Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest (25 page)

“And the humans?” said Nikki. “You expect them to just lay down their arms, bare their necks, and make friends?”
 

“In a way,” said Reginald. “But more accurately, I expect them to forget.”
 

“Oh, right,” said Nikki.
“That’s
logical.” But when she looked over at Reginald, she saw that he was tapping his head, indicating his own vampire brain — the one that got smarter rather than dumber, that was like a codex in itself. A brain that was more than the sum of its parts, featuring millions of collections of vampire memories housed forever in conscious, emergent blood.

“Just like that, huh?” said Nikki.
 

“Just like that.”
 

“Can you do it now?”
 

“I could, yes. But Lafontaine needs to remember. Others will need to remember, too. There will always need to be some humans who know all of what happened. To be shepherds of the secret — to oversee the birth of a new codex.”
 

There was a snapping motion from the back seat, and Reginald looked into the rear view mirror to see that Claire had discovered an ancient Coca-Cola to go with the Cheetos and had just cracked it open. She was drinking it, taking it in in long swallows.
 

“Gross, Claire,” said Reginald. “That Coke is at least forty years old.”
 

Claire shrugged. “Hey, what else am I supposed to drink? Blood?”

S
UNRISE

REGINALD SAT ON THE FRONT porch, looking east, watching the barest blush of red begin to creep onto the horizon. To a lot of vampires, it might look like a suicide in progress, but he’d gotten this down to a science. When the first true yellow began to appear, he’d start to feel warm. The front door was literally right behind him, and he’d duck inside. Even if some joker with a deadly sense of humor locked the door, he could run around the side and dive through a window. It was glass, and they’d never installed steel shutters. But he liked this dangerous little game. He liked to feel the warmth on his skin, to feel as alive as a dead man could feel.
 

“Mind if I sit with you?” said a voice.
 

Reginald looked up at the tall man standing on the deck behind him.
 

“Oh, Jesus,” he moaned.
 

“Not quite,” said the man. He stooped down and sat beside Reginald, looking eastward. He appeared to be in his seventies and had a narrow, hawklike face. He also had piercing blue eyes that, Reginald knew from experience, could look at the forthcoming sun without harm.
 

“Do you want some blood?” said Reginald, raising a pouch. They’d need to start hunting again soon, and Reginald, with his four decades of slightly improved speed, might even be able to catch a victim. Still, he’d miss the farmed blood. It had been so convenient, like his old life of fast food and television had been. But he hadn’t been fat anywhere but on his fleshy body for a long time, and while he’d miss the convenience of packaged blood, he wouldn’t really, deep down, be sad to see it go.
 

“I don’t drink blood,” said the man.

“How about a Coke?”
 

“Real Coke, or that shit your company started making when all the humans died?”
 

Reginald turned and met the man’s gaze. It wasn’t as threatening of a gaze as it had once been. “You saw that?” he said.

The old man shrugged. “I’m an angel. We’re supposed to watch over you.”
 

“But you’re an
evil
angel.”
 

Balestro raised his wrinkled hand, held it level, then wiggled it to indicate that hairs were being split. “Meh.”
 

“It’s real Coke,” said Reginald. “Claire found a six-pack in the back seat of a human car. It kept surprisingly well. I had one for nostalgic reasons.”
 

Balestro kept looking into the distance, nodding. “Yeah, bring me one.”

When Reginald returned with the drink, the angel was still sitting where Reginald had left him. Some part of him had been convinced that he’d been an apparition and would be gone, but he was still there, still as corporeal as ever, still looking exactly as he had all those years ago on the hilltop in Germany when he’d surrounded them with the fabled Ring of Fire. Reginald could see it in his mind as clearly as if it were yesterday.
 

“We couldn’t have done it, you know,” said Balestro, not looking up until Reginald nudged him with the can of Coke. Then he did look up, smiled a thank you, and took the red can from Reginald’s hand. Reginald could have put it in a glass with ice, but this was an angel. Angels were certainly badass enough to drink from cans, and would laugh at Earthly niceties such as ice.
 

