First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella (7 page)

There were seventeen of us, and like
any group of teenagers we divided ourselves into cliques. Strange
as it was to me, I was in with the “cool kids.” We were the most
valuable members of the Family—Nate’s inner circle.

I was the strongest, physically, of
the Family, and I fought with a smooth, graceful power, both of
which meant I was part of every raiding party. Hector and Maria
were lethal in tandem. They fought as a unit like they’d trained at
it for years. Maria was finesse and Hector was strength. Luisa was
the quartermaster. She bragged that she could shoplift from any
store in the city, and she proved it time and time again. We ate
well for a bunch of dirty street kids. Corey was the oldest member
of the Family, even older than Nate. He’d been in the Army, but
he’d torn a muscle in his arm during basic training and he got an
early discharge. Mostly his contributions involved talking tactics
with Nate, but he was no slouch with one of the Family’s two
shotguns, so he came along on the ones that required extra
firepower.

It was the middle of September. I’d
been with the Family for six months when Squirrel gave us a target
on the southern tip of the Bronx, not far from the headquarters of
the City’s sanitation department. The target: an old vodka
distribution warehouse. Lots of the Family were excited by the
prospect of bringing back spoils of war in the form of booze.
Squirrel didn’t mind providing information that could get us
killed, but he blanched at buying booze for a bunch of underagers.
It seemed like he had his priorities screwed up, but what did I
know. Luisa, of course, could have ‘lifted beer or liquor, but Nate
saw it as an unnecessary risk, so we didn’t drink much. We didn’t
even know if there was anything in the warehouse, but we were eager
to find out.

“Good spot for a vamp
nest,” I said, holding a bandana over my face to shield from the
stink of sewage drifting out of the East River. “The smell alone
would keep anyone from checking it out.”

“
Sí
,” Hector said. He fingered the
grip of the pump-action shotgun in his hands.

We didn’t use firearms much. Nate
didn’t like them: They were too noisy for our purposes. But in
situations like this, when there was a large nest with what could
be a lot of vampires, we sometimes had to compromise. Nate may not
have liked shotguns much, but there was no denying that they were
effective.

“You sure you’re okay with
that thing?” It was an empty gesture and we both knew it—I was
terrible with guns. I’d be lucky not to blow my own face off, let
alone do more than singe a vampire’s clothes.

Even so, Hector paused
before he answered. “
Sí
. I’m fine.”

“Look on the bright side,”
I said. “You can always use it as a club.”

He glanced at his tattoo—the vampire
skull broken by a baseball bat. He liked to get in close and bash
in brains. He smiled. “That’s true.”

In the distance, on the other side of
the parking lot, we could see Nate, Maria, and Luisa creeping
towards the back entrance. Corey, meanwhile, was leading a small
band towards the third door, on the west-side of the building and
out of sight. I caught Hector blowing a kiss in Maria’s
direction.

“
Te amo
,” he mouthed, silently, then
glared at me, challenging me to make fun.

I kept my face carefully neutral and
said, “Should we go in?”

We had no idea how many vampires were
inside, but we’d seen movement, so we knew they were in there. The
sun was high, so they’d be trapped when we attacked. On an
intellectual level, I knew that a cornered animal could be even
more dangerous, but I couldn’t convince myself that we’d be
seriously threatened by the vampires. We’d done this a lot. We knew
what we were doing.

Hector smiled. “Let’s go.”

Behind us, boats and
ferries traveled up and down the river. The people onboard were so
wrapped up in their own lives, their own businesses, that they
didn’t notice the small army of teenagers arranging themselves for
an assault on a deadly stronghold. I understood. I’d seen the city
from outside—riding in on the highway or from the deck of the
Staten Island Ferry. I knew what it looks like—all glittering steel
and shining glass. The city looks powerful and impenetrable and
solid. It’s hard to imagine that there are people inside it, that
there is anything inside it. It’s all too easy to forget that
there
are
people—millions of them all living lives that range from easy
and comfortable to difficult and dangerous.

