Brenner: The Gospel of Madness (Book 5 of 6)

by Georg Bruckmann

  Shepard

  I left the arrow stuck in her throat and took the gun out of her flabby fingers. I had heard her skull break when I hammered her head against the edge of the altar. The blood flowing out between her lips threw tiny bubbles as it mixed with her last breaths. I could still hear screams from outside. Still Mr. Paul roared his I’m sorry at the top of his lungs. I could still hear Tommy’s screams, and those of the degenerates. Once Silvia’s voice also rose shrill and panic-stricken, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying. The fluttering echoes generated by the turmoil outside in the church, buzzing around my ears like a swarm of spiteful bats, made it impossible for me. I hastily let the magazine slide out of the pistol. There were still bullets in it. Good, good, good. I let it snap back into place and unlocked the gun. No time to push them out of the magazine and count them. “He’s having another seizure,” they said. They’ve seen this before. They knew how to deal with it. It surprised me myself that I was still worried about Tommy at that moment. After all I’d seen him do. Then, from one second to the next, I realized I wasn’t interested in the boy. I was thinking about Mariam. That’s why I was so obsessed with him. Therefore I had secretly dreamed of taking him with me and finding her and Wanda again. I didn’t even have to formulate those thoughts clearly. They’d just been there the whole time. Ever since I met him in the firehouse. I had imagined Mariam’s joy, her relief, when she saw him again. I had ... “Huh? Hey, Benito! That son of a bitch took off!” It was a deep man’s voice, which roared these words, and while it was still doing so, I heard Mr. Paul’s voice at the same time for the hundredth time, surely, Mr. Paul’s I am ... then Mr. Paul’s voice fell over, broke, went over into a ghastly cry and finally died completely. They finally caught him. I whirled around and saw the silhouettes of three Degs standing in the church entrance. One so big she could only belong to Eater. I fired three vaguely aimed shots in their direction. Not to kill, but just to scare them away. Stupid of me in retrospect, just as stupid as stopping at the altar and thinking. In my hands, it pounded painfully. Sometimes burns take a little time. I had to leave. Hurry, hurry, hurry. On the altar were my belongings, together with other objects, degenerate things and stuff - cups, goblets and crosses - which had probably belonged to the church. With flying eyes I searched the chaos for something useful, while the echoes of my shots were still roaring in my ears. I discovered my crossbow and my machete. For some reason, my left hand found the machete first. The right one was still holding the gun. I grabbed it, cursed in pain, and then I ran out, around the altar and through the hole behind it in the outer wall of the church to the outside. I ruthlessly broke through the same undergrowth, through which I had sneaked to the church. It had been welcome as a cover then. Now it was an obstacle to overcome. A part of my brain tried to recall the circumstances, the arrangement of the buildings, the course of the streets, the path I had come here. My body moved as if by itself, while my eyes still got used to the relative darkness. A branch hit my face. I knew somewhere here must be the place where I killed the degenerate woman. I also knew that I could not drift too far away from the area I was familiar with if I wanted to get back to Gustav quickly. If everything was to have such a terrible outcome here, I had to at least get to him with the formula for his antidote on my arm. Then all this wouldn’t have been for nothing. All the lives. The best thing to do would be to stay the course and ... I noticed that something had changed about the noise the Degs in front of the church made. I couldn’t say exactly what that was, too diffuse were the noises they made in their drunken frenzy. But it was not difficult to imagine that the change that had taken place had something to do with my escape. And indeed, I had made it maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty meters out of the thicket, through a courtyard and back onto the street, when I heard the first steps of people running not far behind me. Lots of people running. The footsteps were still a little away from me, but now that the screaming and the turmoil in front of the church had subsided surprisingly quickly and even Tommy had stopped screaming, they were burning loudly in my ears. I knew I had a lead, but still I couldn’t just run straight along the road hoping to be the faster one. I was too weak from captivity, and my knee was still causing me problems. I had to disappear in