Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (10 page)

Feeling triumphant, he stepped across the threshold.
 

Then, he stepped across the threshold.
 

Then, he raised a foot and stepped across the threshold.
 

He looked down at his feet. Every time he placed a foot inside the house, an invisible force propelled it backward. With the repeated stepping and pushing out, it looked like he was doing the moonwalk.

And from inside, the girl said, “Cool.” Then she walked forward, closed the door in Reginald’s face, and locked it.
 

F
UCK
T
HIS

WITH THE DOOR LOCKED AGAINST him, Reginald sat on the stoop and resolved to simply sit where he was until the sun rose. He’d burn, he’d die, and that would be the end of Maurice’s little rash decision.
 

“Hey,” said a voice from above. He looked up. It was the girl, her head and arms hanging out of an open second-floor window.
 

Reginald sighed.
 

“Hey,” she repeated.
 

Reginald thought,
Go away. You’ve humiliated me, so let me catch my breath, and then I’ll die.

Something hit him on the head and bounced to the step at his feet. It was a button.
 

“Hey.”
 

Another button hit his head.
 

“Hey.”
 

And another.

He looked up. “What? What do you want?”
 

“What’s your name?” she said. “My name’s Claire.”

“Reginald.”
 

She frowned. “Do people call you Reggie?”
 

“They do. But I don’t like it.”
 

“Okay, Reginald,” she said.
 

After a few seconds, she said, “What’s it like, being a vampire?”
 

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

“How did you get turned?”

But he didn’t feel like small talk. Not in the least. He sighed and played with the buttons at his feet. Then he had an idea. He looked up. The girl was watching his feet too, watching him scoot the buttons around on the step below him.

“Hey,” he said.
 

“Yeah?” Still looking at his feet.
 

“Hey.”

“What?” Now looking at the top of his head.
 

“Look here,” he said, pointing at his eyes.
 

“No.”
 

“Just for a second.”

She kept looking at the top of his head. “No.”
 

“Just… I want to see something.”
 

She ducked inside, then reappeared. Something small flew out of the window and hit his shoulder. It was a keychain. He bounced the thing on the palm of his hand. On the keychain, he saw darkness. Fangs. It was from the teen vampire series
Twilight
.
 

Only, it wasn’t a
Twilight
keychain at all, he realized. It was from the HBO TV series
True Blood
.
 

“You ran into the wrong girl if you’re expecting to pull one over on me,” she said. “I know all about vampires. You’re not going to glamour me.”
 

Reginald looked at the keychain for a moment, then tossed it onto the lower step with the buttons. He sighed, then looked at the streetlamp. It was wrought iron. Pretty, for something so utilitarian.
 

“How old are you?” he asked the girl.

“Ten.”
 

“And your mother lets you watch
True Blood?
”
 

“She doesn’t know what I do,” said the girl. “She’s not home most of the time.”

“Is she home now?”

“Nope. Not for another hour. That’s when her second job ends.”
 

“So you walk home by yourself because the church closes at ten?”

“Yep,” said the girl.
 

“I wouldn’t let you do that if I was your father,” said Reginald. “Or if I was someone who worked at the church.”

“It’s not far,” she said in a voice that suggested the matter was closed. Then she said, “You look pretty bad, Reginald.”
 

“Thanks.”
 

“I mean you look sick. There’s something wrong with you.”
 

“I’m very hungry,” he said. “I’m not sure what happens to a vampire when they can’t feed, but I’m about to find out, and so far it’s not so great.”
 

Reginald let his head sag, wondering how long it would be until the sun rose. At least eight full hours, he realized.
 

He felt more tired than tired. This was too much. He wished his short vampire life could just end now, before he had to endure more torture. What good was it being a hunter who couldn’t catch prey? What good was it being a creature of the night who couldn’t move with stealth, who couldn’t lift a car, who couldn’t seduce women into nights of exaggerated, over-the-top sex? He’d given up daytime and donuts to become a vampire. And for what? There was no upside. He’d been a fat outcast in the human world, and he was now a fat outcast in the vampire world. You had to know when enough was enough. You had to have the awareness to quit when you’d hit a dead end.
 

