The Rats of Frankfurt: The Gospel of Madness (Book 1 of 6) (The Gospel of Madness - (A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series))

by Georg Bruckmann

  Shit.

  Darkness.

  I closed the door behind me again and began to rummage through drawers and cupboards until I found a small flashlight that, to my great joy, had a battery that still was functional. Other electricity no longer existed in the most parts of the world, the war had made sure of that. For a brief moment I had to think of all those nuclear power stations that now stood unattended, gloomy and threatening and represented a silent, intangible threat to everything that was left of the world. I couldn’t change it, so I pushed the thought away. With the flashlight in my hand I felt much safer when I descended into the cellar. Arrived downstairs, I was immediately pleased. In the room to my right was a well-equipped workshop. Worktop, various orphaned, meanwhile useless power tools. The wall hung full of hammers, files and saws and there were thousands of nails, screws and nuts in the drawers. Everything was a little messy. Here the master of the house must have had retired for relaxing handicrafts. This assumption was confirmed by a half-full box of beer standing in a corner on the floor. Beck´s. I let the beam of the flashlight wander further. Behind the door were some pieces of wood, among them a few round bars from which I immediately planed to make some bolts for the crossbow. There was another room which, apart from clotheslines, washing machine and dryer, was empty and the boiler room, which also no longer contained anything useful. I took a bottle of beer from the crate and left the cellar again.

  When I reached the top, I opened the bottle at the edge of the counter between living room and kitchen and took a deep sip. At that moment I nearly felt happy. Then I almost dropped the bottle in shock.

  Someone sneaked down the fence. At first just a shadow on the edge of my field of vision, then I realized it was a degenerate.

  I froze, didn’t want him to look through the windows.

  I wouldn’t let him see me.

  I wouldn’t give him a reason to enter the house.

  I needed the security and protection it offered for a little while longer.

  Please, just a few more days without tension and without always having to look over my shoulder.

  My hands trembled as I watched him move out my field of vision. Ragged clothes, more holes than fabric, a spear made of a long iron pipe and a kitchen knife in a dirty scabby hand and bloodshot eyes in a suspiciously looking face.

  I couldn’t tell if the guy was one of those degenerates who had been giving me nightmares for a week, but as soon as I thought about that night, a cold rage started boiling inside me. I could no longer see him and quickly moved from the counter to the kitchen window facing the street.

  There he was again.

  A little perplexed he looked at the chain with the padlock that I had used to lock the gate wings when I arrived outside. Then his eyes searched the windows, and as his gaze glided over me, I shivered.

  He hadn’t seen me. He paused for a moment, then turned around and left.

  Was he really alone, or was he just a scout to lead his pack to fresh prey?

  As quietly as possible, I hurried upstairs into the bedroom. The outlook from this elevated position confirmed my fears. I watched him move away from the gate and stop. He made a brief gesture, and shortly afterwards they stepped out of the overgrown front garden of one of the neighboring houses on the right side of the dead end.

  Two more degenerates. One of them also carried an improvised spear, the other figure was a woman holding a baseball bat lined with nails in her hand.

  They exchanged a few words, then they went down the alley together. One of the men looked around again and I felt as if our eyes had met. I stopped at the window until after about sixty meters they turned right into a street and I could no longer see them. I noticed that I still was holding the beer bottle spasmodically in my hand, forced me to loosen my grip a little and took another novice sip.

  One more, then. And another.

  The last time I had drunk alcohol was a while ago and so a warm, cozy, light feeling soon set in in my body, which seemed somehow inappropriate to me. I sat down on the edge of the bed and allowed myself for a moment to enjoy this paradoxical feeling regardless of all danger. With one last, big sip I emptied the bottle and thought about what I should do. I could not say for sure if the degs had noticed me, but when the last drop of beer was finally drunk, something dawned on me.

  I had made a mistake. The padlock on the gate. It hung inside.

  Not on the outside.

  If the scout had been alert enough, he would have noticed that someone had locked himself in here. And where someone lived, there was food and there you could plunder and murder. On the other hand, he couldn’t have known that I was alone. Maybe this uncertainty would keep them from taking the risk? So I could not say for sure if they would try to enter here, but I cursed myself for my mistake and decided not to stay longer than necessary.

  I gathered my belongings together. The backpack, the crossbow and the olive-green Bundeswehr parka, which was still on the bedroom floor and in whose side pocket were the remaining three bolts for the crossbow. In the drawer where I had found the flashlight, there was another pack of suitable batteries. I took those too, then I went back to the cellar and locked the door behind me. First thing I did was cocking the crossbow and put in a bolt. To have it handy, I placed it on the left edge of the worktop. Then I took another bolt and started working.

  I messed up two workpieces, but for eight others I managed to make improvised missiles out of the round bars and long nails from a drawer with the help of wood glue, a small drill and hemp string. Since they had no feathers like the aluminum bolts from the sports store, they would never fly as far and straight as these, but at short range you could certainly cause enough damage with them to dissuade one or the other of the Degs from possible attack intentions. I kept going. With a whetstone I sharpened the machete and the cheap survival knife. Then I left the basement again. I just wanted to put the cans I had stacked at the front door in my backpack and leave the house, when I saw them.

