Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (40 page)

“You’re sure the window was midnight?” said Maurice.
 

Reginald tapped his head, which was essentially the same as tapping a notarized copy of the official Council notice.
 

Maurice blurred from one end of the alley to the other. He appeared on the roof of the red-walled building and ran its perimeter, looking down. Then he appeared next to Reginald again and said, “Nothing. The streets are reasonably quiet. Where would they be coming from?”

“North,” said Reginald, and gave Maurice the route the SUV would take. Maurice vanished in a cloud of dust and leaves, then reappeared thirty seconds later. “Nothing. The Escort is not coming.”
 

Nikki sat heavily onto a discarded crate. Above her, hanging in the overhead electrical wires, was what looked like the skeleton of an annihilated corded wall phone. She looked paler than normal.
 

“What does it mean?” said Maurice.
 

Reginald felt a strange sensation of role-reversal. Maurice had been around since the day B.C. had become A.D.
He
was supposed to be the authority on vampires and vampire culture in this group — mentor to both his progeny, Reginald, and
his
progeny, Nikki. And here he was, asking Reginald what to do. The notion gave Reginald as much of a chill as the absence of the Council Escorts.
 

“I don’t know,” said Reginald.
 

They sat in silence, all of them waiting and hoping for the arrival of the vehicle they had been dreading moments earlier. Council Escorts were never late.
Never
. The entire American Vampire Nation’s leadership ran like a giant, perfect clock. A master coded algorithm chose a new location for the Council every ten days, and then coordinated the relocation with scores of what were essentially vampire roadies. The Council was disassembled, moved, and reassembled, its parts shipped via dozens of different routes through dozens of different hands. Those coming into the Council were shuffled through multiple pairs of Escorts, none of which knew the whole of the route and all of which were wired with failsafe devices that triggered and killed them automatically if GPS tracking suggested that they’d gone rogue. Only the algorithm knew it all, and the algorithm was perfect. When you received word that your pickup window was between midnight and 12:30am, you could set your watch by the arrival of the Escort vehicle. The idea that it hadn’t arrived and didn’t seem likely to — not within the window, anyway — was disturbing beyond words. Paranoia was the one thing that the Council could be counted on to maintain even while everything else crumbled. What did cracks in the perfection of paranoia mean?
 

“What do we do now?” said Nikki.
 

She and Reginald looked at Maurice, but Maurice was already looking at Reginald, waiting for
him
to answer. Nikki turned to look at Reginald, waiting.
 

“How should I know?” said Reginald.

“You’re the chess player,” said Nikki. Something in her face said that she knew that she’d been allowed to win the games she’d won against Reginald.
 

“I don’t know. We could go to the Council directly, instead of going through the Escorts.”
 

Maurice’s lip curled. Nobody was supposed to know where the Council was located at any given time — and as far as the Council knew, nobody did. But Reginald had cracked the algorithm almost a year ago, and could not only pinpoint the Council whenever he wanted, but could also roll its position back and forth through time as needed.
 

“You want to show your hand?” said Maurice. “You want to let them know you’ve cracked the algorithm?”

“I want to
go to the Council
,” said Reginald. “Now more than ever. This bothers me. It’s like the center is disintegrating.”
 

“That’s bad?” said Nikki.
 

“The farce of government is all that’s keeping the Nation from outright chaos,” said Reginald. “Remove that, and tens of thousands of terrified vampires will no longer have anyone to tell them how to react to things like the Ring of Fire. Most of them have already decided that what Balestro wanted was for them to kill and turn until half of the planet or more was vampire.”
 

“That’s bad,” said Nikki.
 

“Where is the Council now?” said Maurice.
 

Reginald’s eyes rolled up for a half-second. Nowadays, he didn’t need to go to and read the algorithm as needed. He’d started carrying it around in his head.
 

“Outside of Polaris. North of 270.” And he gave them an address.
 

