First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella (13 page)

Without realized what I was doing, I
started towards the stairs.

The vampire had come out of the attic.
That must be where he was hiding.

The others followed me,
pulling at my shoulders. I could hear their voices, imploring me to
stop, but their words were lightweight and unimportant. It was like
I was on some roller coaster track, and there was no turning
around. I
knew
that the vampire that’d killed my mother was somewhere in the
house. After a few moments the protestations stopped and my Family
settled in around me.

The attic was accessible from a
trapdoor-ladder in the ceiling of a second-story hallway. Nate, the
tallest member, pulled the string and dropped the ladder. Before I
had a chance, Nate swung around and began to climb.

He was giving me a chance to calm
down. Smart, really, and if I’d been in my right mind I’d have been
grateful: if I went up there full of as much numb rage as I was,
I’d have been killed. I’d seen what happened to people who went
into battle with blind anger. It slows your reflexes and makes you
put more power into the attacks. You get more tired faster and you
move slower. A good way to get yourself bloodied up. Or
killed.

I took a few deep breaths, and Luisa
started up the ladder. My heart still pounded in my chest, rattling
the bars of my rib cage, but I was settling down. The anger was
still there, but instead of a blazing inferno, it was a smoldering
cooking fire. No longer something wild and uncontrollable, now it
was something that could be useful.

Shifting the ax to one hand, I started
up the ladder.

The attic was cold and dark. The air
was thick with the stench of bodies living together in close
quarters—a smell with which I was very familiar. There was another
smell in the air, too, something like rot, but it was faint and
nearly unnoticeable. Like there something dead in the attic that
was doing its best not to be noticed.

Nate and Luisa moved slowly around the
room, checking behind boxes and tossing aside Rubbermaid storage
containers. There was a pull-cord overhead, connected to a bare
lightbulb. I pulled it, and the attic was bathed in harsh electric
glow.

Something shrieked from behind a
plastic Christmas tree, and a box of ornaments fell with a crash. A
dark shape leaped over the broken glass and charged towards
me.

I didn’t have time to
think, just swung my ax. The blade connected just above the right
ear with a sickening, splattering
thud
. The force of the blow lifted
the figure off of his feet and threw him into a wall.

Nate moved, fast as a
panther, towards where the monster was downed. There was a
whoosh
of air as he
brought the machete down. I heard the
thunk
as the machete dug into the
wooden floor.

I navigated the maze of household
clutter to join Nate standing over the body.

It was skinny, almost sickly, as if
it’d been on a starvation diet for months, except for the stomach
which bulged pregnantly. The clothes were rags and I assumed he’d
scavenged them from the attic. His hair was shaggy and
russet-colored, in need of trim. There were two breaks in his
pallid skin, one where I’d hit him and another where Nate’s machete
had severed his head. Beneath the skin was something like fur, the
same reddish color as the hair on his head. Nausea rolled my
stomach, but I crouched and peeled the skin back.

The Family helped me strip the skin
off the thing’s body.

This wasn’t a vampire. Whatever it
was, it had been wearing human skin like a suit. Free of the human
pelt, it looked vastly different: its limbs seemed longer and it
had short, rodent-like snout. The hands were huge, each finger
ending in a dull claw and the palms were hollowed and
shovel-like.

“Ghoul,” Nate said. “It’s
a carrion-eater.”

“It’s not him,” I
whispered.

“They usually live near
graveyards,” Nate said, “and they eat corpses. I remember my mom
mentioning that they sometimes partner with vamp nests—the vampires
take the blood and leave the rest for the ghouls.”

“It’s not him.”

Nate looked at me, as if he were
seeing me for the first time.

“There has to be a vampire
here somewhere,” I said. “This thing didn’t kill those
people.”

“No, I know, but the vamps
are probably long gone.”

“You don’t understand,” I
cried, aware that I sounded hysterical. “That scene down there?
With the D on the wall? That’s exactly what it looked like when my
mom died. And I
saw
the vampire that killed her, and he’s got to be here!” I was
shouting by the end, tears stinging my eyes.

Nate looked at Luisa, who
shrugged unapologetically in a
he’s losing
it
gesture.

“Nobody else here, boss,”
she said. “The house is empty.”

“They’ve been dead a
while,” Nate said. “The family downstairs, I mean.
This…
scavenger
probably moved in once the vamps were gone.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I
guess. I just…I don’t know, when I saw that mess downstairs I
thought…”

“You thought you had him.”
Nate gave me a bitter smile. “I understand that.” He put a hand on
my shoulder. “You’ll find him someday, Dave. I’m sure of
that.”

Luisa coughed, loudly and
purposefully. “This is all very sweet, but we are technically
trespassing, and we don’t want to be here if some cop decides to be
a hero.”

“Right,” Nate said.
“Better split. You okay, Dave?”

I gritted my teeth into a smile that
I’m sure everyone in the room saw as fake. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m
fine. You’re right—let’s get out of here.”

I spent most of the rest of the day
sitting by myself, thinking about the vampire that had killed my
mother. I hadn’t given him much thought—Mom, either—in months. I’d
been too busy trying to stay alive, to keep from freezing to death
or getting eaten by vampires to spare brainpower for revenge or
grief.

The image of his face—a face I’d seen
only for a moment—was imprinted in my mind like the tattoo on my
shoulder, but I couldn’t remember what my mom had looked like. I
couldn’t remember the sound of her voice or the way she smelled.
I’d lost the way she smiled or laughed, the way she yelled or
cried. All I could remember, when I tried to think about my mother,
was a gashed throat and a lake of warm blood.

He’d been there, I was sure of it, at
the house on 165th Street. What were the chances that there were
two different vampires so depraved that they’d decorate with their
victims’ blood? No, this was unquestionably the work of the same
one.

