First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella (5 page)

Hector took off his plaid shirt and
tossed it aside, revealing a thin body that was nevertheless draped
with lithe muscle. There was a tattoo on his forearm: a fanged
skull, cracked in the center by a baseball bat, with blood dripping
down the obviously fatal wound. Other members of the Family had
similar tattoos, and I knew they were given to a member who’d made
his first kill. All of a sudden, I wanted nothing in the world more
than I wanted my own tat.

There was no bell. Hector simply
barreled in on me without warning, wrapping me in a bear hug and
dragging me to the ground.

I outweighed him by twenty pounds or
more—though I was considerably leaner than I’d been a month ago—but
Hector’s wiry arms might as well have been padlocked to my waist. I
couldn’t move my upper body at all.

We hit the platform and rolled, coming
to a stop only when we hit the shoes of the nearest spectators. I
was on the bottom. Hector’s arms slowly squeezed the life from me
and I couldn’t move. Soon, I’d be out of energy, just from
straining to suck air. I was strong, but I couldn’t break Hector’s
grip.

I remembered something Maria had told
me.

“
Los murciéalogos
will always be
stronger than you. Faster, too, and probably smarter. But that
doesn’t mean you can’t beat ‘em. All you gotta do is outthink
‘em.”

I squeezed my arms together suddenly.
My shoulders popped and I winced, but I was smaller than before.
For just a second, there was open space between Hector’s arms and
my torso. I slammed my forehead into his face. I don’t think I did
the head-butt right—I saw stars—but Hector was at least as hurt by
it as I was. He let me go, and I rolled out from underneath him. He
stayed down, on his hands and knees. I kicked him hard in the ribs,
relishing the chance at the payback for all of the wood he’d made
me chop.

I didn’t hesitate another moment—I
leapt onto his back and locked my arms around his neck in a tight
chokehold, one of the things I’d practiced over and over again. I
kicked his knees out from under him, and he landed on his
chest.

“
Oof
!”

We stayed like that, me pinning him to
the ground.

After what seemed like an
eternity, Maria called out, “
Cinco!
” Five. the fight was over.
I’d won.

I let Hector go. He climbed to his
feet and grabbed me by the shoulders. Blood was pouring from his
nose, but he was grinning like a maniac. I realized I was,
too.

Maria came out of the crowd and threw
her arms around my shoulders, then locked Hector in a celebratory
hug. After a few moments, the cheering and applause died down, and
Nate stepped forward.

He extended his hand. I shook
it.

“Okay then,” he said. “I
guess you’re ready.”

Chapter 7: The Nest

The weight of the ax made my shoulder
ache. My bicep screamed from the strain and my forearm bulged.
Veins pushed out the skin, popping like trains in an open field.
I’d been crouched behind a Dumpster for three hours, forty-two
minutes, and fifteen seconds, and don’t think I wasn’t counting,
because my legs had begun to cramp almost two hours ago, and I
wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep this position. It would
all pay off in a few moments, though, and then I could
move.

It was almost sunrise.

Across the empty street stood the
rotted-out hulk of a boarding house. I knew it well—I’d walked past
it everyday a few years back. According to Nate’s source, the house
had been empty for months. Not an anomaly in the neighborhood, of
course: I’d seen more cockroaches and rats in the last few hours
than I had people.

The vantage point where I crouched was
offensive to all the senses—especially smell, for the obvious
reason of decaying garbage—but it afforded me a killer view
straight down the alley across the street, right to the door that
would lead to the boarding house’s basement. No one had used the
door in the time I’d been there, coming or going. The Dumpster gave
me one more advantage, as well: it masked my scent. This was good,
because the things I was hunting had excellent senses of
smell.

Gray light was beginning to filter to
street level. The sky was lightening. It’d still be a few minutes
before the sunlight reached my alley, but not long now. It was
almost time. They’d be here soon, unless Nate’s intel was wrong,
and Hector and Maria both had an unshakeable faith that Nate’s
intel was never wrong.

“Anything yet?”

Speak—or just
think
—of the devil, and
he appears. And I mean
appear
literally. Nate adjusted the crystal on his
watchband, and he was standing with me in the alley.

I didn’t jump or otherwise let him
know that he’d startled me. From the smirk that crossed his
peach-fuzz lips, he knew, but he didn’t mention it.

“Nope,” I said, choking my
nauseous fear and trying to sound casual. “Nothing yet.”

“Okay.” He nodded.
“Daybreak’s in ten minutes. You ready, kid?”

He was only a few years older than me,
but Nate had a habit of calling everyone in the Family “kid.” It
was the kind of thing that should have annoyed me, but I felt like
if anyone deserved to treat me like I was young an inexperienced,
it was Nate. I didn’t mind—it was like having an older brother for
the first time in my life. Or a father.

I nodded. “I have to do
this.”

Nate clapped me on the shoulder.
“Remember me and Hector and Maria are with you. We’re right behind
you. Remember that and you’ll be fine.”

Then he backed away, twisted the
crystal, and he didn’t vanish, exactly, but it was like my eyes
drifted away from him.

I swallowed and wiped a sweaty palm on
the side of my filthy jeans.

Sunlight made its way down
the street, moving like a slow-motion tidal wave. In a few moments
the entire block would be flooded. Soon it’d be too bright and the
vampires wouldn’t be able to get into their lair. Maybe they’d
moved on to a new nest, or maybe the intel was faulty and they’d
never been there at all. Either way, I was both disappointed and
relieved: disappointed because I wouldn’t get this opportunity to
finally prove myself, relieved because it meant I wouldn't prove
that I
didn’t
belong here.

