Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest (2 page)

It was a good plan, and after four decades, it seemed to be working. The Vampire Nation had gone on just fine. The angels hadn’t shown up with praise or condemnation, and vampires (especially those 99% of new ones) were already beginning to doubt that they’d ever really existed. Reginald had raised a stink when he’d first been duped by the codex (feeling like Jor-El, futilely telling Krypton that the planet was doomed before sending baby Superman into space in a giant sea urchin), but it turned out that nobody wanted to hear about a human war so soon after the last one. Reconstruction required everyone’s full attention. There was work to do. Bills to be paid. TV to watch. The irony was that vampires had started the war feeling like humanity had grown soft… but seeing as most modern vampires had never hunted and there were now six dozen vampire cable TV channels, it seemed to Reginald that all the world had done was to swap “soft” for “soft with pointy teeth.”

Just as Reginald was starting to wonder if he should head upstairs and slip into bed with Nikki, the phone in his pocket trilled. He pulled it out and looked at it. Then, with a welcome and unexpected smile on his face, he tapped the screen and took the call.
 

“Hey Claire,” he said.
 

“Hey Reginald,” she replied. Then there was a long pause. It was so like Claire. She had something to say, and she’d called him, but now that they were talking she wasn’t going to say a thing.
 

“What’s up, Claire?” he said.
 

On the other end of the line, he heard her swallow. “It’s starting,” she said.

O
LD
Y
OUNG
G
IRL

CLAIRE LIVED ALONE ON THE other side of the city. It broke Reginald’s heart that she lived alone, but she said she wanted it that way. What was she supposed to do — shack up with a vampire and have some vampire kids? Because that was all the rage these days, similar to how first-world humans used to adopt children from third-world nations. A well-to-do vampire couple would head to one of the farms, choose a human (usually an adult; kid vampires were creepy), buy them, and then turn them. It was usually illegal to turn humans because enough turnings could skew the balance between the species, but people rich enough to afford their own milker could usually wrangle the necessary connections. The proud parents would then treat the new vampire like a child for the first few weeks, but given that the new vampire was an adult, the relationships usually degraded into three-way marriages. It was a distinct difference versus the old adoption systems.
 

Reginald, who didn’t change from year to year, never got fully used to the fact that Claire did. He somehow expected her to be perpetually ten or eleven as she’d been when he’d met her, when she’d saved the world the first time, and when their joint predictions had failed to save the world the second time. But when he arrived at Claire’s door shortly after nightfall that evening, she came to the door as the same grown woman she’d been the last time he’d seen her: petite with long, light brown hair, by all appearances in her late twenties despite actually being 51. Claire considered her inexplicable slow aging to be a happy medium: she wanted to get older, but didn’t want to do so quickly. The slowness of it gave Reginald hope. Maybe, if she moved to the outskirts and peeked under enough rocks, she’d be able to find a nice human man while she was still young enough to have a normal life and family with him. Not that “normal” had much meaning in Claire’s life.
 

Reginald said hello. Claire invited him inside. The exchange had an automatic feel, because Claire invited
everyone
inside. She had to. If a courier tried to hand her a package uninvited, he might feel the repellant force that protected her human home against vampires, and that would be bad. But with that small issue aside, she could easily pass for vampire. Thanks to the strange biology she’d exhibited since puberty (something Reginald suspected was due to her father being an ice-penised incubus), Claire registered as cold on the City Protection Corps satellites that watched the city. Her aging was slow enough that her neighbors, who she avoided, hadn’t noticed her glacial progression. In another forty years, she might become different enough to make moving a necessity, but for now she was just another vampire next door.

“How do you feel?” Reginald asked, coming inside and making himself comfortable on Claire’s couch.
 

Claire sat on the ottoman across from him. “Okay, I guess. But it’s… I don’t know how to describe it other than to say that I can feel something starting to… starting to
change
.”

