by Andrew Dudek
A huge black shape flew from the murky shadows under the stairs. The vampire’s claws were outstretched and his mouth hung open in a gaping parody of a laugh. He moved so fast that I didn’t have time to get my ax in front of me. He hit like a linebacker and knocked me on my back. His claws raked into my forearms. He laughed as he savaged me like a dog with a chew-toy.
The ax fell from my grip. I couldn’t get my hand around it.
The vampire howled in triumph. His eyes were wide and black, his jaws slavering. Thick, clear liquid dripped from his fangs. A drop landed on my neck, and the skin tingled for a moment, then went numb.
An idle thought, something from an old nature documentary, drifted weirdly in my mind: Vampire bats have a numbing agent in their saliva.
I didn’t have time to worry about though, before a small bucket’s worth of cool, black blood dropped on my face. I coughed, choking, and looked up.
Nate stood with the machete in his hand. The vampire that had been about to turn me into breakfast lay on his side, his head resting on its right ear a few feet away.
The sounds of the battle had faded. Family members were emerging into the light from the shattered door. Some bore fresh scratches or cuts, but everyone looked more or less whole. Everyone held a bloody weapon.
Nate breathed heavily for a moment. His eyes were every bit as vicious as a vampire’s. He closed them. When he looked at me again, his breath had slowed down and he looked like himself. He offered me a hand.
“You saved me,” I said as he pulled me to my feet.
He smiled, an actual broad grin. “We’re a Family, kid. It’s what we do.”
The next few months were a loop of raids, flanked by long stretches of boredom. Vampires are sneaky, when they choose to be, hard to find. Never again did we do two raids in as many days. Rarely did we do more than two or three a month.
Still, I learned an awful lot of things that never would have occurred to me in a “normal” life. Like the ways to kill a vampire: Decapitation is the easiest and most efficient, but fire works well, and if you can catch one on the ground a stake through the heart is effective. (It’s hard to get the stake past the ribs, so I don’t recommend this approach.) I learned how to move silently on the paved jungle of the Bronx, and how to cover my scent with stale garbage and musty clothes. In a few weeks I knew how to time sunrise to the second and I could spot a vampire from three blocks away. I don’t mean to polish my own medals, but I was starting to think Nate was right—maybe I was born for this.
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,” Hect
or 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.
One of the vamps held a long, narrow stick in one hand. He lifted it, so it was pointing at us, and Nate shouted something, grabbed me by the collar, and dragged me to the floor.
The roar of the shotgun rattled the shelves. At this range it seemed even louder than before, but that may have been because it was aimed at me. For an instant, in the light of the flash, I could make out the shape on the floor, the one the vampires had been feeding on: a pile of cloth, skin, and bone.
Hector’s chest cavity was gone, blown away by the shotgun. His neck looked like a used corncob—all dents and teethmarks. The cuts along the delicate veins in his wrists were more precise, almost dainty, but they were clearly severed. Blood poured from all of those wounds, slowly coating the floor with a macabre film.
Nate’s switchblade appeared in one hand, silver knife open. He flung it like a pitche
r. The vampire howled in pain and dropped the shotgun before falling to the floor, clutching at the bleeding wound in his neck.
Like a panther, Nate was already moving. He took off the head of the second vampire with one slice of his machete, then bent and recovered his switchblade. A third vamp rolled forward, a strangely long tongue lolling stupidly over his animal teeth. Nate jabbed with the knife—a feint! When the vampire danced to avoid the blow, he went right through the path of the machete.
Meanwhile, I finished off the vampire on the ground, with a blow to the crown on his skull.
The last vampire pounced on Nate’s shoulders and began ripping into the back of his neck with fangs like a mouthful of daggers.
I grabbed him by the hair and ripped him away from Nate, wincing as I saw bits of dark skin trailing from the fangs. I held him at arm’s length. He slashed at me with his claws, but it was no good: My arms were longer. I threw him to the ground, and, before he could recover, I brought the ax down like an executioner. The blade bounced against the floor, sending a small shower of shrapnel into the air. The vampire’s head rolled away.
The whole thing had taken less than a minute. Four vampires lay dead, rapidly decomposing, and Nate wiped blood from his switchblade and put it away.
It didn’t take a medical degree to determine that Hector was dead. His skin was cool and his eyes were blank and expressionless. I was betting that the shotgun had killed him. Small mercy, that: at least he never felt the ripping of the fangs.
Nate and I each grabbed a shoulder and began to drag him. We’d gotten maybe ten feet when Nate stopped and let his end go. I froze. It took a moment, but then I realized what had happened: The air was filling with a hissing sound, as if someone had opened a basket of cobras. A dozen pairs of eyes, all around us, began to glow in the dark.
