Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest (9 page)

Reginald shook his head. His brain was operating faster and faster, plans and strategies and permutations beginning to string together like the inevitable series of actions in a clockwork mousetrap. Unlike in the war, the vampire power structures weren’t remotely prepared for any of this. They didn’t understand what they were facing because they were willfully blind, having never considered it possible. It made them so vulnerable as to be laughable.

“You’re like people who’ve decided to shoot down a plane with a slingshot,” said Reginald. “I don’t know where to begin to tell you what to do because you’re not capable of knowing the right questions to ask. You’re going to ask me how to build a bigger slingshot, but the slingshot isn’t the answer and never has been. Your entire premise is flawed from end to end.”
 

Ophelia stared at him, insulted.

Reginald raised a hand, ticking off points on his fingers as he spoke. “You don’t know where they are, and that’s just this one community. You don’t know how they’ve been communicating, which it’s clear they’ve been doing nearly in real time. You don’t know how they hacked the Geneva sun blocker. You don’t know how they got the silver or the weapons — were those things sneaked in, or were they somehow made on-site? But even that is just the tip of the iceberg. The bigger problem is what you don’t know you don’t know. For instance: if they could sabotage the sun blocker, what’s to say they couldn’t breach a major city’s gates? You’ve only left one major entrance in each city, because hey, we’re the top dogs! No need to worry about the wild humans or have a Plan B, because they’re just animals, right?” He shook his head. “You don’t know what kind of weapons they might have. They seem to have dug up some of the old AVT rifles, if they got to the AVT’s bullets. So did they just strip dead soldiers for old weapons, or did they build new weapons? And if so, what will those new weapons do, and can they make more of them? Are they training assault groups? Armies, maybe? Did you figure out where the major AVT deployments were, and hence where they might have found the bio agent they seem to have made deadlier over the years? Did you even look?”
 

“We just assumed…” Ophelia began.
 

Reginald shook his head. “You’ve
always
assumed. Do you know the story of how I first escaped from the Vampire Council? Nikki here helped me. They
assumed
she was a vampire because she acted like one and flashed some fake fangs at them, and so they tried to execute her like one. They
assumed
I’d either futilely fight back on my own or let myself be killed, not that I might think of a third strategy they’d never considered.” He scooted back in his chair, crossed one leg over the other. “Well, now you’ve
assumed
that because the contingents of AVT soldiers were gone, that the human threat to you was gone. You left all of that land out there, with whatever rich deposits of goodies were waiting to be found. Or maybe not even
found
; maybe the humans have always had bunkers filled with smart people and smart weapons. Maybe they’ve just been biding their time, multiplying in number out of sight, and making those good weapons better. Like the weapon they used to have in those gray bullets.” Reginald put a hand on his chest. “Now, I know I watched a vampire take all day to die from some sort of a biological weapon during the war. So if
I,
as a regular Joe, saw that, then obviously
you
smart leader types saw it too, and of course you investigated and found out exactly what that weapon was, and how to protect us against it in the future.” He looked mildly at Timken and Ophelia, who looked slapped. When they didn’t react, he shook his head and continued, almost sadly. “But of course you didn’t, did you? Because you’re
vampires
. And you’re on the
top
of the food chain.”

Something shifted inside of Ophelia. Reginald watched her hard expression soften for the first time since he’d first met her under the ice in Antarctica. He could tell it was killing her to drop her sense of superiority, but she seemed to have realized that she was no longer entirely superior… and that maybe she’d never actually been in control.
 

“That’s why we need your help,” she said. She swallowed at the last word, seeming to have forced it out.
 

Reginald let himself smirk. “Okay. You want help? Here’s my advice: bunker in. Get the people you care about and dig yourself a hole. Because this is what I’ve been talking about from the beginning, and you never listened.”
 

Timken looked over. “The apocalypse again.”
 

