Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (48 page)

Walker was just tensing to flee — to run outside and drain the policemen — when Reginald felt a jolt and found Walker suddenly immobile. He looked to the side and saw a shiny metal shaft connecting Walker’s shoulder to one of the wall studs.
 

Reginald ducked out from between Walker and the wall. Walker started to struggle, but suddenly he was just a man pinned down with what appeared to be a giant fork used for turning hot dogs on a grill — probably from this summer’s company picnic. He was, again, only human.
 

When Reginald came around to Walker’s back, he noticed a shiny metal object hanging out of the wound where the barbecue fork had entered Walker’s shoulder. It was the late Clara Norris’s crucifix, which she never failed to wear around her neck every day of her adult life, on a long chain of pure sliver.
 

Maurice stood behind Walker, nodding with satisfaction. He looked up, through the window, at the policemen entering the building. But first things first. He placed one of his hands on each side of Walker’s head and prepared to twist it off. But before he could, Nikki held up a hand.
 

“Wait,” she said.
 

“What?” said Maurice. Walker was wriggling, trying to free himself.
 

“He can’t help it. He wasn’t prepared. Believe me, I know what it feels like.”
 

Maurice’s fangs were out. The expression on his face was like the snarl of a wolf.
 

“He’s a murderer,” he said.
 

“Aren’t
you
?”
 

Maurice looked at Nikki. “He’s a wildcard in a society increasingly filled with wildcards. And what’s more, he’s nearly as hurt, mentally, as those he’s murdered. Killing him would be a mercy.”
 

Nikki stared daggers at him. “No,” she said.
 

Maurice gave Reginald a look, asking for help.
 

“He’s not going anywhere with that silver against his blood,” said Reginald. It wasn’t help. It wasn’t even an answer. But it was the best he could do, because even though he wanted Walker dead as badly as Maurice did, he saw Nikki’s point. He could tell how much of herself she saw in the monster in front of them.

“Look,” Reginald continued, reading Maurice’s face. “Let’s go talk to the police. You can watch Walker if you want. Let’s think this out. And if we have to, in the end, we can always still kill him.”
 

After a minute, Maurice made a small, pained nod.
 

Reginald made jazz hands at Nikki.
 

“Showtime,” he said.
 

C
OPS

REGINALD AND NIKKI MADE IT as far as the lobby before encountering four men with drawn weapons.
 

Nikki had unbuttoned her shirt an extra two buttons to lubricate the conversation — something Reginald had told her not to do because she was bound to embarrass herself. Nikki was effortlessly sexy, meaning that she was sexy at all times other than when she was trying to be. So when she arrived in the lobby, she leaned on a doorframe, arched her back, and pushed her chest out. She licked her lips and made a comment about how the office party had gotten hot enough to call firemen. Realizing her mistake, she corrected herself by saying “I mean, hot enough to call
police
men,” but then slapped herself on the forehead because that was stupid and didn’t make sense. The sudden movement caused one of the policemen to shoot her.
 

The policeman who shot her was a plainclothes detective at the front of the group. He was a tall man with gray hair at the temples. In a movie, his character would be killed one day before retirement, but the detective apparently knew about and was determined to avoid the cliche through any means necessary. After shooting Nikki, he yelled at her to get down on the ground — something pain had mostly caused her to do already. Nikki seemed to find this treatment unfair, but Reginald could understand where the cops were coming from. Sexy or not, Nikki was covered head to toe with blood.
 

The police didn’t seem to have noticed Reginald while they were busy subduing the hot, bloody brunette with the exposed bra. He started to back away, but then one of the uniformed cops saw the message written on the elevator in blood. Reginald locked eyes with the cop and raised his hands, but the cop shot him in the face anyway.
 

“You guys all need to work on your impulse control,” said Reginald from the floor. The bullet had knocked him down and ripped open the back of his throat, but fortunately he still wasn’t feeling pain.
 

