Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse (20 page)

“The codex.”
 

Claude nodded. “The master plan. The blueprint for how to satisfy the angels’ mandate.”
 

“But what if the codex says that the humans survive?” said Reginald. “What if it says you lose?”
 

Claude chuckled, probably thinking about five billion dead humans. “Well, then it’d be like sneaking a peek at the other team’s gameplan.”
 

Claude walked forward, nudged Reginald aside, and approached the vault. He ran his fingers over the surface of the strange tumblers set in the marble. Nikki eyed him, looking toward Reginald. She seemed to be asking if she should try and strike, but the notion was beyond stupid. Reginald shook his head slowly.

“How does it open?” Claude asked, not turning.
 

“From the inside,” said Reginald. “By
zooooombies!”
 

Claude turned, blurred forward, struck Reginald in the chest, and knocked him to the dirt. Nikki reacted instantly, but before she could so much as twitch, she was struck with something massive and flailing. For a strange moment, it was as if she were being attacked by an octopus. Then she fell too, landing beside Reginald under what, in the moonlight, looked like net made of bright white string. Except that where the string touched Nikki’s skin, it burned and fizzled and popped. She was gritting her fanged teeth, trying not to scream as the silver net drained her strength.
 

“Believe it or not, I like you, Reginald,” said Claude, standing over both of them. “The Faction believes that humans are inferior, and that all vampires are superior to them by leaps and bounds. But amongst vampires, we’re actually much more egalitarian than your old Council. The way the Faction sees it, you are vampire, so you are one of us. Maurice respected you. Even the Nation, while it hated you, respected your mind.” Then the smile on Claude’s lips was replaced with a scowl. “But the problem with you is, you think you’re too goddamn funny.”
 

Reginald didn’t like the way Claude had used the past tense to refer to Maurice, but he couldn’t think about that now. There was too much pain and too much to lose. The ground below him was hard; the kind of ground a guy his size might be able to crack like concrete. Beside him, Nikki continued to writhe.
 

“Again: how does it open? Is this a lock? What’s inside?”

“You’re a big, strong man,” said Reginald. “Why don’t you just smash it?” He resisted the urge, looking at Claude’s imposing frame, to add
Like the Hulk
.
 

Claude looked at the marble tomb. It could be an entrance to a series of underground chambers or it could be just a plain old burial vault on top of the ground. Nobody other than the keepers had ever seen the codex, and nowhere, as far as Reginald could tell, had the codex been described. It could be a scrap of ancient parchment. It could be a fragile porcelain cylinder that would crumble to pieces if treated harshly. Reginald almost
wanted
Claude to smash the crypt. Better for nobody to see it than for Claude to.

But Claude wasn’t dumb. He shook his head. “I might damage it,” he said. But it probably didn’t matter anyway, as the marble edifice was almost certainly backed by something stronger. The vault had been designed by vampires to keep something hidden from vampires. They’d made it look pretty, but it wouldn’t be susceptible to brute force. It was probably backed by iron and sandwiched with silver.

Claude reached down and picked Reginald up by the back of the neck, then dragged him across the dirt to the tomb.
 

“Tell me how to open it,” he said.
 

Reginald looked at the tumblers set into the surface of the marble. They almost looked like giant dice, each side the length of the longest bone in a finger. But they had more than six sides each, and they seemed to roll along multiple axes, moving more like a ball joint than rollers skewered to only spin up and down. There were glyphs carved into the surface of the marble, but the marble was soft and had worn with time. But that didn’t matter, because Reginald had already decided that the glyphs were a feint anyway. Vampires thought long-term, and something as crucial as code numbers wouldn’t be left to soften and blur over time. The true code probably came from aligning the shapes of the tumblers themselves. The differences between the different shapes of the tumblers were subtle but obvious to Reginald, and he could see something peeking out here and there at the edges of the marble. Beneath the stone was something harder — something that wouldn’t degrade with time.
 

