Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse Read online

  Contents

  - Copyright

  Dedication

  - A note about this book

  - House of Vampires and Leaves

  - Siege

  - Bunker

  - Glamoured

  - Outbreak

  - Catacombs

  - Paris

  - War

  - Crossing

  - V-Crews

  - Seer

  - It's Never Sunny in Philadelphia

  - Starfish

  - Boneyard

  - Ash

  - New World

  - To Be Continued

  - Get free books!

  - Also by Johnny B. Truant

  - About the Author

  COPYRIGHT

  FAT VAMPIRE 5:

  FATPOCALYPSE

  BY Johnny B. Truant

  Copyright © 2013 by Johnny B. Truant All rights reserved.

  Cover copyright © 2013 by Johnny B. Truant.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual business or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited. I greatly appreciate you taking the time to read my work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book, or telling your friends about the Fat Vampire series, to help spread the word.

  Thank you for supporting my work.

  For Robin, who enables me

  A NOTE ABOUT THIS BOOK

  I’M ONE OF THE THREE hosts of a podcast called Better Off Undead, and on episode 6 of that podcast, we asked the question, “If a vampire offered to turn you into one of his kind, would you accept?”

  Dave, our resident “fat guy and proud of it,” said that he’d take the deal.

  My co-host Sean and I said that maybe that wouldn’t be such a great idea for Dave, because if you’re out of shape when you’re turned, you might stay out of shape for all of eternity.

  So I wrote a book about that single dumb idea. What you’re about to read is the fifth (and next to last) book in that series.

  If you’d like to catch up on the prior books in the series, you might want to get the Fat Vampire Value Meal, which contains books 1-4 at a 33% discount.

  Enjoy.

  HOUSE OF VAMPIRES AND LEAVES

  REGINALD GOT THE FIRST COMBO caught on his fang by accident while he was eating them in front of the TV. He added the second, to the other fang, to be hilarious.

  “That’s not hilarious,” said Maurice, who was reading. He was sitting in a La-Z-Boy with his feet up, a desk lamp on the endtable beside him. He was reading slowly, like a human reads, and was spending several minutes on each page. It was so far beyond inefficient that it was stupid. But when Maurice was asked, he replied with the stock answer so many of them gave when asked about all of their stupid inefficiencies: What else do I have to do?

  “Come on, Maurice, what am I?” said Reginald, crossing Maurice’s dimly-lit study with the two hollow tubes of pretzel wedged around his fangs. In order to not ruin the effect, he had to keep his mouth wide open. Doing so made him drool, just as the cheese filling that used to be inside the pretzels had made him drool before he’d eaten it.

  Maurice laid a finger down the spine of his book, closed it, and looked up with tired eyes. “I don’t know, Reginald. Tell me. What the hell are you?”

  “I’m a walrus who tried to open two wine bottles at once.”

  Maurice looked at Reginald for a long moment, then opened his book and resumed reading.

  “Because the empty pretzel rings look like corks. On my fangs,” Reginald explained.

  When Maurice didn’t respond, Reginald crunched the pretzels and swallowed them. He made sure to chew them well because for empirical reasons too disgusting to think about, he knew that human food did not, in fact, get digested in a vampire’s dead digestive system. When Reginald ate pizza, pizza came out. It came out looking like it had been packed tightly for storage, but was otherwise unmolested.

  He walked to where Maurice was reading, glanced at the words on the page, and recognized the book immediately. Reginald had read literally everything in the house, and had done so at vampiric speeds. His perfect recall would have allowed him to tell what Maurice was reading with the smallest glance, but this book was particularly easy. The text on the page was in a spiral and Maurice kept turning the book to read it. It was House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski.

  “This book doesn’t make any sense,” said Maurice.

  “It’s a book about a manuscript about a movie about a house,” said Reginald.

  “What’s this bit about spelunking in the basement?”

  “They’re investigating the house’s interdimensional spaces like cave explorers.”

  Maurice flipped until he reached a page that had a single word on it. “And what’s this bullshit?”

  “The book’s typography is part of the story,” said Reginald.

  Maurice’s composure snapped. His arm became a blur as he threw the book across the room. It struck the wall and fell open, face-up.

  Reginald looked over at his two-thousand-year-old maker as he stared after the offending book, frustration radiating from him like heat from a coal. The chair seemed to swallow his small frame. It occurred to Reginald that to most people, Maurice’s menacing stare would have come off as n goth kid with bad skin who was embarrassing himself by trying to look impressive.

  “Thousands of books to read in this house,” he said, “and all I can think about is how they’ll never be enough to keep me occupied. Everything is too slow. I feel like a caged animal.”

  “That’s how you’re supposed to feel,” said Reginald, still thinking of House of Leaves.

  “I can’t leave my own goddamn house because there’s a war about to erupt and nobody even knows it’s happening. We can’t tell the world that Timken is planning to unleash Hell on the humans, and we can’t fight him. We can’t take him down. We can’t rally support, other than the little group here in the house. I used to be Deacon of the Vampire Nation. I never wanted to be in charge then and I don’t now, but this sense of impotency is intolerable.” He looked up, almost pleading. “What can we do, Reginald?”