Behind him, the door opened and closed. He turned, expecting to see that the girl had come out for some reason, but instead he found a steak sitting in a shallow Styrofoam tray and wrapped with cellophane, the way the supermarkets sold them.
 

A minute later, the girl was back at the window. She looked at the steak, still studiously avoiding Reginald’s eyes.
 

“I don’t know if that will help,” she said, “but I don’t really want you out there when my mom comes home.” Then, realizing she may have said something she shouldn’t, she added, “Just so you know, she’s a runner. I wouldn’t waste your energy trying to chase her.”
 

Reginald looked up. “What am I supposed to do? Sink my fangs into it?”
 

“I don’t know. There’s blood in there, is all I know, and even though I don’t want you to die, I’m sure not going to let you bite me.”
 

Reginald tilted the tray and watched a shallow pool of beef blood roll around at the bottom. It was cow blood, but maybe it would be better than nothing. He was so, so hungry. Tossing his pride aside, he ripped the cellophane off the package and tipped the corner of the tray into his mouth.
 

He had no experience drinking blood so there was nothing to compare it to, but to Reginald, who was starving, the effect of those few drops of cow’s blood was immediate. Warmth rushed through his veins, to his brain, to the tips of his fingers, wrapped his heart in a blanket and gave it a kiss. Then the wave subsided and he simply felt a little less drained, a little less on the edge of death. It was a start.
 

He bit the steak with his fangs and tried to suck the blood out of it. It didn’t have working arteries, so no gush of blood came out, but he found he was able to suck the liquid out of the spongy tissue. He squeezed it. He licked it like a lollipop. He even tried to wring it out into his mouth. And then, after he’d gotten out all of the blood that was forthcoming and had licked his fingers, he ate it piece by piece. Slowly it went down, and as it did, there was a quenching noise in his stomach. Then he realized he felt
alive
— or at least, as healthy and alive as he’d felt a week ago, as a human.
 

Reginald took a deep breath of relief and blew it out between pursed lips. “Thank you, Claire,” he said. “That was fantastic. I don’t know how to thank you.” He thought that human courtesy was probably beneath vampires, but he was still mentally more human than vampire and the girl had just saved his life.

“You can go home now,” she said. “Before my mom gets back.”
 

“That’s a good idea,” said Reginald. “I didn’t get any sleep last night.” But that wasn’t right. “I mean, last day,” he amended.

He stood up, gave Claire a small wave, and walked down the stairs. He’d turned onto the sidewalk when the girl called to him again.
 

“Hey, Reginald,” she said.
 

He turned.
 

“Will you come back and visit?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Mom’s got extra hours all this week. Every day, into the night. It gets boring here.” Then she raised a hand at him, palm out. “Just so you understand, this isn’t an invitation inside my house. You are
not
invited inside. I’m just saying, you know… come back. We’ve got steaks in the freezer. I’ll thaw some for you.”
 

Reginald nodded. “Sure. It’s a date.”
 

T
OO
F
AT

MAURICE RETURNED THE NEXT NIGHT, on Sunday. He asked Reginald how things had gone while he was away. So to punish Maurice for leaving him alone, Reginald told him
exactly
how things had gone. He told him about the three failed attempts at feeding, and then he told him about the steak and how he’d graciously accepted it, going so far as to bring the styrofoam tray home so that he could repeatedly lick it clean.

Maurice made a face.

“What else could I have done?” Reginald asked. “I’m a fat guy who can’t eat. I was desperate.”
 

“Well,” said Maurice, “you could have fed on the pizza man that first night. That was kind of what I meant for you to do.”
 

“I told you, I wasn’t hungry enough yet,” said Reginald. “I didn’t get hungry until a few nights later. After you’d abandoned me.”
 

Maurice didn’t take the bait.

