Dave Carver (Book 1): Thicker Than Blood

by Dudek, Andrew

  Looking up at him, I said, “What are you doing with me?”

  “Don’t fear, Mr. Carver. You’ll see soon enough.”

  And then he was gone. The door slammed shut and the lock clicked. And I was trapped in the garage. Alone

  The metal leg of one of the cots scraped against the floor, and I screeched like a flamingo. I spun around. A young woman was climbing out from under the cot.

  “Uh, sorry,” she said.

  I took a deep breath and waited for my heart to slow down. “No problem. Who are you?”

  “Jen,” she said. “Jen Carey.”

  Jen Carey looked to be my age, or a little younger—about twenty-five. She had light brown skin, which made me think she was mixed-race. Her black hair was cut short, and she wore a black T-shirt and business-casual slacks—it looked like a waitress’s uniform. She’d sat down on the seat and pulled her knees against her chest. It made her look small and very young.

  “I’m Dave,” I said. “I know this seems scary, but you’re gonna—”

  The door opened again. The she-vamp appeared from between the parked cars. She advanced towards me, a smile creeping across her face. There was a strange hunger in her eyes. Normally, I’d have killed to have a beautiful woman look at me with eyes like that, but I didn’t think what she had in mind would be fun. For me, at least. The vampire would probably enjoy herself.

  I put myself between Loretta and Jen. When the vampire was nearly within arm’s reach, she stopped. “Welcome to your new home, little knight. I just know we’re going to have so much fun together.”

  “What did I tell you, Loretta?” Roberto had come into the garage so silently that I hadn’t heard him. He put his hand on the she-vamp’s arm. “Mr. Carver is our guest.”

  I decided to twist the knife a little. “Yeah, Loretta, I’m a guest. Not a meal.”

  “That’s true,” she said. “For now.”

  My blood temperature dropped a few degrees.

  “Enough,” Roberto said. “Loretta, go outside.”

  “But Bobby...”

  “Now.”

  Without further argument, Loretta stalked out of the garage like a combination between a soldier and a scolded child.

  Roberto shook his head with exaggerated patience. “I apologize for my sister. She’s been looking forward to meeting you in person.”

  I shook my head. “Whatever. It’s not like this is the first time one of you people tried to take a bite out of me. What did she mean by my ‘new home?’”

  “You’ll be remaining here for the duration of the war.” Roberto looked over my shoulder at Jen, who had crawled back under the cot. “Both of you. You will be safe here, you have my word on that. I realize it’s not the Saint Regis, but you will not be harmed. Which is more than I can say for the rest of this rat’s nest you call a city. In any event, you won’t be here long. A few days. A week at the most.”

  “What makes you say that?” I asked.

  “Why, the war will be finished by then, of course.”

  Gulp again. “And how do you plan on doing that so quickly?”

  Roberto smiled. “Mr. Carver, you simply can’t wait for anything, can you?”

  “What can I say? The anticipation’s killing me.”

  “I can assure you,” Roberto said with a sinister grin, “that nothing, anticipation or otherwise, will kill you so long as you remain here.”

  Chapter 19

  As comforting—and not at all creepy—as Roberto’s promises that I’d be safe were, I figured I had a better chance of putting my fingers through a meat grinder and coming out playing concert piano than I had of getting out of that garage alive.

  I spent the better part of the morning risking tetanus by scouring every corner of the garage and the car skeletons for something—a screwdriver, a nail, a letter opener—anything I could use to escape. I was unsuccessful. Roberto had chosen his prison well. The only exit was the door, and that was reinforced with some kind of heavy steel bar. I slammed against it a few times and got nothing for the effort but a sore shoulder.

  I was well and truly trapped. Again. And it really pissed me off.

  I dropped down on the cot with a sore shoulder, bloodied fingers, and a tail between my legs. “They got us locked in here pretty good,” I said. It’s possible I sounded bitter.

  “What are they doing?” Jen asked. “What do they want?”

