Pretty Young Things

by Dominic McDonagh

  Leonard poked around the body cavity, a puzzled expression on his face. ‘No organs,’ he said.

  ‘What’re those, then?’ Robert asked. He was starting to feel distinctly queasy.

  ‘Completely necrotic,’ Leonard said. ‘They haven’t worked in years. It looks like her kidneys were still working in some fashion when you shot her, and her liver doesn’t look that bad, but the rest of it … I mean, look at her intestine. There should be a lot more of this there. It’s almost completely atrophied. It looks like most of her digestive system has just shrivelled up and died.’

  Leonard scratched his head, considering. If the girl had been living exclusively on blood, then she wouldn’t need much of a digestive system, but looking at this, it seemed she didn’t even try to digest it. That wasn’t the only thing that was bothering him, though.

  ‘No corpse lividity either,’ he said. ‘Her blood doesn’t seem to be coagulating where she’s lying. Has she been on her back since she was shot?’ Robert nodded. Leonard rolled the vampire over and pulled her jeans down. Her buttocks were revealed by the thong she was wearing, and were the same pallid colour as the rest of her. None of the bruising you’d expect from somebody whose blood was supposed to have stopped circulating and started clotting where she was lying. Leonard ran a scalpel through one buttock, and wasn’t entirely surprised when blood spouted. ‘Look at that,’ he said, musing. His mobile buzzed in his pocket.

  ‘I’d rather not, thanks,’ Robert replied. ‘It looked a lot better before you cut it open.’

  Leonard smiled. ‘Go and let Jay in then,’ he said. ‘Then we can take a look at the live one.’

  ‘So she got smacked in the face with a car door last night?’ Leonard said. Jay nodded. ‘Her jaw does look odd, but I’m not taking that gag out to take a look at it: the neighbours’ll complain about the noise. How are her teeth?’

  ‘Mostly broken or gone at the front,’ Jay said.

  ‘I wonder if they’re liable to heal up any?’ Leonard pondered out loud. ‘That cut on the other one’s cheek looks like it’s been healing up for weeks.’

  ‘It looked like her face had exploded when I cut her,’ Jay said.

  ‘Perhaps these girls have an unusually high blood pressure. I have a sphygmomanometer somewhere; just let me find it.’

  The live vampire girl was spread-eagled on the table, each wrist and ankle firmly fastened to a different corner. Leonard was convinced that the other girl was still alive too, in at least some senses. Her blood wasn’t circulating, but it hadn’t clotted, and the cells didn’t look as if they were dying. He had a strong suspicion that, whatever metabolic changes had taken place, the odd enzymes in the sample that Hilary had analysed were responsible. This was something that interested Leonard a lot. He was planning to extract as much of the stuff as he could from these two, once he was done with them. He had a suspicion that it might be very useful.

  The girl subjected Leonard to a baleful glare as he tightened the cuff of the sphygmomanometer around her biceps and started to inflate it. He wasn’t that surprised to see that her systolic pressure was very high. Admittedly, she was under a degree of stress at the moment, but that hardly seemed adequate to account for it. He’d shown Jay what lurked inside the body cavity of the other one a while ago. Jay was looking at it again now.

  ‘Chelsea has all this crap inside her?’ he said. He didn’t seem to find the idea reassuring.

  ‘Probably,’ Leonard said, ‘though I doubt that it happens overnight.’ He considered this before continuing. ‘She probably has a lot more blood inside her than you do as well.’ He picked up a scalpel and cut into the back of the vampire’s forearm. She sprayed briefly, then the cut started to seal itself. ‘That’s an incredibly efficient circulation system she has,’ he said. ‘You’d have to really go to town on somebody with this condition to do them any serious harm.’

  ‘I put a bullet through her friend’s gut,’ Robert said. ‘It didn’t seem to bother her all that much. It was the one through the neck that stopped her.’

  ‘It looks like that one went through her spine. Very lucky shot, that.’

  ‘So?’ Robert said.

  ‘So you’d be better off shooting to cripple rather than expecting to kill them by putting a bullet through their gut. They don’t have any guts to speak of. Maybe if you burst all these reservoirs of blood, it’d do something, but you’d be better off aiming at the head or the chest. They still need to breathe, probably.’

