Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (13 page)

“Read it. Hurry, before she gets back.”

So, because Maurice hadn’t been wrong yet, Reginald quickly read the single long page on the screen. He gave the phone back as Nikki was coming out of the bathroom. She handed a wad of toilet paper to Maurice, who thanked her, and again begin slaying her waffle.
 

“So as I said,” Maurice repeated, “Reginald plays piano beautifully.” And after much nudging and pushing and cajoling, Reginald found himself sitting on the bench in front of the piano, a dozen or so bleary-eyed patrons staring up at him. The bench groaned under his weight. He couldn’t get close enough to the piano until he forced it, folding his gut under the keyboard, and even then he felt stretched out. The book of music Nikki had been playing from was still on the piano. He picked it up and began to flip the pages, totally unsure of what would be good to start with. Something easy.
 

He looked at Maurice, who nodded encouragement.
 

The book was filled with different pieces, none of which were remotely familiar to him. Finally he found one by Beethoven, who was at least a name he recognized. The piece was called
Hammerklavier
, and because Reginald had a little bit of German, he knew that “klavier” meant “piano.” It seemed as good a starting point as any.

He placed his fingers on the keys and tried to let his mind go back to the place he’d found last week, when Maurice quizzed about passages in
The Shining
. He didn’t know how to play. He didn’t know how to play. Then, from somewhere in a fog, he kind of did. He knew a few of the first notes on the page in front of him. He could see how they fit together, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

He played the notes.
 

Then he saw how the next few fit, and played those.
 

As he fell into rhythm, his fingers seemed to figure out what to do. They knew whether to strike the keys hard or to touch them gently. He stopped seeing the notes on the page and simply saw the music in his mind. The page was irrelevant. He knew what the music was supposed to be. He could see it as if he were solving a problem. One note led logically to the next, to the next. He closed his eyes. The room disappeared. He played by feel, both in his fingers and in his mind. He saw the piece as a whole, even though the whole hadn’t been in the book. But it was too long. He finished a section and spun off, into something new. Something from inside himself. And he played. And he
did
know how to play.

Some time later — though he had no idea how long — his fingers pecked out a few final notes and he realized, quite suddenly, that he was done. And so he stood up, returned to the table, and resumed eating.
 

Across from him, Nikki looked like she’d been slapped. There was a tear running down her cheek.
 

S
OUL

NIKKI HAD ALWAYS BEEN POLITE and friendly, but in the days that followed, she seemed much more interested in Reginald than could be explained by politeness or friendliness alone.
 

There was much more smiling and small talk in the halls. They had coffee together in the kitchen, where Nikki kept prodding Reginald about how he had learned to play piano so well. They even hung out twice more at the piano bar — both times alone, because Maurice declined.
 

Then one day, Nikki asked Reginald to go with her to Taco Bell, which was one of the only restaurants open at 2am. Reginald, who loved Taco Bell, said that he would
really
like to go, but that he was meeting someone. This was intriguing to Nikki, and she asked who could possibly want to meet with him at two in the morning.
 

At this point Reginald tried to change his story, but he was a bad liar and Nikki was both persistent and beguiling. And so finally, he told Nikki that he had a standing appointment with his 10-year-old niece. He thought that Nikki would find it very odd that Reginald would visit his niece in the middle of the night, but once he told her that his niece had the same sun-wasting disease that he had, she nodded knowingly and said, “I gotcha,” and seemed to accept it. Then she asked to come along.
 

Reginald tried to refuse, but Nikki was both persistent and beguiling.
 

So Nikki went along, and this time all three of them sat in Claire’s living room, watching
Columbo
and eating popcorn, while her mother laid upstairs in a drunken slumber.

Nikki fell absolutely in love with Claire, who she said reminded her of herself as a girl. She told Claire that she wished
she
had her as a niece, and Claire, to whom Reginald had covertly whispered the lie to which she should adhere for the evening, nodded eagerly. She said she’d
love
to have Nikki as an aunt and Reginald as an uncle and then smiled knowingly, and then all three of them chuckled until Reginald caught Nikki’s eye and suddenly became terribly embarrassed.
 