  “Good question,” I said. “They’re planning to overthrow the human governments, but I don’t know what we have to do with it.”

  Jen looked at me, confused and horrified. “Human governments? Are there other kinds?”

  I stared at her. “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  Now it was my turn to be confused and horrified. This girl—who apparently had no idea that they even existed—was an important part of the vampire’s plans. Something didn’t add up. One question came to mind:

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m...I’m nobody. I’m a waitress. I was walking home from the bar last night when this van pulled up next to me. These guys jumped out and threw me in.”

  “You must be somebody important,” I said. I was talking more to myself than to her. “Why else would the vampires want you?”

  She stared at me, confused by my use of the V-word, but she didn’t scream or cry. She waited for me to explain. Jen Carey didn’t understand what was happening, but she might, if someone could just tell her the truth. And if anyone deserved the truth, I figured it was Jen Carey.

  I shook my head and said, “Let me explain...”

  Jen handed it better than some people I could mention. She didn’t scream. She didn’t cry. She didn’t stick her fingers in her ears and scream “La la la!” like a certain low-level British politician I’d once saved from a Black Dog. She watched me, her eyes wary and suspicious but accepting, as the charade that was her notion of truth and reality came crashing down around her ears like a stage curtain.

  It was such a familiar expression—her brown eyes so wide and intelligent and penetration—that I was sure I’d seen it somewhere before. I had a moment where I thought I’d seen her before. But it was a big world, and there was no way that we’d ever met.

  When I was finished, I spread my hands in an any questions? gesture. Jen’s calmness was almost unnerving. (Hell, after my first encounter with a vampire, I just about threw up a lung—though that had more to do with all of the blood.) She was so deliriously, stone-faced calm that, in a sudden flash of insight, I knew she could have been a knight if she wanted. So silent was she that, for a moment, I wondered if her apparent calmness hadn’t been caused by some kind of self-destruct system in her brain. But then she took a deep breath and asked an obvious question of her own:

  “So what do they want with me? I’m just a waitress.”

  I sighed, wishing I had a better answer for her. “You sure you didn’t come into contact with something odd in the last...” Vampires have long lives—like, forever long, if something doesn’t kill them—and their memories are just as lasting. “I really don’t know.”

  “But you said you kill things like them.”

  “Professionally.”

  “Can you take them?”

  I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. “Not without some kind of weapon.” The vamps had taken my knife and switchblade after they’d knocked me unconscious. I was unarmed. “There are at least three vampires out there, probably more. I might be able to take one of them by surprise, but then his buddies would hit me.”

  “So what are you gonna do?”

  “Oh,” I said with a fake-cocky grin, “I’m gonna get us out of here. But for now we just have to wait.”

  I was sitting at the picnic table near the parked cars when Roberto came back in. It was a small act of rebellion, but it was the most I could muster. I looked up and smiled sweetly as the vampire glided between the cars, a covered tray balanced on his ceiling-facing fingertips. I was trying to provoke a respons
e from the vampire agent, some kind of recognition of my presence, but he hardly seemed to notice me. If I wanted Roberto and his cronies to see me, I’d have to leave them no other option.

  I was off of the bench in one fluid motion and running towards the vampire. I lowered my head like a charging rhinoceros. Roberto gaped at me, almost comically as I closed in. The plastic tray clattered to the floor. I let out a wordless battle cry.

  And then Roberto’s hand closed around my throat, cutting off any vocalization. He swept his leg under mine and sent me tumbling to the ground. He came down on top of me, still holding my neck like a vise. He put his knee on my chest. His eyes were black.

  “This is the second time you’ve assaulted me. There won’t be a third.”

  “Ack,” I said defiantly.

  Roberto climbed to his feet, then offered me a hand getting up. I ignored him and pushed myself off the floor, rubbing at my bruising throat.

  “Mr. Carver, what am I going to have to do with you?” Roberto said. The anger was fading from his voice and his eyes were lightening. “Strap you to your cot?”

