CHAPTER 12
Reginald was shell-shocked. Of all the ways the exchange could have unfolded, this was the one he hadn’t seen coming. But after Lafontaine ran from the parking lot to his presumably waiting troops, Claude turned and marched unhurriedly past the burning guard, stopping just long enough to drive his boot into the man’s face and end his misery. Then he began to walk back the way they’d come without a word. Reginald, after a pregnant moment, followed. He was in a dream. What would happen now? And how had he — Reginald Baskin, protector of Nikki and Claire — failed them all?
Claude waited for Reginald to catch up. The humans, who’d obviously been watching, were already descending on the parking lot and the running figure of Walter Lafontaine. Reginald came up beside the new president and looked over, feeling that if he’d never done it before, he was now looking into the face of pure evil. Claude didn’t turn. Reginald found himself no longer angry at the big man. He couldn’t be angry because he felt so many other emotions in anger’s place: disbelief, terror, ejected from reality.
The whole game had changed in the span of thirty seconds. Anything could happen now. He could imagine the blood farm guards gunning down the retreating humans, wasting bullets and lives and stock, decimating the blood supply through the Nation’s own volition. Reginald could almost understand if Claude had sacrificed Timken in the Vampire Nation’s best interests, as Timken had always seemed to think he was doing. But if that was Claude’s intention, wouldn’t he have recaptured the humans instead of executing them? Now the Nation would be just as short on blood as if they’d gone free — but now, the humans would be twenty times more driven to unleash everything they had.
“You’ve killed us all,” Reginald said, his mouth wanting to hang open.
The humans turned as they descended, driving their vehicles and sprinting toward Reginald and Claude. Reginald could see the glint of gunsights, could hear the first firing of shells.
But milliseconds later, Claude half-squatted and grabbed Reginald’s left calf, casually straightening up and dropping Reginald onto his back with a thud. Then the world became a blur of dust and pain as Claude ran, dragging Reginald behind him. Reginald could feel his skull opening, could feel the skin ripping off his back.
It went on forever. Reginald let his mind go, turning inside, finally finding voluntary control of his internal pain switch — or maybe just rediscovering traumatic shock. But then sometime later, he was thrown roughly through the door of the USVC building’s loading bay, left to bleed and heal in a pile on the floor. Claude didn’t bother with pleasantries once he’d delivered Reginald like so much incoming freight. He blurred away, and then Reginald was alone.
Reginald ran upstairs to find Nikki, Claire, and Brian. He didn’t need to tell them what had happened. They knew that the humans had been executed; they’d watched it unfold live on VNN. They hadn’t, however, known that Timken had been killed, though they’d assumed from what they’d seen publicly that the deal had gone bad. The propaganda machine, however, was already hard at work, trying to turn the slaughter of the blood stock into some kind of a necessity, or possibly even a victory.
“He’s done,” said Nikki. “They’ll lynch him. His own people.”
Reginald shook his head. “They won’t. There’s only room for one enemy in the public eye, and right now, the bigger enemy is the humans.”
“But Claude…”
“… will be the man in charge when the dust settles, if it ever does. And the vampires of the world will become convinced that whatever happened at the farms had to be done once Claude explains how the humans killed the president.”
“Nobody will fall for that,” said Brian.
Reginald turned to his brother with a small smile. “I wish I could still believe that,” he said.
Reginald demanded that they leave, and nobody argued. He began packing the room, barking at Nikki and Brian to do the same. Claire, who’d only brought a backpack, followed them around in turns, sticking mostly with Reginald because he moved at a speed she could keep up with. They had the room cleared in just over a minute.
Once they were packed, they trotted to the elevator. They began moving upward. Then the elevator shuddered to a stop, and the emergency lights went on. It could be Claude clamping them down and trying to keep them in place, or it could be that the power was out, that the US Vampire Council building had finally fallen under the weight of the human population of New York.
Reginald shoved Claire to the front of the elevator. Claire looked over her shoulder once, but he only nodded. She put her hand against the panel, and the elevator’s overhead light immediately lit and the box began to move. It reached the top floor, and Reginald nodded at Claire again to take the lead. She did, taking them to the stairwell and then to the roof, where the sky overhead was gray, still glowing from below with the lights of the city. The helicopter was still where Claire had left it, landed askew like the world’s worst aerial parking job. Reginald wanted to crack a joke to loosen the mood, but before he could, on the street far below, they saw an explosion of bright light — a bit of ultraviolet flash preceding a conventional explosion as the wall around the protected section of the city was breached. And perhaps, Reginald thought, that bomb had been a dirty one. Why not? Maybe they’d even made their biological weapon airborne by now. They had the brains and the vampires were forty years out of practice. And the humans, who owned the day and the open land, were slowly buying themselves all the time they’d ever need.
The helicopter lifted off under Claire’s touch, and the chopper full of vampires began lumbering through the sky over Manhattan. Reginald half expected artillery to bring them down, but there was too much excitement and light and fire below; neither the humans nor vampires were concerned about one lone helicopter out about its business. The thundering of the rotors was deafening. The ride was jarring; they kept pitching up and down, lurching either with the breeze or under Claire’s inexpert piloting. He wished he could fly without assistance — just fly through the breeze like a bird or Superman. Maurice had flown, once, when he’d come to save Reginald and die in the doing. But what had Brian said? That the vampire agent was like human adrenaline, that it responded in times of extreme duress to give vampires strength and new abilities. But how was that possible? Nobody knew. The very thing that made them them, and nobody knew anything about it. Was it a germ? A virus? Reginald had asked, but the reactions he always got were almost perplexed. How could anyone know such a thing? And really, why would anyone care?
Curiosity wasn’t a problem for humans, and it had never ceased being present in Reginald when he’d turned. So why was that? But that, too, was something nobody seemed to know.
They crossed the sky in their giant mechanical bird, a middle-aged woman who looked like a college student piloting the craft without knowing how she was doing it. Reginald wondered if Claire had thought to check the gas, then wondered if it mattered. Could she turn the rotors herself? Could she run the engine? Could she make sparks in the cylinders, driving the pistons by the force of mental incendiaries? But ultimately it didn’t matter; they made it back and unloaded, leaving the copter at the converted hospital where Claire had found it. Then they located the car she’d taken, found it blessedly dayproofed, and drove into the wilds, into a thicket, and waited for the daylight to arrive.