Chapter 14
I reversed the van into the ground floor of the office. Michael, John, and Charles had just arrived and were unloading their van of the bodies of the recruits they had gathered.
"How is your catch?" asked John.
"Nearly as big as yours", I replied, surveying the tangle of bodies propped up against their van. "Where are we going to put them all?"
"Charles is already on that", replied Michael. "He is unlocking the warehouse next door."
"I haven't been in there in years, how is it?" I asked them both.
"Very dusty but not too bad", shrugged John.
A loud thump reverberated around the warehouse, coming from the adjoining wall between the two buildings. A dozen more deafening thumps shook the building until the business end of a huge sledgehammer burst through, followed by an avalanche of dust and dirt. The hammer was pulled back through the gap and replaced by Charles' leather gloved hands. He grasped the loosened bricks that surrounded the hole and pulled them out of the thick wall to make a passageway large enough to walk through.
"Let them wake up upstairs before we show them their new home", coughed Charles as he passed through his new doorway.
We carried all the new recruits out of the vans and up the stairs to the desks. We sat them in our desk chairs with their heads resting on the piles of paper on the tables like we had done with Andre. There was eleven new recruits and only eight desks, so three of them were laid on the floor propped up against filing cabinets. The team relaxed by the fridge, drinking pigs blood from their mugs. I stood with them, and chatted about our loose plans but did not drink anything as I knew it would taste horrendous.
Michael retrieved some bribe money from his desk and gave it to Andre to use to buy eleven sleeping bags. Andre had been looking uncomfortable since our return, glancing guiltily at his friend Marcus, so it was beneficial for him to be away and busy for a while. I tossed him the keys from the van I had just parked.
His eyes lit up, he forgot about his guilt and leapt down the spiral stairs to spark the ignition
"Get some light-bulbs as well!" John called down the spiral stairs to him.
Michael also left, taking the other van on a mission to procure eleven new uniforms and to drop off the forty plastic blood bags at one of our morgues.
The remaining team members filled in the paperwork required when a new recruit is turned and filed them away in the cabinets, stepping over the new recruits themselves to reach the drawers. I completed Marcus' form in Andre's absence. My desk chair was occupied by the body of the killer bee girl, so I leaned over the other side of the table while I scribbled away.
Andre returned after an hour with the sleeping bags and laid them out in eleven rows in the basement of the adjacent warehouse. He struggled to see in the almost pitch blackness, but after feeding from the killer bee girl I could still see perfectly in the dark. George, John, and I screwed the new light-bulbs into the dusty fittings and lamps. With the lights on this warehouse was not that much worse than ours, just emptier. That would soon change.
We loitered uselessly on the second floor for several hours. Eventually the new recruits began to wake, one at a time.
The first was the the man that George had found fighting the bouncers. He did not panic after waking, and seemed excited at the prospect of becoming a Cleaner. It appeared that George had explained much before turning him. He was full of nervous energy. He introduced himself to the rest of us as Nathan. He had a strong accent that he explained came from Inverness in the North of Scotland. Andre found him incomprehensible but the rest of us picked up most of what he said. He was in his mid thirties and not in bad shape. George took his recruit off to a corner. The two of them huddled together talking quietly.
The next to wake had none of the excitement of Nathan. The homeless man that had bravely attacked me suddenly sat bolt upright from where he was slumped next to the filing cabinets. He looked around at the bare walls and floorboards of the second floor of office, looking lost and confused, I watched the muscles in his face change and tense as his brain pieced together the events of earlier in the evening. He glared with hatred and fear at the lot of us as we relaxed by the fridge. I poured some pigs blood from a plastic bottle into my own mug and warmed it in the microwave. John and I walked together over to the filing cabinets where the man was cowering. I offered the steaming mug of blood to him in the gentle manner one might feed an animal in the wild. He looked at the contents of the mug and back to me with terror, like I was monstrous. I saw that my presence was worsening the situation, so I left John to talk to him in soft soothing tones.
I leant against the bare brick walls on the other side of the room, continuously checking my wrist for my absent watch out of habit, I kept catching his eye as he glared over John's shoulder with hatred, until my scowl frightened off his gaze.
Waiting for all of the new recruits to wake became increasingly tedious. I was still filled to bursting point with energy from my prohibited feed and had no way of expending it. Standing still was maddening.
The petite scantily clad blonde who was slumped in Michael's desk chair gulped in a desperate lung-full of air and sat up. From eavesdropping on her conversation with Michael, I could tell that he too had explained quite a lot before turning her. Still she remained suspicious and looked around at us all with narrow darting eyes.