“Yes. Again.” He rolled his eyes, shaking his head. “You fucking people,” he said. “Ever since my first year, vampires have been coming to me and asking me to tell them what to do. People acted like I was oracle even before I’d heard of the vampire codex. But if I’m this big, perfect computer mind — which is the way people act when I’m asked for help — then why don’t you listen to what that big computer mind tells you? I told you forty years ago that this was coming.”
 

Timken’s composure broke. He’d finally had enough civility. He stood.
 

“Yes, Reginald! Forty years ago! And it never happened! We built a whole society in that time! We were right, not you!”
 

“You were right?
But isn’t that the biggest assumption of all?” Reginald stood to match the president, then waved his arms theatrically overhead as if beckoning toward the heavens. “If you were right, where are the angels? Why haven’t they returned to pat you on the back and tell you that you done good?”
 

Timken chuckled humorlessly. “I think with angels, no news is good news.”
 

Reginald shook his head and said nothing. His eyes rolled toward the projection at the front of the room, then toward Timken.

“This is not the apocalypse!”
Timken yelled. Then he composed himself, smoothing his hair. “This is just one lunatic, who’s…”
 

“Who’s managed to put together a string of events across the entire planet and coordinated a group of people who supposedly have no access to technology, no power, no food…”
 

“Isolated incidents!”
 

“SIXTEEN
INCIDENTS!” Reginald boomed. He wasn’t used to anger, and even after nearly eighty years on the planet, he certainly wasn’t used to squaring off in a verbal fight. It had always been his way to demure and let the other person win, but he’d had enough. The stupidity here was too thick. They’d either listen or let them go home. There was no third choice.
 

Timken looked over at Ophelia, who hadn’t moved. She gave a small shrug. Timken returned to his chair but didn’t sit, standing over it with his hands on the table like a vulture.
 

“Fine. Let’s say you’re right.”

“
The codex
is right.”
 

“Whatever. So why has it taken so long?”
 

“Maybe they had to swell their numbers. Maybe they needed time to develop their weapons. Or maybe they just needed time to get pissed off enough. To find time to believe.”

Timken sat. When he spoke, he sounded defeated.

“Okay, Reginald. Humans are going to rise up. They’re on a holy mission. Whatever. So what do we do?”
 

“Nothing. In the words of some angels I once knew, ‘You’re fucked.'"

“Oh, that’s helpful,” said Charles, who’d been surprisingly quiet throughout the whole briefing. Reginald had almost forgotten he was there, still covered in white drywall dust.
 

“Look,” said Reginald. “I don’t know what you expect from me. You threatened me to get me here, so I’m here. But if I give you advice, I think we all know you aren’t going to take it. So… just tell me what you want to do and I’ll tell you to go ahead and do it. We can all pretend this worked out the way we wanted.” He looked into Timken’s eyes. “So just tell me, Mr. President: what do you want me to do?”
 

Timken looked at Reginald, then plucked an invisible piece of dust from his lapel. “Lafontaine made one demand at the end of the video,” he said. “Help us meet that demand as best you can, and you can go.”
 

Reginald sighed. “What does he want?”
 

Timken once again exchanged a glance with the general. “He wants to meet,” he said.
 

F
ATASS

“PUT IT THERE.”
 

“IT DOESN’T fit.”
 

“Turn it, fatass.”
 

Reginald, deep down inside his own mind, put his mental hands on his fat mental hips and stared at the nonexistent teenager in front of him, kneeling beside the imaginary puzzle. He wondered what it said about his self esteem that even in the privacy of his own mind, he was insulting himself.
 

“Don’t call me ‘fatass,’” said Reginald’s mental projection of Reginald.
 

“Don’t blame me, fatass,” said Reginald’s mental projection of Maurice. “I’m not actually here.”
 

