Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest (15 page)

With effort, Reginald sat. But before he did, he wheeled Nikki’s chair across from Claude and situated himself one chair removed, so that they didn’t have to sit directly across from one another. It was a ridiculous and petty move, but right now, Reginald was willing to take any tiny victories he could manage.
 

He looked up, and realized that everyone was looking at him.
 

“What?” he said.
 

“Well, what do we do?” Claude asked.
 

Reginald looked at Ophelia. “You’re the general. Where’s your slide show and speech filled with dehumanizing terms?”
 

“We’re blind,” said Ophelia, shaking her head. “You know as much as we know. Even our satellites are starting to blink out. All we know is that there are pockets of human hostility everywhere. The incidents we had a handle on earlier have totally degenerated because troops had to retreat when they were approached from behind.”

Reginald saw something in Ophelia’s eyes. He met them, challenging her.
 

“Or when, in a few cases, those troops were assaulted and killed,” she admitted.
 

“So you got pantsed,” said Reginald. “They walked up behind you — all of you — and just yanked. They had us pegged all along. They were just waiting.”
 

After a moment, Ophelia said, “It seems that way.”
 

“Did you get an idea of how many of them there were? Do you have any data at all?”
 

Ophelia popped up the same screen she’d used before, dimmed the lights, and projected a satellite map of New York onto the front wall. “All we really have is this,” she said.
 

Reginald leaned forward. The map showed heat signatures, with notes and tags overlaying the projection. There were large red and orange clusters across Manhattan and the boroughs. Outside the city, beyond the bridges and tunnels, were smaller, more isolated clusters.
 

“Jesus,” said Nikki.
 

“There’s at least a quarter million on that map alone,” said Reginald. He looked closer. The entire “abandoned” section of the city was lit up to some degree, but amongst the chaos, Reginald could see a pattern. They were mostly around the bridges and tunnels, clustered on both sides of each. At the main corridor — the blocked-off roads they’d used to enter the city’s core — the red heat signatures were positioned along its entire length. It was an excellent deployment map. If Reginald were in charge of the human army, he’d have done the same: notice the single logical choke point, then mine it.
 

“We estimate three hundred thousand,” said Ophelia. We have similar reports from Geneva, but no visuals. Obviously it’s worst around the capitols. The outlying areas won’t be anywhere near this congested.”
 

“So you assume,” said Reginald.
 

“Well, yes.”
 

He looked at the map again. It was bright enough to be a lit Christmas tree. “How didn’t you see all these heat signatures before now?”
 

“We’re working on the theory that they were in the tunnels,” she said.
 

“Don’t you patrol the tunnels?’

“Some. In fact, some of them are the CPC’s main arteries. We actually
use
the tunnels. They’re also mined, in areas where a collapse wouldn’t weaken parts of the city we need for our infrastructure. But there are a lot of tunnels under New York. It’s not just subways. There’s sewers, utility corridors…”
 

“You knew this, but you didn’t patrol them all?”
 

“We did what we could. We can only stretch so thin. There are a lot of tunnels here, and a lot of tunnels and hidey-holes in the rest of the world. We only have so many troops.”
 

“In other words,” said Nikki, “you thought you could step in and occupy enemy territory with your small peacekeeping army.” She turned to Reginald. “Because that strategy has a history of working well in warfare.”
 

“We didn’t have a choice,” said Claude.
 

Reginald stabbed an angry finger at Claude. “See, that’s where you’re just a big fucking fucker,” he said. “That’s all you’ve been saying from the beginning. You, Timken, Charles, even Logan. But you don’t even hear yourselves. It’s like you’re stuck in a loop, like your brains died when your body died. I’ve got a theory. Do you want to hear it?”

“No,” said Claude.
 

“I think that the mind isn’t like the body. I think it can’t be idle and unchanging. I think that a mind either grows or atrophies, so if you think you can just have an ‘unchanging’ mind for millennia while your body stops aging, you’re deluding yourself. In the case of the mind, I think that standing still
is
decay.”

