Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (2 page)

“Women can sense these things,” said Sarah.
 

“Would you ask him out, if you didn’t think he was gay?” said Reginald. It was an odd question, totally out of character for him to ask. Really, it was out of character for Reginald to ask anything. Really, it was out of character for anyone other than the clones to ask anyone anything at all. Except “for permission.”
 

“I don’t know,” said Sarah. “He seems moody.”
 

“He’s awfully young,” said Noel.
 

“So you’d date him if you were nineteen?” said Reginald.

“I’m glad I’m not nineteen anymore,” said Sarah with a shiver. She had a lazy eye. Like Reginald, she’d simply endured high school, waiting for it to end so that she could move into the adult world where people were civilized. Reginald could tell by the way she jumped when anyone dropped anything that she wanted her money back for the broken promises of adulthood too.
 

“I guess,” said Sarah.
 

Despite the lazy eye, Sarah was attractive. She didn’t know it, though, and she hid it well. She had no sense of cosmetics and seemed to know just enough about haircare to get her by. Her dark brown hair was always in a tidy but uninteresting bun, and her wardrobe was comprised of dumpy slacks and out-of-style blouses. She turned to Reginald. “Would
you
, if
you
were gay and nineteen?”

This line of discussion was strange, but Reginald liked it. He never talked to the others in the office. Sometimes he wondered why, given that they were all outcasts. He supposed it was due to the office’s atmosphere of oppression. The proles in
1984
probably didn’t engage in much small talk either.
 

“If I was gay and nineteen, sure,” said Reginald.
 

“Someone has a man crush,” said Sarah.

Reginald shrugged. He almost said what was on his lips, which was
I don’t have many friends.
But in addition to being untrue (he had his family and the four guys he played poker with sometimes), it sounded pathetic. He was already cubbyholed as pathetic for being so fat, and he didn’t need another crucifixion stake floating around, waiting to be picked up.
 

The kitchen door opened and a cleft chin with a set of perfect teeth walked in. It took Reginald a moment to decide exactly who it was because the rest of the office looked so much alike, but eventually he saw that it was Todd Walker. Once he did, he became very interested in the coffee he was stirring.
 

“You in here again, Reggie?” said Walker, who knew that Reginald hated being called “Reggie.” “Damn, boy, give the fridge some time off!”
 

“I was only grabbing…”
 

“Just busting your balls,” said Walker, slapping him on the back. Then, in an aside tone of voice: “Assuming I can find them in there.” He chortled again to show that it was just a joke, which of course it wasn’t.
 

“That’s not nice,” said Sarah.
 

“Oh, he knows I’m only kidding. And who knows? Maybe one day we’ll make a success story out of Reggie like that Jared guy from Subway, and then we’ll all get rich selling the shit out of these treadmills.” Walker smiled. His teeth looked like Arlington tombstones.
 

Walker grabbed a protein bar out of the refrigerator.
 

“What you all pow-wowing about in here?” he said.
 

Nobody answered. Sarah was dissecting her French bread pizza like it was a pithed frog in science class.
 

“C’mon. Noel, what were you guys talking about?”
 

Noel looked up. “The new guy.”
 

Walker made an odd frown that only happened on half of his mouth, like the other half didn’t get the memo. “That fucker’s weird.” He took a bite of the protein bar, then continued with a mouthful of soy or whey or whatever it was. “That sword. I’m worried he’s going to snap. I asked him about it and he said he uses it to trim his hedges. Think he’s serious?” He didn’t pause to let anyone answer. “Saw him leaving a few times when I came in to the office in the morning. So he works all night, and when he leaves, you know what he does? He walks home, and he wears a coat with a hood, and he — get this —“ Walker laughed, because clearly everyone would want to mock the following point. “— he carries an umbrella. Like a parasol.”

Walker, his mouth full of protein bar and his perfect white teeth fighting to be seen amidst the food, looked at Reginald so that he could confirm how crazy the IT guy was.
 

Reginald shrugged.
 

