.
 

“It’s an alarm,” she said, looking around. They were totally alone, standing in a well-lit industrial-looking hallway with doors along both sides. It had an unused, basement look, as if this were the backstage area of wherever they were — somewhere that nobody used except for storage. And judging by the feel,
they
weren’t supposed to be here, either.
 

Reginald ran the sequence of lights back in his mind, watching the buttons light.
 

“No,” he said. “It’s Claire. Claire let us in.”
 

Nikki looked at the keypad, then at Reginald.
 

“The lights made a heart,” he said, pointing. Then he showed her. The zero was below the block of 1 through 9. The shape had been closer to that of a chevron, but you could only do so well in making a heart on a number pad.
 

“Oh. How is that possible?”
 

He shook his head. “I have no idea. She can move energy. I stopped asking how things were possible when my goth co-worker threw a man across a parking lot and killed him with a sword, and then I woke up dead.”
 

“Un
dead.”
 

“Whatever.”
 

Reginald looked at the hallway. It dead-ended to their left. To the right, at the far end, were a double set of swinging doors. He started walking. Nikki followed. The hallway led to another, to another, to another. They took path after path, then finally emerged into a huge room with enormous video screens across its entire, two-story front wall. There were rows and rows of people (Reginald had to assume they were vampires; there were cups filled with red liquid on many of the desks) behind computers facing the screen. Women dressed in black uniforms and with insignia on their chests marched back and forth, watching it all. The setup reminded Reginald of Cheyenne Mountain, the massive control room that NORAD missile defense called home.
 

“Holy shit,” said Nikki.
 

Despite the chatter in the room, every head turned toward them. Blurs came from the rafters, and Nikki and Reginald found themselves staring down the barrels of several large guns. Vampire soldiers had appeared in front of them, painting them with the red dots of laser sights. Reginald couldn’t help but be amused. Vampires using guns to defend themselves? It was all so perversely appropriate.

One of the women in black marched toward them. She looked at them, moving her gaze from their feet to their heads, taking in their arctic gear. Both had taken the crampons off their boots and were holding them in their hands. They didn’t move.
 

The woman made a gesture. There was a quick sense of moving air behind them, and Reginald turned to find himself staring at a broad, muscular man with a square jaw and a massive scar curving from his forehead down to his neck.

“Reginald Baskin,” he said. “Well, if this isn’t an unexpected pleasure.”
 

It was Claude Toussant.

V-C
REWS

CLAUDE INTRODUCED THE WOMAN AS General Ophelia Thax. She was tall and blonde and thin, and her outfit looked like a parody of a military uniform that might be worn at a sexy Halloween party. Claude let the general lead the way, then followed a few paces behind her. Behind Claude were two vampire soldiers, holding their guns up, walking backward. Behind the soldiers were Nikki and Reginald, and behind them were three more soldiers, also aiming guns. Reginald couldn’t help but feel flattered by the implication of his own menace.
 

They moved into a conference room with a glass wall that looked out over the large control area. Once inside, General Thax — not Claude — dismissed the armed guards. They looked nervous to leave the two high-ranking officials alone with the two intruders, but she repeated the command and they dutifully obeyed, locking the door behind them.

Claude sat on the edge of the room’s large conference table, his back to the windows. The woman remained standing, as if at attention.
 

“You can sit,” said Claude, gesturing behind Nikki and Reginald.
 

Reginald sat. Nikki remained defiantly standing, but this was the wrong time to make a moral stand. They’d come here for a reason, and an apparently-very-real sense of fate was at play. They had to find the codex first, get home second, and worry about Claude third. So Reginald reached up and very gently took Nikki’s hand, urging her to sit on the small couch beside him.
 

“Let’s start with the obvious,” said Claude.
 

“This is Vampire World Command,” said Reginald.
 

“Obviously.”
 

“Which apparently is code for Annihilist Headquarters.”
 

Claude looked at the general before answering. She met his eye, and some unspoken message moved between them. Reginald couldn’t see much into Claude’s mind without alerting him to his presence, so he was only able to catch the surface of the thought. He saw only that he’d broached a sensitive topic, and that they were treading on contested ground.
 

“Semantics,” said Claude. He nodded to the general beside him. The space between the four vampires was meaningfully empty, mocking the discussion’s implied civility. “The Annihilist Faction has operated out of VWC for decades, but it is still the VWC who runs it. My people defer to the generals, like Ophelia here.” He tipped his head toward the woman beside him. Reginald expected her to be irritated at the use of her first name, but apparently they’d lapsed into the familiar. Genocide made for strange bedfellows.

