CHAPTER 4
Reginald got a phone call. He wasn’t surprised.
“No,” he told the phone. “No fucking way.”
The phone rallied back, trying to be passive-aggressive: “You have to. You have to help.”
“No, I don’t,” Reginald said. “You’ve raised your petard. Prepare to be hoisted upon it.”
The voice said nothing, clearly failing to understand. So Reginald added, “Would you prefer a metaphor wherein you get fucked up the ass by a dildo that you yourself created?”
On the other end of the line, Charles Barkley cleared his throat. This had to be difficult for Charles. Reginald had been an outsider with the vampire government from the start, and he’d been an outsider with Charles from the moment they’d laid eyes on each other, back in the bowling alley where Reginald had first been turned. Charles had probably drawn the short straw to have to make this call — or maybe Timken had made him do it, reasoning that Reginald and Charles shared a connection. Bygones, after all these years, would surely be bygones. Sure, Charles had tried to kill Reginald a few times, but at the end of the human world, weren’t they all ultimately on the same team?
“Look,” said Barkley in a pouty voice. “Just do it.”
“Oh, well, after a persuasive argument like that, how can I refuse?”
“We’ll pay you for your time.”
“I don’t need your money,” said Reginald. “I’m incredibly rich. Turns out, fat sells.”
“Come on. This is the future of our race we’re talking about.”
“Is it?” said Reginald, switching the phone to his other ear. “Well, then whoopity fucking doo; I’d better snap-to and help out! Vampirism has been so great to me. I was turned into a vampire against my will, then tried and persecuted, then almost executed. I saved the world and everyone hated me for it, and when I tried to make peace after being chased out and almost killed, everyone laughed at me. I tried to stop your fucking regime and ended up causing the apocalypse instead, and…”
“I don’t think you can take credit for that,” Barkley interjected.
“… and when it was all over, your buddy’s right-hand man killed my best friend and maker. And then what happened? Well, as a final insulting capper, I finally embraced my nature as the world’s big fat joke and found out that junk food sells… but when I saw all of you fuckers starting to eat it, I lost my taste for it. Now I only drink blood, and I run. Everyone else eats junk and does nothing all day, and somehow I’m still the outcast. And surprise, surprise… 180 degrees later and here we are again with you fucked and me expected to save the day. So what can you possibly offer to tempt me, Charles? What will make it worth my while to humiliate myself further? Because I’ve been telling you all for years that a human uprising was coming and that you’d better prepare — ‘watch them closely,’ I said; ‘don’t get complacent and assume they’ll lie down forever,’ I said — but nobody’s ever listened… and now, when you finally do want to listen, do you really expect me to believe that the ‘solution’ you want from me won’t involve killing and torturing a bunch more people?”
“To be clear, we don’t believe your bullshit about the human revolution,” said Charles.
“Really.”
“Not at all. We want advice on how to quell an insurgence.”
“Do it your motherfucking self, Charles.”
Charles clucked his tongue on the other end of the line. “You sure have grown up,” he said. “Such a mouth you’ve developed. You weren’t like this when you were Maurice’s pet.”
Reginald felt his face redden. Charles had managed to insult both him and Maurice in one backhanded comment, and he’d done it while asking Reginald’s strategic mind for help. But rising to his bait wouldn’t be the right choice. In over forty years of dealing with Charles — and almost another forty years before that of dealing with people just like Charles — he’d learned that you couldn’t actually fight fire with fire. Snapping back at Charles would only make things worse.
“Have a nice life, Councilman Barkley.”
Charles huffed, but then Reginald heard activity on the other end of the phone. A voice in the background told Charles to let him try, and Reginald prepared himself to listen to more bullshit from some other loudmouth government asswipe.
“Re-gggggie,” said the voice that came onto the phone, drawing his loathed nickname out into two long syllables.
“Who is this?” Reginald asked. But it was just a stalling tactic. He knew exactly who he was talking to. He remembered vocal patterns as perfectly as he remembered everything else.
