The Chronicles of a Vampire Hunter (Book 1): Red Ashes

by Justin A. Moore

  “Wake up bud, come get some breakfast.” My uncle's voice pierced the darkness of my blessedly dreamless sleep even through the door which had been closed by someone the night before, my guess is by a polite soul who didn't want to see my bare ass every time he or she walked by.

  “Mrph.” I responded, in no way indicating the magnitude of my ravenous hunger. I turned myself out of the bed noticing that my towel had left my blanket visibly damp. My clothes from the previous night, or week, whatever, sat clean and folded on top of the dresser. I sighed and grabbed my duffel bag, picking out clean clothes for the day. Fresh blue jeans, wrinkled from spending almost a week stuffed into a bag, and an equally wrinkled black shirt that said “Keep Calm and OBEY” on the front. I did my best to smooth them with my hands before giving up and making my way down stairs and into the family room in the back of the shop. A plate of steaming scrambled eggs, toast and bacon sat on the bar with a tall glass of what looked like dark lager next to it.

  “Morning.” The gruff voice of my uncle came from to my left. I looked over and saw him walking through a door which I had previously assumed to be some kind of artwork made from flotsam and driftwood. He was wearing a stretched tank top and blue jeans. On his feet he wore fluffy pink slippers, which I reminded myself to make fun of when I knew him better. “That's yours right there. I didn't know how you took your eggs, so I scrambled them. Everyone eats scrambled eggs.” He said as he made his way to the bar carrying his own plate.

  “She still here?” I asked, gesturing to the rug across the room.

  “Nah, got her a ticket and told her to get a head start. It's been that way between us.” He responded as he crossed the room.

  I gestured to the glass next to my plate. “Breakfast of champions?”

  He grunted and sat down opposite to me. “Yeah, I didn't know if you were a coffee guy or a beer guy, so I figured Guinness and Kahlua. Can't miss that way.”

  I looked at the clock on the wall. It was about half past eight. “Not too early?”

  He chewed a piece of bacon and pulled a cigar from under the bar, lighting it as he chewed. “Right, continuing your education. You don't need to worry about that kind of thing anymore. You'll still feel liquor now, but you'll never get as drunk as you used to no matter how much you drink.”

  I looked at him skeptically and picked up my fork, shoveling eggs onto my toast. “Are you saying I can't get drunk ever again?”

  He shrugged. “Drunk, sure, but not shithoused. Drugs won't do much for you either, smoking included.” He said as he blew a gigantic smoke ring into the air. “But it's nice to keep the old habits.”

  I bit into my egg-and-toast sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. It was good. Better than anything I'd eaten in a long time, I decided. I reached over and took a drink from the dark brew next to my plate. It was just barely below room temperature and thick, but refreshing.

  “When you were a kid did you ever want to grow up to be a super hero?” he asked me around an egg he had skewered on his fork and proceeded to chew whole.

  I nodded. “Green lantern.”

  He grunted and coughed slightly before grinning at me. “Green lantern eh? Well, a lot of things are changing for you now. After your power woke up your body immediately started changing. You've already survived a beating no normal person could survive. Didn't you croak ,like, four times?”

  I shrugged and let out a ragged breath. “That's what they told me.”

  He laughed. “Won't be the last time. I keeled over when my powers woke up too. We didn't have CPR in those days though; I woke up right before they put me in the pine box. That was with family who knew what was happening, but still couldn’t be sure. Not everyone survives it.”

  I choked on my bacon for a moment and beat my fist against my chest before fixing my uncle with a suspicious eye. “No CPR? How old are you? And are you trying to say I can't die now?” I sucked in a breath as a flood of faux realization made my brain misfire.

  “Am I a highlander?”

