Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse (14 page)

“I see them,” said Reginald.
 

“What do you think of them?”
 

Reginald said nothing, trying to think his way out of the room. If he could get Nikki out of the room, they might be able to repeat what they’d done to escape from the American Council, with Reginald time-stopping to use Nikki as a deadly weapon. But until the doors were unlocked and they had room to maneuver, their options would be limited.
 

“He thinks you’re sick sons of bitches,” said Nikki.
 

Reginald turned. Nikki stood and took two steps toward Claude. But, watching, Reginald saw something that Nikki didn’t — that Ophelia had a Boom Stick weapon on her belt. He considered having Nikki go for it, but then he saw something he’d never seen before: the shaft of the weapon had a glowing window on it. His mind ran through a series of analyses. A weapon like that would be as dangerous to the user as the victim. So how could you make it safe? And suddenly, he was certain that Claude’s new Boom Stick models were keyed to a user’s fingerprints, usable by their hand only. It would be useless to Nikki.

Ophelia’s hand moved toward the weapon.
 

Reginald stepped forward, striding into the tightening knot of vampires. He decided to go for the conversational throat, cutting right to the chase.
 

“You want us to stay.”
 

Claude nodded. “I’d say we
require
you to stay.”
 

“We don’t want to stay.”
 

Claude shuffled sideways, disrupting the cluster. Nikki stepped back. Ophelia’s hand lowered. Claude gestured through the window, to the big screen showing global vampire deployment.
 

“Look out there, Reginald,” he said. “You must see it. It’s only a matter of time before the humans are either finished, turned, or contained. You may not like me much…”
 

“Oh, you’re a delight,” Reginald interrupted.
 

“… but you know we’re going to win this conflict. You don’t
have
to like me, or agree with me, or think that what we’re doing here is right. But this war
is
going to the vampires, and that’s just a fact. So the only remaining question — and I’ll put this to you and your superior brain, Reginald — is how efficiently it can be done. Will this conflict conclude quickly so that we can move on, or will it drag on for months and years, with many innocents being killed in the meantime?”

“Innocents like the humans?”

“Well,” said Claude, “there’s some truth to what Ophelia said, about how they are cows to be raised for meat.”
 

“I’m not going to help you with your… your
crime
,” said Reginald, his mouth curling in disgust.
 

“Crime?” said Ophelia, walking so close to Reginald that he could smell the blood on her breath. “
Crime?
You are a vampire, Baskin! You drink blood! You are a monster! Do you hear me? You are an unholy, dirty, motherfucking
monster
. All of us are. Stop trying to be a human. Stop trying to play both sides. We have been given a mandate, and it is either us or them.
Us or them!”
 

“If you’re saying that the angels…”
 

“Fuck the angels!”
she spat. “We have had to hide since the dawn of time while they infested the planet like locusts. We are the rightful heirs to this world, with the power to take it by force as evolution intended. But what did we do? Did we take what was ours? No! We hid in holes while they built their skyscrapers and mini malls and megaplexes. They made television and sitcoms and infomercials; they sat in chairs and grew soft while we grew hard.” She looked Reginald’s corpulent frame over from bottom to top, as if she’d never seen it before. “We have let them take whatever they wanted. They pollute, consume, eat, shit, befoul everything. We don’t live like they do, but does it matter? No, they fuck up the planet
for
us, so that we can experience their sloth secondhand. Isn’t that nice? They drag us down and we go willingly. And now, at the dawn of our triumph, bleeding-heart pieces of shit like you yell back at us, calling us murderers, as if you won’t live among us when it’s all over. You’re just like a human — willing to accept all of the benefit but none of the responsibility.”
 

Her fangs were out, her mouth open like an angry cat’s. “Come here,” she added. “I want to show you something.”
 

She grabbed Reginald by the back of his collar and dragged him toward the door. Nikki reacted, lunging forward, but Ophelia let go of Reginald for long enough to sprint forward and grab Nikki’s neck in her clawed hand.
 