“Like you’re getting sick again? Like the first time, after the war?”
 

She shook her head. “Not like that. Something weird was ‘waking up’ when it started — when I got so sick. I feel it all the time these days, but now it’s becoming different. I feel something being wound up. It’s changing. It’s
starting.”
 

“What does that mean?”
 

Claire flapped her arms, giving a very adolescent expression of frustration. Reginald watched her with pity. In many ways, she’d never had a chance to grow up. There simply hadn’t been the time.

“I don’t know, Reginald! I
never
know, okay? Same as it’s always been. You used to ask me to predict things, but I could never see the information in my head in the way you wanted me to see it. I see everything, every day, as liquid. Things happen and I realize afterward that I’d known they were going to happen all along. I’ll go to an appointment early by mistake, realize I’ve shown up at the wrong time, and then learn that someone wrote the appointment down wrong and that the time I arrived is actually correct. I’ll remember that someone promised me something, get angry when they don’t remember promising it to me, then realize that I’m recalling a promise made three hundred years ago as if it were yesterday — or, in a few cases, tomorrow. Do you know what that’s like? To know everything but not really
know
that you know it, or how to control it?”
 

Reginald thought of the codex. “Yes,” he said.
 

“It’s not like that. I’m not a vampire. You can
see
the information, at least — like it’s in a big jumbled filing cabinet. Not me. For me, it’s like soup.
You
have control over whether you think about the stuff in your head. I don’t. And so when I call you and tell you that it’s starting,
I don’t even know what that means. What’s
starting? How do I know? Where will it start — whatever ‘it’ is? Why? Or is it even a real thing?” She began to wipe furiously at her eyes, angry at her own sudden tears of frustration.
 

“It’s okay, Claire. If anyone understands what you feel — how you
live,
I mean — I… well, I’m the closest you’ve got, I guess.”
 

She rolled her eyes angrily. “I just wish we knew why I am how I am. Have I found the fountain of youth? Or am I just a freak? What am I, Reginald? Am I human? Am I an incubus? Am I a stilted vampire? If we could just get someone to look at my blood…”
 

Reginald shook his head. They’d been having this argument forever, but there was no way they could take Claire’s blood in for analysis. Reginald wanted to understand why she presented as a kind of half-vampire — why she was cold but didn’t burn in the sun, why her cuts healed quickly and why she could bend energy and electricity to her will — but it wasn’t worth the risk. He had no idea what her blood might reveal, but he knew that unlike himself, Claire didn’t require regular infusions of red blood cells to live. For now, nobody was suspicious of her; Claire was cold and dark, stayed indoors, and got regular blood deliveries like everyone else. But if a lab decided that she — or even an anonymous test subject that Reginald somehow had access to — might be human? Well, that would be bad.
Very
bad.
 

“It’s too risky, Claire.”
 

“Couldn’t you send it to the people Nikki knows? Those Underground people?”
 

“You mean the picketers with vague ambitions to one day circulate a petition?”
 

“Underground science labs. ‘Fighting the power’ and whatnot. Those kinds of people must have
a few
nerds with microscopes who could…”
 

“I told you,” Reginald interrupted, “I’ve looked at your blood under a microscope and it doesn’t reveal anything. We don’t need nerds with microscopes. We need nerds with gene-sequencers.”
 

“And there are none in the Underground?”
 

“No, Claire. Come on. Don’t tell Nikki I said this, but those idiots are mostly just hippies with nothing better to do than rattle their bongs and act like hypocrites. They drink blood just like the rest of us because (let’s face it) we’re
all
fucking monsters. The only issue they can even hang their hat on is the inbreeding thing lately where the humans keep getting sick. They’re barely worthy of having a Fangbook page. You know that.”
 

