Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse (2 page)

“A twelve-year-old girl who can absorb the internet like a sponge.”

“Sure,” said Reginald. “But she can’t
do
anything with all of that information. Being Claire is like being in a library, but not being able to read.”
 

“Claire can read.”
 

“That’s not what I meant.”
 

But Maurice couldn’t possibly understand. He’d had been around since BC became AD, but between the two of them, Reginald’s intelligence was far superior. Reginald could vacuum up information, recall it all perfectly, parse it, collate it, analyze it from every possible angle, then spit out the best options like a room full of networked Crays. What Reginald did was nothing Maurice or any of the others could understand — not just the ability itself, but its mysteriousness. Reginald didn’t know how his mind worked; he just knew that it worked.
 

But as good as Reginald’s facility with information was, Claire’s was orders of magnitude better. Over the past year, she seemed to have developed an affinity for manipulating electronic signals that bordered on spooky. But like Reginald, Claire didn’t understand the things she did. She could unlock unlockable doors online, but she thought of her abilities as being more like swimming than hacking. She claimed she’d seen most of the internet already (including the parts that were supposed to be off-limits), but when asked for specifics, she could only give vague feelings and impressions: the internet and the information it contained was, to Claire,
overwhelming, ordered, red, blue, hot, cold
. If Reginald were to turn her into a vampire, that could change, and they’d become an unstoppable team. Claire could gather data — and then Reginald, via his mental connection as her maker, could make sense of it. But he
wouldn’t
turn her, no matter how many times she asked. She was just a child, he said, and she had years of growing up ahead of her.

“Reginald,” said Maurice, “the other day Claire thought it would be funny to allow me to conduct a ten-minute talk with Karl that didn’t actually exist. I was on Skype with a ghost for
ten minutes,
and I didn’t know it until she started laughing in the other room. She just made it all up.”

Reginald wasn’t amazed by Maurice’s claim. He was irritated. Claire’s father was an absentee asshole incubus and her mother still hadn’t totally recovered from a near-fatal vampire attack last year. Reginald was, for better or worse, the best parental figure Claire had — and he’d told her to knock that kind of thing off.
 

He stuffed down his annoyance, mentally reminding himself to talk to Claire later about it. “That doesn’t mean she can tell the future on command,” he told Maurice.

“Telling the future is what she’s supposed to do!” Maurice blurted, raising his hands into the air. “That’s what saved every vampire in existence from the Ring of Fire!”
 

Reginald shook his head. “The fact that her father is an incubus and some quick bluff work saved us. But be my guest. Go into the living room and ask her what’s going to happen. Hell, ask her what’s going on right now! She’s absorbed all of the vampire internet, including every post ever made on Fangbook. So ask her how many members there are in the Sedition Army. Ask her for the percentage of the vampire population that is actively ready to reap the human population versus those who seem likely to just hide and wait it out. Ask her about human preparations. I’m sure she’s delved into classified areas and can give you the Anti-Vampire Taskforce’s deployment numbers and the technologies they’re using. So go on in, Maurice. Find the girl in the PJ’s reading Harry Potter, and ask her what we should do next. But when she gives you an answer, I just hope you enjoy swimming metaphors and vague, color-based analyses that won’t help you worth dick.”
 

Maurice shook his head. He looked across the room, into the corner where he’d thrown the book.
 

“I
hate
that book,” he said. “I hate
all
of these books. The next time we make a run, I’m going to a Best Buy to pick up a Kindle so that I can at least download some new stuff.”

“Nikki has a recommendation for you, then,” said Reginald. “It’s about a gunslinger who rides a unicorn.”
 

That was when they heard the explosion out on the grounds, at the east edge, where the perimeter fence was its weakest.

