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

“You’re making too much of it,” she said. But meeting her eyes, he could tell that she was only saying the words in order to try to convince herself.

“I don’t think so,” he said.
 

“Is this opinion coming from the vampire codex?”
 

“It’s coming from common sense.”
 

“And from Claire?”
 

“From inevitability.”
 

Nikki tried to sit up tall. “We’re still vampires,” she said.
 

“Yes, we are,” said Reginald. His head turned toward the TV. “But what have
they
become?”

A
SSHOLES

REGINALD GOT A PHONE CALL. He wasn’t surprised.
 

“No,” he told the phone. “No fucking way.”

The phone rallied back, trying to be passive-aggressive: “You
have
to. You
have
to help.”
 

“No, I don’t,” Reginald said. “You’ve raised your petard. Prepare to be hoisted upon it.”
 

The voice said nothing, clearly failing to understand. So Reginald added, “Would you prefer a metaphor wherein you get fucked up the ass by a dildo that you yourself created?”
 

On the other end of the line, Charles Barkley cleared his throat. This had to be difficult for Charles. Reginald had been an outsider with the vampire government from the start, and he’d been an outsider with Charles from the moment they’d laid eyes on each other, back in the bowling alley where Reginald had first been turned. Charles had probably drawn the short straw to have to make this call — or maybe Timken had made him do it, reasoning that Reginald and Charles shared a connection. Bygones, after all these years, would surely be bygones. Sure, Charles had tried to kill Reginald a few times, but at the end of the human world, weren’t they all ultimately on the same team?
 

“Look,” said Barkley in a pouty voice. “Just do it.”
 

“Oh, well, after a persuasive argument like that, how can I refuse?”
 

“We’ll pay you for your time.”
 

“I don’t need your money,” said Reginald. “I’m incredibly rich. Turns out, fat sells.”
 

“Come on. This is the future of our race we’re talking about.”
 

“Is it?” said Reginald, switching the phone to his other ear. “Well, then whoopity fucking doo; I’d better snap-to and help out! Vampirism has been
so great
to me. I was turned into a vampire against my will, then tried and persecuted, then almost executed. I saved the world and everyone hated me for it, and when I tried to make peace after being chased out and almost killed, everyone laughed at me. I tried to stop your fucking regime and ended up causing the apocalypse instead, and…”
 

“I don’t think you can take credit for that,” Barkley interjected.
 

“… and when it was all over, your buddy’s right-hand man killed my best friend and maker. And then what happened? Well, as a final insulting capper, I finally embraced my nature as the world’s big fat joke and found out that junk food sells… but when I saw all of you fuckers starting to eat it, I lost my taste for it. Now I only drink blood, and I run. Everyone else eats junk and does nothing all day, and somehow
I’m
still the outcast. And surprise, surprise… 180 degrees later and here we are again with
you
fucked and
me
expected to save the day. So what can you possibly offer to tempt me, Charles? What will make it worth my while to humiliate myself further? Because I’ve been telling you all for
years
that a human uprising was coming and that you’d better prepare — ‘watch them closely,’ I said; ‘don’t get complacent and assume they’ll lie down forever,’ I said — but nobody’s ever listened… and now, when you finally
do
want to listen, do you really expect me to believe that the ‘solution’ you want from me won’t involve killing and torturing a bunch more people?”
 

“To be clear, we don’t believe your bullshit about the human revolution,” said Charles.
 

“Really.”
 

“Not at all. We want advice on how to quell an insurgence.”
 

“Do it your motherfucking self, Charles.”
 

Charles clucked his tongue on the other end of the line. “You sure have grown up,” he said. “Such a mouth you’ve developed. You weren’t like this when you were Maurice’s pet.”
 

Reginald felt his face redden. Charles had managed to insult both him and Maurice in one backhanded comment, and he’d done it while asking Reginald’s strategic mind for help. But rising to his bait wouldn’t be the right choice. In over forty years of dealing with Charles — and almost another forty years before that of dealing with people just
like
Charles — he’d learned that you couldn’t actually fight fire with fire. Snapping back at Charles would only make things worse.
 

“Have a nice life, Councilman Barkley.”
 

Charles huffed, but then Reginald heard activity on the other end of the phone. A voice in the background told Charles to let him try, and Reginald prepared himself to listen to more bullshit from some other loudmouth government asswipe.
 

“Re-gggggie,”
said the voice that came onto the phone, drawing his loathed nickname out into two long syllables.
 

“Who is this?” Reginald asked. But it was just a stalling tactic. He knew exactly who he was talking to. He remembered vocal patterns as perfectly as he remembered everything else.
 

“I’m hurt,” said the voice. As he said it, Reginald could imagine a cleft chin and tombstone-white teeth curling into a dramatic frown.
 

“I die, and then the world ends,” said Reginald, “and still somehow I have to deal with you.”
 

“Hey. We shared a coffee machine and glances at chicks in working-girl stockings. Am I right?”
 

“I’m hanging up, Todd.”
 

“Hey,” said Walker’s smooth voice. “Remember Noel?” She could’ve been hot if she’d ever done herself up right.”
 

“I remember Noel,” said Reginald. “I found her hand under the copier and set it next to the rest of her body after you killed her, so that she could be buried intact.”
 

“I didn’t kill Noel,” said Walker.
 

“Scott, then.”
 

“Okay, I killed Scott. But I was a kid with a machine gun that first night. Wasn’t it like that when you were newly turned?”
 

“What do you want, Todd?”
 

