The Midnight Cleaning Company

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

During the drive Andre asked the questions that had been troubling him since the early evening.

"What is the difference between them and us? Why do we serve them?" he asked, clearly disappointed with his place in this new society.
"It's all down to the dilution effect. The Elders stopped extending their bloodlines almost a thousand years ago. Each generation of newly sired Vampires gets progressively weaker as the ratio of Vampire to Human blood decreases."

Andre listened intently. I paused to speed through an amber traffic light at Dalston Junction.

"A millennia ago, the strongest of human warriors were recruited to the bloodlines. But they died in the battles for supremacy so were constantly being replaced. The Elders were disgusted at the weakness and impurity of the diluted recruits, so they prohibited any further extension of the bloodlines. The pathetic and broken newest recruits of all bloodlines were jumbled together as weak and unwanted misfits and became the Cleaners. Our role was to maintain the infrastructure of the society of our superiors. We are the deformed bastard sons of whores, left at the door of the workhouse."

I paused to observe how Andre was taking all this information. He looked seriously disturbed but I carried on anyway.

"But you and I are even weaker than the first Cleaners. To maintain a constant number we must create new generations, each more diluted and impure than the last. The further we fall from The Elders, the more exclusive they become. That is why you are filth to them. You represent the bleak future of the race. You remind them that if the Elders don't survive indefinitely, the Vampire race will become as weak as us."

By the time I had finished explaining, we had arrived at the morgue. Andre carried the leather satchel containing his carefully wrapped vials of human blood. He held it tight to his chest, as if clinging to the last fragments of his humanity would protect him from the apprehension he felt towards his new life.

We entered through a side door and I nodded a silent greeting to the morgue attendant. He was busy attaching transparent tubes to the corpse of an elderly woman, who lay naked like a pale prune on the metal table. Andre and I walked through to the refrigerators. I held out my hand to take the leather satchel from Andre. He hesitated but handed the bag over with a resigned sigh.

The walk-in fridge was full of cooled blood in storage but there were no other glass vials. On every shelf were rows of plastic boxes labelled with the age of the deceased and the blood type. Inside were half a dozen neatly stacked blood bags, coated in frost. The antique vials did not fit into the modern storage system so I carefully lay them on top of a pile of blood bags in an existing box labelled 24-A+.

A loud whirring noise followed by splashes told me the attendant had started to extract the blood from the elderly woman.

"No need to open her up?" I asked the attendant as we walked past.

"Na, brain cancer", he grunted. "I can smell the tumours from here but the blood is still good."

He slurped noisily through a straw out of a carton labelled 'goat' in black marker, while he watched the blood bags fill up.

Andre reached for the door to leave, but it was pulled open from outside. In strutted an exhausted looking Human girl wearing tawdry clothes. She stormed past without making eye contact and thrust a note into the latex gloved hands of the morgue attendant.

"A dozen pints of O-" she demanded in a bored and bossy voice.

The attendant turned to retrieve the requested blood but was interrupted by the door being pulled open again.