“You
can
feed on animal blood, and you can feed on dead blood, like you did with the steak,” said Maurice. “Both are terribly poor substitutes, and combined like that —
dead
blood that is also
cow
blood, and filled with food coloring at that — is the equivalent of being a human and digging through a trash can to find uneaten parts of hamburgers that have been sitting in the sun for two days. If you can keep it down, it’ll keep you alive, but…
ugh
.”
 

“It tasted good,” said Reginald.
 

“You probably have a forgiving palate anyway, and when you’re that hungry, anything will taste good,” said Maurice. “But it’s like I said —
not feeding won’t kill you
. It just makes you very weak, and it can be quite painful. As you know.”
 

“Well,” said Reginald, an edge of resentment in his voice, “thanks for leaving me to mere torture instead of death.”
 

Maurice, his good humor maddeningly intact, sat forward and patted Reginald on the legs.
 

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s talk about that. Did I tell you why I was called away?”

“You said it had something to do with the Vampire Nation. That’s all.”
 

“Ah. Well, yes. The Nation as a whole, but more specifically the Vampire Council, which is our local ruling body. We’ve never gotten along, the Council and I, because our society used to be hierarchical based on age, and I’m older than everyone on the council, including its leader. Under the old system, that would make me superior to all of them. Now, I don’t have a taste for politics, but the current leader of the council — a man named Logan — has
such
a taste for politics that he can’t help projecting his lust onto everyone else. To him, those like me — and there are a handful of us, and plenty who are younger but still old enough to remember how it was before the current regime — have always been a threat. But because I’ve always just ‘had a lot of old-fashioned ideas’ and have never directly challenged them, the whole thing has just kind of simmered. We don’t like them and they don’t like us, but we just kind of let each other be. But then, a few weeks ago, I did something big enough that they couldn’t ignore it… and when Charles and Isaac brought me a sort of summons, I killed Isaac. It had nothing to do with his duties as errand boy, and he and his girlfriends were definitely out of line, but vampire/vampire killings are frowned upon. So that was strike two. But strike two got lost in the shuffle immediately, when I committed strike three that same night.”
 

“And that was?” said Reginald. He wanted to stay pissed off himself, but it was hard not to be intrigued by Maurice’s recounting of vampire politics.
 

Maurice held out his hand, palm up, at Reginald.
 

“Me?”
 

“You remember how I told you that people train before they become vampires?” said Maurice. “That’s a relatively new thing. We used to procreate naturally, turning people as we saw fit, often to create eternal friends and companions. But that meant a lot of ‘imperfect’ vampires — people like you and me, who have our flaws — and progress always seems to want to march on, to trend toward ‘bigger and better and faster.’
 

“Vampire culture is very animalistic. Just for an example, the classic way to ascend to the head of the Nation is to assassinate the current head of the Nation. It’s been buried in bureaucracy and we have a farce of democracy nowadays, but that core is still there, and still very true. The strongest among us tend to survive, and so a few hundred years ago, our whole society underwent a change designed to help us survive in a world where humans were increasingly powerful and self-aware. It made sense at the time to a lot of vampires. It
did
make us stronger and faster and more elusive, but it also created a race to the top. Each generation of vampires since has tried to be a little stronger, a little faster. The bar just keeps getting higher and higher.”

“Sounds like the Olympics,” said Reginald.
 

“Exactly. But it all happened slowly, and at the time, it all made sense. Why
shouldn’t
the Nation keep track of new vampires? Nobody saw the harm. Then they created a system of orientation, to teach new vampires the things they needed to know, so that they’d be able to function and wouldn’t give all of us away. That made sense, too. Then orientation became a class that people could take
before
becoming vampires, to help inform the decision they were about to make. That was sensible. Then orientation became bootcamp, complete with physical training. Then that training became more or less mandatory. Today, there’s a whole system — with controls, regulations, even applications — in place for people who want to become vampires. It’s no less bureaucratic than the bureau of motor vehicles.”