First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella by Andrew Dudek Read Free Book Online Page B

there were six
in the rectory. According to Nate, we’d need more soldiers. So
there were eight of us marching.
    We did it all over again, a repeat of
the day before: the sheer boredom of the waiting, followed by
sudden terror as we sprang into action. Again I led the way to the
battlefield. I broke the door with three swings of the ax this time
and charged down the dusty stairs into a closed-up
cellar.
    A vampire stood at the bottom of the
stairs, gazing up in shock. I swung the ax in a horizontal slash
which sheared through his neck like I was felling a sapling. His
head rolled away and his body dropped like a puppet.
    Nate landed on the stone floor a
moment behind me, in time to put himself in front of a lunging
vamp. He caught the first blow on the sleeve of his canvas jacket,
and struck with his machete. The vampire’s head rocked back and
away. Black blood spurted like a geyser.
    Hector came next with his
bat, followed by Maria and her knife. They spread out into the
gloomy basement, heading to the right. Luisa and Grady went to the
left. Two more—Travis and Corey stayed outside, just to be sure no
vamps slipped past us to return to their previously scheduled
marauding. I heard wet thumps as Hector pounded a vampire. I heard a wordless
battle-cry from Maria. Luisa and Grady shouted and grunted. A
vampire hissed in pain.
    A huge black shape flew from the murky
shadows under the stairs. The vampire’s claws were outstretched and
his mouth hung open in a gaping parody of a laugh. He moved so fast
that I didn’t have time to get my ax in front of me. He hit like a
linebacker and knocked me on my back. His claws raked into my
forearms. He laughed as he savaged me like a dog with a
chew-toy.
    The ax fell from my grip. I couldn’t
get my hand around it.
    The vampire howled in triumph. His
eyes were wide and black, his jaws slavering. Thick, clear liquid
dripped from his fangs. A drop landed on my neck, and the skin
tingled for a moment, then went numb.
    An idle thought, something
from an old nature documentary, drifted weirdly in my mind: Vampire bats have a numbing agent in their
saliva.
    I didn’t have time to worry about
though, before a small bucket’s worth of cool, black blood dropped
on my face. I coughed, choking, and looked up.
    Nate stood with the machete in his
hand. The vampire that had been about to turn me into breakfast lay
on his side, his head resting on its right ear a few feet
away.
    The sounds of the battle had faded.
Family members were emerging into the light from the shattered
door. Some bore fresh scratches or cuts, but everyone looked more
or less whole. Everyone held a bloody weapon.
    Nate breathed heavily for a moment.
His eyes were every bit as vicious as a vampire’s. He closed them.
When he looked at me again, his breath had slowed down and he
looked like himself. He offered me a hand.
    “You saved me,” I said as
he pulled me to my feet.
    He smiled, an actual broad grin.
“We’re a Family, kid. It’s what we do.”
     
    The next few months were a loop of
raids, flanked by long stretches of boredom. Vampires are sneaky,
when they choose to be, hard to find. Never again did we do two
raids in as many days. Rarely did we do more than two or three a
month.
    Still, I learned an awful lot of
things that never would have occurred to me in a “normal” life.
Like the ways to kill a vampire: Decapitation is the easiest and
most efficient, but fire works well, and if you can catch one on
the ground a stake through the heart is effective. (It’s hard to
get the stake past the ribs, so I don’t recommend this approach.) I
learned how to move silently on the paved jungle of the Bronx, and
how to cover my scent with stale garbage and musty clothes. In a
few weeks I knew how to time sunrise to the second and I could spot
a vampire from three blocks away. I don’t mean to polish my own
medals, but I was starting to think Nate was right—maybe I was born
for this.
    There were seventeen of us,