Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse (9 page)

“Where would they go? Where would the others run to?”
 

The vampire swallowed. “Everywhere.
Anywhere.”
 

Nikki, behind Reginald, sighed. “So much for finding Karl,” she said.
 

The vampire swallowed again. “Karl,” he said.
 

Reginald leaned closer. “You know where Karl would have gone?”
 

“I know he has a boyfriend in Paris,” he said.
 

Reginald sat back against the stone wall. He looked at Nikki while the pale, blistered vampire continued to die.

“Paris,” he said.
 

Nikki nodded.

Outside, Europe was awash with sunlight — the humans’ single great advantage.

P
ARIS

THE VAMPIRE — WHOSE NAME WAS Vincent — died a few hours later. There were no fireworks. He simply dissolved into ash and was gone.
 

Reginald and Nikki, knowing they needed to sleep, took turns napping in the bed in their old room. With only two people to stand watch (and one of them being Reginald), they had to do their best and hope. The lower door seemed secure and was difficult to find from the outside, so they concentrated their guard on the upper door. They were able to close and latch it, so they set up a chair in the cathedral space at the foot of the giant stone staircase to watch it. Nikki, whose entire body was a weapon, merely sat and waited. Reginald armed himself to the teeth, having no idea what species of firepower he was wielding, and hoping against hope that nothing would happen — seeing as he had no confidence in his ability to handle it alone.

Their bunker remained unperturbed. At sunset, they struck out with plans to make their way to Paris. Every train they were able to book along the way was efficient but slow, mocking the time they both felt ticking by.
 

Nikki wondered why they were bothering to seek Karl. They’d both known the EU Deacon for a couple of years and knew him to be a notorious bisexual playboy — not a scholar or an archivist. He might not even
be
in Paris, Nikki argued. And besides, she added, how exactly was finding Karl going to get them closer to finding the codex anyway?
 

Reginald, who was getting the hang of predestination (and its more foo-foo cousin, fate), told her that “finding Karl is what I would do next” was, in itself, enough reason to find Karl. Fate was the one place where circular logic was useful. Why was finding Karl the right move? Because Reginald
thought
it was the right move. That was all that was required. If Claire’s glamour-enduced trance had been correct, there was an objective truth about how things were supposed to happen. The very fact that they were doing a thing
made
it the right thing to do.
 

“Then let me ask you a question, hot shot,” Nikki said.
 

Reginald told her to go ahead.
 

“You’re telling me that you were
supposed
to become a vampire.”
 

“I guess.”

“Because one day, you were
supposed
to find this code thingy.”
 

He nodded.
 

“Which, of course, was possible because you were
supposed
to find Claire in order to learn that the code thingy existed.”
 

“Three for three,” said Reginald. “As I understand it, anyway.”
 

“Then if all of that’s true, why do we even need to find it? You act like we’re going to read the future off some scroll or whatever, then use what we learn to prevent the human/vampire war and the deaths of like… billions of people. But how can you prevent
anything
if what’s going to happen is just… you know… going to happen anyway?”
 

“If that’s how it unfolds, then I imagine it will be because I’m
supposed
to prevent it from happening.”
 

“You’re sure of that.”
 

“I told you a long time ago that this war feels very wrong to me — and I mean ‘wrong’ in terms of ‘isn’t supposed to happen’ rather than morally wrong. I can feel it in my gut.” He slapped his gut. “And this bitch is never wrong. It has authority.”
 

“But it’s pointless either way. If you’re
destined
to prevent the war, why are we working so hard and risking our asses to find the codex?”
 

“How can we find it if we don’t look for it?”
 

“You
have
to find it. It’s all predestined or whatever.”
 

“Nikki, in order to find something, you have to actually look for it.”
 

She put her fingers on her temples, then let her head sag. “This makes my head hurt.”
 