But if was going around, using human
arteries as paint cans, that suggested a degree of intelligence.
I’d known since the beginning that they were able to conceal their
fangs through some kind of magic camouflage, but I’d assumed that
was as human as they got. But, if this one vampire could operate
with a pattern, they were much smarter than I’d thought.

It was nearing sundown when Nate
joined me. We were in the subway station. The rest of the
Family—what was left of it, anyway—were milling around, laughing
quietly, eating cans of beans, and otherwise enjoying themselves.
The Family’s leader and I watched them, together, for a moment in
silence.

Finally, Nate said, “You
okay?”

“Yeah. Fine.”

I shrugged. I was hesitant to bring up
my theory to Nate. I was a little embarrassed to be thinking about
it—Nate was the brains of the Family, and if he hadn’t thought of
something, how could I expect to get there first? Ah, screw it: if
we were wrong, Nate needed to know more than anyone.

“Just…how smart do you
think vampires are?”

He sighed, looking up at the dark
ceiling. “I know exactly how smart they are, Dave: They’re as smart
as people. That means some of them are really dumb, some are really
smart, and everything in between. My mom taught me all of this, you
know. She always said I should know it, just in case. I always
said, ‘just in case of what?’ but she’d shake her head and go on
with the lesson.” Nate laughed, a short, guttural sound that had
nothing to do with humor.

“The thing of it is, Dave,
the vampires we’ve been fighting have been the dumb ones. I don’t
know what they’re doing here, but there are others out there, ones
that are really, really smart, and they’re the ones that we gotta
worry about.

“Did you know there are
parts of the world that are literally run by vampires? They kill
people as easily as we kill cows. I don’t know much, but I know
what my mom said: ‘Sooner or later the vampires will realize they
hate us more than they hate each other, and then the whole world
will be in real trouble.’ She said they’ve tried it
before.”

He looked at me, and there was
something dark in his eyes, something that glittered dangerously
like amusement. “It’s just a guess, but I think it’ll happen in our
lifetimes.”

I tried to laugh. “So, what, it’ll be
like World War Two with vampires instead of Nazis?” As I spoke the
image lost its humor and was replaced with a dawning sense of
horror.

“I guess.”

“Hell, man.”

“Yeah.” Nate took out his
switchblade. He popped it open and showed it to me. “It’s silver.
It hurts them, even if it can’t kill them.”

“I know.”

He closed the blade and offered the
little weapon. “Take it.”

I blinked. “What? Why?”

Nate sighed. “I don’t
know, Dave. Call it a hunch or a premonition or a prophecy. There’s
a war coming and I
know
you’re gonna be an important part of it. I guess
I just want you to have all the weapons you can get.”

With that, he stood up and slapped me
on the back. “You had a tough day, Dave. Tomorrow will be tough,
too, but you know as well as I do that the tough days are just
that: days. You survive them and you move on to the better ones.
Get some sleep, Dave, and hope there’s some good days
coming.”

I woke to screams.

Scrambling to get up, my
feet got tangled in my thin blanket, and I went down, slamming my
chin into the ground. A vibrating wave of pain slid into the depths
of my face. Slapping the ground in frustration, I pushed myself to
my feet and ran towards the screams. I got a few steps before I
tripped on something and went tumbling onto the tracks.
That
one hurt. Dazed,
light-headed, and confused, I looked to see what had tripped
me.

Luisa’s body lay on the platform, her
eyes staring sightlessly, her mouth gaping. Her hand hung off the
platform, as if reaching to offer me a hand up. The wrist was
slashed and blood trickled down her hands to drip off her
fingertips. Her throat had been opened.

Another scream echoed oddly in the
cavernous interior of the station. I pulled myself onto the
platform, grabbed my ax, and, leaving Luisa where she’d fallen, ran
towards the sound.

The center of the platform, the
Family’s common area, was a battleground. A horde of vampires was
crowding into the station. I’d never seen so many of the undead
creatures. They clogged the stairs on both sides of the platform,
hissing and slavering. I tried to count, but it was impossible:
There were too many of them, and they all moved eerily
fast.

The platform was slick with blood—red
and black mixing together into a horrible brownish
solution.

Nate stood in the middle of the fray,
his machete moving with a mind of its own. He had four vertical
cuts down the side of his neck, like he’d been slashed. Nearby I
saw a severed hand, fingernails elongated and pointed like the
claws of a cat.

Swinging my ax blindly with as much
power as I could muster, I lumberjacked to the center.

A vampire landed on my back, slashing
at my shoulders and biceps with his claws, snapping at the small of
my neck. I dropped to one knee, grabbed him by the wrists, and
twisted. The soft, fragile bones shattered audibly. The vampire
howled in pain. I flipped him off of me and brought the ax down
hard enough to split his skull.

Nate crouched over a pile of dead
vampires, like a lion defending his kill. Every time he added
another to the stack, every time he turned a vampire back, two more
closed on him. One was creeping up behind him when I buried my ax
in the gray skin of the vampire’s head.

The
thunk
drew Nate’s attention. His
eyes flitted my way for a fraction of a second, and then he was
back to business. “Dave, get out of here,” he said.

“What?” I chopped a
vampire in half. “I’m not leaving you guys!”

“‘
Guys?’” Nate laughed. “Dave, there’s nobody here but me and
you.”

For the first time I noticed that the
bodies around Nate’s feet weren’t all vampires. There was Gianni,
and Maureen, and Pablo. I felt sick.

“They must have sent a
thrall or a ghoul to follow us back from 165th Street,” Nate said.
His machete never stopped moving, even as he talked. “They figured
out where we were.”