Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (11 page)

“So it never ‘just happens’ anymore?” said Reginald. “You have to… what… get permission? Because I’ve got to say, that sounds really funny coming from a race of cold-blooded killers.”
 

“Procreation accidents like ours do happen,” said Maurice. “It’s frowned upon, and it’s very much fringe behavior — on par with humans who undergo extreme body modification. Usually the creator vampire isn’t punished, but the new progeny is almost always treated like a baby with a terrible birth defect for his or her entire life, and the creator is usually shunned for willfully subjecting another to a flawed eternity. But it does happen, and when it does, it usually just means a few more forms and a bit more hassle, like if you forgot to renew your license plates until months after they’d expired.
 
But you…”
 

“Me?” said Reginald.
 

“Well, let’s just say that you’re a bit farther outside of what our society is used to even in the most spontaneous of accidents.
Quite
a bit farther.”
 

Maybe it was his new vampire nature or the fact that he’d starved himself into exhaustion in Maurice’s absence, or simply the fact that he was tired of taking shit from everyone — human
and
vampire — but Reginald found himself getting angry again.

“Just say it, Maurice,” he said. “I’m like trying to get license plates renewed after the car in question drove off a cliff, exploded, dissolved into ash, and then gained three hundred pounds.”
 

Maurice sighed. “Frankly, yes.”
 

 
“So… what? Why did they call you in? I’m assuming it wasn’t just to yell at you.”
 

“They want to evaluate you,” said Maurice. “If they like what they see, you’ll go through the normal registration processes, retroactively, and life will go on. If they don’t, you’ll be destroyed.”
 

Well. That was blunt.

“Can I impress them with my speedreading?” Reginald asked.

Maurice shook his head. “I doubt it. The evaluation is a standard thing. I could show you videos; it’s all public record. It’s composed of physical tests. No real weight is given to the mental.”
 

“Can I pass it?”

“I don’t see how.”
 

“So the evaluation is a formality,” said Reginald. “You’re basically telling me I’ve been sentenced to death.”
 

“That may be a little fatalistic, but it’s probable.”

“Then I’ll run. In a car, I mean.”
 

“You can’t run,” said Maurice, shaking his head. “Nobody really knows where our authorities watch, but we know it’s all very Big Brother and that they don’t miss much. I might try it if it were just me, but you don’t exactly blend in.”

Reginald threw up his hands. “Am I just supposed to stay here and wait to be killed? Between no chance and a tiny chance, I’ll take the tiny chance. What do I have to lose?”
 

“Well, one thing I didn’t tell you is that the Council plays dirty,” said Maurice. “People have run in the past, so the Council has found a solution to that particular problem. They simply start killing everyone the runner knows until they return or until they run out of people and vampires to kill. So your mother and father, any siblings, childhood friends, you name it…”
 

“Do you think they’d kill Todd Walker?”
 

Maurice grinned. “Definitely.”
 

“Then I’m definitely running,” said Reginald.
 

Maurice chuckled.

Reginald sat down, then sighed.
 

“Okay. Fine. I won’t run. So what now?”

“We’ll go to the Council. A week from Wednesday.”

“Where is it?”

“Nobody knows. It moves. Part of Logan’s paranoid regime. Someone will come for us, and we’ll go with them.”
 

“And in the meantime?”

Maurice stood up and brushed at his pantlegs. “The best way to make a good impression while you’re waiting is to demonstrate your ability to follow directions and blend in,” he said.
 

“And what does that mean?” said Reginald.
 

Maurice went to the door, opened it, and tipped Reginald a goodbye salute. “Tomorrow is Monday,” he said. “I’d suggest you go to work.”

N
IGHT
S
HIFT

THE FOLLOWING EVENING AT TEN o’clock, Reginald arrived for his first night on the night shift, made a pot of coffee, and walked back to his cubicle feeling strangely content.
 

On his way to work, he had stopped by the church he’d visited on Saturday night and waited for the kids to come out into the play yard. Once they did, he found Claire and called her over to a corner. She came toward him easily, and he found himself wondering if, once she got close enough, he could grab her and bite her. But when she got within ten feet, she all of a sudden jumped as if goosed, then turned and ran in the other direction. Reginald was about to leave, dispirited, when she ran back out, hiding something under her coat. When she got close, she pulled out what looked like an enormous brain. It turned out to be a five-pound bulk tray of ground beef, on a white Styrofoam tray, wrapped in cellophane.
 

“They had it in the cafeteria fridge,” she explained.
 

Though she still wasn’t meeting his eyes, she
was
close enough to grab… but he looked down at the beef and felt his insides soften as if she’d given him a teddy bear. Maurice’s reservations aside, Reginald still didn’t have anything to compare dead beef blood to, and he couldn’t help but be touched.
 

“Thanks,” he said.
 

He told Claire that he couldn’t come over to visit. He said he had to go to work and apologized. She seemed disappointed — said she’d even thawed him a few steaks — but then something bright leapt into her eyes and she asked if he got off work when it was still dark. He said that his shift ended at seven and that as it stood, he’d have to very carefully make it home while the sun was shining — a notion that fascinated Claire, who didn’t see how that was possible. Her face fell again, but she said she understood.
 

Then, as Reginald was turning to leave, again thanking Claire for the pile of ground beef that he was already starting to pick at, he said that he could probably visit on his lunch break, if that wasn’t too absurd. She said that it wasn’t absurd in the least, and so they arranged to meet at a ground floor window on the side bordering an empty house and away from her mother’s bedroom. She promised to leave him a chair so he wouldn’t have to stand or sit on the grass.
 

Then he went to work, wondering if it was odd that his two best friends were turning out to be an impossibly old vampire who looked eighteen and a ten-year-old girl. If anyone was watching him, they’d think he was a pedophile. But that was the good thing about being a social misfit — it didn’t matter too much what other people thought, because they were constantly thinking the worst anyway.
 

