Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (25 page)

Maurice shook his head. “It’s so deep. So deep in our mythos.”
 

“Then tell me,” said Reginald.
 

“Yeah, Maurice,” said Nikki, propping her elbows on the table. She had an interest in mythology that bordered on a fetish. Reginald had made fun of her because she’d taken a 3-volume compendium of the Greek gods with her on vacation.
 

“All right,” said Maurice. “To answer your question — Do we have an explanation for ourselves? — the answer is yes and no. We don’t have a rational explanation, no. We don’t know what makes us tick, really, and we don’t know, actually and precisely speaking, who the first vampire was. There are two basic schools of thought on it. One says that vampires and humans co-evolved as separate species and that we had our own ‘mitochondrial Eve,’ and one says that humans came first and that we evolved from them in a way not unlike a certain famous fish crawled out of the ocean and breathed air one random day.
 

“But on the other side of ‘do we have an explanation?’ — yes, we do. On the non-rational side, we have a myth.
 

“Now, two things you need to understand about vampire myths. The first is that even though we tell the stories, we don’t actually
believe
them. It’s like how some Native Americans talk about the world being created when a beetle came down from the sky, found nothing but water, and dragged mud up from the bottom of the ocean so he’d have a place to stand. They, like us, don’t literally believe those myths today, but they tell them anyway. It’s part of their culture.
 

“But the second thing to understand is that unlike with Native Americans, our myths aren’t told from parent to child. Vampires are, almost all of the time, turned willingly when they’re adults. That skews our demographics. Most people who apply to become vampires do so because they’re damaged in some way.” His eyes flicked to Nikki, who looked down. “No offense, Nikki. But below the surface, most vampires — at least today — are emotionally disturbed, or angry, or grew up powerless and now want power more than anything. You’re choosing a life of eternal youth that revolves around ritualistic, sexualized behavior. You’re choosing never to see the daytime again, to live in shadows and indoors, and to be a predator and a killer. And now think: Our myths spread from jaded, damaged adult to jaded, damaged adult. There is no innocence or blind acceptance. Everyone knows the myths, and while nobody believes them, they’ll often talk themselves into believing parts of them because it gives them
purpose
.”
 

Maurice looked into Nikki’s eyes, Reginald’s eyes.

“If I could psychoanalyze a little bit, vampires are lost souls,” he said. “Humans at least have pervasive myths in their culture about where they came from and where they’re going, but what about us? We start as directionless, jaded people. We make a conscious choice to turn away from our humanity, and after that, in the big picture, we’re given no direction. We live forever, so there’s no need for an afterlife. So what our myths do is to act as a glue and to fill that void in meaning. Vampires have to believe in something or they’ll go mad, so they grab onto our myths. They laugh at them on one hand and embrace their core meanings on the other. But then, because they’re approaching the myths as fully formed adults, they’ll ritualize them, or subconsciously embody them, or use them as excuses for atrocities. Does that make any sense?”
 

Reginald, who knew of Maurice’s interest in psychology, nodded.
 

“So with all that out of the way, the vampire creation myth — the one that nobody literally believes but that everyone tells — goes like this: In the distant, distant past, in the time of Adam and Eve, the universe was ruled by God and angels. Yes, the same god — at least in the modern version of the myth. A group of angels tried to seize power, were foiled, and then were cast out of Heaven. In some versions of the myth, Lucifer is one of these fallen angels, and in others he’s not. In some versions there is a Hell, and in some versions there is not. But in all versions, there are six fallen angels, three of each gender — presumably anthropomorphized from our own genders — and they settle here, on earth, on the mortal plane, as the first earth-dwelling immortals.

“Now, God had already created Adam and Eve, and just like in the Christian tradition, they were his most treasured creations. But there was a problem. He had six very dangerous renegade angels to contend with, and he didn’t trust them, as well he shouldn’t. But the fallen, themselves, were between a rock and a hard place. God had thus far only banished them and could, they suspected, incinerate them instead. So a kind of detente grew between them — an acrimonious ‘agreement to disagree,’ say. But it was too tenuous. Neither side trusted the other. The angels feared being destroyed, and God feared for his creations.
 