They rode through the night. Reginald’s phone rang, despite the fact that he’d forgotten to charge it and its battery was dead. The call was from Maurice. The ringtone was the Revolting Cocks cover of Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy,” because Claire had once argued vehemently that it was so much better than the original. Reginald, who liked Rod Stewart, had argued that Claire shouldn’t know such a suggestive song. When Claire had won the argument, he’d switched his position to arguing that Claire was too young to appreciate Rod’s genius, let alone know about the Revolting Cocks.
 

Reginald answered the call. On the other end, Maurice made a grossed-out sound, then yelled at Reginald that he didn’t want to stare into his ear canal. Reginald held the phone out, realizing he was supposed to conduct the impossible call via video.
 

They kept their discussion brief, Maurice noting how much effort the connection was costing Claire. He gave them a brief report: America was sliding into shit, the neighborhood was all gangs and fires, Vampire President Timken was finally admitting that vampires were committing atrocities but claiming responsibility for none of them. Maurice’s house, however, was still secure. They’d been joined by a handful of sympathetic vampires and had repelled several attacks from hostile vampires. By comparison, humans assaults were not a problem. With so many of their own homes under siege, the humans had little energy to attack the fortified compound.
 

When Reginald hung up, he and Nikki talked before trying to sleep. It was funny: for months, they’d held their tongues about what Timken was planning to do, and now that they
could
finally blow the whistle, there was no point. So Timken wanted to kill humans. Who cared?
Most
vampires now wanted to kill humans because humans were killing them… seeing as the humans had decided that vampires wanted to kill them. It was a no-win scenario. All the while behind the scenes, Claude and the Annihilist Faction were still conducting mass exterminations — but in the fog of undeclared war, how would anyone manage to summon outrage over it?
 

They arrived in Paris as dusk broke, then followed Reginald’s hunches from nightclub to nightclub looking for a tall, dark German named Karl. It didn’t take long to find him. Karl should have been keeping a low profile, but in the end he was the party guy and the orgy king. Because he had spent centuries as Deacon and had lived long enough to accumulate sizable investment income, he was also rich. His love of loud parties and louder orgies gave him away, and Reginald and Nikki easily homed in on him.
 

Karl was delighted to see his old friends. He also seemed, in his new haze of random sex (“Am I supposed to worry about getting a disease in my dick? I am already dead!” he told them unasked) to have forgotten the Chateau massacre entirely. When they asked him about it, he waved a hand and said, “When you are as old as me, you are used to death.”

Reginald suspected the truth was deeper. An immortal life was a long time to accumulate psychological defenses, and when he spoke with Karl, Reginald realized he could see right through him. He wasn’t related to Karl and hence shouldn’t have been able to sense his blood… but he could, sure enough.

But even without blood telepathy, the truth of Karl’s fear was revealed in everything he had done since leaving Luxembourg. He no longer wanted to be called Deacon, and reacted violently when Reginald or Nikki mentioned his old home or post. He didn’t want to talk about what had happened at the Chateau. Despite claiming he wasn’t in hiding, he’d altered his appearance as much as was possible for a vampire. He’d cut his long black hair and now wore a chic,
Vogue
-worthy androgynous hairstyle. He’d traded the bones and claws in his ears for diamonds and gold. He’d ditched his ornate vampire robes in favor of stylishly-cut bespoke suits that Nikki, who knew a bit about fashion, said must have cost a fortune.
 

“Nicholas contacted me a few months ago,” said Karl as they walked the teeming Paris streets in the direction of his apartment. Paris wasn’t like Luxembourg had been. The clubs and bars were hopping, and there were people everywhere in defiance of the dark. The Parisians flinched back from Nikki but treated Reginald rudely, muttering that he was American. Watching the drinking and nightlife carry on unabated around him, Reginald was amazed that no matter how bad things got, people always found ways to feel normal.
 

“What did he have to say?”