  Reginald sat down on an ottoman opposite Maurice. “The same thing we’ve been doing. Wait.”

  “I can’t keep waiting.”

  Reginald nodded. He could sympathize. It had been nine months since Nicholas Timken had pardoned Reginald and publicly forgiven him for attempting to rig the Vampire Nation election. Since then, the election had been re-held, supervised by even more watchdogs (including a few assigned by the human authorities and William Erickson’s office), and predictably, Timken had won. All the underground information Reginald could find suggested that below the veneer, Timken was building his Sedition Army and changing vampire hearts and minds via the Young Seditionists movement, and that on the other side, the humans were doing the same. While the vampires were building their armies, the humans were quietly building theirs… but the bubble hadn’t yet popped, and until it did, there was really nothing they could do but wait and see. It was maddening to the impotent few who knew of the catastrophic danger the world was facing.

  “There’s nothing else to do,” said Reginald.

  “We should blow the whistle on Timken.” Maurice sat up, inspired. “And Claude! I’ve heard some horrific things about what Claude has been doing as Timken’s number two. He’s my brother, so I have insider information on him. Wouldn’t the population be interested just from a gossip perspective? I could do an exclusive interview and talk about how he’s secretly an Annihilist, bent on turning Human Earth into Vampire Earth.”

 
“Just get on the cover of US Weekly?”

  “Hey, it works for the Kardashians,” said Maurice. “We could blow two whistles at once and go all mainstream like in True Blood. Think of it: ‘Vampires: They’re just like us.’ Get some paparazzi photos of you to go with it and label them like, ‘They eat taquitos! Even though doing so is fucking retarded!'"

  Reginald laughed — not because it was funny, but because Maurice seemed to need it. Then he told Maurice what he already knew: “We can’t blow the whistle. If the humans get wind of what Timken and Claude have planned, there’ll be war.”

  “There’s going to be war anyway,” Maurice countered. “At least this way they’ll be prepared… before it’s too late. I say we find a big outlet, go public, and tell everyone what the president and his crony are up to.”

  Reginald shook his head. The past nine months had been plenty of time for the most advanced vampire mind in history to think out his options. Ever since they’d bunkered in at Maurice’s estate, holding down an isolated fort in a world where everyone on both sides of the conflict hated them, Reginald had done very little other than gather data and think through the permutations. He’d read every word in the house, spent untold hours scouring public and secure areas of the internet and the vampire network, and had spent entire days sitting in a chair, sipping from a blood pouch, letting his wheels spin. All of the options he could imagine forcing now were no-win scenarios.

  “What do you think will happen when, instead of having ten or twenty thousand trained human troops as enemies, we suddenly have seven billion civilian enemies too?” said Reginald, leaning in. “You tell the human world that vampires not only exist but that they are plotting to exterminate the planet and there’ll be chaos. Villagers these days have much better resources than they did back in your day, Maurice. They won’t come at us with pitchforks. From dawn until dusk every day, it’ll be open season with stakes and fire… and, given time, some fancy silver bullets.”

  “So what?”

  “You want to die?” said Reginald.

  “I can die,” Maurice muttered, his lip curling as he stared into the corner. “I’ve lived long enough.”

  “What about me, then?” said Reginald. “What about Nikki? What about Brian and Talia?” He could go on, but Maurice got the point. Brian had turned his wife Talia when they’d collectively lost their need to hide, and Talia, in turn, had turned their oldest son. Recently, as anti-human sentiment had started to percolate through the vampire population, restrictions on creation had all but vanished. Pretty much anyone could be turned into a vampire these days, and pretty much every type of person was. There were countless vampire children now, and countless vampire elderly who had been too feeble when turned to hunt well on their own. This wasn’t just about human troops versus vampire troops; there were huge populations of innocents on both sides. Maurice wanted to make an omelette, but in Reginald’s mind, there were just too many eggs that would have to be broken to do it. Regardless of who needed whose blood to live, the truth was that the lines couldn’t be drawn in life as easily as they could be in movies. There were good guys and bad guys on both sides — and when war came, all of them would suffer.

  Maurice sighed. “I can’t just sit here reading.”

  “Your only other choices are to join Timken and Claude’s side or to join the humans’ side. One option makes you a murderer and the other makes you a traitor to your own kind.”

  “What does Claire say?” said Maurice.

  “She doesn’t know what to think.”

  “She’s supposed to be a prophet.”

  “She’s a twelve-year-old girl,” said Reginald.

  That was increasingly easy to forget. Every vampire in the house had, by now, heard the story of Claire’s encounter with the angel Balestro on the mountaintop in Germany. Despite the fact that she spent inordinate amounts of time lying in a bean bag chair watching SpongeBob SquarePants while eating Froot Loops, the vampires regarded her like an oracle. They kept asking her things she could never know, like whether such and such friend of theirs was okay and when the cold war outside would finally turn hot. Claire took it all with good humor, but it bothered her to be treated like a freak. She didn’t understand the things she could do, and her prescience, such as it existed, almost never obeyed her conscious control. She could change the channel on the TV without touching the remote and could “push” a secure video connection across Maurice’s laptop to Deacon Karl Stromm in Luxembourg, but otherwise she was just as clueless as the rest of them.

