Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (22 page)

“By the common stairway, of course,” said Maurice. “The rear stairway is for the Deacon and his staff only.” He nudged Charles toward the front of the box where a long, meandering set of steps weaved through the bleachers before wrapping back to where Charles would be able to access the Council box.
 

Charles was trying to turn his head back around, but the muscles seemed to have torn. He grabbed both sides of the backward-facing head and tried to torque it back to front, but there was a snap and he stopped.
 

“You interlocked my vertebrae, you
ass
hole,” said Charles, tugging at his head with both hands. Watching him was bizarre. Reginald honestly wondered which way he’d walk — forward blind, or backwards and at least be able to see?

“Suck it up, Charles,” Maurice hissed. “Do you want a Snoopy band-aid for your boo-boo?”
 

“You could burn for this,” said the back of Charles’s head.
 

“I doubt it. I’m the Deacon. Right, Deputy?”
 

“‘Deacon may injure Council members at Deacon’s discretion,’” said Reginald, making a note on a clipboard he’d found on a shelf at the back of the box.
 

Charles began to carefully make his way (backward for the torso and forward for the head) toward the large stairway. Maurice gave him a kind warning to watch out lest he break his neck on the way down.
 

When Charles was gone, Maurice grabbed the rock and banged it on the arm of the throne.

“I, Deacon Maurice Toussant, hereby call to order this meeting of the Vampire Council, yada yada yada, you get the idea,” he said, a surprising amount of authority radiating from his small frame. “I know a lot of you here don’t like that I’m here. But as the ancient human expression goes,
tough shit
. I am your Deacon, and you will show me respect. You don’t have to like me. You don’t have to support me. But the next person who fails to recognize my authority to lead this Council, having bested the previous Deacon as is our law —”
 
He gestured at Charles, who tripped and fell as if on key. “— will be summarily staked. Do any of the rest of you want to challenge me? I’ll face you one-on-one. Speak now or forever hold your petty comments.”
 

He paused, his chest full and his head high. The room remained still.
 

“No? None of you who have challenged me in my absence? Who have questioned my right to rule or the presence of my proxy? None of you whom I’ve heard call me a relic, a throwback, a reactionary revolutionist? I know who you are, so speak if you’re going to speak.”

Reginald coughed.
 

“Fine,” said Maurice. “Then as Deacon, I…” He trailed off, then looked over at Reginald.
 

“What?”
 

“I don’t know how to conduct a Council meeting,” Maurice whispered.

“You’re supposed to have the Deputy read the minutes first. That’s me. I don’t know the minutes. I wasn’t here and haven’t reviewed the videos yet.”
 

“Make something up,” said Maurice.

Reginald walked to the front of the box. Someone laughed. Two or three voices muttered something.
 

“Minutes of the last meeting,” said Reginald. “Council talked about laws. Then the building blew up.”
 

The crowd increased its murmuring. Yes, they seemed to remember it that way too.
 

“Also, Charles Barkley was accused of fornication with a poodle. Charges were forgiven.”
 

No objections came. Reginald wondered what else he could get away with, but decided not to push his luck.
 

“So are the minutes,” said Reginald, concluding as he’d seen past minutes concluded in the records. Then, for effect, he bowed.

Reginald walked back to Maurice and whispered, “Now you make an opening address. Think Carson’s opening monologue.”
 

“I didn’t prepare one.”
 

“I just told them Charles screwed a poodle. I don’t think it matters what you say,” Reginald whispered.
 

“Can I talk about anything?”
 

“Sure. But I’d go for a rant. Openers are the time you get to speak without being interrupted by the Council.”
 

 
Maurice stood up and walked to the front of the box.
 

“You are all assholes,” he began. He looked back at Reginald.
 

“Maybe take it down a notch,” said Reginald, holding his finger and thumb pinched together in front of his face.
 

Maurice turned back to face front.
 

