First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella Read online

  “Run,” Nate said.

  “What about Hector?”

  “No time.”

  We ran, leaving Hector’s body behind.

  As he ran, Nate smashed into bottles with his machete. It took me a moment to catch on, but when I realized what he was doing, I began to mimic him on the other side of the alley. It made it awkward to run, but I managed to keep up.

  The vampires were still after us, hounds on rabbits. They were staying back, toying with us, slipping on the blood-and-vodka slick floor. That kept them out of striking distance. That range was the only thing that allowed us to get out of the warehouse in one piece. We burst into the sunlit parking lot, panting and sweaty.

  Maria stood in the middle of a circle formed by the rest of the Family. Nate jogged over and consulted with Luisa.

  “Everyone out?”

  “Everyone who’s coming out,” she said, her voice dark.

  “Give me the lighter.”

  “Where’s Hector?” Maria said. When Nate didn’t answer, just moved towards the warehouse door, she asked, louder, “Nate, where is he?”

  I shook my head, tears stinging my eyes.

  She saw the grimness in my face, threw back her head, and howled in sorrow.

  Nate clicked the lighter to life. He stared for a moment at the pool of darkness that was the inside of the warehouse. I couldn’t see the shapes of the vampires within, but I knew they were in there. They were trapped, unable to leave without frying themselves in the sun. The warehouse that was now soaked with high-proof alcohol.

  Nate threw the lighter.

  Before long, the fire had consumed the warehouse. Smoke rose into the air. Flames licked the clouds. Distant sirens filled the air, alerting the world the fire department was on their screaming way.

  Nate, his arm still around a sobbing Maria said, “Come on. Let’s go home.”

  Chapter 10: Aftermath

  Counting Hector, the vodka raid cost us four members. Three were left behind as the warehouse burned, killing the vampires and frying the corpses of our brothers. It was wrong, but there was nothing for it. At least this way, Hector, Sean, and Tony didn’t suffer the indignity of being eaten.

  The fourth fatality was Corey. He was beaten to death with the stock of his shotgun. His body was a bloody, jumbled mess, but Luisa had gotten him out before the warehouse burned.

  We had an impromptu funeral, in the station. We stood in a circle around a fire. Maria sat on the floor, inconsolable, her face buried in her hands. Luisa appeared fascinated by a spot of grime on one wall. Nate stared straight into the fire. No one said anything. There wasn’t much to be said.

  I didn’t know where to put my hands, or where to look. Mostly I stood near the back of the group, feeling like someone had scooped out part of my insides. My body hurt, my head hurt, my soul hurt. I didn’t cry when my mother died, not right away, and I didn’t cry now, but I wished I could. In a strange way, I envied Maria: She was sobbing on the ground like a piece of her was burning away to nothingness in that bonfire, but at least she was releasing it. The emotion, the sadness, the pain was welling up in me like a kinked hose, and I expected the pressure would make me burst.

  After an eternity that was really a moment of silence, Nate nodded. “They won’t have died in vain.”

  That was all the eulogy that Sean, Tony, Corey, and Hector needed. The funeral was over. The fire was extinguished and everyone set their various tasks for the day: sharpening weapons, washing clothes, cleaning off blood, and preparing for the next raid.

  Nate pulled me and Luisa into his makeshift office.

  “We need to bury Corey,” he said.

  The former soldier’s body rested under a moth-ridden bedsheet we’d found somewhere.

  “We can’t just dump him in the tunnels. Someone could find him and that would lead the cops right to us.” Nate looked at us. Part of me wanted to say that might not be so bad, but I held my tongue. He fished some change from his pocket. “Luisa, call Squirrel and see if he’ll get us some wheels.”

  The bitter-faced girl was quiet as she took the coins and shoved them into her own pocket. She was equally silent as she ascended the stairs in search of the nearest pay-phone.

  “She thinks it’s my fault,” Nate said.

  I shrugged. My stomach was churning like there was an ocean in there. Except for vampires, this was the first time since my mom that I’d seen a dead body.