“And so they negotiated, like divorced parents would negotiate over a child they share. They came to an agreement. Adam and Eve would have two sons: Cain and Abel. Cain and Abel would represent a branching of intelligent life on earth into two. In the human version of the myth, Cain kills Abel. In the vampire version, they both kill each other, over and over and over again. First Cain kills Abel. God resurrects Abel. Then Abel, furious, kills Cain, who is resurrected by the fallen angels. It goes on and on and on, brother killing brother, neither side willing to surrender. So eventually, the only way to keep them apart so that each can father his own branch of life on Earth is to ‘sunder the day’ and give each dominion over one. Abel is given the day, the light, and the spark of life. Cain is given the night, the darkness, and the dead.”

“So when Altus talks about angels…” said Reginald.
 

“Correct. He’s talking about these mythical Six.”

“But why would they be against us? We’re supposed to be in their corner, according to the myth.”
 

Maurice shrugged.
 

“Maybe he’s talking about other angels,” said Nikki. “You know, the good ones.”
 

“Does it matter?” said Maurice. “It’s a myth.”
 

“Just for the sake of argument.”
 

“Vampires act like there are only those Six. Incubi too. You never hear anyone talk about any ‘good angels.’”
 

“I just don’t get it,” said Nikki.

“Because it’s a myth,” said Maurice. “Do you believe that sky beetle dragged mud up from the ocean to make the land of the Earth?”
 

“But I still don’t see why the angels would have supposedly turned on vampires,” said Reginald.
 

Maurice rolled his eyes and stood up. “Magic coyote. They turned on us because a magic coyote came in and barked, and then the cactus spirit toked up some weed and the sky fell.”
 

“Hey, you said yourself that vampires take these things into their psyches and ‘use them as excuses for atrocities.’ We’ve seen atrocities in the past two weeks. I think it’s worth understanding.”
 

“So you think Balestro was an angel.”
 

“I don’t know
what
Balestro was. But wouldn’t you agree that we’re facing a very serious threat — no matter whether it’s mortal, immortal, or angelic?”

Maurice shrugged and sighed, acquiescent.

“And we’ve been given a deadline, remember. Thirty days. 29 days now. Talk about ritualism. We don’t have to believe any myths, but Balestro and anyone who might be with him seem to.”
 

“So…”
 

“We’ve got to at least figure it out and decide how to respond,” said Reginald. “Whatever Balestro was, he’s bigger and better than us. I’d say there’s a one hundred percent chance we’ll regret it if he does come back and we’ve done nothing but sit around with our thumbs up our asses.

“So,” he said to Maurice. “We should talk to Brian about manufacturing some consensus on the Council. Let’s meet in my apartment tomorrow at midnight. In fact, have Brian drag Charles along. We’ll have to get him involved. He’s an ass, but he represents everyone who hates us. They won’t listen to us, but they’d listen to him.”
 

Maurice nodded, then peeked out the small window in the mail room door. He looked at the clock on the wall above Walker’s ass-hole in the plaster.

“One fifteen,” he said. Then he cocked a thumb over his shoulder, at the mail room door. “They’re shitfaced out there and it’s only going to get worse. Anyone want to knock off early for the weekend? They’ll never know.”
 

“Good idea,” said Reginald, standing from his chair. “I have some reading to do anyway.”
 

D
IABEETUS

REGINALD WAS UPSIDE DOWN, BALANCED on one hand in the center of his living room, when the doorbell rang.
 

He wasn’t just doing acrobatics. He was multitasking. On the floor below him was a laptop, and on the laptop were the video records of the past two chaotic Council meetings. Reginald was also using the laptop to research vampire mythology, and was also using the hand to eat Doritos.
 

Getting into the handstand had taken a while. He’d stood in front of a wall, put his hands on the floor, and attempted to kick up. The first time he’d tried, he’d plowed his face into the ground. The second time, he’d rolled over and ended up wedged in the corner between the floor and the wall, and had to smash an end table to escape. The third time he’d kicked a giant hole in the wall.
 

