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

Maurice turned to look forward again. “Yeah, you would be.”
 

Reginald looked around himself. “This is disgusting.”

“You should have seen it before,” said Maurice. “Wait until the police find the puddle behind the bowling alley. It’s much bigger than this one.”
 

Reginald looked down. He was on a concrete pad at the top of a hill. There was nobody around. It looked like it might be an observation patch used by hikers who came up through the woods, but if that were the case, then the police would be alerted to a second large puddle of blood when the hikers came through. Quite the busy night.

“You brought me up here?”
 

“Couldn’t stay at the bowling alley. Too much noise. People were coming.”
 

“Where are we?”

“The park. The big one.” He pointed. “That’s I-17 down there.”
 

Reginald wondered why he wasn’t woozy, especially if he’d lost as much blood as Maurice had said he had. But he
wasn’t
woozy. In fact, he felt sharp and clear-headed. He did the calculation in his head.

“The park is an hour from the bowling alley by car. And you didn’t have a car.”
 

“I ran. Carrying you.”
 

“What time is it?”
 

“Eleven thirty.”
 

“You’re missing work,” said Reginald.
 

“Yes,” said Maurice. “But it’s allowed. I’m on paternity leave.”
 

Reginald didn’t understand that, but it was no more bizarre than claiming to have run forty miles with a three hundred and fifty pound load in an hour, so he let it go.
 

Reginald strolled away from Maurice, taking in his surroundings. He’d never been up this far, but he realized that knew where he was. He knew there was a trailhead a bit farther down the hill, near a picnic area that was reachable by car. His mother had taken him to that picnic area a dozen times throughout his childhood and into his adulthood. No, wait. Fourteen times. The last time had been on April 28
th
. He remembered that very clearly.
 

There was a square post in the ground twenty or thirty feet away. Reginald walked over and touched it. There was a blue metal arrow nailed to the post, and the arrow pointed to a gap in the woods. Reginald reached back in his memory until he could see the other end of the blue trail near the picnic ground in his mind. That end of the trail left the area almost vertically. Impossible to climb without getting down on your hands, in fact.
 

He marched back to where Maurice was sitting. Reginald realized that he could see a webbing of veins in Maurice’s face and neck, and on his hands. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed it before, because it looked sickly. Perhaps painful. He gasped.
 

“You’ve noticed the change in your vision,” said Maurice.

“Did I hit my head?”
 

“No. This is something else. Tell me, can you read that billboard down there?”
 

Reginald looked where Maurice was pointing and was able to make out a yellow billboard with an advertisement for a lawyer on it. He read the words on it aloud to Maurice, then gasped. It had been easy and natural to read it, but now that he looked again, he realized that the billboard was only an inch across in his field of vision. He could hold his arm at full length in front of him and the billboard wasn’t much larger than his fingernail. It had to be miles away.
 

“Sorry,” said Maurice. “I meant that one.” He pointed again. “To the left.”
 

“Which?”

“The blue one.”
 

“I don’t see a blue one.”
 

“Almost directly to the left of the one you just read, then higher up.”
 

Reginald squinted into the distance. He could see a blue speck, but nothing that looked much like a billboard. Nothing within reason, anyway.

“All I see is that blue speck above the two red lights, near the horizon.”

“Yes. That one.”
 

It was easily ten times as far away as the yellow billboard. He couldn’t even tell that it
was
a billboard, let alone read it.

“Of course I can’t read it,” he said. “It has to be ten miles away.”

“Probably about fifteen,” said Maurice, standing. “From this height, the horizon is nearly twenty miles off. I can see a sign on top of a gun store near Harvest Street, which has to be fifteen miles at least. I could read farther, but the curvature of the earth prevents it.”
 

Reginald decided to let that go too. Too much was odd right now, and he decided he should pick his battles carefully. So he asked something more pertinent.

“How did I really get up here?” he said.

“I told you. I carried you.”
 

“I weigh almost three hundred and fifty pounds,” said Reginald. “And that trail back there? It comes out of the lower trailhead at a forty-five degree angle.”

Maurice walked over to Reginald and wrapped an arm around his legs. Before Reginald could protest, Maurice lifted him in the crook of one arm as easily as Reginald lifted his 2-year-old niece. Then he set him down without comment.
 

“What are you, some kind of circus strongman?”

“Oh, come on, Reginald,” said Maurice, suddenly looking nothing like his usual, young goth self. He looked older. In fact, he looked almost amused. “Stop being so obtuse. You saw what you saw, if you’d let yourself believe it. I’m a vampire, and now so are you. You’ve figured that out by now.”

“Ha ha.”
 

Maurice opened his mouth in a sharp, fast motion. Fangs descended from his upper incisors.
 

“Neat,” said Reginald.
 

“You have them too.”
 

Reginald felt his teeth. No, he didn’t. Then something happened and suddenly he did. They had descended somehow, spearing his finger and drawing blood.
 

“This is always the lamest part of any supernatural story, where the person refuses to believe it all,” said Maurice. “I’d love it if we could skip the drama.”
 

Reginald, strangely unafraid, thought about the proposition in front of him. It made sense. Supernatural feats. Fangs. Blood. He’d seen the movies. Part of him wanted to protest and recoil, but another part — a part that felt new, and making itself at home inside of his head — told him to man up and be the first person ever to see what was right in front of his eyes. His new, vampire eyes.
 

“Okay,” said Reginald.
 

“You’re on board?” said Maurice.

“Yeah, sure. Why not?”
 

“You understand that you’re done with daylight. You can only be out at night, or you’ll need to stay inside all the time. You’ll need to call into work and change your shift so that you’re working at night, like me. And if they won’t change you over, you’ll need to find a new job.”
 

