Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (58 page)

Then, in the corner of their shared thoughtscape, the warm pink feeling darkened. Reginald felt it happen, raised a metaphorical head to look. Nikki sensed it, but he could tell that she couldn’t see it as he could; she was sensing
his
sensation of whatever it was. But whatever it was, it was growing. The cloud of eroticism began to disperse; mental Reginald sat up. Mental Nikki pulled the sheets over her metaphorical bodiless body and mentally asked him what was wrong. The corner became less and less pink, more and more black. It became like a peephole. Reginald saw a dark night through someone else’s eyes. Felt gravel crunch under someone else’s feet. Felt cool air on someone else’s skin.
 

Nikki’s thoughts lost their pink color, became the darker maroon color of blood. Somewhere there was a heartbeat, always still strange to him in a vampire’s mind or chest. He felt her thoughts quicken, somehow disturbed by what Reginald sensed, not because she could see it but because she knew Reginald could.
 

Reginald stepped more fully into the black peephole, feeling Nikki recede to a maroon halo of feeling behind him. It was like she was watching over his shoulder now. He could feel the other person’s
 

(vampire’s)

feet crunch on the rock below. It was small rock, like gravel. The picture was becoming clearer and clearer, as if he were coming more fully within its broadcast range. He felt the breeze more acutely. He saw objects around him in the darkness. A barn that was probably bright white during the day now visible as a shadow to his left. Fences. Fields. Sheds. He felt the body he was in lean forward, as if preparing to take a tackle. Below his feet he felt the gravel move as the body shifted. His peripheral vision showed him horizontal, parallel slats of wood among the gravel. And long, smooth rails of metal. Vibration was coming up this other’s legs from below. And a light ahead, rapidly approaching.
 

Closer.
 

Closer.
 

A whistle. The sound of onrushing doom.
 

Inside the train, Reginald’s eyes snapped open to find that he was staring directly into Nikki’s eyes, wide awake and terrified. He reached over to Maurice to shake him, to warn him, but it was too late.
 

S
WEEPERS

THE SOUND OF THE COLLISION and derailment was like the world ending. There was a titanic booming noise, like a bomb, and Reginald felt himself thrown forward as the front of their car crumpled and bent like a tin can. Seats sheared away as roof met floor. Glass shattered and peppered the air. He struck something hard and felt his right arm crushed and pulled off; a bulkhead (some massive piece of metal, anyway) screamed toward and smashed his face and then for a while, everything was black while his eyes healed. Gravity shifted; he felt himself alternately flying, floating, being thrown forward and up, whipping toward the back of the car as, presumably, the whole thing spun end for end.
 

He didn’t think to slow his mind (the time-stopping trick, if he could manage it in his rusty state) to analyze the minutia of the experience. This was something he wanted to end as fast as possible. His mind called out to Nikki and Maurice and even Karl, who he’d never before been able to feel. He couldn’t find them, but he could hear screaming, and he felt relatively sure that at least some of it was in his head — which, as long as it didn’t cut off suddenly, was actually a good thing because it meant that they were alive. There were many, many human noises. Most were like thumps of meat being struck with a hammer. He heard yells and panicked screams. There was an odd sensation of hundreds of people holding their breath, unable to breathe as the cars upended and tumbled. As the cars landed and rolled and he fell up and down and then up again, many of the human screams ended and new ones began, but even those didn’t last for long before going silent. There was more booming, more crunching of metal. The car was jerked forward suddenly, everything in it slamming into what was barely still a rear wall. Everything had become sharp protrusions and crushing vises. His vision came and went.
 

Maybe four seconds had passed. And then, for a while, blessedly, there was nothing.
 