Walker closed his mouth and shrugged back. “Maybe you don’t think it’s strange, but you’re not exactly in the middle of the bell curve.” He took another bite.
 

Noel coughed, then covered her mouth quickly and resumed looking at her lunch.
 

“Well, I’ve gotta get to work. Trying to leave early. Have a date with a contortionist who can put her legs behind her head and cross them like a pretzel.” He leered at Sarah and Noel, both of whom might be prospects for Walker if they underwent an extreme makeover. “Can either of you do that?” he said with an erect penis in his voice.
 

And with that, Walker was gone. The earlier spirit of loose camaraderie left with him.
 

Then Sarah spoke. “I wonder if he has a skin condition or something,” she said. “Maurice, I mean.”

Reginald turned to go. “Maybe he’s a vampire,” he said with a chuckle, and then he let the kitchen door close behind him and walked back to his desk.
 

B
RO
D
ATE

MAURICE WORKED FROM 11PM UNTIL 8am with, presumably, an hour break for what Reginald had to assume he called “lunch.” His job seemed to be doing a lot of technical stuff that Reginald didn’t understand and didn’t particularly care about.
 

After a few weeks, Reginald’s rut began to settle into a familiar rhythm of intersection with Maurice’s rut. They started to run into each other at precisely 7am each morning when Reginald, who preferred to get in early and get out early, walked down to the kitchen for his second cup of coffee. That’s where he found Maurice one day, sitting at one of the tables with a cellular phone in his hands, using both of his thumbs to text or email someone at an inhuman speed.
 

“Holy crap are you fast on that keyboard,” said Reginald. Then, deciding to go for broke with his new office “friend,” he added, “My fingers are too big for one of those things, but even on a regular-sized keyboard I’m pretty slow.”
 

Maurice jerked his head around and uttered a noise of surprise. The door had been propped open and he hadn’t seen Reginald enter.
 

“I’m sorry,” said Reginald. “Thought you saw me here.”
 

“Nah, it’s… it’s cool,” said Maurice, stowing the phone with a self-conscious glance around as if he’d been caught doing something private, lewd, or both. He paused, then answered Reginald’s observation: “Practice texting is all.”

“You work at night, right?” said Reginald. He didn’t wait for an answer because he was only making preamble. “So when you take your hour break, do you call it ‘lunch’ even though it’s like 3am?”

Maurice nodded. “Yeah,” he said.
 

 
“So do you eat lunch foods, or is it, like, your dinner?”
 

Maurice’s mouth made an amused half-smile. “I just grab a quick bite,” he said.
 

“And so, if you work at night, how do you have a social life?” Then he realized how forward that question was, especially with the corporate culture being what it was, and muttered an apology. It was the fact that the clones weren’t here, he realized. None of them arrived before 8am, and most arrived closer to 8:30 or 9. These were the sweetest hours of the day — another reason he liked to come in early.
 

“It’s cool,” said Maurice. “I don’t mind you asking. And to answer your question, the truth is that I
don’t
have much of a social life. It’s one of the downsides of living how I do.”
 

“Maybe we could hang out,” Reginald blurted. It was out before he gave himself permission to say it, and he immediately regretted it. Maybe he did have a man crush. This was odd of him, odd at the office, and odd in a dozen other ways.
 

“Sure,” said Maurice. “It’d have to be right before I get to work, though. Like nine or ten at night. I get up around eight PM, and, honestly, I can’t get much sun.” He shrugged. “I’ve got a condition.”
 

“That’d be cool,” said Reginald.
Cool
. The word felt foreign on his lips. It was something he never had been, and definitely was not currently. “Let’s do that sometime.”
 

“Cool,” said Maurice. He stood to go, tipping an invisible hat at Reginald and then stepping sideways to move his skinny frame around Reginald’s formidable protruding stomach. He didn’t ask Reginald to move aside, even in a polite way, and made no show of holding his own tiny gut in as he passed. Reginald silently thanked him for the courtesy.
 

When Maurice was halfway down the hallway, Reginald decided, in the spirit of the moment, to ask one final question.
 