“Nikki!” Reginald shouted. “Don’t!”
 

“Oh, no,” Ophelia purred, her fingernails drawing blood. “Please
do.”

Nikki shook her off, refusing to engage. Then Ophelia walked toward the door without grabbing Reginald again, her point made. Reginald got to his feet, and he and Nikki followed. Claude, still nonplussed, brought up the rear.

They made their way down a long hallway, down a set of stairs, and into a dark room. Several computer monitors lined the front wall, all turned to a muted night mode. There was no external light in the room; the only illumination came from the monitors. There were three men and another general in the room. The men were sitting. The woman was standing.
 

Claude, with a glance at the back of Ophelia’s blonde head, dragged two chairs from the back of the room and placed them behind the room’s seated technicians. Reginald and Nikki sat. None of the room’s occupants looked back and only cast the briefest of glances at Ophelia. Claude stood against the back wall.

This was also so familiar. It was almost a cliche. The front room had reminded Reginald of a missile command center, and this room reminded him of commanders watching a black ops operation. And, looking toward the screens, he saw that that’s exactly what it was.
 

The monitors showed video that seemed to be coming from a soldier’s mounted camera — something Reginald inferred from the presence of other soldiers around the camera-wearer. The soldiers wore black jumpsuits, almost like ninjas, but with their heads exposed. They were wearing black gloves with sharp black pieces of metal at the tips. Reginald was reminded of something that was a mix between Wolverine and Freddy Krueger.
 

“You’re watching a V-Crew,” said Claude, squatting behind Reginald and Nikki. “A specialized unit within the VWC and Annihilist Faction’s joint army. Nick Timken’s SA troops are sloppy by our standards. They are too visible, offer too many targets, and take too many collateral casualties. Tell me: have you seen troops like this before, out in the world?”
 

“No,” said Reginald, watching the soldiers on the screen. They seemed to be headed toward a circle of lights. It appeared to be a medium-sized town. He couldn’t tell where it was, but wherever it was, it was nighttime.
 

“There’s a reason,” said Ophelia, looking back and keeping her voice low as the room’s mood seemed to require. “These Crews are much better at what they do than the SA, and are in a separate world from the Kill Squads. We don’t leave evidence. We don’t leave bodies. The others slash and burn. It was inevitable that everyday vampires would start to attack humans openly (you can’t cure stupidity, as they say) but for the official peacekeepers —” She laughed at the term. “— to be the SA? Unforgivable. But hey, they are America. They can do whatever they want, right? It doesn’t matter that it makes our officials culpable. But think about it, Reginald. You have an unmatched strategic mind. How much more damage could we have inflicted before the outbreak if all of our official actions had been done in stealth?”
 

Reginald didn’t answer. He was watching the monitors. The V-Crew was moving in distinct, contained bursts rather than sprinting into the city. They were moving forward in a blur of motion, then stopping, assessing, and repeating. The city was getting closer. In the distance, Reginald could see humans milling around, some of them armed.
 

“See this?” said Ophelia, pointing at a screen. It seemed to show the same region from above, with bright green blobs moving about and some sort of glyph tags tracking other objects that the camera couldn’t see in the dark. “This is
their
feed.
Their
satellite. We don’t even need our own. We can piggyback on theirs. It’s simple. They secure their systems against other humans, but we are better than humans. We’re in, using their own technology against them, and then we’re out, and they don’t even know we’ve been there. We’ve done it again and again, when their population needs trimming or when we need to bolster our blood stores.”

Reginald watched the screen, feeling cold. On the overhead shot, the troops were moving closer and closer to the human city.
 

“How many are in that city?” Nikki asked. Reginald almost wished she hadn’t asked, because it was obvious what was about to happen.
 

Ophelia turned to one of the technicians seated in front of a keyboard, watching a computer screen, wearing a kind of headset and mic. “Tell her,” she said.
 

