Chapter 9
"Are you all right love?" a kind female voice pulled me from unconsciousness.
A car passed by the end of the alleyway and the headlights briefly illuminated her. She was a short brunette with big kind brown eyes. She wore a blue dress under a thin yellow cardigan. She was hugging herself to keep warm. Her chubby bare legs were covered in goosebumps.
"I came to pee behind this bin but you were slumped here", she giggled.
She looked at the blood covering my chest and said, "looks like you had even more wine than me". She had a soft and friendly voice and a sweet cockney accent that seemed anachronistic.
Half of my body was consumed by pain, but I was more concerned about the numbness of the other side. My head felt like it was being continuously run over by a train and I couldn't move or feel the right side of my body. I shakily raised my left hand and put it to the side of my head. I felt a huge dent. I pushed slightly harder and felt the shattered segments of skull give way like the top of an egg. The sensation made me throw up some blood, which dribbled down my front. The girl thought it was red wine.
"Hehehe! You're really fucked", she giggled. "You can't stay in this alley all mornin', there's all sorts of dodgy people around", she continued. "Would you like a hand up?"
She offered her arm to help me to my feet. I reached out wearily and took her hand. She smiled sweetly, looking me straight in my ice-blue eyes with her sparkling warm brown ones.
My grip tightened. The pretty smile fell from her face. I lurched at her, crunched my teeth hard into the soft skin of her delicate wrist and dragged her down to my level.
It was pure ecstasy as my teeth pierced her wrist and warm blood poured from the wound. My memory raced back to find comparisons to make sense of the sensation, but my bleak life failed to provide an adequate analogy to describe the effect. It was like the first sip of coffee in the morning, combined with the first gulp of a cold beer after a long day, both invigorating and energising yet paradoxically soothing and overwhelmingly refreshing. It was poignant that I had to recall pleasures from my distant human life to describe the bliss of feeding off humanity itself. The more I drank, the more intense my thirst became. I was consuming life itself, and clung to it just as desperately.
I did not notice the girl struggling until she had stopped. Her cold pale blue skin a stark contrast to the warm crimson dripping from my chin.
I had been so focused on feeding that I had not noticed the rapid healing. After I had drained the girl, I lay her down on the spot where I had fallen. She looked as though she was sleeping. She looked delicate and serene.
As I stood over here, feeling a mixture of: shock at my self-preservation instinct to feed from her, shame for killing the girl, and gratitude to her for saving my life, it struck me that I was standing at all. The function had returned to my entire body. I put my hand to the dent in my cracked skull to find it absent. My experiences with healing had always been fuelled by pigs blood, and while they were immeasurably useful, the process was a slow and painful one and could never have healed this level of damage. Far from the near-death state of a few minutes ago, I felt fantastic. All my muscles felt loose and strong and I was filled with energy. My senses had never been this heightened. My eyes caught every fragment of light. I could see my surroundings in such detail it was as if it were daytime.
I looked down at the girl again. I could not leave her exsanguinated body here, and I could not bring her back to the disposal room at the office, as drinking Human blood was strictly prohibited for Cleaners.
I pulled some bin bags out of the large metal bin I had dented with my fall and emptied the rubbish they contained onto the ground. I wrapped the bin bags tightly around her tiny corpse, along with a bunch of broken bricks I had found in a pile next to the bin. The process did not take long as I was well practised in the art of covering up murder. Although this felt different.
Usually when I clean up puddles of blood or dispose of bodies, I feel nothing but a detached professionalism. This time along with a whole menu of new sensations caused by consuming human blood, I felt guilty. This was as much about covering up my shame as it was covering up evidence.
As I hurriedly secured the bin bags to hide my indiscretion, the silence in the alleyway was pierced by a high-pitched beeping. A silly tune chimed out from a small pink handbag on the ground. To my heightened senses the noise seemed deafening. I opened the bag to investigate. It contained a small green purse, some keys, and a mobile phone. A text message flashed across the screen saying,
"Ffs how long does it take you to piss!? Xx"
Panicked that the girl's friends would soon come looking for her, I scooped the black plastic wrapped girl onto my shoulder to carry her to the canal.