Twenty minutes later, they piled out of Reginald’s car. Nikki and Maurice sprinted in twin blurs toward the back door of a warehouse with a large FOR RENT sign out front. Finding the door chained from the outside, they circled the building, Nikki moving clockwise and Maurice moving counterclockwise. Reginald hadn’t yet reached the building. He’d tried to sprint with Nikki and Maurice, had immediately started to run out of breath, and had tripped on a brick anchored at the head of a parking space.
 

“All doors are chained from the outside,” said Maurice, joining the others.
 

“There must be another entrance. They wouldn’t chain themselves in,” said Reginald.
 

“Where?”
 

“Does it matter?” Nikki returned to the nondescript back door, placed a hand on the push bars of both doors, and gave a small shove. The door shuddered in its frame, then both doors wrenched completely free of their hinges with a sound like an explosion. The metal doors fell inward and clanged onto a dark concrete floor. Ironically, the chain between the doors held.
 

“Those are pull bars, not push bars,” said Reginald.
 

“Oops,” said Nikki, stepping over the felled doors and into the dark warehouse lobby.
 

“Totally dark,” said Maurice. He vanished in a blur, and Nikki did the same. Reginald sat down on a box near the door and wiped blood off of his knee. He’d taken off a lot of skin when he’d tripped in the parking lot, and although the wound had healed instantly, there was a lot of blood. Reginald found that the sight of blood still made him queasy — a significant challenge to his new lifestyle.
 

Nikki appeared behind him, her ass barely on the tiny remaining amount of box that Reginald’s formidable ass wasn’t occupying. Several pieces of paper, caught in her slipstream, fluttered toward them. Reginald caught one. It said that the building’s rent came with utilities paid and that the price had just been reduced. There was a photo in the corner of a very unattractive realtor whose name was apparently Floyd.
 

“The Council is not here,” said Nikki. “You must have read it wrong.”
 

“No,” said Reginald patiently, “I didn’t. Math is black and white. Right now, the algorithm places the Council here. Maybe there’s a basement.”
 

“They’d be up here,” said Nikki.
 

Maurice appeared beside her. “Agreed. They’d use the main space. There aren’t any basements in this industrial park, anyway. It’s too near lowlands.”
 

Reginald felt troubled. The Council, like its Guards and Escorts, was supposed to operate like clockwork. They couldn’t have changed the algorithm. Nobody understood it well enough to change it. All they could do would be to restart it, and the logistics of doing so were bafflingly complex. Besides, he’d gotten the notice about their pick-up time window with the Escorts, so as of a few hours ago, everything was on track. Yet the Escorts hadn’t arrived and Council was missing. What was going on? The only thing that bothered Reginald more than a secure, efficient Vampire Council was a sloppy or a missing one.
 

“What now?” said Maurice. Again deferring to Reginald as if he were senior. Reginald didn’t like that, either.
 

“I don’t know.”
 

“Come on, Reginald. What now?”
 

He shrugged. “All I know to try is to go to where it was last. Although I don’t know if I’ll be happy or terrified if I find it destroyed.” He was thinking of the two disasters at Council that had preceded their trip to Europe, to meet Balestro the angel at the stone altar in Germany. One of those times, the roof had been blown off of the Council and hundreds had died, the rest buried in rubble through the daylight hours. And even then, the Council had survived and moved on. The idea that another disaster might have occurred filled Reginald with foreboding.
 

“It’s not destroyed unless it happened very recently,” said Nikki.

“How do you know?” said Maurice.
 

“Fangbook.”
 

“You’re on Fangbook?”
 

“You’re the only one who’s
not
on Fangbook, Maurice,” she said. “I even joined a group on out-of-control thirst. Some very good support to be had in there. But to answer your question, there would have been buzz if something had happened, but there hasn’t. I even saw a status update from Charles.”
 

“ ‘CHARLES BARKLEY… is being a dickbag,’ “ Maurice read off of an imaginary Fangbook status update.
 

Reginald shook his head.
 

“Contact the Council,” said Maurice. “Tell them the Escorts didn’t show. Ask for a new window.”
 