They appeared at that moment, even
more suddenly and fluidly than Nate had done. There were three of
them, all skinny and wearing dark sweatshirts with the hoods pulled
over their faces. They sprinted down the alley, and I was reminded
of rats scurrying for a safe hole at the noisy approach of a
garbageman. The third figure rounded corner too sharply and bounced
off the brick wall of the opposite building. One of them fumbled
with a lock on the cellar door and managed to get it open. One by
one, the three vampires disappeared into the boarding house
basement.

Well, this was it. Moment of truth. I
held my breath and counted silently.

One. Two. Three. Four.

On
five,
a pebble landed in the street.
It sounded far louder than it should have in the early Bronx
morning. It was the signal.

I leapt to my feet and ran towards the
alley, shaking my muscles as I moved. I hit the alley first, but I
heard three sets of footsteps behind me: Nate, Maria, and Hector.
All of them had weapons of their own, but I went first—because I
had the ax.

It turned out that the ax had belonged
to a firehouse, long before I joined the Family. Nate had liberated
it shortly after beginning his guerrilla campaign. Since then, it
had been the battering ram.

Even using all of my strength, I had
to hit the cellar door five times before it broke, splintered and
shattered. Pieces of wood fell down into the stairs, the vanguard
for the encroaching sunlight.

The sun reached down like the fingers
of an angry god.

Terrible, inhuman shrieks lifted out
of the basement.

I took a deep breath, nearly choking
on the smell of deeply charred meat. I coughed, but I couldn’t
hesitate now—I was committed. I lifted the ax over my shoulder, its
honed edge resting near my head, and I led the charge into the
vampire nest.

All three of the vampires
had their backs pressed against the wall. One of them, whom I guess
was closest to the door when it broke, was clutching his face. Thin
tendrils of black smoke leaked from between his fingers. The
others
hissed
monstrously, their mouths dangling to reveal their
fangs.

I hadn’t seen a vampire since that
night in the alley near the police station. It had been dark, and
my senses had been fried with grief and adrenaline and trauma. I
realized now that I didn’t really remember what they looked like. I
wasn’t prepared for this. The vampires looked like corpses with
skin made of Silly Putty. Their faces were gray and cracked like
old paper. Their jaws hung open, weirdly distended, like a
python’s. Their fangs were snakelike, too, and they had long,
obsidian fingernails: curved and sharp like cat claws. Worst of all
were the eyes—all of their eyes: pupils, irises, even sclera—were
solidly, purely black like marbles.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs,
balancing the ax. The vampires kept their distance, their backs
pressed against the wall, which was as far as possible from the
harsh, broiling rays of the sun. It was hard, almost impossible to
read emotion on those animalistic, dead faces, but one was clear:
hatred. These things hated me.

Well, the feeling was
mutual.

I pictured a creature like this
savaging my mother, ripping her apart like a lion does to a
buffalo, and a wave of revulsion made me shudder. I pictured the
man who had killed her—tall, athletic, dark hair and eyes, pale
skin. I pictured him morphed like this: gray skin, black eyes,
animal teeth. I pictured my mother: crumpled and dead on the
bedroom floor.

I hefted the ax and I stepped out of
the light.

The first vampire, on the left, flung
himself at me. Hector had trained me for this: If a vamp got too
close, he could take me down, no matter how strong I was. When a
vampire closes like this, it’s to make a killing blow. I ducked,
putting my torso at a ninety-degree angle to my legs, and kept
charging. The vampire sailed overhead. I heard the whooshing sound
of Nate’s machete slicing through air, followed by a meatier sound
as it embedded itself in vampire skin, muscle, and bone. Something
heavy bounced off the wall and landed on the floor, followed by
something even heavier—the vampire’s head and body,
respectively.

The second vampire, the one that had
been blinded by the sunlight, waded into the fray. He was wounded,
but not fatally, and his features were even more grotesque than his
friends’. His skin bubbled on his face.

He swiped at Hector with his claws.
Hector squared off with the vampire, swinging his bat in short
strikes, feinting left then right then left again. Each feint
caused the vampire to adjust his course accordingly until,
suddenly, Hector cracked the vampire across the face from the
right—immediately after a rightward feint. The disruption took the
vampire by surprise, and he went down, bleeding from just above the
eye.

Maria descended on him, her combat
knife in one hand, a wooden stake in the other. She used the handle
of the knife as a hammer and pounded the stake into the vampire’s
back, right through the heart. He screamed, but not for long. Then,
to make sure he stayed down, Maria used the serrated edge of her
blade to saw through the neck. After a few gruesome moments, the
vampire’s head rolled off his shoulders.

The left one vampire—one for
me.

I heard the Family members settling
into position behind me—where they could cover me if I needed it,
but otherwise preparing to stay out of the fight. After all, this
was my final exam: I had to kill a vampire.

The sole surviving vampire looked from
me to the others and back again. His eyes were wide and his dried
tongue flickered like a snake’s.

And then he lunged, and I no longer
thought of anything. The vampire pounced at me, and my training
took over. His claws raked across my chest, ripping open my shirt
and carving four gashes into my skin. I winced and rolled back,
avoiding the worst of the blow. I smacked him in the face with the
wooden handle of the ax, and he stumbled to the right. With a
snarl, he staggered, but he recovered quickly.

My hit to the face had put ten feet
between us, but he was already closing back in on me.

My right foot shot out and
connected with his knee cap. Something went
snap
and the vampire went to the
ground. He rolled on impact and, even with what had to be a broken
knee, he started to rise.

Alarms went off in my skull as I
realized that the broken knee would barely slow him down. Blood
vessels pounded hard enough that I was sure everyone in the room
could hear them. Everything slowed down. I pictured the vampire’s
head as a log that needed splitting. I swung the ax over my head,
grunted, and brought it down on the crown of his skull.