Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (6 page)

Then, once Reginald was safely in his cubicle, he found that he couldn’t stay awake. Three separate times before lunch, he woke up quite unexpectedly to find that he’d fallen asleep on his keyboard, his screen filled with a repeating string of random letters (and, in one apropos section, nothing but “zzzzzzz”). At one point a new email arrived from Todd Walker, and Reginald opened it to find a photo Walker had snapped of him asleep on the keyboard, a puddle of drool leaking onto the dark surface of the desk.
 

He’d also gotten chewed out by Berger for being so late, and for being so sweaty. “If you want to get in shape, that’s great,” he said, “but do it on your own time.” Then he made an exaggerated face and waved a hand through the air. “And then take a shower.” Reginald considered protesting, but then ran a hand through his hair and found it wet, found it standing up and resisting his efforts to smooth it, and noticed the giant wet stains on his shirt, across the front, sticking to his back, and actually dripping at the armpits.
 

At the end of the day, hoping his boss’s animosity had cooled, Reginald walked into Berger’s office and asked to be transferred to the night shift. Berger said no, that he needed Reginald around when the accountants and bankers were awake. Reginald protested. Berger held firm. Finally, Reginald told him that he had a rare family disease that had recently fully developed and that he was ultra-sensitive to sunlight. He even Googled for a segment he seemed to remember on a news magazine show about a girl who couldn’t get any sunlight at all and showed it to Berger to prove that this was a real thing, but still Berger was skeptical.
 

“I don’t believe you,” he finally said. “Why now? Why today, suddenly, with no warning, when you were okay yesterday?”

Rash action was going to be required.

Reginald took a deep breath and placed his hand in a ray of sunlight streaming through the window and onto Berger’s desk. Immediately, his skin began to turn red and blister. Reginald yanked the hand back, making noises of discomfort, and shoved the hand into his pocket so that Berger wouldn’t see how quickly it healed.
 
Berger looked shocked. Finally, he nodded.
 

“So it’s a real threat to your health?”

“Absolutely,” said Reginald, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. “I could die.”
 

“Okay, You can work ten PM to seven AM, starting Monday.”
 

Reginald started to protest, but then decided that it was kind of absurd of him to expect Berger to invert everything overnight, and so he let it go.
 

B
IG
B
RAINS

IN ORDER TO AVOID THE daylight remaining before he could switch to the night shift, Reginald called in sick on Wednesday, and planned to do the same on Thursday and Friday. He called early, before Berger’s secretary was in, and left a message on Berger’s voicemail. Then he turned his phone off for the rest of the day.
 

Maurice came over on Tuesday night before heading to work. It was Reginald’s first full night as a vampire. He had some questions about his new life, and he had a story to relate.

“Yeah,” said Maurice when Reginald told him about the day’s events. “Daylight’s a bitch.”
 

They were sitting in Reginald’s house. Reginald was on the couch, semi-supine, and Maurice was in a La-Z-Boy with the foot support up, a cigarette burning in his hand. He said he’d picked up the habit back in France, well after becoming a vampire. No, it didn’t make sense, he said, but vampires liked to be chic, and smoking in Paris cafes was the height of chic at the time.
 

“It isn’t just daylight,” said Reginald. “A lot’s a bitch so far. I’ve got to be honest. I’m not seeing the upside.”

“Well, you’ll never die unless you burn in the sun or someone stakes you,” said Maurice. “You’ll never get old. And you’re stronger.”
 

“Yeah,” said Reginald. “Watch this.” He picked up an empty can of Mountain Dew, flourished it for Maurice, and crushed it.
 

“Stronger than you were, I mean,” said Maurice.

Reginald rolled his eyes and opened a new can of Mountain Dew. It turned out that vampires could eat and drink human foods if they wanted to, and Reginald, always a comfort eater, still very much wanted to. He’d already eaten two buckets of fried chicken since dinner, and the remnants were still on his face. There was a Sara Lee coffee cake warming in the oven and the corpses of three Twinkies at his feet. At the rate depression was setting in, he’d bankrupt himself on Cheetos and Yoo-Hoo within a month.
 

