First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella Read online

  “Besides,” Nate continued, “it wasn’t murder. Those two weren’t victims, Dave. They were vampires. They’re casualties of war.”

  I swallowed. My heart pounded so hard I could feel it rattling my throat. “War?

  “Yeah.” Nate didn’t look over his shoulder. “We’re fighting a war for this neighborhood. And we’re losing.”

  It hung in the air for a while, the dark thought that permeated those words. Nate walked in silence for a moment, just long enough to me to begin to feel nauseated. “Hopefully, the sun’ll come up before the cops find the bodies, anyway. Sunlight has a powerful effect on vampires, including their corpses. One good ray of light and—poof!—they’re dust.”

  He led me out of the alley into a city street. On a normal night, in a normal neighborhood, I knew it would be crowded with people. There would have been pedestrians and taxis and kids on the corners. There was nothing like that here. The streets, the sidewalks, the corners were completely empty. It was amazing how quickly I’d gotten used to that.

  We walked for what felt like a long time but was really just a few blocks. Nate stopped in front of the entrance to a subway station, one of the underground ones, which are unusual in the Bronx. The paint on the railings was chipped and the metal was rusted. Long wooden boards had been nailed into place, creating a floor over the stairs. The boards were covered with spray paint. The graffiti looked like random curves and swirls, but as I studied them I detected a pattern of symbols. Nate noticed me looking at the ciphers and he rolled his eyes. “You’d think the city would paint over them more often, but as long as we don’t use gang symbols they don’t care. Or maybe they just don’t notice.”

  He looked around for a moment, like a man about to scale a private fence, and he bent down to lift one of the boards. It came up with no effort. When the board was high enough, he squeezed through, then held it for me. I was bigger than Nate, and I had to squeeze and wriggle, but I got through and dropped into darkness.

  I heard Nate fumbling in his bag. A moment later a flashlight powered to life.

  “Come on,” he said and started down the stairs.

  The air was still and musty. It felt like descending into the bowels of some cavern that had never been seen by human eyes. There was a distinct sense that I was entering some new phase of my life, and I wasn’t sure I was happy about it. The only thought I could formulate was that this was graduation day. Everything seemed weird, like I’d been plucked out of my normal, familiar life, and dropped somewhere extraordinary.

  Of course, I thought, that’s an illusion. Your life, for the last year at least, wasn’t normal. You’ve known for a long time that something strange was happening and you couldn’t see it or give it a name. Now you know what’s happening and want to go back to your boring high school life. I don’t know what this is, really, but it’s got to be better than what you’re getting away from. Besides, you have to do this. You have to avenge Mom.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “There are places like this all over the city,” Nate said. “Abandoned subway stations. I guess they didn’t get enough traffic or bring in enough revenue, so the mayor shuts ‘em down. It’d cost more to fill ‘em in, so they just sit here underground, empty and unused. Makes a perfect hideout for the Family.”

  “Don’t you get homeless people camping down here?”

  Nate laughed. “Dave, we are the bums camping down here. What do you think, we’re living in a subway station for the atmosphere?”

  We rounded the corner on the landing and started down the next flight of stairs. At the bottom I could see the faint, flickering light of a fire. My immediate response—being a city kid with zero camping experience—was to panic, but Nate smiled, so I relaxed. This wasn’t a dangerous fire, then, the kind that kills so many people in urban environments. These were controlled: campfires. I could hear voices, too, whispers and murmurs. Nate showed no concern about this, either, so I decided this must be the Family.

  The subway station was bigger than I’d expected, but that could have been because I’d never seen one empty. To me, subways were supposed to be way-stations—someplace you go on your way to somewhere else. It felt…wrong, somehow, to be in one that was so quiet and still. Not that it was empty. Far from it. I counted more than a dozen kids, most within a year or two of my age. Most were skinny and haggard like Nate, but there was some baby-fat. Nearly everyone was a minority: black, Hispanic, and Asian, though the knowledge that there were real vampires made the racial divide seem less important. There was an even mix of boys and girls. I saw a lot of tattered denim and torn canvas clothing. They were sitting around a small collection of campfires, eating directly from tin cans of beans and SpaghettiOs.