  In a small caravan they came along the dead end street. Five or six ragged figures with spears went ahead, followed by two carts, a four-wheeled car trailer and a handcart, each pulled by naked, emaciated people who had ropes around their necks. The bodies seemed weak and scuffed. Especially the body of the woman who had to pull the larger car trailer together with an old man. On the carts were supplies, tarpaulins and tent poles and some other things that I could not recognize exactly through the thick glass next to the front door and through the struts of the fence.

  Again I hurried up the stairs to the bedroom and tried to be quiet, although the procession was certainly still forty meters or more away. From here I could see a lot more, and the hair on my arms stood up. Behind the carts, also prevented from escaping by ropes, three children trotted. At this distance I estimated the age of the little ones between eight and eleven years.

  It simply had to be the same degenerate group I came across a week ago. At the end of the caravan, four more degenerates walked tall, armed with knives, clubs and spears. Two of them carried additional sports bows with translation and quivers with arrows on the shoulders. But all this was not that important at the moment. More importantly, in the blink of an eye I had made a decision and the sight of the prisoners had given me certainty.

  This pack of degenerate slavers wouldn’t let any more kids get bitten to shreds by wild animals. Never again.

  ***

  However, my new determination did not prevent me from feeling fear. Fascinated like a rabbit in the spotlight, I watched fist-balling and sweating how this platoon of wretched and wicked people set up camp right in front of my fence.

  That’s why the scouts were there. They were not looking for easy prey today, but for a safe place to camp - and the dead end was ideal, since the supposedly empty houses, the fences and the overgrown gardens offered protection on three sides. As I watched the degenerates and their prisoners setting up camp outside my house, I tried to analyze the situation as objectively as possible.
On the first floor of the house I was safe from discovery for the time being. No one bothered looking up. Soon I got aware of a simple hierarchy within the group. One guy was a little older than the rest, about fifty maybe. He was of wiry stature, the only one not dressed in rags and relatively tall. He stood, flanked by two strong looking men, in the midst of the activity and seemed to consult with them. The rest of the troop was busy unloading the wagons pulled by the naked prisoners, or carrying flammable material, furniture and a lot of books, out of neighboring houses and piling it up in the middle of the improvised camp. The prisoners were still tied to the two carts, but had in the meantime sat on the ground and tried with a lowered gaze not to attract the displeasure of the bustling degenerates. Every now and then, however, one of them was beaten or kicked in passing and their fearful and damped noises of pain made the Degs laugh mockingly. Once one of them pointed towards my house. Another time someone even shook the chain with which I had closed the gate, and I got sick with fear.

  Don´t.

  Not now.

  I’m not ready yet.

  The leader finally called the man to order. There is enough wood for a decent fire. The gate would be taken care of tomorrow. At least that’s how I interpreted the leader’s gestures.

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Yeah, you creeps, take care of that damn gate tomorrow. Don’t you pay any attention to me.

  I watched them for a while until I was really sure they wouldn’t change their minds. The carts had been arranged across the road so that they formed a barrier that shielded the camp from the open road. This way they were protected from attacks by other gangs and wild animals from all sides by my fence, the two neighboring houses and their carts. They had unloaded the tents, but had not set them up yet. The Degs had put down the tarpaulins and tent poles at the eastern edge of the camp. Food and water containers had been brought to the center of the camp, where a small fire of looted furniture and books had already been lit. The leader, protected by his two henchmen, took his seat with his back to me and his eyes turned to the road. Most of the other degenerates also sat in loose circles around the fireplace, except for one who was preparing the food and, for this purpose, pulled something that looked like the old carcass of some unidentified animal out of a blue garbage bag and two other men who walked down the street with shouldered spears and took a stand about thirty meters away from the camp.

  Wonderful.

  I actually seemed to enjoy a certain amount of fool’s freedom, at least as long as I didn’t make any noise and didn’t show my face outside or in the windows. The leader had now taken a small, leather-clad book from one of his pockets and seemed to study it. The rest of the group talked, and now and then one of the aides seemed to give an instruction with a slightly raised voice, as I could tell from the body language. I could not understand the words, but it was also to be seen that there was no concrete reason for the apparent command tone, since nobody reacted to it with any visible action. It only seemed to be a matter of clarifying the hierarchy. I took one last look at the neglected group. Finally I leaned the tense crossbow against the wall next to the window, taking care not to hit the cold heating element under the window sill so as not to make any kind of noise and to announce my presence by mistake. I left the two aluminum bolts together with the ones I had made myself next to the weapon and went down to the ground floor with my machete in my hand and the sheathed knife on my belt. There I began to put my plan into action.

  While I was searching the whole house for usable items the second time, one thing was clear to me: if I really wanted to take on such a superiority, I had to prepare myself.