After her initial chat with Michael, he introduced her to the room while she stood next to him nodding occasionally. Her name was Natalia, she was originally from Belarus. He had met her at the strip club where she had worked until tonight. She wanted more from life than taking her clothes off for salivating idiots so acquiesced to Michael's offer. She struck me as far too serious for one so young. She never smiled but retained tightly pursed lips and a furrowed brow as if she was perpetually annoyed. This gave her a thin sour face.
One of John's recruits had woken, so John left the homeless man alone at the far end of the room to attend to him. The recruit was a giant of a man, built like a bull. His skin was a dark as onyx. His newly ice-blue eyes shone like headlights. His huge shoulders heaved when he tensed his heavily muscled arms upon seeing John. He jumped to his feet with the agility of a frightened cat and stormed up to John where he stood with their faces almost touching, like competing boxers at a weigh in. John looked minuscule in comparison as he strained his neck to hold eye contact. The huge man's big bright eyes sparkled with rage and his barrel chest heaved with each breath. John spoke to him too softly for me to hear and calmed him down, never breaking eye contact to exert his superiority. The giant nodded and sighed before walking off with John, listening intently.
My curiosity regarding that situation was immediately forgotten when the killer bee began to stir at my desk. Her jerking movement caused a cascade of paperwork to fall onto the floor. On reflex, she picked the pages up and placed them back onto a loose pile, before looking round wondering where she was. She peered around the dim desk-lamp lit room before seeing me leaning against the brick wall. Her eyes lit up with relief. They had changed to an ice-blue like mine, but oddly still retained some specks of her original green.
I was sick of standing around waiting by the desks so I led the girl down the spiral staircase to the ground floor. She looked around at her surroundings, examining everything with the wonder and excitement of a child in a sweetshop. She wasn't nearly ready to see the disposal room yet, so I subtlety slid the door to that room shut as I walked past. We walked together through the new passageway to the adjacent warehouse that had now become an extension, still having not said a word. There was an air of the sober morning-after awkwardness of a one night stand. Neither of us wanted to be the first to break what had now become a noticeably long silence.
"You never told me your name", I said eventually.
The empty ground floor space of the office extension seemed gigantic. My voice echoed around the whole building. The girl replied with a soft voice, almost a whisper. It lent an intimacy to our conversation. We were conspirators whispering secret messages, or lovers with our heads close together on a pillow.
"My name is Jennifer", she said with a nervous half smile.
"I prefer Killer-Bee", I teased.
She snorted with a little laugh but her smile rapidly faded. I could tell there was a lot of questions on her mind.
"I'm Fleming", I announced, thrusting out my hand. She shook it delicately.
"That's an odd name", said Killer-Bee.
"We only use one name here. My Christian name was William, but there was another with the same name turned at the same time so they used my surname. Even after the other William had died, the name stuck", I explained.
"I shall call you Will", she grinned.
"No... it's Fleming", I said.
Killer-Bee scuffed the toes of the high heels she was still wearing on the dusty stone floor and looked pensive while she thought of how best to phrase her many questions.
"Am I dead?" she eventually blurted out, abandoning the idea of subtlety.
"No", I replied, seeing her exhale with relief. "You were... but not any longer... it's complicated".
She looked even more confused. "What happens now?"
"Just do what you are told for now. We will train you in how to fight and how to clean", I responded in an attempt to comfort her.
"How to clean?" She repeated with disgust in her voice.
My laughed echoed around the empty warehouse, making me sound like an evil cartoon villain.
We heard Michael's distinctive Northern Irish voice through the passageway into the original office and so went through to investigate. He was standing halfway up the metal spiral staircase so that everyone else, who was gathered on the ground floor, could see him. The rest of the new recruits had woken now and were standing in bunches around the colleague that had turned them.
The homeless man was standing by himself behind everyone else. I approached him and Killer-Bee followed. He glared at me with the rage of a caged animal, exhibiting the bravery I had previously admired but now found irritating.
Michael began to address the gathering like a General in front of his army on parade. It was a pathetic army. Half of which was completely untrained and oblivious to what they were about to be forced to fight for, as well as every other aspect of their new life. Still Michael beamed down from his pedestal of the stairs with pride.
"By now you all know who we are and what we do", boomed Michael enigmatically.
"You have been granted a gift. You will never grow old, never get sick. You body will never wither and betray you by falling apart".
