“Yes, she’s made several YouTube presentations, started a Facebook page with over two hundred thousand Likes and rising, and #vampiresarereal is trending.”
At last I found my voice. “That alone is enough to make me throw up in my mouth a little.” I looked at Sinclair. “Thanks for texting me.”
“As my queen commands,” was the chilly response, and I managed not to roll my eyes (I was trying to cut back on that).
“People don’t actually believe this—this campaign to expose us,” Tina asked, looking like someone had nailed her with a punch between the eyes. “Do they? Surely not.”
“Never underestimate the stupidity of herd animals,” was my husband’s grim retort. “There have been times we were nearly exposed, and that was before the plague that is social media. The more man embraces science over spirit, the harder it is for us to hide.”
“Oh, come on. This is just the latest Internet thing, the supernatural version of ‘is this dress blue or gold,’ right? In a month no one will care. They’ll be on to, I dunno, reillegalizing marijuana or something.”
“Not so fast.” The kitchen door swung in and Marc entered, lugging an armful of junk. He put everything down on the counter, turned, and said, “Ah, excellent. You’re probably all wondering why I’ve called you here.”
“You didn’t call us here,” I replied, eyeing the poster boards and the tripod with more than a little trepidation. “We were just here. Where’d you disappear to?”
“We have a tripod?” Jessica asked.
“All right, this is your resident research geek speaking, so everyone put your petty woes—”
“Petty?” Sinclair asked, and I was not to be outdone: “Woes? Who says that?”
He ignored our interruptions, pulled an old wooden pointer from somewhere (the same place he got the tripod?), and thwacked the first poster.
“Reasons why the Antichrist’s YouTube crap will probably go viral if it hasn’t already,” he said, and damn if that wasn’t the title of the poster. He pulled the top page away, exposing the second. Another thwack!
“She’s hot.” Hot was right at the top of the page in big red letters and with, if I may say so, a ridiculous number of exclamation marks. “I know it’s dumb—”
“She’s not that hot,” I mumbled, probably fooling no one. That was normally Sinclair’s cue to say something reassuringly sexy, but . . . nope. Not today, it seemed.
“—but people want to believe beautiful people are telling the truth and are intrinsically good. It’s dumb, but hotties get the benefit of the doubt all the time.”
Thwack!
“Er . . . surely there is a quicker way to do this,” Sinclair began, but Marc was well into lecture mode.
Legions was next, this time in black, and with only two exclamation marks, thank goodness. “She’s got hordes of Satan worshippers who will do anything, literally anything, she asks.”
This was true, though I often forgot about it, because Laura found her followers extremely embarrassing, didn’t talk about them, and didn’t let them come around. Hard to pretend to have the moral high ground when people were constantly tracking her down (something to do with astrology and the Bible helping them find her, don’t ask me how it works) and pledging to do her evil will. Which in this case was . . .
“She wants to expose vampires and she’s got an army of asshats to help her.”
“This is the most organized I’ve ever seen you,” I commented. Hey, it kept him busy, it wasn’t gross, no dead animals were harmed and later stored in our freezer—I had no complaints. Well, I did, but not about Marc’s process.
“Yes, well, to continue: Her minions shouldn’t be discounted. They’re not just helping her with the YouTube stuff, they’re spreading this stuff all over social media. And plenty of them are coming across as credible, because she’s keeping mum about that whole Antichrist thing, and she’s not letting them sacrifice babies or otherwise be evil when the cameras are on. She’s got lawyers and cops and politicians on her side.”
“So do we,” Tina said.
“Dead lawyers,” he explained, “dead politicians. You can’t point to one of them and be all, ‘See? That thing about vampires being real is a hoax—just ask this vampire lawyer, who will sue you and suck your blood if you slander us.’”
Another poster. This one was a still shot of the “Leave Britney alone!” guy. Crazy hot was in green, sans exclamation points. “She’s just the right amount of crazy: she’s not a foaming-at-the-mouth psychopath and she’s not boring, like someone with a phobia. So you’re scared of spiders or can’t handle small spaces, big deal. But Laura? She’s just crazy enough to be intriguing. And she’s got a fuckload of charisma to back it up. People want to hear what she’s got to say. And they keep coming back to hear what else she’s got to say. And then they tell their friends and forward links.”