Circle of Wagons: The Gospel of Madness (Book 4 of 6) (The Gospel of Madness - (A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series))

by Georg Bruckmann

  How did Tommy get mixed up with these people? Had they really found him, like the woman said, or had he let them find him? Had he - from his point of view - told the truth, or had he presented his story in such a way that it had the greatest possible effect on these people? Because one thing was clear. As sorry as Tommy was to me, as much as I regretted that I had decided to flee in the tunnel, had decided to leave him and his father behind - as much as I didn't want to allow him to get bogged down in the delusional idea that I was the culprit. It had been the degenerates who had brought this situation in the first place. I wanted him to understand that - and I didn't want to die.

  Not for that.

  I caught myself grinning. That was crazy. Half an hour ago I had still seen death and decline everywhere, and now, when death had somehow become tangible and seemed to come closer and closer, I walked tied up through the snow and grinned.

  Brain chemistry.

  The buildings all around slowly floated past me and my grin. More apartment blocks. A clothing store on the right. On the left a shop whose window reminded me of a video store, even though the incomplete lettering above the smashed door had at some point announced the words "wellness massage". Twenty meters further, on the right, a gas station burnt down a long time ago. Then the tower block to my left. And then I remembered. Reminded me I'd been by here before. With Wanda. With Mariam. With our prisoner. With Brownjacket. It had been dark and the windows in the tower building lit up. He had called them the High People. I mumbled the three words to myself. The woman with the prosthesis who was marching next to me on the right turned her masked face towards me, but did not tell me again that I should keep my mouth shut.

  In front of the entrance to the fifteen-story building the troop stopped. The fact that they had no intention of announcing our arrival suggested that we had already been seen, probably from a great distance. This in turn made me assume that the troop of about twenty people who had captured us did not by any means represent the entire "High People".

  They waited in silence, but without seeming worried. This gave me time to take a closer look at the surroundings and the building itself. The forecourt ... no, not only the forecourt, but a circle of about fifteen meters radius around the building, had been neatly cleared of snow, plants, broken-down vehicles and debris. Here a low sawn tree stump protruded from the loose looking paving stones, there one could see that small walls had been torn down on which one might have sat before the war, or which had formed a shed for garbage cans or a bicycle stand or something like that. In short, anything that could provide cover for an attacker had been removed or destroyed. When this became clear to me, I also noticed the black spots on the stone floor here and there. Molotov cocktails probably. I looked up, scanning the facade floor by floor with my eyes. The bottom five had been blocked up. Partly they had done real masonry work, partly they had helped themselves with wood. Both variants had in common that they had loopholes, some transverse, some upright, some cruciform. Most of them were manned, judging by the gun barrels that protruded from them and were aimed at us. Then, in addition to the balconies, which were also walled-in, there were additional extensions which obviously had the purpose of allowing stones or the like to rain down on possible attackers if, contrary to expectations, they came close enough. Somehow this whole building reminded me of a mixture of a castle and the tower of a mad magician from a fantasy film.

  A deep, metallic squeak put an end to my observations. Something was moving. At first I thought it was the door. But then I was amazed to find that it was a piece of the wall, and that this piece of the wall was several meters from the entrance door. It slipped slowly, very slowly, inch by inch, inwards. The opening that was created in this way was narrow. Very narrow, to be exact. The noise still continued, even though I could no longer see movement with my eyes in the blackness of the opening, but I knew it was there. The effort these people put in to feel somehow safe was considerable. The whole thing wasn't even that badly thought out. Attackers would concentrate on the front door, and if they were to find out somehow that the real entrance was a few feet away, and if they were to succeed in opening it from the outside, they would have to squeeze their way through one by one, only to be welcomed by a deadly hail of bullets at the end of the narrow corridor. The corpses of the first killed would block the entrance and obstruct the following if they were shot early enough.

  I still admired the tactical skill and ingenuity of the High People as they pushed me through the entrance. Two had squeezed in before me, then me, and directly behind me the woman with the leg prosthesis. I wondered if the forced sideways movement was causing her problems or pain, but there was nothing to make me suggest that. It certainly took more than twenty seconds until I was through, twenty seconds in which I only heard the rubbing of clothes on stone or concrete and the puffing of people trying to get over with the claustrophobic situation as quickly as possible.