Hooded figures crept across the
parking lot, each holding a weapon. There were baseball bats and
hockey sticks and handmade clubs and knives and lengths of chain
and machetes and another shotgun. And me with my ax and Hector with
his own gun.

We jogged across the lot like we owned
the place. When we reached the door looked at Hector and said, “Why
don’t you knock this time?”

He grinned, lifted the shotgun, and
blew away the padlock.

My ears ringing from the blast, I went
left, holding my ax loosely in my hands. Hector went right,
shouldering the gun. Deeper inside the warehouse I heard another
blast, followed by the faint squeaks of a door’s hinges.

The inside of the warehouse was dark.
Most of the place was aboveground, so the vampires had had to do
some renovation to make it inhabitable. They’d hammered boards over
all of the windows, blocking ninety-five percent of the sunlight
from getting through. What filtered in wasn’t enough to be damaging
to the vamps and it also wasn’t enough for us humans to see by. The
only real, usable light came through the small sliver of the
door.

“I don’t like this,” I
muttered. “It’s too dark.”

“Quiet,” Hector said,
invisible somewhere behind me.

“That, too: It’s too
quiet.”

Where the hell were the vampires?
There hadn’t been so much as a hiss when the shotguns went off.
They should have been swarming, descending on us like a plague of
sharp-toothed pigeons.

I felt Hector’s hand on my shoulder. I
looked at him and could just barely make out his fierce grin. It
was dark in here, so dark, like swimming in murky water, there was
no way of knowing where anything or anybody was. I heard the
occasional footstep in the warehouse as the Family fanned out in
and around the shelves, or the breaking of glass as it fell from a
shelf. Otherwise, though, the silence was frightening. I could hear
my own labored breathing, my own heartbeat. And I was dimly aware
that a vampire could hear it, too, pumping my delicious blood
through my soft veins.

We reached a wall at the end of the
warehouse.

“What do you think?” I
asked.

“
Nada
,” Hector said.

A voice, a female voice, Maria’s
voice, screamed somewhere in the darkness. Hector spun around and
without a word to me, sprinted towards the sound, leaving me alone.
I paused for a moment, unsure what to do, and then I heard the
booming roar of a shotgun.

“Dammit!” I whispered. I
ran into the dark, pulling a cheap plastic flashlight from under my
coat and flicking it on. We didn’t like to use the lights—standard
procedure: make it as hard as possible to be seen—but it didn’t
seem like there was much point in secrecy. The whole operation was
fucked and I wanted to
see
what was happening.

The light bounced off a huge,
curvaceous set of boobs. I blinked, staring at the cleavage for a
moment, and looked at the face attached to them. A beautiful woman
smiled for a moment—I had a flash-image of silky, dark hair and
shining eyes—and then her face changed. The skin went gray, the
eyes went black, and the fangs descended.

The female vampire sprang at me, her
claws slashing at my face. I batted her away with the handle of the
ax and jumped to the side.

Right into a pair of she-vamps. Both
of them were similarly pretty—in fact, I thought they could have
been sisters—at least, until they dropped the acts. Three sets of
horrific vampire mouths descended on me, snapping and
snarling.

I closed my eyes and
waited for the end. Instead, though, two of the she-vamps hoisted
me by the arms. The third leaned in close and touched her shriveled
lips in a perversion of the
shush
gesture. The ax lay uselessly at my feet. The
largest of the vampires slammed me against a shelf, rattling and
clanking bottles. Then she leaned in for the kill, fangs
dripping.

So I stabbed her in the
eye.

Like most of the Family, I carried a
small backup weapon: a short, sharpened phillips-head screwdriver.
It wasn’t very sharp, but it was enough to punch a hole through the
blackness of the vampire’s eye.

