by Andrew Dudek
“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.
It splintered like a melon. Black blood flew everywhere, along with chips of bone and splashes of gray matter. Coal black eyes blinked once, then he collapsed, dead.
I straightened up, panting, and looked over my shoulder.
The four of us stood a few blocks away and watched as firefighters put out the blaze. It was necessary, according to Nate, to burn the bodies. Vampire remains are fragile—they wither and turn to dust when exposed to fire or sunlight, as well as a few other substances, so there'd be no sign of them inside the cellar. No one would ever look into the murders of three skinny young men in the basement of the old boarding house.
What was more, Nate said, the fire would be spectacular. Word would spread, and the vampires that still lived in the city would know that we were coming for them.
A crowd gathered—a small crowd, but that wasn’t surprising. There weren’t many people left in the neighborhood to rubberneck. After a while, Hector and Maria drifted off, heading back to the subway platform. Nate and I stood for a few minutes more, watching as flames licked out of the broken basement door. The FDNY had it under control. It wasn’t going to spread to other buildings. It wouldn’t hurt anyone else. Finally, Nate turned away without a word and began to walk down the block. I stayed still for a moment, watching the building burn.
“Hey,” Nate called. “Aren’t you coming?”
Was I coming? Of course I was. It wasn’t like I had anyplace else to go. I hurried to catch up.
As we headed back towards the subway platform for a good day’s sleep, Nate put an arm around my shoulder. “Congratulations, kid,” he said. “Welcome to the Family.”
Chapter 8: Safe at Home
Three hours later, in the station, I sat next to a small, portable grill and watched hamburgers sizzle. I don’t know where Luisa had found the chopped meat, but she’d procured it from somewhere. Hector and Maria sat nearby, huddled together and whispering in each other’s ears. I didn’t really see any of this. The memory of the way the vampire’s eyes had blinked stupidly would be with me forever. There was a chance I would never really see anything else again.
I was hungry, and the smell of the burgers was mouthwatering. I was tired, too, but I knew I’d never sleep today. My body was keyed up, adrenaline pumping in my veins like liquid jackhammers.
“Dave?”
Nate stood behind me, still dressed in his battle clothes. His machete was still sheathed at his hip.
“Yeah?”
“Come with me for a minute.”
I followed Nate into the section of the platform that functioned as his office, separated by a large piece of plywood and on old shower curtain. Nate pulled the curtain closed, cutting us from the rest of the Family. That older, gray-bearded man that I’d first seen weeks ago was sitting back there.
His name, I knew, was Squirrel. The nickname came from his beard—gray and coarse—not from his size. He was huge, with bulging muscles under his denim work-shirt. His forearms, neck, and hands were covered with old tattoos. He was wearing rubber gloves and holding a small machine in his hands. It looked like an Industrial-Revolution-mating of a ballpoint pen and a handgun, with lots of little moving pieces and a pointed needle. It was hooked up to a car battery. The machine made a high-pitched sound somewhere between a buzz and a whine. A tray was set up on a nearby stool, full of caps of colored inks.
“Is this what I think it is?” I whispered.
“You’ve made your first kill, kid,” Nate said. “You’re one of us.”
“Sit down.” Squirrel’s voice was gruff and hoarse, as if from long years of whiskey and cigarettes. He pointed at the hard-backed plastic chair next to his.
I stripped off my T-shirt and sat.
“You ever have a tattoo, son?”
I shook my head.
“ ‘Kay, well it’s gonna hurt. Not too bad, though.” His narrow dark eyes focused on the slash-marks on my chest, the ones from the vampire’s claws. “Not too bad. I expect you’ll have felt worse.”
Damn right. I was a conquering hero. I’d killed a vampire. My body bore the bloody gashes from its unholy claws—I wasn’t afraid of a needle.
The buzzing increased until it sounded like a ‘roided-up bumblebee. Squirrel leaned in, taking my left arm hard in his hands. I grinned, feeling about as cocky as I ever have in my life. The big man touched the humming needed into the upper part of my bicep.
