Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (49 page)

It was like listening to
War of the Worlds,
minus the aliens, with a southern accent.
 

The picture painted by the police detectives had set Reginald’s mind on edge. The deejay chatter wasn’t helping. Incidents like the one at the office were happening everywhere, it seemed, and the detective Reginald had glamoured had said that it was becoming increasingly difficult to come up with logical explanations for them. The forensics teams gave the detectives information that didn’t make sense. The detectives tried to work with the nonsensical information, and when they did, they came up with explanations that were outlandish but at least seemed rational. They proposed that the culprits were teams of strongmen with wild animals. They proposed that hallucinogenic agents had been released into the water or the air. They proposed that similar events in disparate locations pointed to vast, coordinated gangs of cultists with vampire fetishes, and when they proposed such widespread conspiracies, they called the FBI to report what they’d found and to compare notes, to whatever extent the FBI was willing to share. But as time passed, as more bizarre events occurred, even the crazy-rational explanations ceased. Cases were closed and filed — or perhaps opened and held with the hope that someone might somehow, someday, miraculously find the missing piece and make sense of it all. More cases showed up each week, each day. The cases came in faster than investigators could process them. Cases stacked up and became routine, no longer amazing or terrible. They were simply added to the ongoing roster of atrocities; another day on the job. Police departments everywhere were in triage mode, content to clean up the bodies as quickly as they appeared, even if they couldn’t propose an explanation for what had occurred. From what the detectives reported hearing up the chain, the FBI these days wasn’t much different.

Reginald gave the policemen back at the office the only help he could. He told them that if they couldn’t find silver or wooden bullets — which they wouldn’t be able to — that crossbows firing wooden bolts made better weapons than guns of any type or caliber, and that they should always aim for the heart. He told them that they and their friends and families should stay inside their houses after dark whenever they could. He suggested wearing silver jewelry, which might buy them some time, and carrying any lights they could find that mimicked the wavelengths of sunlight.
 

It was nearly 3am by the time Reginald’s car pulled into the alley behind the bagel deli and the group walked down to the Asbury, where the Vampire Council remained and seemed determined to stay.
 

Nothing had been cleaned up. The lookout was gone from the ticket booth, but the corpses and the blood were still there. Either no police had come looking for whoever the bodies had once been, or — more likely — the police
had
arrived, had been glamoured, and then had gone back to their station to close the books on yet another missing persons case in an untenable slush pile of unsolved missing persons cases.
 

The club’s main room was still mostly empty. The door to the basement was still ajar, and Reginald, as he approached with Nikki, Maurice, and the restrained Todd Walker, could still hear noises coming from below. This time, however, they found a very large vampire bouncer at the top of the stairs. He wasn’t there for long. The bouncer was barely able to raise a hand before Maurice leapt at him across the length of the club with a broken-off chair leg in his fist. A second later, all that guarded the door was a pile of ash and clothes, and Maurice’s shoulders were rising and falling, and he kicked the ash in frustration before stomping down the steps into total chaos.
 

The Council had stopped being a Council.
 

The main arena and surrounding stands had become a throng of bodies. Vampires milled everywhere, turning the overcrowded space into an odd amalgam of marketplace, battle royale, and flophouse. Vampires were huddled in corners and asleep on benches where the assembly normally sat, drunk on drunken humans or — Reginald thought — perhaps high on human junkies, which he’d heard about but had never seen. The stoned vampires resembled human junkies, lying semi-conscious in corners, wan and paler than was usual even for the undead, their eyes distant and dreamy. It was possible, Reginald had heard, to become addicted to drug addicts. It was more psychological than physical, though; human junkies often wanted to quit and couldn’t, whereas vampire junkies simply didn’t want to quit. Because they were more or less immortal, they had no real reason to.
 

Human bodies and body parts were everywhere. Reginald almost tripped over an arm walking in. There were drained, paper-skinned humans in corners and in the stands, discarded like empty liquor bottles. The walls and doors were splattered with so much blood that Nikki at first commented that the Council must have redecorated. It smelled like rancid meat. The smell repulsed Reginald, but apparently he was alone; Nikki and Maurice’s nostrils flared as they walked in, and Walker tried to tug out of Maurice’s grip. Maurice had to (and wanted to) break his clavicle to keep him still. Walker yelled out in pain, but nobody looked over. The atmosphere was too loud, and there was no shortage of screaming in the arena.
 