  “If you want to keep me here, yeah, that’s probably your best bet.”

  “I keep telling you: no one here means you any harm.”

  “What about your sister? I feel like she wouldn’t hesitate to take a bite out of me.”

  Roberto closed his eyes and he said, almost apologetically, “Loretta...has wanted to taste you for some time. I never allowed her access to your chamber in Guyana because I know how she can behave with her food, and I feared the encounter would do you damage, but she listens to me. I promise you: she will not harm you.”

  Truthfully, I’m guessing about what Roberto said after the first couple of sentences there. I was too hung up one specific word.

  I felt a snarl in my throat. “You were in Guyana?”

  He scratched his chin. “I was in charge of the facility there.”

  I put all of my power into a swing. He dodged out of the way and my fist carried me harmlessly past him. His eyes were pitying as he looked down at me. I must have looked pathetic, sprawled on the ground. Still, Roberto was surprised when I moved fast enough to get off the ground and punch him in the throat. If he’d been human the blow would have put him on the ground, gasping for breath. As it was it knocked him to the ground in surprise.

  I kicked him in the face, feeling the satisfying crunch of his nose breaking under my boot. I stomped again, knocking out a few of his teeth. He slithered out of the way of the third blow and rose to his feet. He pushed me hard in the chest, and I fell over, but I barely felt the blow, I was so hopped-up on rage. I was so angry I didn’t hear the garage door squeak open and a vampire grab hold of me from behind. Accountant-Vamp was back there, looking down at the ground and holding me by the biceps, pinning my arms behind my back. I turned back to look at Roberto.

  “And you think we could be friends?” I snarled. “After you were my, what, my fucking warden for months?”

  “If it makes you feel better,” Roberto said, “I was just following orders.”

  I spat in his face. “Loads better, thanks.”

  He produced a handkerchief from somewhere and wiped the spittle from his cheek. “You’re angry. I can understand that. But you’ve already lost, and the sooner you accept that the sooner you can begin your new life.”

  “My new life as a vampire house pet?”

  “No, as an ally. As a friend. As a leader of the humans that survive the war.”

  “See,” I said, “it’s the ‘friend’ part that gets me. You and me are never gonna be friends. Because you’re a monster. And, me, I kill monsters.”

  Roberto folded his soiled handkerchief and put it away. “Enjoy your lunch.” He nodded at the tray that he’d dropped when I rushed him. The sound of his Italian leather shoes was the only breach in the otherwise silent garage. When Roberto was clear, Accountant-Vamp flung me to floor and left, too.

  Just before the door closed, Roberto’s voice drifted from outside. “You know, I’m really beginning to think that he is wrong about this one...”

  I didn’t ask who he was. I knew no one would tell me.

  The tray turned out to contain lunch: peanut butter sandwiches, apples, and bottled water. Carbs, protein, fruit, and hydration. Leave it to a vampire to take better care of human nutritional needs than most people do. A cynical man would have thought they were trying to fatten us up like a farmer does to a hog right before Easter.

  I gave Jen her share of the food and sat down at the table to eat. My pride shouted that I shouldn’t give the vampires the satisfaction of letting them see me take their food, but my stomach was louder. I hadn’t eaten in what felt like days and I was gonna need all of the fuel I could get if I wanted to bust out of the garage. Neither was I worried about poison. If Roberto wanted to kill me, all he had to do was let his sister in to “play” with me. I shuddered at the memory of the eyes of the female vampire. Lots of guys say things like “She was looking at me like a piece of meat,” but I’d never seen it applied literally. Loretta had been eyeing me like I was a hunk of steak. Creepy.

  Whatever the elders had planned for me, I knew it wasn’t going to be good. I couldn’t understand what my part of their plan would have been. There was no way I could have made it clearer that I wanted no part of helping them defeat the Round Table. But they didn’t really need me to agree in order to make me do that. All they needed was a hairline crack in my willpower, and they could make me do whatever they wanted.

  They could enthrall me.