“I don’t know how to open it,” said Reginald.
 

Claude smashed Reginald’s face into the tomb’s threshold, shattering his nose and jaw. For a moment he wondered how he was supposed to respond to Claude with his face broken, but then the thought was lost in pain… and then in obvious memory as his bones and skin knitted.
 

“Let’s try that again.”
 

“Yes,” said Reginald. “Because that was awesome.”
 

“Tell me how to open it,” said the big man.
 

“I seriously don’t know. You can break my face all day, and I still won’t know.”
 

“You’re the vampire mastermind,” said Claude. “It’s why we tracked you from Antarctica. You found something that has been lost and presumed gone for centuries. You’re really trying to tell me you can’t take this last step?”
 

Gripping the back of his neck, Claude held Reginald’s head up so that he could look into his eyes. Reginald tried Claude’s mind, but met the same solid wall he’d felt at the VWC. But it didn’t matter anyway, because there wasn’t just Claude to contend with. There were the V-Crew soldiers too, and Reginald counted a dozen of them. With Nikki incapacitated, the ensuing fight would be like thirteen hungry wolves versus half of a hot dog.
 

“Maybe you should have let me try the lock before your dramatic entrance,” said Reginald. He snapped his fingers. “Damn your need to be a drama queen!”

Claude smashed Reginald’s face again. With Claude holding the back of his neck, Reginald could only look down. He watched his blood pool below him, painting the tomb’s entranceway crimson.
 

“Tell me.”
 

“I don’t know.”
 

Smash.
 

“I can do this all night.”
 

Reginald winced, grimacing as his skull knit. He wished his pain switch had been courteous enough to turn off. It was so temperamental. It seemed to work as a warning sense, but never worked when being numb might actually be helpful.
 

“Let’s not,” said Reginald. “I think this is less fun for me than it is for you.”
 

“Just tell me. Tell me how to open it.”
 

“Try to pry it open with those big vampire fingers of yours.”
 

“I can’t. There’s silver in the cracks.”

Reginald knew that, of course. He’d seen it right away. The box was a conundrum. It was like giving Superman a safe made of kryptonite. It couldn’t be opened the right way without solving the lock, and it couldn’t be smashed —
if
it could be smashed — without taking what Reginald reasoned was an excellent chance of destroying what was inside.
 

Reginald shook his head as best he could manage. “Then I’m out of ideas.”
 

Claude sighed, then threw Reginald aside as if he were a sack of flour. Reginald struck the ground, rolled, then stretched until everything popped into place. He came to his feet. The troops didn’t even flinch, apparently not willing to consider him a threat. He was near their periphery, and less than a foot away was a gap between two men. But even if he’d been thin and if Nikki wasn’t being held, he wouldn’t have tried to squeak between the soldiers. They were too fast, too strong, too trained.
 

Reginald walked toward the big vampire. Despite the situation, a feeling of confidence was beginning to settle over him as he thought about Claude’s dilemma. Claude wasn’t getting what he wanted because Claude wasn’t supposed to find the codex.
Reginald
was supposed to find the codex, so one way or another he was going to come out holding it. Whether Claude then took it from him and killed him was still up in the air, but a partial win was a partial win.

“Why don’t we just leave things to chance?” said Reginald.
 

Claude turned.
 

Reginald continued: “I can’t read it. You can’t read it. So neither side learns how this all turns out. We just have to do what we’re going to do, and see what happens.”
 

Claude blurred toward him. Reginald couldn’t stop Claude’s charge, but his detailed sight and mind saw the blur pull something from behind his back as he approached. A partial second later, he was pinned down with his side to the ground and Claude above him, that same thing buried in his neck. Reginald struggled against whatever had impaled him, but the thing was hot, like a brand. His neck wound wouldn’t close around it. He rolled his eyes to the side and saw that Claude had his hand wrapped around a stake that was tipped with silver.
 

