Free First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella by Andrew Dudek

only marginally
relieved. “The guy’s name was Everett, I think. He said he worked
at the sanitation plant and he saw strange guys coming in and out
of the warehouse. It sounded like vamps to me, so I passed it on to
you. That’s all. Weird guy, though.”
    “Weird how?”
    “He didn’t say much.
Seemed out of the whole time. Like he was baked or at least halfway
out the door. Didn’t so much as flinch when I put the needle to
him.”
    Nate shook his head, but his eyes
flashed. “Okay. Thanks, Squirrel. I’m sorry for all of this. You
mind giving Dave and Luisa a ride? We need to bury
Corey.”
    Squirrel looked troubled, but his
confusion gave way to relief. “Sure thing, Nate. I’ll be upstairs
in the truck.”
    When he was gone, Nate put his head in
his hands and sighed. I’d never seen him look so defeated. He
answered my questions before I had the chance to ask. “This Everett
guy was enthralled. It’s like being possessed by a
vampire.”
    “They can do that?” I
shuddered. As if vampires aren’t scary and disgusting
enough.
    “Some of them can. The
more powerful ones. But if they sent a thrall into Squirrel’s shop
to give hum bad intel…”
    I frowned. “It means they know who he
is.”
    “And his connection to us.
We need to get someone in that shop who can vet the informants.”
Nate shook his head. “Never mind that for now, though. We’re
burning moonlight. Take Luisa and go, okay. Give him the best
burial you can, kid. Corey deserves that.”
     
    Fresh Kills, in Staten Island, was the
largest landfills in the world—one of the biggest manmade
structures in history, a modern Statue of Zeus. It was so large,
they say, that it was visible from satellites in orbit. That’s
Staten Island, folks: the place with the dump so big you can see it
from space.
    We took the Cross Bronx to the Jersey
Turnpike, south a ways, then hopped across the Goethals. Even well
after midnight, the traffic was steady and frustrating and the trip
took most of an hour and a half.
    In case you’re wondering, a landfill
the size of a small island smells exactly like you’d think. We each
wrapped bandanas around out faces to shield us from rotten food
mixed with what could have been literally tons of dirty diapers.
Local rumors always held that the Mafia used Fresh Kills as a
dumping ground for some of its dirty work, so that smell could have
been mixed in as well: Corey’s wasn’t the first body to be buried
beneath the mounds of trash.
    I felt bad about that. I
hadn’t known him for very long, but he was a member of the Family,
and that made him my brother. Nate’s instructions rang in my ears
as the three of us dug: Give him the best
burial you can, kid. Corey deserves that. He was right: Corey did deserve a good burial—but no matter
how much respectful silence we lent to the proceedings, there was
no way this could be thought of as good.
    A squadron of seagulls swooped by,
squawking loudly. It didn’t matter to them that we were burying a
young man. All they knew was that we were disturbing their sleep
and making a mess of their food stores.
    After nearly an hour, Luisa stabbed
her shovel into a pile of decomposing pizza boxes and said, “That’s
deep enough.”
    We pushed Corey into the
hole as gently as we could. He bounced against the side and landed
with a sickening thwack . The plastic rings from a six-pack drifted down to rest on
his head like burial shroud.
    Luisa nodded, apparently in
satisfaction, and picked up her shovel.
     
    “Wait,” I said. Luisa
scowled, but I continued. “Corey you didn’t deserve what happened.
None of us did, I guess. We’re all just kids and we lost our world
to something that shouldn’t even exist. Who knows what your
life—any of our lives—could have been if those monsters hadn’t
taken it from you. I guess, deep down, that you knew this wouldn’t
have a happy ending. I’m starting to realize that myself. I can’t
promise that we’ll rest until every