First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella
Read First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella Online
Authors: Andrew Dudek
Tags: #vampire, #urban fantasy, #horror, #action
First Kill
By Andrew Dudek
Copyright 2015 Andrew
Dudek
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This one’s for you, Mom.
Yeah, you too, Dad
Table of Contents
Chapter 2: Darkness in
Daylight
Chapter 9: Victories and
Losses
Chapter 12: Pints with Guinness Make us
Strong
Chapter 13: The Siege of Legendary
Bobby’s
Chapter 1: The Vanished Ones
The day I turned fifteen was also the
day Melissa Freeman disappeared. On its own, this wouldn’t have
been particularly strange: it’s an unfortunate fact of living in
the South Bronx that sometimes classmates won’t show up in class on
Monday morning. A lot of them were never seen in the neighborhood
again. A lot of them were never heard from again.
No, it wasn’t strange that
Melissa Freeman
went
missing
. What was remarkable was that it
was
Melissa Freeman
who went missing.
I guess every graduating class, even
in the dilapidated and moldy schools where I got my high school
education, has at least one student that the faculty can point to
with pride and say, “That one’s ours.” One student who makes it
worthwhile for teachers to show up for work. One bright spot, even
in the dark sea that is the New York Public School system. One kid
with actual promise.
That was Melissa Freeman in my
school’s class of 1999. I was a few years younger than her—a
sophomore while she was a senior—and I always found her inspiring.
She’d been accepted to Harvard, Yale, and Duke, but she was
planning to attend Columbia on a full scholarship. She was going to
make something of herself, or so the teachers said: she was going
to become a crusader against the poverty and the gangs, and an
activist for education. Melissa Freeman, in short, was
special.
So when we returned from winter break
in ’99, we were stunned and a little hurt to discover that Melissa
wasn’t coming back to school. She’d had a part-time job in a burger
place, and one day she’d simply never come home from work. No one
knew what happened. Her manager said that she left at eleven, like
she did after every shift. Her parents’ apartment was a few blocks
away, a ten minute walk. At times it could be a dangerous trek—full
of gangsters and muggers and who knew what else—but she’d made the
walk a thousand times. The Freemans would later say that they
didn’t worry too much. She’d spent her life in the city, and they
couldn’t imagine her falling victim to one of its
ambushes.
I tended to agree—if for no other
reason than I couldn’t see myself getting killed and disappeared by
a mugger. I was fifteen. All teenagers are immortal and invincible,
at least in their own minds. I didn’t know what had happened to
Melissa Freeman, but I was pretty sure it had nothing to do with
the usual perils of urban existence.
Life went on. Maybe the school’s
community mourned a little longer, grieving for the lost potential,
but soon enough, as it always did, life went on.
Most people didn’t notice it, not at
first—I certainly didn’t—but over the next six months the number of
disappearances ramped up. It wasn’t all students—in fact, it wasn’t
even mostly students. The majority of the vanished ones were
homeless people—folks like Sidewalk Randy, an old black Vietnam
vet, who for as long as I could remember, had stood outside of the
bagel place on the corner of my block, holding a coffee can full of
something that looked suspiciously like human ashes. Then, one day,
without warning, Randy was gone. He was gone and he never came
back. My mom said that it wasn’t unusual for people like Randy to
pick up roots and move on.
Still, there was a look in
her eyes when she said it, like maybe she knew more than she was
saying. Also in that look was a dangerous gleam, something that I’d
never seen there before. She was warning me, gently and without
saying a word, that I shouldn’t press too hard on this
subject.
Maybe,
the flashers in her eyes seemed to say,
you won’t like what you find
.
That was the first hint of darkness I
ever saw in my mother. Up till then I’d thought of her as a
hard-working, patient, harried woman. She was a teacher—not at my
school, thank god, but in another Bronx public school. I guess she
dealt with much the same things I did. Gang members roaming the
halls, angry delinquents, prospective criminals. It’s not something
we ever talked about—I wish we had, now—but sometimes I wonder if
my mother ever felt the same way I did. All on its own, that could
be enough to put a darkness in a person’s soul, even if you got
good at hiding it.
I should know.
I’d never felt
safe
in school. Many of
my classmates were in gangs or drug-dealing crews. Many already had
impressive rap sheets. Some, rumors held, had murdered people. In a
school that was eighty-nine percent black and Hispanic, it was
unnerving to be a young white man. I was tall for my age, and I’d
inherited a heavy musculature from the father I’d never known, so
no one ever really messed with me. I stayed quiet and I kept my
head down. It wasn’t like I had a panic attack every morning, but
there was an omnipresent sense of well-justified nerves, sharpening
my edges and keeping my instincts honed.