  “Anyway, we’re gonna need to have a conversation with Squirrel. There were supposed to be six or seven vampires in that warehouse, Dave. Not thirty or forty. Squirrel’s information was wrong. We need to know what happened, and if it could happen again.”

  I frowned. My internal sea got choppier. “You think he set us up?”

  A pause. “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure. It could have been a mistake. It could be someone gave him bad information. It could be that he set us up. We need to know.”

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “You’re the biggest one here. Just stand behind me and look mean.” He paused. “Maybe hold the ax.”

  “So I’m the muscle.”

  Nate smiled, a distant, bitter expression. “Exactly. You cool with that?”

  “Totally cool.”

  It was well after midnight by the time Squirrel arrived. That wasn’t unusual—he had a business to run. He made his way down the stairs, watching the dirty, angry, wounded faces that greeted him. When he reached the bottom, he nearly ran into Luisa, who was methodically running a whetstone along her cleaver.

  “What do you need?”

  Nate fiddled with his watch and he seemed to materialize from the darkness. “Why don’t you come back here, Squirrel. We have something to discuss. Dave?”

  The three of us went behind the curtain. Nate sat in one chair and gestured for Squirrel to take the other. I stood behind the big man and tapped the ax-handled against the floor. The hollow thumps echoed in the station, an ominous heartbeat.

  “We hit the vodka warehouse this morning,” Nate said.

  “I heard,” Squirrel said. “It burned down. They talked about it on the news.”

  “There weren’t six vampires there. There were dozens.”

  Squirrel’s head wobbled. I could see a tattoo on the back of his neck: a pair of skeletal hands, clasped as if in prayer. “That don’t make sense.”

  “That’s what we thought.” Nate’s voice was deathly quiet, and it was possibly the most frightening sound I’d heard that day. “But they were there. I lost four soldiers, Squirrel!” He hissed the last sentence, leaning forward like a striking snake.

  “We got Corey’s body out,” he continued, more calmly. “But we had to burn the others with the enemy.”

  “Mary, mother of God,” Squirrel whispered.

  “Yeah, I don’t think she had much to do with it.” Nate was cold. “What I want to know is: Why were there so many? You said six. And there were thirty.”

  Squirrel looked at me, his mouth hung open like a panting dog. His mustache bristled, and I could see the tattoo of playing cards on his tongue. The effect was comical. He stood up, his hands waving wildly. “You think I did this on purpose? Come on, Nate, I’ve known you since you were in diapers—you think I would—“

  I put a hand on his shoulder and forced him back to his chair. “Sit down,” I said.

  Squirrel looked from me back to Nate, his face quivering with fear. “Dave, Nate. Come on, you know how this works. I’m not in that life anymore, not really. I’m a tattoo artist, not a vampire hunter. I get the information and pass it on to you. I’ve never claimed to be one hundred percent accurate.”

  “You’ve never been this wrong before,” Nate said. “Which suggests this was a setup. Now—“

  “Look, Nate—“

  I grabbed a handful of coarse gray hair and yanked Squirrel’s head back. “Shut. Up.” I let him go. He coughed and fell silent.

  “I don’t think you set us up,” Nate
continued, as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “But I don’t think it was a mistake, either. I need to know who told you about this warehouse.”

  Squirrel sounded only marginally relieved. “The guy’s name was Everett, I think. He said he worked at the sanitation plant and he saw strange guys coming in and out of the warehouse. It sounded like vamps to me, so I passed it on to you. That’s all. Weird guy, though.”

  “Weird how?”

  “He didn’t say much. Seemed out of the whole time. Like he was baked or at least halfway out the door. Didn’t so much as flinch when I put the needle to him.”

  Nate shook his head, but his eyes flashed. “Okay. Thanks, Squirrel. I’m sorry for all of this. You mind giving Dave and Luisa a ride? We need to bury Corey.”

  Squirrel looked troubled, but his confusion gave way to relief. “Sure thing, Nate. I’ll be upstairs in the truck.”

