Pretty Young Things

by Dominic McDonagh

  The Mengele-wannabe had turned his gun on Hayley, with shaking hands, but nowhere near quickly enough. Lucinda knew that Jesse James probably wouldn’t have been quick enough on the draw, and this guy was hardly in that league. The shot went wild as Hayley closed her hands around his wrist and shoulder and twisted. Her knuckles were white. The guy shrieked as his arm bent out of shape, bones and cartilage cracking like a breakbeat beneath his thin, piercing wail.

  Leonard felt his clavicle break. His carpal tunnel was crushed as the bones around it moved closer together, and his elbow was bent out of shape. It started off as an odd feeling of shock before pain signals came crashing down his nerve fibres. The gun was tugged from his limp fingers, then there was another explosion of agony as the muzzle was shoved into his mouth, breaking teeth as it went. He blacked out before the gun was fired.

  ‘Shit,’ Hayley said, removing the gun from Leonard’s mouth and wiping its barrel clean on the front of his shirt. ‘What’s the point of shooting the bastard if he can’t feel it?’ This consideration didn’t stop her from kicking him in the ribs after she’d dropped the gun. Then she crouched down in front of Chelsea. ‘It’s okay, hon. Let’s get this crap off you.’ She removed the gag from Chelsea’s mouth. ‘How are you doing?’ she asked.

  Chelsea shuddered and bit her tongue. ‘Oh, I’m great. This bastard drugged me with something, sneaked into the hospital and killed my boyfriend, tied me up, showed me what he’d done to Rowena, then started talking about what he was planning to do to me. I haven’t had a very good evening, put it that way.’

  ‘The night is yet young,’ Hayley said. ‘Lie on your side a minute so I can unfasten this.’

  ‘Where’s Rachael?’ Chelsea asked. ‘She’s the only one of us missing at the moment.’

  ‘Don’t worry about Rachael,’ Hayley said. ‘She’s out of the way, now.’ She paused to look up from what she was doing. ‘Want to give me a hand with this, Lucy?’ she asked.

  Lucinda was standing by the table, examining the pipe plugged into Rowena’s intact arm. ‘What was this about, Chelsea?’ she asked.

  Chelsea took a deep breath and told her.

  Leonard’s mouth hurt worse than his arm when he came to. He realised that he’d been stuffed into the straitjacket he’d used on Chelsea. His ankles were fettered as well, and something cold and sticky was oozing over his face. When he opened his eyes, he realised that Chelsea was emptying part of his precious collection of vampire blood over him to wake him up.

  ‘I think he’s back with us, girls,’ Chelsea said. Her friends were watching him with unsympathetic expressions. ‘Still want to kneecap him, Hayles?’

  The schoolgirl stepped forwards, holding Leonard’s gun in one hand. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘but tell him the rest, first.’

  ‘We’re leaving now,’ Chelsea said. ‘We’re taking the papers you’ve stolen and what you’ve left of Rowena and Nicola with us as well. It’d be better if the police found some evidence of what you’ve been up to when they arrive, but we don’t want anybody else examining their bodies.’

  Chelsea paused. The smile she flashed him would have been very attractive if it hadn’t been colder than a January midnight in the Arctic circle. ‘What we are going to do is leave the contents of your filing cabinet on the kitchen table for them. The photographs of what you did to that poor girl’s face should be enough reason for them to lock you up for a long time. Keeping evidence of all this crap you’ve been up to lying around was really stupid. They’ll think that what Hayley’s about to do to you is some sort of gangland thing, I’d imagine.’

  ‘And we’re disposing of the blood, of course,’ the American added. ‘You’re not going to get to make the change. Still, look on the bright side: if you hadn’t been too paranoid to infect yourself immediately, Hayley would be able to do a lot worse to you than just break your legs.’

  ‘Anything else to add, or can I shoot him now?’ the schoolgirl asked.

  Chelsea nodded slightly. ‘Go for it, Hayles,’ she said.

  The schoolgirl rolled Leonard over onto his face and planted one foot firmly in the small of his back. Leonard squeezed his eyes tightly shut as he heard the hammer of his pistol click back. Something pressed into the back of one knee. The pain, when it arrived, was even worse than he’d expected. He was astonished that he even noticed the second shot.

  As the echoes from the shots died away, he heard the vampires retreating up the cellar steps away from him.

  Chelsea looked at the photos stacked on top of the collection of invoices and medical notes on the kitchen table. ‘Jesus wept,’ she said. ‘I thought the bastard only cut up vampires.’

  ‘Her husband paid him to destroy her face,’ Lucinda said. ‘I get the impression he doesn’t like women very much, undead or not. Still, he’ll be able to spend a lot more time in the intimate company of men soon. Given what Hayley’s done to his teeth, he may turn out to be very popular with the rest of his wing, once he’s locked up.’

  ‘On which note, we should get going before the bluebottles turn up ourselves, ladies,’ Hayley said. ‘Do we have everything?’

  ‘So long as that folio was the only book that wasn’t in the kitchen, yes,’ Lucinda said. ‘We’ll take Nic and Weena back to the warehouse, then go out to a club and find somebody to eat. I don’t know about you girls, but I’m starving.’