S
IEGE

MAURICE LOOKED AT REGINALD. REGINALD looked at Maurice. Then there was a blur and the pages of Maurice’s discarded book, in the corner near the door, riffled. Reginald, now alone, turned to follow. He had another nine months of vampirism under his belt and, feeling stronger and more confident, sprinted hard to follow. He struck the doorframe, which cracked and tossed splinters into the hallway. He grasped his face and felt blood trickle into his palm. Reginald actually felt pleased. He must be getting stronger. It wasn’t uncommon for him to run into doorframes (not his fault; he had less clearance than anyone else), but this was the first time he’d broken one.
 

He found the others in the marble foyer of Maurice’s house. Brian was in his boxers, bare-chested, wearing his pointless invisible-rim glasses, looking enormous. His wife Talia was beside him, regrettably not bare-chested, wearing a comfortable-looking set of short sleep clothes. Nikki
was
bare-chested. She slept topless, and apparently hadn’t thought of modesty when she’d heard the noise. Reginald pulled off the sweater he was wearing and handed it to her. Then there was a crashing sound from the outside and Nikki blurred toward the front door. She yelled and returned to Reginald’s side, her face and hair black and singed.
 

It was daytime.

“I forgot,” said Nikki.
 

“You forgot.”
 

“Well, just listen to what’s going on out there!” she said.

Reginald listened. He’d thought it was quiet save the explosion and crash, but as he concentrated he realized he could hear a sort of animal chattering, like vampires made when circling a kill. It was an ominous sound — the sound of approaching doom. He’d seen humans cower from it. For vampires sadistic enough to make the chattering noise in front of their prey, human cowering was just validation, so chatters were inevitably combined with laughter. Outside, Reginald could hear laughter, too.
 

“You thought it was vampires,” he said.
 

“What else would it be? That’s who we’re hiding from.”
 

“According to Timken, who ‘forgave’ us, we’re not hiding at all,” said Reginald. He could hear the chattering outside, circling, coming closer.
 

“Humans,” said Brian. His fangs were out. So were Talia’s. So were Maurice’s, when he walked in from the east wing, the direction from which the explosion had come from.
 

“The Swedes are dead,” he said.
 

Maurice said it like he was announcing the score of a sporting event, but Nikki and Talia’s hands went to their mouths. Reginald felt his undead heart sink. Bjorn, Gert, and Paul had been part of their little bunkered-in family for almost six months, ever since Karl had sent the Swedish refugees — vampires without allegiance, like the rest of them — to Maurice’s mansion to wait out the coming storm.
 

“Dead?”
 

“Ash. The explosion took out the fence and several windows at once. The humans left the stakes they used to kill them in their beds, almost as if to taunt whoever found them. They seem to have staked and retreated. They must have been afraid of who they might meet deeper in.” Maurice put a hand on his hollow chest, silently adding that their fear was justified.

“Cowards,” said Brian, his menace growing deeper.
 

Maurice looked back toward the east wing. “They’ve put the sun behind them,” he said. “Smart. Even if we wanted to risk running out and sticking to the shadows, we couldn’t get at them.”
 

Beside the front door, one of the blackout shutters shook as something struck it. There was a sound of breaking glass, and a sliver fell to the floor from the other side of the shutter.
 

“Stay away from the east-facing windows,” said Maurice. “The sun is still very low.”
 

“Won’t the shutters protect us?” said Talia.
 

“They’re just shutters,” said Maurice.

They stood on the marble floor, listening. The chattering became a sort of mumbling, and there was more laughter. The voices moved around. Reginald listened hard, trying to catalogue all of the nuances of what he was hearing. One voice had a lilt to it. One had a guttural sound around the R’s. At least two were female. He listened, taking notes on a mental tally board.
 

“I hear eleven of them,” he announced.
 

“What if there are some who are being quiet?” said Nikki.

Reginald shook his head. “I’m counting their footsteps.”
 

“And I can hear them
breathing
,” said Brian. He said it with contempt, his mouth open and his fangs out like an animal. Breathing was a human thing. Technically they all did it too — but barely, and it wasn’t terribly necessary.
 