  Every dirty, tired face was looking at me. A few stood up, producing weapons. Pipes and knives, mostly, but one held a machete and another was straining to hold something that looked like a fireman’s ax.

  Nate waved them off.

  “Yo, guys, back off,” he said. His voice echoed oddly in the room, bouncing off the walls and into the gaping maw that was the tunnel. “This is Dave Carver. He’s gonna be staying with us for a while.” He looked at me, and while his face wasn’t exactly warm, it wasn’t unsympathetic, either. “Dave, welcome to the Family.”

  I felt like I’d been thrown to the wolves. Nate disappeared into a makeshift office next to where the ticketing machines would have been in a modern, operational station, along with a couple of other kids, leaving me alone with the Family. Most ventured off in pairs or trios—I could hear some of them screwing in dubious privacy—but two sat down next to me: a boy and a girl. Both looked Hispanic. Both were about seventeen.

  The girl’s name was Maria and her boyfriend was Hector. Maria was sharpening a nasty-looking knife. Hector held an aluminum baseball bat, dented and bent. The metal of both weapons was covered with deep-set, dark stains. Maria had no interest in me—she sat on an old milk crate and sharpened her knife. Hector, though, kept his hand possessively on Maria’s thigh and glared daggers in my direction.

  I smiled nervously and looked at my feet. I was still wearing the old sneakers I’d worn to school. Their soles were still coated with my mother’s blood.

  The darkness of the station made it dank and cavernous. The air was heavy, stifling with humidity. Fires seemed to draw in the oxygen—I knew there had to be decent ventilation somewhere, because I didn’t smell too much smoke, but it still made me nervous.

  I’ve never liked parties. Anytime there are too many people in one confined space I get wary. I wanted to get up and find some corner where I could be alone, but I was afraid to insult Hector and Maria. I knew from experience that kids my age could be unforgiving and that they tended to hold on to first impressions. If I ostracized myself from the Family I might never get another chance. I didn’t know them, but I wanted them to like me.

  Hector seemed like the jealous sort, and he carried himself like some of the gangsters I’d known—angry and aggressive. I wasn’t afraid of him—I was pretty sure I’d never be afraid of anything ever again—but he seemed like the kind of guy you didn’t want to make angry. Maria was still displaying nothing toward me at all. Suddenly she bent to the knapsack between her ankles and drew out a large can of beans. She split the top with the knife and handed me the can.

  “You look hungry,” she said. “You can eat ‘em cold. Some people heat ‘em, but it ain’t necessary.”

  Hector’s eyes narrowed, and I had the distinct impression that if I tried to heat the beans I’d be wading into a sea of mocking disrespect.

  I thanked Maria and tipped the can back, drinking the beans as if they were a beer. The beans were slimy and I had to resist the gag reflex, but they weren’t bad and I was hungry. For some reason I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten.

  Maria smiled. Hector gave a small, respectful nod. I wiped my mouth on the sleeve of my sweatshirt.

  “So,” Maria said, “I guess your family’s dead.”
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br />   “Yeah,” I said. “My mom.”

  Maria shook her head. “Sorry, man. I know how rough that is. My hermano got killed by vamps last year. Everybody’s lost their people like that.” There was a fierceness in her eyes that I hadn’t noticed before, something dark and ancient and powerful. “That’s what this place is about, amigo: vengenza.”

  “Revenge?” I said.

  “Sí.” Hector said. His eyes were big and dark. They made him look wild and dangerous.

  “Well, partly,” Maria said. “It’s about revenge, but it’s also about just…I don’t know, trying to stop them. You know what’s been going on, right? Nate explained it?”

  “Some of it, I guess,” I said. “I know vampires are attacking people.”

