First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella (15 page)

On the long walk from the
shop, I’d thought about what Nate would have done.
First of all, he wouldn’t have deserted his
family.
I pushed that thought away and
decided that, if Nate had survived in my place, he wouldn’t have
rested until he’d killed all of the vampires in that house, or he
died trying.

I owed it to him to do no
less.

The sun began to break through the
clouds, sending beams of light down like messages from the heavens.
I swallowed hard. My heart pounded so I could feel it in my
temples. The was the day I died.

I’ll see you soon,
Nate,
I thought.
I’ll see you soon, Mom.

I put one foot on the bottom bar of
the black wrought-iron gate, and started to climb.

“Dave. You’re David
Carver, ain’t ya?”

The voice was distantly familiar, like
I’d know it a long time ago. The man’s accent was southern, but
faded and not so deep that it was incomprehensible—one of the
Carolinas, I figured. Maybe Virginia. It was gruff, like its owner
had spent lots of nights with moonshine. The man was unfamiliar to
me, but I could tell that I wasn’t unfamiliar to him.

I hopped off the fence and turned,
gripping the ax.

The man was dressed all in black: the
long coat that he wore over a work shirt and jeans. His skin was
tanned and leathery, the skin of a man who’s spent a lot of his
life outdoors, under a strong sun. His head was shaven, but his
beard was thick and wooly, curling down his cheeks, over his jaw,
and around his mouth. He was one of the biggest people I’d ever
seen: at least six-six and he must have weighed three hundred
pounds. Judging by the way the coat bulged in the arms, shoulders,
and chest, I guessed most of that weight was muscle. There were
lines in his face that made me think he looked older than he was,
but he was probably in his fifties. The expression on his face
confirmed that he knew me.

But that wasn’t the weirdest
part.

The strangest thing, even by my
increasingly bizarre standards, was the fact that, on his left hip,
the man wore a freaking sword.

I was far from an expert,
but it looked like a samurai sword. Somewhere, in the recesses of
my brain, I knew it was called a
katana
. The hilt was wrapped in
black wire and, at the square piece of metal that would have
protected the hand, were four red jewels of some kind. The sword
gave off…an energy. Not something you could see, or hear, or smell,
it was something you
felt
, like when you stood too close
to the speakers at a concert. This didn’t vibrate and sway like
music, though—this was constant and steady. The sword at this man’s
side was powerful.

“Well, hell, boy,” he
said. “Don’t you look just like your daddy?”

I blinked. “You know my
father?”

“
Knew
him, should say. We went back a
long ways.”

The man frowned. Then, like dawn
breaking in the sky around us, realization crossed his face.
“Right. I forgot. Your mama didn’t want you to know who your daddy
was. Or what happened to him, for that matter. ‘Fraid you’d run off
and get yourself some revenge and get yourself killed in the
process.” He smiled then, a knowing smile. “That ain't what you’re
up to, is it? Tryin’ to get yourself killed?”

I shook my head and ran my hand
through my hair. “Who are you?”

He slapped himself on his bald head,
like he’d forgotten to pick up milk. “Damn! That was rude o’ me, I
s’pose. M’name’s Bill Foster, Dave. I was your daddy’s best
friend.”

“Well, that’s nice,” I
said warily, “but I never knew my father, so I’m not real
interested in his friends. He left me when I was a
toddler.”

Bill Foster tugged at the end of his
beard. He seemed to be puzzling something behind his dark,
intelligent eyes. “Kid,” he said slowly, like he wasn’t sure he’d
chosen a safe path through the woods, “your daddy didn’t run off on
you. He died. He got killed.”

I felt myself slump against the fence.
“What?”

“Yep. By a
vampire.”

I sat down on the sidewalk. Hard. My
ears were ringing and I felt light-headed, but I could still hear
Bill Foster’s voice. I couldn’t hear anything else.

