Free Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest by Johnny B. Truant Page A

minute his hood was removed.  
    Lafontaine continued. “You have kept us in cages. You have taken our blood. You have taken our planet . So we have taken a few of your people. We know what hurts you. We know what doesn’t.” He gave a disturbing little smile. “And we have something new to show you.”  
    Someone off-camera handed Lafontaine a syringe. Lafontaine stabbed the syringe into the vampire’s arm, and the CPC officer immediately began to writhe and thrash as if whatever was in the syringe burned. His fangs descended; he started to snap at the black man like an angry snake. Keeping away from his prisoner’s mouth, Lafontaine pulled up the vampire’s sleeve to expose the point of injection. The camera moved closer. The pale vampire’s skin was black in one spot like a bruise, but the blackness was already visibly spreading.  
    “Back in the war, the human troops had a weapon,” he said. “They put it in bullets. We took it out of those bullets and we made it better.” His face twisted in cruel, remorseless anger. “We made it much, much better, and we put it back into bullets.” Then he paused and made a small, vengeful smile. “Oh, and we also put it in other things — things that are much bigger than bullets.”  
    Behind him, the vampire’s skin crawled with darkness, the bruise now the size of a grapefruit. Ophelia pressed a button and the video paused. The vampire’s mouth froze open in pain, his fangs down.
    Timken shook his head. “Animal.”  
    Brian’s head snapped toward the president. With his vampire’s speed, it looked like a jump cut in a film, as if his head had suddenly been swapped between frames.  
    “Really,” he said.  
    “I could let you watch the rest of the video,” said Timken. “They recorded the entire thing. It takes over an hour for the man to die. Most of it is just screaming.”  
    “I seem to remember you vowing to eliminate 99 percent of the human population,” said Reginald. “I’d argue that makes you almost as much of an animal as this guy who killed one vampire.”  
    “I never did anything with malice,” said Timken, his eyes becoming annoyed.  
    “Well, that makes it better,” said Nikki.  
    Ophelia flipped the video off, then put the still of Lafontaine back on the screen. “The vampire’s name was Calvin Gregory,” she said. “He was stationed just outside New York, on patrol in wildlands, so we’re assuming the video was taken nearby. That looks like a cave he’s in, but I don’t know of any natural caves outside of New York. Our guess it that it’s something they hollowed out below ground. But that raises all sorts of questions, the most obvious of which is, How? It’d have to be dug out with machinery, so why didn’t we see it happen on the satellites? How did nobody hear it? And how did they reinforce the cave once they’d made it? It’d take materials and knowledge they shouldn’t have access to.”  
    Reginald shrugged. “Humans are resourceful. Don’t you remember?”  
    Timken laughed. “Humans weren’t as resourceful back when Ophelia was one.”  
    “We…”  
    But as soon as he’d begun speaking, Reginald stopped himself. Despite the fact that he’d been a vampire longer than he’d been a human, he’d just referred to himself as the wrong species. He started again.  
    “ They have a tendency to find a way if you give them half a chance. You killed most of their population, but you didn’t go around and burn the planet. Vampires took a lot of the obvious conveniences and technology, but there’s a lot of world still out there that you never touched. All those houses with all those supplies in them? The humans have obviously scavenged better and figured out more than you gave them credit for.” Then he thought of Lafontaine’s gut and added, “They’re even eating well.”  
    Ophelia shook her head. “How?” she said, clearly dumbfounded. Despite being military, Reginald had noticed that