Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse (6 page)

“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.”

O
UTBREAK

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 spent 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.
 

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.