Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (67 page)

“You promise?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I promise. I keep my promises.”
 

Then something occurred to him. Wasn’t she pushing electrons right now?

“Have you tried other stuff?” he asked. “Stuff that looks all…”
 

“Like stuff a wizard would do?” she said.
 

“I guess.”
 

“Like appearing on the side of a van beside a woman in a bikini and a tiger’s head, possibly holding a laser gun that goes ‘ZAP!’?”

“Um…”
 

“The answer is yes,” said Claire, laughing. “What little girl doesn’t want to be able to shoot lightning bolts and read crystal balls? But so far, zilch. But that would be bad ass.”
 

“
Claire
,” Reginald said in a scolding tone.

“Sorry. That would be
awesome
, I mean.”
 

Reginald thought to have her try a few things while he watched, but there would be time for that later, after the election. He bet himself a dozen donuts that she would eventually to be able to do things like her video image had just shown. She’d probably be able to control thoughts, too. It was all just energy. And as a plus, even if he was wrong, he’d win a dozen donuts.
 

“But to my original point,” he said. “The election software is different from what’s been used for the smaller Fangbook votes so far. It isn’t native to Fangbook. It’s open to scrutiny but is very black box once you’re under the hood. There will be no way to determine if you can hack it until it’s up and running. Without data in it, it’s just encryption.”
 

“Your silly encryption is nothing to one as powerful as me,” said Claire with a mad scientist’s laugh.
 

“You don’t know that.”
 

“Sure I do. Let me at it. Let me see right now if I can get inside it.”
 

“Getting inside doesn’t prove that you’ll be able to influence a live data set,” said Reginald. “It’s complicated.”

“You mean that you don’t think I’ll understand it.”
 

“I didn’t mean that. But also yes. I don’t think you’ll be able to understand it, because I don’t. It doesn’t use encryption keys. I don’t see how that’s possible, and I’m super awesome.”
 

“What are encryption keys?” said Claire.
 

“I told you that you wouldn’t be able to understand it,” said Reginald.
 

A spark jumped from Reginald’s keyboard to his finger, making him jump. It was a tiny thing, no more than a static shock.
 

“I don’t have to understand it to do it,” said Claire.
 

But despite Claire’s confidence, Reginald, Nikki, Maurice, and Karl remained skeptical and nervous. None of the rest of the EU Council knew of the plan because 1) it was highly, highly illegal, bordering on treason, and 2) it seemed prudent to minimize the potential security leaks behind the whole operation. Karl didn’t believe any of it was remotely possible. Nikki was guardedly optimistic but unconvinced. Maurice was mostly apathetic, and Reginald was a basket case.
 

Six days before the election, the impartial committee in charge of the election announced that all voters would be required to reconfirm their identity via a genetic scan. This introduced an entire new level of difficulty and set off alarm bells in Reginald’s head. Claire would no longer be required just to manipulate a simple pool of votes once past the security. The committee had distributed devices that took a finger-stick blood sample before opening a two-minute voting window for an individual voter. Reginald knew nothing about the technology. It must electronically assay for a genetic fingerprint that was unique from person to person, but which sequence did they use? There was no way that the system was storing each voter’s entire genetic sequence. That wasn’t possible… but then, neither was encryption that didn’t use encryption keys. And what, then, did the system do with that data? Did it store the sample data beside the vote… and if so, was it time-stamped? Would Claire’s manipulations change those timestamps? Would the addition of a whole new genetic sample table (or series of tables) affect her ability to change the votes? And if it did, how could she possibly manage that much interconnected data?
 

“Breathe,” Claire told Reginald. “I keep telling you, this isn’t about moving numbers around. This is
magic
.”
 

“What does
that
mean?” said Reginald, not at all mollified.
 

“It means that it’s like dreaming. Do you build every element of a dream? Or do you have a full, very-real-at-the-time dream experience that you don’t question because your subconscious mind knows what it’s doing?”
 

“This isn’t making me feel better.”
 