The Guard were present, but none were at their posts. They’d clustered into small groups and stared daggers at Reginald’s group as they crossed the floor. Reginald knew what the black groups of Guards were calling themselves from Fangbook. They referred to themselves as Kill Squads, and they did exactly what their name implied. Their function was to do what the Deacon wouldn’t — to lead the Vampire Nation in decisive action, massacring until the balance began to tip in their favor. The looks that the Kill Squads gave Reginald’s group would best be described as “appraising.” They were wondering if enough time had passed in anarchy to allow them to murder the Deacon with impunity. Several bared their fangs.
 

Everywhere, in every corner, vampires were feeding on humans. Some of these seemed to have been brought in wild and unglamoured. Reginald had to avert his gaze as some of those present toyed with conscious prey, allowing humans run and then blurring past them, confronting them no matter where they went, laughing at their terror.
 

Nikki’s eyes were watery. Her throat was hitching, as if trying to swallow something it couldn’t pass. Only once they’d entered the Council room — a tiny oasis in a sea of chaos — did her agitation subside. The walls of the Council room were broken and dirty and bloodied, but the chamber itself was far cleaner than the arena and was mostly empty. The room’s emptiness and its relative order were probably due to the work of Brian Nickerson, its sole occupant. Brian was sitting in a chair when they entered, reading a book.
 

“How can you be sitting here reading?” Nikki practically screamed at him.
 

“Because I don’t want to be out there, and because staring at the walls gets old fast,” he answered placidly.
 

“Why don’t you
do
something?” said Maurice, indicating the melee in the arena.

Brian chuckled. “You’re the Deacon, Deacon.”
 

Maurice closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“You don’t like the new Council?” said Brian, placing a bookmark in his book and standing up. “See now, I’d forgotten that some people still felt that way. Vampire YouTube and Fangbook love it. They’re very eager to vote on things now that they have the power. So between meetings, they’ve been finding all sorts of other, non-governmental things to vote up and vote down. This chaos? This that you find so repugnant? Hell, they’ve created it. They’ve weighed in. They’ve rocked the vote right and proper.”
 

“What have they been voting on?” said Reginald.
 

Brian rubbed his chin. Reginald couldn’t tell if he was trying to make an ironic point or if he was genuinely nonplussed by what the Vampire Council had become.
 

“They particularly enjoy pageants,” Brian said after a meditative pause. “The way it works is, they bring in four or five humans and they line them up. Then they broadcast photos and video to the Net, and Fangbook votes on what happens to the humans, in what order. A lot of the ‘contestants’ are turned. Others are… well,
not
turned.”
 

Walker fidgeted in Maurice’s grasp. Maurice dragged him to the other end of the small room and sat him heavily in a metal chair. Then, after reminding Walker that he’d live only as long as Maurice decreed he’d live, Maurice removed the silver chain from his neck and used it to tie him to a heavy iron pipe.
 

“Care to introduce your friend?” said Brian, watching Maurice work.

“He’s a co-worker,” said Maurice. “This is a project we’re working on together for a client.”
 

“So you brought him in, so that he could see the show?” Then Brian pitched his voice to Walker, whose head was down, his face invisible. “Sorry, co-worker,” he said. “Council is usually more organized and impressive than this. It’s too bad you couldn’t see it as Reginald saw it the first time.” Then Brian tossed a tension-breaking smile in Reginald’s direction. The first time Reginald had seen the Council, he had been on trial for his life.
 

“
Someone
wouldn’t let me kill him, and he’s too dangerous to have loose. He needs to learn vampirism from vampires,” said Maurice, returning to the group. He looked at Walker. Then he looked through the door and into the arena, shaking his head. “But if these are to be his role models, I think I might have to kill him after all.”
 

“I’m sorry, Maurice,” said Brian, sighing.
 

Nikki’s carefully set facial expression finally broke.