  ‘Industry might be worth a look,’ Hayley said as they left the house and started towards the Saab. They’d shifted their two friends’ remains into the boot before phoning 999. Chelsea had felt her flesh crawling under Hayley’s gaze as they’d moved what was left of Rowena outside.

  ‘No way,’ Lucinda said. ‘I thought we might try 5th Avenue for a change. See if we can find a pretty goth boy or two in an indie club.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Hayley said. ‘That okay with you, Chelsea?’

  ‘Sure,’ Chelsea said. ‘Are we going back to Faulchion Close afterwards?’

  Lucinda shook her head as she started up the ignition. ‘I’ve booked us into the Lowry for a couple of days. It’s not a good idea to go back to the house until we’re sure that Chelsea’s doctor hasn’t mentioned it to the pigs. I don’t think he’s quite that stupid, but stranger things have happened. I think we might have upset him a little, and he seems a vindictive sort.’

  ‘The Lowry?’ Chelsea said. The Lowry was the only five star hotel in Manchester, and very expensive. She’d have thought the Brittania would have been more to Lucy’s taste.

  ‘I have Coral’s credit cards,’ Lucinda said. ‘She was dim enough to note down all her PINs in her address book, and I pretty much have her signature down, so it’d be a pity not to use them.’

  ‘True,’ Chelsea agreed. ‘Very true. What are we going to do with all this blood?’ Apart from the bucket she’d poured over Leonard to wake him up, most of what he’d removed from Nicola and Rowena was lying on the back seat. If it was in a container that wouldn’t spill, they’d taken it. If it wasn’t, it had gone down the sink, but that had still left them with a lot of the stuff.

  ‘We might want to find a few new playmates, Chelsea,’ Hayley said. ‘Our numbers have been reduced a bit over the last few days, haven’t they?’

  Chelsea laughed at that. ‘It’ll save us cutting ourselves if we do want somebody to join us, won’t it? Are you sure that’s all he had?’

  ‘I doubt it very much,’ Lucinda said. ‘Have an orange.’

  Chelsea caught the satsuma she was thrown. ‘I can’t eat this,’ she said.

  ‘Peel it anyway,’ Lucinda said. The orange squished moistly as Chelsea dug her nails into the rind and unravelled it. She froze when she saw the pulpy vermillion mess in its core. It had been injected with somebody’s blood, and the cells were reducing the orange’s fruit to a sludgy mess.

  ‘Dear Christ,’ Chelsea said. ‘Shouldn
’t we go back and do a better job of clearing out his stash?’

  ‘Forget it,’ Lucinda said. ‘The house will be swarming with policemen by now, and I’d imagine you’ve seen enough of those lately.’

  ‘But if he has more of the stuff hidden, he can convert himself. Should we let him do that after everything he’s done?’

  ‘Yes, we should.’ Lucinda’s voice dripped with malice. ‘If he manages to convert himself on getting out of prison, he’ll be dead inside of seven years. Why do you think Coral only ever brought women over?’

  ‘I always thought it was some sort of lesbian thing,’ Chelsea said.

  ‘Only partly, there’s a biological reason as well. Your body is capable of replenishing itself from unfertilised ova. Male vampires can’t do that, so they have to replenish themselves from us. That’s why Coral left her family in London in the first place. The arranged marriage to somebody who was braindead was the final straw for her, given that he was being fed her bloodborne cells on a weekly basis so that he could put his brain back together. I’m not sure how it works, but they find and replace cells that are in a bad way.’

  ‘So if he does manage to keep a stash of blood from the police and use it himself, he’s screwed, then?’ Chelsea asked. She was stunned. Apart from anything else, she hadn’t realised that Lucinda was quite that cold-blooded.

  ‘Completely and utterly. Still, he doesn’t know that, and it’ll give him something to look forward to while he’s serving his sentence. Three or four good years, then a collapse into infirmity so fast it’ll make Methuselah Syndrome look like a nasty cold, and there’ll be nobody he can turn to for help. Any of his medical friends he turns to will be more interested in pithing his entrails than trying to help. I think that that, on top of however long they lock him up for, is a slightly more vicious twist of the knife than you and Hayles torturing him for a bit and then putting him out of his misery.’

  ‘I’ll say,’ Chelsea agreed, and shrugged. She didn’t particularly feel like going out that night, but she supposed that she could keep her broken hand hidden in her pocket, and she had to admit that she’d need to find somebody to eat before collapsing.

  Back in Chorlton, Leonard chewed on his lip with his remaining teeth as he heard the clatter of police boots upstairs, and prayed that they wouldn’t take any interest in the samples he’d secreted about the house. The fruit bowl should be safe, and the demijohn in the airing cupboard if the vampires had missed that one. He could claim that he’d been making wine from pomegranates, perhaps. Leonard’s main concern at that point, though, was that they’d give him a shot and try to fix his knees and his arm. His world had contracted to these small focuses of pain. Once they had been eased, he’d turn his attention to punishing his tormentors. Leonard had no doubt that he’d find them. He was owed favours by people who could keep the blood fed until such time as he was free to inject himself with it, and then he’d have centuries to track them down. All that had happened to him was a temporary setback.

  It didn’t matter how long they locked him up for, Leonard assured himself. He had all the time in the world.

  About The Author

  Dominic McDonagh is the author of the Urban Gothic episode ‘Necromance’. He has no agent.

  Also Available