“By which I mean that you’re shortsighted. You refuse to see what’s in front of your faces. You’re a population that has entered into a willing, deliberate evolutionary bottleneck in order to become homogenous, with zero diversity in your population. There is, no pun intended, no new blood in our ranks. You must see that, yet you seem so intent on proving me and my ways wrong that you’re willing to doom all of us to do it. I’ve been watching the new legislation. I’ve seen what’s on the roster for tonight, and for meetings to come. Councilman Barkley has been pushing for an age limit for new vampires. The age is lower for women than men. Why would that be? I’ve seen the law that would require retroactive testing for vampires who are old enough to have never gone through the application and bootcamp process. What’s the point? Any vampire old enough to fit that description would be orders of magnitude stronger than any new vampire. You are spinning your wheels in order to prove your own idiotic, asshole point. Two weeks ago, nearly four hundred among you died, and today you’re back here not to talk about what happened and what it could mean and what to do, but to throw more…
asshole
legislation onto the docket because you don’t like my ways and what I represent.”
 

He paused. When it seemed that he was done — and not a bad opener, thought Reginald — a voice spoke up from the assembled audience.
 

“Permission to address the Deacon,” it said. The speaker was a young man with jet black hair, severe black eyebrows, and a chiseled jaw.
 

Maurice nodded.
 

“All due respect, Deacon, but this isn’t about being disrespectful. It’s about quality control.”
 

“Really,” said Maurice.

“We survive on fear and spectacle. Humans outnumber us a hundred thousand to one. They own the daylight. We need to be worthy of their fear and respect. Times are only getting harder. Humans are slowly covering and exposing every corner of the planet. If our representatives are…” He gestured in Reginald’s direction. “I’m just saying, I don’t know how frightened I’d have been, when I was human, of… of…”
 

“You can say it,” said Reginald. “Of me. Of a fat guy.”
 

The kid shrugged.
 

“How old are you?” said Maurice.
 

“Six years as a vampire.”
 

“So, a child of modern cinema. Tell me: Before you knew we were real, how would you have described a vampire?”
 

“Uh…”
 

“Go ahead. You may speak freely.”
 

“Fast. Strong. You killed them with a stake. They backed away from crosses and holy water. Maybe they flew. They were dark and glamorous. Sexy. Beautiful.”
 

“Did becoming a vampire fix your flaws? Make you — as you said — dark, glamorous, sexy, and beautiful?”

“Yeah, for sure.”
 

“Did you see
Nosferatu
?” said Maurice.

“Pardon?”

Maurice looked up from addressing the kid in the stands and played his gaze over the entire Council and assembly.
 

“You like to think that you’re so different from humans,” he said. “But you aren’t. Few of you are older than one hundred years old. I am over two thousand. Throughout most of my life and through early cinema, vampires were monsters. Creatures of the night. Outcasts — and not in a brooding, fashionable way. In a ‘we must pursue and kill it’ way. Vampires have not always been beautiful, sexy, and glamorous. We’ve been like goblins and ghosts. Things that were fearful because we were so
unlike
humans, not because we conformed so clearly to their ideals. I had a friend who was turned after losing most of his face, having been dragged half a mile over stone roads by his horse. Name was Jean. Nice guy. He didn’t sparkle, but he scared the hell out of his victims. But there aren’t many Jeans anymore. There’s nobody like him, and supposedly it’s all about ‘quality control.’ You grew up believing what you believed because it was what others showed to you, not because it was ‘true.’ You are slaves to pop culture.
Human
pop culture. The ideals you’re striving for are not objective absolutes. They are new inventions. Your ‘quality control’ is actually just fashion.”
 

“This reminiscing is nice,” said a voice from the Council. If Reginald didn’t know better, he’d swear the speaker was Todd Walker. “Can we move it along?”
 

Maurice threw up his hands. “Fine.”

The crowd murmured. Reginald watched them, trying to read the room’s mood. It was jovial. They’d already forgotten what Maurice had said… or, more likely, they’d never heard it.
 