“The Vampire World Command,” said Ophelia, beginning to pace with her hands intertwined behind her back, “was created for two purposes. The first was to act as a kind of vampire United Nations. The various worldwide councils have never really gotten along; they’re closer to a handful of gangs controlled by warlords than civilized nations. The Soviet Council is like a tribe of barbarians. The Far East vampires haven’t changed much since Genghis Khan’s day. Even the EU and US barely talked to each other. VWC was supposed to bridge that gap and get them talking, but the endeavor failed from the start. We could never get representatives to come here and discuss ways to work together. The problem is that vampires like too much to be independent. Average American vamps have gotten good at doing as they’re told, but they’re really the only ones, and the US leadership has never cared about cooperation at levels above their own heads. So very quickly, we at VWC moved away from diplomacy and toward our other purpose: to act as a failsafe.”
 

“A failsafe.” Nikki repeated the words without inflection.
 

“The VWC always considered the human population to be a potential threat, whereas the individual councils treated humans like they were cows raised for meat. There were realities that required vampires to make themselves known to certain humans — groups like Erickson’s. We knew they weren’t stupid. They formed the AVT almost immediately after learning officially that we existed, and we suspect that armed force has grown much larger than is commonly known. We also recently found out the hard way that they’ve been hiding some fancy new weapons as well. Humans outnumbered vampires by a hundred thousand to one, and they were growing faster than we were, so in the opinion of the VWC, it was only a matter of time before they’d decide to test us. When that happened, there needed to be a body capable of responding in a coordinated manner — not as a loose collection of self-interested barbarians. That body also needed to be strong and well-trained enough to respond decisively to end the threat, in whatever form it took, using both innovative weapons and the substantial talents we already had.”
 

Reginald thought about the guns the soldiers had aimed at them. Those guns hadn’t looked particularly innovative, but he hadn’t been shot, and it was true that humans died when you shot them with just about anything. How much innovation was really necessary?

“The Annihilist Faction,” Claude added, shifting on the table’s edge, “had two things in common with the VWC. First, we also considered conflict with the humans to be inevitable. And second, we already had soldiers of our own. As a bonus, we also had a set of deep pockets able to
fund
those soldiers — something the VWC couldn’t count on.”
 

“So you bought yourself an army,” said Reginald. “Just like you bought one for Timken.”
 

Claude laughed. “Same army, different leadership. But as much as I like Nick, he’s too timid. He’s willing to do what’s necessary, but only as a last resort. The generals here were always willing to be as proactive as the situation required. So together, we made a good team.”
 

Looking at Claude, Reginald felt the rest of the puzzle fall into place: Timken didn’t know about the VWC, just as Maurice hadn’t. He didn’t know that his right-hand man was busy stabbing humanity in the back while he was out shaking hands. Reginald found himself recalling his discussion with Timken: the almost regretful way the president had spoken of there being no other way to save vampirekind than to turn the planet. He’d been willing to do what was “necessary,” but would his hand have been forced enough to do it without Claude’s murderous duplicity? Would the fire, on both sides, have burned hot enough without the war that the VWC/Annihilist troops had been conducting behind the scenes?

Reginald stood. Ophelia took a step toward him.

“You sick son of a bitch,” said Reginald. “You wanted this. You’ve been
waiting
for this.”

Claude didn’t stand. He nodded, unperturbed. “There’s no rule that says a man can’t enjoy his work.”
 

Reginald turned from Claude and Ophelia and approached the windows. Nikki was still sitting, her hands on the arms of her chair, her entire body betraying her readiness to spring up. He hoped she wouldn’t try. It would be both pointless and unnecessary.
 

He looked out at the big screens, the rows and rows of vampire technicians sitting in front of computers. Uniformed women strolled between them. He almost wanted to ask why the generals were all women, but he’d already run through the same logic the VWC must have run through when it was formed and felt confident of the answer Ophelia would give. Vampire women didn’t feel the need to rattle sabers and compare dick size. It made their decisions more logical and less testosterone infused — and in this context, much more cold.
 

“You could have taken the planet any time,” said Reginald.
 

“Oh yes,” said Claude. “In order to be sure we’d survive, we had to ensure that we were a hundred thousand times stronger and more prepared than the humans were. It was an amazingly sharp mandate, and it made us strong quickly. We have the troops, the training, and the weapons. That big screen shows our deployment. Do you see the positions?”
 

Reginald looked. The largest screen showed a globe projection in the center, with certain areas magnified and expanded on smaller screens around it. From this distance, he could make out small red dots scattered across the surface of all of the maps like spilled cayenne pepper. It was exactly as he’d anticipated, though on a frighteningly more thorough scale than he could have imagined. The missing piece of information had been the Annihilists’ cooperation with the VWC, and now that he knew about it, he saw how the human defeat was as inevitable as the toppling of dominoes. But also as he looked, he could already spot inefficiencies — areas where human populations would act differently than the VWC had apparently predicted. There weren’t enough deployments in Eastern Europe, for instance, and the island nations wouldn’t fall as predicted unless the plan included air support not evident on the big map. But as his strategic mind worked through the data, a troubling question surfaced:
Why were Claude and Ophelia telling them all of these details?
The answer to that question — which he was growing increasingly cognizant of — was even more troubling.