Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest (23 page)

He looked at Reginald, then at Nikki, and then back at Reginald. He shook his head in a way that was almost sad. His eyes were somewhere else, departed from sanity. Saliva dripped from his fangs, then ran down his chin. His fist, holding tight to Nikki’s neck chain, was shaking. He was gripping it so hard that Reginald found himself hoping that the gloves would split against the silver, burning him.
 

“So many mistakes,” he said. “So many bleeding hearts. No vampire should exist because of pity, because it is our
ruthlessness
that makes us strong. Lafontaine never should have met you tonight. If he’d blown his bombs out of hand, we’d be on our way to extinct. I won’t make that same mistake. A vampire should never hesitate. When faced with an enemy, he should kill it. Not
love
it. Not
forgive
it.” As he concluded, his nose brushed Nikki’s chin just above the chain. His fangs grazed her skin. Reginald saw her flinch.
 

“Please,” said Reginald, his voice breaking.
 

“
Please
is for the weak,” said Claude. “
Pity
is for the weak.
Mercy
, Reginald, is for the weak. We are strong. As your human friends are about to learn, all
mercy
will get you is a knife in the back.”

“Or a silver-lined meat fork pulled from your shoulder,” said a voice.
 

Claude turned, but not fast enough. Todd Walker had been born to be a vampire. He’d been strong and fast even on his first night, when Nikki had begged Maurice not to kill him after Maurice had impaled him with that fork. Walker’s gloved hands flipped the chain from Nikki’s neck to Claude’s in milliseconds. But it didn’t last for long; Walker, who’d survived through Nikki’s mercy, immediately began to falter. Claude was two thousand years old, and stronger in spite of the silver.
 

Reginald met Nikki’s eye.
 

“Get him,” he said.
 

Nikki, now free and unencumbered, struck at Claude with an outstretched hand, her fingers pressed together and straight. Her nails speared him through the neck, emerging at the back. Her other hand joined the first and she pulled, and a moment later Maurice’s killer’s head struck the dirt. Then Walker and Nikki stepped back as Claude’s body began to spark and burn, and in seconds he was nothing but ash.
 

Charles turned and ran.

The vampire soldiers around the field began to buckle and twitch as Reginald, still chained to the folding metal chair, reached into their minds. Vampire adrenaline came in the form of a late-stage cavalry, finally flooding his system as he watched Claude burn. He felt his blood’s intelligence grow fists. He saw the mental walls the soldiers had raised and blasted effortlessly through them. Then he had the vampires by their throats, all of them at the ends of arms of thought, all with their rotted brains clenched in his grip, squeezing and churning.
 

Guns turned on their holders. They were re-appropriated human weapons, so when the vampires around the field began to fire on themselves, black blooms formed around the gunshots and they began to light up the night with their screams. Reginald reached inside one of the soldiers and, feeling anger like a torch, made him pull the pin on the UV grenade strapped to the belt he’d stolen. The grenade exploded, setting him on fire.
 

Then the vampires ran. There was no nobility, no loyalty, no thought given to loathed human compassion. Those who could still run became streaks in the night. Reginald felt them go, watching their thoughts and emotions diminish into the night.
 

When the vampires were gone, the humans rose to their feet and re-claimed their dropped weapons. Then, one by one, they began to train them on the three vampires still left in the middle of the field.
 

Reginald looked down at Lafontaine. The big man was bloody but alive.

“It’s over,” said Reginald.
 

Lafontaine spat blood, climbing onto his knees. “It’s not over.”
 

Around the field, guns flashed red dots. Reginald watched as Nikki and Walker’s chests were painted with them, skittering across their fronts like fireflies. He looked down. The dots were on him too. He was still bound, still unable to flee even if he’d wanted to. Nikki and Walker couldn’t even carry him, thanks to all the silver.
 

Reginald met Lafontaine’s sightless eyes, knowing that the man could see him. “I saved you,” he said.
 

The red spots clustered tighter. Human soldiers took to their knees, steading their aim.
 

“You
betrayed
me.”
 