He paused for dramatic effect and to scan the room for the reactions of the new recruits.
"The Elders have bestowed this gift of immortality upon you, and you are to pay them back with your service".
I peered around at Michael's audience. Half looked naïvely excited, Killer-Bee among them. The other recruits did not look so pleased. They appeared either forlorn or furious at the news of the loss of their liberty and agency. This was most evident with the homeless man I had turned. He did not look once at Michael on his podium of the stairs, but continued to glare at me with loathing from a few feet away. I avoided eye contact.
Over the next four days, the old hands put the recruits through an intensive training regime. If they were going to be of any use in serving their purpose, they had to know how to fight.
Teaching such a soft and inept group was exhausting for the instructors as much as for the students.
The recruits were making relatively rapid progress, but that did not help my mood. The longer the training exercises continued, the increasingly irritable and impatient I became, for I had not fed since I drank Human blood straight from Killer-Bees' femoral artery.
The taste of our supplies of cow, sheep, and pig's blood was too appalling. The animal blood I had been contently drinking for almost a century, now smelt like hot tar and tasted like petrol.
On the third day my hunger drove me to force myself to swallow the foul thick liquid, but my stomach rebelled and immediately regurgitated it.
It was difficult to hide this from my colleagues, who had begun to query my foul mood. At the end of the fourth day, my frustration and need to feed had become unbearable. It was more than just extreme thirst. My skin was greying and drying out. My throat was so raw that I could no longer shout instructions at the recruits, and my mind was slow and groggy. Every joint ached and I felt dizzy and nauseous.
I was teaching the recruits how to incapacitate an opponent in hand to hand combat. They formed two lines facing each other on the ground floor of the adjacent warehouse that had become our office extension, and attempted to follow my instructions regarding where to strike to disable muscles and mobility.
The homeless man was not committing adequately, lumbering with slow and weak punches that were easily parried by Natalia.
"No! No! No!" I croaked through teeth gritted in frustration.
The man I had turned looked back at me, his eyes aflame with frothing rage. He was a fragile membrane away from allowing all that he had pent up erupting out in a violent and destructive torrent. I knew exactly how he felt.
"Like this", I shouted, grasping his right shoulder and spinning him around to face me.
I jabbed a short straight punch with my left fist, balled up in white-knuckled rage, into his windpipe, then one low curling blow under his ribs as his arms rose to clasp his throat. The loathing faded from his eyes for the first time and was replaced by desperation and pain as he gasped for air and started to loose consciousness. I sped along the process by sharply raising a knee into his face as he bent double.
"There... is that so difficult?" I questioned the group of recruits with obvious exasperation escaping my raspy throat.
They stared at me, mouths agape, and all winced when the dead-weight of the unconscious homeless man landed hard on the stone floor.
John and Charles had been walking around the edges of the large room, discussing what containers and equipment should be procured to store in here. John rushed forward when he heard the loud echoing crash of the body hit the floor. He dropped to his knees to check that the man was still alive.
"You almost killed Stanley!" he cried in shock.
"Who is Stanley?" I replied in my confused state.
John and all of the recruits looked at me as if I were insane. I tried to lick my cracked lips but my tongue was too dry and swollen.
"I'm going for a walk", I said weakly, avoiding eye contact with any of them. "Good job so far... John will take over the lesson from here", I continued as I backed away towards the door.
As I stepped onto the pavement, my knees buckled and nearly gave way. Aware of Andre following behind me, I kept myself upright through sheer force of will. I stumbled off into the night, ignoring his concerned shouts enquiring if I was all right.
My feet had become numb. The loss of the tactile sensation of my shoes pushing off the paving slabs was disorientating and caused me to stumble like a drunk down the dimly lit forgotten road. I felt that I would float away into the sky if it were not for the heaviness of my head, which my neck had become too weak to support and so lulled onto my shoulders. My vision blurred and the ground before me ebbed and flowed like the tide. Reaching the end of the road, I leant on the wall of a tall red brick building for support and to catch my breath.
The street that ran perpendicular on this side was a small and narrow pedestrianised row of shops. The shutters had been pulled down on the majority of them, but the neon lights shown brightly, blinding me with their illegible technicolour glare. Silhouettes of people walked up and down the pedestrianised road, going about their business. I was a junkie on a desperate quest for the next fix, and every person that strolled past was a smouldering spoon of smack.