“Reginald, I can create a video right now of you skateboarding with Gerald Ford. Do you really think I’m such an excellent artist that I know where to put those billions of pixels? Or do you think that either my subconscious mind or something outside of me might be taking the
spirit
of my intention and handling the details for me?”
 

“Make your fingers spark,” said Reginald.
 

Onscreen, the small girl with the charming smile snapped her fingers and there was a bright white flash, like a photo strobe.

“Did you do that for real, or was it a video effect?”
 

“I keep my promises,” she said.
 

Reginald couldn’t quiet his gut, so he fed it. He couldn’t quiet his mind, so Nikki fed Reginald’s gut, this time with nourishing blood. And ultimately, Maurice’s apathy convinced both of them that there was no point in driving themselves insane with worry. It would either work or it wouldn’t, and if it
didn’t
work, that was no worse than having never tried. So with an attitude of
que sera, sera
(which Karl informed him wasn’t even correct syntax), Reginald sat down in front of his computer on election day and waited to watch the future of the world.
 

He didn’t need to worry. For most of the day, Claire did nothing and Reginald heard nothing from her. The polls closed at noon GMT, and until 11am GMT, Reginald simply watched election coverage and fretted with Nikki beside him. Then a little after eleven, Claire Skyped him and informed him that Charles Barkley was now leading the election by six percent — just enough to win without being obvious, as Reginald had requested. Reginald asked if she was sure. She rolled her eyes. Reginald asked if it had been difficult. Claire rolled her eyes again, and at the same time, a video appeared on Reginald’s computer screen beside the Skype window. It showed Reginald skateboarding with Gerald Ford.
 

Nikki’s face scrunched as she peered at the screen.
 

“I thought he was dead,” she said.
 

“Well, so am I,” said Reginald.
 

Reginald, assurances and skateboarding videos with Gerald Ford aside, was unconvinced. Claire had been projecting her interpretation of the aggregate data into his computer screen all day, and he said that he hadn’t seen it tick up in Barkley’s favor. Claire told him that he was looking at the wrong data set, and with that, the window showing the Fangbook data changed. And he saw that indeed, Barkley was leading. But only by five percent.
 

“They really like the other guy, so new votes have already closed the gap on what I just did,” said Claire. “I’ll tweak it again as it gets closer to ending.”
 

The next hour passed without incident. At midnight GMT, coverage announced that polls were closed and that the counting had begun. But Reginald already had the results in front of him. Former Councilman Charles Barkley had captured forty-seven percent of the vote. Nicholas Timken had fallen short, at forty-three percent.
 

Reginald had ten minutes to meditate on what he’d just done — what kind of a future the Vampire Nation and the world was in for under Barkley — before the door at the top of the cathedral room staircase exploded inward and a flood of Sedition Army troops rushed in with their Boom Sticks drawn.

B
USTED

REGINALD LOOKED UP, JUMPED, AND backed against the wall. Nikki was beside him; she flinched forward to fight but he held her by the arm, as hard as he could, until she looked over and saw his wide eyes and stopped struggling.
 

Councilman Mellus was coming up from the lower catacombs when the rubble from the door began to rattle down the steps and, seeing the intruders, rushed at them without thinking. The soldier in front raised the Boom Stick he was carrying. There was a bright blue spark a snapping noise and Mellus disintegrated instantly into ash, billowing upward in a surprised cloud and then settling down as if someone had just pulled a rug out from under it. Then several others — Lola, who’d seduced the angel Santos, the eternally pregnant Greta, a man Reginald barely knew named Harmon, others — blurred like lightning into the room, having heard the explosion. The stood ready with hands hooked into claws, their fangs out. They advanced toward the shock troops as if they hadn’t realized what the armored soldiers were carrying.
 

There was a blur and Karl appeared in front of the group, facing the troops, his arms wide, his palms facing backward. He pushed them back, repeating over and over not to engage, to stand down, as if the vampires of the Chateau were the soldiers. And still the Sedition Army advanced. They moved like humans, slowly, their red helmets’ blank visors scanning their opposition, sizing them up. They also moved like military; one walked forward, stopping at the bottom of the stairs with his weapon out and then motioning for the others to walk down and join him.
 