  On the other side, an apartment bathed in dim, electric light awaited me. Narrow, it went through my head, although the apartment was empty, and it took me a moment to realize that it was because the outer walls had been reinforced from the inside. At least one whole additional wall had been pulled up. The windows had also been bricked up. Made sense. The four bald men who had opened the secret entrance were unmasked, unlike those who had captured us. Their age ranged from about twenty-five to forty-five years. All had their hair extremely short or completely shaved off.

  It was not a sophisticated mechanism that moved the piece of wall, it was pure muscle power, I recognized. The concrete block was mounted on a roller system made of metal pipes, which reminded me of the pictures of the ancient pyramid building in a museum or a school book. Slaves moving giant stone blocks on tree trunks.

  As Gustav and the rest of our hunters gradually came in, I noticed the heavy wooden beams leaning against the wall. A T-beam made of steel was also there. They were exactly the same length. As soon as the wall piece was pushed forward again, they would use the wooden beams and the steel beam to secure their door against manipulation from outside and to block it. When the door was closed again and the squeaking faded away, I noticed how loud it was in here. There were sounds to be heard from everywhere, in such a variety that I was not able to distinguish the individual components.

  "Hey! Stop gawping and keep going!"

  The one-legged one stood next to me. She had unwound the scarf with which she had hidden her face. She was young, somewhere in her early or mid-twenties maybe. Her skull was also completely shaved, so I couldn't tell the color of her hair. She pushed me forward by my shoulder. In the meantime they had all taken off their scarves and shawls and I could see that really all of them had gotten rid of their hair without exception. Was probably fashion here, although ...

  Again she pushed me out of the empty apartment into the stairwell. The lighting conditions here were a bit worse than before, but I could see that the original front door and the whole area around it had also been completely bricked up. The elevator shaft was open, but I only saw it passing by. Since I was pushed straight up the stairs, heard Gustav cursing behind me and therefore turned briefly to him, I only got a glimpse of it. On every landing we reached, there were at least two head-shaved guards. Men and women alike. The doors to the right and left of the heels leading to the corridors with the apartments connected to them were all closed. I couldn't help it - I stopped in the middle of the third staircase that we climbed up, to a lesser extent because my leg hurt because of the monotonous effort, but to a much greater extent because I realized how many people might be living here in a very small space. Already those I had seen so far represented about thirty percent of the population of the much larger polyclinic. Fifteen floors. At least three apartments per floor. If there was a family in each of the apartments, how the hell did they feed themselves? I didn't realize I had asked that question out loud. Only when Mr. Limpleg told me again that I should keep my mouth shut did I realize it.

  In this way it went
up nine or ten floors.

  "Mr. Segmeier, please open the door. We bring the child murderer and his friend. Mr. Mack and Mrs. Simon will want to see them."

  The guard she had addressed obeyed and stepped aside.

  I couldn't believe what I had just heard. Mr. Mack and Mrs. Simon? They were referring to each other by their family names? That was more than absurd. I tried to give Gustav a look. He was a few feet below me on the stairs surrounded by three bald heads. The whole bunch had stopped, while the one-legged one had asked the guards for admission and now slowly started to move again.

  Soon we found ourselves in a spacious kitchen. They put us on two plain wooden chairs and tied our ankles to the legs of those chairs. On the stove were pots, and on a chopping board lay half a cucumber and a handful of small potatoes. The stove was also powered by electricity, and the fan heaters installed everywhere spread a stuffy warmth and beehive-like noise. It ... it was remarkable, no, just crazy, what kind of effect this picture of domestic pre-war normality had on me.

  I felt as if I had travelled back in time, especially when I saw Mr. Mack and Mrs. Simon coming out of the living room. Clean clothes, no not just clean, ironed, fucking shit again, ironed!

  The two looked like straight out of an advertisement for a furniture store or a family insurance policy. This impression was reinforced by the fact that Mrs. Simon was clearly pregnant and a considerable belly became visible as she stepped out behind Mr. Mack and laid a hand on his shoulder. Well, and then there were three things that ended my mental time travel. On the one hand, the heads of the two were also free from any hair, and on the other hand, the two were simply too old to really correspond to the clichee image of a couple that had been so popular before the war. They were both well beyond their forties. A pregnancy at this age would not have been completely harmless even in a perfect world.

