Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

Jules cleared his throat. He chose his words carefully, for maximum impact. “There’s a new vampire tryin‘ to muscle in on our territory. Ablack vampire.”

Besthoff slowly interlaced his long, slender fingers. “A ‘black’ vampire? Come, come, Mr. Duchon. There is no need to hide behind such euphemisms here. Please speak plainly.”

“All right. A colored vampire. Anyway, this wiseass little snot-nose says he’s got a whole army of other vampires behind him. You’ve gotta figure they’re all colored, too. This asshole-Malice X, he calls himself-he’s trying to scare me outta town. He barged into my house, messed up my coffin, and told me I couldn’t be puttin‘ the bite on any more black, uh, colored victims anymore. How’s that for nerve, huh?”

Jules leaned forward in his chair, eager to catch every iota of indignant outrage that he expected would soon darken his host’s face.

But Besthoff’s expression did not change. “And exactly how,” he asked calmly, “do you anticipate this could affect me and mine?”

Jules’s jaw dropped, but no words came out. He couldn’t believe what he had just heard. Maybe his host’s advanced years had left Besthoff with a hearing problem? “Er, Mr. Besthoff, maybe you didn’t, y’know, understand what I’m saying. This is some pretty heavy-duty shit I’m talkin‘ here. I mean, somewhere out there in the darker parts of town, there’s Lord-knows-how-many colored vampires who mean to push you an’ me out-”

Besthoff stopped Jules’s rant with a regal gesture of his hand. “No, Mr. Duchon. They mean to pushyou out.”

Jules’s mind swirled like the spin cycle on a crapped-out washing machine. Straussman entered the library and set a silver tray holding a carafe of coffee, a sugar bowl, a small pitcher of cream, and a white china cup on the table near Jules’s elbow. For want of anything coherent to say, Jules snatched the cup from the butler’s fingers, poured himself an overflowing helping of steaming black coffee, and gulped three deep swallows.

The combination of anger and caffeine focused his mind somewhat. “Whadda ya mean,” he sputtered, “ me? You an‘ me an’ everybody else in this fancy palace of yours, we’re all in this thingtogether! How much simpler do I hafta make this? We’re allwhite,Caucasian,pale-skinned vampires-”

Besthoff stood. “Obviously, Mr. Duchon, there is much you do not understand.” He walked toward the door and gestured for Jules to follow. “Come. Let me show you something. Please, bring your coffee with you, if you would like.”

Straussman refilled Jules’s cup and handed him the saucer to take with him. Cup and saucer clattered noisily in Jules’s hands as he followed Besthoff. The butler opened a pair of leaded-glass doors, which sparkled with reflected gaslight, and Besthoff and Jules walked through a topiary garden to a second house. This other structure was much less elaborately embellished than the main house and only a single story, although still quite large.

Besthoff unlocked the front door with a massive iron key. Jules was surprised to enter a long, wide, open ward, lined with four rows of narrow cast-iron beds, which were covered with simple white starched sheets. Nearly all the beds were occupied. Soft grunts, moans, and wordless intonations filled the air as a crew of uniformed aides fed and tended to the prone figures.

“Welcome to our pantry, Mr. Duchon.”

Jules downed his last mouthful of coffee. “Your ‘pantry’? This place looks like one of Charity Hospital’s wards from eighty years ago.” He took a closer look at the people lying in the beds closest to him. Their eyes seemed too small and too widely spaced. Their arms and fingers were stunted, and their expressions were unfocused and oddly cowlike. “Who are all these people?”

“The assistants you see are all members of our household. With the exception of a few founding fathers, all who live here take their turns tending to the livestock.”

“Livestock? What? You mean the retards?”

Besthoff smiled. “The ‘retards,’ as you so charmingly put it, are the descendants of the inmates of an imbeciles’ hospital run by an obscure, impoverished order of French nuns. In 1873 the order was disbanded by Rome, and the sisters were faced with the morally devastating situation of having to turn their helpless charges out into the streets. Fortunately, Mr. Krauss, Mr. Katz, and I took heed of their plight. Never ones to turn our backs on opportunity, we offered to take over the care and housing of the imbeciles, at no charge to the Church or state. The imbeciles have been marvelously docile and tractable creatures. We’ve bred six generations of them since we took over their care.”

It took a few seconds for the full implications to sink in for Jules. As his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, he recognized the blood extraction equipment standing by several of the beds on the far side of the room. “You mean to tell me… you breed them for theirblood?”

“Of course. Why else would we house and feed more than two hundred imbeciles? We carefully control their diets, feeding them the proper nutrients to ensure that their blood is well balanced and healthful. Thus, the blood that we consume is considerably superior to that obtained from random victims. Especially those from the New Orleans area.” He glanced condescendingly at Jules’s more-than-ample gut and wryly smiled.

Jules was too occupied with conflicting emotions of revulsion, jealousy, and grudging admiration to realize that he’d just been slighted. Two hundred imbeciles-how many gallons of blood did that equate to in a year? He tried to do the math in his head, but the numbers overwhelmed him. “Sweet Lord almighty-what a setup you’ve got here!”

Besthoff smiled again. “I thought you might think so. Perhaps now you understand why we need not bother ourselves with the affairs of free-range vampires such as yourself. We of the High Krewe of Vlad Tepes evolved beyond the hunting-and-gathering stage well over a century ago.”

Straussman appeared at Jules’s elbow to retrieve the cup and saucer, and the rotund vampire was quickly and efficiently shown to the front gate.

The bum’s rush. They gave me the bum’s rush, just like Maureen said they would.

Jules forced himself to open his eyes. He’d stewed and fumed in his coffin long enough. Long enough to develop a painful crick in his neck. Much as he hated to admit it, his coffin was getting too small for him again. He’d been putting off that inevitable trip to the lumberyard as long as he possibly could, but it was as plain as the belly overhanging his belt that he couldn’t procrastinate any longer. Hell. One more reason to go on a damn diet.

Jules pushed open the hinged lid on his coffin and sat up. He grabbed hold of the wrought-iron clasps he’d bolted onto the adjacent wall and pulled himself out of the box, which was almost as wide as it was long. He brushed the clumpy earth off his flannel pajamas, trying to make sure most of it landed back in the coffin. Sweeping dirt up off his basement floor was a task he disliked almost as much as building new coffins.

He glanced at his watch. Nine thirty-nineP.M. He’d wasted almost an hour of darkness with his stewing. But he just couldn’t get over it. Those stuck-upbastards! In their own way, they were just as bad as Malice X was. Looking out for nobody but themselves, not giving a shit what happened to the rest of the bloodsucking fraternity. They’d landed their fancy house and their hundreds of retarded blood-cows, so they felt perfectly at ease letting their less well-off inner-city cousin twist in the wind.

So he was on his own. If he couldn’t get the High Krewe to lower the hammer on Malice X, then he’d just have to do his best to round up some white victims, inconvenient as that might be. Maybe it was for the best. The upside of this regrettable turn of events was that the average white kill in New Orleans was way lower in fat than the average black kill. And if Jules played his cards right, maybe he could accelerate his weight loss by harvesting someextremely low-fat white victims.