“I been lookin’ for you
since I heard what happened to your mama, but you’re a tough kid to
find. I just came from a pizza joint in Harlem. Guy that owned it
told me an interestin’ story ‘bout a guy that was in there a few
months back. Also mentioned a coupl’a kids that were there.
Described ‘em, too, a black kid and white kid. I said to myself,
‘That white kid sounds like he could be Jesse Carver’s son.’ The
pizza man had heard these kids talkin’, and it sounded like they
lived in an abandoned subway station in the Bronx. Well, there’s
only so many of those lyin’ around, and I got a city municipal
worker who owed me a favor to draw me a map. The last few days I
been walkin’ around and, just last night, I happened to walk into
one of ‘em, and you know what I found?”

I nodded. I knew exactly what he
found.

“There was a fuckin’
massacre down there. ‘Bout a half-dozen dead kids, maybe thirty
dead vamps. I looked around, but I didn’t see nobody that looked
like my buddy Jesse, so I thought, ‘What would Jesse do in this
situation?’ Why, he’d go and look for revenge. From there it wasn’t
hard to figure out where the nearest vamp nest would be—look at
this place, it was practically built for vamps to hide in—and here
I am.”

His smile faded, along with his ironic
detachment. “I know what you’re feelin’, kid. I been there. And I
know what you’re thinkin’ of doin’. You think it’s your only
option, but it ain’t.”

“What else do I have?” My
voice sounded thin and shaky, even to my own ears, compared with
the resonant boom of Bill Foster.

“I’m a member of group
that kill things like them monsters in there.” He jerked a thumb at
the old house. “So was your ol’ man. I think you got what it takes
to join us.”

I blinked. “Really?”

He nodded. “You wanna die, and I get
that, but that…that’s the coward’s way out. You know shit, Dave,
shit that would make the hardest bootleggers wet their bunks. When
you know stuff like that, you basically got three
choices.”

He counted off on his fingers. “One:
You can forget ‘bout it, put it out o’ your mind and go ‘bout your
business. I reckon that ain’t an option for you. Two: You can spend
the rest o’ your life cryin’ yourself to sleep at a night like a
baby scared of the shadows. And three: You can get off your ass and
do somethin’ ‘bout it. You can help us make sure that nothin’ like
what happened to you happens to other kids.”

I felt myself stand up. I couldn’t
remember making a conscious decision, but I found myself looking at
Bill Foster in the eyes.

“What would I have to
do?”

“Right now? Just come with
me. We’ll get some backup out here and sort out the monsters in
this old house. Then we’ll give your friends a proper sendoff and
get you some proper trainin’.” He smiled. “What do you think,
kid?”

I answered before I thought too hard,
before I talked myself out of it. “Yeah. Okay.”

Bill Foster grinned and put a hand on
my shoulder, a comforting gesture, a fatherly one. “Well, then,
Dave Carver: Welcome to the Order of the Round Table.”

###

Author’s Note

Thank you so much for
downloading
First Kill
! I hope you enjoyed Dave’s first adventure as much as I
enjoyed writing it. As you may be able to tell, Dave Carver’s story
isn’t done yet—it’s just beginning. I sincerely hope you’ll join
him.

Keep reading to get a
sneak peek at the first full-length novel in the story of Dave
Carver:
Thicker Than
Blood
. It’s set ten years after the events
of
First Kill
, so
the man you’ll soon meet is quite different than the one you just
saw. Still, I hope you’ll enjoy it.

If you enjoyed this novella, please
consider rating it and reviewing it at your favorite ebook
retailer. Mention it on your blog, share it on your social media
pages. I’m a new, young writer, and I need all the help I can get.
I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks again!

Andrew Dudek

Preview:
Thicker Than
Blood

Ian Twine’s wife had been dead for
three days by the time he was found by the men with the
swords.

The rainforest of Guyana pressed in
all around him, giant trees that dwarfed the California redwoods,
where Ian had spent much of his formative years. They were
unpleasantly tall, these trees, like something out of Earth’s
ancient past, something from a pre-human era. The jungle canopy was
high overhead, blocking out the sky, so Ian had no idea what time
of day it was. Monkeys chattered and birds screeched. Somewhere in
the distance a jaguar roared. The humidity was heavy, so oppressive
that Ian felt like he’d be able to make more progress swimming than
walking--he certainly wasn’t moving fast enough for the two men
with the swords.