But the fourth time, he’d suddenly and astonishingly found himself standing on his hands, his back against the wall, staring out into his upside-down living room. It was a strange sensation. As he held the position, he went back to that strange place in his mind where his vampire abilities resided. Something clicked. His muscles stopped trying, and simply did what they were supposed to do.

It dawned on him that handstands were easy. He wondered why he’d never realized it before.
 

Reginald’s balance crawled upward from his hands to his core, from his core to his legs. He realized that his legs didn’t matter. He alternatively let them hang and straightened them, watching his balance move with his mind’s eye as if it were a ball of light in his center.

He walked away from the wall on his hands, into the center of the room. Maurice had been right; it didn’t take much strength. He was just holding himself up, not flexing and extending muscles. So he picked one hand up off the carpet and held it out to the side, balancing on the other hand. He kicked his legs up into the air and made tiny hops. Then he tried the other hand.
 

Balance.
Who knew?
 

He started to feel cocky.

He put both hands back on the floor and, looking down, his back arched, attempted to lower himself to the carpet for a handstand pushup. The carpet jumped up and hit him in the face like it was angry with him. As he fell, his feet punched another hole in the plaster.
 

Not yet on the handstand pushups, anyway.
 

So he’d gotten the laptop and had started studying, and that’s when the doorbell rang.
 

Reginald carefully lowered his feet to the ground, placed the computer and a bag of Doritos he’d been eating one-handedly onto the coffee table, and opened the door. He found Charles Barkley in the doorway, levitating three inches off the ground.
 

Charles’s whole body jiggled and, without moving his lips, Charles said, “Hi Reginald! I fuck poodles!” Then he flew into the room and crushed the coffee table. The computer was spared.
 

Behind him, the gigantic figure of Brian Nickerson stood with its arm out. Then the arm went down.
 

“’Sup, Reginald,” he said.

“‘Sup,” Reginald echoed.
 

Once Brian cleared the doorway and moved to stand beside it, Reginald saw that Maurice and Nikki were behind him. Nikki had her arms crossed and was shivering.

“Are you cold?” Reginald asked.
 

“F-f-f-freezing,” she said.
 

Todd Walker stepped around Nikki and sauntered uninvited into Reginald’s apartment.

“Walker?” said Reginald.

Brian hit Walker hard on the back. Walker became Barack Obama.
 

“Altus,” said Reginald.
 

“Reginald,” said Barack Obama. Then Obama walked into the living room, sat on Reginald’s La-Z-Boy chair, and put up the foot rest.
 

“Fuh-fuh-fuh,” said Nikki.
 

“I’ll get a sweater,” said Reginald. He came back minutes later with a garment that Nikki vanished completely inside of, as if she’d wrapped herself with a blanket.

Reginald raised an eyebrow at Maurice.

“Hey,” said Maurice, “you wanted a meeting of Heaven and Hell, so I figured I’d invite the only demon I know. Too bad he’s a huge cock, but then again, he’s a demon. It’s how they roll.”
 

“This place smells like human,” said Charles, who’d extricated himself from the coffee table.

“Have a seat, dickbrain,” said Brian.
 

Charles sat on the couch.
 

“Not there,” said Brian.
 

Charles stood.
 

Brian motioned for Reginald to sit on the couch and then sat down beside him. Reginald felt sorry for the couch. Sitting side by side, Reginald thought that he and Brian must look like before-and-after photos for a fitness alchemy pill.
 

There were two chairs in Reginald’s breakfast nook. Maurice and Nikki dragged them to the coffee table and sat in them, with Nikki bundled up like Nanook of the North. Charles looked around and, after a moment’s indecision, sat down on a milk crate that Reginald sometimes used as a step stool.
 

“I’d intended to keep this reality-based and secular,” said Reginald, “but now that Altus is here, I’m sure it’ll devolve quickly.”