We were now officially announced.
Just that no one cared.
The whole building was empty. The only thing we found in the following twenty-minute search, apart from rats scurrying away from us, was a dead fox who must have somehow managed to penetrate the building and then never get out again. Maybe it starved to death. Maybe it'd just been old and come here to die. Maybe the rats had caught it too.
"What do you think?"
Sonja looked at me questioningly.
"I don't know, I don't know. Maybe there's a broken window somewhere or something."
We could not afford to stop to reconstruct the fate of the animal. We met Mr. Paul's team on the ground floor and continued the searches together. Quickly we realized that the hospital beds and dialysis machines, which must have been here once, had been taken away at some point. Unfortunately, there was no way of determining whether these had been the vampires or whether the beds and equipment had been used more urgently elsewhere during the war. On the upper floor, which we reached through a staircase that had been built next to a now useless elevator, there was still an orthopedic and a urological doctor's office that were empty and seemingly untouched. My gaze fell on the magazines in the waiting room of the urological practice. The Stern, the Spiegel, the Freundin and the Fokus. Today more irrelevant than ever. So absurdly irrelevant that I almost laughed. I denied it.
"There's nothing here. Come on, now. We've got to keep moving."
"What is our next destination?" asked Mr. Paul as we hurriedly climbed down the stairs.
"First Viernheim. If we don't find a clue there either, it's Mannheim's turn and then ... then I don't know. Quick now."
Back on the freeway. Viernheim was only a few minutes away from Weinheim west of the A5 and it was ... different.
Again Mr. Paul drove the car, again I had climbed into the trunk to replace the ammunition, which had been used up in Weinheim, with new ammunition from the backpacks. Without paying any further attention to the fact, I noticed that the exit that led to the center of the small town this time went uphill and not, as in Weinheim, downhill. Then it turned right, onto a small motorway bridge that led to a roundabout. And then we all noticed that something was not right at all in Viernheim.
At the flagpole, which towered over the roundabout like a paradoxically proud relic from the old days, hung a woman about four meters above the ground. I could already see that from a distance, because the body was naked. What was frightening for me at that moment was not the fact that the dead woman's hands and feet had to be cut off, nor the fact that there seemed to be no skin between her knees and her navel, no, what really frightened me was that the crows that fluttered sluggishly away as our vehicle approached this disgusting, cruel memorial for whatever had not yet done much damage to the dead body.
It wasn't an old corpse.
The already quiet, sluggish conversations in the Passat had completely ceased in one fell swoop, and the eyes of all were directed at this beacon of cruelty. Mr. Paul slowed down, as if he had inhibitions to get too close to the dead. When we finally reached the roundabout, I could see that both hands and one foot of the woman were still lying on the concrete pedestal into which the flagpole was embedded. The other foot had probably been dragged away by some animal to feast on.
"Fucking bastards, who does that?"
Sonja hadn't addressed anyone in particular, had just had to say anything to make the sight more bearable, but I knew who was doing such a thing. Wanda told me.
Degenerates.
So close to Heidelberg.
So close to the Tower of the High People.
So close to the Hurters in the polyclinic.
So close to Gustav.
Without comment I handed the reloaded weapons to my companions in front of the car. I didn't have to tell them to roll down the windows and secure to the sides. They did it instinctively. Even Mr. Paul now steered with only one hand and had drawn his pistol with the other. We left the roundabout behind us and followed the second exit towards the center. On the next three or four hundred meters we saw nothing unusual, only a group of three dogs ran away from us and disappeared in the wild garden of an apartment house. Apart from the wild, gnarled, winterly plants that were present everywhere, this area was spared from destruction. Some of the front doors were open. Either hastily abandoned or plundered. Mr. Paul continued to let himself be guided by the signs, and then it started again. At first sporadically, but the further we went towards the city center and pedestrian zone, behind which, according to the map, the hospital had to be somewhere, the worse things got.
More bodies.
Just as naked as the one on the flagpole, and just as cruelly battered. Men and women, draped in obscene positions on radiator hoods, tied to lanterns, their terribly stiff eyes, as far as they still existed, looking broken into the afterlife, their faces distorted in mirrored images of the pain endured. One body every twenty meters or so. Some still had arrows or spears in the body, preferably in direct proximity of the genitals. A man had been astride a hunter's fence, leaning his back against a brick rubbish bin shed as high as his chest. His arms were sagging to the right and left, and when I noticed that they were gently swinging back and forth in the wind, this strangely caused much more horror and nausea in me than the fact that the left half of his face looked as if it had been burned and then someone had torn out individual pieces of meat. Maybe bitten, too. I fought for composure, and at some point I managed to rationalize these impressions.
How many dead had we seen by now? Fifteen? Twenty? Had they all belonged to the same community or were they members of different parties who had lived in symbiosis or competition with each other in the post-war Viernheim?
It didn't matter. The crux of the matter was that it took great numerical superiority to afford the luxury of such pornographic cruelties. If it had been a hard fight for those who had done this, they could not have taken so much time. No, superiority was the cue here. Superiority was the word that frightened us all, whether we thought it out or not. The display of power and sadism.
