First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella Read Free Page A

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.
    “Most likely that ain’t
happening. People don’t usually adopt kids that are, what,
fifteen?”
    “Sixteen,” I
said.
    “Sixteen, then. You’re in
for a rough few years and then you’ll be out on the street.” He
nodded at a cop passing by in the hallway. “They’ll do their best,
but they won’t be able to stop the vampires. If you come with
me…hell, I don’t know. Maybe you’ll be able to help.”
    “I don’t know,” I
said.
    “Look,” he