Nikki and Claire enjoyed each other so much (devolving into actual, literal hair-braiding and nail-painting at one point) that Reginald and Nikki didn’t arrive back at the office until after four. Reginald apologized to Maurice, who he found shooting staples into a trash can, and Maurice said that he was getting really good at shooting staples and hadn’t realized they were gone.
 

The next evening — the final evening before Reginald’s appointment with the Vampire Council — Nikki and Reginald went out to dinner before work. The lighting was low. There were candles on the table. It was almost like a date, except that she was a hot girl and he was fat Reginald. Otherwise, the resemblance between their dinner meeting and a date was uncanny. Reginald even made an effort to dress up, in the spirit of what felt like an occasion. Nikki wore a dress with a slit up the side. She promised to change into something more boring before going to work lest she blow Walker’s mind, or lest she find herself fending off his grabby hands until midnight.
 

“You don’t think he’d actually grab you, do you?” said Reginald.
 

“Yeah, I do,” she said. “And in fact, I kind of hope that one day he does.”

Reginald almost took this the wrong way, but then she explained that she’d been practicing Krav Maga since her father had started making her attend lessons at age six, when it had become apparent that she’d be pretty.
 

“That fucking guy,” said Reginald. Then, demurely, he put a hand in front of his mouth, as if he’d shocked himself. He didn’t swear much, and certainly not in front of women. Swearing, in Reginald’s mind, implied confidence, which he’d never had much use for.
 

“It’s okay,” said Nikki. “He definitely is ‘that fucking guy.’”
 

“Asshole,” said Reginald.

“Motherfucker,” said Nikki. Then she giggled, a sound that for some reason made Reginald’s blood hunger rise to the back of his throat. She brushed a loose hair off of her neck. Her neck was long and white, and Reginald had to suppress an almost irresistible urge to leap over the table and sink his fangs into it.

“I’d like to be forward, Reginald,” she said. “May I?”

“Sure.”
 

“You’re better than you think you are.”
 

Reginald didn’t know what to say to that. It
was
forward. For one, it was presumptuous to tell him who he was. For two, it implied that he didn’t think much of himself. And for three, he didn’t care and hearing her say it made him feel good.

“Thanks.”

“I mean it, Reginald. I see how Walker is with you, and I see how you avert your eyes when people talk to you. Can I be even more forward?” Then she answered herself, laughing: “Why stop now? Okay, I’ll say it. Just because you’re big doesn’t make you less than that asswipe, or any of those other asswipes. Our society is messed up. We judge people by how they look. But you? You’re better than the Walkers of the world. The soul you showed when you played the other night? It’s beautiful.”

“My soul?”
 

“Yes. Music comes from the soul,” she said matter-of-factly.
 

“I thought that one came from Beethoven,” said Reginald.

“Well,” she said, “forgetting for a moment that
Hammerklavier
is one of the most difficult pieces I know of — especially for someone who ‘just learned by playing around’ — you spun off on your own at the end. Where did that come from?”

“I don’t know. I guess my gut.” Then, realizing the pun, he patted his gut and laughed. “It does have some authority.”

“It came from your soul. Your soul is beautiful.”
 

Reginald thought that her breasts were beautiful. He felt guilty thinking something so shallow, but then he decided it was okay because he liked a lot about her, and her chest was just one part of an overall delightful whole.
 

“I like being here with you,” she said.
 

“Why?” said Reginald. He realized how it sounded, but it was a knee-jerk reaction. The word was out before he could stop himself.
 

“I told you why.”
 

“But… I’m fat. And not terribly attractive.”
 

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” she said.
 

A full minute passed. She reached forward and took his hand.
 

“I’m a vampire,” he blurted.
 

