Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (44 page)

Reginald’s hand stole up into the small of his back, slowly, his fingers wrapping around the stake.
 

The male vampire got closer. Reginald inclined his head slightly, exposing his neck. Soon, the vampire would realize he couldn’t smell a human scent on Reginald, but for now the reek of Victoria’s blood would mask it. He took a quick glance at her and saw her swallow. She was alive, but couldn’t have long. The blood was everywhere.
 

Reginald freed the stake from his waistband. The woman was still too far away. He took a shambling step forward, inclining his head farther. The woman hissed, her fanged mouth coming open. It was a sound filled with lust and hunger.
 

In front of Reginald, the male vampire opened his mouth and began to lean forward. Then there was a loud noise and the side of the vampire’s head exploded.
 

Reginald turned in the direction of the sound to see a group of seven or eight humans running down the alley. The man in the lead was holding a handgun at arm’s length.
 

“Fuck you, monster!”
he shouted.
 

The man next to the shooter hooted and fired a second handgun. The shot took the female in the shoulder. A flower of blood bloomed on the wall behind her. The man fired twice more. Since he was only holding on with one hand and was running, both shots went wide. Then the man stopped, sighted, and carefully fired a fourth shot, which hit the female vampire in the eye.
 

Two of the men in the approaching posse were holding shotguns, but they hadn’t so much as raised them. There seemed to be an order to the attack that they all understood, as if they’d done this before. The shotguns, with their wide radius, were probably intended for close-quarters work. They probably only came up after the lead men had winged their quarry with the smaller guns. Reginald couldn’t help calculating as he watched them run. He was thinking that they could step up their game by investing in a rifle or two.
 

The male vampire stood up. The side of his previously coifed hairdo was matted with blood. He touched it in revulsion. He then bent down to check on the female, but choosing to duck rather than attack was a mistake. The moment’s hesitation gave the men enough time to sight and fire again. Three bullets smashed into the male’s chest, throwing him backward into the wall and seducing a groan. Then the shotgun-bearers finally got into the action as the group arrived around Reginald. They trained their barrels on the female and opened fire, blowing a C-shaped hole in her side.
 

The male was already halfway healed. He hissed, but Reginald, who the posse was ignoring, could hear the pain in that hiss. Gunshots wouldn’t stop a vampire unless they were silver or wood and struck him in the heart, but they hurt like hell and could definitely slow one down.
 

The group of men (Reginald counted eight now that they’d formed a firing line and were standing still) fired shot after shot into the pair of vampires, backing them away from Victoria. One of the men shouted to watch out for a victim on the ground. Blood was absolutely everywhere. The vampires refused to stay down. They healed quickly, but every time they got to their feet, the men with the guns fired again and knocked them back down.
 

The female, finding herself temporarily unshot, crouched, jumped, and landed on the three-story roof of the building behind her. Reginald looked up, but she was already gone in a blur.
 

The male vampire was struggling to get his feet. Literally. The barrage of bullets had torn off one of his feet. Reginald watched as the foot turned to ash inside of his shoe and a new one, shoeless, grew at the end of his ragged leg. Watching the male try to get up was like watching a person struggle forward into the stream from a pressure hose. But it was just a standoff; the vampire couldn’t heal fast enough to flee, and the group would never kill him with normal metal slugs.
 

The vampire, barely recognizable for all the blood, gripped a ladder hanging from the building’s roof and began to climb — slowly, because all of his energy seemed to be going into healing. Then the shotgunners, both of whom had been reloading, raised their weapons, took several steps forward now that the creature was retreating, and fired, and fired, and fired until they were empty. When the smoke cleared, the vampire was hanging from the ladder by his hands. His torso was hanging on by a small band of something — maybe skin, maybe tendon, maybe even intestine. Reginald could see that his spine had already been snapped. It was sticking out at a strange angle.
 

Then the tendon or whatever it was gave way, and the vampire’s lower half fell to the ground with a
Fwump
. The legs immediately turned gray under the vampire’s now-discarded pants and began to flake away. The top half of the vampire continued to clamber up the ladder hand-over-hand, screaming in pain. Then a bulbous pink balloon began to grow where he’d been halved. The balloon elongated, and by the time the vampire reached the top rung, the pink had become peach and had formed the beginnings of new legs and a naked ass.
 

The men appeared too shocked to speak or to continue firing after the escaping half of a vampire. The shotgunners were empty and hadn’t bothered to reload. They all watched as the vampire reached the roof and vanished.

One of the men stooped toward Victoria, who was hard to find amongst all of the blood. Where had all of the blood come from? Reginald had never gotten a satisfactory answer to that. Vampires could bleed and bleed and bleed, and they’d never run out.
 

“You okay, mister?” said one of the men, looking over at Reginald. “He didn’t get you before we showed up, did he?”
 

Reginald nodded at the first question, then shook his head at the second. He bared his neck to show the man.
 

“Those things just keep coming,” said one of the men holding a shotgun. “We’ve found that all we can do is to drive them back.”
 

“They’re
vampires
,” said a boy at the back of the group, who was holding only a bat. Whether he’d had a gun drawn at any point, Reginald hadn’t seen.
 

“Shut up, Greg,” said the man who’d led the charge.
 

“He saw what just happened,” said Greg. “You saw it, right? We ain’t crazy.”
 

Reginald shrugged, unsure how to get out of this situation. He didn’t want to stick around and face the police — if, in fact, the police showed up. But they’d have to. The noise of the encounter had been thunderous. Dozens of shots had been fired. Every house for miles must have called 911.
 

“Can you stick around for an ambulance if we call one?” said the man who’d asked if he was okay. “There’ll be a lot of questions for eight guys with weapons standing over a woman covered in ten gallons of blood. We’ve gotta go. You tell them whatever you want, okay?”
 