She rocked her head back, howling in
pain, clutching at the bloody hole where her left eye should have
been. Her free hand closed around the collar of my jacket,
seemingly by instinct, and ripped me out of her sisters’ grasp. My
sleeves tore and one arm was slashed. The vampire released me like
she was throwing a javelin. I hit the ground hard, slid a few feet,
and grabbed the ax.

The she-vamp charged, roaring like a
bear. I dropped into a ballplayer’s slide and kicked at her ankle.
Bone cracked and she hit the ground in a heap.

Vampires can heal from a lot. Both of
the injuries I’d given to this one would heal, given enough time,
even the eye. I didn’t give her the time.

The ax whistled as it sailed downwards
through the air. It cut through her neck and left her headless on
the dusty warehouse floor.

I didn’t savor the moment, just spun
to face her sisters. They were gone. I spat blood on the floor and
ran towards the direction of the shotgun blast, shouting, “It’s a
trap! Ambush!”

I rounded a corner to see another
vampire. He had Maria pinned against a shelf of vodka bottles. One
hand was wrapped around her mouth so she couldn’t scream, and he
was biting the side of her neck. He was so focused on his meal that
he didn’t notice me until I hit him with a powerful hip-check.
Before he could recover, I took off his head, too, and he was dead
before he hit the floor.

Maria was pale. The edges of her
bite-wound were jagged, and smeared with blood. For a moment it
reminded me of some gruesome, lipsticked mouth.

“You alright?” I
said.

“Fine.” She was clutching
at the wound, but her color seemed to be returning to normal.
“Where’s Hector?”

“He came looking for
you.”

Maria’s skin paled again.

“Go. Find him. I’ll be
right with you.”

I nodded and continued my progress
towards the shotgun. The warehouse was like a maze, full of
floor-to-ceiling shelving units and dim lighting. All around me, I
could hear the snarls of vampires and the grunts of Family members
locked in deadly combat.

Nate and three others were standing in
the square of light provided by the open front door. Five vampires
lay dead around them, most missing arms or hands, all missing
heads.

My leader’s eyes were steel when he
saw me. “Where’s Maria?”

“She’s bit,” I said. “It’s
not bad. She should be right behind me.”

He nodded. “We have to find Hector and
Corey. Dave, with me. Luisa…” He paused, one of the only times I
ever saw him hesitate before giving an order. “If we’re not back in
ten minutes, you know what to do.”

From his pocket he pulled a cigarette
lighter and tossed it to Luisa, who nodded and led the others out
into the sunlight, waving her meat cleaver like a
banner.

I looked from the retreating form of
Luisa to Nate. He bit his lower lip, hard enough to leave an
impression. For a moment he looked like he wanted to cry. Then he
shook his head, and ran into the depths of the alley. I hesitated a
moment, then followed him.

We sprinted down the alley formed by
the towering shelves, still mostly loaded with old vodka bottles.
Too-dark blood dripped from the blade of Nate’s machete, leaving me
a breadcrumb trail that I could follow, clutching my ax like a
protective talisman.

I don’t know how far we ran. It can’t
have been too far, because Luisa didn’t burn the warehouse down
around our ears, but it was far enough that the light from the
doors became a distant memory. We might as well have been
underground. Nate pulled a charm on necklace from under his shirt,
muttered a word in Creole, and the charm began glowing with a
steady orange light. All I knew was row after row of shelves of
glass and the sounds of our sneakers hitting the stone
floor.

Soon, though, I became aware of
another sound: hungry, feral snarls, like from a pack of wild
dogs.

Nate quickened his pace. I had to
strain to keep up.

At an open area, in what had to be the
heart of the warehouse, four vampires were hunched over something
on the floor. Fangs extended, they were squabbling and feasting
with a sickening gusto.

“Hey!” Nate shouted. “Get
away from him!”

As one, like a flock of birds, the
four vampires rose and spun to face us. In the darkness, it was
tough to make out the color of the liquid that stained their chins,
throats, and chests, but I had a feeling it was the scarlet of
fresh blood.