  “It’s not just attacking,” she said. “It’s a fucking war. You know how many people have gotten took by the murciélagos? Hundreds in the last year. It’s an all-out assault and if somebody doesn’t stop ‘em…hell, I think they could take the whole city.”

  I frowned and watched the flickering, jumping light of the fire. “So what do we do about it? What do I do about it?”

  Maria smiled, and for the first time, I realized she was pretty. Her skin was a little paler than healthy, maybe, and her hair was dirty and limp, but when she smiled her dark eyes sparkled like midnight diamonds. “First thing we gotta do, Dave, is teach you how to fight.”

  Chapter 6: Boot Camp

  I don’t know what I expected—I thought Nate and I had some special bond, due to our shared sense of loss, but I quickly came to realize that everyone in the Family had that same sense. Everyone had lost someone to the vampires. I didn’t see much of Nate over the next few weeks while I went through a crash course in vampire hunting.

  Maria and Hector were my teachers. We’d spend four or five hours every night training. I learned that vampires weren’t a New York problem—every culture on the planet had their own experiences with the bloodsuckers. Nate, for example, would sometimes derisively refer to them as “sangsue,” which I guess is what his Creole mother would call vampires. “Murciélago,” meanwhile, was Spanish for “bat”, as in vampire bat. Whatever you called them, I was beginning to learn how they operated.

  By and large vampires are ambush predators. They’d wait in dark, shadowy alleys for someone to pass by alone and unprotected. It was simple enough, but it was still tough to get my brain around. I was young enough that my brain retained some of the elasticity of childhood, but I was more adult than kid at this point, and deep down I wasn’t sure I believed.

  It took about a week for me to get a handle on the theoretical reality of vampires. The truth was, none of us knew much about them, not even Nate. Nobody knew much about their lifestyles or their habits.

  What everyone in the Family did know, though, was how to kill them.

  The easiest way, I learned, was to separate the head from the body. For this reason most of the Family favored bladed weapons—sharp knives, saws. Nate carried a machete under his hoodie at all times. Others, like Hector, preferred blunt instruments like a baseball bat. Rumor had that Hector had bashed in the skulls of more than a dozen vampires with that old Easton. Other than that, they had figured that vampires were repelled by sunlight and that they were restful during daylight. So the Family went on their raids during the day, particularly early in the morning when, presumably, the vampires would be most tired.

  But I was still a long way from going with them on an attack. For one thing the Family didn’t have intelligence on the location of a nest. More importantly, I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t go until Hector and Maria said I was ready.

  I was trained how to use the ax. It was the heaviest weapon in the armory, and I was the person with the most recent diet of protein. Even without training or combat experience, I was the physically strongest member of the Family. Good genes, I guess.

  To start: I chopped wood. I’m not sure where Hector found all those old logs in the Bronx, but he carried them down the stairs by the armload and told me in his halting Spanglish to split them into burnable pieces. I couldn’t rest, couldn’t have food or water until the entire pile was split. My arms ached by the end of a session. My chest, shoulders, and back screamed, but I felt myself getting stronger. Within a few weeks I could cut a pile in half the time.

  Once I was strong enough, Maria began teaching me speed. We’d sprint across the station, back and forth until I couldn’t move anymore. More than once, I had to run into the tunnels to puke. It was, if this was even possible, more grueling than the strength training, but in short order I could run a mile in less than eight minutes.

  Finally in the middle of April, a month after I found the Family, I entered combat training.

  The whole Family gathered around as Hector and I squared off in the center of the platform. It felt for all the world like a schoolyard brawl, with a throng of hecklers egging us on. Nate was there, too, the first time I’d seen him for more than a few moments since the night he pulled me out of the police station. He was standing slightly apart from the circle, next to a man who stuck out the way only an adult can when surrounded by a pack of teenagers. The man had a grizzled beard that was gray in front of his ears and around his mouth, and his face was covered with deep worry-lines that turned his forehead into a map.