Claire rolled her eyes — a mannerism that hadn’t changed since she’d been forty years younger, since her face had been fifteen years younger. She’d grown into a pretty young (-ish) woman, petite and lithe and with a charming non-fanged smile that she accented with falsies whenever she went out. But when she did things like roll her eyes, Reginald couldn’t help but think of the little girl in the coat with the anorak hood, content to invite a vampire into her house as long as he kept her company while her mother was too drunk to care.

“Some resistance,” she said.

“They shuffle paperwork. You just wait; one day they’re going to rise up with a heinous bake sale fundraiser and will propose lobby reform. It’ll be chaos.”
 

Claire sighed, then moved into the kitchen. She opened a cabinet and pulled out a box of Snaco Triscuit clones. She held the box toward Reginald and shook it.
 

“No thanks.”
 

“I have taquitos, too. The non-blood kind.”
 

“Claire, you know I don’t eat that stuff anymore,” he said. “I haven’t eaten human food since the end of the war.”

“You don’t
ever
eat it? Even when you’re home alone and nobody is watching?”
 

Reginald shrugged. He simply wasn’t interested in those old habits anymore. He was a vampire, and keeping that in mind after the war had seemed important — especially given how endangered traditional vampires were these days. How many modern vampires had ever hunted? How many ran anywhere when they could drive in light-tight vehicles? How many knew how to glamour? There was no point, seeing as few modern vampires had ever seen a human up close and would probably be afraid of them if they did. Vampires these days didn’t even think of themselves as fast or strong because they moved at the same speed as their neighbors. With no basis for comparison, vampiric speed, strength, sight, hearing, vision, and even sex had simply become the norm. Reginald had seen vampire porn. It didn’t interest him because it looked like it was on fast-forward.
 

“No, not ever.”
 

“But it’s
your
company. It’s how you made your fat stacks of cash.”
 

“Yeah, well,” Reginald said, “sometimes I feel like a disillusioned mother who wonders at the horror of what she’s given birth to.”
 

Claire ignored the statement’s implications. “You just get sick of it, being around it all day?”

“I guess.” He didn’t want to talk about it. It wasn’t that he felt like he was better than other vampires; he just didn’t want to be like them. At all.
 

Claire shrugged and popped one of the crackers into her mouth. “Well, for a race that doesn’t need this food, you did a pretty good job of replicating it. And thank God. Because if I couldn’t eat human food openly, I’d have to move out into the wildlands with my mom. And it kind of sucks out there.”
 

“How
is
your mom?” Reginald asked.
 

Claire popped another cracker. “Old.”
 

“She doing okay?”
 

Claire shook her head side to side, pursing her lips in a shit-happens sort of expression. “Not really.”
 

“I’m sorry.”
 

“She’s over eighty in a post-healthcare society. She’s just old, Reginald. It’s okay, really.” She paused, suddenly thoughtful. “You know, the strange thing is that neither of us mind the fact that she’s dying because dying is at least a
change
. You haven’t changed even one little bit in the time I’ve known you. Neither has Nikki. To tell the truth, I find the idea of getting old and dying one day strangely comforting. It’s funny: I never liked change growing up. I wanted everything to always stay the same forever — other than, of course, getting a little bigger so kids would stop picking on me. But when you spend this long watching perpetual sameness, change starts to look good again. It’s like reading a good book. Good books are only good if they eventually have an end.”
 

“Deep.”
 

Claire shrugged and ate another cracker.
 

“I think it’s funny that you don’t think anything has changed,” said Reginald, suddenly aware that he was procrastinating. Claire’s mind might flit from thing to thing, but Reginald remembered perfectly well why Claire had called him — and he also remembered just how nervous her voice had sounded on the phone. She seemed calm now, but his mind was still clanging with those two simple words that had chilled him to his already-chilled bones:
It’s starting.
 

Claire shrugged. “Meh. So what? Dark buildings. Dark cars. Sun blockers and UV domes. Blood on the shelves in the supermarket…”
 

“… decimation of the world’s population. A takeover by monsters.
Mad Max
style living outside of the city perimeter…”