Pretty Young Things

by Dominic McDonagh

  ‘I’d noticed. I’m going to see if I can deal with the other one. Is there a back way out of here?’

  ‘There should be, but it’s been chained shut. We could just leave, instead of going after her.’

  ‘And then she’ll come after us, with the other three. Fuck that, Chelsea.’

  Jay paused, and scooped up Robert’s handgun. ‘I think Robert has another magazine for this on him, and it isn’t quite empty. If you can’t deal with the shotgun, you can probably use this.’

  Chelsea pulled her face out of Robert and took the gun off Jay, awkwardly holding it in her left hand. ‘Don’t get killed,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll try not to,’ Jay promised. He leaned forwards to kiss her on the forehead, then surreptitiously wiped Robert off his mouth as he turned.

  Michelle crouched on top of the glass-fronted bookcase containing Coral’s collection of vampire novels and sprang up into the beams supporting the warehouse ceiling. The case wobbled a little, creaking quite noisily, but the i-beam was welded in place and stayed silent as she caught hold of it and pulled her stockinged feet up onto it. She’d removed her shoes, as she didn’t feel that platform-soled pseudo engineering boots with springs in them would be terribly practical for either running around support beams or moving quietly, no matter how cool they looked. She’d been grateful that she she’d opted for a pair of the shorter New Rocks, as she had been able to kick them off almost immediately. She’d carried one a short way before dropping it, and had then shed her studded belt, which she’d been worried might chink or clank, and her black corduroy pencil skirt, which she could move more freely without. In this way, she’d left a trail for the tooled up idiot who’d tried to kill her, luring him deeper into the maze of furniture and other crap that hadn’t fit into the house in Faulchion Close. Michelle rose from her crouch and walked along the beam, heading up towards the skylight, silently and with the fluid grace of a gymnast pumped full of prescription painkillers. She felt like killing her erstwhile associate’s boyfriend before going after Chelsea herself, and that could prove tricky with him toting a shotgun the size of a baleen whale’s schlong. There was an upside to that, of course: the more overconfident he was, the more careless he’d be. With Coral and Sophie dead, he’d doubtless be feeling very cocky indeed.

  He had to go, Michelle knew. Now that Coral was dead and Rachael, Lucinda and Hayley were out playing, there was nothing else to stop her from skinning Chelsea alive. Michelle thought it would be interesting to see how long she’d live without her skin. Perhaps she could manage without it. Hayley would doubtless be upset, but Michelle thought she could live with that. She’d been astonished by the extent to which Hayley had tried to defend Chelsea, even daring to argue with Coral about it. It had always been obvious that Hayley liked Chelsea a lot, but Michelle would never have credited her with that much gall. Coral had sent her out hunting with Rachael and Lucinda to keep her out of the way while the rest of them started in on Chelsea. Michelle had been dubious that the method Coral had settled on to cripple her hand was likely to do any permanent harm that wouldn’t heal up eventually, but it had obviously been hurting Chelsea a lot in the short term, so she had been willing to put up with it and keep her doubts to herself.

  Michelle’s pussy still ached, and she didn’t have a lot of sensation left in her torn clitoris. That would probably improve with time and blood, but tearing out the ring she’d worn there was still something Chelsea was going to regret. Now that Coral wasn’t there to insist that she be kept in pain for months or years, Michelle was eager to kill her really painfully and quickly before Rachael got back. With Coral gone, Rachael was probably in charge. She’d want to take her time over Chelsea as well, so it was vital that Michelle got Chelsea’s boyfriend out of the way and did something truly ghastly and lethal to her before the others got back. She thought that she’d start by nailing Chelsea’s ankles to the floor, breaking her other hand with something heavy, and seeing how much of the bitch’s genitalia it was possible to remove using only her teeth. Probably not too much of it, but it would help her get warmed up while she thought of something really appalling to do, and it seemed fitting, given the interest Rachael had taken in fucking up Chelsea’s hand. There were tools to be had, after all. Michelle felt a faint stirring of pleasure in her mutilated groin as she pictured Chelsea’s reaction to receiving a battery acid enema. It would destroy the nerves, which Coral would doubtless have dismissed as crude, but Michelle was likely to have only a couple of hours to spend hurting Chelsea, rather than a decade or so.