“I want you to come to New York, same as Chuckie does. We’ll take in a show.” This was a joke. Most of New York was deserted even at night because the vampire population was so small and hence was safer in a cluster. The city had proven impossible to clear, even forty years later, because it was simply too large and the human bands in the old neighborhoods kept moving around. So the US Vampire Council had walled off the southern tip of Manhattan and fortified the USVC building in the financial district, and it had let the rest of the city go feral. Broadway had gone with it. The only “shows” still playing in the vampire section of New York were sex shows, of which Walker probably partook often.
 

“Fuck you.”
 

“Come on. We’ll make it worth your while.”
 

“I have all the money I’ll ever need,” Reginald said. It was true, too. After the vampire government had gotten the presses going and re-minted world currency to replace the scattered currencies of the human world, the system had stabilized surprisingly fast, and Mogul Reginald had cornered more than his share.
 

“Hey,” said Walker, chuckling. “How is Nikki?”
 

Reginald was taken off guard. He didn’t reply.
 

“You’re married, right? How is she?”
 

“Fine.”
 

“Just to be clear, I meant ‘How IS she.’
IS
. You know what I’m saying.” He chuckled with sexual innuendo.

Reginald prepared to hang up.
 

“She was so hot. I’ll bet she’s really wild, too. And totally fucking tight. You know what I mean by…”
 

“Tell Charles I said I fucked his mother,” said Reginald, taking the phone away from his cheek.
 

“And with her being in the Underground?” Walker continued, his voice now sounding canned with the phone no longer against Reginald’s ear. He made panting noises. “Seriously, revolutionary chicks are so hot. I can just imagine Nikki firing a gun. Just a regular human
gun
. You know, so the recoil makes her tits bounce.”
 

Reginald stopped with his finger hovering above the END button. He put the phone back to his ear.
 

“What was that?”
 

“Oh, come on. I heard you never miss anything. I’ll bet you heard me unbuckle my pants a minute ago so I could beat off thinking about your wife.”
 

Reginald felt his fangs extend. He was suddenly sure he could lift a house. “I’ll kill you,” he said.
 

“Good. I’m in New York. Come here and maybe we won’t send CPC to arrest Nikki as a subversive.”
 

“They don’t even do anything,” said Reginald. “They’re just lobbyists and paper-pushers.”
 

“All I know is that they’re on the restricted roster,” said Walker. “‘Report your neighbors.’ ‘Anarchists are a threat to us all.’ You know the slogans.”
 

“Sounds like Claude Toussant’s work,” said Reginald. He hadn’t heard anything about the “Report your neighbors” initiative for over thirty years, but Claude had a million zingers at the ready. One recent poster and TV propaganda campaign showed a young human boy with a sinister scowl on his face, holding a stake. The caption read:
He’ll grow up to kill your family. Will you let him?

“And that’s another reason to come,” said Walker, twisting the knife. “To catch up with family. Claude will be so happy to see you.”
 

There were a million things Reginald could say to that, but he held himself back. Just as with Charles, Walker would only be egged on by anything else he said. The die was cast. If they knew about Nikki’s involvement in the Underground, then he had to go. He wouldn’t make it worse by opening his chest to stabbings.
 

“When and where?” said Reginald.
 

And Walker, grinning all the way through the phone line, told him.
 

N
EW
Y
ORK
, N
EW
Y
ORK

NIKKI WENT WITH HIM. BRIAN went with him too. The three of them were like a posse.
 

Reginald didn’t strictly need Nikki or Brian, but he didn’t like the idea of going to see Walker without moral support. Besides, he had plenty of money to blow on the trip. So they took a shielded jet — private, because with only ten million people in the world and with half of them being slaves to the other half, there was little demand for regular commercial air traffic between any two cities. There was a daily flight from New York to Los Angeles and another from New York to Geneva (with a stopover in Paris), but the other settlements (Chicago, Berlin, the Far East Council’s home city of Beijing — an abandoned city if ever there was one) were serviced once a week or less.
 

They landed at the bones of JFK airport near three A.M, then got into a blackout limo for the drive into the city. They traveled only on patrolled roads, but Reginald couldn’t help but wonder about the wildlands beyond. New York had been home to almost as many people in its day than existed in the entire world now, and a lot of those people had run to the suburbs during the purge. CPC and other agencies claimed that they tracked humans on their satellites, but the world — even just the area outside of (and, honestly,
inside
of) New York’s boroughs — was a big place. There were only a handful of vampire cities, and that left a lot of open space for human men and women to roam.
 

And grow.
 

And plan.
 

And reproduce.

And innovate.
 

As they drove, Reginald stared at the screen where the window would have been decades ago, watching as the camera showed him the city’s skyline approaching in green-tinted black. He would ordinarily retract the shields for nighttime driving, but Timken had sent the limo — and, being a government vehicle, it was armored and didn’t open up. So Reginald took in the view in the enclosed space as best he could, watching both the city and the deserted sprawls behind them. He wondered again what might be brewing where vampire eyes weren’t watching. Reginald had spent some time tooling through the wildlands out of curiosity, and he’d seen a lot of video footage and documentaries of what the wildlands had become. All but the largest cities were now overgrown with plant life, looking like something out of a post-apocalyptic storybook — which, when you got right down to it, was exactly what they were.
 

The documentaries said there were isolated bands of wild humans who lived in those thickets, but Reginald had always questioned the numbers they quoted. Back before he’d begun to disbelieve the codex, he spent inordinate amounts of time trying to work out the mechanics of a human uprising. He filled notebooks with handwritten calculations out of habit, despite the fact that he could do the figuring in his head. He began to believe that there were many more humans hiding than the Vampire Nation believed — that there had to be in order for the predictions to make sense. But as he worked and panicked and tried to raise his futile, laughable alarm, the days stretched into weeks. Weeks stretched into years. Years stretched into decades. And as more time passed, it all began to seem like bullshit: the codex, the uprising, even his own math on the matter.