First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella (4 page)

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.”

“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.