  ‘Shotguns,’ Jared said. Robert and Leonard both looked at him quizzically. ‘A shotgun shell close up will burst all these lumps you’re talking about, won’t it?’

  Leonard shrugged. ‘Maybe. No idea, to be honest.’

  Jared turned to Robert. ‘Want to see if you can find us a couple of shotguns?’

  Robert was a little nonplussed by this. ‘Er, what?’ he said.

  ‘We’re going to have to go after Chelsea,’ Jared said. ‘That pistol you brought isn’t going to do very well. Something that’ll turn anything it hits into dog food is a better idea.’

  ‘Are we?’ Robert said. It was news to him.

  ‘Yes.’

  They were interrupted by furious thrashing from the table. Leonard had just removed one of the live vampire’s fingers with a pair of bolt cutters, and was staring at the stump with an interested expression. ‘Closing already,’ he said. ‘There’s an artery in that finger as well. She should be spraying the wall over there.’

  ‘Can we take that gag off her without her screaming the house down?’ Jay asked.

  Leonard paused to consider this. ‘Of course we can,’ he said. ‘It’s just a matter of convincing her that it’s in her best interests to keep quiet. I have a sun lamp upstairs. I wanted to see, in any case, if it’s just ultraviolet she has a problem with, or bright light in general.’ The vampire started struggling again. Her bonds would probably give out sooner or later. Leonard slapped her, hard, which struck Jay as being akin to threatening somebody who had third degree burns with a cigarette lighter, but she stopped moving. However impressive her healing abilities were, she was still favouring her left leg.

  ‘Stop that!’ Leonard snapped. ‘I’m going to turn a sun lamp on you. The question is how long it stays on you. Any crap and you’ll be under it for at least 24 hours. Once we’ve seen what effect a small dose of ultraviolet has on you, we’re going to take the gag out so you can answer a few questions. If you behave yourself and keep you voice down, that’ll be the only dose of UV you get. Otherwise …’ Leonard paused. ‘Do I need to go on?’ The vampire shook her head. ‘Good,’ he said, and turned to Robert and Jared. ‘Give me a hand getting this down from the spare room, will you?’

  ‘I think I should go and see if I can rustle up some shotguns,’ Robert said. ‘It’s getting late, after all.’ He also didn’t feel like sticking around to watch whatever foul results Leonard’s experiments were going to reveal.

  The sun lamp had a striking effect. The girl’s eyes screwed up shut as though her eyeballs were trying to crawl inside her skull, and she writhed furiously, twisting her head so far to one side it was surprising her neck didn’t snap. After a minute or two of this, Leonard snapped the lamp off.

  ‘Photophobic, then,’ he said. ‘It looks like it’s just her eyes that are sensitive.’ He brandished a camera and fired the flash off into her face as her eyes opened. They snapped shut again, but there was less writhing this time. ‘Looks like it is just ultraviolet, as well. Pity. It’d make it a lot easier for you and Robert to get your girlfriend back if you could hold them off with a bright light.’

  Leonard leaned over the vampire. ‘I’m going to take the gag out now,’ he said. ‘Any unnecessary noise and I’ll leave you down here for the next couple of days to get a nice suntan. Is that clear?’ The vampire nodded. Leonard rooted in a nearby fridge. ‘If you behave your
self, on the other hand, you’ll get something to eat.’ He flourished a transfusion pack of whole blood and paused to let the vampire consider that, then pulled the gag out of her mouth. It was a large, red rubber ball gag and had been fastened in place with leather straps around her head that connected to either side of a steel shaft passing through the ball. It looked very uncomfortable. Jay had never used it before. She still didn’t make any noise besides coughing a little as it was removed.

  ‘Where are your friends going to have taken Chelsea?’ Jay asked as soon as the gag was removed, before Leonard had the time say anything else.

  ‘Warehouse,’ she said. Her voice sounded odd. Not only was she a little hoarse, but the extent to which her mouth had been messed up was making it hard for her to speak clearly. Jay found it frustrating that they’d caught this one alive rather than one of the others.

  ‘What?’ he said, reaching for the lamp. The vampire made an effort to control herself and tried to speak more clearly.

  ‘A warehouse,’ she said. ‘We’ve abandoned the place in Faulchion Close and moved into a unit on an industrial estate while we decide what to do next …’

  ‘Thank you,’ Jay said. ‘The address?’

