The Midnight Cleaning Company

Chapter 10

There were a few other occupied tables but I was not concerned about eavesdroppers.
An exhausted waiter strolled over with a forced smile.
"Two sirloin steaks, both blue, and four large vodkas with no ice if you would be so kind", I said before he had made it to the table.

He nodded and spun on his heel, taking the hint that we did not want to be interrupted. He reappeared a moment later with the tray of drinks.

By the time we had finished out first glass each, the waiter had returned with a steaming plate in each hand.

"Were you any good at history when you were in school?" I asked Andre as he began cutting into his steak.
"I weren't any good at anything in school" he smirked.
"Fair enough", I laughed, "Everything they told you was a lie anyway".
"Yea, history is told by the winners or some shit", he said.
"That's part of it. Only those left alive can tell stories. It is like a giant game of Chinese whispers. Those still standing look back and explain why the rest are not, and make guesses that get passed on and on until they metamorphose into what you were told in school. It has made it easy to maintain The Secret over time, for we as an institution are always left standing."

"What has this got to do with the rest of the guys freaking out and loosing their shit?" said Andre through a mouthful of steak.
"I told you already that I was turned during the First World War... The others in our department were also. A lot of Cleaners were created then, for there was a very large mess to clean up". I paused to eat a bite of steak.

Remembering from many trips to this café, that their blue steaks were gorgeously juicy, I had been salivating with anticipation for the whole walk. As I bit into it, a small amount of warmed cows blood seeped out and dribbled out of the corner of my mouth. I licked my lips to retrieve it but choked on the sour and acrid juices. It tasted like gargling a mouthful of dirty pennies. I spat the chewed chunk of steak into my napkin. Andre was so engrossed in his meal that he did not notice. I drained my second glass of vodka to wash the taste out of my mouth.

"A group of Rogues in France took advantage of the chaos of the Human war to rapidly expand. The thousands of young men dying each day and the abandonment of entire villages was the perfect smokescreen for their ambition. The Cleaners of the time did not realise until too late, by which time the Rogues had built an army." I said.

Andre was chewing his steak and evidentially thoroughly enjoying it while he listened, oblivious to my discomfort of discussing a topic I usually try to avoid thinking about.

"The only way to defeat an army, is with a bigger one of your own, so the Cleaners greatly increased their ranks", I continued. "Both sides turned thousands of soldiers from the front lines to fight their parallel war. The war dragged on indefinitely because of the inexhaustible numbers of fresh men the oblivious European powers kept sending into the middle".

To maintain my resolve to keep talking, I signalled with four fingers to the waiter. He hurried over with another two glasses for us both. Andre downed one in a single gulp. His face contorted in disgust. He pressed his hand over his mouth to suppress the urge to vomit and signalled for me to carry on.

"Eventually the Human conflict ended and the Cleaners in charge of the army realised the cover was blown. If the war continued then The Secret would be exposed."

Reassured that his stomach would retain the vodka, Andre had resumed devouring his steak. He nodded to show that he understood as his mouth was too full of bleeding beef to speak.
"What do you know of the 1918 Influenza pandemic?" I asked.
"The what?" said Andre, spitting small chunks of food onto the table.

"After the Humans war, a flu epidemic killed ten times as many as the war itself... Well that is how you would have heard it if you had paid attention in class... The Cleaners seized the opportunity of the temporary smokescreen to quadruple our numbers. We descended upon villages and turned the entire population. They woke from their mass graves to be press-ganged into our ranks, and with our superior numbers, we finally made headway and pushed the Rogues out of Central Europe."

"Okay", said Andre. He wiped his lips and took a sip of neat vodka, before making a face of disgust and changing his mind to down it in one instead. He went to say something but I interrupted.

"The tale is not finished yet", I said with a forced smile, meant to spur myself on but instead morphed into an uncomfortable grimace.

"Are you going to eat that?" Andre asked.

"Lost my appetite", I said, sliding my plate over.

He smirked, licked his lips and launched into the second steak.

"We thought that they were finished and so spent the twenties in Eastern Europe, mopping up resistance and cleaning evidence of the Elders, much as we do now except with a huge number of colleagues and resources. We did not realise until too late that the Rogues had been regrouping. They returned in the early thirties with twice our number. We had no excuse to hide this amount of disappeared Humans from the world and feared The Secret would be exposed. Fortunately the deaths of the thousands who were recruited or silenced witnesses, were assumed to be more victims of a purge that the Russian leader of the time was undertaking."

I had made it though the majority of my recollection and was determined to finish. It was the first time that I had spoken of the events of my early years in my profession. My chest was so tight that it was almost painful to do so, yet I felt a tremendous relief of pressure from saying it out loud that I wanted to continue.

My distress of relaying the information became clear to Andre, despite my efforts to conceal it and his engrossment in his meal.
"The continued warfare was even more ferocious than before. The vastly bloated size of the forces meant each side threw wave upon wave at each other until none remained."
I paused while I attempted to push a particularly traumatic memory from my mind and to down another glass of vodka from the table.
"At least it sped up the process of a war of attrition", I said, slowly shaking my bowed head.

"Four more double vodkas!" shouted Andre to the waiter who was loitering by the door looking bored. He sensed the urgency in Andre's voice and rapidly complied. Andre thanked him. We raised a silent toast to my fallen comrades and downed the liquid.

I cleared my throat and continued, "Eventually their forces were obliterated and we called it a victory. The battered remains of our army was camped in two locations in parts of Eastern Europe to maintain a close watch on the area and ensure no Rogues remained. We were confident that it was finally over but were especially cautious not to be taken by surprise again". I paused for a moment to take a deep breath and brace myself for the inevitable mental images that would accompany my recollection of events I had tried so hard to repress.

"We heard rumours that the Cleaners in the other camp were drinking Human blood... I remember dismissing them as the paranoia of people institutionalised by war, who couldn't accept that it was over... Shortly afterwards I was proved wrong when they attacked our camp. We repelled them at huge cost but managed to counter attack by following the fleeing survivors."

I had been talking so quickly to try and get it all our while I still could, that I was becoming breathless. I paused and took a deep calming breath before finishing.
"The Cleaner camp that had turned Rogue was still incapacitated after their failed assault and so could mount no effective resistance. We cut out the rot and slaughtered every single one of them, our own comrades in-arms".

I downed my last double vodka to help suppress the harrowing images that were flooding back. Andre was about to finish his but I took it from his hand and drank it myself.
We stared across the table at each other in silence. I was exhausted from unbottling memories I had been struggling to contain for half of my long life.
Andre evidently did not know what to say. He was so stunned that he had forgotten to finish the rest of the second steak.

"There was not many of us left by the end. The Elders ordered the survivors scattered around the world to work where needed", I said quietly, adding an anti-climactic ending to my tale. 
I prodded the check patterned table cloth with the tip of my steak knife.

We sat quietly opposite each other for a few moments, avoiding eye contact.
"Hopefully now you understand why we cannot start recruiting to solve our current Rogue problem. It only exponentially exacerbates the issue", I said, failing to keep the desperation out of my voice.

Andre nodded with a serious expression. In front of him lay the last bites of the second steak. One cold slice was still impaled on the fork where he had left it to concentrate on listening to my history lesson.
"I've lost my appetite", he said, following my gaze.

The waiter appeared at our table to ask if we were finished and to collect the plates.
I asked for the bill on autopilot. My focus was transfixed on the blue plaster on his index finger. I forced myself to snap out of it and got up to leave, placing a fistful of the office's bribe money on the centre of the table as I got to my feet.