Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse (19 page)

“Come on. It’s almost dusk.” He continued to nudge her.
 

“I am forever ruined.”
 

“Nikki. Seriously.”
 

“I had so many orgasms, my orgasms had orgasms. I have awoken everyone in the motel.”
 

“Everyone in the motel is dead,” he said.
 

“Exactly. I came hard enough to wake the dead. You thought you had it rough with vampires? Here come the zombies. And they’re all going to have zombie boners, because my screams are pretty hot.”
 

They were. Reginald felt a stiffening. But there was work to do.
 

“Come take a shower.”
 

Not moving, Nikki giggled and said, "'Come.'"

“What are you, fifteen?”
 

“At
least
fifteen. But I lost count when I blacked out.”
 

“I should never have shown you I could do that.”
 

She sat up. “I just realized something. Have you
always
been able to do that?”
 

“The one thing, or the thing with the phone?”
 

“Jesus. I forgot about the phone.”
 

“Yeah. That was probably illegal.”
 

She wagged her finger at him. The motion made her boobs jiggle. Reginald tried to think about baseball. Then he remembered that like the motel’s bonerified zombie residents, most people who’d ever played baseball were probably dead.
 

“If your shitty self-esteem is keeping anything else from me, you need to get over it and let me know,” she said. “You know what’s illegal? Keeping those skills from your lovely girlfriend. I think I dislocated a hip. You didn’t do it; I did it. Just popped right out. Might also have broken a toe or two when I kicked that hole in the headboard. So… what else is there? Can you bake cupcakes super well? Can you do the dishes faster than a speeding locomotive?”
 

“I can walk at upwards of three miles per hour,” he bragged.
 

Nikki hopped up, now fully exposed. He tried to keep his eyes on the prize — the prize being the diminishing light visible through the curtained window — but it was hard with Nikki totally nude in front of him.
 

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll take a shower and get ready. But at dawn, you are going to injure me again.”
 

Reginald looked Nikki over from top to bottom.

“Oh, hell,” he said, giving her a shove back onto the bed. “Let’s just get it out of the way now.”
 

Given their pleasant diversion, they didn’t leave the motel until after the sun was well down, immersing the area in darkness. Despite its size, Philly didn’t seem to have retained power — likely due to the larger civilized cluster nearby in New York. Without electricity, the city (and the semi-rural surrounding area, where Reginald and Nikki set out in search of the vampire codex) was like a black pit. Reginald, after he’d become a creature of darkness, had begun to notice all of the little, barely-noticed lights that covered the world. Back in his human home, there had always been a ready light on his TV. His coffee maker had LED numerals that showed the time. There was a glow from the lighted panel on the front of his digital video recorder, a red light on the smoke detector, and a weak glow from distant streetlights that peeked between the curtains. But now all of those lights were gone, and their absence felt ominous. There were no little sounds, either — the hum of a refrigerator motor, the whoosh of recirculating air, the dim sounds of planes overhead or cars on the street. It felt like they were inside a parody of civilization rather than civilization itself.
 

They emerged into the moonlit streets, looking around to be sure they were alone. They saw nobody and nothing. No humans, no vampires. No AVT, no SA, no Kill Squads or roving gangs. There were no lights in any of the buildings.
 

Nikki ran.
 

Reginald, riding behind her in his sling, steered her like a horse, tapping her shoulders to indicate where to turn while she was at speed, then leaning down to give her input when she stopped to ask. He didn’t need a map. He
was
a map.
 

But as they traveled, he began to feel unsure.

A sudden sense of doubt settled over Reginald. He’d seen the shape of the river in the seer’s mind, and he knew for a fact that they were approaching the same shape in the same river. But what was to say that the river was anywhere near the codex? What was to say that the other image he’d seen in the maker’s memories through Malcolm’s blood — the statue of the angel with fangs — was even related to the river image? And even if the two images
were
related, what was to say that they were
geographically
related? What if the maker had once spent time near the Delaware River… and quite separately had guarded the codex by a statue of a vampire angel? Or worse: wasn’t it possible that
neither
image marked the location of the ancient document? This entire errand might be for naught. They could be in the wrong place, in the wrong country, on the wrong continent. Because now that he thought about it, why would a thousands-of-years-old vampire relic be in
Philadelphia?
Why not Jerusalem? Why not under an Egyptian pyramid?
 

But as they approached their destination, a force grew in Reginald that was stronger than self-doubt: a sense of fate. And once they were within moon-lit sight of the graveyard, Reginald knew that this was the right place. The cemetery was old. Not old enough to have existed when the codex was penned, but old enough that the keepers would have had hundreds of years of history to move it here — presumably because an ocean’s distance from its place of origin was enough to throw seekers off its trail.
 

The cemetery was surrounded by an ornamental fence and guarded by an enormous iron arch. There were hinges on the inside edges of the arch, suggesting that there had once been a set of gates in its middle that had long ago rusted away. The poorly tended main road was gravel that had been mostly lost to the dirt below, and the grass around the graves had grown long and deep through its bloody summer without a groundskeeper. As Reginald dismounted and they marched on, the road forked and diverged into dozens of small paths, dispersing into trickles like a river’s delta.
 

“Where is the statue?” said Nikki.
 

Reginald shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Are you sure it’s here?”
 

“No. But I think it is.” His sense of doubt returned. The statue, really, could be anywhere nearby. It could be in a park. Or outside a sacrilegious church.
 

“One of the graves,” she said, touching a marker. The stone was old, canted forward as if for creepy effect. Then she looked around, and Reginald’s gaze followed. The entire yard was ramshackle, as if nobody had tended it in centuries. Headstones were chipped and leaning, like a Halloween parody. The place had a few mausoleums, a few obelisks. It wasn’t a huge cemetery, but it was big enough. There had to be thousands of graves, thousands of places to search.
 