I yelped. I was ready for it too hurt, but I was expecting a sharpness, like being cut. Instead, it felt like Squirrel was rubbing my skin with sandpaper. It hurt more than I expected, a dull, scraping ache. Nate leaned against the filthy wall, an amused smile on his face. I gritted my teeth and let out a single breath. Okay. I can do this.
“You know,” Nate said, “you did good back there, kid. Real good. Most of us lost it a little bit the first time. But you…you’re like a natural.”
I shrugged, causing Squirrel to curse and tighten his grip on my arm. I could smell the cigarette on his breath. “Hold still, son.”
“Sorry.”
The tattooer grumbled something unintelligible and looked at Nate. “You got ‘em? All four?”
Nate’s eyes flashed. “There were only three.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
Nate looked at me. “Was there a fourth vamp?”
I shook my head, making sure to keep my arm from moving, and thought for a moment. “I was there almost four hours before we went in. No one left the cellar and no one entered. There was no one else there.”
“Maybe he had a fight with the nest and got kicked out,” Squirrel said.
“Maybe.” But Nate didn’t sound convinced.
“Anyway,” Squirrel said, “I got another tip.”
“Already? That was fast.”
“Yeah. There’s an old rectory across from Pelham Park, near the Sound. About six miles east of here.”
“How many?” Nate was all business now. The amusement was gone from his face, and his voice was as hard as a soldier’s. I noticed his right hand was dangling, almost subconsciously near the handle of his machete.
“As many as six. Supposed to be hunkered down pretty good in the basement.”
I gulped, loud enough to be heard. The others looked at me. “Sorry,” I said. “I think I’m just a little dehydrated.”
Squirrel shook his head. He shut off the tattoo gun and pulled it from my arm. I sucked in a breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding. The break from the pain was a blessed relief.
“That’s a lot of vampires,” Squirrel said. “Don’t rush into it. Scout it out first, make sure you can handle it.”
Nate’s eyes narrowed and I suddenly wanted to be someplace else. “Don’t tell me how to do my job, Squirrel.”
“I’m not—all I’m saying is watch your back. Don’t get these kids killed.”
They glared at each for a long moment, their eyes locked like a pair of rival lions. Nate finally nodded, as if accepting an unspoken apology that I hadn’t detected.
“You’re right, man. Of course we’ll be careful. You know me—I’m always careful.”
Squirrel frowned, but he went back to work on my tattoo without further comment.
Nate smiled faintly. “Seriously, Dave, good work today. When you’re done here get some sleep.” He shot a glance at Squirrel, but the man’s face was steadfast on his work. “It looks like we’re gonna have another busy night tonight.”
I tried to sleep, beneath a stolen comforter in a spot near the stairs. I kept closing my eyes, but I couldn’t make them stay closed. They kept opening so I could stare at my tattoo.
By any objective measure, it should have been horrifying: a human-shaped skull with its jaws hideously distended, its mouth full of razor teeth. The business end of an ax was buried between the empty eye sockets, and droplets of blood blood ran down the front. The tattoo stood stark against the pale skin of my upper arm, the colors bright and vibrant. Blood—real blood, my blood—was smeared, soaking the sleeve of my shirt
, reminding me, in a strange way, that I was no longer alone. For the first time since my mom had died, I had a real family. I had a place where I belonged.
And now I had proof, and no one could take it from me.
The handle of the ax rested near my head, where I could grab it in a hurry if I needed. I was already adopting the sleeping practices of the Family: always be prepared. As I closed my eyes and drifted off, though, I knew I wouldn’t need the ax. The subway platform may not have been a traditional home, or the kind I’d have chosen for myself, but it was a home. And there was one thing I knew for sure: Home meant safety.
Chapter 9: Victories and Losses
We marched across the Bronx to Pelham Park. There was an old rectory across a street, next to a mostly abandoned church. People weren’t using this place to worship anymore—they weren’t using it for anything. The vampires were spreading.
According to Squirrel, 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.