“I’m hurt,” said the voice. As he said it, Reginald could imagine a cleft chin and tombstone-white teeth curling into a dramatic frown.
“I die, and then the world ends,” said Reginald, “and still somehow I have to deal with you.”
“Hey. We shared a coffee machine and glances at chicks in working-girl stockings. Am I right?”
“I’m hanging up, Todd.”
“Hey,” said Walker’s smooth voice. “Remember Noel?” She could’ve been hot if she’d ever done herself up right.”
“I remember Noel,” said Reginald. “I found her hand under the copier and set it next to the rest of her body after you killed her, so that she could be buried intact.”
“I didn’t kill Noel,” said Walker.
“Scott, then.”
“Okay, I killed Scott. But I was a kid with a machine gun that first night. Wasn’t it like that when you were newly turned?”
“What do you want, Todd?”
“I want you to come to New York, same as Chuckie does. We’ll take in a show.” This was a joke. Most of New York was deserted even at night because the vampire population was so small and hence was safer in a cluster. The city had proven impossible to clear, even forty years later, because it was simply too large and the human bands in the old neighborhoods kept moving around. So the US Vampire Council had walled off the southern tip of Manhattan and fortified the USVC building in the financial district, and it had let the rest of the city go feral. Broadway had gone with it. The only “shows” still playing in the vampire section of New York were sex shows, of which Walker probably partook often.
“Fuck you.”
“Come on. We’ll make it worth your while.”
“I have all the money I’ll ever need,” Reginald said. It was true, too. After the vampire government had gotten the presses going and re-minted world currency to replace the scattered currencies of the human world, the system had stabilized surprisingly fast, and Mogul Reginald had cornered more than his share.
“Hey,” said Walker, chuckling. “How is Nikki?”
Reginald was taken off guard. He didn’t reply.
“You’re married, right? How is she?”
“Fine.”
“Just to be clear, I meant ‘How IS she.’ IS. You know what I’m saying.” He chuckled with sexual innuendo.
Reginald prepared to hang up.
“She was so hot. I’ll bet she’s really wild, too. And totally fucking tight. You know what I mean by…”
“Tell Charles I said I fucked his mother,” said Reginald, taking the phone away from his cheek.
“And with her being in the Underground?” Walker continued, his voice now sounding canned with the phone no longer against Reginald’s ear. He made panting noises. “Seriously, revolutionary chicks are so hot. I can just imagine Nikki firing a gun. Just a regular human gun. You know, so the recoil makes her tits bounce.”
Reginald stopped with his finger hovering above the END button. He put the phone back to his ear.
“What was that?”
“Oh, come on. I heard you never miss anything. I’ll bet you heard me unbuckle my pants a minute ago so I could beat off thinking about your wife.”
Reginald felt his fangs extend. He was suddenly sure he could lift a house. “I’ll kill you,” he said.
“Good. I’m in New York. Come here and maybe we won’t send CPC to arrest Nikki as a subversive.”
“They don’t even do anything,” said Reginald. “They’re just lobbyists and paper-pushers.”
“All I know is that they’re on the restricted roster,” said Walker. “‘Report your neighbors.’ ‘Anarchists are a threat to us all.’ You know the slogans.”
“Sounds like Claude Toussant’s work,” said Reginald. He hadn’t heard anything about the “Report your neighbors” initiative for over thirty years, but Claude had a million zingers at the ready. One recent poster and TV propaganda campaign showed a young human boy with a sinister scowl on his face, holding a stake. The caption read: He’ll grow up to kill your family. Will you let him?
“And that’s another reason to come,” said Walker, twisting the knife. “To catch up with family. Claude will be so happy to see you.”
There were a million things Reginald could say to that, but he held himself back. Just as with Charles, Walker would only be egged on by anything else he said. The die was cast. If they knew about Nikki’s involvement in the Underground, then he had to go. He wouldn’t make it worse by opening his chest to stabbings.
“When and where?” said Reginald.
And Walker, grinning all the way through the phone line, told him.