Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse (8 page)

So Nikki again shouldered his weight, ran up to the building, and then stopped in the yard. She let Reginald down. The grass underfoot was soft and green, but one entire wing — Reginald thought it was where the cafeteria had been — had been burned. The building was open to the air, recent rain pooling in the exposed hallway.
 

“Should we go in?” said Nikki.
 

“I think we have to.”
 

“Karl and the others are very strong,” she said. “They either held their own and are alive in there or somewhere else, or they are dead. If there was a time for us to help them or make a difference, it’s over.” She looked at the burned wing. Whatever had happened here had happened a few days ago at least. There was no smoke, only char and ash. Reginald wondered why the incident had never shown up on VNN or Fangbook. The fact that something as monumental as a raid on the European Vampire Council hadn’t so much as been mentioned sent a chill down his spine. Either every vampire in the area who might have reported it was dead or gone, or Timken and his toadies wielded a significant amount of power over what appeared on Fangbook and what didn’t.
 

“No, I mean
I think we have to,
” said Reginald. He pointed to the eastern sky, which was blushing red and orange, very quickly ripening into yellow.
 

“Shit. We could run west. Find a basement.”
 

“You think you can outrun the sun with a fat guy on your back?”
 

“I don’t want to go in there, Reginald.”
 

“I think we have to,”
he said for a third time. The grass below them began to grow pale shadows. He was getting warm, and he could see sweat on Nikki’s brow and at the neck of her tight black garb.
 

He got behind her and pushed, shoving her through the fallen and burned wall. She breathed heavily, watching him, watching outside, looking at the fallen brick and plaster. But then the trees beyond the hole began to form true shadows and the decision was taken out of their hands. They stepped back from the radiation of the sun, retreating into the quiet darkness.
 

The entire building seemed to be deserted and silent. They made their way to the Cave in the basement, to the brick wall at its end, and found the door to the catacombs yawning open. Reginald gaped at it. How long had the EU Council structure been open to the world — to the increasingly panicked and murderous human population above? Reginald thought back to the last report he’d heard from Karl. Karl hadn’t been covered with as much stink of treason as Reginald had been following their attempt to rig the election, but his stature in the vampire community had dropped significantly. In the eyes of the vampire world, the EU Council had gotten into bed with traitors, and until that last report, Karl had made zero headway in finding allies willing to stand against Timken. Everyone Karl had tried to recruit said one of two things: either that Timken was the benevolent and fair leader he’d claimed to be and that Karl was crazy, or they said that Timken
was
planning to turn earth into a vampire planet… and that was just fine. Everyone had seen the Ring of Fire. Everyone knew what was at stake. And absent any decent-sounding alternative explanations, everyone pretty much agreed that as regrettable as it seemed, killing off the human population was one way to give the angels what they seemed to demand.
 

Karl, when Reginald and Maurice had spoken with him three weeks ago, had told them that riots had begun to break out during the day. He told them that he saw crosses and garlic hanging outside more and more of the bars. He told them that people had gone missing all across the small country, with reports of many more in neighboring Germany, France, and Belgium. In Brussels, a group of dead tourists had been fished out of one of the canals and their bodies had been suspiciously pale. There was a rumor that one night, over Paris, the light atop the Eiffel Tower had grown strangely dim — and that when a worker had gone up to check, he’d found a prominent local businessman’s corpse wrapped around the light, blocking the beam. Reginald, back in America, had been unable to confirm either rumor. If they’d happened, they’d been erased or suppressed.
 

And now this.
 

“My desire
not
to go in there has ratcheted up a notch,” said Nikki.
 

Reginald looked at Nikki. She usually looked like a warrior, but right now she was actually shivering. He reminded himself that not long ago, she’d been a human woman, outwardly exuberant and confident but wounded inside. She drank blood these days, but she’d been on death’s other side enough for it to have left its mark. After they’d discovered their ransacked office and the bodies it had contained, she’d had nightmares for months.
 

“We’re here for the day either way,” he told her.
 

“Do you think anyone was courteous enough to leave some of those lead day suits here for us?” she said, peering back toward the morning sun.
 

“I don’t think I could fit into one anyway,” said Reginald. He looked down at his corpulent frame. “Or lift one.”
 

“You could stay here and hang out. I’d take my suit and go somewhere else.”
 

She was whistling in the dark, trying to keep talking so the monsters would stay away. Right now,
they
were the monsters… but because it was all he could do, Reginald played along.

“Where would you go?”
 

“Starbucks,” she said. “I have a theory that if you walk into a business looking like Snake Eyes from G.I. Joe, nobody asks questions. They just roll with it. I wouldn’t even bite anyone. Just sip cappuccinos all day. Maybe get into a chess game with a bearded guy the locals call ‘Spider.'"

Reginald smiled, then took her hand. They had to go inside. There was no other way.

Fighting fear, he led the way. Nikki could clear a freight yard with her hands and Reginald couldn’t successfully fight anything other than a pizza, but he stayed in front anyway. It had an upside. Until he was run through with a telephone pole or whatever else awaited him below, he’d get to feel like a hero.
 

What they found at the foot of the stairs looked like the remnants of a battle. There were human bodies — some whole, some in pieces — lining the room. All of the humans (and their parts) were in black uniforms. They’d been wearing helmets that were connected to sturdy torso armor by jointed neck plates. Reginald reached down and flipped up a flap of fabric on one of the bodies’ sleeves, already knowing what he’d find.
 

“AVT,” he said, looking at the insignia. But of course, the armor had told him that. The Anti-Vampire Taskforce had many catchy slogans. Looking at the conjoined armor, Reginald thought of the one that said,
Protect the neck.
 

“The human government sent in troops?”
 

“Apparently.”
 

“How can they? It’s an act of war.”
 