“Stand down!” yelled the detective, as if he hadn’t fired one of the shots himself. Reginald couldn’t see the detective because he’d spun as he’d fallen, but the voice Reginald heard suggested that that the speaker was snarling. Imagining the snarl, Reginald realized he’d already concocted a whole imaginary backstory for the detective: He was a seasoned pro who did everything by the books, but he’d been saddled with a loose cannon of a partner in his final days on the force. He liked his coffee with two packets of equal and a spoonful of that shitty powdered creamer. He had a boat named SEA WHISPERER.

A toe nudged Reginald. He turned, then came up onto his knees. A weapon was pointed at his face. Reginald looked past the gun and saw that the three other cops were occupied. One was looking uneasily at the ONLY HUMAN message on the elevator, one was peeking past Reginald into what had to look like a carnival of horrors, and the detective was still covering Nikki.

“It’s fine,” Reginald told the cop. “You missed me.”
 

The cop’s mouth was hanging open. His gun was shaking. Slowly, Reginald reached up and ran two fingers across his cheek. They came away bright red. Then he looked over his shoulder and saw a huge blossom of what used to be his blood and brains.
 

Reginald sighed and looked the cop in the eyes. “All right, we’ll do this the easy way,” he said. “Holster your weapon.”
 

The cop shrugged and slid his gun into its holster.
 

The detective looked over. He seemed alarmed until Reginald met his eyes and said, “That sounds like a good idea. Let’s all put down our weapons and talk this out.”
 

The detective blinked at him, then pursed his lips thoughtfully. “That sounds like a good idea. Let’s all put down our weapons and talk this out,” he said. Then he flicked the safety on the side of his own gun and put it away.
 

One of the two remaining men looked from the detective, to Reginald, to the blood splatter behind him, to the elevators, and then repeated the circuit.
 

The eyes of the last man became locked in Reginald’s gaze. A moment later, he holstered his weapon and said to the still-unglamoured cop, “I’ve always loved you.”
 

The final policeman looked at the other three, incredulous. There was a moment of tense indecision, but then he looked at Reginald, seemed to relax, and put his own gun away.

“Rough night, huh?” said Reginald, standing up. He looked over at Nikki, who, fully healed, walked over to sit on the lobby bench.
 

“Rough night,” the detective agreed.

“First things first,” said Reginald. “You came here and found that we were all drunk and that the call to 911 was a prank. If you get any phone calls about missing people who work in this office, you’ll tell them that you responded to a call here and found the people they’re calling about drunk or passed out and that you… I don’t know… hauled them off to the drunk tank. Do cops still do that?”
 

“I’ve always loved you,” repeated one of the uniformed cops.

“If you hear from anyone who came here looking for someone and found dead people, you’ll think they’re hysterical.” He thought for a moment, then added, “‘Hysterical’ like
crazy
, not like funny.”
 

“Good catch,” said Nikki. “That could have been awkward.”
 

Reginald looked from the eyes of one man to another, to the third, to the fourth. “When, eventually, your fellow policemen discover that something untoward actually did happen here and you can no longer deny it, you’ll remember everything you saw — except that you won’t remember me or this woman. We weren’t here, and you didn’t talk to us. You came in and found everyone dead. You will remember that the traumatic nature of what you saw threw you into some sort of post-traumatic state and caused… temporary amnesia, I guess.”
 

“Nobody will buy that,” said the detective. “I’ve been through too much to go into post-trauma after seeing some bodies.”
 

This was a new and very helpful thing that Reginald had discovered as his glamouring skills developed. Not only was he increasingly able to “second-hand glamour” people he never met by using people he did, but his subjects more and more often pointed out logical flaws and holes in Reginald’s glamour stories. Once, a man Nikki had brought home for Reginald to feed on had asked him, “How did my pants go missing at a Tony Robbins seminar?” during his final debrief. (The man’s pantsless state hadn’t fazed Reginald, which was troubling in itself.) So Reginald had concocted a side story involving a bachelorette party in the hotel where Nikki had found the man, where Tony Robbins had also been Unleashing the Power Within a few thousand people.
 

Reginald took two steps forward, reared back, and punched the detective hard enough to throw him into the opposite wall. The detective rebounded off the drywall but stayed on his feet.
 

