First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella (2 page)

I hadn’t told my mom where I was that
day—or what I was doing. I was beginning to worry about her: she
was getting increasingly upset about the Vanished Ones. She’d lost
a lot of weight and was getting unhealthily skinny. Gray was
encroaching on her head, and no amount of boxed hair dye could halt
its advance. There were heavy bags under her eyes, and the wrinkles
on her face made her look ten, fifteen, years older. Yeah, I was
worried about her, and I didn’t want her burning energy worrying
about me and how I was holding up. Whenever possible I tried to
help her forget about the wave of terror that had descended on the
neighborhood. So I told her that I was playing
basketball.

“Okay, honey,” she said.
“Just make sure you’re home by dark. You know why.”

As if there was any
question about
that
.

After the ceremony, I went
straight home. A few of Franklin’s homies invited me to pour out a
forty in his memory, but I decided not to be a part of that. We
weren’t
that
close.

Besides, there was something bothering
me, digging in my guys like a worm or a mole, that told me I needed
to get home. I had a bad feeling.

As I entered the lobby of our
building, a strange man was coming out. It wasn’t like I knew every
tenant in my building by name—it wasn’t that kind of building, even
before the Vanishing—but I’d recognize most of them by sight. I
knew, somehow, that this man didn’t live here. He didn’t belong
there. He was tall and lean. His dark hair was swept back from his
forehead and he had a prominent widow’s peak. There was a roundness
to his cheeks that seemed to contradict the slimness of his
figure—he looked like a man who’s just eaten well. His clothes were
all black—suit, tie, and spit-shined shoes—except for the starched
white of his shirt. There was a scarlet spot on that white collar.
At the time, I took it to be tomato sauce, maybe
lipstick.

But it wasn’t either of those
things.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that
was the first time I laid eyes on a vampire.

We stared at each other. For a strange
moment, I thought I should have recognized him. He certainly seemed
to know me. He actually paused in his tracks for a moment and gazed
warily at me from over his thin neck. He nodded once, finally, a
gesture of acknowledgement, and stepped past me out the door. The
sun was just beginning to set, and heavy shadows blanketed the
sidewalk. As he disappeared into the darkness, I saw a strange,
satisfied smile drift across those predatory features.

I rode the elevator alone, in
silence.

The apartment door was
unlocked—
really
unusual, even before the last year. I frowned. A breath
hitched in my throat. For a long time I stood in the hallway on the
third floor of a shabby apartment building outside of a half-open
door. Something was wrong.

I wanted to leave. But the apartment
was the only place in the whole damn city that had ever felt
anything like safe. It was the only place where I’d ever felt
tucked securely away from the dangers that prowled the streets
after dark. I knew that if I stepped outside, I’d find myself
ripped to shreds by whatever it was that had taken the Vanished
Ones. There was no place else to go.

You’re being silly,
I told myself.
There’s
nothing to worry about. Mom just forgot to lock the door behind
her—that’s all.

I convinced myself that I was right,
that there was nothing wrong, and I opened the door.

The previous fall, my
biology class had gotten a shipment of frogs to dissect. This was
an unusual luxury, and the teacher had wanted us to be sure to
appreciate it. (Mr. Aldison was one of the earliest Vanished Ones—I
remember hearing his wife wail as she spoke with the principal.)
Mostly what had stuck with me was the smell. I couldn’t tell you
which organ was a frog’s heart and which was its liver—or if they
even had hearts or livers—but I knew I’d never forget the smell.
Strongest, of course, was the bitter, chemical scent of
formaldehyde. But underneath that there was something else.
Something warm and metallic and somehow alive, even though the
frogs were long dead:
Blood
.

When I opened my apartment door, I was
hit with the smell of blood. My brain went into sensory overdrive,
and I couldn’t see anything but red. I couldn’t hear anything but
the pumping of a heart, and I couldn’t smell anything but
blood.

After a moment I regained control and,
my palms sweating and my throat dry, I stepped into the apartment
that I shared with my mother.

The walls, the furniture,
the floors—everything—was splattered with something that looked
like chunky red paint. It was still wet, still thick and slowly
dribbling down the sides of the walls. The TV screen was completely
coated. So was the stupid old rug that Mom had bought three years
ago at a flea market and refused to admit smelled like cat piss.
The coffee table was shattered, as if—
as
if someone had been
thrown
through it
. The couch
was lying on its back.

The old wood floor of the hallway to
the back of the apartment, to my mother’s bedroom, was smeared with
blood.

Slowly, because I knew what I’d find,
I followed the trail.

The blood was even worse in the
bedroom. The floor was covered with the stuff, a pool that seemed
to be an inch deep. The bedspread was saturated with the red liquid
and the mirror over my mom’s dresser was flecked with so much gore
that it looked like modern art.

My mother sat on the floor in the
pool, her back against the bed-frame. Her blue eyes were open and
they stared at the wall. Her mouth hung open. Her dark hair was
soaked with blood and sweat.

And her throat was gone.
Jagged bits of flesh had been removed, unevenly, and I knew that it
had been done by something with sharp teeth. Her wrists had been
opened, too, and the arteries high on her legs. I stared at her for
a moment, my brain refusing to process what I was seeing: My mother
was dead. No matter where I looked in the room, my eyes were drawn
with directional magnetism to her face, her perfectly unmarked face
and I wondered, stupidly,
Why would
someone do this?

I vomited the vodka I’d drank at the
honoring ceremony. It burned coming up as much as it had going
down. I blinked back tears and realized I could no longer stand. I
fell into the pool, the puddle of blood and sick. I dry-heaved,
because my gorge was empty, and buried my face in my hands,
uncaring that I was covered with blood and puke.

The curtains were open and the last of
the day’s sunlight shone through, illuminating my mother with an
angel’s halo.

I threw back my head, and I howled
like an animal.

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.