Reginald gave her a pursed-lipped smile. “Nik, the war is on.”
 

“Not officially.”
 

“Well then, if I had to guess, I’d say that this raid…” He waved his hand around the room. “… didn’t
officially
happen.”
 

They walked through the halls and corridors, feeling uneasy. There were dozens and dozens of dead AVT soldiers. How many had they sent in? Considering how well-armored the troops were, how many had run through, untouched by the clawed hands that must have swarmed them? Or had the vampires decided not to fight, but to run instead? Reginald and Nikki had spent months here; they even found their old room and snickered nervously at the holes in the walls that had been made during their over-the-top sexual antics. There had been scores of vampires living here, with room for hundreds. During the past uneasy months, those previously-empty rooms had probably filled with nomads seeking protection. The Chateau had likely made an appealing target for the AVT: hit the Council and wipe out a few hundred tag-along bloodsuckers in the bargain.
 

But had it worked? The answer to that question was less clear.

Reginald saw a few telltale piles of ash that had probably once been the Chateau’s vampire residents, but there were, at most, about as many vampire piles as there were human bodies. The vampires had probably converged on the troops, ripping the rivets from their armor and shoving implements through the cracks. (Earlier, they’d seen a few humans next to their suits, having been scooped out like meat from the shell of a lobster.) After an initial showdown, however, Reginald guessed a lot of the vampires had probably just run. Most of them weren’t fighters, just as most of the humans being slaughtered weren’t fighters. But this was an extermination war, and in an extermination war — where ultimately only the ending numbers mattered — innocents made the best targets of all.

Whatever had happened had happened untidily. Nothing had been cleaned; nobody on either side had come back to collect spoils or reclaim property. The fridge was still filled with blood pouches. The vampires, if they’d survived, had left behind everything they owned — and so had the Anti-Vampire Taskforce troops. Reginald picked up a weapon he’d never seen before and hefted it. It had the shape of a standard military weapon, but had several attachments mounted to it. The thing had two barrels that seemed to be fed by two ammunition clips, and it appeared to be operable via a multi-function trigger that Reginald was afraid to touch. He removed one of the clips and found modified wooden bullets, each with a hollowed tip jacketed with silver. The other contained smooth gray bullets with red lines running down their curved length. The attachments were all mysterious; Reginald was afraid to try any of them. Clipped to the belts of the soldiers were what looked like grenades, but they had LEDs near the top that pulsed green.
 

“What is all this?” said Nikki, watching him.
 

“The hidden component of centuries of military development,” said Reginald. “Apparently this is why military expenses have always seemed so stupidly high. They’ve had to report the spending… but only half of what they were spending
on.”
 

“Anti-vampire weapons?”
 

“Makes sense,” said Reginald. “They’ve known about us since the beginning. They kept it quiet and shook hands, but humans aren’t stupid. They know they’re food. I guess they wanted to be prepared in case we ever tried anything like… well, like this.”
 

The weapon had a strap, so Reginald threw it over his shoulder. He carefully removed and then clipped one of the blinking grenades to a loop on his belt. Both made him feel better. He doubted he could outgun hostile vampires if they encountered any, but humans fell when you shot them with just about any kind of ammo.
 

They swept the catacombs, traveling deep. The found the emergency exit closed and secure. There were no bodies or piles of ash here; either nobody had made it this far or the vampires had made it down alone and escaped into the neighboring chamber. Even if it had been daylight at the time, there were holes on the other side in which they could have hidden to wait out the sun. He hoped that was what had happened — that some of their allies and friends had made it out alive.
 

Finally, on the last leg of their sweep, they found a survivor.

Reginald didn’t know the vampire who’d hidden under the bunk in the deep catacombs, but he wasn’t sure he’d recognize him if he did. He was literally falling apart. He looked pale and almost green, and his skin was covered with blisters. His face was slack as if with palsy, and his limbs didn’t want to obey his brain.
 

Reginald knelt next to the vampire.
 

“Can you speak?” he said, fighting the urge to turn away.
 

The thing groaned, rattling with harsh breath. “Yes,” he finally managed to say.
 

“What happened here?”
 

“Invasion,” he said.
 

The vampire gave a shambling intake of breath. Reginald could imagine his dead lungs heaving, his body for some reason unable to heal faster than damage
(damage from what?
Reginald wondered) was being done.
 

“What did they do to you?”
 

“New weapons.
Hurts.”
He touched his side. There was an open gunshot wound there, nowhere near his heart. It looked diseased and festering.
 

Reginald turned to Nikki. “The bullet. We have to get it out.”
 

“It’s out,” said the vampire, pointing at the floor. Reginald saw one of the gray bullets on the stone below the vampire. The thing had flowered open along the red lines, exposing a hollow center that was now empty. The opened bullet was in a pool of mixed slime and ash. It seemed to have dropped off whatever deadly cargo it carried inside its target and then simply fallen away as the vampire rotted from the inside out.
 

“Did anyone escape?” Reginald asked.
 

The vampire nodded, then winced. “Lots.”
 

“Good.”
 

“Mellus died. Lola. Some other council members, I think.”
 

“Karl?”
 

“Escaped. Dragged out by the others. Didn’t want to go.”
 

“Out the deep exit?”
 

“Yes. Then it…
ended.”
 

“Ended?”
 

The vampire grinned a horrid grin. Reginald realized that most of his teeth had fallen out, including his fangs. “We killed them all. Even with their fancy new guns.”
 

Reginald thought of what he’d seen coming through the catacombs. Apparently the AVT hadn’t retreated after all. Apparently they’d been overpowered and defeated. The surviving vampires must have fled and missed this survivor. Or — and this was more troubling — maybe they’d left him behind on purpose. Reginald thought of the gray bullet’s hollow core. What might the humans have created… and was it contagious?