“It’ll get better,” said Maurice. “Like I told you, we get stronger and faster as we get older.”
 

“How quickly does that happen?”

“Pretty quick,” said Maurice. “You’ll notice a significant difference in a century or two.”
 

“That’s not fast,” said Reginald.
 

“Measurable improvement even in a decade, then,” said Maurice with the air of someone conferring a great favor.
 

Reginald sighed.
 

“Are you hungry?” asked Maurice.
 

“Starving. That’s why I ordered the pizza.”
 

“You understand that human food doesn’t nourish you anymore, right?” said Maurice.
 

“It nourishes my soul.”

Maurice sat up. “What I was asking was, are you hungry for
blood
? Because by tomorrow or Friday, you’re going to need something other than carbs and grease.”

“I’m hungry a lot. How can I tell the difference?”

“Well,” said Maurice, “if you feel like you will die — and I mean literally
die
— if you don’t get some sustenance soon, that’s blood hunger.”
 

“I feel that way now,” said Reginald.
 

“No you don’t. That’s just old habits.”

Reginald waved his arm dismissively, indicating that Maurice was of no use to him.
 

After a few minutes of silence, Maurice hopped up buoyantly, like an aerobics instructor. “C’mon,” he said. “Stand up. I want to try something. Have you tried anything physical since last night? Maybe your wind is getting better.”

Reginald shrugged.
 

“Do some jumping jacks,” said Maurice.
 

Reginald did. After twenty, he was starting to pant and sweat.
 

“I did twenty!” he said, jubilant.
 

Maurice shook his head.

“I’m not improving? Am I hopeless?”

Maurice didn’t answer. Instead, he propped his elbow on a stack of
TV Guide
magazines like he wanted to arm wrestle. “Let me see your guns,” he said. Then, noticing the look on Reginald’s face, he added, “I’ll go very light. I just want to see where you’re at.”
 

Reginald hunkered down and put his palm in Maurice’s palm, which made Maurice’s hand look like that of a child mannequin by comparison. He set his elbow on the
TV Guides
and looked up.
 

“Ready?”
 

“I guess,” said Reginald.
 

“Push.”
 

“I am pushing.”
 

“I mean, push as hard as you can.”
 

“I am pushing as hard as I can,” said Reginald.
 

Maurice sighed. “Okay, then try to resist me. I’m going to push really, really light. Okay?”

“Okay.”
 

There was a loud snap and Reginald’s wrist exploded in a mess of tendons and veins. It was as if someone had thrown spaghetti into the air. Blood sloshed down his arm, and a tiny gusher from the severed artery began squirting Maurice in the face.

Maurice tilted Reginald’s hand, which was still attached by a flap, back up and into place. It healed instantly. He grabbed a greasy KFC napkin that Reginald had tossed onto the floor and began mopping his face with it.

“Sorry,” he said. Then silence hung in the air.
 

After a few minutes in which Reginald thought Maurice might be deciding to kill him after all, Maurice looked up with something like hope.
 

“What about your mind?” he said. “Have you ever been tested?”
 

Reginald had been a mediocre student. High school had been miserable and he’d wanted only to survive it, to make it to the next day and the next day until it was over.
 

“I was average. I got mainly B’s in school.”
 

Maurice shook his head. “Not the same thing. Have you ever displayed high creative aptitude? Are you good with math? Music? Memory? Problem solving?”

Reginald shrugged, unsure.
 

“Think about it,” said Maurice, “because vampirism enhances our true mental natures just as it enhances our physical natures. The only hitch is, the things that get enhanced in your head aren’t always the things you were good at as a human. It’s like vampirism reads your innate skills right off of your DNA — the potential you were born with. Many new vampires are surprised by what they find they can do. I have a friend who’d never played an instrument before, but learned to play drums as good as any human alive in an hour. He discovered it quite by accident, by playing Rock Band and then deciding to try the real thing.” Maurice nodded at Reginald’s video game console and his Rock Band guitar and drum set.

