Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (17 page)

Behind Reginald and Nikki, there was an explosion as Maurice decapitated another Guard with his hands.
 

They reached the garage staircase and began climbing. It was slow-going, but the Guards were still only coming in ones and twos. A few minutes later, they exited the stairwell at the fifth floor, and walked into the southeast corner, where Reginald’s cousin Walt had left a car with an ignition key stowed under the floor mat.
 

It was impossible for anyone to decipher a 128-bit encryption key and hack the Council algorithm. But the world had never seen a mind like that of Reginald Baskin.
 

When they reached the car, Maurice and Reginald climbed into the trunk. There was a roll of duct tape inside in case the trunk turned out to have any light leaks. The trunk itself was cavernous. Walt was only slightly smaller than Reginald, so Reginald had told him to rent a car with a trunk big enough for two Walts, just to be sure.
 

Nikki pulled the car out of the parking garage and stopped when they were safely out into the blinding midday sun. Then she reached back and pulled up a small knob to fold down the right side of the rear seatback, giving access to the two vampires in the trunk.
 

“Damn, Nikki,” said Maurice. “That’s bright up there.”

“And hot,” said Reginald, who was already sweating.

“Screw you guys,” she said. “I just risked slaughter by about a thousand vampires on an errand that didn’t originally involve me. I’m for damn sure going to have someone to talk to on the drive back.”
 

“You did great, Nikki,” said Reginald. “Thank you. And Claire thanks you. Or will, when we pick her up.”

“I just can’t believe nobody could… I don’t know…
smell
me.”
 

“You carry human blood for a few days after you’re first turned,” said Maurice. “They’d expect you to smell like a human.”
 

But really, it was simpler than that. A lot of Reginald’s plan relied on logic, but a lot of it also relied on human nature — or, in this case, vampire nature. People were arrogant, unable to see things from a point of view other than their own, and hence always saw what they expected to see. That’s why the Guards who came for Nikki hadn’t sensed her humanity.
 

Of course
Reginald would turn Nikki so that she could protect the little girl in his and Maurice’s absence.
Of course
Reginald would never think that the council knew about Nikki. The Council thought it had “caught” Reginald and that it had “caught” Nikki. The predator always underestimates its prey. Having been prey for all of his life, it was a lesson Reginald knew well.
 

“You did great,” Reginald repeated. “Great acting. I thought you were really scared up there.”
 

“I
was
scared,” she said. “Scared that they’d do something you hadn’t predicted. Scared they’d discover that my fangs were fake and filled with those dumb ninja powders. Scared they’d chase me when they caught me, and wonder why I couldn’t run faster if I was supposedly a vampire. Scared they’d outright kill you before you could get those mirrors out of your stomach. Scared you wouldn’t grab them from the guy in time, or that you wouldn’t push them close enough for me to reach. Scared I’d hit Maurice with one of my sunbeams. Scared you’d gotten the location wrong and that we’d turn out to be somewhere else, with no car, surrounded by angry vampires whose leader we’d just assassinated.”
 

“Then you did brilliantly under pressure,” said Reginald. “And you saved at least two lives today: mine and Claire’s.
 

“And probably mine,” said Maurice. “I had a treason trial coming up with at least three counts to it. But now look at me; I’m the
pres-o-dent.
” He imitated Yakov Smirnoff. “What a country!”
 

Nikki had a map beside her but didn’t seem to want to look at it while driving. “How much farther before I turn?” she said.

“To Claire?”
 

“To the tanning salon. Yes.”
 

“Left at 451, one mile, right on Hollister. It’s 14501.” Reginald had memorized not just the route but the entire county map.
 

They were headed to a tanning salon at which Walt had left Claire. Reginald had found it nearby via an internet search and had chosen it because it had received five citations from the state for overpowered tanning booths and for leaving tan lamps in plain sight to provide what the staff called “an ambient tanning experience.” It was a busy enough place that Claire could read a book in the lobby all day long and pretend to be waiting for her mother, all the while basking in illegally high levels of ultraviolet light. The UV levels were high enough that Nikki would have needed to be the one to go in and get Claire even if it were nighttime, because Maurice and Reginald would have come out Kentucky fried.