“You’re sorry. You’re
sorry?
Open killing! Open defiance! Breaches of protocol, drunkenness and depravity, harvesting humans for humiliation and torture? All of that, and you just sit here, reading and making jokes? Why haven’t you done anything, Councilman Nickerson?”
 

“What do you suggest I do, Nikki?”
 

“Anything,” she said. “Anything! Talk to the others. Get them to see reason.”
 

“
Reason
.” Brian laughed. “Did you know that there’s a huge movement right now that’s read a deadline into the Ring of Fire incident? It’s like those nutjobs who said the world would end in 2012. I don’t know when this supposed Ring of Fire armageddon date is exactly, but I will say, from watching them, that a deadline really is a fantastic motivator. You thought they were dangerous before? Now they’re dangerous
on a deadline
. Dangerous, and crazy, and scared out of their motherfucking minds, pardon my French. You can’t talk reason into people who are panicking.”

“Try.”
 

But Reginald answered for him, addressing Nikki in his calmest tone of voice.
 

“Right now, Brian is our insider, and the one person here who can provide a counterpoint to the craziest of the ideas that come to vote. He’ll be that as long as he doesn’t rock the boat, but you saw what it’s like out there. The moment he tries to push any sort of an agenda — any agenda at all — they’ll oust him at best, or kill him at worst.”
 

Brian gave a nod. “That’s about the size of it,” he said.
 

“So we just give up?” said Nikki.
 

“No,” said Maurice. “We may indeed have to give up, but I’m not going to give up without at least trying to make a last stand.”
 

“You want to
fight?
” said Brian, his face incredulous.
 

But Reginald, thanks to their shared blood, could read Maurice in a way that Brian couldn’t.
 

“No,” said Reginald. “He wants to speak.”

S
PEECH

MAURICE DIDN’T TAKE THE BACK set of stairs to the Deacon’s box. Instead, he walked through the front door of the Council room, crossed the clay-floored arena, and took the steps that ran up through the stands.
 

Everyone recognized the Deacon, even amidst the chaos. The first few who saw him climbing the steps turned, fangs out and bloody from feeding, snarls on their lips, and watched their lame duck leader as he went by, his eyes steely and forward. Reginald, arm-in-arm with Nikki, followed in Maurice’s wake. Malice seemed to press down on them like a giant, suffocating hand. Then, as the first few turned, others followed their gaze. Soon the entire assembly was watching as the thin, shallow-chested, black-haired vampire passed, trailed by his large companion and the beautiful brunette.
 

Each watcher seemed to be weighing a decision. They wanted to challenge Maurice and his defunct authority, but Maurice was many times older, stronger, and faster than all of them. So they watched, and they waited.
 

When Maurice reached the box, he lowered himself regally in the large sandstone throne. By now, all of the vampires with present minds (and even a few of the junkies, who were largely absent) were quiet, watching the Deacon. Maurice raised a large stone and struck it against the arm of the throne.
 
Then he stood and called the Assembly to order. Nobody moved; nobody went to their seats; nobody cleared the crowded arena floor or filed into place in the Council box. Reginald could see several Council members, including Charles himself, in the crowd. They looked up at the Deacon’s box with scorn.

Nobody moved. Everyone was watching. There had to be four or five hundred of them on the floor, in the seats, in every corner. Other than Brian Nickerson, there wasn’t a friendly face among them.
 

Maurice took a deep breath, then spoke.
 

“I am not blind,” he said. “I know that the office I hold means very little now, and will likely mean nothing at all very soon. The Vampire Nation has spoken. It has chosen a farce of democracy over a sovereign leader. In the days of Logan, I would have applauded the change. Even today, had certain events not occurred, I would have applauded it. I did not want to be your leader. I would not have seized power if there had been another way to save the lives of my progeny and his progeny. But our rules said that after I deposed Logan, I was the one who had to lead this Council and this Nation. But I did not want the power I was given, and today, that power means nothing, which means that I am free. Congratulations. The Vampire Nation is now a nation by the vampires, for the vampires. We crossed the seas centuries ago in crates of dirt, and now we are free to live the American dream, free to determine our own futures, free from autocratic rule.”