“I think,” said the big man, his veneer of calm and cool finally beginning to falter, “that you know
exactly
how to open that vault.”
 

“I don’t!”
 

“I also think that the audio pickups in your room at VWC heard you saying something about fate. But a big lump like you wouldn’t believe in something as flimsy as
fate
, would you? Fate is for fortune tellers. Fate is for mystics. But for the great vampire logician? No, I don’t think so. And that got me at first. It made me wonder if you were really the mind they say you are, if you were willing to spout off about bullshit. But then something occurred to me. Would you like to know what it was?”
 

“I’m on the edge of my seat here,” Reginald croaked. The silver stake was pinning his head flat, so he couldn’t look up. He rolled his eyes toward Claude, thinking that the joke was on him. The silver against Reginald’s blood made him weak and unable to fight. But that was his normal state, so
ha-fucking-ha.

“I remembered that the whole idea behind the codex is
based
on fate — but that it was a kind of logical fate. Things were set up; other things had to happen. So if
you
were spouting off about fate when you thought you were alone…” He tapped Reginald on the forehead. “… then you weren’t using the word in the same way a fortune teller would. No, you would be talking about
logical
fate. And so I began to believe in you, Reginald. I believe that you were
fated
to find the codex. I believe that you
have
to know how to open that vault, because if you
don’t
open it, how can you get the codex? How can you
save the world
without holding it in your fat little hands and reading it to the end?”
 

Shit.
 

But he tried again: “I don’t know how to open it,” he said. “Honestly.”
 

Claude withdrew the stake. He moved over to Nikki, still pinned beneath the net. Being careful to avoid touching the silver himself, Claude placed the tip of the stake over Nikki’s heart.
 

“I’ll bet she knows how to open it,” he said.
 

A strange whistling noise began to fill the air. Claude looked around curiously. The V-Crew looked first at each other, then at Claude. They peeked at the other graves and monuments, seeing nothing coming. But the sound was getting louder, becoming like the roar of an engine. Like an airplane engine. Or like an airplane
without
an engine. Like something bludgeoning through the air, beating it aside like water from a ship’s wake.
 

Reginald looked up.
 

What looked like a meteor struck the ground in the middle of the circle of V-Crew soldiers, causing the land to split and buckle. Rocklike bits of hard clay spun into the air and then began raining down. The soldiers had flinched back. Now they were turning toward the boulder, or asteroid, or bomb, or whatever it was. But there was no bomb, and no asteroid. Kneeling on one knee and one arm, like a man preparing to spring, was Maurice.
 

Then he sprung.
 

He went for Claude first, meeting the bigger man before he could prepare, catching him in the chest and throwing them both against a massive vault with huge doors plated with greening copper. The doors collapsed inward, folding over the ball of vampires like a fist pressed into aluminum foil. The hinges snapped; the vault’s stone front wall sundered and fell.
 

The soldiers rushed toward the chaos.
 

Reginald wasn’t worth considering, apparently. He found himself alone and uncovered. He reached for a tree branch, snapped it off, and used it as a hook to drag the silver net off of Nikki. The thing was light; it came away easily. Once she was free, Nikki sped into the melee. Reginald called after her, feeling weak and useless. His mind was confused from the silver, as if pieces of the stake’s coating had flecked off into his body. His bloodsense came and went; he couldn’t concentrate enough to summon any of his abilities. He tried to focus, watched his vision slow, watched it crawl forward. He couldn’t stop it. Something was changing. The pain avoidance trick, the hyper-attention trick — all had deserted him, leaving him feeling like a puppet on a string. The moment was chaotic. The codex wouldn’t be able to define or quantify it. Reginald had the free will to use his abilities and couldn’t summon any of them. His foes had the free will to fight, and did. He was an instrument of predestiny. He was a slave to fate. He was an instrument of change, an agent of chaos. He’d started all of this. He would be the one to finish it.
 

It was all too much, too many strings to grasp. All he could do was to watch it happen.