Reginald awoke to find his head clear but everything below his chest in agony. Apparently the trick his body sometimes had of shutting off pain in perilous situations was also rusty, because right now everything hurt. He raised his head, which was whole and without a scratch on it, and looked down to see that he had a gigantic metal fin protruding from his torso. The car had folded more or less in half and had split along the crease, creating a forest of sharp protrusions. Reginald seemed to have landed on one of those protrusions. He looked toward his legs and found them whole but half naked. There was a huge pile of gray ash beside the left leg with fabric lying on top of it that looked like his pants, and Reginald wondered if, while he’d been blacked out, he’d lost a leg and re-grown it.

There was an itch in his mind. Something he couldn’t quite put a finger on. Something was wrong that had nothing to do with the actual crash itself. He needed to get off this fin so that he could escape.
 

Reginald shifted his weight and found that the pain, as he tried to move, was beyond the world. It would be better to just stay where he was, he decided.
 

No. Move.
 

There was urgency behind that thought, but things were still too foggy. All that mattered was getting out.
 

He tried to put his hands under himself and push, but one of his arms refused to come along. He looked over and saw that the arm on one side was crushed under what seemed to be a luggage compartment. There was still luggage inside. He could see a Samsonite suitcase that had survived just fine, just as Samsonite promised. There was an ugly bag near it that looked as if it were made out of carpet, and this one hadn’t fared as well. Reginald could make out a wallet, a loose drugstore card, an annihilated cell phone, and a danish wrapped in cellophane. For one comic-horrible moment, Reginald imagined himself squirming over and, without use of his arms, sucking down the danish like Popeye did with spinach whenever he got into a jam. His belly would bulge and color would return to his limbs and he’d then split the car in half with his corpulence, freeing them all.
 

Hurry.

And that thought was insistent, but what was becoming more insistent — even more than the giant metal fin that had almost bisected him — was finding the others. They had to be here. They couldn’t have been impaled by wood, so as long as they’d managed to avoid a direct beheading, Nikki, Maurice, and Karl would still be alive, probably trapped like he was. And why not? Reginald could still hear humans making noises. Plenty of them, frail as they were, seemed to have survived. For now, anyway.
 

Nikki!
he thought.
 

He reached out his mind. They hadn’t quite gotten the hang of true telepathy, as Nikki’s vampire enhancements hadn’t gifted her mind as strongly as they’d gifted his. But if he concentrated, he could always find her. And then, after a moment, he did. He slipped inside of her head, knowing that it was a violation but deciding that the situation excused it. He saw a crushed leg, Nikki’s own. She was working herself free. Then he reached out for Maurice and found him, too. Maurice was already free, already searching. But he wasn’t searching openly, and that gave Reginald pause. He was hiding behind felled seats, moving from place to place warily, as if playing a war game. Maurice wasn’t looking for Reginald or Nikki. He could feel that Reginald and Nikki had survived. Instead, he was looking for Karl.
 

Reginald looked at his pinned arm. Just thinking about it hurt. He wondered why his panic response wasn’t kicking in. Then, in a regression into Eeyore self-loathing, he decided that it was because he was Reginald and that Reginald’s body had always betrayed him.
 

He wasn’t going to be able to pull himself off of the metal fin without his arms. And he wasn’t going to get his arm back without…
 

Ugh.
He didn’t want to think about it.
 

The arm wasn’t hanging on by much. If he could sever it, it would regrow on the end of the stump and he’d be free.
 

He looked at the fin sticking through his middle.
 

Well, free-ish, anyway.
 

Reginald rolled away from the pinned, mostly severed arm in its pool of blood and pulp, then tried to use his weight to jerk it hard enough to snap it off. But every time he tried, the fin cut something in his torso and lit his mind up like fire. It would almost be easier if he
weren’t
a vampire, if he
couldn’t
heal. The fin hurt especially bad because he was cutting the same flesh open over and over again, causing fresh gluts of blood to roll out and down his shirt. And each time afterward, he healed everything except the part where the fin was, clamping him to it tightly.
 

The other problem was that most of his abdominal muscles had been severed. He couldn’t sit up or roll well at all. Core musculature was mostly out of the picture.
 

Maybe he could
stand
off of the fin.
 

