First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella

by Andrew Dudek

  Everything went black, and I don’t know what happened until a strong hand landed on my shoulder. I looked up to see a woman in a police uniform. She pulled me to my feet, murmuring something encouraging, something that I don’t remember. As she led me from the room, I noticed for the first time the blood on the wall above the bed.

  Everywhere else in the apartment, the blood was splattered with no apparent regard for pattern. Here, though, the vile liquid had been used as paint, paint to create a single character, one single letter. Five feet hight and two across, above my mother’s bed was painted a capital letter D.

  Chapter 3: Nate

  The tears finally came while I rode in the back of a police car. I sobbed and wailed. Snot ran down my face. My cheeks turned white from salt. My hands were covered with blood. The two cops, tough, battle-hardened veterans with severe haircuts and precise mustaches, looked at each other. No doubt they’d seen a lot of strange things in their careers with the NYPd, but they’d probably never had a banshee of a sixteen-year-old boy covered with blood and puke in their backseat.

  A large-bellied Hispanic cop with a salsa stain on his shirt led me to a conference room inside the precinct. He looked at me sympathetically, coughed, and said, “Sorry about your mom, kid.”

  I blinked at him. Everything looked blurry—I put that down to the tears in my eyes.

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess the detective’ll wanna talk t’ya. Not that anybody thinks you did…that to your mom, but y’know, you might know who did.”

  The cop seemed nervous to be talking to me. I guess he wasn’t used to dealing with something so savage as what happened to my mom.

  “They’ll…we’ll figger out who did this, kid. We’ll find this monster. I guess I promise you that.”

  And then he was gone, like he couldn’t wait to get out of my presence, and I was alone. Other cops milled this way and that, going about their business like they couldn’t see me. Occasionally I’d catch one of them looking in my direction, but they’d hurriedly look away without eye contact. These officers, I guessed, weren’t used to this level of brutality—and they didn’t know how to deal with it. I understand their problems, I do—but I was sixteen and I’d just found my mother butchered like a hog. I needed someone to comfort me. I needed someone to tell me that it was going to be okay.

  Instead the cops averted their eyes from my face like I had some kind of mind-control powers.

  “They’re not gonna look at you,” a voice said.

  I jumped in my seat, drawing some momentary attention from a nearby desk jockey, but he immediately went back to work. I looked around and was startled to see a skinny young man sitting next to me at the conference table.

  He had dark skin; short, curly hair; and a patchy beard that made it hard to guess his age. I put him at a few years older than me, but not much—between eighteen and twenty-one. He wore a baggy sweatshirt and jeans, and he was dirty like somebody’s who’s spent a lot of nights sleeping in less than comfortable places. His cheekbones stood out, prominent as flagpoles, and he seemed to have very little body mass on that skinny frame. He was nearly emaciated, and I immediately suspected he was homeless.

  “How’d you get in here?” I asked.

  He smiled, and his teeth were surprisingly straight and clean. “Don’t worry about that. You wanna know why none of the cops are paying any attention to you?”

  Something about this kid made me uneasy, but something else was oddly comforting. For the first time in a long while, in the presence of this strange kid, I felt something resembling safety. Rationally, I figured he was a crazy street kid, and I’d have been better off ignoring him or trying to get him to leave.

  Instead I said, “Yeah. Do you know?”

  “It’s because they’re not equipped to deal with what happened to you.” He tapped his own forehead, right between the eyebrows. “Y’know. Mentally.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  The kid sighed. “We live our lives thinking there are certain rules, right? Certain laws. The earth goes around the sun, gravity keeps us on the ground, whatever. But what if there were things that didn’t obey those laws? What if there were things that are…supernatural?”

  I blinked. “What does that mean?”

  “Your mother wasn’t killed by a madman. She was killed by a vampire. So was mine. So were all of those people that have been going missing.” He held up his hand in a let me finish gesture. “Think about it: You’ve known something’s been wrong, right? You know there’s something in this neighborhood that wasn’t here before. Something that doesn’t belong here.”

