The Midnight Cleaning Company

Chapter 28

Chapter 28

Four laptops were perched on bar stools in the centre of the dimly lit speak-easy. They streamed live news updates to keep us informed of the developing chaos. Fires raged in all corners of the city and the police were kept busy responding to a mysteriously large number of attacks on members of the public and a sudden spike in what was perceived to be gang related violence. Fortunately the Humans were unaware of the true extent of the carnage.

The Rogue Lieutenants lured the European Cleaners into ambushes by breaching The Secret all over the city. We stretched their intimidatingly large army thin and slaughtered the isolated Cleaners when they arrived weighed down with equipment and panicked by the imminent failure to fulfil their primary purpose.

By the second evening the Cleaners had begun to change their tactics in response to their crippling losses. Instead of stumbling unprepared into ambushes we had prepared they sent in a raiding party to scout the area before the rest entered with their black holdalls full of Cleaning equipment to dispose of both evidence and the witnesses we had deliberately left behind.

My phone burst into life and vibrated on the bar. The screen lit up and showed a juvenile photo of Andre sticking out his tongue, which he had taken of himself when entering his new contact number.

"They've taken the bait", his excited voice said over the line. "By the way, I'm not sure how I feel about being the bait".

"Ha-ha! Just get inside and make a mess", I laughed.

"I'm all over it... hurry up though", he said and hung up.

I sprung to my feet.

"Let's go!" I called to the room of comrades, interrupting the planning of their own attacks.

I threw on my tweed jacket and slid my snub nosed revolver into the inside pocket. Eight of us thundered down the narrow staircase to the street and squeezed into Josephine's taxi. The black cab roared down the street and tore through the city, cutting through red lights and weaving in and out of traffic and break-neck speed. We made the journey from Notting Hill to Hackney, traversing the whole city, in an impossibly quick time.

The cab screeched to a halt outside my old office. Three unmarked black vans were parked outside.

"That is at least fifteen of the buggers", one of Josephine's Lieutenants noted with a voice tense with nerves.

George patted him on the shoulder. "They wont know what hit them", he said.

Josephine, my Lieutenant Daniel and I took a few moments to tamper with the unguarded vans. Josephine and I knew enough about basic engine function to disable the vehicles, whereas Daniel achieved the same effect by plunging both his hands under the bonnet and ripping out fistfuls of wires and metal. After preventing the escape route of our quarry, I looked up at the building which had been my home for fifty years and scowled at the symbol of my servitude as if it had been personally responsible for my imprisonment.

Killer-Bee handed me a jerry can full of petrol. I splashed the contents over the large sliding front entrance. I handed the can to a Rogue under Daniel's command to continue to soak the perimeter of the building. He was to wait outside with a lighter, ready to engulf the building in a wall of flames should we not make it out.

We had to move quickly before the pungent aroma of petrol reached the European Cleaners inside and alerted them to our presence. The front door of the adjacent warehouse that had become an extension to the office was made of wood and far easier to breach than the metal entrance and the barred windows of the main building.