It was true. Maurice wasn’t actually there any more than the gigantic floor puzzle in front of them was there. “Maurice” was just Reginald’s way of projecting his maker’s blood memories into a visual that made sense while he was inside his own headspace. “Maurice” had all of the real Maurice’s memories, quirks, and tendencies, but everything he did these days was really just another facet of Reginald. It was tempting to pretend that Maurice was still here and alive in a way, but down that road was madness. When Reginald had first discovered the ability to bloodwalk (which the angel Balestro had given him for a reason Reginald still didn’t understand), Reginald remembered being entranced with the idea of becoming lost down here, walking through the vampire family tree forever, putting his various ancestors on like so many gloves. But the family tree within him was just like the codex, which Reginald had currently chosen to represent as a floor puzzle: it was just an archive, and nothing more. Pretending a life could be lived in it would have been as close to death as a vampire could get without disintegrating into ash.

“Well, then stop insulting me, Reginald,” said Reginald.
 

Maurice (who wasn’t actually Maurice, Reginald reminded himself) was still down on his hands and knees, studying the puzzle. He turned his head toward Reginald. Reginald knelt beside him, then took a piece of the puzzle in his hands. He turned it one way, then another. Eventually he slipped it into place. At the same moment, he felt a tiny jolt inside of his real mind as another little thing, unseen and distant, somehow made sense. The sensation felt good, and being with “Maurice” again felt good as well. It made him forget why he’d neglected the puzzle and his blood memories in the first place. But then he remembered why — and remembered what circumstances had set him to work on it again now — and some of the pleasure faded back away.

In the way you can recognize the picture on a puzzle before it’s finished, Reginald had known the codex’s broad strokes since he’d first begun to piece it together forty years ago. It foretold the human revolution, but didn’t dwell much on the vampire revolution other than to say that the latter had made the former possible. He could read a few other things from the in-progress puzzle as well — most notably that humans, not vampires, were considered by the angels to be the stronger species. The humans had always had the power to eradicate the world’s vampires, but they hadn’t realized it until they’d been
forced
to realize it by the decimation of their population — which had forced them to evolve, and made them desperate enough to strike.

But because Reginald had let the puzzle lay fallow for so long, there were vast areas of it that were still unsolved — foggy places where Reginald could only guess at the gaps in his knowledge. He couldn’t tell where the codex’s prophecies ended, for instance. But sometimes it almost looked as if the human revolution was the final event the puzzle predicted, and that filled Reginald with dread. The codex was the pre-told history of vampirekind. If it ended with the human revolution, what did that say about their chances of surviving?
 

“Maurice?” said Reginald. He knew that Maurice wasn’t really there and that he was just talking to himself, but talking to oneself had its uses.
 

“Yes, Reginald.”
 

“If this is all inevitable —” He gestured out across the vast puzzle, which in Reginald’s mind’s eye stretched to the horizon. “— then why am I bothering to help Timken? Should we just run?”
 

“If you run,” said Maurice, slotting another piece into the puzzle, “then they’ll kill you.”
 

“We’re all doomed anyway. Or so the codex says.”
 

“That’s not what the codex says.”
 

“So the codex implies, then,” said Reginald.
 

Mental Maurice turned to look at him again. “Since when were you a slave to rules?”
 

Reginald thought about it — a thought within his current state of thought. It was true. Reginald wasn’t a punk rocker or a rebel, but he’d never considered societal norms to have much merit. Human rules said that people were more or less equal and should be treated as equals, but everyone had always mocked Reginald for being fat. Vampire rules said that inferior vampires shouldn’t be allowed to live, and he’d lived despite being considered inferior. But even that was a set of nested dolls, because he
wasn’t
inferior, despite being
considered
inferior. The way in which people kept asking him for advice (before ignoring it because they, who were clearly
not
inferior, knew better) proved that he was considered superior at least some of the time. So what did all those rules really mean in the end?

“But this is all, like, predestined,” said Reginald.
 

“More or less. But look at how there’s always been wiggle room. You remember what I said, right? About how angels don’t understand free will?”