That year, though—and
looking back it seems like it started when Melissa Freeman
disappeared, though that may be hindsight playing tricks—something
darker settled over my little core of the Big Apple. It felt like
being a game animal on a preserve. It settled into my bones and put
my muscles into a constant of tension. There was someone stalking
the streets of the South Bronx—I knew it in my gut, by some
instinct I couldn’t name—or
something
.
Others felt it, too. People didn’t
linger outside apartment buildings and tenements anymore. Bodega
owners and pizzeria managers stopped hosing their sidewalks down at
night. Everybody who could get out of the neighborhood got out of
the neighborhood. Most of us, though, couldn’t afford to leave.
Property values and rent went into free fall, compared to the rest
of the city. So we were trapped, there in the middle of a hunting
ground.
I’m making it sound worse than it was.
Sure, there were moments where I was convinced that something was
stalking me from the shadowy alleys and the crooks of buildings.
But most of the time, fifteen or twenty hours a day, I didn’t give
much thought to the presence of something that I knew, deep in a
corner of my soul, was a monster.
People on the streets were like
zombies. Skin pallid, bags under eyes so gray they almost looked
black. I looked much the same. I can’t speak for any of them, but
for me it was because I wasn’t sleeping. The nights were the worst.
Sometimes, well past midnight, but before the saving grace of dawn,
I’d hear anguished screams outside my window, echoing weirdly and
morbidly.
As the year progressed, as more and
more people joined the ranks of the Vanished Ones, the neighborhood
fell into an uneasy routine. To an objective observer it would have
looked something like how a herd of buffalo deals with a new wolf
pack—it’s a fact of life that there’s something out there that
wants to tear open your throat and eat your young. Nothing to be
done for it but to keep your chin up and live your life. Old lines
of demarcation lost their importance. It wasn’t unusual to see
members of formerly rivalrous gangs walking side by side down the
street—safety in numbers. No one said much, at least not to me, but
I think we all agreed that whatever was causing these
disappearances, it was important that we banded together against
the encroaching darkness.
Early in the year a pair of uniformed
cops were found skinned, gutted, decapitated, and drained of blood.
They were crucified on the rusting jungle gym in a small park.
After that the cops, never exactly a strong presence in the
neighborhood, gave up. The war was over, and the police had lost.
All that was left was for the darkness to finish the
job.
I lost friends that year, people I’d
known since I was a small child and people I’d only met in the last
two years. I lost enemies, too, bullies who’d always treated me as
an outsider. I lost teachers and neighbors. I lost strangers.
Looking back on it, I realize that I lost something else, too,
something equally important: I lost my home.
If there was anything that comforted
me during that dark year, it was the fact that no one, as far as I
knew, had been taken from their homes. It was always people alone
on dark streets, or delivery men in the predawn gray. As long as
the sun was shining, I could feel reasonably safe outside. As long
as I was home by dark, I thought everything would be
okay.
So that was the rhythm of my life in
1999 and early 2000: allotted fresh air during sunlit hours, home
and safely behind a locked-and-chained door by the time the sun
went down. As long as I kept to that routine I felt…well, not safe,
exactly, but secure in the knowledge that I was doing everything to
protect myself. Like the buffalo that herd together against the
wolves.
Some days I almost forgot about the
darkness that threatened to swallow the South Bronx whole. Some
days, when the sun shined bright and the spring air brought the
city to life, I could almost convince myself that everything was
normal.
Until the day that the darkness
followed me home—the day the darkness staked its claim on my
soul.
Chapter 2: Darkness in Daylight
We held the honoring ceremony for
Franklin Parson after school on a bright, sunny afternoon in the
middle of March. It had been more than a year since Melissa Freeman
disappeared. I was sixteen. It was a Wednesday. It was unseasonably
warm.
We didn’t call it a “funeral,” out of
respect for the few optimistic souls among us who still maintained
that the Vanished Ones might not be dead. After all, except for
those two gruesome cops, no bodies had ever turned up. This always
struck me as idealistic, almost naïve, even back then. None of the
Vanished had ever been seen again, not one—privately, I thought of
them as funerals.
Some weeks we’d have as many as five
or six ceremonies. After a while I mostly stopped going. There was
only so many times you could sit through the same hokum about being
in a better place, maybe, and the real burden being on those of us
left behind. But Franklin had been a friend.
I’m not saying he was a good kid—he
was a member of one of the more prominent gangs, and I know for a
fact that he’d had a juvenile conviction for armed robbery when he
was thirteen—but he was okay to me. We weren’t blood brothers or
anything like that, but in our freshmen year he’d once stood up
against a few of his buddies to me. I guessed that Franklin Parsons
was part of the reason I rarely got hassled by the kids in school.
He’d helped me out on that day, which seemed so long ago, and now
he was gone.