an unobserved moment around a corner or into a house entrance or into a cellar or somewhere else. They wouldn’t search the whole town for me. No, they wouldn’t do that. They didn’t have enough people. They couldn’t work building by building and apartment by apartment, and they wouldn’t, because they couldn’t know if I was still nearby or not. I tried to remember where the car was by which I and Sonja and the rest of the High People had arrived. It wouldn’t occur to me, that I most likely would die. My thoughts were confused, no, not confused, but there were too many of them at once. The faces of the people killed at the construction fence. Benito’s voice. They’d look like hedgehogs. Tommy’s tense little body. His screams. The laughter and grin of the Degs. Silvia, how she got fingered by Benito. The vampire doctor’s torso. Eater´s greedy dog face. I forced these thoughts and images aside. And the other vehicles all over town? I had no time to examine them, no time to find one that might still be fit to drive. I kept running, now I had the feeling that I could remember where our car was standing, but at the same time I knew that this feeling was wrong. How much longer would I last? Ten minutes? Fifteen? It began to snow again, heavy, wet flakes that thawed away as soon as they touched the ground. Two minutes later the running noises behind me had come even closer, the snowing had stopped as quickly as it had started, and I slipped on the wet ground as I turned around another corner. My knee. As fast as I could, I got up. How long had it taken me to stand up again and pick up the machete that had slipped out of my hand? Three seconds? Five? I had a stitch. Calls echoed through the night, barked orders, in the distance and distorted. I started moving again, jogging rather than really running. I couldn’t trust my knee right now, and I was afraid of another fall. If I were seriously injured, I’d be sentenced to death. The clouds were breaking and moonlight was illuminating my surroundings. Also my eyes had gotten used to the night around me in the meantime. I could see that the street I had just turned into was lined with the naked, bizarrely mutilated bodies of the crucified and hanged. At the foot of some of the lanterns I passed, there were still more corpses on the ground, still dressed mostly, which - for whatever reason, probably due to time or space reasons - had not been so macabrely staged. The angry, fast steps behind me came ever closer, I noticed, tearing myself away from the horrible sight. My eyes showed me pictures I’d rather not have seen. My knee didn’t hurt, unlike my burned hands, which hurt terribly now, but it felt spongy, like it was made of rubber. At each of the gruesome memorials of human cruelty that I passed, my brain told me that it would sense the smell of decay. But it couldn’t be. Could it? They hadn’t hung up there that long, and it was cold. What I could smell with certainty when I sucked air into my lungs in panic and greed at the same time was the contents of the intestines and bladder that the poor pigs had excreted when they died, a nasty pestilence of it. I cursed my treacherous knee. The footsteps had become louder again by a tiny amount, and again my brain showed me pictures of a bloodthirsty horde of degenerates, of Eater’s people on my heels. And it also were Eater’s people I saw when I threw a panicky, quick glance back. Four of them with the characteristic bone jewelry. Three men and a woman. Further back, Eater gasped himself. The colossus had trouble keeping up with his rabble. They’d come within fifty yards from me. The thought of a successful escape had been deceptive. I still tried. But as so often when you do something half-heartedly and know from the start that you won’t make it ... again my knee let me down and I fell. I felt it before it really happened, then hit the ground hard. This time I didn’t lose either the machete nor the gun. I rolled away, scraping my elbow on the wet road. Fifty meters are not far when people have been gripped by hunting fever. And when I looked up now I noticed that they had already more than halved the distance. In thei
