Pretty Young Things

by Dominic McDonagh

‘It doesn’t normally happen to anyone.’ He paused and his tone changed slightly. ‘This is a complete waste of time. We’re not going to get anything out of her while she’s in this state. I’m going to take her to Casualty and then somebody can try again in the morning.’ There were odd crackles of static. Chelsea knew that they should mean something, but she couldn’t quite grasp what it was.

  ‘Okay, I’ll take you to hospital now,’ he said. ‘Do you mind answering some questions in the morning?’

  ‘No,’ Chelsea said. She’d be asleep in the morning.

  The A&E was a wasps’ nest that somebody had shot with an air gun, buzzing furiously and radiating pain. A pile-up had just happened, and the spare parts were being cut out of the wrecks. Chelsea was glad that somebody had got help for Jay before that had arrived to push him down the queue. She was starting to feel a little better, and clarity had brought guilt with it, to prey on her mind.

  ‘Where’s my boyfriend?’ Chelsea asked the nurse who was looking at her hand.

  ‘He’s in surgery.’

  ‘Is he going to be all right?’

  ‘He’ll live. Does that hurt?’

  Chelsea hissed through her teeth. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You can still feel it, then. That’s something.’

  ‘Have they crippled me?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. We’ll need an x-ray of this. Can you come with me?’

  The radiology department was a lot quieter. Chelsea thought that she could probably find her way to another exit from here. Somebody spread her hand out on a plate and zapped it with a dose of hard radiation, then arranged to stick her head in a drum so they could check that she hadn’t fractured her skull. Her hand felt a little better now that she’d had her fingers straightened out, but she still couldn’t move them.

  ‘It’ll be about an hour,’ someone told her. ‘You probably haven’t fractured your skull, but it’s as well to be sure, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is,’ Chelsea agreed. She wondered what time it was. She was probably being kept on hold while they investigated inside heads that had been broken in the pile-up, as there wasn’t anybody else in the small waiting room she was in.

  When she was left alone, Chelsea stood up and started looking for an exit. She wandered deeper into the hospital rather than retracing her steps back to casualty. Somebody might notice her leaving there. She headed up a staircase, as she couldn’t hear anybody moving around up there. It looked like a ward where people were convalescing from surgery. Somebody had a bag full of plasma dripping into his arm. Chelsea ripped it open and sucked most of the contents out. It was cold, its texture was vile and it tasted worse, but it filled her up, and hopefully she’d be able to get some benefit from it. After that, she continued on her way. She was hoping for a fire escape, but she’d settle for a window or a way up to the roof. Anything that would get her out of the place before somebody came looking for her. She’d given Jared’s flat as her address, which after the fiasco there the other night probably wasn’t too smart.

  She found a wall-length window at the top of another staircase, but that didn’t look like it was going to open, and she was sure that breaking it would set off a dozen alarms. Chelsea leaned against it for a moment, sighing heavily, then headed downstairs again. There was a door there that was unlocked, and didn’t look like it was going to set off an alarm. She opened it, and found herself in a car park where a couple of older women in surgical scrubs were smoking and talking quietly between themselves. Chelsea gave them a wide berth, and they didn’t notice her as she made her way out towards the main road. Recalling the address Jay had given her in the car, she realised that it’d take her a couple of hours to walk to Leonard’s, but she was confident that she could manage that before dawn, and there was nowhere else that she could think of to go for help. Nobody had taken a blood sample or got much more out of her than her name or Jay’s address, so she hadn’t done that badly, given that she was probably legally dead.

  Things could be worse.

  Chelsea had to remind herself of that with every step she took.

  6: You’re Lost, Little Girl

  Leonard was woken by somebody hammering on his door at 3.00 in the morning. This wasn’t a usual occurrence for a struck off doctor who didn’t have the Daily Mail baying for his head over euthanasia allegations. The last time he’d had an insistent caller during the wee hours, he’d still been practising, and it’d been a junkie who’d turned up to demand a prescription for methadone. On this occasion it was a vampire who looked like roadkill from a particularly ghoulish Charles Adams cartoon.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ Leonard asked. Chelsea swayed a little as she answered. She didn’t look as though she’d had a very good night.