Charles rolled his eyes.
 

“You caused this, you know,” said Reginald, turning his anger on Charles. “It’s right here, in the vampire codex.” He tapped his head. “Humanity didn’t have the edge it needed to fight you back when there were only seventy thousand vampires and seven billion humans. They had the numbers, but they were soft and complacent. They’d stopped evolving. They let everything else do their thinking for them. But you had to push them, didn’t you? Your little apocalypse forced them to adapt or die. And guess what? They adapted. And now,
you’re
going to die.”
 

The conference room door opened. Reginald’s head turned to see the oiled hair and bright white tombstone teeth of Todd Walker enter the room. This time, Nikki flinched to rise, but Reginald put a hand on her knee to hold her down. It was the first time either of them had seen Walker in the flesh since they’d left him chained to a pipe in the old Council building in Columbus. Since then, he’d had many titles, and most had implied that he’d finally found his niche. He’d become a professional bully and asshole.
 

Walker straightened his suit coat, then walked to the table and made himself comfortable beside Charles, on a slight diagonal from Nikki. Unbelievably, he winked at her.
 

“Sorry I’m late,” he said.
 

Claude nodded toward Charles and Walker. “These two were both in Timken’s cabinet: secretaries of something or other that I don’t care about and that don’t matter. But now they’re like my vice presidents.”
 

“You’re not the president,” said Nikki.
 

Claude smiled, his sinister teeth emerging from behind his black goatee.

“I stand corrected,” he said. “But let’s just play pretend, to keep the titles simple.”
 

“Okay,” said Reginald. He pointed toward Walker. “His title is ‘cunt.'"

“That’s not playing pretend,” said Nikki.
 

Walker faked a frown. “I’m hurt. All those years working together. We’re friends, you and me.” And as Reginald stuck his fingers into Walker’s mind — he didn’t care about being improper when the subject was Walker — he saw something amazing: Walker really
did
consider them to be twisted kinds of friends. Reginald decided that people like Walker probably didn’t have any genuine friends, so this was the best they could do. They probably had people they made fun of who “knew it was all in good fun” instead. And hey, thumbscrews made for strange bedfellows.
 

 
Nikki started to reply, but the exchange was pointless. Reginald gave her a look and she fell silent. They were outnumbered by douchebags. There were only two sensible people and four assholes, and just like that Reginald realized that he’d landed in a triage situation. He’d never get a sensible outcome out of these four, so the best he could do would be to
get by
and
get out
. He would need to figure out the easiest, most non-offensive way to do what they required of him, do it, and find a way to escape — keeping in mind that “escape” would probably still mean a life on the run from someone. His job was to protect Nikki, Claire, and Brian. Everything else was secondary, including his own life.
 

Claude extended a hand toward Walker. “Todd is our blood marshal,” he said. “That basically means that in addition to being my vice president — I’m sorry, I mean my ‘vice vice president’ — he’s been in charge of monitoring the blood stock at the farms.”
 

Reginald understood now why Walker was here. There were two primary tasks on the table, and Claude had nailed both of them. They had to appear to be doing something to improve PR (ideally something symbolic; rescuing Timken or killing Lafontaine were at the top of that list) to give the population the appearance that everything was under control, and they had to keep the vampires of the world fed. If the blood supply dried up, panic would quickly follow.
 

All eyes turned to Walker. He sat back.
 

“We’ve lost control of or access to seventy-five percent of the state-controlled blood farms,” he said. “It looks very intentional. Before we lost imagery, we were beginning to get the distinct impression that the biggest clusters outside of New York and Geneva were around the farms.”
 

“How the hell did they coordinate all of this?” said Charles.
 

Reginald looked into Charles’s eyes. “Their leader removed his eyes and could see,” said Reginald. “Clearly, they’ve figured a few things out over the past forty years.”
 