Mr. Paul stopped the car in front of three concrete bollards that separated the pedestrian zone on this side from the rest of the city. One could see that these barricades had not been conceived by the town planners, but had been placed here sometime during the later course of the war.
Behind them, at the first six street lights, there were more naked dead. Mr. Paul got out.
"Have you noticed that none of them has been shot? I mean, they're all lacerated, slashed or have the skull bashed in, but no gunshot wounds. That's them, isn't it? Your degenerates?"
I just nodded.
"What now? We can't get through here by car. Shall we continue on foot? Take the direct route? Or do we better try to drive a bow and get to the hospital and dialysis from the back?"
The truth was I had no idea what would be best. In order to gain time, I unfolded the map that I had discovered in a side compartment in the trunk right when we started. But my thoughts were racing, and the tiny lines that represented the streets made no sense to me. Sonja took the map away from me after a few seconds and began to study it herself, while Mr. Paul and the three others each kept an eye on one direction across the barrel of their weapons.
"Going straight, it's still a hundred or a hundred and fifty meters," she said and nodded down the pedestrian zone.
I heard that, but I didn't react. The wind was blowing around my ears, making it hard for me to listen for the presence of degenerates. Did they move on after they installed their hellish artworks here? Were they already watching us? Already closing in without us noticing? No firearms. Seen that way, the car would probably offer us the most safety. Or should we better just turn around and leave? The vampires would surely have fled the area once they had discovered the bodies as well? Didn't they? Or what if ...
"We have to go back. We need to take a closer look at the bodies! All the bodies we've seen so far."
"What? Why?"
"Because we have to be sure it's not Mr. Doctor and her anemic that the degenerates exhibited here."
This thought seemed to worry Sonja even more than our hostile environment, transformed into a bizarre hell. She did not like the thought. The possibility that she might have been robbed of her revenge was what made her pale. Not the bodies all around. Paradoxically, I felt the same way, too. The danger posed by the degenerates. The proximity to the polyclinic. The cruelty with which they had raged here. All this played only a subordinate role, considering the possibility that the source of knowledge of the correct composition of Gustav's antidote had been tied to a lantern in the form of a dead Mrs. Doctor, forever out of reach.
The fact that I hadn't noticed the blond hair of the vampire doctor at any of the morbid exhibits so far hardly calmed me down. We certainly hadn't seen them all yet. Mr. Paul also seemed to have had this thought, for he said:
"We'd better split up. Same groups as before."
He looked at Sonja and then continued.
"You go back and take another close look at everything. Me, Mike and Linus, we're gonna take on the pedestrian zone."
I would argue that he would recognize Brownjacket from the shot of Mr. Mack's surveillance camera at best, and that therefore it made no sense at all to divide us up. That I was the only one who had seen some of the vampires and especially the doctor from up close and in person, but dropped my inquiry. Instead, I said:
"Okay. Listen. You look out for arms with needle punctures. Fresh needle punctures and scars from needle punctures. For gnarled veins on the forearms. Many dialysis patients use to have a shunt there. An artificial vein. If you can't see it with the naked eye, you should be able to feel it. And for the BMX masks. They're all naked, but maybe their belongings were deposited somewhere nearby."
Sonja objected:
"The one with the needles and the arms is good, but the one with the masks? If it is really your degenerates who have done this, isn't it likely that they took the masks with them to wear them themselves?"
"Good question. Possible. Actually, they shouldn't be touching anything modern. That would be contrary to Da Silva's commandments. On the other hand, the interpretation of these commandments probably varies from group to group. At least those we were dealing with in Frankfurt had nothing against taking advantage of modern weapons, even if they did not use them themselves. Both variants would therefore be possible. But an accumulation of masks would definitely be a clear indication of the presence of the vampires."
"Well, I don't have a better idea, either. So let's do it this way," said Mr. Paul.
"One more thing. You go back, and we ..."
Sonja had spoken to Mr. Paul and now she nodded in my direction and that of the man who had already accompanied us in Weinheim.
"… we're going into the pedestrian zone."
One could clearly see that this instruction did not suit Mr. Paul at all. He pondered for two or three seconds, then briefly drove his tongue over his dry lips and said:
"Okay, whatever you say. But then at least take Linus with you. Behind us we have not discovered any dangers, but we know nothing about what could be waiting for you in this pedestrian zone."
Sonja agreed.
"All right. Take care of yourself."
"Yes. You too. I'll meet you back here in half an hour. When one group hears shots, we say more than three within a short time, they stop their excursion and come to the aid of the other."
A good idea from Mr. Paul. In our current situation, the best possible compromise between the fastest possible search of the area and the greatest possible security. I watched him and his companion for a second as they turned their backs towards us and held onto the first body we had left behind. Then I hurried to come after Sonja.
The pedestrian zone was in front of us, and under the dead eyes of the desecrated corpses at the lanterns we put one foot in front of the other and penetrated deeper. We checked body for body. None of them had the punctures on their forearms that I described earlier, and I did not recognize any of them either. This may not have meant much, because firstly, dead faces sometimes show almost no resemblance at all to their living counterparts, and secondly, not every face was still in an identifiable state. We had just finished with the fourth corpse, a young, thin, female figure, almost without breasts, which one must have stabbed, as it looked, a spear from below into the heart in the best crucifixion manner, then the wind blew a terrible cry to us.