After they’d retrieved Claire and told her a scaled-back version of their trial-and-escape story, she said that maybe she wasn’t ready to become a vampire yet after all. She was, however, very happy to see Nikki and Reginald and to meet Maurice, who she confessed she’d heard a lot about.

Two hours later, they were all at a temporary safehouse — a weekly motel room which, through a computer error of some sort, had been paid for by an American Express card belonging to one Todd Walker.
 

And the waiting began.

B
LOOD

TWO WEEKS OF HIDING, ONE reluctantly-conferred Deaconship, and two dozen pounds of raw ground beef later, they left the motel as free men and women. Reginald found himself still hungry, and growing increasingly intolerant of dead blood.

Maurice went out and hunted during their hotel stay, but due to Reginald’s terrible hunting record, Nikki offered Reginald her neck for feeding. The idea was simultaneously intoxicating and improper. They’d shared room and bread and board for two weeks, and they’d played endless games of euchre after teaching Claire the game, but there seemed to be something simmering between the two of them that had begun on the night Nikki had watched Reginald play the piano. Reginald didn’t want to jinx it. And besides, it felt like pity. If the possibility of a free, mutually satisfying exchange of blood was possible down the road, he wanted to wait for it, impossible though it might seem.

So he waited. He kept eating raw meat, his throat increasingly burning for the real thing.

Maurice, Reginald, and Nikki returned to work on the following Monday. Berger gave them all an earful, accusing them of conspiracy and abandonment and disloyalty. The company had been forced to scramble, to improvise, and to hire expensive, premium tech freelancers. Berger’s admonitions meant nothing to Reginald. He didn’t care if he ended up fired. He told Berger, with zero emotion in his voice, that he’d had a death in the family. After a lot of moaning and blame-laying, Berger relented. After a lot of feather-rustling and chest-beating, he did the same for Maurice and Nikki, and over that first week back, night shift life returned to more or less normal.

The first night, Reginald went to get his 11:00 cup of coffee and when he returned to his cubicle and sat down, he was greeted with the predictable low, purring sound of a Whoopee Cushion. But this time, instead of putting his face in his hands and quietly throwing the thing away, he stood up.
 

Walker’s perfect chin and tombstone teeth popped up over the cubicle wall. He jumped a little when he saw that Reginald was already standing, and that they were face-to-face.
 

“Welcome back to the nightshift, Reggie!” he said brightly.

Reginald looked deep into Walker’s eyes, then grabbed his brainstem with a low, seductive voice.
 

“Hey, Todd,” he said. “Want to come with me to the kitchen for a bite?”

FAT VAMPIRE 2: TASTES LIKE CHICKEN

C
OLD
P
RICK

REGINALD BASKIN, WHO THOUGHT HE might just be the fattest, slowest, and weakest vampire who ever lived, decided that he was going to need the emergency shirt he kept at the bottom of his desk drawer.
 

“So have you seen enough?” Reginald asked the customer between heaving breaths, the treadmill thundering under his feet.

The customer, an old man leaning on a bejeweled cane, nodded and said, “More or less. But can you give me another few minutes just to be sure? You don’t mind, do you?”
 

“Not at all,” Reginald lied.

Reginald was not built for treadmill running. His gut swayed side to side, all three hundred and fifty pounds of Body By Cinnabon shaking and rattling and punishing the machine beneath him. His breath came heavy and fast. He felt lightheaded. He raised an arm to wipe the sweat from his forehead, and received an unpleasant blast from his armpit.
 

Yes. He was going to need that shirt.

Reginald had been a vampire for six months, and there had been many times during those months that he’d wished Hollywood had gotten vampirism right. If Hollywood had gotten it right, Reginald would have had boundless strength, speed, and power from day one instead of passing out and breaking his nose the first time he’d tried to run. If Hollywood had gotten it right, he’d never have been tried by the Vampire Council as “an unfit embarrassment.” If Hollywood had gotten it right, demonstrating one of his company’s treadmills for a potential buyer would be a stupidly easy task, and he wouldn’t feel like he was going to die.
 