  And then there was Mrs. Simon's cold, unambiguously unmotherly look, which first scanned Gustav and finally got stuck on me.

  "Is that him? The child murderer?"

  The one-legged woman gave her answer and her tone of voice showed the power gap between the two women.

  "Yes, Mrs. Simon. The description we have of the boy fits, and he admitted he knew him. Just..."

  "What, just?" Mr. Simon's eyes narrowed as she waited for an answer.

  "He was talking about a 'Tommy' and... ".

  "Okay, I get it. He's trying to talk his way out of it. This might take a little longer. Get them out of my kitchen," she sighed.

  "And disinfect the two savages."

  She looked around, now again the housewife and expectant mother.

  "Why wasn't this done right away? I guess I'll have to clean again."

  A large gesture, apparently surrounding the whole apartment, and a theatrical sigh followed.

  The one-legged woman let her head hang when she was berated, but refused an apology. Instead, she asked:

  "Upstairs?"

  Mrs. Simon had already turned away and was handling the sink with a few rags. She didn't seem to have heard the question, and the gaze of the one-legged wandered to Mr. Mack. When he realized it was up to him to answer the question, he nodded.

  "Yes, upstairs, all the way up. We'll do it there, Mr. Hagen."

  So back to the stairwell, and further up. This time my brain had enough capacity to analyze the sounds, this beehive-like buzz, a little better. Children laughing, babies crying, there was singing somewhere and the deep humming from below. A generator, I suspected. Gustav had been suspiciously quiet the whole time. I was worried. Not too much time had passed yet, but by evening he would certainly need another dose of his antidote. It was probably this circumstance that crossed his mind and darkened his features the most. Downstairs, a woman started screaming. The voice was often broken and echoed on its way through the stairwell. But it was clear that she had to be in a lot of pain. The one-legged woman who had led our procession put her hand on the door handle. We must have reached the top by now, and no guards had been posted on this last landing. When she heard the painful voice, she paused for a second and turned her bald head down, as if she wanted to look down through me.

  Then she turned back to the door and opened it.

  "He's a doctor, you know?"

  She didn't respond, and a bald head with pockmarks kept pushing me forward.

  It was thaw, but after we had stepped out on the roof, I immediately began to miss the warmth of the building. But then I was too distracted to freeze. The whole roof was covered by greenhouses of all sizes standing close to each other. The small penthouse apartment was also used for food production, as a look through the windows told me. Everywhere green behind glass or behind plastic foils.

  That was impressive, and this or similar was what Gustav's vision for the polyclinic might look like. But all this, no matter how impressive it might be, could not possibly be enough to feed all these people. They had to have other food sources, they had to ...

  "Off with them to the center. Strip them down and spray them."

  "Why bother?"

  One of our guards spoke behind me and I turned around. He pointed his finger at me. A young man with blue eyes, all taken by righteous anger.

  "They're going to fall soon anyway, aren't they?"

  The one-legged answered:

  "Mr. Paul. We're not savages, are we? There will be a fair trial, and he here..."

  She nodded in Gustav's direction and then continued:

  "...is not incriminated by our foundling. Actually..."

  She took a second to think.

  "We do him wrong if we treat him the same way we treat this one."

  She pointed at me, started thinking about it again and then approached me directly.

  "Doctor, did you say?"

  I nodded.

  "All right, let's go. Strip, spray, remove hair. Be especially thorough with the doctor. We don't want him bringing vermin into our house. Then bring him down. I want him to help Mr. Lehnert. We'll leave the defendant here until the trial begins."

  So it happened.

  They left me naked, wet, smelling of disinfectant and freezing on the roof and took Gustav away. They took my clothes, too. I started running up and down to keep warm at least a little bit. But then, a few minutes later, the door to the stairwell opened again and Mr. Paul threw a blanket at me. He looked at me while I was wrapping up. Before he disappeared again and closed the door behind him, he drove his thumb across his neck. The gesture was unmistakable.