He came from the front. From deeper within the pedestrian zone and was often thrown back and forth between buildings and thus equally distorted and amplified. Sonja looked at me. Such an agony had stuck in the tortured sound that I was sure that the degenerates were about to carry out another terrible execution.
We ran.
Mariam and Wanda
Wanda screamed at Doctor Mahler and Mariam alike as she shooed them up in front of her. It was a wild, panic-born mixture of curses, demands, insults and rage against the degenerates coming out of her mouth unfiltered. At that moment, Wanda didn't even notice what she was yelling. Nor that she called Mariam a useless piece of dirt, while she rudely tore her back to her feet when the girl stumbled halfway up the tower. Wanda was in thoughts already a step further, and everything that happened on the way to the top of the steeple on the stairs was already ticked off in her head. The staircase - or rather the narrowness that the staircase represented - would enable them to buy some time. And time was what they needed. Time and the radio.
I hope this stupid tower is high enough.
I hope they're around.
I hope they can hear us.
Hopefully the door will hold for a while.
The door didn't hold. She could hear the euphoric roar of the degenerates, reflected from the walls, sounding upwards. They were inside.
Should she give Mahler a gun? No, not at all. She would stop the degenerates on the stairs and Mariam would operate the radio. How much further was it? When would they finally have reached the top? Fucking lousy shit tower. Again Wanda yelled at the girl and her prisoner. They just didn't get it. Dumb fucks! Or is it? Couldn't they really go any faster?
But they had to!
Up.
Up and up.
All the way to the top. As fast as they could. Steps from below. The sound of clothes rubbing against walls. It was still at a distance. But it would get louder soon. They'd come closer. They would come and try to kill them.
Two thirds of them had made it. Maybe fifty meters. Now it was Doctor Mahler who fell. Since his hands were still tied behind his back, he could not catch the fall. That would make a dent. Wanda pushed Mariam, who had run behind Mahler, rudely to the side, the girl bounced against the wall and also went to the floor. Wanda cursed, paused, stretched her hand out to Mariam, pulled her up again. For a fraction of a second she imagined how she would kick the idiot in the balls, once for every step, until they finally arrived at the top. Instead, she helped her prisoner to his feet and pushed him further forward. His breath rattled. Fucking pussy. Wanda pulled Mariam by the hand. Even the girl gasped and puffed.
So hard to get good staff.
Wanda fought down the hysterical laughing that tried to break out of her.
Ten seconds. Ten minutes. Ten hours, ten days, or ten years.
Wanda didn't know it, but at some point they were upstairs. She pushed Mahler into a corner and warned him not to move. She didn't do it with words. She, too, lacked the breath to do it. She only gestured with her rifle and he understood. His head was red and Wanda almost feared that somewhere within the guy a vein would burst. Mariam immediately set about getting the radio up and running. A wave of warmth, of pride, flooded Wanda, but only for a fraction of a second. She understood. She didn't have to tell her what to do.
Almost.
"Your weapons! Give me your guns and then start the radio!"
Mariam first let the pistol and then her rifle slide across the floor in Wanda's direction. The sounds fro
m below came closer. Only when Wanda had positioned herself above the stairs that the degenerates had to come up, did she begin to explore her surroundings with glances.
The last, highest floor of the tower, above which there was another superstructure, not accessible by stairs, on which the statue they had seen from below was planted, was octagonal and about six meters in diameter. In the middle of this platform, lined with a richly decorated railing, a large brass bell was suspended. It dangled from the suspension above a hole in the floor. It had been given plenty of room all around so it could swing.
Mariam already had the radio in her hands, but couldn't speak yet. She was still too much out of breath, and the little breaths that she pushed out of her lungs, turned into tiny clouds in the cold air, which soon dissolved. She had her back against the brick railing and Wanda could see that the child was trying to normalize her breathing. With her mouth open, Mariam stared at the church bell. Wanda realized that it was neither childish curiosity nor amazement at the craftsmanship with which this building had been created, but pure, intense concentration.
Mariam's eyes searched for Wanda's. And Wanda understood that there was no need for further instructions. She pulled out her own gun. It was still full. How many bullets were left in Mariam's? Wanda tried to remember, but she couldn't. They could be here any minute. Should she let Mahler load the guns? No. A quick look. The verbal outburst earlier seemed to have consumed all the man's energy. He had huddled up in a corner next to Mariam and did nothing. Neither did he ask for a gun, nor did he lament. Wanda wondered if he really didn't care about what happened. Or was he just paralyzed with fear?
"Keep an eye on him, will you?" Wanda, still a little breathless, turned to Mariam. The girl's eyes slid over to the prisoner for a second, then back to Wanda. Mariam nodded. More sounds from below.
Circle of Wagons: The Gospel of Madness (Book 4 of 6) (The Gospel of Madness - (A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series)) Page 19