Not that he
could
die right now, of course, even if he’d wanted to. And he kind of
did
want to. Where was a wooden stake when you needed one?

“It’s just because I’m buying fifty of these machines, you understand,” said the customer.

“No.”
Breath
. “Prob.”
Breath
. “Lem.”
Wheeze
.

“And I’m incapacitated, or I’d do it myself,” said the customer, nodding at his cane.
 

“Sure.”
 

“And, frankly, I’m not…” He paused, looking down at his own slight frame. Then he raised his nose at Reginald’s girth. “And
you
are…”
 

“Of course,” said Reginald, cutting him off. The customer owned a Perfect Size Fitness franchise and would be buying the heavy-duty line of treadmills because they could take the most pounds of punishment. What he had almost said was that Reginald was fat enough to give the treadmills a realistic test. And while Reginald had made peace with the body he’d have forever, he didn’t want to embarrass the customer by making him say it.
 

“What’s the weight limit again?” said the customer.
 

“Five… Five hundred…” said Reginald, trying to catch his breath. Talking was becoming harder and harder.

“Five hundred pounds? I guess that’s enough. And that’s at maximum speed?”

“I guess… it’s…
sure
,” he said

Reginald wasn’t a salesman and hence wasn’t sure about the treadmill specs. The salesmen worked a different shift than Reginald. They all had perfect bodies and perfect faces and represented the company well, whereas Reginald was usually hidden away in accounting, further insulated by working the night shift. Why Phil Berger had called and insisted that Reginald accommodate this little old man now, in a ridiculous after-midnight meeting, was beyond him. Something to do with the old man’s schedule, Berger had said.
 

“I imagine it could accommodate more weight at walking speeds than running speeds.”
 

“I don’t…”
 

“Because when you run, it’s like slamming the thing with sledgehammers, I mean.”
 

“I’m not…”
 

“Can you try it out at full speed?” said the man. And then
oh God oh shit oh damn
, the little old man was reaching toward the control panel and pushing the arrow that made the belt go faster.

“You don’t mind, do you?” he said. “I just need to be sure.”
 

“I’m.”
Wheeze
. “I’m going to…”
 

Reginald’s vision blurred. His feet came out from under him and he pitched face-first into the treadmill’s console. The console cracked in half and Reginald fell to the belt, which rolled him off and into the corner behind the machine. His legs and rear wedged against the wall. His upper body, unable to roll further, remained on top of the deck. The running belt, still revolving because Reginald had pinched off the dead man’s switch, was tugging his shirt down off of his shoulders and straining the buttons. Higher up, it was coating his face with friction burns.

With his last ounce of energy, Reginald rolled away from the belt and crumpled into the corner, breathing heavily. His heart was beating like a cross between a tympani and a telegraph. His shirt was soaked, sticking to him like tape.
 

That’s when Maurice walked in.

Maurice looked at Reginald, at the treadmill, and then at the customer. His head made a small, odd jerk, and then he ran at the customer so fast that he seemed to vanish from the doorway and appear in front of the old man, who he punched in the face hard enough to throw him back into a treadmill that was folded against the opposite wall. The customer, struck above his center of gravity, rotated before impact and hit the folded treadmill face-first. The treadmill’s deck broke in half and fell onto the man in a shower of metal bits and wires.
 

Reginald’s mouth dropped open.
 

Then the broken treadmill’s halves shifted and the customer got back up using his cane, which seemed to have flown across the room with him. He brushed at his hair with his free hand, dislodging shards of metal and plastic. His face was a mess of red pulp, his nose pointing inward, toward the back of his head. His wiry white hair stood up in a blood-soaked cowlick.

Maurice approached the stooped old man. Even Maurice, who looked like a nineteen-year-old goth kid, seemed imposing compared to the battered old man.