Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse (7 page)

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.
 

But regardless of who was doing what and who was reporting which version of the truth, one thing was clear:

It was beginning.
 

C
ATACOMBS

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.
 

Reginald missed a step, slipped his toe from its edge, and raked the front of his leg on the concrete. The flesh on the front of his leg opened in a long red friction burn.
 

“Shit,” he said, collapsing onto the step.
 

Nikki made sympathetic noises, then told him to grit his teeth until it healed and the pain went away.
 

“No,” said Reginald. “I mean,
shit.”
 

The wound healed.
 

“Shit, shit, shit,
shit.
”

“What?”
 

“It didn’t hurt. At all.”
 

“Awesome.”
 

Reginald, feeling both afraid and furious, grabbed a fist-sized rock from beside the steps and slammed it very hard onto his other hand, which he’d laid flat on the concrete step. He heard something snap and watched blood well beneath his skin. It healed. Again, it didn’t hurt.
 

“
Not
awesome,” said Reginald. He looked up at the Chateau. He looked up and down the steps, wondering where the students were. Shouldn’t kids be coming up for class in the school above the vampire catacombs — Karl’s hideaway in plain sight of the local human population? He looked at Nikki and saw that she understood. The last time Reginald’s sense of pain had suddenly left him had been during their escape from the American Council at the time of Charles’s coup. It came and went and Reginald didn’t seem to have any control over it, but every time it had happened had meant trouble. It was his Spidey Sense, warning him of danger.
 

“The Chateau?”
 

“I can see where it’s been burned.” He pointed. “There.”
 

“And the school?”
 

“I don’t know. But I don’t see any students.”
 

“Hell.” Nikki flexed to run, but Reginald shouted to stop her.
 

“Don’t you dare go without me,” he said.
 

Nikki looked at him for a long moment. She was far faster without him, but he’d been giving her hell for running off alone ever since she’d run out to surveil Maurice’s neighborhood.
Angry citizens and trained troops were out there killing vampires,
he’d said.
What would I do if I lost you?
It was a weak-sounding thing to say, but he’d said it anyway, and his anger that she’d taken the risk had been real.