  ‘Car crash,’ she replied. ‘Jay’s in casualty and the police might be looking for me. I left the hospital as soon as I could, but they might have got a good enough look at me to start wondering. I wasn’t thinking very clearly for a while.’

  ‘Probably not,’ Leonard admitted. After what he’d found inside the couple of vampires he’d cut up, he didn’t think it would be very hard for a paramedic to start finding anomalies inside Chelsea. ‘What happened to your hand?’

  ‘Rachael broke my fingers,’ Chelsea said. ‘Then she twisted all the joints and wrapped it up into a fist. I think I’d done something to upset her.’ Leonard couldn’t tell whether the girl was dazed or being sarcastic. He supposed that the two weren’t mutually exclusive.

  ‘Can you move your fingers any?’

  ‘My thumb, a little.’

  ‘You should have it put into traction immediately, but you’re probably not up for that, I take it.’

  Chelsea laughed at that one. ‘No way.’

  ‘I’ll splint it for you, but you need to have an osteopath look at this.’

  ‘Maybe it’ll grow back if I cut it off at the wrist,’ Chelsea said. ‘Coral claims that her fiancé was shot through the head in the Crimea and eventually recovered from that. Of course, he lost most of his memory and his personality along with his brain, and it took him 50 years.’

  Leonard wasn’t sure if she was speaking to him or to herself. He got the impression that the girl’s mind wasn’t firing on all of its cylinders at the moment. Concussion could do that. ‘That’s probably a little extreme, yet. Does it hurt?’

  Chelsea came out with a glare so withering that Leonard almost flinched under it. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t have any physical responses to anything and don’t notice if somebody tortures me.’

  ‘I’ll get you a painkiller,’ Leonard said. ‘Hopefully morphine will do some good.’

  ‘I’d settle for it not doing any harm,’ Chelsea said. ‘It probably can’t hurt. Cocaine seems to work okay. Michelle was a massive coke whore. She never picked up a bloodcalf who wasn’t carrying. She loved that shit.’

  Leonard wondered how to deal with this. Chelsea was obviously agitated, which was worrying given that she could dismantle him with her bare hands if she took it into her head. The fact that she had the use of only one of them wouldn’t slow her down much. A nice big dose of morphine was probably the best thing for her.

  ‘I’ll give you a shot, then see if I can do anything for your hand,’ he said.

  Chelsea seemed quite blasé about needles, and simply watched dully as Leonard sank the syringe into her upper arm, emptied it and then withdrew it. ‘It’ll take a while to work,’ Leonard told her. He’d brought it up from the cellar, thinking it inadvisable to take her down there and let her see what he’d done to her former housemates.

  ‘How long?’ Chelsea asked.

  Leonard shrugged. ‘Not long, probably. It depends on your metabolism. No more than five minutes.’ Once she’d started nodding out, he’d splint her hand and put her in the back room. ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘I ate before leaving
the hospital.’ Leonard’s habitual pokerface slipped as images of Chelsea lapping up blood out of somebody on an operating table flitted through his head. Chelsea smiled at his expression and continued, sleepily. ‘Just one of those bags of blood. I didn’t bleed anybody there. Horrible stuff. Tastes really foul. Whatever they do to filter it really fucks it up.’

  ‘A friend of yours really recovered from having his head blown off?’ This notion had lodged in Leonard’s head like an irritating novelty song.

  ‘I never met him. He wasn’t any friend of mine. Neither was Coral really; we were all her little harem of serfs and sex toys. Nasty old hag.’

  ‘I’d have thought a bullet through the head would kill you. From what I’ve seen, massive blood loss and injuries to the central nervous system are about all that work.’