“But how?”
 

Reginald could only shake his head, suddenly wishing he could put his big brain to use on the other side. He’d already formed a mental image of the human world as it had actually existed over the past decades, as opposed to the way the vampires had imagined it existing. There had to be huge underground manufacturing facilities and research labs. Wet benches and medical equipment capable of growing a biological weapon able to preferentially attack the vampire agent but not human cells. The humans, Reginald had already realized, clearly knew far more about vampires than vampires did.

“I doubt we could understand their methods without years of prerequisite background,” said Reginald. “How would you explain a cell phone to a caveman?”
 

“Ooga,” Nikki suggested.
 

Walker cleared his throat and resumed. “There are only a handful of farms that can still operate, produce, and ship blood without incident. We’ve ordered emergency protocols, and…”
 

“You’re going to drain them dry,” said Nikki, realization dawning.

“
Close
to dry,” said Walker. “But we can’t kill them, because then that would be it for our blood supply. Oh, there’s plenty more blood out there in the wetsacks who are attacking us, but it’s like fresh water in the middle of the ocean, seeing as we can’t get near it. We’ve spent a lot of time experimenting to find the ideal drain point in situations like this, where we drain them enough to get as large of a batch as possible without impairing our ability to, in a day or two, get more.”
 

“We’ve also increased CPC presence around the remaining farms,” Ophelia added, bringing the room lights back up.
 

Walker nodded. “Now, in addition, there are the small private farms. A lot of vampires keep their own humans, and a few have a small herd and re-sell as organic or all-natural or some other horseshit. We keep records of all of them, and we’re moving out now, to seize what we can, under order of national emergency.”
 

“What about HemoByte?” said Nikki.
 

Walker nodded. It was the simplest of gestures, but Reginald marveled at how odd it was coming from Todd Walker. The nod had acknowledged Nikki’s point, no more and no less — but it also meant that Walker was speaking to them as equals. It was strange to remember the way he’d tortured them both at the office, and that they were all sitting around a table to discuss the stealing of people’s blood.
 

“We do have HemoByte, yes. But taking pills isn’t the same as drinking, and while it will keep vampires from starving, they won’t like it. It won’t keep them from panicking. But we’ve pulled in all of the stores we can find and are already distributing rations in the city. But it’s a fragile balance. The more we look like we’re in emergency mode — I mean, standing in line for a ration of fucking
HemoByte
instead of going to your fridge for the real thing? — well, the more people will panic, and then it just gets worse and worse. We want to prevent riots by acting like all is well, but all
isn’t
well, and we need to keep them from starving.”
 

Reginald shook his head. He didn’t want to say what was on his mind, which was that he’d been predicting all of this for decades, and nobody had listened.

“You’ve apparently done a lot of thinking about this,” he said instead.

Walker nodded. “We’ve had to. You’ve heard the reports that a lot of the blood stock is becoming sick? Well, we’ve been understating the problem a little. It was starting to reach epidemic levels before all of this happened. The need to have a Plan B has been on a lot of minds lately — mine most of all.”
 

“What’s causing it?”
 

“We don’t know. At first we just thought it was flu. We were going to institute a vaccine program, but…” He stalled, unsure how to continue. Then Reginald realized why.

“But you couldn’t synthesize the vaccine, could you?”
 

Walker shook his head. “I asked our eggheads. They said they couldn’t. I said that was ridiculous; they were our
eggheads
. But then I realized that really, they’re just cooks. They need a recipe, and in the war, the recipes for how exactly to synthesize flu vaccines were all lost. It was like a scavenger hunt. They had to look all over, and they already had a handful of vaccines — measles, chicken pox, a few of the biggies — but the flu wasn’t one of them.”
 

“The flu vaccine was a dead end anyway,” said Ophelia. “It looks like flu, but it sticks around too long. Unless they’re passing it back and forth. Can that happen, or does the virus eventually die off in a small population?”