  Hector took off his plaid shirt and tossed it aside, revealing a thin body that was nevertheless draped with lithe muscle. There was a tattoo on his forearm: a fanged skull, cracked in the center by a baseball bat, with blood dripping down the obviously fatal wound. Other members of the Family had similar tattoos, and I knew they were given to a member who’d made his first kill. All of a sudden, I wanted nothing in the world more than I wanted my own tat.

  There was no bell. Hector simply barreled in on me without warning, wrapping me in a bear hug and dragging me to the ground.

  I outweighed him by twenty pounds or more—though I was considerably leaner than I’d been a month ago—but Hector’s wiry arms might as well have been padlocked to my waist. I couldn’t move my upper body at all.

  We hit the platform and rolled, coming to a stop only when we hit the shoes of the nearest spectators. I was on the bottom. Hector’s arms slowly squeezed the life from me and I couldn’t move. Soon, I’d be out of energy, just from straining to suck air. I was strong, but I couldn’t break Hector’s grip.

  I remembered something Maria had told me.

  “Los murciéalogos will always be stronger than you. Faster, too, and probably smarter. But that doesn’t mean you can’t beat ‘em. All you gotta do is outthink ‘em.”

  I squeezed my arms together suddenly. My shoulders popped and I winced, but I was smaller than before. For just a second, there was open space between Hector’s arms and my torso. I slammed my forehead into his face. I don’t think I did the head-butt right—I saw stars—but Hector was at least as hurt by it as I was. He let me go, and I rolled out from underneath him. He stayed down, on his hands and knees. I kicked him hard in the ribs, relishing the chance at the payback for all of the wood he’d made me chop.

  I didn’t hesitate another moment—I leapt onto his back and locked my arms around his neck in a tight chokehold, one of the things I’d practiced over and over again. I kicked his knees out from under him, and he landed on his chest.

  “Oof!”

  We stayed like that, me pinning him to the ground.

  After what seemed like an eternity, Maria called out, “Cinco!” Five. the fight was over. I’d won.

  I let Hector go. He climbed to his feet and grabbed me by the shoulders. Blood was pouring from his nose, but he was grinning like a maniac. I realized I was, too.

  Maria came out of the crowd and threw her arms around my shoulders, then locked Hector in a celebratory hug. After a few moments, the cheering and applause died down, and Nate stepped forward.

  He extended his hand. I shook it.

  “Okay then,” he said. “I guess you’re ready.”

  Chapter 7: The Nest
/>   The weight of the ax made my shoulder ache. My bicep screamed from the strain and my forearm bulged. Veins pushed out the skin, popping like trains in an open field. I’d been crouched behind a Dumpster for three hours, forty-two minutes, and fifteen seconds, and don’t think I wasn’t counting, because my legs had begun to cramp almost two hours ago, and I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep this position. It would all pay off in a few moments, though, and then I could move.

  It was almost sunrise.

  Across the empty street stood the rotted-out hulk of a boarding house. I knew it well—I’d walked past it everyday a few years back. According to Nate’s source, the house had been empty for months. Not an anomaly in the neighborhood, of course: I’d seen more cockroaches and rats in the last few hours than I had people.

  The vantage point where I crouched was offensive to all the senses—especially smell, for the obvious reason of decaying garbage—but it afforded me a killer view straight down the alley across the street, right to the door that would lead to the boarding house’s basement. No one had used the door in the time I’d been there, coming or going. The Dumpster gave me one more advantage, as well: it masked my scent. This was good, because the things I was hunting had excellent senses of smell.

  Gray light was beginning to filter to street level. The sky was lightening. It’d still be a few minutes before the sunlight reached my alley, but not long now. It was almost time. They’d be here soon, unless Nate’s intel was wrong, and Hector and Maria both had an unshakeable faith that Nate’s intel was never wrong.

  “Anything yet?”

  Speak—or just think—of the devil, and he appears. And I mean appear literally. Nate adjusted the crystal on his watchband, and he was standing with me in the alley.

  I didn’t jump or otherwise let him know that he’d startled me. From the smirk that crossed his peach-fuzz lips, he knew, but he didn’t mention it.