Reginald was still shaking his head. “I don’t like it. It’s not by the book, and ‘by the book’ is all the Council knows.”
 

Reginald stood up, picking at his shredded and bloody pantleg, and began walking back toward the car. Nikki and Maurice followed. Reginald climbed into the drivers’ seat, then made an annoyed noise and moved the seat all the way back, to switch from Maurice-driving mode to Reginald-driving mode. In the back seat, Maurice moved to the opposite side, sitting behind Nikki.

“Where are we going?” said Maurice.
 

“Back to campus, where we just were,” said Reginald. “And when we get there, if we find what I think we’ll find, I’m going to punch the Council members in the face.”
 

“Why?”
 

“Because I get terrible gas mileage on this car, and someone owes me gas money,” said Reginald.
 

He shoved the transmission into gear and the car lurched forward, back past Polaris and toward the expressway.
 

C
OUNCIL

THEY FOUND THE VAMPIRE COUNCIL where the algorithm had left it two weeks earlier — in a cavernous and forgotten space beneath a club on High Street called the Asbury.
 

They’d parked the car less than two blocks from where they’d initially waited for the Escorts and walked a few blocks, through campus streets and alleyways, until they’d come to the front of the club. Posters in the entryway advertised coming bands. There was a very large man in the ticket booth wearing sunglasses. He was asleep. Maurice walked into the ticket booth, kicked the man, and got no response. Then he reached down and pulled up the man’s lip to reveal a slightly-sharper-than-normal canine tooth that would descend into a fang for feeding.
 

“He’s not asleep,” said Maurice. “He’s drunk.”
 

“Vampires can get drunk?” said Reginald. He couldn’t believe the issue had never come up, either in his own experience or in anything he’d read. But then, neither Reginald nor Nikki were really drinkers, and neither was terribly social outside of their own circle of three.
 

“Not like humans.” Maurice kicked the man again. “We don’t metabolize alcohol. But what we
can
metabolize is the blood of a human who’s been drinking a lot. And I’ll tell you something: someone this size would have to drain three or four totally shitfaced humans to get drunk enough to pass out.”
 

Maurice pushed on a small door at the back of the ticket booth. From where Reginald was standing, he could see blood on the back wall of the smaller chamber it revealed and what was either the top of a bald head or something that looked like one.

“Humans like these fine folks here, for instance,” said Maurice, re-closing the door and exiting the ticket booth. He shook his head. “That’s so sloppy. So flagrant. Bodies tossed into a closet like empty whiskey bottles. What’s going to happen on Friday, when college students pour in here to buy tickets to see whatever band is playing?”
 

Nikki stood on her toes, bringing her higher off the ground even than her ill-advised heels, and peered into the ticket booth. There was blood everywhere — on the counter, on the floor, down the unconscious vampire’s shirt.
 

“This is a Guard?”
 

“Probably a lookout.” Maurice opened the door again. “Lookout!” he yelled, then kicked the vampire hard in the groin. He re-closed the door.

“What’s going on here?” said Nikki.
 

“I think the shit might be hitting the fan.”
 

Reginald was nodding. “This makes sense.”
 

“It
does
?”
 

“I’ll show you later. Let’s just say that what’s been coming out of Council lately has been less professional but more honest than usual. Come on.”
 

Reginald led them through the lobby and into the main hall, which looked large in its emptiness. There was a stage across the room bordered by black curtains. Above the stage was a rack of can lights covered with multicolored gels, and further back were several larger spotlights. A shallow sunken dance area with a wood or laminate floor was in front of the stage, and the pit was surrounded by a slightly higher level floor studded with tables. Nobody appeared to be present.
 

To the left of the stage, past the pit, was a door that looked like it might cover a stairwell. A large red EXIT sign was above the door, but the door was ajar and Reginald could see a corridor of some sort beyond it. Above the door, a boxy pneumatic closer had been broken away from the door and hung against it, limp.