“This is why you need familiars, Maurice,” said Talia. She’d mentioned it again and again in the past, urging Maurice to find some trustworthy humans to watch the grounds while the sun was up.

“So that when they find out what Timken is up to, they can stake us in our sleep?” Maurice spat back.
 

“Then use the humans we have here,” she said. “Like Nikki’s sister.”
 

“My sister is not a soldier,” Nikki said, her eyebrows creased.
 

“Not now, Talia,” said Brian.
 

Maurice had his hands on his hips. “There are only eleven of them. They can’t hurt us.”
 

But then they heard a new noise, this time coming from the west. Some of the humans had circled around in that direction a moment ago, and now Reginald could hear a popping, cracking sound.
 

“Oh shit,” said Maurice.

It was the sound of fire.

Maurice’s wife Celeste blurred in, either having slept through the initial tumult or having run around the house, assessing. Soon after, Nikki’s sister Jackie jogged into the foyer and took Nikki by the arm. Jackie was an inch shorter than Nikki and had lighter hair, but otherwise the two might have been twins.
 

“What is it?” she asked.
 

“Fucking humans,” said Nikki.
 

Reginald looked from Jackie to Nikki, who had her fangs bared, like Brian.
 

“No offense,” Reginald added, because Nikki wasn’t going to add it.
 

“Oh,” said Jackie, exhaling. “Should we go back to bed?” Jackie kept the same schedule as her sister, sleeping during the day and staying awake all night, making only one obligatory excursion into the sun each day to soak up some necessary Vitamin D. Most of the other humans — Claire, her mother, Brian’s human kids — did the same. When you lived inside a sun-tight mega-mansion with vampires, time of day didn’t matter much. Only Reginald’s mother kept to her usual pattern, but that was mostly so that she could complain that nobody paid attention to her.
 

“Sure, you can go back to bed,” said Brian, “if you’re into burning alive.”
 

“They set a fire?”
 

Nikki nodded.
 

“Can we call the fire department?” said Jackie.
 

“Interestingly, yes,” said Maurice. “But ironically, the first thing the firemen will do when they show up is to pull us outside — so that we’ll be safe.”
 

“We could hide in the house when they come,” said Talia. “Let Jackie meet them out front.”
 

“With the people who are trying to kill us, you mean?” said Nikki, her animosity at Talia clearly visible. Nikki was the younger sister, but she was as protective of her human sister as a mother bear of her cubs, and this was the second time Talia had suggested throwing Jackie into danger.
 

“And then when the arson squad shows up, they’d come in and find us anyway,” Maurice added.
 

Reginald looked at his maker. “You’re so negative,” he said.
 

The humans outside were beginning to taunt and shout. Reginald heard slurs he recognized from pop culture vampire movies and shows (eg: “fangers” from
True Blood
; humans were so damn unoriginal) and a few more general epithets like “cocksuckers” and “motherfuckers.” One man with a country-fried accent was yelling “faggots” and “niggers,” thus establishing that the group considered its hate endeavors to be more or less interchangeable.
 

Jackie was at the shutters, trying to look out without letting the sun in. She shouted,
“These are the good ones in here, you assholes!”
 

“Jackie!” Nikki hissed.
 

“These vampires are trying to
help
you! Go kill some of the bad ones!”
 

“Jackie!”
 

From outside, the loudmouth yelled,
“Shut up your ass, faggot!”
 

“That guy,” said Brian, “will need to die painfully.”
 

Reginald could feel minutes bleeding away. The west end of the house was on fire. The east end was awash with sun. They couldn’t go outside. They couldn’t call the authorities. All of their vampire allies in the area, if they’d had any (which they didn’t) would be incapacitated. They had no local human allies. Their attackers were outside in the sun, beyond reach. The humans inside were too few — and of them, only Jackie would be worth anything in a fight. The people outside would be armed. Waiting was the wrong choice, but it was all they could do.
 

“Bunker in the basement,” said a voice behind them. “Wait for night, then waste them.” It was Claire, leading her dazed mother by the hand.