“Good monologue,” said Reginald. “Wrong crowd.”
 

“Maybe the roof will come off again,” Maurice said.
 

“One can hope.”
 

“What do I do next?”

Reginald looked at the clipboard, flipping a page. He made a face.
 

“What?” said Maurice.

“Executions,” said Reginald.

C
RAZY
O
LD
M
OTHERFUCKER

“IT’S A LIGHT NIGHT FOR executions,” said Reginald. “Just one guy to execute.”

“Then what?”

“Then it goes to new business, and the Council will begin voting in the new laws you just said were stupid.”

“I’ll get my veto stick ready. They can keep lobbing them in and I’ll just keep hitting them out of the park.”
 

“For now,” said Reginald. “But they’re starting to outsmart you. They’re adding riders.”
 

“Riders?”
 

“Apparently I’ve gone from one stupid system of government to another,” said Reginald. “I’m a bit unclear, but it seems that vampire politicians can make mash-up laws just like US politicians can. One law might contain two prime parts to it. For now, the Council seems to just be playing around to see how you’ll veto or not veto, but this could turn into an effective way to surpass the Deacon’s veto power.”
 

“What do you mean?”
 

“Like, one bill might contain legislation to prevent the eating of babies, and also impose an age restriction on bootcamp applicants. Since you can’t make laws, you have the simple choice of allowing baby-eating or allowing the age restriction.”
 

“They can’t do that, can they?”

“I’m not totally sure, but it seems so.” Reginald had read the text of all of the night’s proposed laws while Maurice had been speaking. He’d also leafed through a rudimentary law book he’d found on the shelf. When he got home, he’d need to consult the official statutes online. He couldn’t get an internet data signal on his phone from inside the building, because it was designed with jamming equipment.

“That’s idiotic,” said Maurice.
 

“That’s government. Like I said, they’re finding ways to outsmart you.”
 

“Shit.”
 

“It’s okay,” said Reginald. “I can outsmart
them
.”
 

Maurice took a deep breath. “Okay. One step at a time. Let’s deal with this execution. What’s the guy’s crime?”
 

“Wanton creation.”
 

“Receiving? Or giving?”

Maurice was asking if the man was a vampire who’d been created illegally (like Reginald) or a vampire who’d created another illegally (like Maurice). Both were bad, and unless the new vampire could pass a strenuous test and be retroactively certified as acceptable, both maker and made could end up facing a death sentence.
 

“Receiving. He turned himself in, actually. Does that happen often?”
 

“It never happens,” said Maurice. “It’s not like we have a downtown police station that new vampires can walk into. What do you mean, ‘He turned himself in’?”
 

Reginald had already replaced the clipboard, having read the entire night’s business. He would be able to recite it word for word, letter by letter, forever.
 

“He claims not to know his maker. Woke up with blood around his mouth, recalling none of the night prior.”
 

“Glamoured. Glamoured
while
being turned, because it wouldn’t be possible once he was fully vampire.”
 

“Yes,” said Reginald. “He knows who he is and what he is, but he’s been figuring it out as he goes. He didn’t realize it was a crime to exist, and here he is.” Reginald found he was unable to keep the sympathy out of his voice. It was too easy to relate to the man.

“And he’s already been tested and failed, because this shows up as an execution,” said Maurice.

“Half right,” said Reginald. “According to the paperwork, he’s waived his right to a test.”

“That’s insane.”

Reginald, who’d been through the test and had failed miserably, didn’t think it was insane at all. He respected the man for trying to preserve his dignity.
 

“I’ll just pardon him,” said Maurice after a beat.

“The Guards say he’s strange,” said Reginald. That hadn’t come off of the clipboard. He’d heard it when they’d passed a pair of Guards in the hall.

“I don’t care how strange he is,” said Maurice. “Two can play the game of ‘let’s do things just to piss off the opponent.’ He’s getting a big, fat pardon. Bring him in.”