  When he was gone, Nate put his head in his hands and sighed. I’d never seen him look so defeated. He answered my questions before I had the chance to ask. “This Everett guy was enthralled. It’s like being possessed by a vampire.”

  “They can do that?” I shuddered. As if vampires aren’t scary and disgusting enough.

  “Some of them can. The more powerful ones. But if they sent a thrall into Squirrel’s shop to give hum bad intel…”

  I frowned. “It means they know who he is.”

  “And his connection to us. We need to get someone in that shop who can vet the informants.” Nate shook his head. “Never mind that for now, though. We’re burning moonlight. Take Luisa and go, okay. Give him the best burial you can, kid. Corey deserves that.”

  Fresh Kills, in Staten Island, was the largest landfills in the world—one of the biggest manmade structures in history, a modern Statue of Zeus. It was so large, they say, that it was visible from satellites in orbit. That’s Staten Island, folks: the place with the dump so big you can see it from space.

  We took the Cross Bronx to the Jersey Turnpike, south a ways, then hopped across the Goethals. Even well after midnight, the traffic was steady and frustrating and the trip took most of an hour and a half.

  In case you’re wondering, a landfill the size of a small island smells exactly like you’d think. We each wrapped bandanas around out faces to shield us from rotten food mixed with what could have been literally tons of dirty diapers. Local rumors always held that the Mafia used Fresh Kills as a dumping ground for some of its dirty work, so that smell could have been mixed in as well: Corey’s wasn’t the first body to be buried beneath the mounds of trash.

  I felt bad about that. I hadn’t known him for very long, but he was a member of the Family, and that made him my brother. Nate’s instructions rang in my ears as the three of us dug: Give him the best burial you can, kid. Corey deserves that. He was right: Corey did deserve a good burial—but no matter how much respectful silence we lent to the proceedings, there was no way this could be thought of as good.

  A squadron of seagulls swooped by, squawking loudly. It didn’t matter to them that we were burying a young man. All they knew was that we were disturbing their sleep and making a mess of their food stores.

  After nearly an hour, Luisa stabbed her shovel into a pile of decomposing pizza boxes and said, “That’s deep enough.”

  We pushed Corey into the hole as gently as we could. He bounced against the side and landed with a sickening thwack. The plastic rings from a six-pack drifted down to rest on his head like burial shroud.

  Luisa nodded, apparently in satisfaction, and picked up her shovel.

  “Wait,” I said. Luisa scowled, but I continued. “Corey you didn’t deserve what happened. None of us did, I guess. We’re all just kids and we lost our world to something that shouldn’t even exist. Who knows what your life—any of our lives—could have been if those monsters hadn’t taken it from you. I guess, deep down, that you knew this wouldn’t have a happy ending. I’m starting to realize that myself. I can’t promise that we’ll rest until every vampire is dead. There are too many of them and too few of us—we’ll probably all end up in holes like this one soon enough. I’ll say this, though: We’ll do our best to make sure you didn’t die in vain. We’ll keep killing fangs until one of them sends us to join you.”

  After a beat in which the only sounds were the angry cries of the gulls and the distant sound of trucks speeding by, Luisa said, “Amen.”

  Squirrel looked ill.

  “Seriously,” Luisa said. “That was a good speech. You should’a been a politician or an officer or something.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  Luisa laughed. “Come on, Captain Carver. Let’s bury this poor son of a bitch and go home. I need a bath.”

  Squirrel stopped the truck at the curb next to the entrance to the subway station. Luisa hopped out of the passenger seat without so much as a word to the big man. I slid across the bench seating, eager to get out of the pickup truck and away from Squirrel as soon as possible. I felt guilty about the way I’d intimidated him, and there was something strange about the way he’d let me intimidate him. Squirrel seemed to fear me in a way that he didn’t fear any of the others, and it made me uncomfortable. I had my palm on the door handle when Squirrel gently grabbed my shoulder.

  “Nate trusts you, Dave,” he said. “You may be the only person who can say that right now.”

