The Midnight Cleaning Company

Chapter 25

Chapter 25

I picked my way through the club, examining the occasional mutilated corpse, looking for one I recognised. The anxiety built into my chest until it evolved into panic.

I passed a gang of four Rogues who goaded and teased one of the last standing Cleaners. She was badly hurt, propped up against one of the mirrored columns struggling to stay on her feet. The Rogues advanced slowly, keen to enjoy themselves. She managed to shove one away but another punched her face. Her head shot up and I saw that it was Natalia. Her knees buckled and she slumped further down the mirrored wall.

I felt the clench of guilt as if a fist squeezed my intestines. She had only recently been made a Cleaner, perhaps she had not yet been corrupted beyond redemption. I did not know if she would be a threat if spared, but I could not watch her murdered before me.

I pushed between the Rogues and Natalia. They must have assumed that I wanted the pleasure of the kill myself for they backed off, only to stiffen when I helped her to stand and led her away towards the stairs to join Andre and Killer-Bee.

"Fleming! Fleming!" came the desperate cry of one of my Lieutenants, an experienced Rogue I had encountered several times during my time as Cleaner. He was bent double, struggling to catch his breath.

"Outside...Charles...Michael!" he panted.

I sprinted across the room, skidding on the pools of blood that swamped the floor and burst out of the fire escape my Lieutenant indicated. I emerged in a narrow alleyway used for deliveries. Both Charles and Michael were there. They had been hunted down and immobilized by George and Josephine.

Michael was sitting on the ground slumped up against the brick wall, tightly clutching the side of his neck where Josephine's teeth had carved a canyon in his flesh. Blood gushed over his hand. When he spoke he gargled and croaked.

"Diluted scum", he managed to say. "They will wipe you out..."

"Who will?" Josephine teased gleefully. "You said zis already but we are still 'ere".

George gave her a stern disapproving look. There was no need to rub our victory in the bruised and bloodied faces of our old colleagues.

"You know what we have to do", George said with obvious reluctance as he paced back and forth in front of the two captors. "You must understand that we cannot let you live", he pleaded with them, asking for their forgiveness to ease his conscience.

"I am not going to beg, you are just going to have to kill me", Charles said with a strange calmness.

Josephine had him pinned up against the wall with her elbow and snarled at him in response with her face so close that their noses almost touched. Charles did not flinch but remained aloof. He rolled his eyes.

George sighed deeply and ran his fingers through his hair. He slowly pulled the combat knife from the sheath on the back of his belt and turned it over it his hands, examining it closely as if it would provide a different solution.

Michael accepted that his death was inevitable. He was not the type to surrender and go quietly. He pressed his right hand tightly against the wound in his neck and began to scream obscenities at the three of us. George stooped down and plunged his knife into Michael's chest, piercing his heart.
My kind are rather difficult to kill. Our bodies are resilient and heal rapidly. The only way to ensure a victim cannot heal is to break them past a point of possible return. Obliterating the heart or brain is the most reliable method. In the case of our old colleagues we did not want them to suffer. It was like killing a twin. We were all once soft material poured into the same mould, pressurised, heated and beaten into the same shape. But George and I were different now. We had evolved beyond our original design. Charles and Michael were stuck in the past, mere tools of their masters. I justified our actions to myself by thinking of the murder as more akin to euthanasia; putting them out of their misery and that it was part of the laws of nature. The newly mutated and superior version has to wipe out all the previous incarnations or else be persecuted for their differences.