by Andrew Dudek
First Kill
By Andrew Dudek
Copyright 2015 Andrew Dudek
Smashwords Edition
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This one’s for you, Mom. Yeah, you too, Dad
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Vanished Ones
Chapter 2: Darkness in Daylight
Chapter 3: Nate
Chapter 4: Reason to Believe
Chapter 5: The Way Station
Chapter 6: Boot Camp
Chapter 7: The Nest
Chapter 8: Safe at Home
Chapter 9: Victories and Losses
Chapter 10: Aftermath
Chapter 11: Back to the Past
Chapter 12: Pints with Guinness Make us Strong
Chapter 13: The Siege of Legendary Bobby’s
Chapter 14: The End
Chapter 15: The Beginning
Author’s Note
Preview: Thicker Than Blood
About The Author
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 o
ut 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.
I hadn’t told my mom where I was that day—or what I was doing. I was beginning to worry about her: she was getting increasingly upset about the Vanished Ones. She’d lost a lot of weight and was getting unhealthily skinny. Gray was encroaching on her head, and no amount of boxed hair dye could halt its advance. There were heavy bags under her eyes, and the wrinkles on her face made her look ten, fifteen, years older. Yeah, I was worried about her, and I didn’t want her burning energy worrying about me and how I was holding up. Whenever possible I tried to help her forget about the wave of terror that had descended on the neighborhood. So I told her that I was playing basketball.
“Okay, honey,” she said. “Just make sure you’re home by dark. You know why.”
As if there was any question about that.
After the ceremony, I went straight home. A few of Franklin’s homies invited me to pour out a forty in his memory, but I decided not to be a part of that. We weren’t that close.
Besides, there was something bothering me, digging in my guys like a worm or a mole, that told me I needed to get home. I had a bad feeling.
As I entered the lobby of our building, a strange man was coming out. It wasn’t like I knew every tenant in my building by name—it wasn’t that kind of building, even before the Vanishing—but I’d recognize most of them by sight. I knew, somehow, that this man didn’t live here. He didn’t belong there. He was tall and lean. His dark hair was swept back from his forehead and he had a prominent widow’s peak. There was a roundness to his cheeks that seemed to contradict the slimness of his figure—he looked like a man who’s just eaten well. His clothes were all black—suit, tie, and spit-shined shoes—except for the starched white of his shirt. There was a scarlet spot on that white collar. At the time, I took it to be tomato sauce, maybe lipstick.
But it wasn’t either of those things.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the first time I laid eyes on a vampire.
We stared at each other. For a strange moment, I thought I should have recognized him. He certainly seemed to know me. He actually paused in his tracks for a moment and gazed warily at me from over his thin neck. He nodded once, finally, a gesture of acknowledgement, and stepped past me out the door. The sun was just beginning to set, and heavy shadows blanketed the sidewalk. As he disappeared into the darkness, I saw a strange, satisfied smile drift across those predatory features.
I rode the elevator alone, in silence.
The apartment door was unlocked—really unusual, even before the last year. I frowned. A breath hitched in my throat. For a long time I stood in the hallway on the third floor of a shabby apartment building outside of a half-open door. Something was wrong.
I wanted to leave. But the apartment was the only place in the whole damn city that had ever felt anything like safe. It was the only place where I’d ever felt tucked securely away from the dangers that prowled the streets after dark. I knew that if I stepped outside, I’d find myself ripped to shreds by whatever it was that had taken the Vanished Ones. There was no place else to go.
You’re being silly, I told myself. There’s nothing to worry about. Mom just forgot to lock the door behind her—that’s all.
I convinced myself that I was right, that there was nothing wrong, and I opened the door.
The previous fall, my biology class had gotten a shipment of frogs to dissect. This was an unusual luxury, and the teacher had wanted us to be sure to appreciate it. (Mr. Aldison was one of the earliest Vanished Ones—I remember hearing his wife wail as she spoke with the principal.) Mostly what had stuck with me was the smell. I couldn’t tell you which organ was a frog’s heart and which was its liver—or if they even had hearts or livers—but I knew I’d never forget the smell. Strongest, of course, was the bitter, chemical scent of formaldehyde. But underneath that there was something else. Something warm and metallic and somehow alive, even though the frogs were long dead: Blood.
When I opened my apartment door, I was hit with the smell of blood. My brain went into sensory overdrive, and I couldn’t see anything but red. I couldn’t hear anything but the pumping of a heart, and I couldn’t smell anything but blood.
After a moment I regained control and, my palms sweating and my throat dry, I stepped into the apartment that I shared with my mother.
The walls, the furniture, the floors—everything—was splattered with something that looked like chunky red paint. It was still wet, still thick and slowly dribbling down the s
ides of the walls. The TV screen was completely coated. So was the stupid old rug that Mom had bought three years ago at a flea market and refused to admit smelled like cat piss. The coffee table was shattered, as if—as if someone had been thrown through it. The couch was lying on its back.
The old wood floor of the hallway to the back of the apartment, to my mother’s bedroom, was smeared with blood.
Slowly, because I knew what I’d find, I followed the trail.
The blood was even worse in the bedroom. The floor was covered with the stuff, a pool that seemed to be an inch deep. The bedspread was saturated with the red liquid and the mirror over my mom’s dresser was flecked with so much gore that it looked like modern art.
My mother sat on the floor in the pool, her back against the bed-frame. Her blue eyes were open and they stared at the wall. Her mouth hung open. Her dark hair was soaked with blood and sweat.
And her throat was gone. Jagged bits of flesh had been removed, unevenly, and I knew that it had been done by something with sharp teeth. Her wrists had been opened, too, and the arteries high on her legs. I stared at her for a moment, my brain refusing to process what I was seeing: My mother was dead. No matter where I looked in the room, my eyes were drawn with directional magnetism to her face, her perfectly unmarked face and I wondered, stupidly, Why would someone do this?
I vomited the vodka I’d drank at the honoring ceremony. It burned coming up as much as it had going down. I blinked back tears and realized I could no longer stand. I fell into the pool, the puddle of blood and sick. I dry-heaved, because my gorge was empty, and buried my face in my hands, uncaring that I was covered with blood and puke.
The curtains were open and the last of the day’s sunlight shone through, illuminating my mother with an angel’s halo.
I threw back my head, and I howled like an animal.