  I shook my head, trying to clear my head. “Even if that’s true—and I’m not saying I believe it—what does it have to do with me?”

  “I want you to help me kill them.”

  The simple statement hung in the air like a balloon. For a moment the kid was quiet, and the only noise in the conference room was background office sounds that filtered in from the cops outside.

  “There are a lot of us, Dave,” the kid said. “A lot of kids that have lost our families to this…assault. Most of us have no place else to go, so we’re kind of living together and we’re hunting down the vampires.”

  “Vampires.” I snorted, a sound that was meant to sound incredulous and derisive. It came out scared.

  “Yeah.” He didn’t laugh. He didn’t smile. “I’ve seen them. I’ve killed some of them.”

  He looked at his wristwatch. There was a jagged, semiprecious-looking stone on its face instead of a clock. “I’m almost out of time. This is your one and only chance. You want to help clean up this neighborhood, you come with me. If not, go live with your aunt or uncle or whatever and hope for the best.”

  “I don’t have any aunts or uncles,” I said quietly. “I don’t have any family.”

  He nodded sympathetically. “I know what that’s like. I didn’t have any family, either. Now, though…now I have a family. We can be your family, too. Or you can go into the system and hope somebody will give you a good home.

  “Most likely that ain’t happening. People don’t usually adopt kids that are, what, fifteen?”

  “Sixteen,” I said.

  “Sixteen, then. You’re in for a rough few years and then you’ll be out on the street.” He nodded at a cop passing by in the hallway. “They’ll do their best, but they won’t be able to stop the vampires. If you come with me…hell, I don’t know. Maybe you’ll be able to help.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Look,” he said. “Either way you’re probably looking at a short, unhappy life. This way, at least you might be able to do some good. Besides, you might even be able to dish out a little payback to the monster that killed your mother.”

  Something stirred deep in my guts, an emotion I’d never before felt: rage. I wanted revenge. I looked around the precinct. The cops all of a sudden looked comical—like bumbling oafs from a fifties TV show. They weren’t prepared for the brutality of my mother’s killer. Neither was I, but I thought that this dirty, skinny, homeless kid was ready.

  He smiled. I guess my decision showed on my face. “Excellent, Dave. Welcome to the Family.”

  “How am I gonna get out of here?” I asked. “I don’t think they’ll just let me leave.”

  “Let me worry about that. Stick close and it’ll be fine.”

  He stood up and headed for the door. I got up and followed, looking around cautiously. None of the cops seemed to care. None of them seemed to notice.

  “Hey,” I whispered. “What’s your name?”

  He spun around and slapped himself in the forehead. “Sorry, I completely forgot. My name’s Nathan Labat. Call me Nate.”

  Chapter 4: Reason to Believe

  Nate made sure I never got more than a step behind him. I trailed in his wake, like a satellite orbiting a heavenly body. This close, I could smell him—a powerful mixture of sweat, dirt, and something that smelle
d coppery. I was scared that one of the officers would look up from his paperwork and see me making an escape, but it never happened. Nate showed no sign of nerves, though his hand never left the stone on his watchband. The hairs on his arms stood erected, as if some commander was compelling them to attention.

  We went out of the towering glass doors and stood in the early evening, breathing cool air, and stood on the sidewalk. A couple of uniformed officers were bringing in a handcuffed man, who slurred and stumbled.

  “Come on,” Nate said, and he led me down the walk.

  A few yards from the station, we rounded a corner into an alley. A moment later, the stone on Nate’s watch let out a spark of white light and a crack like a miniature gunshot. He frowned at the thing and shook his arm. When nothing happened he cursed and said, “Let’s go.”

  We walked in silence for a moment. “Stick close,” he said. “This isn’t a good place to be alone at night.”

  No kidding, I thought. I stayed as close to Nate as I could without stepping on his heels.

  “So, what is that thing on your watch?” I asked.