I found myself salivating as I watched them from the wall where I leaned for support. They passed me like sushi on a conveyor belt in a Japanese restaurant; an interactive menu, exhibiting all their varieties of colour, shape, and scent. This thought brought a smug smile to my cracked lips, but it quickly faded when I realised that this was an impotent fantasy. The silhouettes were too fast for me in my pathetic state. Each one that glided past transformed into a living breathing person in the fleeting moment that they became illuminated by the neon shop lights. But they all kept walking, regressing back into a silhouette and fading into the darkness of the distance, teasing me with a tangible, edible mirage, before becoming a shadow and evaporating out of my reach.
But then I saw a slow moving shadow. It emerged into the neon glow and exposed it's true face. An elderly woman pushed a tartan grocery bag on wheels in front of her. Both the rusty wheels and her old bones creaked as she shuffled past. I saw my chance to pick off a weak one from the herd and lurched forward to seize it. I grasped the elderly woman's coat collar in both fists and dragged her backwards through the narrow entrance into the forgotten road lined with warehouses. I could not be sure whether I was hidden in shadows, or if it merely appeared that way to me with my deteriorated eyesight, but none of the pedestrian traffic that continued to pass either noticed nor intervened.
The elderly woman could not scream for help, for I had severed her windpipe in my vicious bite intended to pierce her jugular. I held her close to my chest, with my back pressed up against the corner wall. My eyes were closed as I consumed her blood and savoured every second. Both our heartbeats thumped in rapid unison with the footsteps of the people passing by just a few meters away. Until hers stopped.
The shock had given her a heart attack. Her blood, which had previously gushed out of the gashes in her throat faster than I could drink it, now ceased to pump at all. I was consumed with thirst and so sucked hard at the wounds to extract the remaining sustenance.
After I could drain no more, I let the exsanguinated old woman fall from my tight embrace. She dropped like a stone to the ground and slumped into a pile. Her head tilted back, causing her pale face to stare up at me, the expression of her last moments of terror frozen onto it like a carving. In a momentary hallucination, I saw the face of my own grandmother. A face I had not seen in over a century; a face I had believed I had long since forgotten. Suddenly she was no longer a shadow taunting me, or a weak member of a herd, she was a little old lady and likely someone's grandmother.
I was instantly so disgusted with myself that I felt nauseous. I would have vomited the blood I had just consumed onto the ground next to her corpse, but fought hard to stop my body as that would be the last insult to the recently deceased elderly woman, to waste the blood she had died to give.
I was breathing heavily, struggling to process the adrenaline rush and the rapid changes in my body as it clawed out of its recent state of deterioration and starvation. My muscles felt as though they were inflating. My entire body felt incredible, unstoppable and filled with energy; but despite all the endorphins that coursed through it, my mind was the opposite. I had still not broken eye contact with the dilated black holes in the face of the corpse which lay crumpled at my feet.
"What a fuckin' hypocrite", teased a jovial voice from behind me, snapping me out of my guilt induced trance. I spun around in panic, expecting with deep stomach dropping dread to see the betrayed faces of my colleagues.
I was oddly relieved to see three Rogues standing before me instead. Through my suddenly vastly increased olfactory senses. I could tell immediate who they were. They smelled like copper pennies and stale sweat. It dawned on me that they had found me by following the smell of blood, biologically programmed into our kind, like sharks, to track the wounded prey and sense weakness.
Dread gripped my mind like a fist clenching around my brain. The Rogues were a scouting party, scouring the area for signs of the Cleaners, to find our office and to signal an attack, and I had led them right to the end of our street.
Two of the Rogues laughed reading my panicked expression.
"What have you done to this little old biddy?" said the closest one, grinning and exposing his slightly elongated canines.
The guilt inside me turned to rage and fuelled a furious slash of a slap. To the surprise of both the Rogue and myself, my unclenched hand connected with his jaw and hurtled him to the ground. The Rogues had taken comfort in having me surrounded and had planned to toy with me, but I was a dangerous cornered animal.
With their friend still dazed on the ground, the other two launched themselves at me. As I found my centre of gravity, adrenaline rushed to my brain. My body tensed, my mind focused, and time appeared to slow down.
All three of them were dressed ridiculously and conspicuously. The two that rushed towards me wore long overcoats they must have copied from films. The flowing fabric signalled every movement they were about to make. The two Rogues lunged simultaneously. I sidestepped to dodge the wild grasping hands of the one of my left, bringing my elbow up into the face of the one on my right, whose momentum carried the bridge of his nose to meet it with a crunch. His head snapped back, and he stumbled away, struggling to maintain his balance.