“Come on,” the older of
the two, a tanned, giant man with a Virginian accent, a shaved
head, and a wooly beard. “We gotta keep movin’. This place ain’t
safe.”

Ian snorted, despite the horror of the
situation. The man, Bill, was right: This place sure as hell wasn’t
safe.

Three months before, Ian had heard
rumors of a small village living in the Guyanese jungles, a tribe
that’d had no contact with the world outside. A tribe that had
never encountered modernity. They lived in huts, supposedly, and
hunted with spears and bows and arrows. When he’d told Michelle of
this rumor over dinner one night, her eyes had lit up. This was
just what they needed, she said, to get their ratings back to their
nineteen-nineties glory. Ian had been less sure. Their ratings
weren’t what they used to be, sure--the market for televised
naturalists seemed to have evaporated somewhat since that
Australian guy had died--but they got steady enough ad rates that,
along with the occasional grant, they could keep heading out into
deep wilderness to film the animals and plant life they found
there. Still, he’d had to admit: the title had come to him with
perfect clarity, the way all of the best ideas of his career ever
had: Ian Twine’s Lost Tribe. Maybe it wouldn’t bring him the best
numbers of his life, but he could already picture the promos: Ian
standing at the top of Kaieteur, a waterfall more than four times
as tall as Niagara in the midsts of a thriving rainforest. And he’d
never actually been to Guyana, despite the fact that it was one of
the most impressive examples of biodiversity left in the
world...

Yeah,
he’d thought.
This could
work.

Ian and Michelle had hiked through the
jungle for three days without finding so much as a hint of this
lost village but getting some great footage: a jaguar devouring a
capybara, swarms of piranhas, a bush dog and her pups. All good
stuff, but not what Ian was here to find. He was beginning to get
discouraged.

That was when they found the backpack.
It was small--child-sized, in fact--and pink. It had stickers of
ponies all over it. Ian had thought it looked like something that
his youngest daughter, Ellie, would have loved. Something about it,
though, out here in the dark, muggy jungle, made him nervous. It
just seemed wrong somehow. When Ian had mentioned this, Michelle
had laughed, called him a moron (good-naturedly, as she often did),
and told him they needed to get a move on if they wanted to find a
decent campsite by nightfall. Ian had still been nervous, so
Michelle, still laughing, had set up the camera, with the pink spot
right in the center of the viewfinder. When she bent to pick up the
backpack, she triggered the trap.

A classic snare trap, the rope, which
had been hidden by a handful of rotting leaves, wrapped around her
leg and pulled her into the air so she hung, upside down, suspended
from a branch. Ian laughed, pulling his utility knife from its
pouch on his belt. “Now who’s a moron?”

And then they appeared. There were
four of the manlike creatures appearing out of the jungle like
strangely un-wispy ghosts. They advanced on Ian and Michelle,
snarling like mad dogs. At first Ian thought they were men, perhaps
some of the villagers he’d been searching for, but that thought was
rapidly dismissed. These...things may have been more or less shaped
like humans, but they weren’t. Their skin, for one thing, was gray
and papery, hanging off of their bones like peeling wallpaper. The
fingernails were long, curved, and sharp. They reminded Ian of the
claws of a leopard or some other big cat. Their jaws hung open,
giving them a slack look which would have been humorous if not for
the mouthful of razor-sharp teeth. The canines curled from the gums
like a snake’s and thick, clear liquid dripped off of the ends.
Most disturbingly of all, though, most inhuman of all, were their
eyes. They were black, all of them—pupils, irises, and
sclera—completely black like a shark’s eyes. One of them grabbed
Ian by the collar and flung him into the trunk of a tree, knocking
the wind out of him. The second grabbed Michelle by the hair and
held tight. She screamed as a third creature slashed with his claws
at a rope that was disguised as a vine and she fell to the
ground.