  Of course, there was a minor obstacle to remove first. Michelle grinned as she watched him round a stack of packing cases containing every magazine anybody in the house had bought over the previous 20 years. Pushing them over onto him would probably part him from his toy, but Michelle couldn’t reach them from where she was without jumping off the beam. A better idea occurred to her as she studied how he was picking his way through the warehouse, and she began to tail him, stepping lightly along the beam that ran almost parallel to the path he was following through over half a century of clutter.

  The idiot never once thought to look up. Even if he had, the strip lighting was between him and Michelle. He was pinned out for her under cold light like a dead creepy-crawly on a microscope slide.

  Jay almost managed to avoid the vampire’s attack. As he edged between a pair of wardrobes (one in ugly ’70s moderne, the other a smaller, art deco affair), he heard breaking glass and picked up a flicker of something from the corner of one eye as the light above him went out. He ducked backwards instinctively, so the leaping vampire’s heels hammered into his shoulder rather than the back of his head. This meant he got his shoulder and his collarbone broken instead of his neck; but he still lost his grip on his gun. A lancing pain shot down his arm for a moment, then the sensation was drowned out as he was punched through the wardrobe to his left by the impact. The hard edge of something caught him in the chest, and he felt something break there. Then all the pain faded as it became hard to breathe.

  Michelle stepped on the shotgun and laughed. It looked like she’d crippled Chelsea’s boyfriend permanently, from the way he was holding his arm. If he was right-handed, he’d be unable to shoot anyone again. Luckily for him, he wasn’t going to live long enough to become an invalid.

  He was breathing in short, ragged gasps. As Michelle thought about it, she decided that this might have worked out better than simply breaking his neck. He was obviously in a lot of pain now, whereas if she hadn’t inadvertently warned him by catching her foot on a light as she’d jumped, she would have snapped his spine and killed him more or less instantly. She picked up the gun and placed it to one side on a coffee table. It might be useful when negotiating with Rachael later, she thought, but she wasn’t going to need it now.

  Chelsea’s pet was still struggling to free himself from the wrecked Pucci wardrobe. It was a pity she hadn’t knocked him through the other one, which was a lot more solid-looking, but he obviously wasn’t going anywhere with his good arm on the side that had caved in the furniture. He screamed as Michelle gathered a handful of his jacket and pulled him out of the wreckage he was lying in. The wardrobe had been full of video tapes, most of them recorded from the TV or copied by hooking two VCRs together. Michelle had been wondering where they’d got to: Coral had banished them from the house after acquiring a DVD player five years earlier.

  ‘Don’t be such a big baby,’ she told him. ‘Pain is the only physical proof of existence. Your body’s telling you that it isn’t dead yet.’ She rolled him over onto his back, then planted her foot firmly in his crotch and pressed down hard. She was surprised that he even noticed having his balls crushed, given the state he was in, but he whimpered as she shifted her weight to press his testicles into his perineum while she reached into the neck of her sweater. She’d taken to wearing a razor as a pendant since a drunken crusty had maced her for picking up the
girl’s boyfriend 12 years earlier. She’d been paranoid for a lot longer than that, mind you. Probably ever since Calvin had picked up a couple of girls to model for him at a fetish club and they’d turned out to be vampires. The studio had looked like an abattoir by the time they’d finished with him, and Michelle had messed the bed she’d been chained to when’d they turned their attention to her. She still wasn’t sure whether she was glad that Rachael had found her attractive or not, but it had at least been preferable to being bled to death. She’d been somebody then. Now the adornments that had made her a big deal had mostly melted or vanished as her body rejected everything that she’d ever done to make it her own.