With my already raised right arm, I struck diagonally downwards, striking the Rogue on my left on the side of his face with my palm. The blow dazed him momentarily. I seized the advantage to put all my weight into landing a punch to his solar-plexus with my left fist. The atrociously dressed idiot crumpled like a house of cards.
The Rogue I had first thrown to the ground was getting to his feet. I aimed a vicious kick to his face. I had timed it poorly, but my heel crashed into his forehead and sent him back down.
The remaining Rogue with the shattered nose looked at his two friends on the floor and turned to flee. I smiled a hunter's confident smile and drew my knife from its sheath on the belt behind my back as I charged after him.
There is no way in normal circumstances I would have come off so well in a fight against three Rogues, especially now that I have witnessed first hand the empowering effects of the Human blood they drink. The only edge us Cleaners had was our age. The Rogues are almost always younger and therefore more diluted. Judging from the almost parody clothes these three wore, I would guess them to be very young. This thought rushing through my mind as I chased after the fleeing Rogue filled me with confidence. The cockiness, adrenaline and bloodthirstiness, drove me to abandon common sense in my pursuit of the Rogue. I chased the young man through the heavily populated pedestrianised row of shops, in full view of dozens of members of the Human public. We both crashed through crowds of Humans, sending them tumbling into the each other. Several screamed when they saw the large knife I wielded. I ignored them and focussed solely on the fleeing Rogue; my prey.
The Rogue pushed through a group of late night shoppers, sending plastic bags flying around us, I lunged forward and seized the end of his long coat. I dug my heels into the tarmac and tugged hard, dragging him backwards. He tried to shrug the coat from his shoulders. I let go of one side and pulled with all my strength on the other corner, spinning him around. In a desperate attempt to stay upright, his feet splayed out sideways like a tap-dancer on an ice-rink. I released the coat tails and sprung forward, pulling my right arm back in preparation to plunge my knife into his chest.
The tip of my blade was inches away from the heart of the unbalanced Rogue when my arm was grabbed from behind. A strong force span me around to be greeted by a hard punch to my left eye. The other two Rogues had recovered and chased after us.
The one I had winded was still slow as a result. He approached in well practised unison with the other and tried to grab me. I slashed my knife across the palms of both of his outstretched hands and he yelped in pain. I was unable to avoid the blows of the other who had caught up with me. His two punches hit me straight on, I staggered backwards. The Rogue I had been chasing rejoined the brawl. From behind me, he stamped downwards onto the back of my shin. I gritted my teeth and tried to maintain my stance but it was impossible. I staggered backwards on top of him and we both fell. The Human public around us were all screaming now. Some dropped their shopping as they ran, but most struggled away with it, the plastic bags flapping like broken wings at their sides.
The Rogue behind me hit the ground first and I landed on top of him. The boots of his two friends immediately rained down on me. I slashed at them uselessly with my knife. The blade glanced off the toe caps before they kicked into my side and my face.
I thought better of trying to protect myself, and span the blade in my fingers, stabbing down behind me instead. I felt the knife penetrate the fancy-dress lace shirt the Rogue behind me wore, and plunge deep into his abdomen. I pushed the knife downwards and twisted and wrenched with all my remaining strength. One side of the blade was serrated for this purpose. The serrated edge chews up a wound so appallingly that the healing process takes much longer. It also causes absolute agony, which judging from the guttural animal screams of the Rogue right into my ear, he had just discovered.
I rolled off the chest of the screaming Rogue onto the tarmac next to him, using the momentum to pull my knife from his chest. The twisting had created ample space to pull it free with relative ease.
The other two Rogues aimed a few more kicks in my direction but they were more concerned with the cries of pain from their friend. I scrambled to my feet and regained my fighting stance: my knees bent, coiled like a spring on the balls of my feet, with my left hand out in front of me and my right clasped tightly around my bloody knife, pulled back level with my collarbone.
The two Rogues still standing had lost their stomach for a fight now that the odds were evening out. They glared with loathing as they scooped their still screaming friend off the ground and carried him off into the nearest alleyway.
When they had gone I returned my knife to its sheath and allowed myself to take some deep breaths to calm down before dragging the body of the elderly woman back to the office to destroy it, blaming her death on the Rogues I had encountered.
The Rogues now knew of our rough location. They would concentrate all their efforts on this part of East London, descend upon us in large numbers and come far better prepared.