  “A twelve-year-old girl who can absorb the internet like a sponge.”

  “Sure,” said Reginald. “But she can’t do anything with all of that information. Being Claire is like being in a library, but not being able to read.”

  “Claire can read.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  But Maurice couldn’t possibly understand. He’d had been around since BC became AD, but between the two of them, Reginald’s intelligence was far superior. Reginald could vacuum up information, recall it all perfectly, parse it, collate it, analyze it from every possible angle, then spit out the best options like a room full of networked Crays. What Reginald did was nothing Maurice or any of the others could understand — not just the ability itself, but its mysteriousness. Reginald didn’t know how his mind worked; he just knew that it worked.

  But as good as Reginald’s facility with information was, Claire’s was orders of magnitude better. Over the past year, she seemed to have developed an affinity for manipulating electronic signals that bordered on spooky. But like Reginald, Claire didn’t understand the things she did. She could unlock unlockable doors online, but she thought of her abilities as being more like swimming than hacking. She claimed she’d seen most of the internet already (including the parts that were supposed to be off-limits), but when asked for specifics, she could only give vague feelings and impressions: the internet and the information it contained was, to Claire, overwhelming, ordered, red, blue, hot, cold. If Reginald were to turn her into a vampire, that could change, and they’d become an unstoppable team. Claire could gather data — and then Reginald, via his mental connection as her maker, could make sense of it. But he wouldn’t turn her, no matter how many times she asked. She was just a child, he said, and she had years of growing up ahead of her.

  “Reginald,” said Maurice, “the other day Claire thought it would be funny to allow me to conduct a ten-minute talk with Karl that didn’t actually exist. I was on Skype with a ghost for ten minutes, and I didn’t know it until she started laughing in the other room. She just made it all up.”

  Reginald wasn’t amazed by Maurice’s claim. He was irritated. Claire’s father was an absentee asshole incubus and her mother still hadn’t totally recovered from a near-fatal vampire attack last year. Reginald was, for better or worse, the best parental figure Claire had — and he’d told her to knock that kind of thing off.

  He stuffed down his annoyance, mentally reminding himself to talk to Claire later about it. “That doesn’t mean she can tell the future on command,” he told Maurice.

  “Telling the future is what she’s supposed to do!” Maurice blurted, raising his hands into the air. “That’s what saved every vampire in existence from the Ring of Fire!”

  Reginald shook his head. “The fact that her father is an incubus and some quick bluff work saved us. But be my guest. Go into the living room and ask her what’s going to happen. Hell, ask her what’s going on right now! She’s absorbed all of the vampire internet, including every post ever made on Fangbook. So ask her how many members there are in the Sedition Army. Ask her for the percentage of the vampire population that is actively ready to reap the human population versus those who seem likely to just hide and wait it out. Ask her about human preparations. I’m sure she’s delved into classified areas and can give you the Anti-Vampire Taskforce’s deployment numbers and the technologies they’re using. So go on in, Maurice. Find the girl in the PJ’s reading Harr
y Potter, and ask her what we should do next. But when she gives you an answer, I just hope you enjoy swimming metaphors and vague, color-based analyses that won’t help you worth dick.”

  Maurice shook his head. He looked across the room, into the corner where he’d thrown the book.

  “I hate that book,” he said. “I hate all of these books. The next time we make a run, I’m going to a Best Buy to pick up a Kindle so that I can at least download some new stuff.”

  “Nikki has a recommendation for you, then,” said Reginald. “It’s about a gunslinger who rides a unicorn.”

  That was when they heard the explosion out on the grounds, at the east edge, where the perimeter fence was its weakest.

  SIEGE

  MAURICE LOOKED AT REGINALD. REGINALD looked at Maurice. Then there was a blur and the pages of Maurice’s discarded book, in the corner near the door, riffled. Reginald, now alone, turned to follow. He had another nine months of vampirism under his belt and, feeling stronger and more confident, sprinted hard to follow. He struck the doorframe, which cracked and tossed splinters into the hallway. He grasped his face and felt blood trickle into his palm. Reginald actually felt pleased. He must be getting stronger. It wasn’t uncommon for him to run into doorframes (not his fault; he had less clearance than anyone else), but this was the first time he’d broken one.

  He found the others in the marble foyer of Maurice’s house. Brian was in his boxers, bare-chested, wearing his pointless invisible-rim glasses, looking enormous. His wife Talia was beside him, regrettably not bare-chested, wearing a comfortable-looking set of short sleep clothes. Nikki was bare-chested. She slept topless, and apparently hadn’t thought of modesty when she’d heard the noise. Reginald pulled off the sweater he was wearing and handed it to her. Then there was a crashing sound from the outside and Nikki blurred toward the front door. She yelled and returned to Reginald’s side, her face and hair black and singed.