  “Magic crystal,” he said. “My mom gave it to me before she died. It makes you…well, not invisible, exactly, but harder to notice. People’s eyes pass right over you. The problem is, it only lasts a little while, and I used it a lot today. The power’s completely drained. It’ll take a couple days to recharge.”

  I shook my head. Magic crystal. The idea was unbelievable—everyone knew there was no such thing as magic. For that matter there was no such thing as vampires. It suddenly occurred to me that I had just escaped custody with a crazy person. I was a fugitive. By now the cops would have noticed I was gone and probably called in the marshals. They’d track me down—because this guy Nate surely didn’t know how to evade a real manhunt—and toss me in prison.

  “Dave,” Nate said, “I need you to focus right now, okay? I’m not crazy, whatever you may be thinking. You made your choice and you’re in the brave new world. You gotta stick with me.”

  I hesitated, but he was right. I had made my choice. The police station was a few hundred feet behind me, but it might as well have been on the other side of the globe. I was locked in and I might as well go with it. Besides, if Nate was crazy and I believed him—and god help me, but I did—then it stood to reason that I was crazy, too. And if I was out of my mind, any decision that I made would be correct, right?

  Nate grinned. Without another word, he disappeared down a smaller alley that jutted off the main one. I followed, this time without so much as a moment’s pause.

  “So your mom was, like a witch?” I winced, realizing I might have said something offensive.

  Nate didn’t seem bothered. “Something like that. She is—was—a hedge magician. She wasn’t officially a part of the Magic Council, but she knew as much about sorcery as any of those stuffed-robe wizards in Europe. She was trained in Louisiana.” He said this last bit as if it should mean something to me.

  Louisiana; magic; his name, Labat. The combination of those three things triggered some old bit of information I’d read somewhere.

  “Was she…was she a voodoo lady?”

  Now, Nate sounded upset—not offended, but impatient, like it was a question he was tired of answering. “She didn’t like that term. She didn’t belong to any one school of magic, but yeah, she used some voodoo in her work.”

  “Oh,” I said. Nothing that had happened since I got home to the bloody apartment had made senses, and this was no exception. Magic Councils? Schools of magic? What the hell was happening?

  We were just a few blocks from the apartment where my mother had died. I didn’t recognize the alley, but I felt like I was seeing it more clearly than anyplace I’d ever been. There were overflowing Dumpsters, bits of broken glass and crumpled cans, spray-painted walls, and old rusted-shut doors. It was dark, and the few light fixtures were either burned out, empty, or broken. A few yards ahead I could see that the alley opened into a wider space, like a stream entering a pond. Aluminum garbage cans lined the walls, and the emergency doors of the various businesses were shut. Most had padlocks and chains around them—new additions, I was sure. With darkness falling on the neighborhood, everyone had gotten a lot more paranoid.

  Of course, if Nate was right, then maybe everyone had a reason to be paranoid. The part of my brain that still functioned normally was going on autopilot, idly wondering if you could still consider something paranoia if it was justified when I walked into Nate’s back.

  He didn’t move. Skinny as he was, Nate was a lot more solid than he looked. I was a couple inches taller, and I outweighed him by thirty pounds, so I should have knocked him right over. Instead, Nate stopped me as easily as if I’d walked into a brick wall.

  I wondered what could inspire such rigidity.

  I looked around Nate.

  Two dark figures stood on the other side of the urban hollow. They looked like big, powerful men. Slowly, they stalked to either side, like lions in a nature documentary. I’d been robbed before—it happens sometimes when you live in a city. A year before, my first thought would have been muggers. Something about these two men, though, made me think thoughts that were much darker.

  “Vampires,” Nate whispered.

  The dark shapes stepped out of the shadows, into the relative illumination of a single electric lamp over the back door of a boarded-up liquor shop. Right then I knew that Nate wasn’t crazy—or if he was, I was at least as insane.