“Are you asking if I’m good at Rock Band?”

“Just looking under the hood. Have you played since last night?”
 

“No.”
 

“Want to?”
 

Reginald wanted only to drink his Mountain Dew and wait for his pizza, and maybe spend some time hoping to die. Everything else felt pointless and futile.
 

“Nah.”
 

“You might be surprised, Reginald. Seriously. I was thinking about this last night. Typically, vampires are very good either above the neck or below, but seldom both. It’s as if there’s only so much improvement to go around. Most vampires end up being strong and fast, but not much more mentally adept than humans. The most mentally gifted vampires I’ve ever known were those who aren’t perfect physically. It’s like vampirism goes to your brain when there’s not much else for it to work with.”
 

Reginald barely heard the point about mental adeptness. He’d heard something else.

“You’ve known vampires like me?”
 

Maurice rocked his head back and forth a little, unsure. Then he said, “Not like you, no.”
 

“But you’ve known vampires who weren’t physically perfect.”

“In the past. Yes.”
 

“In the past?”
 

“Times change. Things change, even for us.”
 

“Do you still know them? Can I meet them?”
 

Maurice bit his lip. “No. There aren’t many around nowadays.”

“But the old ones. What happened to them?” He was rising from his chair, finally feeling excited, but Maurice didn’t seem to share his excitement.
 

Instead of answering, Maurice changed the subject. “Do you know about glamouring?” he said. “Skill at glamouring usually goes with better mental adeptness.”

“Glamour. You mean like putting on makeup?”

“I mean like making humans do what you want. It’s like hypnosis. I thought everyone knew about that.”

Reginald raised his eyebrows, intrigued. The idea of making people do his bidding was promising. He could make Walker come to work without pants. He could get Berger to give him a huge raise. He might be able to get hot women to have sex with him, or at least get them to undress in front of him.
 

“Can I try it on you?” he asked.
 

“Vampires can’t be glamoured,” said Maurice. “Try it next time you’re around a human. Just
one
human to start. Just look them in the eyes and start talking, never breaking eye contact. Ask them to do something small, like snap their fingers, to see what effect you have. You’re either going to have a gift for it or not, and if you do, you’ll figure it out with practice.”
 

Reginald nodded, encouraged.
 

Maurice looked Reginald over, from top to bottom and down again. Then he leaned back against Reginald’s breakfast counter and crossed his arms.
 

“Okay,” he said. “Reginald, you are easily the most out-of-shape vampire ever created. Which means…”
 

“Gee, thanks.”
 

“Let me finish. Which means that if lack of physical gifts really does correlate with increased mental gifts, you might have some value to the Vampire Nation after all. As a culture, we’ve gotten dumber since my time. I can see it happening. It might be coincidence, or it might not be. Stand up.”
 

Reginald stood.
 

“I’m above average by today’s standards, but among vampires as a whole I’m not particularly mentally gifted,” said Maurice. He grabbed a book at random from Reginald’s ramshackle bookshelf and looked at it. Then he showed it to Reginald. It was Stephen King’s
The Shining.
 

“I’ve never read this,” said Maurice. He opened the book, looked down at it, and then there was a blur and the riffle of pages, like shuffling a deck of cards, as the stack of pages moved from Maurice’s right hand to his left. “Now I have. People say this guy doesn’t end books well, but I didn’t see that boiler explosion coming.”
 

He tossed the book to Reginald, who caught it with both hands. “Now you do it,” he said.
 

Maurice had read the book in under fifteen seconds. Reginald looked at the thing in his hand as if he’d never seen it before.
 

“That’s what ‘not particularly gifted’ looks like?” he said.
 

“I’m just fast,” he said, pulling out a new cigarette and lighting it. “‘Fast’ is muscular. Humor me and try it yourself.”