Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) by Johnny B. Truant

asked if he got off work when it was still dark. He said that his shift ended at seven and that as it stood, he’d have to very carefully make it home while the sun was shining — a notion that fascinated Claire, who didn’t see how that was possible. Her face fell again, but she said she understood.  
    Then, as Reginald was turning to leave, again thanking Claire for the pile of ground beef that he was already starting to pick at, he said that he could probably visit on his lunch break, if that wasn’t too absurd. She said that it wasn’t absurd in the least, and so they arranged to meet at a ground floor window on the side bordering an empty house and away from her mother’s bedroom. She promised to leave him a chair so he wouldn’t have to stand or sit on the grass.  
    Then he went to work, wondering if it was odd that his two best friends were turning out to be an impossibly old vampire who looked eighteen and a ten-year-old girl. If anyone was watching him, they’d think he was a pedophile. But that was the good thing about being a social misfit — it didn’t matter too much what other people thought, because they were constantly thinking the worst anyway.  
    With his coffee in hand, Reginald walked into his cubicle and sat down on his cushion. A loud farting noise came from beneath him.  
    Reginald closed his eyes and asked both God and whoever oversaw vampires for his money back.  
    A head with perfect teeth and a perfect cleft chin popped over the cubicle divider like a jack in the box. A hand stole over the perfect teeth to keep in an outright burst of laughter. What escaped instead were chortles. The eyes squinted to slits and tears brimmed at the corners.  
    “Hey!” said the perfect head of Todd Walker once it had gotten its laughter under control. “Welcome to the night shift, Reggie!”  
    “Todd?”  
    “You and I are like hair in a braid, Reggie. After you said you had to go to the night shift on account of your skin-melting disease, Phil moved me back here too.”
    And Reginald, in addition to wondering if it was legal for Berger to tell people about his “skin-melting disease,” thought: … to torture me?
    “You’ll be here all night?” said Reginald, fishing the Whoopee Cushion out from under his seat cushion and dropping it in the trash.  
    “3pm to midnight,” he said. “I’m like an ambassador, bridging the worlds of night and day. I didn’t want to do it, but at least I got a big pay raise.”  
    Reginald didn’t take that very obvious bit of bait.  
    “Besides,” said Walker, “the night shift isn’t all bad.” At this, he nodded toward the door, where a tall, dark-haired woman was walking in and hanging up her coat. She looked like she was probably in her late twenties, dressed in a black skirt and black sweater with a white shirt peaking out from underneath. She was wearing heels, but even without them she was tall. Reginald, who was both tall and big, noticed that she almost hit her head on the low EXIT sign that he often ran into himself.  
    The woman walked in their direction, coming between the rows of cubicles. Walker raised his cleft chin and displayed his perfect white teeth.  
    “Hey Nikki,” he said.  
    “Hey Todd,” she said.  
    “What are you doing after work?”  
    “Sleeping.”  
    “Want any company?”
    She rolled her eyes humorlessly and walked past them, into the kitchen.  
    “IT specialist, like your buddy,” said Walker. “Apparently she’s also a pianist. Pianist. Pianist. I wonder if she likes all things that sound like ‘pianist.’” Big grin. Reginald noticed that Walker was speaking to him about the night shift girl the way he’d talk about marathon running to a person in a wheelchair.  
    With nobody to talk to except for Reginald, Walker was harder than usual to shake. When Reginald had worked the day shift, Walker had been a pest. Now, he was a friendless pest who, in addition to torturing Reginald, seemed