She nodded. “I know.”
 

“You know?”
 

“Maurice told me.”
 

“Maurice is a vampire too.” This verbal diarrhea was idiotic. He’d rat out his mother for a crime she’d never even thought of committing if he kept it up. Maybe
Nikki
was a vampire. Maybe she was glamouring him right now, except that vampires couldn’t be glamoured. And by the way, what a load of crap
that
was.

She smiled. “I know he’s a vampire. We’ve known each other for a while. Things come up. He has some stories that don’t make any sense without that particular tidbit.”

“Are
you
a vampire?”
 

“No. But I assume your niece is?”
 

“My niece?”
 

“Your niece. Claire? I assumed that’s the reason you meet with her at 2am.”
 

Reginald shook his head. “She’s not my niece. She’s a human I tried to feed on because I couldn’t catch anyone else. I couldn’t catch her either, so she gave me a raw steak. Her mother is always drunk. We get together every night at 2am and watch
Columbo
because she’s lonely and doesn’t have many day friends.”

That was without question the oddest reply that anyone had ever given to anyone, anywhere, ever, but Nikki seemed unfazed by it. She patted his hand, as if 10-year-old, middle-of-the-night playmates were totally normal.
 

Reginald’s head sagged. “I’m a bad vampire. I’m slow. I’m weak. I’m too fat to be undead.”
 

“Maurice says you’re smart.”

“I guess.”
 

“And he’s always told me that vampirism enhances what’s in you already,” she said. “Which is how I know that your soul is beautiful, with that music you had inside.”
 

Reginald found himself starting to smile, but then his mind floated to tomorrow, to his meeting with the Vampire Council, and the smile left his lips. It seemed unfair that he could have found such contentment so soon before being sentenced to what felt like an inevitable death. He was once a fat kid, then he was a fat adult, and then he’d had two and a half weeks to be a fat vampire. Soon he wouldn’t even be that. Soon he’d be ash, and as far as the vampires of the world were concerned, it was good riddance to bad public relations rubbish.
 

“I’m on trial tomorrow,” said Reginald. “Did Maurice tell you that?”
 

“Yes.”
 

“Do you guys have long conversations while I’m in the bathroom or something?”
 

“Maurice is my mentor,” she said.
 

“You must not talk about computers much, with all the vampire discussions you have,” said Reginald.
 

“No. I meant, he’s my mentor in vampirism,” said Nikki.
 

“He’s what?”
 

She shrugged. “Some people meet a baseball player and decide to become a baseball player. I met a vampire.”
 

“Wait. You’re going to become a vampire?”
 

“Yes. I’m in training. Just finished, actually.”

“Ah. Training.”
 

“There’s a whole program,” she told him. “It’s like Six Sigma meets Navy SEALs bootcamp. You’ll see.”
 

“I’ll see?”

“After your trial. Maurice says you’ll have to do it all retroactively. But the good news for you is that they can’t decide
not
to turn you since you’re already turned, and…”
 

“Nikki,” said Reginald, interrupting her, “I’ll never see that training. I’ve watched some of the ‘meetings’ from the council records. I know what they’ll ask me to do and I can’t do it, not even close, and so I’m going to be executed. It’s a big puppet show. They just want to humiliate me before they kill me, because I blemish their image.”
 

Reginald didn’t tell her the other unsavory things he’d learned from the public records, like how the only way to avoid a quick death in a sun chamber was to commit an additional offense that
really
pissed off the council — in which case you’d be cut open over and over and over before finally being dragged into the sun to die. From what Reginald had seen, the torturers were quite good, and used a wide variety of sharp knives to do their jobs.

Nikki shook her head. “You should run,” she said.
 

At least she wasn’t telling him that he might pass his ordeal. That would just be insulting to both of them.
 

“I can’t run,” he said, and told her what Maurice had said about what the council did to the families and friends of runners. They’d kill Maurice if they could catch him. They’d kill Nikki.