  Michelle opened the razor. ‘If you’re not happy with that,’ she said, ‘I suppose I’ll have to put you out of your misery. Too bad. You won’t get to see what I do to that ungrateful little sow Chelsea.

  ‘Just two slices. I’m going to slit your eyes, then I’m going to slit your throat. You’ll die a lot faster than you deserve, really, but I’ll be wearing your blood all over my face when I kill your girlfriend.’ She leaned forwards and so lowered her centre of gravity, easing the pressure on his balls a little as she knotted her fingers in his hair and tilted his head back. Then she felt something press into her back, and started to turn.

  Chelsea had turned her attention away from what she was doing as soon as she’d heard the crash and Jay’s scream. She’d cursed passionately, then gathered up the pistol and staggered towards where the noise had come from.

  She still didn’t feel very good. Possibly she’d feel better after a good sleep on top of what she’d been able to drink from Robert and Coral (she’d not had time to turn her attention to Sophie), but right now she probably didn’t feel any worse than Jay did. She wished she’d tried harder to talk him into leaving.

  Mercifully, Michelle had been focused on Jay with an intensity that seemed to have edited out most of the rest of her environment. That was good, because there was no way Chelsea would have been able to have shot her at a distance. She didn’t bother trying to move quietly, just rushed forwards as fast as she could, and poked the barrel of the gun into Michelle’s back. Michelle was starting to turn as Chelsea squeezed the trigger. The gun jerked in her hand, but the bullet still went through Michelle’s torso at an angle.

  Michelle staggered off Jay, then turned to face Chelsea. Chelsea shot at her again. This one was aimed even more sloppily, but went through her hip, shattering it, and she collapsed. Chelsea stood over her and emptied the rest of the gun’s bullets at her. Most missed, but one went through her throat and another went through her chest. Chelsea wasn’t sure whether she was dead or not, but she’d be unlikely to cause any more trouble, which was good. Chelsea didn’t feel up to any more trouble. She looked at Jay and wondered if she could get him out to the car without killing him.

  ‘I told you we should have just left,’ she said.

  The tube that Leonard had sunk into the vampire’s heart, by way of the arteries in her arm and with a great deal of effort, was still pulsing. She should have had eight or nine pints in her body at most, if she’d been normal. He’d extracted easily twice that, and she was still bleeding. After realising how inadequate specimen jars were proving, Leonard had turned to storing the purple blood in demijohns from his abortive attempt at home brewing, and now he was running out of them. He knew that she’d fill this latest one as handily as the others. Her eyes were closed tight and her lips were blue, but her heart was still driving her bloodstream out of her. Leonard suspected that it would be a lot more reluctant to take the hint that she was dead than her brain had been, but it was still astonishing to watch. He had an inkling that the blood bloating the sacs in her abdomen was being released to compensate for what she was losing. Of course, it was draining out of the arm that hadn’t been dissected, because he’d left a hole that couldn’t be clotted shut, but her heart had no way of knowing that, and Leonard doubted that it was going to stop while it still had anything left to pump. He looked at the steadily filling demijohn, then went upstairs to rinse out the bucket he kept in the airing cupboard.

  His only real disappointment was how little the vampire had known about her condition, but she’d at least been able to suggest a better source of information. Leonard was going to wait until the next day before investigating that, though. Whatever these creatures’ frailties might be, he had no intention of risking running into one of them outside of daylight hours.

  Jay was drifting in and out of awareness as Chelsea struggled to drive to the A&E with one good hand. His lips were blue. She’d laid his palm open and drunk from him after dragging him out to the car, assuming that it wouldn’t make much difference at this stage, but very little had emerged. Chelsea had killed enough people by bleeding them to death to recognise shock when she saw it. He’d insisted that she take him to Leonard rather than the hospital, and had even managed to tell her Leonard’s address, but she’d ignored the suggestion. He was too far gone to have much idea where he was at the moment anyway. Chelsea herself was having trouble focusing. She wasn’t in much better shape than Jay was, albeit more likely to recover without surgery, so it shouldn’t have come as that big a surprise to her when she lost control of the car for a second and ploughed into something. The steering wheel rushed up to meet her.