The vampire didn’t take his eyes off the screen. “Heat map surveillance indicates four hundred fifty three.”
 

“How long?” Ophelia asked.
 

“I was just about to give the order to cut the power, sir.”
 

“Go ahead.” Ophelia turned to face Nikki and Reginald. She smiled briefly, then turned back to the monitor.
 

The technician spoke into his microphone. Reginald heard an answer come through the vampire’s headphones. A moment later, on the screen, every light in the town went out.
 

“We use what is essentially a unidirectional EMP generator,” said Ophelia. “Technology we stole from glamoured human military officials not long ago. We don’t need to find power lines this way, and we don’t need to worry about generators the targets may have. One flick of a switch and it’s nighttime, and then the monsters arrive.”

Onscreen, the visual blurred as the camera-bearer blurred the rest of the way toward the settlement. On the overhead satellite shot, Reginald watched as six glyphs — all of them tracking something that was invisible on the screen, presumably a member of the V-Crew — spread out in a coordinated pattern. A grid appeared over the satellite view, and the smudges indicating human heat signatures were all speared with miniature labels. It would probably appear random to Nikki, but Reginald could see that there were six groups of labels bearing six distinct glyphs, presumably assigning kills to individual soldiers.
 

“Time,” said Ophelia.
 

“Ten seconds, sir…
mark
.”
 

The camera was a blur. Even in the infrared, Reginald could see faces, terror, and liquid splashing everywhere. He watched an arm fly as it was severed with one of the clawed gloves, turning end for end as if in slow motion.
 

“Fifteen,” said the operator.
 

Reginald turned away. Nikki did the same. The vampire operator called out twenty seconds, then twenty-five. Screams could be heard sneaking around his headphones, but the screams sounded confused, not terrified. The humans weren’t having time to scream in terror, and they couldn’t see. They barely knew what was happening, and once they did know, they were dead.
 

“Final signature down, sir,” said the operator.
 

Claude shuffled behind them as if rising at the end of a movie. Ophelia appeared between Nikki and Reginald.
 

“Twenty-seven seconds,” she said, “and another nest of parasites is gone forever.”
 

S
EER

THERE WAS ONLY ONE WAY to fight, and it was to not fight at all.

Reginald had engaged in philosophical debate with Timken when Timken had told Reginald his plans, but Ophelia and Claude were not Timken. Nobody in the entire VWC compound was Timken. Reginald had made a mistake in vastly underestimating the depth of his foes’ ruthlessness. Timken was just the tip of the iceberg. His fantasies that the codex would reveal a simple Timken-related solution (expose him, assassinate him) were gone, and a more complex problem had fallen into place. Now he was facing psychopaths. Psychopaths who wanted his help to become
better
psychopaths.

He’d also realized something terrible in the minutes following the V-Crew display: Ophelia (and, by extension, Claude) hadn’t shown him the extermination in order to shock or intimidate him. They’d done it to impress him.

And that, in the end, might be the only way out.

“Get out” had moved in front of “find the codex” on Reginald’s to-do list. He was doing more harm by staying at VWC than the piddling amount of good the codex could still provide even if he found it. Besides: if he
could
get out, he might still find the codex. He wasn’t sure how that would happen, but if predestination was in play, then the details would handle themselves. He reminded himself that nothing was an accident. His trip to VWC hadn’t been wasted even if he learned nothing; there was a reason he’d come. But was that reason to learn information, or was it something more sinister? Was he destined to help Claude and Ophelia win the war whether he wanted to or not? Could they twist him into an unwitting weapon of mass destruction?

He wouldn’t let that happen. And with that simple conviction, he reminded himself that the fact that Claude and Ophelia thought he might be impressed by the V-Crew attack could be a weakness. It meant he might have one last chance to play into the arrogance of the hunters — to get what he wanted by letting his opponents think they were getting what
they
wanted.
 

So following the V-Crew display, he’d stuffed down his disgust and acted impressed.