  He laughed raucously at me as he scraped his plate clean of his breakfast. “Oh you can still die pretty easy. Enough bullets will do it. A good headshot will put you down in the ground pretty quick. You can drown, get shocked, run over; hell you can just be beat to death. It's just... slightly harder now. You're gonna heal a lot faster, and that includes everything, like your liver. A nine mil to the gut will be something you sleep off, and bleeding to death won't be a huge problem, but you'll still need to take care of yourself if you get hurt. You can still get infections, but they'll be rare, and even the normally incurable ones will disappear after a week or so. Most scars you get will fade away with time, but I'm afraid that mess on your face isn't going anywhere for a good, long while.”

  I shrugged. “They say chicks dig scars.”

  He chewed the last bit of his breakfast and pushed his plate aside, reaching under the bar for a bottle and popping it open by beating the cap against the corner of the counter. “I dunno who 'they' are, but they can't be all right. Otherwise chicks wouldn't run screaming from this.”

  He reached down and gripped the bottom of his tank top, pulling it up to his neck. Giant craters of scar tissue protruded from his stomach and chest, and in other places chunks of flesh were just plain missing. I clearly saw at least four scars that looked like old gunshot wounds, some claw marks, even several bite marks from some kind of animal, and what looked like human bites. Twisted knots of muscle coursed under thick pads of roughly healed flesh. I dropped my fork.

  “Yeah, did you actually test that statement?.”

  “What?”

  “That it sends chicks running and screaming?”

  “Uh,” he said, one eyebrow shooting up. “Naw, just an expression.”

  “’Cause that,” I said, pointing at the roadmap of pain that was his torso. “Would be a felony. Probably.”

  He laughed and lowered his shirt, slapping his leg. “Yeah, chicks don't dig all scars. I got these either within the last year or two, or before or shortly after my power came in. Yours are alright though, probably. As for your other question, I was born somewhere around Norway before the American Colonies were formed. I came over here in the late 1700's to get a fresh start.”

  I stared at him, at his eyes. He looked right back at mine, and his cold gray eyes looked at that moment very old, and I could feel the truth in his voice even as the simplicity and actuality of what he said didn't quite register in my brain.

  “So you're what, three hundred or so?” I said, failing miserably at sounding nonchalant.

  He shrugged. “Closer to four hundred I think, we didn't really keep track of birthdays back then. Vampire hunting was pretty common in our village at that time; in fact it's one of the few things I remember. Back then we used to go on hunts with the adults as soon as we could run without making too much racket.”

  “You can't remember what life was like when you were, you know, in the motherland?” I asked, trying to bring a bit of levity to the subject.

  He shook his head and plucked the cigar out of his mouth, looking at it mournfully, and totally killing my attempt at brightening the ponderous air. “It's like trying to remember when you were a toddler. You remember bits and pieces, maybe really traumatic events, but as time goes on things fade. Four hundred years is a long time.”

  The gravity of what he was saying hit home when he looked up from his cigar at me. This guy, who gave me no reason to doubt that he was my uncle, whom I met for the first time less than a week ago, who had already put me in a locked cellar with a living vampire for five days in less than an hour after we met, was now telling me that I was going to live for hundreds of years.

  “Yep,” he said as if reading my mind, “play your cards right and you too can live long enough to forget all about me, your friends, and everything you ever knew up to this moment.” He smiled and I saw the beginnings of tears form in his eyes before he blinked and they were gone.

  “Wait,” I said, “Lily said she was
a fledgling when you did the same training with her as I just did... does that mean that she's also your, err, age?”

  My uncle rubbed his head thoughtfully, “I suppose she's close to my age, maybe a bit younger. She's old though make no mistake. Most vampires don't make it to their hundredth birthday, but she's tough. She's a Malkuthian vampire, really old clan first recorded by some kabbalistic high priests back before Jesus’s time. 'Demons of the Earth' is what they called them. They're the closest thing to human that vampires got. I met her for the first time when I was hunting elk in the mountains. She came up and put the whammy on me and,” he hooked two of his fingers down and made a stabbing gesture at the counter, “Sunk them fangs in. I was as surprised as her when my blood just kept coming back. Kept me tied up for about six days, thought she hit the jackpot with a bleeder that never ran out. But On the fifth day I busted out of her compulsion and turned the tables, she just didn’t know it yet. I hadn't had my power for more than a few days before I encountered her. She was the second vamp I'd ever fought.”