  Chelsea was out for only a few moments. As she raised her aching head, she realised that somebody was trying to pull open the door on her side of the car. The door wasn’t playing. She fumbled with her seat belt. That opened fine. She couldn’t tell if Jay was any more of a mess than he had been before she’d dozed off at the wheel. Neither of them had gone through the window, at least.

  The door sprang open. Somebody was helping her out. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ she slurred. ‘I think my boyfriend’s hurt.’

  ‘You don’t look too clever yourself, love,’ somebody said. Chelsea was uncertain whether or not it was the man who was holding her up. ‘I’ve called an ambulance.’

  ‘This guy really is hurt.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Was that another voice? How many was that?

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Chavs,’ Chelsea said. ‘Chavs tried to rape me.’ She couldn’t see clearly and her eyes hurt. She didn’t realise she was crying. ‘They hurt Jay. I was trying to get him to the City General.’

  ‘Do you think she has concussion or something?’

  ‘She looks like she’s been head-butting a bus.’

  ‘Sit down.’ Was that another voice? How many people was she talking to? Chelsea couldn’t see clearly. She’d thought she was sat down. ‘An ambulance is coming. He’ll get to hospital.’

  ‘Good,’ Chelsea said. A thought occurred to her. ‘What colour am I bleeding?’

  ‘You’re confused, love. It’ll be okay.’

  ‘I don’t think it will,’ Chelsea said, then the world went away again.

  Sirens were blaring when Chelsea regained consciousness. ‘Can you see me?’ someone said. It was a stupid question. Of course Chelsea could see him. He was wearing one of those ugly, fluorescent-yellow, hi-viz jackets.

  ‘Yes,’ Chelsea said.

  ‘How many fingers?’ He had a beard, that much was clear. Chelsea thought he was a paramedic rather than a policeman. Policemen were why she hadn’t called for an ambulance in the first place.

  ‘Just the one, I think. What’s going on?’

  ‘You drove right across the middle of a roundabout, love. What the hell happened to your hand? Somebody said you were in a fight.’

  ‘Never mind that, how’s Jared?’

  ‘Your friend’s still breathing. He’s going to need surgery.’

  ‘He’s still alive? He’s going to be all right?’

  ‘He’s still alive. It’s too early to make any promises about the other. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You should be. Your bedside manner s
tinks.’

  ‘I think she can answer questions, but she’s very upset and she’s confused. That looks like concussion.’ He’d dropped his voice to speak to somebody else, who was wearing a peaked cap and a lot of navy under his ugly yellow jacket. That worried Chelsea. At least she could hear the conversation, which she probably wasn’t supposed to. Either she was regaining her faculties or her hearing was getting better because she was going blind. She could tell how many fingers she’d been shown, so she didn’t think she was going blind. ‘It might be an idea to give her a head x-ray in case she’s fractured her skull, and that hand needs to go into traction, but apart from that, she’s just banged up. Very badly, but nowhere near as badly as her boyfriend. None of the burns looks serious.’

  Had she really driven straight across a roundabout? She was lucky she hadn’t killed anybody. In some recess of her mind that remained perfectly clear, she was screaming until her throat hurt, but outside, where lucidity ebbed and flowed, she answered the questions she was asked.

  ‘You were attacked and then drove away?’

  ‘Yes. I wanted to get Jared to hospital. He was very badly hurt. Is he going to be all right?’

  ‘He’s on his way to hospital now.’

  ‘Can I go to hospital? My hand hurts.’

  (Chelsea was being clever: she didn’t really want to go to hospital.)

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘Somebody hit it with a brick and stamped on it because I punched him in the balls.’ Chelsea said.

  ‘Where was this?’

  ‘Outside a club.’

  ‘Do you remember which club?’

  ‘No. I go to a lot of clubs. This sort of thing doesn’t normally happen to me.’