  The two men were obviously built on the frames of human males, but they were also obviously not human. Their skin was unnaturally pale, almost gray, like corpses. One opened his mouth, and his jaw extended past the natural limits of a human skull, unhinged like a snake’s mouth. His teeth reminded me even more of a snake: they were long, curved, and wickedly sharp. Worst of all, though, were the eyes. They shone in the darkness, again calling to mind a big cat, but they were totally, completely black, like pools of ink.

  The second vampire—because there was really nothing else to call them—hissed, a horrible sound that had no business emerging from a human throat. This was a sound that belonged to a biblical serpent, something from humanity’s dark and recessed memories. This was the sound of a monster.

  I expected them to, I don’t know, to mock us. Maybe I’d watched too many cheesy movies or something, but I really thought they’d toy with us, give us a chance to run. But a lion doesn’t mock an antelope, a wolf doesn’t tease a buffalo, and a hawk doesn’t give a mouse a chance to escape.

  When they moved, they attacked in earnest. They broke into a sprint, closing the distance with all the feral intensity of an apex predator.

  I shut my eyes and waited to die.

  A moment later, when I wasn’t dead, I opened my eyes.

  One of the vampires was on the ground, clutching at his throat. Although the liquid that leaked from a hole under his clawed hands was too dark, almost black, there was no question that it was blood.

  Nate was also down, grappling with the other vampire. In his hand was something that glittered, even in the weak light. I was never much for the gangster culture—my mom would have killed me if she knew I was carrying a weapon—but I’d seen my share of knives. The weapon in Nate’s hand was a switchblade, about three inches long with an ornately carved handle. The blade was a strange color, though: it looked like…silver.

  The vampire slammed Nate’s head into the pavement, stunning him, if only for a moment. It leaned low over the street kid, hissing. Thick droplets of clear liquid fell from the fangs and landed on Nate’s forehead. Nate closed his eyes against the saliva. Slowly, much more slowly than was necessary, the vampire lowered its jaws towards Nate’s throat.

  I moved on instinct: I grabbed an empty tequila bottle and threw it. It didn’t break when it bounced off the vampire’s shoulder, but it surprised him, just enough. For a fraction of a second, it loosened its grip.

  The silvery flash of the blade was almost too fast to see. A line of that
same black, blood-like fluid appeared under the vampire’s face, and it fell to its side. It looked up and whispered, in a dry, croaking voice, “How?”

  “Silver,” Nate said. “I know how much you undead bastards love the stuff.”

  The first vampire was climbing to its feet. It looked shaky and weak, but it was slowly steadying itself and recovering. Nate tackled it. They went to the filthy ground in a heap. From somewhere in his backpack, Nate pulled a brick. He slammed it into the vampire’s head. Again and again he brought down onto the skull until there was nothing left but black blood, gray brain matter, and powdered bone.

  Nate returned to the other vampire, which was still laying stunned, and slowly, almost clinically, crushed its skull, too.

  I watched in horror as the two bodies changed. They decomposed at a horrifically advanced speed. In a few moments there was nothing left but something that smelled horribly like rotting meat and a few strips of clothing over a frame of bones that looked disturbingly human.

  “Come on,” Nate said. “We gotta get outta here.”

  When we reached the end of the alley and headed down the block, he looked at me over his shoulder. “Well,” he said, and then he smiled. “Do you believe me now?”

  Chapter 5: The Way Station

  “Those…those were vampires.”

  Nate looked at me, an odd expression on his face. “Sure were.”

  We’d gotten a few blocks from the scene of the battle and the air was starting to come to life with the tortured wail of distant sirens.

  “Won’t the cops track us down?” I said. “I mean, we left two bodies back there. God, that’s a murder scene.”

  Nate shook his head and looked like he’d tasted something bitter. “Nah. Vampire remains are different from humans, so the cops won’t believe what they’re seeing. They’ll write it off as a prank. I know from experience.”

  He ducked into another alley. I followed, hesitantly, but this one proved to be free of vampires.