First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella (9 page)

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.”

“What happened after
that?” I asked. “I mean after your mom died. That was, what, five,
six years ago? You were on your own that whole time?”

“I stayed with Squirrel
until I was eighteen, then I got a place of my own. I was working
at a bookstore in Brooklyn when I heard about the disappearances.
It sounded like vampires to me. I found Maria just after her family
got killed and you know the rest.”

I guessed I could
understand Nate’s troubles. Going to see a friend of his mother’s
must have been difficult, like going back to a time he thought was
done. He’d built a life for himself, and asking for help from
someone who might remember him as a child made him
feel
like a child. I
couldn’t imagine going back to my old life, even if it was
possible. That’s what this must have felt like to Nate: going back
to a world he thought he was truly past.

For my part, though, I was excited. I
had no idea what Felix Guinness, this sorcerer, could teach us, but
the possibilities seemed endless. Nate’s little gadgets were
impressive, but Guinness was apparently in a totally different
league. Who knew what a mightily powerful and fully trained
magician could do?

Up till now, the Family
had been, at best, a local sheriff’s office. Really, though, we
were a neighborhood watch. We were reactive, unable to do anything
until we
knew
where a vampire nest was. Now, though, with Guinness’s help,
I could see us going on the offensive. The war suddenly seemed to
be on more even footing. We were about to become the goddamned Navy
SEALs.

At the same time, I felt a hell of a
lot smaller. When I’d first found out about vampires, it was as if
the walls of the world had been blown out and reconstructed miles
away. The rules were different—the world was bigger. Now it had
happened again. The boundaries had been knocked down, but this time
they hadn’t been rebuilt. There were no boundaries. There was no
way of knowing just how different the rules of the game were.
Someone had ripped up the instructions and told the world to go
nuts.

I felt like I had found my destiny. It
sounds cheesy, I know, but it’s the truth. For the first time in my
life, I felt like I fit into the world. So far I’d been part of the
Family’s quest for vengeance, but there was more than that. This
was about protecting people. It was about making sure that no other
kid ever lost his family in the way that I had.

It was exciting, but it was scary,
too.

I had a purpose in life.

That’s big for a seventeen-year-old. A
lot of people—most people, maybe—never find their purpose. If they
do, it’s usually not till they’re much older. They waste their teen
years, their college years, rolling from degree program to degree
program, job to job, relationship to relationship. And here I
was—even if I hadn’t dropped out, I wouldn’t yet have finished high
school.

And I already had my
purpose.

Nate put a hand on my shoulder. A man
was crossing the street, heading towards the building identified by
the business card. Despite the warmth, he wore a long black coat
with the collar pulled up high and tight. If I hadn’t known that
vampires didn’t look the way they do in the movies, that’s what I
would have thought he looked like—an extra from a vampire movie. I
smirked at that, too.

But when Nate spoke, his voice was
serious. “Come on,” he said. “I think that’s him.”

Chapter 12: Pints with Guinness Make Us Strong

We followed the man into the building,
up a flight of stairs, and down a long hallway. He never looked
back, or gave so much as a hint that he knew were trailing him like
hunting dogs. Guinness’s hands were in the pockets of his big
overcoat and he walked with a jaunty, sort-of-hitched step, like he
had not a care in the world and he couldn’t wait to get where he
was going. There was nothing that suggested he had any idea we were
onto him, that he was watching us watch him.

But when we followed him around a
corner, he was gone. We were only a couple of seconds behind him,
ten feet at most. There wasn’t time enough for him to open an
apartment door and get inside. We would have heard a door close. He
should have been in sight—but there was nothing and no one. The
hall was empty.

A hand fell on my shoulder and soft,
deep voice, like something from the bottom of the sea, said, “Can I
help you boys with something? I should warn you—if you’re looking
for somebody to rob, gosh, did you pick the wrong man.