The Midnight Cleaning Company

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

"Are you all right love?" a kind female voice pulled me from unconsciousness.

A car passed by the end of the alleyway and the headlights briefly illuminated her. She was a short brunette with big kind brown eyes. She wore a blue dress under a thin yellow cardigan. She was hugging herself to keep warm. Her chubby bare legs were covered in goosebumps.

"I came to pee behind this bin but you were slumped here", she giggled.

She looked at the blood covering my chest and said, "looks like you had even more wine than me". She had a soft and friendly voice and a sweet cockney accent that seemed anachronistic.

Half of my body was consumed by pain, but I was more concerned about the numbness of the other side. My head felt like it was being continuously run over by a train and I couldn't move or feel the right side of my body. I shakily raised my left hand and put it to the side of my head. I felt a huge dent. I pushed slightly harder and felt the shattered segments of skull give way like the top of an egg. The sensation made me throw up some blood, which dribbled down my front. The girl thought it was red wine.

"Hehehe! You're really fucked", she giggled. "You can't stay in this alley all mornin', there's all sorts of dodgy people around", she continued. "Would you like a hand up?"

She offered her arm to help me to my feet. I reached out wearily and took her hand. She smiled sweetly, looking me straight in my ice-blue eyes with her sparkling warm brown ones.

My grip tightened. The pretty smile fell from her face. I lurched at her, crunched my teeth hard into the soft skin of her delicate wrist and dragged her down to my level.

It was pure ecstasy as my teeth pierced her wrist and warm blood poured from the wound. My memory raced back to find comparisons to make sense of the sensation, but my bleak life failed to provide an adequate analogy to describe the effect. It was like the first sip of coffee in the morning, combined with the first gulp of a cold beer after a long day, both invigorating and energising yet paradoxically soothing and overwhelmingly refreshing. It was poignant that I had to recall pleasures from my distant human life to describe the bliss of feeding off humanity itself. The more I drank, the more intense my thirst became. I was consuming life itself, and clung to it just as desperately.
I did not notice the girl struggling until she had stopped. Her cold pale blue skin a stark contrast to the warm crimson dripping from my chin.

I had been so focused on feeding that I had not noticed the rapid healing. After I had drained the girl, I lay her down on the spot where I had fallen. She looked as though she was sleeping. She looked delicate and serene.

As I stood over here, feeling a mixture of: shock at my self-preservation instinct to feed from her, shame for killing the girl, and gratitude to her for saving my life, it struck me that I was standing at all. The function had returned to my entire body. I put my hand to the dent in my cracked skull to find it absent. My experiences with healing had always been fuelled by pigs blood, and while they were immeasurably useful, the process was a slow and painful one and could never have healed this level of damage. Far from the near-death state of a few minutes ago, I felt fantastic. All my muscles felt loose and strong and I was filled with energy. My senses had never been this heightened. My eyes caught every fragment of light. I could see my surroundings in such detail it was as if it were daytime.

I looked down at the girl again. I could not leave her exsanguinated body here, and I could not bring her back to the disposal room at the office, as drinking Human blood was strictly prohibited for Cleaners.

I pulled some bin bags out of the large metal bin I had dented with my fall and emptied the rubbish they contained onto the ground. I wrapped the bin bags tightly around her tiny corpse, along with a bunch of broken bricks I had found in a pile next to the bin. The process did not take long as I was well practised in the art of covering up murder. Although this felt different.