  Robby

  Robby pushed forward. He hadn't bothered to be quiet in the stairwell yet, but now, outside on the other side of the house - now he did. At dusk, the schoolyard looked spooky. The two, the woman and the girl, he had left upstairs. Doctor Walter Mahler - he needed him. Not only because he would ascend if he could recruit him - recruit with or without his consent - but also because he believed in the cause. Really believed in it. The world had to be purified, cleaned, purified of all the polluted sites, and of all the pollution, nuclear waste was the largest. This miserable, dirty, malicious legacy that all the ignorance and stupidity of the old world had left behind - him and his friends and all the others - they would manage to clean it up. They already had achieved a lot. Brockdorf and Stade had already been brought under their control and were in the process of shutting down in a controlled manner. At Neckarwestheim, however, they had encountered problems. Robby didn't know exactly what it was, but he didn't have to. He was on the right side, with the right people doing the right thing and he was proud that they let him be there.

  It was for the cause he now gladly sneaked with his machine pistol ready after doctor Mahler.

  Mahler and his two companions had looked around the schoolyard. He could not hear what was spoken, but what he could see from their faces in the semi-darkness, and the way Mahler had turned one of the large MG cartridge cases between his fingers, spoke for itself. They were confused and had no idea what the attack was all about. One of Mahler's companions just picked up a
piece of the shot door from the floor, looked at it, shook his head slowly and dropped it again.

  Then they went back to the school building. Robby sneaked up on them. He wasn't worried about making the distance too great. It was dark in the building - they would have to turn on light in some way if they wanted to move around safely. He wouldn't lose them. Carefully he put one foot in front of the other and moved as quietly as he could after his prey and into the building. He almost got his foot caught on one of the pieces of rubble, but just in time, before he caused a treacherous noise, he noticed the resistance on his boot and quickly pulled it back. He detached his hand from the handle of the sub-machine gun, wiped it off his pants and then re-positioned the weapon.

  If there was still a little bit of daylight outside in the schoolyard, it was pitch-black in the entrance hall of the school.

  Robby was right.

  The light from two torches bathed the hall in bizarre, distorted shadows. Robby realized that the residents of the school had left the hall unused for the most part. Only in the corner to his right some school desks had been pushed together and piled up. Raw material for repairs, he assumed.

  The three men talked to each other as they reached a corridor on the other side of the hall. Robby could still only understand choppy syllables, but the men's conversation added to the noise level, making it easier for him to sneak after them. They had not carried firearms when he had watched them from the apartment where he had left the tied up woman and the girl. At least he hadn't been able to see any. But he still had to be careful. His people were already out of range of his little radio. He was all on his own - and there were at least three of them. He couldn't screw this up.

  They now walked along the corridor and he had to hurry so that he could make use of the little light radiating from their lamps to the rear. The corridor was long. To the right and left, the course of the concrete walls, painted in an ugly yellow, was interrupted at regular intervals by doors. They were all open, and Robby couldn't tell if they had been ripped open by the storm team entering the building, or if they had been open all along. The corridor ended in a stairwell and the men's voices were strongly echoed by the reflections. They went up the stairs and then, when they had reached the first landing and then went around the corner, they disappeared from his field of vision. Again he accelerated his steps to come after them. The crouched posture in which he moved forward put a strain on him, and he knew that he actually had no reason to walk this way. Still, he couldn't get himself to stand upright. He wiped his forehead with his jacket sleeve and then set foot on the first step. Something was wrong. He took the second and third steps, then he knew what it was. The light. It stopped moving, and they had stopped talking. They had stopped. With held breath he pushed forward, then he reached the landing. Carefully, he went around the corner. They were standing up there around something. Mahler and one of his companions had pointed their lamps at a place on the floor. Robby could only see their legs from his lower position, and then he realized what they were looking at. It was a woman's body. She was lying on her back. Her long hair and her right arm hung down on the stairs, and the index finger seemingly playfully touched one of the steps. This gesture seemed light, almost elegant. When Robby let his gaze wander further, and saw that half the woman's face had been shot away, he grimly distorted his mouth. He knew they couldn't be squeamish, and that self-protection and the cause, their mission, sometimes required it, but he was infinitely sorry every time someone stood in their way and there was a shooting. On the other hand, he was glad that the woman hadn't injured anyone from the storm team and that it was her who lay dead in the stairwell here.