"Norman Spinrad - tHE FAT VAMPIRE" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

It all took place in a glutinous greasy brown fog. But Christine remembered the moment when it cleared with crystal clarity.

She came back from wherever she had been in the act of gobbling mashed potatoes with a tablespoon in each hand. Suddenly she felt light-headed but magically lucid. The ache in her guts was gone. Her vision cleared. She didn't even feel like throwing up.

Across the table, Count Armand Kubescu was picking listlessly at a turkey carcass. His eyes were glazed, he was slumped back in his seat, his cheeks were puffy, and he seemed to have developed a set of jowls that she had never noticed before.

Christine, for her part, felt like she could eat forever.

"What's the matter, Armand?" she said savagely. "You're eating like a bird."

Count Kubescu moaned, then belched torpidly. The turkey carcass fell from his limp fingers.

Christine leered at him triumphantly as she drew the whole huge serving platter of mashed potatoes to her. Gloriously crazed with the succulent aroma of impending victory, she dispensed with the niceties, leaned over the platter, and proceeded to shovel great gross gobs of the gravy-laden potatoes into her mouth with both hands like human conveyer-belt.

With every handful, Armand Kubescu groaned softly, sank back deeper into his chair, seemed to visibly accumulate fat around his eyes, and jowls, and neck, as if a million years of Southern-fried chickens were all at once coming home to roost.

By the time she was finished with the mashed potatoes, which didn't take that long at all, he had pushed his chair back from the table to accommodate his newborn paunch, his arms were hanging limply at his side, and he had broken out into an oily sweat.

"Ah, just in time!" Christine said.

The waiter had arrived with the dessert wheelbarrow.

Deep dish apple pie. Dutch apple pie. Peach pie. Pecan pie. Chocolate cream pie. Banana cream pie. Boston cream pie. Angelfood cake. Devil's food cake. Strawberry short-cake. Platters of chocolate, vanilla, and rum raisin ice cream. A huge bowl of whipped cream.

The old couple and the family of Teutonic tourists had left sometime during the proceedings, but the Japanese sumo wrestlers, Little Abner and his chorus girl, and the Hell's Angels had gathered in a semi-circle around the table.

"I'm getting a little full," Christine said, "so I think I'll just have one piece of everything ala mode with whipped cream."

There was a spattering of applause.

"No! No!" the Count gibbered in terror. "Not dessert!"

But Christine showed no mercy. She leered across the table at Armand Kubescu, slowing her pace somewhat to savor it, but steadily
devouring everything. Beads of sweat poured down the Count's face, then rivulets. His eyes all but disappeared behind oleaginous wads of flesh. His fat cheeks panted. His jowls quivered. Distractedly, as if of their own volition, his hands, with their sausagelike fingers, reached up shakily to grasp at the lip of the table.

Christine was down to the last slice, banana-cream pie with a big ball of chocolate ice cream, smothered in whipped cream.

She slid the whole dripping thing onto the palm of her hand, winked at the Count, opened her jaws as wide as they could go. "Delicious," she said, and crammed it all down her throat in four continuous gulps.

The Count screamed, spasmed, pushed against the table, and went over backwards, to lie supine on the floor, quite comatose, gasping and blowing like an enormous beached whale.

There was a round of applause.

Christine rose shakily from the table, bowed to the audience, and waddled off to the ladies' room for a world-class barf.

#

Allie Ellison was there in the recovery room to greet her when Christine came out of the anesthesia.

"All's well that ends well, hon," she said. "Alex outdid himself. Guess I own him a blowjob. Ah well, what are friends for?"