r faces I could still read traces of their drunkenness. Glassy eyes, wide open, the skin reddened from exertion, and the body animated by thirst for blood and a sinister kind of lust. None of them wore a bow. They had probably not taken the time to equip themselves, but had grabbed the first weapons they could find when Eater had shouted the news of my escape in the middle of their failed orgy. These were certainly not the only ones who had gone hunting for me. Just the first ones who discovered me. I rappelled up into a kneeling position and aimed at the bone degenerate who was closest to me. Now I regretted my pointless waste of ammunition in church. Every bullet was precious. The gun jerked twice in my hand. The first shot missed the degenerate. The second shattered the chain of human bones he wore around his neck and then penetrated his chest at heart level. I turned around, towards a new target, looked out of the corner of my eye and saw that the victim was still running. I ignored him. He just didn’t know he was dead yet. Somewhere in the back of my head, thoughts came up. The shots will tell them where I am. Then: But if I allow them here to kill me, it doesn’t matter. I took the next shape for a ride. The woman. The two bullets I fired hit her in the left thigh and stomach. She fell, overturned and lay there screaming in panic. Quickly I rose from my kneeling posture and shot the next figure over. Headshot. Three out of four. Actually a reason to pat oneself on the back, but then something happened that made me forget my relief. The pistol’s sled stayed behind. The gun was empty. The gun was empty and the fourth bone degenerate was only seven meters away from me. I dropped the gun and changed the machete to the right hand. Already I had to meet the blow of a broad-headed club led from above. I made a purely mechanical counterattack with which I hoped to cut off a few fingers of the damn son of a bitch at best, but he was too fast and evaded. He went back trying to smash my skull in. A series of wild attacks gave me little opportunity to take the initiative. The guy seemed to be everywhere at once. Whenever I wanted to interrupt the hail of attacks, he seemed to anticipate in advance how I would try, and every blow I parried hurt me hellishly when the vibrations made the grip of the machete scrub over my burnt skin. We were moving around in circles. From one side of the street to the other and back again. Bastard. If I didn’t manage to kill him quickly or at least injure his leg so that the disadvantage of my treacherous knee at the moment would be balanced, Eater would reach us. And then I wouldn’t stand a chance. Two opponents in such a fight were a certain death sentence. From the corner of my eye, as I ducked away, turned and took a lunge to the side to interrupt his rhythm, I saw the woman I had shot in the belly slowly sitting down, both hands pressed against the wound and screaming with anger and fear. Again the club rushed up and just in time I brought the machete between me and the weapon to prevent it from breaking my left humerus. Another pain in my hand. Another turn. Now I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before. Under one of the long extinguished lanterns, on which had been tied up an old, fat-bellied man and dangling naked and terribly ridiculously in the air, lay three more corpses. One of them moved. The bizarre, unexpected sight almost made sure that a lateral kick of my opponent, whom I could not have foreseen, would have hit my already stricken knee. Almost, but nevertheless, the evasion made me lose my balance and I stumbled. As I rolled over the wet asphalt, I glanced hastily down the road. Eater came near! Then the bizarre sight of the slowly rising dead caused the panic, which wanted to reach for me, to give way to astonishment. How could such a thing have been possible? I stumbled backwards a few meters between myself and my opponent. He grinned confidently, taking my retreat as a sign of fear, as a sign that my will to fight was broken. He was right about the fear. Not about the broken will. I just needed some time to think. The figure of the revenant had opened his mouth to an inarticulate groan, which could not be heard among the cries of the bone-degenerate with the abdominal wound also trying to stand up. It was a man. Terribly battered. A laceration on the forehead. Deep cuts and ugly abrasions on the face, the fingers of the left hand protruding at bizarre angles. The whole figure was covered almost everywhere with dried, brownish blood, the clothes torn in many places. With his eyes wide open, directed at us who were fighting, he tried to lift himself up. I had perceived all this in a fraction of a second. That and the fact that I could now clearly hear Eater’s asthmatic wheeze. A quick look over my shoulder told me that he had arrived at the scene. But he was not yet ready to intervene in the fight. With his hands resting on his knees, he bent forward wrestled for breath. His fat, ugly face was red and covered in sweat. With greedy little piggy eyes, he looked me straight in the face for a fraction of a second and turned his lips into a nasty grin. Then I heard my opponent take quick steps. I managed to evade his blow, and finally I also managed to score myself. Not a heavy strike, but the blade of the machete went into his left upper arm. He didn’t scream, but