Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest (3 page)

“Like I said, no big deal,” Claire finished. She slid into the big chair opposite him, her posture slumped and terrible. She was chronologically in her fifties, looked like a twenty-something, and acted like a teenager. Reginald half expected her to turn end-for-end on the chair so that her feet were up and her head was down, then pick up a phone and talk to her friends about boys and going to the mall. If, that was, the world had still had human malls and non-feral human boys.

After a quiet moment, Reginald said, “Okay. So I’m here because you called me. Sounding kind of panicked, by the way.”
 

“I did.”
 

“Well, what are you feeling right now?”
 

Claire didn’t bother to sit up. She remained slumped. “Alert.”

“Alert?”
 

“Yes, Reginald. Alert. Awake.”
 

“Hell,
I’m
awake.”
 

“In my head, I mean. In my chest. In my arms. Hell, in my ass. My ass is totally awake now, Reginald.”
 

“Ironic,” he said. “Mine is asleep.”
 

“I thought you felt this kind of thing too. What with the vampire codex being in your blood and all.”
 

He shook his head. “What I have is an archive. What you have is more like a barometer. If I look in my internal files, I can tell you how Cain felt about his breakfast a zillion years ago, but if I look tomorrow, that feeling will be exactly the same. And if I
don’t
look, I’m not affected by it at all.”
 

“Was that really his name? Cain?”

“What? Oh, yeah, I think so.”

“But not like…
the
Cain.”
 

“You’re changing the subject.”
 

“You never explained it to me,” she said. “You were always like, ‘I don’t want to talk about it, Claire.’ Well, now you’re asking about my ass and I think it’s only right that…”
 

“I am not asking about your ass.”
 

“… that you tell
me
about what
you’ve
got if you want
me
to do more fortune-telling for
you
. Haven’t I done enough fortune-telling already? When will it be enough?”
 

Reginald sighed. Claire was being sarcastic, but she was telling the truth: Reginald never
had
wanted to talk about it. Once he’d had enough time to walk up and down the bloodlines — exploring the real-as-this ability to step into the memories of any vampire in history — the mythical codex had appeared in front of him, plain as day. It had always existed as a million fragments scattered throughout vampire history, but only someone with Reginald’s puzzle-solving mind would ever be able to see it. But he’d already been a Chosen One once, and that experience had ended in the extermination of a planet. He’d had a second shot at it when he’d seen the first assembled pieces of the codex and had dutifully rung the alarm, but the uprising the codex warned of had never come. He refused to be fooled a third time. He didn’t want the codex, and he didn’t want the ability to peep into others’ minds — even if that meant leaving “mental Maurice” in his brain’s shadows like childhood toys stowed under the basement staircase. Every person — and every vampire — deserved the privacy of his secrets. And Reginald, for his part, deserved the chance to be a nobody for a change.

“Look…” he began. Then he sighed. “Okay, fine. Yes, ‘Cain’ as in the first vampire, but not really ‘Cain’ as in the same bad boy history talks about.”
 

“So the way the legend explains the conflict between humans and vampires…”
 

“It’s not true. But if you try telling that to anyone in charge — if you can find anyone with enough vampire history to even
know
the legend — they’ll tell you you’re crazy. The children of Cain set against the children of Abel, yada yada yada. Nobody believed that old story before the war, but now it’s their bible. Almost literally, because they like to think of themselves as winners. ‘We beat Abel’ and stuff. They could put it on a T-shirt.”
 

“So if it isn’t ‘Cain vs. Abel, how is it really?”
 

“We’re not hunter and prey. The codex says it’s closer to a symbiotic relationship.”
 

“Like leeches,” said Claire.
 

“No…”
 

“Oh! Like a tapeworm.”
 

“Gross.”
 

“Like one of those things that hangs on sharks?”
 

“Claire, all of those things are parasites. Didn’t you ever take a biology class?”
 

She nipped the corner off a faux-Triscuit. “Someone destroyed the world before I got to high school. But it’s cool. There’s far less reason for me to know the state capitals or the history of the Civil War nowadays. Just think of all those poor suckers who wasted their time learning about the bicameral legislature.”
 

Reginald pointed a “gotcha” finger at her. “But see… clearly you
do
know about the bicameral legislature.”
 

“Right. So, like, two camels.”
 

Reginald sat back, settling into the couch. “I shared, so now it’s your turn. I’ll bet if you try really hard, you can do better than ‘I feel awake.’”
 

She stared at him, annoyed.
 

“Look,
you
called
me
. Should I go home? Nikki had just gotten up and was starting to do nude yoga when I walked out the door, and…”
 

“Oh, gross.” Coming from Claire’s fifty-something mouth, the statement sounded bizarre. But Reginald and Nikki had always been like a second mother and father to her, so maybe her reaction was that of imagining her parents having sex — a “gross” proposition for a child of any age. Reginald’s own mother had died fifteen years ago, having remained safely hidden away, and had spent her final years happily watching vampire sitcoms over a wireless connection while eating ice cream that he’d never told her was blood-flavored. But even still, after all this time, Reginald didn’t want to imagine her doing nude yoga.
 

“I’ll talk more about it if you don’t tell me what you called me over to talk about,” said Reginald. Then, when Claire hesitated, he said, “When she does ‘downward dog,’ she sticks her…”
 

“Fine! Okay, whatever. I don’t know really how to describe it other than to say that I’m starting to know things in a way that’s more conscious. I feel it like something jutting further and further out of a fog, as if it’s emerging.”
 

“Are you still scooping up new information from the internet? You used to be like a sponge when you turned on a computer.”
 