“You couldn’t have done what?” said Reginald.

“Killed you all with the Ring of Fire.”

Reginald looked over at Balestro’s hawklike profile. Then he looked back toward the blush on the horizon, which had brightened.

“I figured as much.”
 

“Your deaths or your survival had to come from your own decisions,” he said. “We can’t kill anyone. We have to find a way to get you to decide to walk willingly into demise, or fight to live.”
 

Reginald nodded. Maurice had told him the same thing years ago. At the time, the fact that angels couldn’t circumvent free will had seemed to be just one more datum in a game filled with arbitrary rules and rituals.
Can’t enter a human’s house. Piercing of the heart by wood — but not by anything else — will kill a vampire. Can’t glamour humans into letting you into their homes, or into submitting to slavery.
It was all so random. But once Reginald had solved the codex, the ritualistic nature of Heavenly decrees had stuck out like a loose thread in a tapestry, and he’d begun to wonder if that big pyrotechnic display had all been for show — a way to push vampires toward conflict so that they could be made to die fighting.
 

“Dirty trick,” said Reginald, sipping his pouch of blood.

“It was nothing personal. We did it for your own good.”
 

“Hey,” said Reginald. “All’s well that ends well. The way I see it, seven billion people died horrible deaths due to a fear of something that never existed. And also, we were almost consumed by a biological weapon in dirty bombs, which would have killed both species.” Reginald raised his blood pouch, touched it to the side of Balestro’s soda can in a toast. “It’s all good.”
 

After a moment, the angel said, “You were dead anyway.”
 

Reginald turned.
 

“If we could have exterminated you, we would have, to clear this planet and start over. Spurring you to war was almost as good, seeing as whatever you did in a war would only harden your enemies — who you knew you couldn’t eliminate no matter what — to fight better against you. When you were turned, Reginald, you saw how vampires used to be. They were arrogant and growing stupider by the year. They were asking for extinction.”
 

“And that justified all those deaths? To stop vampires from being arrogant and fancy and sparkly? To stop Charles’s fashion victim wardrobe and perfect hair?”
 

The angel turned to face Reginald. His gaze was like an X-ray, and Reginald felt more naked than naked. He felt transparent, as if his metaphysical fly was open and his soul was flapping in the breeze.
 

“Like I said, you were dead anyway.”
 

Reginald felt himself becoming angry. “What the hell does that mean?”

“You’d broken the natural cycle. You were bottlenecked. You’d stopped evolving.”
 

“Is this about Claire?”
 

The angel laughed. “Claire. The incubus’s daughter.” He laughed again, and the sound rattled Reginald’s bones. He hadn’t seen Balestro smile before; he hadn’t even thought it was possible. “When you live forever and have access to the dominoes of fate, it certainly is nice to be surprised.”
 

“So it’s
not
about Claire.”
 

“She was a pleasant surprise. And proof that not even Heaven knows everything. You’re building an unknown future right now. Even we don’t know what will happen next.” He turned to look at Reginald. “Yet, anyway.”
 

Reginald didn’t know if the angel was being honest or just screwing with him. Based on what Claire had told him, seeing the future was merely a matter of knowing everything in the universe. Not a terribly big task for an angel, really.

“No, it’s not about her,” Balestro continued. “We may have deceived you about the Ring of Fire, but we told you the truth about the bottleneck. Humans evolved but you did not. Vampires aren’t curious like humans are. They stick in one place. And that was mostly okay, because it was how you were and it couldn’t be helped. But then you started to extend those prejudices into your society. You only turned people of a certain type, and the vampire population — already homogenous — became even more homogenous. But it didn’t stop there. You would only
feed
on a certain class of people, too. And so the Agent (what your friend Walter calls ‘V’), began to concentrate in certain bloodlines while it waned in others. You were not doing your job as a species. You were not spreading the spark of vampirism — which, ironically, doubles as the spark of humanity.” He turned his head and stared over with his sharp blue eyes. “But, you see, Reginald — blood needs to circulate. It is not enough for it to simply exist as blood.”
 