He bent his legs up, planted his feet, and pushed. But he didn’t budge, and when he looked down, he realized why. His legs weren’t bent up at all. His feet weren’t planted at all. He tried to move his legs again, but they didn’t move. Apparently his spine was also bisected.
 

Awesome.

He lifted his other hand, thinking that maybe his surprisingly strong fingers could peel the fin, or rip it off. But the hand flopped like a dead fish — wholly intact but with its tendons and supporting musculature severed, making it useless.

He was running out of options.
 

There’s only one way to do this, and you know it,
said a heckling voice in his head.
 

Reginald closed his eyes, took as deep of a breath as his lungs would allow, and leaned toward his crushed arm. He flicked out his fangs.
 

Then, making faces of revulsion, he went to work.
 

Nikki found him a few minutes later. She climbed a mountain of human gore and detached seats and arrived just as Reginald was heaving himself off of the giant metal fin using his newly grown arm.
 

“Thank God,” she said. “You’re alive.”
 

Reginald spit, then wiped at his mouth with his sleeve.
 

“I just chewed my own fucking arm off,” Reginald replied, making a disgusted face and indicating the pile of ash under the luggage compartment. Once the arm had collapsed to ash, the compartment laying on it had shifted, causing the cellophane-wrapped danish to tumble out. Reginald had taken it as a sign. He was unwrapping it now, preparing to devour it as if he had a grudge against it.

“Do you know where Maurice is?” she said.
 

“I could feel him around. He’s free. Looking for Karl. I don’t know where.”
 

Reginald felt his strength — what he had of it — returning. The danish seemed to be helping. So it was like with Popeye.

“Your boobs are out,” he said.
 

They were. So were Reginald’s. If they’d been humans, they’d both be dead, but as vampires they’d been able to take the slashing abuse that their clothes couldn’t, leaving them alive but exposed.
 

Nikki made a halfhearted attempt to pull her slashed bra over her breasts, then tugged at what had become a belly shirt. It didn’t help. Reginald continued to stare, fully aware of how inappropriate it was under the circumstances.

“We derailed,” she said.
 

“So you’re saying this isn’t the Avignon stop?”
 

Nikki’s eyebrows furrowed. “We aren’t anywhere near Avignon.”
 

“Because
that’s
what’s important right now.”

Nikki flicked her head around nervously. “Karl said earlier that there are several other vampire and human dignitaries on board. Very seriously doubting the humans survived. I guess this puts a crimp in the summit. Son of a bitch stroke of bad luck.”
 

“It wasn’t bad luck. We were deliberately derailed. I thought you knew that.”
 

“How would I know that?”
 

Reginald thought of her wide, terrified eyes just before the crash.
 

“Never mind. We have to…”
 

But then he stopped, because there was a loud, rending noise below them.
 

Because of the way the car had bent, Nikki and Reginald were up on a peak in the middle of the car. Nikki had come through a hole in the next car and had climbed up, following a kind of homing radar that they shared. It was what Reginald was about to use to find Maurice and hopefully Karl when he’d heard the noise. Without the radar, Nikki wouldn’t have easily seen him. He was above, in a fold. Most of the car’s contents, including a handful of still-living humans, were lower down.
 

Reginald peeked around the edge of the luggage compartment that had trapped his arm. Nikki, her hand on his shoulder and her bare breasts pressed into his back, peered over his shoulder.
 

The rending noise had been a man in a vintage-looking black suit opening a hole in the side of the car with his hands, peeling the metal back like a can of sardines. He had a thick black goatee, large, severe eyebrows, and a shock of black hair that was sticking more or less straight up. He strolled through the hole he’d made and looked around as if inspecting racks of clothing at a department store.
 

Reginald could see a group of three humans (they looked like teenage tourists — European, judging by their clothes) look toward the man as he came in. They didn’t seem to find it odd that he’d opened a hole in the car with his hands. All they cared was that he was here to rescue them.