  “Second? What about the first?” I asked, thoroughly engrossed.

  “Freshly turned Thanatic. Those black-blooded bastards are a lot of trouble. Crazy strong the second they wake up after being bit. Instinctual type of vampire; can't stand light, all the best parts of vampire powers excepting of course compulsion where they come in second, but all of the most severe weaknesses. A good shotgun blast to the chest is normally enough to turn 'em into charcoal. But, as with all vampires, the older they get the stronger they are. The change does horrible things to their body, like making bones stick out of the skin and making hair fall out, that kind of thing. They’re the dominant type we got here in the Southwest, but we got a lot of the other clans too. I’ll tell you more ‘bout them later.”

  “How strong are we talking here?” I asked, “I mean, you said the vampire that attacked me in the desert was one of the oldest, and I took him out easy.”

  “Whoa there hoss, think twice about what you're saying.” My uncle took a drink from his bottle, the foam running over the top as he put it down. “He was antediluvian. He predated history. When you nailed him, you killed a couple thousand vampires all at once. Eurus was the progenitor of an entire race of vampires with a name I can't even pronounce. Basically it translates as 'Living Nightmares of Nightmares.' I know it doesn't make sense, but basically his entire brood were little more than zombies with him acting as a kind of hive mind.

  He himself was one tough sonnuva bitch, but I want to give you a comparison. When I took down my very first vamp, it was by ambush with a childhood full of training in preparation for my powers to come. When they came, first thing I did was go out and find that vamp, and I fell on it with all my might and turned it into a smudge so fast he didn't even have time to burn. When your powers were triggered, your body was so full of raw power that I was on the other side of the planet and you woke my ass up. The reason you managed to beat such an ancient vampire is because you caught him by surprise in the height of your full power, and you got lucky that he panicked and didn't just rip your head off. Even with all that luck, and the full potential of your power realized in a moment—as it always is the first time—you still got put in a coma for a month and a half. Not to mention all of the other injuries.” He paused for a second before wetting his mouth with another swallow of beer before continuing.

  “The whole vampire community is buzzing with word that Eurus is dead and there's a new hunter running around. Your power was felt by everything that could feel it in the world, and I'm not just talking about vampires. All the other horribly slimy things with big teeth that hide in the dark also felt it. I heard last week werewolf sightings were at an all-time high, and that's unusual mostly because werewolves aren't seen unless they want to be.”

  I couldn't keep the smirk off my face. “Werewolves? Really? C'mon.”

  He burned the end of his barely smoldering cigar with a wooden match to get it burning better and puffed it a few times. “Oh sure, all that good stuff. Werewolves aren't like they show in the movies though. About two and a half times the height of a man and can't be killed by a goddamned thing without a hell of a lot of effort. Silver can pierce their hide, but good luck trying to saw through them ‘cause they regenerate as fast as you cut 'em. Claws a foot long, eat anything that moves. Last time I heard one was brought down it took twelve hunters using spears and a goddamned cannon with a silver-plated ball. They spread their curse when someone survives their attack, but you can imagine that's damned few. Oh, and that full moon stuff is mostly crap. They turn on a full moon, sure, but for spans of about four years. They spend most of that time avoiding humans, and retain a good deal of their intellect. They know what would happen if humans got a good picture of a real werewolf.”

  I had to scoff at that. “Nobody would ever believe it. Even then, what could the government do to kill one?”

  My uncle leaned back in his chair and blew smoke at the ceiling fan, which swirled the smoke around the room. “Well, I imagine you know what happens when you drop napalm on something. Burnt to a crisp is still dead enough to make no difference when it comes to spooks, werewolves and vampires included. Fire is the one beautiful cure-all. The attack on Hiroshima actually killed a whole clan of vampires when they dropped that bomb. Silver lining and all that, still a shame though.”

  I drained the rest of my glass and set it down on my plate. “You make it sound like we have the biggest advantages.”