Thankfully it was late for even the revellers of Camden to be stumbling home, so the area was deserted. I strode quickly through the back-streets to Camden Lock. The girl and the bricks were almost weightless to me. I hurried to the waters edge and tossed the girl in. She landed in the centre with a loud splash. Bubbles oozed out of the bag as it sank beneath the black water.
I glanced around to make sure there were no witnesses, and hurried to leave the scene of my crime.
I decided to dump the girl's handbag in a separate place to be safe. A couple of streets away, I smashed the girl's phone under my heel and kicked it down a drain. I emptied her purse of the fifty pound note it contained and dropped her keys and empty bag into the sewer.
Leaning against the brick wall the empty market courtyard, I fought to calm my rapid breathing. Loud noises from impossible distances disoriented me: the scratches of rats' claws in the sewer beneath, the hiss of a bicycle chain in an adjacent road, and snores of sleeping residents all along the street. The overwhelming detail of sounds from so far and so close forged a violent amalgamation in my head. I shut my eyes to concentrate but only succeeded in feeling like I was spinning and zooming in and out of focus.
I opened them again to ground myself. My heightened sight was not as sickening. The colours and details were beautiful.
It had been almost a century since I had seen any natural colours except degrees of greys, blues and blacks that form the limited pallet of the evening. Now my eyes detected the faintest glimmers of light, illuminating all the subtleties I had been missing.
Distracted by all the colours around me, I failed to notice that the sun was beginning to rise. I checked my watch and saw that it was broken. The glass face had smashed in my four-story fall and the hands had frozen at half past four. I had no idea how long I had been unconscious so set off at a jog for the high street.
The watch had been given to me by my father in 1916, the day before I went to war. I removed it from my wrist and turned it over. It had an engraving on the back, but almost a century of sweat and friction had worn away all the words except one, "duty". I could not remember the rest of the original message.
I reached the high street and dropped my broken watch into a bin I was hurrying past. A black cab was driving by with the orange vacancy light on, so I flagged it down.
"Take me to Hackney, fast!" I instructed the driver and handed him the fifty pound note I had taken from the girl. He nodded and slammed his foot down.
The taxi pulled up around the corner from the office. The sun had not finished rising but I was already starting to feel enfeebled. I wished the cab driver a good day and set off at a fast walk down the street lined with vacant warehouses. I pulled the key from my pocket and turned it in the old lock. The door opened stiffly.
As I stepped over the threshold I was greeted by the unmistakable sound of three guns being cocked and aimed at my head. A hand grabbed the front of my shirt, dragged me inside and pushed me backwards up against the inside of the large door.
In front of me stood George. When he realised who I was he did not lower his gun, nor release me, but maintained eye contact with a warlike scowl.
"How the fuck did you survive that?" came Michael's Northern Irish twang from behind George.
"The bullet went right through and a bin broke my fall", I replied, not telling any lies.
"There's not a scratch on you", said George suspiciously as he looked me up and down.
"Can't say the same for the bin", I replied, holding George gaze as I pushed his gun aside.
"Try to contain your joy that he survived guys", said Andre from the far side of the large room.
"I'm glad your not dead bruv", he said to me, raising the mug of pigs' blood he was sipping.
"We are all pleased that you survived", said John, holstering his pistol.
"Means one less we have to recruit", he said, directed at Michael and Charles.
They had evidently been debating methods of taking down the Rogues more successfully than last night.
"You were already planning a recruitment drive?" I asked.
"Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it", said Charles glumly.
"We have to exterminate the Rogues but they vastly outnumber us", replied John in an attempt to justify himself.
Andre, who had finished putting away equipment, leant on the side of one of the vans to listen, intrigued by the raised voices.
"What are you arguing about now?" he asked.
"Better unpack all that equipment, there is going to be a lot more bodies to clean up", I said bitterly, glaring at John and Michael.
"Fuck you!" spat Michael, "we don't have a choice".
"The world doesn't work that way any more. You can't forcibly recruit an army and fight pitched battles and expect no one to notice. It's not just all the witnesses, it's the witnesses with smart phones sharing everything with the whole world. We might as well announce The Secret in an advert on television!", I said.
"If you have any alternative ideas let's hear them!" snarled John.
Both Charles and I remained quiet. John shook his head, muttering obscenities to himself as he stormed off down the stairs to bed. I left the awkward silence to ascend the stairs to my desk and to get a drink.