“He was not angry,” said Karl, his stride long and elegant — a modicum of the old Karl held over through his makeover. “He held no grudge against me or any of us. I suspect it’s because he feels nothing of the election nonsense matters anymore. And he is right. Now the media is alive with figureheads and appearances, but truthfully all of it is just posturing. Nicholas said he was in talks with Erickson and the humans, but unless they are stupid, they know his SA and the Annihilists are behind the so-called ‘plagues’ in Sudan and Egypt, India, other places. The humans know he is pushing the riots in Moscow and Rome.”
 

Reginald looked at the people around them, once again amazed that Rome could burn while Paris carried on. Karl caught his gaze.
 

“Paris is mostly quiet of that,” he said. “Everyone here just wants to party and pretend it is not happening. Fashion shows go on. Clubs go on. I can blend in because their fashions here make me not stand out at all. Everyone is like a vampire.”
 

“But anti-vampire sentiment…”
 

“It is not so much,” said Karl. “But that might change very soon.”
 

“Why?”
 

“When I talked to Nicholas, he was trying to get in front of the accusations against him. That’s why he called me. He wanted my help. I imagine he reached out to you? He said he was going to.”
 

Reginald shook his head. The idea that the vampire president might have contacted him for help was shocking. Timken had appealed to Reginald after the election debacle — claiming that the angels’ mandate made turning Earth into a vampire planet the only logical course of action — but Reginald hadn’t budged and had vowed to fight against Timken for as long as he could. For nine long months, that’s what Reginald had done, more through subterfuge than action. After all that history, how could Timken think Reginald and Maurice might help him? His delusion and single-mindedness was terrifying.

“He probably couldn’t get through,” said Reginald. “Maurice locked us down pretty tight.”
 

“Oh, he is only trying to buy time,” said Karl, flapping his bejeweled hand in answer to Reginald’s expression of disbelief. “Vampires fight humans and they fight us, but until it’s all out in the open, most humans are in the dark. When they realize we are real, things will get harder for Nicholas and Claude. He knows that day will come, so he is trying to wipe out as many humans as possible before it does.”
 

“But he’s accepting responsibility for some of the vampire attacks — to Erickson, at least.”
 

“Yes. In the interest of keeping the humans talking. He’s saying that factions are going rogue — slyly adding that they are doing it because the humans are attacking
us.”
 

“The AVT, you mean,” said Reginald, thinking of the dead soldiers in the Chateau.

“Yes, but also just humans in general. Nicholas told Erickson that the SA is just trying to keep the peace and nothing more — to protect vampires in areas where humans are burning nests during the daytime. The humans, thankfully, do not seem to know about the Annihilists. If they did — and if they knew the Annihilist vision calls for ridding the planet of all humans except for a handful to bleed — the humans would have unleashed their troops already. I suspect Erickson is not stupid, but is afraid like the rest of them. They’ve been studying us for centuries and have what seem to be some nasty new weapons —” Reginald thought of the human weapon concealed in his hiker’s backpack. “— but we are still terrifying to them, and they might believe we could kill them all if we wanted to. So they are hoping against hope while Nicholas stabs them in the back to the tune of many millions already slaughtered.” As he finished, Karl scoffed. “
Hope
: humanity’s greatest vulnerability.”

They arrived at Karl’s apartment and walked the steps to his top-floor apartment overlooking the Seine. Reginald complained the whole way up, stopping halfway to pull a juice box from his bag.

Once inside and behind a fortified metal door with three deadbolts, they made themselves comfortable while Karl served French cheese and bread with a blood fondue. Reginald sat in a chair comprised of a bright chrome frame stretched with swaths of black leather to create the chair’s arms, back, and bottom. The thing slanted backward like a bucket seat, so in addition to feeling like he was going to bend the thing in half, Reginald kept thinking he was going to get stuck in it. Combine the two and the chair would clamp around him like a claw, necessitating extraction by the jaws of life.
 

“Have you heard anything about the rest of the American Council?” Nikki asked, dipping a white cube of cheese into Karl’s red fondue.