  ‘I don’t think it was a very big bullet. He was kept in a room and fed for decades before he was anything more than a vegetable. Of course, Coral might not have been telling the truth. She claims that she fled from her marriage because he wasn’t the same person after he recovered …’

  (Leonard could believe that. Growing a new brain or part thereof wouldn’t leave much in the way of memories or personality, he guessed.)

  ‘… but she could well have been lying. The story often changed. Personally, I think she didn’t want to be forced into an arranged marriage because she preferred girls, and she just lied about the details.’

  Leonard cleared his throat. ‘We can talk about this later,’ he said. ‘That painkiller’s coming down on you pretty heavy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Chelsea agreed, ‘it is. Am I nodding out?’

  ‘I think so. Will you be okay in the spare bedroom until it gets dark again? There’s a heavy curtain in there.’

  ‘I’d imagine so,’ Chelsea said. Her voice was starting to slur a little, so the morphine was definitely kicking in. ‘Can you help Jay? I had to give them his address. He’s a real mess, and I think he’s probably in a lot of trouble.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can do anything. I can probably find out what kind of shape he’s in, at least. I’ll go to the hospital tomorrow. I know some of the staff there.’ Leonard paused. ‘You don’t need to eat, or anything?’

  ‘No.’

  Leonard hoped that the opiate wouldn’t make her sick. Her friend in the cellar had puked her guts up after the morphine had started working, but at least she’d done that in the cellar where it was easy to clean up. He shuddered to think what sort of ghastly, incriminating mess Chelsea would leave all over the bedsheets in the spare room if she vomited.

  ‘Hand still hurt?’ he asked

  ‘Some. It isn’t as bad. Duller.’

  ‘The shot’s working, then. I’d better get you into bed before you fall down.’

  Chelsea nodded. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  Upstairs, she burrowed under the duvet and rolled onto her side, hiding her face in the bedclothes.

  Leonard left her there, then walked downstairs, humming softly to himself. She was going to be out of action for at least 18 hours, even if she did sleep off the morphine in a hurry. It would still be an idea to lock up the cellar before leaving the house in the morning, though. Even if Chelsea wasn’t mobile during daylight, the notion of her finding the remains of her friends down there just didn’t bear thinking about. Luckily, she’d been far too groggy to ask what he meant about exsanguination killing vampires.

  Jay was a little dismayed to wake up in hospital. His arm was in traction, so it didn’t look like he’d be able to discharge himself in a hurry. His mind and body were both fogged by anaesthetics, but he was still aware of a gnawing discomfort in his side and his shoulder. That was the last time he was going to chase a vampire through a warehouse with a shotgun, he decided. He’d have been better off asking if Robert could have got hold of a flame thrower, or maybe a rocket launcher.

  In a more lucid state of mind, he’d have been furious at Chelsea for bringing him here rather than taking him to Leonard’s. He’d made a point of telling her Len’s address. He was also wondering what kind of trouble he was in. He suspected that the police hadn’t bought his story the other night, and might well be taking an interest in his condition now. Whatever was going to happen, however, it didn’t look like there was much he could do about it.

  ‘He’s still groggy,’ somebody said. ‘Try not to take too long.’

  Jay was a little surprised at the sight of his visitor. ‘Morning,’ said Leonard. ‘I’d brought some chocolates, but they don’t want you eating yet. They had to open you up.’

  ‘Open me up?’ Jay said. No wonder he hurt.

  ‘Internal bleeding. They had to cut you to fix that. It’s probably as well your pet vampire didn’t manage to get you to my place. There’s no way I’d have been able to sort that out. The shoulder would have been beyond my powers as well. If she hadn’t crashed your car, you’d be dead by now, probably.’

  Jay pondered this. ‘She crashed my car?’ Chelsea probably hadn’t been in any fit state to drive.

  ‘Drove it across a roundabout then into the back of a lorry. The only reason either of you is still alive is that going over the roundabout slowed you down.

  ‘In some ways it’s a lucky break. They’re willing to blame the state you’re in on the crash. Chelsea was babbling incoherently while the ambulance was scraping you up off the road, but they’ve blamed that on concussion. They are worried about where she’s got to, though. She wandered off while she was waiting for a head scan.’