  I shook my head, but he cut me off before I could protest. “I’ve known that boy since he was a baby—he ever tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sure he’s told you about his mom, though. She was a witch, one of the most powerful in New Orleans for decades. I was her apprentice for a little while, but I didn’t have the talent to really make it, even as a hedge magician. My only skill is my art. The colors in my tattoos don’t ever fade and, sometimes when I really put an effort into it, I can make them move.” He rolled his shoulders and smiled. “Anyway. I was saying that Nate trusts you. You’re his second-in-command, am I wrong?”

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “We’re all equals. Nate is just…”

  “First among equals?” Squirrel rubbed a hand over his hairy chin. “But if there’s a first, don’t that mean there could be a second among equals?” I frowned, but Squirrel continued. “I’m not asking you to spy on him—I know how loyal you kids are to each other—but I think he’ll listen to you.”

  He pulled from a pocket a business card. “Have him talk to this guy. He’s an old friend of mine. If Nate insists on carrying on with this war, he’ll need help, and this guy can help.”

  “Felix Guinness,” I read. There was no phone number, only an address in Harlem. “Who the hell is this?”

  “Like I said, he’s an old friend of mine. Another former apprentice of Helena Labat. A sorcerer, a registered member of the Magic Council.”

  “A sorcerer,” I said. “Really?”

  Squirrel laughed. “Son, you’ve spent, what, six months fighting vampires. Is it really so hard to believe that there’s other crazy shit out there?”

  I frowned and tugged at the end of a strand of my hair. The truth was, I’d never considered the possibility that there were other…things…in the world. I mean, I knew that Nate could do things that looked an awful lot like magic, but I’d always assumed they were tricks, illusions. But if Squirrel was right, and magic was real—and I guessed I had to at least consider that possibility—I wondered what else could be out there.

  A car drove past, the first we’d seen since getting back to the Bronx. It was speeding. The driver was in a hurry to get home, I guessed. I couldn’t blame him. Nobody much liked to spend time out of doors once darkness hit these days. And with no cops around to harass him, why not get out of the neighborhood as fast as you could?

  “Guess not,” I said.

  “Give the card to Nate,” Squirrel said. “I don’t know, maybe Guinness can teach you kids a thing or two. Maybe no one else will have to die.”

  Chapter 11: Back to the Past

  For
a few weeks, Nate flatly refused to go see Felix Guinness. When he finally changed his mind, it was on a warm September day after a long, quiet stretch. It didn’t make sense to me, but the fact that we hadn’t seen a vampire in weeks made Nate think they were getting better at avoiding us. He decided we needed to learn how to hunt them.

  Waiting to meet Guinness felt a lot like waiting to ambush a vampire nest. Nate and I, alone, crouched in an alley across the street from a four-story residential building in Harlem. My palms were sweaty and my stomach churned, just like before a raid. There were differences, of course.

  It was the middle of the day, and the sunshine felt good on my skin if uncomfortably warm after a few minutes. The vampires hadn’t crossed the Harlem River, yet—there were people everywhere: enjoying the late summer sun and walking in small groups, chatting, laughing. A few people gave Nate and me strange looks, but most seemed to take no notice. I knew the feeling: There are homeless people on every corner in New York—you can’t live guilt-free without learning to ignore them. They just thought that Nate and I were bums.

  That struck me as funny, but I didn’t mention it to Nate. His lips were set, exactly the way they got before a raid. I couldn’t understand why he was so upset about this expedition. It had been a chore convincing him to go—and even harder to convince him to let me come. But rule number one of the Family was that no one went anywhere alone, not if they can help it. Even during the day, you never knew when you’d run into an agent of a vampire.

  We were getting paranoid.

  Nate needed cheering up, I decided. It wasn’t like this mission required total stealth. I said, “So this guy was a friend of your mom. Did you know him?”

  “No.” Nate was brusque, but then a pain appeared behind his eyes and he softened. “I don’t think so. My mom had a lot of friends—coworkers and apprentices and customers and fellow practitioners. I was pretty young when we moved up here and only a few years older when she died. It’s possible I knew him back home.”