Claire gave a sad little frown. She held a hand in the air. Her palm sparked with blue lightning, which then crawled over her skin like a living glove. Small tendrils of blue plasma reached up into the air from her fingertips, snapping out as if grabbing for something.
 

“A vampire named Clark just posted on Fangbook about finding an old human-era quarter on the street,” she said. “The first reply comment was, ‘Cool story, bro.’ That post was liked by three people within the first minute. Elsewhere, a new blog was launched, just now, about vintage Star Wars figurines modified to make the creatures into vampires.”
 

“People are still blogging?”
 

“Out in the wildlands, a human named Ben Kirkman was expected in WL-14 two hours ago. He’s traveling from one underground settlement to another but is running late, and is worried about a woman named Candace fearing for his safety because of it.”
 

“Where are you getting this?”
 

“Off the air. I don’t even need a connection. Haven’t for years.”
 

“You never told me that,” said Reginald.
 

“It’s not a normal conversation topic,” she said. “Besides, I made your dead cell phone talk to Maurice from Antarctica during the war. How is that any less ridiculous?”
 

“You just seem sad about it.”
 

“I can’t shut it out,” she said. “Back then I at least needed a computer if I was to get new information. Today, it just comes to me. I’m like an antenna. I hear
everything
. Anything transmitted electronically is very easy, but I can often pick up random thoughts at closer distances. Signals on the other side of the world are harder to hear than anything in this country or especially inside the city, but I can hear them if I try. I don’t even have to use satellites. I feel as if I’m bending the energy around the curvature of the planet.”
 

“But how?”
 

“How can you see into the thoughts and memories of the entire vampire family tree?”
 

Reginald nodded. “Touché.”
 

They sat for a minute — the vampire who’d made his fortune by treating vampires like humans and the girl who seemed to be something other than human.
 

“Reginald?” she finally said.

He looked over at Claire, her long, light brown hair stubbornly trying to make its way in front of her delicate features as she fought to keep it back behind her ears. She was regarding him with a graveness that looked almost innocent. She’d grown up too damn fast. She’d never had a chance to just be a girl — to play with other girls and run around giggling about boys she liked. It wasn’t fair. But at least she was here and alive, which was more than could be said for the girls she might have done that giggling with.
 

“What is it like for you? When you do… whatever it is? Is it as swimmy and indistinct for you as I describe it is for me?”
 

He considered demurring, but then found himself sighing and simply answering the question.
 

“I can go into their memories. And when I do, it almost feels like I’m in their bodies.”
 

“Can you go into Nikki?”
 

Reginald resisted making a joke.
 

“I try to stay out of anyone who’s alive now. Walking the blood memories of ancient ancestors feels different from peeping into the thoughts of living vampires. I can usually only do that close up, only if I feel I have to, and only if they don’t try to keep me out. It seems to be easier with vampires I’m closely related to.”
 

“Like your maker.”
 

Reginald held her gaze. “Yes.”
 

“So you can feel Maurice.”
 

“His memories. A mental impression of him.”
 

“Do you still miss him?”
 

Reginald looked down. Which of the thousand answers he’d felt over the years should he give her? Yes, he missed Maurice. Yes, he felt guilty about Maurice’s death, seeing as it had been Reginald’s mission that had brought it about. And yes, even though it wasn’t fair, he sometimes blamed Claire for sending him on that mission. Forty years hadn’t dulled the pain one bit. Nikki had grieved for a while, and Brian, who was Maurice’s only other progeny, had grieved for much longer. But even Brian had eventually gone on, because Brian didn’t have to sense Maurice’s thoughts every time he laid still at night like Reginald did. Maurice was always near Reginald.
Always
. He was a hair’s breadth away — close enough to hear as if in an echo, but never close enough. Having Maurice’s blood memories in his head was almost torture for Reginald. It was like having a conversation with a recording: he could talk to his maker forever, but Maurice could never really, truly, autonomously talk back, because he was gone. And on top of everything, Reginald felt the terrible guilt of neglect. He could sense Maurice’s thoughts inside him, and hearing those thoughts was terrible. So for most of the past forty years he’d refused to listen, shutting Maurice away and pretending he couldn’t hear him scratching at the walls of his mental box.
 

“Yes, I still miss him.”
 

“I do too.”

After a long moment, Reginald decided to try again. Sometimes cracking Claire’s prescient code was like water eroding stone. You just had to keep plinking away.
 

“On the phone,” he began, “you said that ‘it was starting.’”
 

She nodded, now looking down. The mood in the room had soured. He didn’t know how it had happened — maybe the talk of Maurice had done it — but it had. It was a good thing. It meant that Claire’s time-honed defenses were finally ratcheting back, that the two of them were finally approaching the thing that Claire been panicked enough to call about before she’d convinced herself that everything was just fine.
 

“Is it the humans?” he asked.

Pause. “Yes.”
 

“What about them?”
 

She shook her head, now looking at her hands. Her light manner was gone, and Reginald felt himself shiver. He was already warring with his own defenses and demons, realizing what she might have meant when she’d called — and how that might change everything.

“What
about
the humans?” he repeated.

“You know.”
 

“Some sort of an…” He swallowed. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. He’d finally made peace with the fact that it had
never
been true. But he had to finish the sentence, and he did it like ripping off a Band-Aid: “… an uprising?”

Claire shrugged, still not looking up. “Maybe and maybe not. More than anything, I get the sense of a sleeping machine finally starting up. It has the feeling of… of
dawning.”

“Where are you getting this? What’s telling you that something is coming?”
 

She waved her finger in the air, presumably indicating all of the signals she was picking up on her internal antenna, then assembling like her own kind of codex. “Everything,” she said.
 

“How? Where?”

“I don’t know.”