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

the general had a big a blind spot in her ability to reason. She’d underestimated her opponents for so long — and had mistakenly relegated them to the intelligence and docility of sheep — that their biting back was almost offensive to her worldview.  
    Reginald shrugged. “Canned foods. Twinkies. I don’t know, and the details are irrelevant. But what’s key here is that you aren’t considering some of the more obvious questions.”  
    “Like what?”
    “Well, how was that video recorded?”  
    Ophelia looked at Timken. “We could figure it out. I’ll get back to you.”  
    “It doesn’t matter. But whatever they took it with required power. So how are they generating power?”  
    Again, Timken and Ophelia looked at each other.  
    Reginald shook his head. His brain was operating faster and faster, plans and strategies and permutations beginning to string together like the inevitable series of actions in a clockwork mousetrap. Unlike in the war, the vampire power structures weren’t remotely prepared for any of this. They didn’t understand what they were facing because they were willfully blind, having never considered it possible. It made them so vulnerable as to be laughable.
    “You’re like people who’ve decided to shoot down a plane with a slingshot,” said Reginald. “I don’t know where to begin to tell you what to do because you’re not capable of knowing the right questions to ask. You’re going to ask me how to build a bigger slingshot, but the slingshot isn’t the answer and never has been. Your entire premise is flawed from end to end.”  
    Ophelia stared at him, insulted.
    Reginald raised a hand, ticking off points on his fingers as he spoke. “You don’t know where they are, and that’s just this one community. You don’t know how they’ve been communicating, which it’s clear they’ve been doing nearly in real time. You don’t know how they hacked the Geneva sun blocker. You don’t know how they got the silver or the weapons — were those things sneaked in, or were they somehow made on-site? But even that is just the tip of the iceberg. The bigger problem is what you don’t know you don’t know. For instance: if they could sabotage the sun blocker, what’s to say they couldn’t breach a major city’s gates? You’ve only left one major entrance in each city, because hey, we’re the top dogs! No need to worry about the wild humans or have a Plan B, because they’re just animals, right?” He shook his head. “You don’t know what kind of weapons they might have. They seem to have dug up some of the old AVT rifles, if they got to the AVT’s bullets. So did they just strip dead soldiers for old weapons, or did they build new weapons? And if so, what will those new weapons do, and can they make more of them? Are they training assault groups? Armies, maybe? Did you figure out where the major AVT deployments were, and hence where they might have found the bio agent they seem to have made deadlier over the years? Did you even look?”  
    “We just assumed…” Ophelia began.  
    Reginald shook his head. “You’ve always assumed. Do you know the story of how I first escaped from the Vampire Council? Nikki here helped me. They assumed she was a vampire because she acted like one and flashed some fake fangs at them, and so they tried to execute her like one. They assumed I’d either futilely fight back on my own or let myself be killed, not that I might think of a third strategy they’d never considered.” He scooted back in his chair, crossed one leg over the other. “Well, now you’ve assumed that because the contingents of AVT soldiers were gone, that the human threat to you was gone. You left all of that land out there, with whatever rich deposits of goodies were waiting to be found. Or maybe not even found ; maybe the humans have always had bunkers filled with smart people and smart weapons. Maybe they’ve just been biding their time, multiplying in