The Midnight Cleaning Company

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

I reversed the van into the ground floor of the office. Michael, John, and Charles had just arrived and were unloading their van of the bodies of the recruits they had gathered.

"How is your catch?" asked John.

"Nearly as big as yours", I replied, surveying the tangle of bodies propped up against their van. "Where are we going to put them all?" 

"Charles is already on that", replied Michael. "He is unlocking the warehouse next door."
"I haven't been in there in years, how is it?" I asked them both.
"Very dusty but not too bad", shrugged John.
A loud thump reverberated around the warehouse, coming from the adjoining wall between the two buildings. A dozen more deafening thumps shook the building until the business end of a huge sledgehammer burst through, followed by an avalanche of dust and dirt. The hammer was pulled back through the gap and replaced by Charles' leather gloved hands. He grasped the loosened bricks that surrounded the hole and pulled them out of the thick wall to make a passageway large enough to walk through.
"Let them wake up upstairs before we show them their new home", coughed Charles as he passed through his new doorway.
We carried all the new recruits out of the vans and up the stairs to the desks. We sat them in our desk chairs with their heads resting on the piles of paper on the tables like we had done with Andre. There was eleven new recruits and only eight desks, so three of them were laid on the floor propped up against filing cabinets. The team relaxed by the fridge, drinking pigs blood from their mugs. I stood with them, and chatted about our loose plans but did not drink anything as I knew it would taste horrendous.

Michael retrieved some bribe money from his desk and gave it to Andre to use to buy eleven sleeping bags. Andre had been looking uncomfortable since our return, glancing guiltily at his friend Marcus, so it was beneficial for him to be away and busy for a while. I tossed him the keys from the van I had just parked.
His eyes lit up, he forgot about his guilt and leapt down the spiral stairs to spark the ignition
"Get some light-bulbs as well!" John called down the spiral stairs to him.

Michael also left, taking the other van on a mission to procure eleven new uniforms and to drop off the forty plastic blood bags at one of our morgues.
The remaining team members filled in the paperwork required when a new recruit is turned and filed them away in the cabinets, stepping over the new recruits themselves to reach the drawers. I completed Marcus' form in Andre's absence. My desk chair was occupied by the body of the killer bee girl, so I leaned over the other side of the table while I scribbled away.

Andre returned after an hour with the sleeping bags and laid them out in eleven rows in the basement of the adjacent warehouse. He struggled to see in the almost pitch blackness, but after feeding from the killer bee girl I could still see perfectly in the dark. George, John, and I screwed the new light-bulbs into the dusty fittings and lamps. With the lights on this warehouse was not that much worse than ours, just emptier. That would soon change.

We loitered uselessly on the second floor for several hours. Eventually the new recruits began to wake, one at a time.

The first was the the man that George had found fighting the bouncers. He did not panic after waking, and seemed excited at the prospect of becoming a Cleaner. It appeared that George had explained much before turning him. He was full of nervous energy. He introduced himself to the rest of us as Nathan. He had a strong accent that he explained came from Inverness in the North of Scotland. Andre found him incomprehensible but the rest of us picked up most of what he said. He was in his mid thirties and not in bad shape. George took his recruit off to a corner. The two of them huddled together talking quietly. 

The next to wake had none of the excitement of Nathan. The homeless man that had bravely attacked me suddenly sat bolt upright from where he was slumped next to the filing cabinets. He looked around at the bare walls and floorboards of the second floor of office, looking lost and confused, I watched the muscles in his face change and tense as his brain pieced together the events of earlier in the evening. He glared with hatred and fear at the lot of us as we relaxed by the fridge. I poured some pigs blood from a plastic bottle into my own mug and warmed it in the microwave. John and I walked together over to the filing cabinets where the man was cowering. I offered the steaming mug of blood to him in the gentle manner one might feed an animal in the wild. He looked at the contents of the mug and back to me with terror, like I was monstrous. I saw that my presence was worsening the situation, so I left John to talk to him in soft soothing tones.