  ‘It’s still going to cause problems, though.’

  ‘I wouldn’t rule it out. Chelsea’s safe, by the way. I’ll have a better idea how she’s going to make out by this evening.’

  ‘Fine,’ Jared said. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Anything I can get you?’

  Jared rolled his eyes. ‘A bottle of Scotch would be nice.’

  ‘If you drink on top of the dope they’ve pumped into you, you might stop breathing, Jay.’

  ‘That’s what the doctor said.’

  Leonard shrugged. ‘I used to be one myself.’

  The house in Faulchion Close was quiet in the early afternoon sun as Leonard let himself in. He’d been wondering about the neighbours, but a stroll around the area had confirmed why the vampires hadn’t had any trouble. Burglar alarm boxes studded expensive art deco facades like barnacles clinging to a pier. Security grilles lurked over windows, as cold and dead as Lou Reed’s eyes. This seemed an insular, paranoid sort of cul de sac. So long as the vampires didn’t let any of the hoi polloi they imported roam around frightening the children, it was doubtful that anyone hereabouts would give a shit what they got up to.

  Leonard had taken a couple of sets of keys from the dead vampires stored in his cellar, and the one he’d vivisected had told him a few things about the place, so getting in was easy. The vampires hadn’t bothered with any alarms, as the house had never been left unoccupied before recent events had led to a change of plans. Now that they’d moved out and it seemed Robert and Jared had managed to kill at least a few of them, Leonard thought that it was probably safe to be poking about in daylight. And he just had to have more information. He was particularly interested in the mechanics of vampirism, and how the infection was transmitted. Chelsea’s drugged and concussed ravings had at least suggested that it wasn’t a purely female affliction, which had been the first thing that a nest of lesbian rave bunny vampires had suggested to him. At present, though, the only tangible thing he had was a large quantity of vampiric blood, decanted from its original owners into containers, and still alive. His experimental addition of a pack of denatured whole blood to a sample of this hadn’t led to any of the usual reactions: the whole blood had simply been absorbed and assimilated. Leonard was now certain that the vampire creature was just a vessel to cart its bloodstream about; but apart from causing an aversi
on to ultraviolet and a few dietary changes, this didn’t seem to inconvenience the host to any great degree.

  Blood had long interested Leonard, ever since he himself had been diagnosed with a circulatory problem, and he felt that vampirism looked a lot more appealing than his own condition. He wanted to be sure what he was getting into first, though, and the vampire he’d vivisected hadn’t been up to answering any questions about her biology. Still, she’d maintained that her den mother’s private papers contained a lot of information about vampires that she hadn’t chosen to share with her brood. In fact, little Chelsea had apparently been acquired to replace a plaything who’d been killed after daring to look through these papers. Following this incident, the den mother had apparently stashed most of the papers in a left luggage locker at Manchester Piccadilly; but Leonard’s guest, or so she’d claimed, had secretly got a copy of the key made and hidden it away in her room at the house. Leonard hoped she hadn’t been lying about that. Even if she had, there was still a chance that there might be something of interest left behind at the house, given the speed at which its tenants had vacated it. But would he find the information he needed, or at least enough of it to enable him to fill in the gaps? If not, he was sure that Chelsea would be willing to reveal the details of how she had been infected. His previous subject had claimed that it was just a matter of transferring a sample of vampiric blood into her own bloodstream; and after watching the way a sample had transformed the pack of whole blood from his stock, Leonard was willing to believe that.

  It was possible that vampires might consider Leonard’s blood a rare vintage. It was far too efficient, soaking up oxygen with such zeal that he had to be bled regularly to stop it from killing him. The chemical imbalance left him with a tendency towards cyanosis. The other cure he’d seen touted for it involved having steel coils sunk into the lungs to leach oxygen out of the haemoglobin by rusting. The idea of changing his entire bloodstream into something else entirely struck Leonard as, potentially, a more feasible and long-lasting solution to his problem.