More vampires spilled up from the lower tunnels, having been drawn by the noise. The troops faced them, Karl urgently repeating their every order:
Get back. Don’t move
.
 

Reginald hadn’t moved from his computer. He still gripped Nikki’s arm tight enough to leave a mark (until she healed, anyway) and he still stood dead still, his brain processing it all, categorizing, analyzing their chances. But this wasn’t like the American Council escape. These weren’t vampires fighting with their hands and teeth. These were trained troops with weapons. It wouldn’t matter whether Reginald could appear to slow time or push away pain. It wouldn’t matter how fast the Chateau vampires could move or how well he could direct them. The twitch of one finger on any of the red-helmeted men would end them with a shard of silver through the heart.
 

There was movement behind Karl, and Reginald realized that Maurice was pushing his way through from the back of the crowd. His mind reached a lightning-fast conclusion: Maurice was the only new arrival to the siege who knew what they’d done, why the troops were here, and what it was all likely to mean. Maurice’s movements said that he was miliseconds away from fighting for his life. He either hadn’t yet noticed their Boom Sticks or thought he could outmaneuver them.
 

Once he was past the crowd, Maurice was going to attack. And then he was going to die.
 

Reginald and Nikki were against a wall very near the entrance to the catacombs, closer to Maurice than Maurice was to the soldiers. Reginald felt a twitch in his grip as Nikki wrenched herself free. Maurice cleared the crowd and leaped at the same time Nikki did. They met in the air, Nikki taking Maurice around the waist like a flying tackle. They slammed to the ground in the corner, still safely back from the troops, who twitched forward and pointed their weapons. Nikki and Maurice flipped over. They flipped over again, now with Nikki on top. She wasn’t a tenth as strong as he was, but she was on top with his hands pinned, and something in her face must have caused things to click for Maurice. All of the tension went out of his body. Then it was over, and Nikki got up and released him, and Maurice nodded something to her that looked like a thank-you. Both of them returned to Reginald’s side. The invading soldiers watched it all happen, only vaguely interested, their Boom Sticks held out like microphones.

The soldier in the lead pulled off his helmet. He was a young-looking vampire with a head of wavy blonde hair and a narrow, hawklike face. He holstered his Boom Stick. Then, with a look but no word, he walked over to Reginald, flanked by two others who hadn’t removed their helmets or holstered their weapons.
 

The man looked at Reginald, then at the screen of his computer. The monitoring window that showed the election data was still open in the center, green text visible on a black background.
 

The blonde man looked back up at Reginald and gave him a look that was strange; it was almost as if the man, who Reginald didn’t know, was disappointed in him.
 

Wearing gloves, the soldier removed a pair of silver handcuffs from a pouch on his belt and said, “Reginald Baskin, you are under arrest for treason, as an enemy of the Sovereign American Vampire Nation.”

“As a seditionist?” said Maurice from behind Reginald.
 

Keeping his eyes on Maurice, the soldier closed the cuffs on Reginald’s wrists.
 

F
LIGHT

REGINALD LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW of the plane. Below him, the Atlantic ocean looked black and bottomless, an endless void pocked only by a few pinprick lights from freighters.
 

The blonde soldier was beside him, now wearing civilian clothes. Beside the blonde man, in the aisle seat, was another vampire Reginald didn’t know. He had a solid, no-nonsense build and wore a solid, no-nonsense black haircut. This one’s name was Rolf. The blonde man was Tim. Rolf was German and Tim was American. They were a perfect example of the new spirit of international cooperation. And, by virtue of the full permission that the vampires had to transport a prisoner overseas on a human airliner, it was a perfect example of inter
species
cooperation. Reginald stared at the sliver handcuffs on his wrists, which were resting in his lap. Everyone was working together happily, all in agreement that the folks in the Chateau de Differdange needed to be quelled. If Reginald were in anyone else’s shoes, he’d think that he was the bad guy here.