Reginald pointed at one of the other cops. “That guy over there slammed your car door on your head while you were here. It gave you a concussion and some short-term memory loss. Better?”
 

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” said the detective, rubbing his scalp.
 

Reginald told the four policemen to walk outside, then followed them through the outer door and into the parking lot. Nikki stood with the five men for two minutes before announcing that she was cold and that her nipples were hard enough to cut glass. She went inside.
 

Reginald, who’d always had good natural insulation, felt fine despite his lack of a coat. He looked at each of the policemen in turn, then said to the detective, “What are you hearing about all of these killings and disasters lately?”
 

“We’re hearing that there are a lot of them,” he replied. “Nobody can keep up.”

One of the uniformed cops added, “People are saying it’s vampires.”
 

Reginald’s eyebrows rose. If the policemen weren’t glamoured, that particular tidbit wouldn’t have come out even if they’d wanted to discuss their work with Reginald. Even amongst themselves, he doubted any of the cops would admit to believing in monsters, but scared people came up with all sorts of preposterous explanations that they’d never share openly.
 

“Why vampires?”
 

The detective, who had apparently heard the same rumors and had access to more case data, answered for him. “Victims are torn apart, often drained of blood. Witnesses have reported seeing people run away in a flash, jump impossibly high, pick up incredibly heavy objects. A lot of the dead appear to have been bitten on the necks — twin punctures through the carotid artery.”
 

“Don’t you think it’s more likely that it’s the work of psychopaths?” said Reginald.

“We’d like to believe that, but it’s getting harder and harder to.”
 

“Why?”
 

“It’s too widespread. It’s too coordinated. Too many people are dying in the same exact way. Whatever’s doing this is too strong and too fast. There are too many strange eyewitness accounts to be coincidence. And it’s happening everywhere — all over the country, and maybe even outside of the country.”
 

“One of the men’s wives made these for the entire department,” said one of the patrolmen, reaching into his shirt. He pulled out a small wooden cross on a length of rawhide string. “Everyone laughed and mocked both her and her husband. She’s a real bible-beater, this woman. The jokes have been constant, and Harper hasn’t had a moment’s peace. But recently, everyone is wearing them. Even while they continue to make their jokes.”
 

Reginald reached out and took the cross in his hand. It was crude and done without craftsmanship, as if it had been made in a hurry. Then he looked into the eyes of each man in turn.
 

“Silver,” he said. “Replace them with
silver
crosses, on silver chains.”
 

One of the patrolmen put his hand on Reginald’s shoulder. “I’ve always loved you,” he said.
 

B
REAKDOWN

THEY WERE IN A DARK car. There was no moon.
 

In the back seat, Maurice sat next to Todd Walker. He’d wrapped the silver crucifix chain twice around Walker’s neck and had told him that even without the silver, he was much faster and much stronger than Walker could imagine. He added that he was absolutely dying to twist Walker’s head off like the lid of a mayo jar, so giving him an excuse to do so wouldn’t be wise.
 

Reginald was driving. Nikki sat in the passenger seat beside him, her face concerned. Every once in a while, she’d turn to look out the side window for minutes at a time and say nothing. The radio had been off earlier, but Nikki had turned it on because she said that silence made the mood too eerie. The volume was low. It was set to a country music station, and during the breaks between songs, the deejays kept talking about calamities that had occurred this week and comparing them to calamities that had occurred last week. Was this week’s mass unexplained college campus killing fundamentally different from the mass unexplained industrial park killings last week? Were things improving or getting worse in given parts of the city? How did the roving rape gangs downtown (which had been operating for weeks) compare with the new roving rape gangs that seemed to be gaining ground in Hilliard? The deejays wondered (in the “why, cruel world?” way that people wondered, more lamenting than actually pondering) what was going on with the world. A caller jokingly mentioned vampires, and another slightly hysterical (again,
crazy
-hysterical rather than
funny
-hysterical) caller theorized that this was the beginning of the end, and that the gates of Hell were swinging wide to allow demons to walk the earth.