“No problem,” said Reginald. He wasn’t big on natural light anyway, and this would get him away from Walker and his clones. Win freakin’ win.
 

“You’ll never age.”

“Good deal.”
 

“You’ll never die unless you get staked or get stranded in the sun. Or unless you go tanning. No tanning, Reginald.”
 

“No problem.”

“And you’ll need to drink blood to live, of course.”

That was gross but not in the least unexpected. He’d already thought about it, and he guessed he’d get used to it.

“Can I still eat pizza?” he asked.

Eventually Maurice said, “I guess.”
 

Then something struck him, and what struck him made him suddenly excited.
 

“Wait,” he said, holding a finger up to Maurice. “Check this out.”
 

He turned back toward the blue trail and, new vampire nature running through his veins and nerves, ran as fast as he could. The trees blurred around him. He felt wind against his face. His arms pumped. His legs thundered. He wasn’t tired. He felt exhilarated, the world seeming to swim by as if in a dream, the horizon rotating like a record on a platter, and then it rotated end for end, the ground above and then the air above, and again and again and again until his face hit a rock and he heard his nose break.
 

He rolled over onto his back, panting, his breath trying to climb out of his chest. Then his stomach clenched and he rolled to the side just as he exploded into fits of vomiting.
 

The last thing he saw before blacking out was blood — probably Maurice’s blood — in a pool of something that looked like oatmeal.
 

F
ALLING
S
HORT

HE AWOKE ON THE SLAB again, feeling deja vu. Only this time, he was clear of the giant pool of congealing blood and his chest was moving up and down, up and down. He was sweating, and he barely had control of his breath. Maurice was standing over him.
 

“Don’t try that again,” said Maurice.
 

“What the hell?” said Reginald. “I’m breathing. I’m sweating. I’m supposed to be dead.”
 

“Let me ask you something,” said Maurice. “In vampire movies, do the vampires bleed?”

“Sure.”
 

“How is that possible, if their hearts don’t work?”

Maurice sank down into a squat at Reginald’s side.

“How about changes in hair? With the exception of
Interview with the Vampire
, we’ve never seen a vampire who can’t change his or her hairstyle, grow it longer, grow a goatee. What do you make of that?”
 

Reginald didn’t see what Maurice was getting at.

“One more. In those same movies, how do vampires get their nutrition?”

“They drink blood,” Reginald answered.

“How would that work, if their digestive systems don’t function?”

Reginald sat up, his senses returning. He used his sleeve to mop what had to be a half cup of sweat from his forehead and neck.
 

“What are you trying to tell me?” he said.

Maurice sat down next to him, sighed, and said, “The agent that makes us vampires changes us, Reginald. It changes our eyes, our ears, our brains, our nerves, our blood. It alters the function of all of our organs and all of our systems. It makes our muscles work better. We get stronger. It makes us more or less impervious to the things that used to kill us, save sunlight and penetration of the heart by wood. And perhaps most importantly, vampirism allows us to heal amazingly fast. But what you need to understand is that
all of those organs still function.
We can run fast because our muscles heal as fast as we damage them. Our cells heal faster than we can deprive them of oxygen. We can be shot and stabbed through the lungs
not
because we don’t need to breathe, but because we can heal the damage instantly.”
 

“Is this just… you know… FYI?” said Reginald.
 

“Becoming a vampire means, more than anything, that you’ll heal instantly, with emphasis on the idea that ‘heal’ means
‘to return to your previous state.
’ You could cut off my leg and it’d grow back. But…” He rolled up one of his pantlegs and pointed at a white line just above his ankle. “But this scar? Watch.”
 

Maurice pulled a small knife from his pocket. It was very sharp; Reginald could see the uneven, ugly wear that suggested it had been repeatedly sharpened beyond the pristine and pretty edge it’d had when it left the factory. Maurice hesitated half a beat, then sliced the blade into the skin above his ankle. He inhaled with a hiss. Then, with one quick motion, he sliced away a chunk of skin as thick as a swatch of leather. Blood spilled to the dirt.
 

Then, within seconds, the wound became pink and then pale. Hairs sprouted. And as the skin knitted, the scar reappeared.
 

“Reginald,” said Maurice, “are you familiar with the process that goes into determining whether a person will be granted a sex change?”

As much as Reginald didn’t know where Maurice was going before, he really didn’t know where he was going now.
 

“Noooo…”
 

“It’s not just a medical procedure. Prospects are required to go through rounds of therapy and counseling and hormone treatments… all with the purpose of
making sure they truly want to commit to an irreversible change, and of preparing them for that change.
”

“Are you saying…”
 

“I don’t know that I should have turned you,” said Maurice. “It was an impulse, and it was rash. Maybe too rash.
Probably
too rash, actually. You’re ill-equipped. You didn’t know what you were getting into, and you didn’t have time to prepare. I’m sorry, Reginald. I made a snap decision. For some reason, I didn’t just want to let you die.”
 

“Um… thanks?”

“You may not be thanking me later. See, you’re now more powerful than you’ve ever been, but a vampire’s enhancement is always relative to their condition at the time of their change. I was fast when I was turned, and vampirism made me much, much faster. I wasn’t particularly strong, but I did get stronger, and I developed more strength with age. You, on the other hand…”
 

“I’m a fat vampire.”
 

Maurice shrugged. “Did you ever wonder why there are no legends about overweight vampires? It’s not because vampirism makes you fit. It’s because just like with a sex change, becoming a vampire is usually something that a person enters into willingly. It’s something that prospects know about well in advance — and because they know they’re committing to never, ever changing, it’s something people train for. It’s like picking your hairstyle and wardrobe for a photo that will last forever. Before people become vampires, they get strong. They get fast. They get healthy. You wouldn’t believe how many vampires are vegans and vegetarians before they’re turned. It’s ironic.”