“Hey,” he said. “Why do you wear a sword on your belt?”

“I use it to trim my hedges,” said Maurice.
 

He waved and was gone. For some reason, Reginald decided he was dead serious.

B
ABES

REGINALD DIDN’T BUG MAURICE ABOUT setting a time to hang out. He felt odd having proposed a bro date in the first place, and he wasn’t used to not being laughed at. He figured he’d let the idea simmer. Either Maurice was genuinely interested in hanging out or he was just being polite. If the latter was true, Maurice would never propose a time and Reginald would give himself the dignity of never raising the issue. But as it was, Maurice turned out to be genuinely interested, and surprised him the next Monday by suggesting they go bowling.

They settled on meeting at the lanes at 9pm — a full two-meal cycle after work for Reginald and two hours before work for Maurice. Reginald was surprised that Maurice had suggested bowling. He half figured they’d end up using a Ouija board or attending a black opera. Something as normal as bowling coming from the sword-wielding goth kid was a welcome surprise.
 

Reginald hadn’t bowled in years, but he’d been good back in high school despite already being over two hundred and fifty pounds. Now, a hundred pounds heavier and with foot trouble, back trouble, high cholesterol, and (he was pretty sure) pre-diabetes, bowling was still within his physical capabilities. It was physical but not taxing, and the lane balls came in a wide range of weights and finger-hole sizes. As a plus, a bro date involving bowling wasn’t awkwardly intimate like dinner or loud like going to a bar — which for Reginald would also be totally uninteresting because he was a teetotaler.
 

Yes, bowling would do just fine.
 

They were three frames into the first game when Maurice seemed to hear something, looked toward the entrance, and groaned.
 

Reginald raised his head and followed Maurice’s gaze. At first, he thought that Walker and his clones had gotten into character and followed them to the bowling alley, but then he realized it was an entirely different group of perfect people.
 

It was Maurice’s own collection of Todd Walker clones.
 

The group was comprised of two couples that appeared to be in their early twenties. All four were supernaturally beautiful. The women’s hair (identical in style, though one was blonde and one was a deep chestnut) was perfectly groomed and styled, shiny and bouncy, seeming to move in a breeze that didn’t exist. The cheekbones on all four were high and perfectly set. The men had a sixteenth inch of stubble that didn’t look shaggy, but instead looked stylish and handsome. They were somehow both rugged and feminine, like they could chop some serious wood, but could do so without ruining their nails or knocking a hair out of their perfect cover-model hairdos.
 

All four were dressed like Maurice — full black coats with black clothes underneath. They even wore black nail polish, and the women wore black lipstick. The only difference between their black clothes and Maurice’s black clothes was the cut. What the four beautiful people were wearing was chic and at the height of couture. What Maurice wore looked practical. Where Maurice looked morose, the four newcomers looked like European runway models.
 

“Friends of yours?” said Reginald.
 

“Hardly,” said Maurice. He made eye contact with one of the men, who’d spotted him and was leading the group over.
 

Maurice stood and met them halfway between the lanes and the door. All five of them stood in a scrum, twenty feet from Reginald. Maurice looked small and shabby next to the others. It was as if they were all siblings in a high-class litter of dogs, and Maurice was the runt. Reginald tried not to watch them out of courtesy, but he couldn’t help staring at the women. They were astonishingly beautiful. Like dark angels, they were.
 

After a few minutes of what looked like argumentative discussion, Maurice walked over to Reginald and said, “Sorry about this. I need to handle something. It shouldn’t take long.”

The blonde woman was looking at Reginald. She was licking her lips. His first thought was that she was mocking him — someone as attractive as she was couldn’t possibly be attracted to someone like him — but then he noticed that the other woman was doing the same. Then, putting a new point on the whole experience, he noticed that the men were doing it, too.
 

The blonde woman raised her hand and made a slow beckoning gesture with one delicate finger. Reginald didn’t consider refusing. His legs propped him up as if of their own will and he found himself standing beside her before he knew what had happened.