“Mmm,” said Reginald. “That’s poetic. But I still don’t think I can let you off the hook for all the human deaths.”
 

The angel finished his drink, looked at the can with reverence, then set it aside. “
We
didn’t kill them,” he said.
 

“For inciting those deaths by frightening a race of murderers, then. The slaughter happened in your name. ‘For the angels,’ and all that. Timken told me that himself. He didn’t even want to do it. He said that he liked humans, but was convinced that this was the only way. Of course, he was a psychopath, but that was his reason in the end: because you’d led him to believe that there was no other way.”
 

“There
was
no other way.”
 

Reginald shook his head, then turned his torso toward the angel and put an over-the-top quizzical expression on his face. “Tell me, sage,” he said. “How is that, exactly?”
 

Balestro stood. He looked down at Reginald, who remained seated.
 

“Humans are your natural predators,” he said. “If they couldn’t stir your population enough to break the bottleneck, what could? I would have thought you’d have seen that in your bloodline. That’s one of the main reasons I gave you the ability to see the bloodline, you know.”
 

“I thought vampires were the predators.”
 

Balestro laughed. “Vampires would think that.”
 

The angel took a step back, then seemed to pose.

“Are you leaving?” said Reginald.
 

“I’m standing.”
 

“It looks like you’re getting ready to vanish or something. Like you’re about to leave.”
 

The angel nodded toward the side of the porch. “I figured I’d just walk back the way I came,” he said. But then, instead of moving, he stood as if waiting for Reginald to speak — as if he felt Reginald had something to ask and wanted to give him the opportunity.
 

“Okay,” said Reginald. “I have to ask. Why me?”
 

“Why you
what?”
 

But Reginald wasn’t sure. Why had he been turned in the first place? Why did he have to be the one to show Lafontaine the light? Why had he been the one to solve the codex? There were too many questions.
 

“You were in the right place at the right time,” the angel continued when he realized Reginald wasn’t going to speak. Then he added, “… fatass.”
 

Reginald started to get to his feet, annoyed. But then he saw that the angel was smiling.
 

The blush on the horizon was much brighter when Nikki walked out of the house and sat where Balestro had been sitting. Mere reds had given way to oranges that painted the entire eastern sky the dull color of sherbet. She hooked her arm through his, then leaned her head on his shoulder.
 

“This is going to be the most romantic burning alive ever,” she said, looking at the horizon.
 

“Did you know,” said Reginald, “that it turns out that diversity is important enough to die for? That it is, in fact, important enough to exterminate an entire planet for?”
 

Nikki asked what Reginald meant. He told her about Balestro’s brief visit and, as he’d sat alone for the past few minutes, his own growing certainty that his outsider status had, for once in his 79 years, finally been an asset.
 

“An asset.”
 

“Yes. Mix up the gene pool. Mix up those who the vampires feed on. Mix up the humans by killing most of them, forcing their hardest, most resourceful traits to rise to the surface. Then mix up the vampires with a hard reset — a paradigm shift of epic proportions.”
 

“So you’re anticipating more misfit vampires in the future.”
 

“That, yes. But I was also thinking about Lafontaine. Do you think he would have been as willing to listen to a thin, muscle-bound, stunningly attractive vampire as he was to me? Or do you think the message sounded better coming from an imperfect messenger — someone who, thanks to some heft around the middle, reminded him of himself?”
 

Nikki moved her arm to hug him more fully. She couldn’t get her arms around him. She’d never be able to. Never, never, never. And finally, for once, that seemed okay.
 

“Maybe he saw your emotion. Your compassion. Your emotional flaws.”