  ***

  I crept carefully and crouched through the whole house and collected everything I considered useful in the entrance area. Whenever I had completely looted a room, I tried to block

  the door to that respective room. Sometimes I managed this by simply turning a key that was still in the door lock, but now and then I had to reach for a broom handle, a floor lamp or something similar.

  In the end, there was only one way left unblocked to get into the bedroom upstairs, because I wanted to start my attack from there. But first I had to go back to the cellar. I unlocked the door as quietly as possible and descended the steps. There was another hatchet here, over there was a hammer. I found a bottle of solvent and about two liters of petrol for a chainsaw, but the tool was nowhere to be seen.

  Back on the ground floor, I let my eyes wander over the rubbish I had collected here. Suddenly my plan seemed completely idiotic. I’d certainly die today.

  On the other hand, what kind of life would I possibly lose today? Aimless, restless and pointless - that’s all I could think of at the moment to describe my state of being, and right now I didn’t really know whether that had been very different before the war. Completely slack and lost in thought I stood around for a few more minutes, trapped in a web of conflicting thoughts and shadowy memories. Then I had to think again of the girl the degenerates had sacrificed to the wild dogs and of the three other children who were still tied to the carts outside the house. Finally I went back to work.

  In a way you could say, I worked backwards from the front door up into the bedroom. All the time I was aware that none of my measures were suitable for really killing one of the degs. Rather, I tried to ensure that they could not make use of their numerical superiority and all at once attack me. If I was lucky, I’d catch two or three of them before they climbed over the fence. The others would probably try to enter the house through the entrance door or through one of the bigger windows on the ground floor. But no matter which way they would choose to get to me and kill me - in the end, every one of them would end up in the hallway and try to get to me via the stairs leading up to the bedroom.

  At some point I had finished my preparations and was back in the bedroom. Not only had I added the axe and the hammer to my arsenal of weapons, but I also had three Molotov cocktails made from empty beer bottles, chainsaw gasoline and with the help of an old cleaning cloth as wick.

  I left one of them next to the crossbow, which was still leaning next to the heating element below the window. The other two I placed at the top of the stairs. While my hand was playing with the lighters in my pocket, I looked out the window.

  I got nervous.

  The improvised camp of the degenerates had not changed. I can’t say for sure how much time my preparations had taken. Not too long I guess. The group was still sitting around the fire. The two guards at the northern border of the dead end were still at their posts and the leader was still leafing through his little leather booklet.

  There was no better time than now, I reassured myself.

  I picked up the crossbow and opened the window very slowly and as quietly as possible. Nobody had noticed anything down there and I set my sights on the back of the leader’s head. Through the rifle scope I could see that his hair was getting gray here and there, but that shouldn’t be his concern anymore - he wouldn’t get much older.

  I took a deep breath, held my air - then I pulled the trigger.

  It took the bolt a fraction of a second to reach its target. With a wet, somehow crunching sound, the missile penetrated deeply into the leader’s skull from behind and tore him forward. The book fell out of his hands into the mud and his body collapsed. I did not wait for the reaction of his comrades, but moved quickly away from the window in order not to be discovered just yet and began to make the crossbow ready again. When I had the cocked the bow another time and just was inserting the bolt, I heard the first cries.

  Taking advantage of the chaos below and their moment of shock, I stepped back to the window and aimed again. The two aides had leaned over the leader’s body. The rest of the group had taken up arms and they looked around suspiciously. But nobody had discovered me yet and now I took my time. Through the telescopic sight, I chose the degenerate who looked the biggest and most dangerous. He was on the other side of the fire, had just picked up his spear and jump
ed up in shock. I aimed at his ugly face full of pustules and pulled the trigger again.

  This shot didn’t hit as well as the first. It missed the face and the bolt drilled into the man’s chest below the left clavicle. He yelled in pain, but at the same time he raised his arm on his unharmed side and pointed at me.

  I was discovered.

  Now several things happened at the same time. I was again readying my crossbow, the two aides let go of their leader’s body and reached for the weapons and the two archers on the other side of the fire placed arrows on the tendons. The whole camp was now in motion and turmoil and a great shouting arose, in which the prisoners also took their part.

  The degenerates screamed with rage, the prisoners with fear.

  By the time I had inserted the third and last of my feathered aluminum bolts, the two aides had already climbed halfway over the fence and the archers had put their weapons on me. As fast as I could, I also aimed at one of them and pulled the trigger. The bolt pierced his hand and his arrow rose high into the grey sky. I dropped my crossbow, reached for the Molotov cocktail and with the other hand for one of the lighters. I was going to throw the incendiary charge at the two henchmen as soon as they had gotten over the fence protecting me. The scrap of fabric at the top of the Molotov cocktail had just caught fire when an arrow rushed past me and hit the wall behind me. When the slower of the two aides had just put his feet on the ground, I sent the flaming projectile on its way. I was a little hasty with the throw. The bottle crashed on the ground one meter away from the guy, there was a bright jet of flames, and he was caught by a spray of burning liquid. I jumped back from the window, just in time, because a second arrow came flying in and just missed me. I was thinking about what I should do.