  The vampire exhaled slowly and named names. ‘What are you going to do to me?’ she asked.

  If he hadn’t spent a day and two nights hanging in her cellar being cut with razor blades, Jay might have felt sorry for her. ‘If I don’t find anything at this address,’ he said, ‘I’m sure Leonard will be able to think of something very unpleasant.’

  ‘I’m not lying. Coral is renting everything on the estate. Unit 8 is sealed nice and tight so we have somewhere to lie low in an emergency. It looks like Coral was right to do that.’

  ‘It isn’t an emergency quite yet,’ Jay said, ‘but who knows how events will unfold? Is your den mother likely to exchange you for Chelsea?’

  ‘Not a chance in hell,’ the vampire said. She didn’t really fit the image that reading Keats’ Lamia had conjured up for Jay when he was in school.

  ‘Oh well,’ Jay said. ‘It was just a thought.’ He turned to Leonard. ‘I’ll go and take a look. Stick to cutting up the dead one until I get back, will you?’

  Leonard picked up his instruments and returned his attention to the corpse. He wanted to see how much blood he could extract from it. ‘Your turn will come soon enough,’ he told the live one. It would be hard extracting from anybody a large amount of blood that clotted this quickly. Leonard found himself thinking about extending a cannula into the heart, but that would work only on somebody whose heart was still beating. In the meantime, the swollen nodes clustered around the girl’s ruined intestines could probably be milked with a syringe, one at a time, if he could avoid bursting them. Leonard sighed and reached for his medical kit. This would be a lot easier if her circulation was still on his side, as her blood pressure would be eager to force its mass out through any aperture he could convince to stay open. That was going to be the tricky bit.

  ‘What can you tell me about this stuff?’ he asked the live vampire. ‘Has anybody told you anything about your physiology?’

  The girl started to answer, but Leonard’s investigation of the vampire anatomy was forestalled by the return of Robert, bearing a brace of shotguns. The guns were huge things that resembled streamlined totem poles.

  ‘Ten-gauges,’ Robert explained. He was obviously expecting Leonard to be impressed.

  After explaining where Jay had got to, Leonard made the best of a bad situation and had Robert help him extract the contents of the dead vampire’s blood reservoir. The sacs were pumped full of blood very tightly, explaining their tendency to burst if provoked, but could take a fine needle without popping like a squeezed zit. Leonard wasn’t entirely surprised to find that they stopped spraying quickly if the needle was withdrawn without draining them. He was forming a strong suspicion that the blood was the vampire, and the host body was just there to drag it around and keep it fed. It would be interesting to compare blood cells taken from a number of different vampires, as Leonard had an inkling that they wouldn’t be any more dissimilar than two samples from the same culture of slime mould. He was also certain that the blood was still alive, and would stay that way until the host organism’s bloodstream ran out of nutrients that the cells could absorb. Perhaps the sacs would start to deflate only as this began to happen. Leonard would be interested to see how long that would take, and resolved to leave a few of them intact so that he could watch the process. In the meantime, he contented himself with draining the bulk of them. It was a slow and tedious process, and by the time a few specimen jars had been filled, Robert was looking distinctly queasy. The live vampire didn’t look very thrilled by the undertaking either, though she watched it with wide eyes, her lips white and pressed together so tightly that Leonard hadn’t needed to reinsert the gag to keep her quiet. Watching him drain her friend was either scaring or revolting her, it seemed. Leonard carved open the corpse’s femoral artery to see if there was any clotting yet. There wasn’t, and violet blood washed over his hand for a second before the incision sealed itself. Leonard wondered if the platelets were stored inside the vampire cells. In a way, it was a pity the sample he’d arranged to have analysed had been examined by a biochemist, not a cytologist; but then he wasn’t at all sure he’d really have wanted a cytologist looking at it. It was unfortunate that he didn’t have the equipment to investigate her blood cells thoroughly himself. Maybe some sort of arrangement could be made with Hilary.