I heard him exhale air, more surprised than painful. His certain victory began to crumble. I saw it in his eyes. I took advantage of this moment of shock, multiplied my efforts, covered him with blows which he fended off with his club, which, as I now saw, consisted of nothing but hard, gnarled wood that had been freed from the bark. The vibrations that arose when our weapons collided caused me unspeakable pain, but I didn’t want to lose the initiative at any price. I gritted my teeth and drove him before me. Finally he went backwards, was on the defensive. The pain in my hand grew stronger and stronger. Soon my fingers would no longer obey me, I thought. Soon they would no longer be able to hold the machete. I continued to strike my opponent, casting hectic glances in all directions. I had to finish him off fast. The face of the undead now looked strained. It’s like a picture from a horror movie. But I could see a spark in his eyes. I could see that he understood the situation, the events that took place right in front of him. And I could see anger, a little flame of burning vindictiveness that began to burn hotter and hotter as I drove my opponent towards him. The Deg didn’t notice any of this because I didn’t give him time to think of anything but how to escape my blade. My anger was also burning. The machete was lighter than his club and he had to make an effort to counter the multitude of fast, hissing attacks I made rain down on him. Then finally it was time. He was now very close to the undead, close enough in any case. It happened what I had secretly hoped for. The Risen One mobilized strength from somewhere in his maltreated body, let himself fall forward, his arms outstretched and embraced the legs of my opponent, held them in spite of his broken fingers by clutching his other wrist with his healthy hand, tore at them. Clumsy and weak, the movements looked grotesque, but they served their purpose. The degenerate stumbled and fell. Then I was above him and I hit him. I didn’t have much strength left. The blade got stuck in his forehead without splitting the skull. Not deep enough. He screamed, furious with fear and panic. He wriggled uncoordinated. The club had slipped from his hands and rolled across the wet road. I tore the handle of the machete, wanted to get the blade out so I could strike again, but my burned hand had finally let me down. It just didn’t want to work anymore. The pain was too great. The undead seemed to notice what was going on. I could see that he looked over at Eater, then he picked himself up again and threw his body with the last of his strength across the wriggling Bone Degs in front of him. That’s how he bought me time. I used it, took two steps around the degenerate so that his head was now in front of my feet. The head where the machete was still stuck. He had closed his fingers around the bloody handle, but did not dare to tear the weapon out of his own skull. Three times I stepped against the back of the blade and drove it deeper into his twisted, internally and externally ugly head. I put all my anger into these kicks. My anger at the world. At Tommy. At Da Silva and every one of his followers. At Benito. At Wanda. Anything and everything. Then, when my opponent had twitched his last flinch, my bloodlust died away and I suddenly had trouble keeping myself on my feet. Too much pain. Too much effort. Too much of everything. I staggered as I sought the gaze of the undead. Our eyes met. He understood. I didn’t have to tell him I was grateful. I didn’t have to
tell him he saved my life. He knew. He knew it, and he knew, as did I, that it wasn’t over yet. Eater! I thought I could feel him behind me and whirled around. He wasn’t there. He was still where he had stopped to recover. Only that he had no longer put his hands on his knees and was no longer breathing so heavily. With a slack, disbelieving expression on his face, he walked towards the woman with the bullet in her stomach. His lips moved soundlessly. I think he mumbled her name. He went to his knees next to her, made helpless, with such a colossus of man ridiculous caressing movements with his hands, did not know where to touch her or how he should help her. He seemed to have completely forgotten about me. Real, deep horror stood in his eyes when he finally pressed his hands on the abdominal wound and calmingly talked to the pale woman. I didn’t watch any more. I reached out my hand to my rescuer, then pulled it back, bent down instead, pushed my arm under his right arm bend, and dragged him up from the corpse of the bone deg. He let himself be helped, pulled himself up on me until we both stood on our feet. We swayed, almost fell. Before we dragged ourselves away, he bent over again to the machete and tore it loose.