The Midnight Cleaning Company

Chapter 26

Chapter 26

I suffered through a long morning of panic and confusion. Their morale deflated, their excited energy depleted, the army whispered in scared voices to each other while they set about the morbid task of carrying the several hundred decomposing corpses down to the basement. I could not face them so retreated to my room with a bottle of vodka, one glass and two morgue blood bags.

It was not just the rank and file who were nervous and disheartened. I was scared. The fear sapped at my energy and resolve. The army of Rogues had no idea of the devastation that just one Elder could unleash. They were impossibly fast and strong, but more than anything else they were excruciatingly bored. A thousand years is a long time. They jostled for social capital in their elitist society but had no outlet for the death and destruction that they were biologically primed to inflict. Now that they had heard of our rebellion and the failure of the Cleaners to contain it, they would be frothing at the mouth with excitement at the thought of the potential social gains and of the entertainment value of a massacre.

Andre knocked at my door. I invited him in and poured a few splashes of both the blood and the vodka into yesterdays unwashed glass for him. He took it and flashed me an exhausted smile.

"What are we gonna do?" he asked.

I shrugged and finished my drink.

"Can we fight them?" he continued tentatively, already aware of the answer.

I slowly refilled my glass, squeezing the last dregs from the second blood bag into my glass and mixing it with a couple of measures of vodka.

"We will have to lay low. When faced with an overwhelmingly superior enemy the only possible course of action is guerilla warfare", I said.

"Can we pull it off?" Andre asked, betraying hope and naïve optimism.

"Hit them hard and fast, then disappear", I began.

"I know what it involves", Andre interrupted, "but could it work?"

"Maybe", I said.

The hope drained from him. He took a big gulp of his drink.

"The Rogues in The War had time on their side but they fought the same way they always had, throwing bodies at the conflict until the problem is buried beneath the corpses. If we fight smarter than that then we could make it through this", I added to revive his optimism.

I was not certain if he believed me and I doubted my own bravado, but I needed him to have faith so that I could syphon off some of his hope and optimism for myself, like a parasite; like a vampire.

I gathered my twenty one Lieutenants and their charges who had survived the battle. To each Lieutenant I handed an old mobile phone, several thousand pounds in role of notes from the club's safe and a dozen of the blood bags raided from the morgues, to sustain themselves and their troops while they lay low and awaited instructions.

"Keep these with you at all times. The only way we will win... and we will win, is if we are coordinated", I shouted as I paced back and forth in front of the one hundred Rogues gathered before me.

"Follow your orders. Strike hard and fast and then vanish", I instructed. "Oh and look after yourselves... and don't attract any unnecessary attention".

My attempt at a morale rousing speech had started strong but faded out. I had no clue what I was doing. I hoped that it was not as obvious to my troops as it felt to me. Feeling their eyes still on me, I walked over to the bar and downed one last whisky before marching out of the door, leaving my Lieutenants to issue instructions to their charges.