  When Jay got back, there was still a lot of untapped blood left in the corpse. Leonard had carefully removed a couple of full sacs from their roots and placed them in a petri dish. He had been working to excise a third when his phone had beeped, and Robert had hurtled upstairs to let Jay in at the front door. Anyone would think, Leonard mused, that Robert didn’t feel very comfortable watching him work. Robert seemed in a hurry to leave, and Jay had satisfied himself that the industrial estate was where he’d been told it was. There were still a lot of these warehouse units dotted around Manchester, and they could be rented or bought for very little, ever since the emphasis of local industry had shifted from fabrication to the media back in the ’80s. Jay was convinced that there was no earthly reason for the units in the estate to be locked up as tightly as he’d found them if they weren’t being used for anything. Leonard wasn’t sure about that, but at least it would get Jay and Robert out of his hair for a while.

  ‘Have fun playing,’ Leonard called after them, then waited. As soon as he heard the front door slam shut upstairs, he picked up the gag from where he’d dropped it by the vampire’s head. ‘I don’t think you have much else to say for the moment,’ he told her. ‘Open wide or I’ll turn the sun lamp back on.’

  The vampire meekly opened her mouth, and Leonard plugged it before she could change her mind, and tightened the straps. The last time he’d seen a woman look quite that miserable was when a Chinese entrepreneur who claimed to be connected to the Triads had paid him to mutilate his wife, a former model who was proving less of a trophy than he’d hoped for. Leonard had no idea if the girl had really been cheating on her husband, but he’d videotaped the entire procedure he’d carried out on her face, and still watched it from time to time. His client had been delighted, and had provided a fat tip on top of Leonard’s promised fee, recognising that acid wouldn’t have done anything like as much damage. Since being struck off, Leonard had often felt underappreciated by those who sought out his medical services, but always found it amusing that, despite having spent his mainstream career as a general practitioner, he almost always had to perform surgery on his more recent patients. He felt that he had the touch for it, and perhaps should have gone into that field legitimately when he still had a career, but reflected that limiting himself to a small selection of operations would have bored him to tears. On the other hand, he found the current situation fascinating, and looked for
ward to extracting from it all the information and entertainment that he could. He started by adjusting the restraints on the live vampire’s right arm, loosening and then tightening them to hold her arm stretched out from her side at full length. The wrist dangled over the edge of the table, but that just made it easier to clamp down firmly. Once it was fixed securely in place, Leonard tore the sleeve of her shirt away and reached for his instruments. The vampire’s faded blue eyes widened in expectation and horror.

  Rowena’s eyes widened as a scalpel was poised over the crook of her arm. It didn’t hurt all that much as it made a shallow cut into her. The pain came a second or two later as the blade was quickly slashed through her up to her armpit, parting the layers of skin on its way. The slit being pulled open, and held open with clamps, hurt even more. Rowena was almost grateful for the gag, as she was sure that she would have screamed without it. She tried to shift her arm, but the most that she could manage was to wriggle her fingers as her arm was unravelled above her elbow.

  Immersed in pain and thrashing helplessly, Rowena’s brain flicked back to her first encounter with vampires, Hayley and Caitlin, in an all-night café in the city centre maybe a half hour before midnight in either the late August or early September of 1990. She’d been minding her own business, nursing a cup of coffee at a quiet table, when two thuggish oafs had started to pay her too much attention.

  Rowena had been backed up into a corner by her antagonists when her knight in shining rubber had arrived: Hayley, dressed in a gleaming black mini dress from Skin 2.

  Hayley put the first thug down immediately with a sharp blow to the back of his neck. He was a big lad, and she practically had to stand on tiptoe to reach, but he folded up and collapsed immediately she hit him, though she twisted him around and kneed him in the face as he went down. His nose left a bloody smear over her knee. Hayley smiled sweetly at the second thug, who had paused in mid harangue. He had a faint Glaswegian burr to his voice, revealed in the couple of seconds when he’d been shouting in isolation after his sidekick had fallen silent, and he wore a shocked expression as he realised that a teenage girl in a rubber dress had knocked his friend out. Before Hayley could say anything, he took a step back and dug into his brown suede bomber jacket, obviously fishing for a weapon. Hayley dipped one hand into her cleavage and skipped forwards, then took a couple of steps back as his beer-gut split open and his intestines flopped out. Something clattered to the floor behind him as he dropped it and crammed his hands into the hole in his abdomen instead. Hayley’s next razor stroke severed his carotid, and he fell sideways, spraying like a fountain.