“It’s going to take forever,” said Nikki.
 

But Reginald had an idea, and despite his own feeling that it was a violation, Nikki agreed. He slipped into her mind, using their blood connection to see through her eyes. Then she blurred past every grave, looking sideways as she traversed each row. Reginald’s computer mind studied the mental image of each grave she passed. It was oddly efficient, and only three minutes later they already knew they’d failed.
 

“It’s not here,” said Reginald.
 

“I could look again.”
 

Reginald shook his head. His analysis had, within his own mind, felt like it had taken hours. He’d seen each grave Nikki had blurred past with an archeologist’s precision. There were only a handful of statues of angels, and none had fangs. There were no hidden corners and few trees or obstructions in the old boneyard. The statue was simply not here.
 

“I can run circles around this place. Everywhere around your bit of the river. Parks. Zoos. Private shrines in backyards.”
 

Reginald was still shaking his head, warring anew with the sense of fate still insistent inside of him. He’d been so sure. So very sure.
 

Then his eyes fell on a utility shed with a green hose coiled on its outside wall. The shed looked as old as the cemetery markers; it was made of logs and there was a pasty gray mortar visible between the layers. The thing was small but solid, about the size of a compact car.

Reginald approached the shed. Nikki followed. Their legs swished through the unmowed grass with a noise like whispers.
 

There was a padlock on the door. The hasp mounted to the log door looked like it had been made from forged iron. The lock was a thing of antique beauty, simple but clearly made by hand. It was covered in rust, but the bolt was thick, like something from a medieval prison.
 

“Tell me,” Reginald said, fingering a cake of rust that had covered the lock’s large keyhole. “How did the grounds crew store their lawnmowers in here without ever opening the door?”
 

He put his fingers in the space between the lock’s hasp and its base, then spread them. Reginald’s fingers were shockingly strong — small muscles overcompensating for deficient large ones — and he watched as the hasp stretched like taffy. The bolt snapped with a noise like a gunshot. He tossed the pieces of the lock aside, then opened the door and found something surprising.
 

“It’s a grave,” he said.

The log shed contained a small burial crypt. It wasn’t quite a mausoleum and would be barely large enough to stand inside, and to one side was a statue of an angel in robes, her wide mouth accented by two sharp fangs. The entire tomb was made of marble that had been softened by the years. The shed had been built around it with very little room to spare. The logs were like a shell, clearly built to conceal it.
 

Reginald stooped to peer at the crypt’s low door. There was an odd kind of lock buried into the white stone — three omnidirectional tumblers covered in faded gyphs that rolled like dice under his fingers.
 

“This is it,” he said. “This is what we’ve been looking for.”
 

A noise like a small stick breaking popped from behind them, and a deep voice said, “We’ll take it from here, Reginald.”
 

They turned. Behind them in the quiet graveyard was Claude Toussant.

A
SH

CLAUDE WAS WEARING THE SAME oddly formal black suit he and the other Annihilists had worn when they’d crashed the TGV trains. Black-clad V-Crew soldiers stood in a semicircle around him, their silver-bladed gloves up and poised.
 

“Step back, Reginald,” said Claude.
 

Reginald did, and as he did, he saw that there were more soldiers on the other side of the shed. They’d entirely surrounded him in the time it had taken to lean toward the crypt door, and none had made a sound.
 

“You too, Nikki.”
 

Nikki looked like she might try to do something stupid. Reginald’s eyes asked her not to. The V-Crew had them contained, arranged in a loose circle that put each vampire about a double-arm’s length from the next. If the soldiers extended their arms and clasped hands, they could all play the world’s most disturbing game of Red Rover.

“Don’t try any of your little mind tricks, by the way,” said Claude, waving his hand around his head. “Everyone here has trained to keep you out, and judging by my dry run at VWC, it works just fine.”
 

“I wasn’t trying very hard back then,” said Reginald.
 

“Sure you were,” said Claude. “And as smart as you are, you still can’t lie worth shit.” Then he took two steps forward and leaned toward Reginald. The soldiers didn’t move, remaining in their loose formation.
 

“So,” he said. “You had a nice trip from Antarctica?”

Beside Reginald, Nikki’s hand darted to her mouth. Through the hangover of the blood bond they’d used to scan the graves, Reginald felt her realize something.

“You
wanted
us to escape,” she said.
 

Claude nodded. “We couldn’t get anything out of Malcolm. We’d been trying for decades, but he’s a fucking idiot and a terrible seer. He couldn’t tell us anything, and we used our most persuasive methods to ensure that he told us the truth. Then we had him turn several humans to see if the blood bond between them could clear anything up — if the new vampires could interpret what was inside Malcolm, their maker, in a way that he himself couldn’t. But nothing worked.” Claude tapped his chin with a finger. “I’d suspected as much, because I’ve never heard of a vampire who could sense much more than his maker’s moods, let alone one who could see a generation back. But hey, I’d never heard of a vampire who could glamour other vampires either… at least until I got back from the TGV and worked out what must have happened between us. So when you showed up at Vampire World Command? Well, it was just too golden of an opportunity. I just had to see what
you
could find out from Malcolm — if, that was, you thought you could run away undetected with whatever you learned.”
 

“You knew we’d come,” said Reginald, eyeing the V-Crew soldiers and poking them with his mind. They all had mental walls up. To Reginald’s bloodsense, the walls felt like reinforced concrete.
 

Claude shook his big head, his goatee looking particularly black in the moonlight. “Oh, not at all. But when you
did
show up? Well. We couldn’t have planned it any better. It was an incredibly lucky coincidence — almost as if you’d been sent to give me the last piece I needed to end this conflict.”