“I wasn’t behind what just happened. They betrayed me, too.”

Lafontaine stood. Once he was up, he was steady. He looked strong, even. Determined. “Your kind is always ‘behind it,’ and that’s the problem,” he said.
 

“We need to talk. I came here to talk.” He felt the mood on the field, realizing that what he’d thought earlier was still true: he was able to feel the emotions of the humans even though he was sure that all of the vampires were gone. The mood he felt wasn’t good, or trusting, or even compassionate enough to give him the slightest benefit of the doubt.
 

His voice dropped to pleading, making him hate himself as he heard it but knowing that time was running out. “We
have
to talk.”
 

Lafontaine pulled a walkie from his belt. He keyed in a code.
 

“What are you doing?” said Nikki.
 

“Ending New York,” he said. “Ending Geneva.”
 

“We just saved you! Look at what just happened here!” Nikki begged.
 

Lafontaine shook his head. “There’s no other way. We will never be safe as long as you continue to live.”
 

“Please,” said Reginald. “Give me five minutes.”
 

“Vampirekind has already had too many minutes.”
 

“We have to talk!
All you have to do is listen!
”
 

Lafontaine’s empty eye sockets met Reginald’s. He shook his head, and said, “I don’t want to listen.”
 

Then Reginald saw it.
 

Inside his mind — inside his
blood
— Reginald saw a vision of 28 opening doors. He saw the doors circling a rotunda at the end of a corridor, and he could feel the corridor as much as he could feel the doors. He knew what was coming. He knew what had changed. He saw the missing piece — the piece of the codex that finally cleared away the fog of indecision. And he knew what he had to do.
 

Around the baseball field, in exact synchronicity, all 28 of the human soldiers turned their guns around as the vampires had, pressing the muzzles to the undersides of their chins.
 

Lafontaine watched his troops turn their guns on themselves, their movements as perfectly coordinated as a water ballet. Then he lowered the walkie, his mouth hanging open.
 

“Now
will you listen?” said Reginald.

L
ISTEN

CLAIRE WALKED ONTO THE BASEBALL field like a lion tamer entering a circle of animals she’s subdued. There was a second folding metal chair near the dugout. She picked it up and dragged it to the pitcher’s mound, set it across from Reginald and Lafontaine, then reached toward the human and plucked the walkie from his unprotesting hand. She gave the walkie to Nikki, who pocketed it, then sat on the chair backward, her chest against the backrest.

“All my life,” she said, addressing Lafontaine, “I knew I was different. At first I just didn’t fit in, and I thought it was just because I was a strange kid — smaller, picked on, smarter than most and with a strange knack for getting my mom and other adults to let me do what I wanted. I was good with computers. I once outran a bunch of bullies who had much longer legs than mine, and I outran Reginald when I first met him.”
 

“To be fair,” said Reginald, “I was also outrun by several other people that week.”
 

Claire smiled at him — her too-young face suddenly making sense. Then she looked at his chains, and he felt something in them shift and change, and then the links broke and they fell to the dirt.
 

“But when I got older and I realized that my father was an incubus, I started to develop new skills that were beyond ‘strange.’ I got good at moving energy around. I became a hacker who didn’t need to hack. And I got all this
noise
in my head. And then I got sick for a while, and I really remember that because, looking back, I never got sick before then. Literally
never
. I had never had a cold, the flu, a stomach ache, an infection… not even a cut that lasted for long. I looked into it later — after the war, after I found my skin growing cold and realized I could pass for vampire. I decided that I had exceptional mind-body control, like a yogi. So I tried to manipulate myself consciously and found that I could slow my heartbeat, warm my skin if I wanted. All sorts of things. I looked back on that sickness, more curious than ever, and realized that it had happened right after all of my other abilities had started to show and right before my aging slowed down.” She put her hand beside her mouth and whispered at Lafontaine as if she were conveying a secret. “I’m 51! But don’t tell anyone, okay?”
 

Lafontaine looked from Reginald to Nikki to Claire. He even looked up at Walker, who seemed dumbfounded. Then he looked around the field, at the humans still holding guns to their throats.