Reginald nodded.
 

“Listen… I know you’re scared, but… what’s your name, buddy?”
 

“Floyd,” said Reginald. But he
was
scared, and there was a lot of blood, and apparently his body enjoyed coming up with new and amusing ways to betray him. So, when he opened his mouth, the neighborly expression dropped off of the man’s face and he began fumbling with the safety on his handgun.
 

“He’s got fangs!” the man yelled.
 

In the seconds it took for the other men to turn and raise their guns, Reginald threw his weight into a tall stack of palettes and ran. The stack wobbled and fell behind him, striking two of the men in the lead and creating an obstacle for the rest.
 

The reach of their guns was unimpaired by the palettes, however.
 

The first gunman fired and hit Reginald in the back. It must not have hit any bones, because Reginald watched a red bloom form on the front of his shirt as the bullet passed straight through him. They were going to try and bring him down like they’d done the others, so he’d have to grit his teeth through the pain and force his legs to keep working. If he fell, he was done for. The man called Greg had said they were vampires. Sooner or later, one of the men would think to break off a piece of wood and stick it into the fat guy to see what happened. In fact, said fat guy had made it easy. He had a stake tucked into the waistband of his pants.

The bullet wound felt like someone had shoved a very hot spike through Reginald’s side. He felt himself wanting to favor that side, but he made his arms keep pumping, driving him forward.
 

The first of the men were over the fallen palettes, now thirty yards back. The shotgunners, thankfully, were at the very rear of the group. It would take them time to reload, and it wasn’t easy to do so while running.
 

The pain of the gunshot passed, but Reginald was already feeling lightheaded and damning his vampire inabilities. He could sprint over short distances, and he’d found that if he did, he could outrun humans for a minute or two… but once the sprint gave out, even moderately fit humans easily overtook him.
 

There was no question they’d catch up. He couldn’t lead them to Claire’s house even if he could get there, which he couldn’t. He didn’t know where to go. But he’d need to find a way out in the next sixty seconds, or it would all be over.

Two more shots struck him. The first hit him in the hip, causing fantastic pain to race down his leg. The second ripped the side of his head open. There was a moment of confusion while his brain healed, then a red cloud of agony. Healing took a good ten seconds, and the ripping sensation down his leg and in the back of his head made those seconds intolerable. He started to stagger. To weave. He felt the pain threatening to kick his legs out from under him, and then it would all be over.

But then, time stopped.
 

It didn’t really stop, of course, but Reginald suddenly found himself with the same slow-motion clarity he’d experienced while reading for the first time as a vampire. Back in his living room, with Maurice watching, he remembered how seconds had dilated into hours. He’d read an entire book at what felt like a normal speed, then had come out of his trance to find that the second hand of the clock had only advanced a few clicks.
 

Reginald’s awareness took in the scene around him. The men were behind him, frozen. He still hurt, but he was no longer staggering. Nothing was happening. Nothing at all.
 

Am I becoming fast? Am I becoming strong?
 

But no, that wasn’t it. His brain was simply processing quickly.
Super
quickly. So quickly that events outside of his mind seemed to take no time at all by comparison. He’d probably always been able to do this, but had just now realized it. It was as if he’d unlocked a new achievement in the game of vampirism. He’d leveled up.

Could he move faster? Could he use this span of this timelessness to elude them?
 

Reginald tried to move his arms and his legs, but they were trapped in slow, cold tar.

So it’s just my mind that’s fast.
 

And that made sense, but it didn’t help him any. Sure, he could assess his situation all he wanted, but assessing didn’t change his predicament. There were still eight men behind him with guns, and his body still couldn’t move fast enough or for long enough to elude them. He had two choices: he could wait here forever, trapped in a frozen moment in time, or he could wind the reel forward and watch himself die in agonizing detail.
 

Reginald sensed his body.

His exhaustion was distant and far-off. He was aware that his muscles and lungs would only last for so much longer in real time, but none of that mattered. You couldn’t draw breath in the space of a thought, and whatever mind-presence he was in now didn’t need to breathe. But the pain. The
pain
was real. Even now, even in timelessness, the pain was making it hard to think. The pain was the problem. He could deal with exhaustion, but the
pain
slowed him down even more. The
pain
was allowing his pursuers to close the gap. The
pain
was causing him to stagger and weave. The
pain
was about to make him trip.

The pain will bring you down, so you have to turn it off,
said a voice.
 

It wasn’t Reginald’s voice. It was as if he were hearing it on a loudspeaker, in his head, in an anteroom of frozen time. Where had he heard that voice before?

Turn off the pain,
the voice repeated,
so that you’ll have a chance.

Turn it off?
he thought.

Turn it off,
said the voice.

The idea didn’t make sense.
 

But then, quite suddenly, he saw how to do it. It was as if he’d been in a dark room and someone had turned on a light. He saw where the pain came from and where it went, and he saw how to break the circuit. He flipped a switch inside of himself. The knife slicing down the length of his leg vanished. The ache in his head vanished.

Now go,
said the voice.
 

Time resumed without warning.
 

The mental controls slipped and skittered under Reginald’s metaphorical hands as the voice pushed him rudely back into the world against his will. It was as if Reginald, even with his hands on the wheel of his mind, hadn’t been able to avoid a patch of black ice. He found himself barreling forward again in the dark alley, the men behind him.
 

But the pain was gone. Totally gone. He felt fine. He was short of breath, and in a moment, his legs would give out from exhaustion. But there was no pain.
 

There were two more shots behind him. Both struck him just below the shoulder blades. Their impact felt like a heavy tap on the back, nothing more.