  He chuckled and picked up the plates and walked towards the driftwood door. “Five days in a basement with a vampire driving you mad just by lookin' at you, and you think we have the advantage? Or maybe it’s just women who hold us menfolk at a disadvantage.”

  I shrugged and got up to follow him, opening the door back up after he passed through it. The door led into a fully furnished kitchen, the kind you see in rich people’s houses. I remembered that, for someone four centuries old, he was doubtlessly ridiculously wealthy. For a brief moment I was distracted by the thought of how much interest I could accrue on a bank account over four hundred years. “What else can you tell me about our family?” I asked soberly.

  He set the dishes down in the sink and sighed. “I think your mom was just a plain old civilian, gorgeous lady. Only met her twice. Your dad was about forty years younger than I am. I know you probably don't remember him that well, but you guys look so much alike that it's scary. Except your new face work of course.” He said, gesturing to the left side of my face. “Still hungry?”

  “Starving. Five days is a long time to go without eating. What do you know about my sister?”

  He walked to the gigantic stainless steel refrigerator and pulled out a giant handful of frozen mini pizzas. “Well, I know she was born, but I wasn't able to track her down after she was adopted. I kept an eye on you 'cause you stayed in the system. She got adopted by some nice rich folks up in Maine I think, and as far as I know hasn't had her powers come out.”

  I nodded. Somehow I knew the answer would be “No clue.” That's the answer everyone had ever given me when I'd asked about her, like she was some kind of dirty secret. Honestly, I considered it a travesty of the foster care system that split us up. I tried not to dwell on it.

  Ever.

  “Any other relatives I should know about?”

  “Oh sure,” he said, watching the hot pockets begin to steam on the rotating tray in the microwave. “You've got some cousins, my boys, up in Montana. Three of 'em, all pissed off at me of course. Kids. Oldest is Jacob, he's about a hundred now, looks about your age. Youngest just got out of high school, hasn't come into his power yet. Lives with his mom still, looking at colleges, his name is Will. My second oldest just hit his ninetieth birthday, and he's named Adam. He and Jake are keeping busy by holding a clan of vamps up there in check. You've also got another Aunt named Bethany up in England. I'm not sure what she's doing these days, but she's a damned good hunter. She's in her second century. You don't have any grandparents, sor
ry bud. Your mom was an orphan, I think, and I don't know that much about her. And my parents died, oh let's see... Second World War in Germany, fighting some abominations the Nazi's created. Everyone else is just kind of out there doing their own thing, and I haven't kept track.” He opened the microwave and plucked out the hot pizzas by the edge of the plate. He tossed me one and I caught it, immediately regretted it, and tossed it from hand to hand trying to keep my hands from bursting into flames.

  “Ah, damnit... Hey, so, why did you contact me then? What makes me so special?” I asked as I finally settled on holding my hot pocket by the wrapper. I followed him back out into the living room to the bar.

  “Well I promised your dad if anything ever happened to him that I would take care of you. Keep you hidden ‘til your powers came in, and then train you to defend yourself and get you started in the family business. Foster care was a pretty good system to keep you in. I made them move you around a couple times, sorry for that. Your sister disappeared though, but that's good. If I can't find her, neither can they ‘til her powers come in. And if it’s anything like yours, we'll feel that.”

  “You said that before,” I said, “That you felt my, you know, powers come out. How did you feel it?”

  My uncle laughed and made some weird hand gestures. “I felt a disturbance in the force... but really, it's like hearing a thunder storm from far off. You feel it in your bones. You'll know it when you feel it. A lot of vamps can feel it too, which makes sense I guess.”

  I shook my head in confusion. “How does that make sense?”

  He sighed and pulled a pair of bottles from under the bar. “Well, we share a lot of similarities with vamps as far as our powers go. Long life, improved strength and vitality—Our power is a form of inborn blood magic. We can even compel normal people, just like Lil’ compelled you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s a little hocus-pocus for me. I’m not going to be able to hypnotize people or anything. I saw a TV special about how that whole thing is basically made-up.”