Reginald met Claire’s eyes. Inside, with a connection they’d never shared before, he asked her if it would be safe to let the humans go. Her mind told his that the men with guns wouldn’t — and, in her presence,
couldn’t
— hurt them now. So Reginald dropped his mass-glamour: a new kind of glamour that reached up from inside, through the blood, like walking the vampire family tree — now available for humans, too. The soldiers lowered their weapons, then turned to watch the events unfolding in the field’s middle.

Claire opened her mouth and licked her upper row of teeth. Two of them descended into fangs. Reginald looked at Nikki, who said nothing.
 

“Now, today,” Claire continued, “I realize that I was always kind of a vampire. But I was something else, too. I could walk in the sunlight. I wasn’t as fast or as strong as true vampires. Even though I aged slowly, I did age. Right up until the moment Nikki turned me, just tonight, it never really made sense. But now I see it. I see how the potential to become a vampire — a
half
vampire, anyway — was always there. It was always inside of me.” She turned to Lafontaine. “The same as it’s inside of you,” she added.

Lafontaine, seemingly unwilling to trust his feet, sat on the dirt of the mound. “What do you mean?”
 

“I have the ability to manipulate energy. At first, it was just a neat trick. Reginald said I could tell the future. But of course I couldn’t tell the future. I made it up. I told the angels — do you know about the vampire angels? — that I knew a war was coming and that Reginald would lead a great change in the vampires of the world. The angels wanted to kill them all. But I think we showed them another way things could unfold, though we got lucky in that they couldn’t tell I was bluffing. But the thing is, I
wasn’t
bluffing; I just didn’t know it. Soon after I realized I could make computers do things. Anything electronic. I could push signals anywhere I wanted. I could float into the most secure computers. My hands would make this neat blue lightning. But what I realized, once I put two and two together with the way I could change my body as I needed, was that I had been healing myself all along. It was mind over matter, very literally. I was surrounded by vampires. I always wanted to be one. So my body
made
me one — or at least, half of one.”
 

“How?’ said Lafontaine.
 

Reginald stepped in, putting what Lafontaine had told him together with what he’d just learned from the codex’s final piece. “It’s not just a virus,” he said. “It’s a
retro
virus.”
 

“V? You mean it’s…?”
 

Reginald nodded. “It’s part of you, yes. In vampires, it makes us what we are. But in humans, it’s dormant. Unless, of course —” He gestured to Claire. “— you can manipulate your own body through force of will.”

“Or desire,” Claire added. She resituated herself on the chair, crossing her arms over the backrest. “What I’ve realized about vampire blood, now that my veins are full of it, is that it’s conscious. It’s not just a bunch of machinery. It holds memories and desires, and all of those things are passed from maker to progeny. That’s why Reginald can access it within himself, and how he was able to put together an ancient puzzle. But for me, I didn’t realize that I’d woken up those genes before being turned. I just knew that I was manifesting vampire traits. I got cold. I aged slowly. I was somewhat faster than normal, somewhat stronger than normal. I didn’t get sick, and when I got cut, it healed quickly. It was my ability to change my body combining with the awakening consciousness of my vampire blood.”

Nikki squatted beside her, and Reginald was touched to see how motherly the gesture was. Nikki had been on the planet for 79 years to Claire’s 51, but right now they looked the same age. They’d outgrown their mother-daughter appearance in the past years, but the bond had never left Nikki’s heart.
 

“How did you have vampire blood?” she asked. “Were you bitten?”
 

“My mother had it,” she said.
 

“Was she bitten before the time that almost killed her?”
 

“No. Her mother and father had it.”
 

Nikki looked at Reginald.

“This is what I found when I completed the codex,” said Reginald, looking alternately at Nikki and Lafontaine. “The virus is copied into the DNA of human hosts when they’re bitten. It’s like how a mosquito sort of backwashes into you when it bites you, and why infected mosquitos can spread diseases like West Nile and malaria. You don’t turn, but the virus is still there, and it’s copied down the line, from parent to child.”