  But that didn’t make sense, either. If Roberto wanted to enthrall me, he’d had plenty of chances to do it.

  Unless...

  They were waiting for backup.

  Like anything in life (or un-life), enthrallment was a skill that could be improved with experience. A really skilled vampire could get into my brain and out again with no proof that he’d ever been there. They could send me back to work with a flawless puppet-string tied around my soul. I’d be the perfect double-agent—I wouldn’t even know it.

  Wait.

  What if that had already happened? What if the traitor was me?

  There were large portions of my time in Guyana that were gray in my mind at best. Minutes, hours, even entire days that were gone from my memory like an erased hard drive. It was possible that a compeller had come in, wrapped his fingers in my gray matter and left, disguising the whole thing as a case of PTSD.

  I put my head down on the table. I was in a lot of trouble here. Maybe even more than I had realized.

  Sometime later—it may have been hours or days, the time seemed to drift away into nothingness in that garage-prison-cell—the door opened and Roberto entered, flanked by Loretta and Accountant-Vamp. Roberto pointed at me and snarled, “Away from the table. Now.” All traces of Old World politic was gone from his voice, and once more it was easy to remember that he was a vampire—a monster. I guess he didn’t appreciate the kicks to the face.

  A dozen or two vampires followed them. They were dressed primarily in loose-fitting, black clothing that reminded me of a commando team’s uniforms. I jumped off the bench, feeling my hands rising to a defensive posture.

  The vampires ignored me though, and I scurried to join Jen at the cots. The Accountant-Vamp followed me. He pushed his glasses up high on his nose, a high-school-movie cliche nerd gesture, and said, almost apologetically, “If either of you moves, we’ll have to kill you both.”

  Roberto sat in the center of one of the picnic benches, other vampires flanking him like advisors surrounding a Mafia don. Loretta was at his right, licking her lips and stroking her brother’s elbow. The Accountant-Vamp hung at the fringes of the group, lurking like a stray dog among a wolf pack.

  “My friends,” the vampire agent said, “our time is nearly at hand. Is everyone prepared?”

  There was a roar of assent from the assembled vampires.

  “Tonight, we strike a blow for our race. Tonight, we begin the proce
ss of ending the failed experiment known as humanity. Tonight marks the start of the age of vampire.”

  There was a cheer like Roberto was a football coach giving a speech right before a big game.

  “We will spread across this continent like a wildfire. Mighty cities will fall to our power. Presidents and generals will tremble as we feast on their wives and children.”

  I stood up. “How you gonna do all that?”

  Roberto glared at me. “Mr. Carver, this is not your concern.”

  “Nah, I’m pretty concerned. How’s it gonna happen?”

  “Sit,” Roberto said. To the rest of the vamps, he said, “The end of our oppression is tonight.”

  “The hell it is,” I said. “I’m not letting you kill anyone.”

  Roberto roared, a wordless, animal cry. He sailed across the room. His human features melted away. He grabbed me by the throat and lifted me up. My feet dangled six inches above the ground, kicking uselessly. “You do not get a say,” Roberto said. Then he threw me across the room. I bounced off the wall, hit the floor, and stayed there.

  I was afraid that I’d broken my back, but the feeling returned soon enough. By the time I got back to my feet, though, the vampires were stalking out of the garage. Accountant-Vamp was the last to leave, and he looked at me for a long moment before he, too, was gone.

  I beat my hands uselessly against the door. Jen came up behind me.

  “Is this it?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “They’re gonna kill my friends and then they’re gonna take over the world.”

  I moped. Or brooded, if that makes me sound tougher and manlier. Whatever you want to call it, I sat on the edge of the cot and felt sorry for myself. I stared at the door, waiting for it to open with the news that my friends were dead. That the New York division of the Round Table had been massacred. That the vampires were well on their way to a total victory on the North American continent.

  We’d lost the war. I sat on the cot, feeling the metal bar digging into the bottoms of my thighs and tried not to cry. I wished I was dead, too.