With his coffee in hand, Reginald walked into his cubicle and sat down on his cushion. A loud farting noise came from beneath him.
 

Reginald closed his eyes and asked both God and whoever oversaw vampires for his money back.
 

A head with perfect teeth and a perfect cleft chin popped over the cubicle divider like a jack in the box. A hand stole over the perfect teeth to keep in an outright burst of laughter. What escaped instead were chortles. The eyes squinted to slits and tears brimmed at the corners.
 

“Hey!” said the perfect head of Todd Walker once it had gotten its laughter under control. “Welcome to the night shift, Reggie!”
 

“Todd?”
 

“You and I are like hair in a braid, Reggie. After you said you had to go to the night shift on account of your skin-melting disease, Phil moved me back here too.”

And Reginald, in addition to wondering if it was legal for Berger to tell people about his “skin-melting disease,” thought:
… to torture me?

“You’ll be here all night?” said Reginald, fishing the Whoopee Cushion out from under his seat cushion and dropping it in the trash.
 

“3pm to midnight,” he said. “I’m like an ambassador, bridging the worlds of night and day. I didn’t want to do it, but at least I got a big pay raise.”
 

Reginald didn’t take that very obvious bit of bait.
 

“Besides,” said Walker, “the night shift isn’t all bad.” At this, he nodded toward the door, where a tall, dark-haired woman was walking in and hanging up her coat. She looked like she was probably in her late twenties, dressed in a black skirt and black sweater with a white shirt peaking out from underneath. She was wearing heels, but even without them she was tall. Reginald, who was both tall
and
big, noticed that she almost hit her head on the low EXIT sign that he often ran into himself.
 

The woman walked in their direction, coming between the rows of cubicles. Walker raised his cleft chin and displayed his perfect white teeth.
 

“Hey Nikki,” he said.
 

“Hey Todd,” she said.
 

“What are you doing after work?”
 

“Sleeping.”
 

“Want any company?”

She rolled her eyes humorlessly and walked past them, into the kitchen.
 

“IT specialist, like your buddy,” said Walker. “Apparently she’s also a pianist. Pianist. Pianist. I wonder if she likes all things that sound like ‘pianist.’” Big grin. Reginald noticed that Walker was speaking to him about the night shift girl the way he’d talk about marathon running to a person in a wheelchair.
 

With nobody to talk to except for Reginald, Walker was harder than usual to shake. When Reginald had worked the day shift, Walker had been a pest. Now, he was a friendless pest who, in addition to torturing Reginald, seemed willing to take any conversational port in a storm. And most of what he seemed to want to talk about was how hard he was going to nail Nikki once he broke through her veneer.
 

With the unexpected and unwelcome addition of Walker, the first part of the night shift went much the same as the day shift always had. Reginald didn’t have a window, so large stretches of time passed where nothing seemed different, with Walker raising his petty annoyances every few minutes. The only real difference was that when he went into the kitchen for coffee (which he still very much enjoyed, just like pizza, fried chicken, and the rest), he ran into Maurice, with whom he exchanged a few words. He also ran into the new girl, except that she wasn’t exactly new. Maurice said she’d been working at the company for as long as he had.
 

Walker left at midnight and the world became blessedly quiet. It was as if a weight had been lifted off of Reginald, but he wasn’t the only one who felt the change.
 

“Oh, hey, did it just get less assholish in here?” the not-new new girl said aloud as she watched the door close behind Walker.

Reginald looked up. It seemed unlikely she was precisely talking
to him
, but he was the only other person within earshot. So he smirked, but said nothing.
 

“Now the party can start, right?” she said. This time she definitely
was
talking to him.
 

Reginald smiled, then looked down.

“Reginald, right? I’m Nikki. I would have introduced myself earlier, but I’ve been socially beaten down since that jerk started working nights. It’s like living under a totalitarian regime.” She extended a hand.
 

Reginald decided that this was the largest number of words a woman had voluntarily said to him in ten years. Reginald shook her hand. It was small but strong, and soft as powder.
 

“Have you met Maurice?” she said, gesturing. “He wears a sword on his belt.”
 

“Yeah, we knew each other from before. We overlapped a bit when I worked days.”
 

She nodded. “Well, nice to meet you.” And she turned to go.
 

Being the only three people in the office, Nikki, Maurice, and Reginald pinged past each other for the rest of the night like the last few bingo balls left in the hopper.

“How’s your hunger?” said Maurice, who he ran into a bit later. “Did you feed yet?”
 

“Um… kind of,” said Reginald.
 

Maurice made a face.
 

“I’m going out for lunch,” Reginald added.
 

At 2am, Reginald put on his coat, nodded to Maurice, and headed out to his car. He drove the few miles to Claire’s house and, suddenly very aware of how bad all of this could look, parked a block away and approached on foot via a small alley behind the row of houses. As he walked, he decided that this was a dumb idea. Not only was he fraternizing with a little girl through her window in the middle of the night, but she probably wouldn’t even be awake. Kids said dumb things, then forgot them.
 

But as he rounded the corner between Claire’s house and the abandoned house next door, he saw a chair sitting on the grass next to a window. A light was on in the window, and as he approached, the sash raised and a small head wearing an anorak hood stuck out and smiled.
 

“Reginald!” she said.
 

Reginald shushed her, then scampered up to the window. “Your mom will hear you!” he said. “And for the same reason, are you sure you want that light on?”
 

“She’s totally passed out drunk,” said Claire. “I could set the house on fire and she wouldn’t flinch.”
 

“Oh.”
 

Claire read his facial expression. “It’s okay. She does it all the time.”
 

“Oh.”