Should I shoot the crossbow out the window again?
Or should I prepare myself for them to storm the house soon?
No, not with the crossbow!
On the one hand, the remaining degenerate archer now had warmed up for sure and on the other hand I just had my homemade bolts at my disposal. I had already used up all the more precise aluminum bolts. So the decision was made. While I was crouching in the bedroom to avoid being hit by a third arrow, I listened eagerly.
The degenerates were still screaming with rage and those I had hurt were screaming in pain and expressing their anger. Metallic rattling, the rustling of clothes and a grinding noise told me that other Degs were about to climb over the fence. On the ground floor, loud, booming blows made the front door tremble and behind me an arrow slammed into the bedroom door and made it squeak in its hinges as it moved slightly. Time to move.
Standing on top of the stairs I readied the crossbow for the fourth time and inserted one of the self-made bolts. Through the small window next to the front door I could see how they were gathering. However, the angle was a bit awkward, so I couldn’t really see how many they were. While still aiming at the door below, which vibrated from the heavy blows of the degenerates, I heard the sound of breaking glass from the ground floor somewhere.
Someone must have tried to enter the living room.
Suddenly the front door gave way with a bursting, wooden sound, jumped open and a ragged figure stormed through the door frame. I pulled the trigger and the bolt hit the degenerate’s upper body. With a horrified, unbelieving expression in his eyes, he stared at the wooden shaft that stood out from him. Then he went down under the onslaught of his pressing comrades. He fell forward and the bolt disappeared completely inside his body. While I tried with sweaty fingers to light the Molotov cocktails previously deposited here, I saw three other degenerates climb over the corpse of their friend and take the entrance area.
It was the unusual sight presented itself to them that prevented the degs from immediately storming up the stairs to chop me to pieces. Cross and crosswise, in the entire entrance area I had set up a net and footrests of cords, belts, knotted power cables and shoelaces. However, my plan didn’t seem to work out. I had expected them to rush at me immediately, just to get tangled up and fall and this way make easy targets for me, but I guess I was wrong.
The short moment of rigidity was over when I had finally lit the fuses of the two Molotov cocktails.
The very second I took my first throw, they hectically began to chop on the first lines and cables that were stretched between them and me and to violently pull on them. What they did not notice, however, was that one of them was standing in a quiet large puddle of solvent.
When the first of the two remaining Molotov cocktails exploded on the floor, ignited the highly inflammable liquid and turned the deg into a living, screeching torch, the living room door on the side of the scenery suddenly burst open and the woman with the spiked baseball bat jumped right into this madness. I threw my second incendiary charge at her, but instead of smashing at her feet on the floor, the bottle simply kept rolling and just set a curtain in the back of the entrance area on fire. Smoke, greedy flames and screaming were now omnipresent. As I beheld a scornful grin on her face, I realized that the other degenerates had broken my net and were getting ready to storm the stairs. The first of them, who set foot on the stairs, slipped in a puddle of soap and salad oil and fell forward. This blocked the way for his comrades at short notice, and I had enough time to throw the axe and the hammer. The axe unfortunately only hit the degenerate woman with the handle on her upper body, but the hammer I threw right afterwards hit her right in the face, broke her nose and took some teeth with it when it fell to the ground. Her hands slapped in front of her bloody face and she started screaming loudly and gurgling wet. Up to here it had all worked out incredibly well for me, but at the latest my surprise advantage was gone now. The one of the aides I hadn’t caught with the Molotov cocktail out by the fence just stepped over his fallen comrade and then jumped at me with a mean-looking knife in his hand. Down at the front door I could see the silhouettes of other degenerates preparing to enter the battlefield shining through the flames.
Too many … way too many.
***
When I reluctantly woke up, all I could see at first were dark silhouettes. Strange, naked and bizarre figures and shadows seemed to hurry around me in circles, wafting, materializing and then dissolving again, coming back and then leaving. Undefinable murmurs, quiet, short exchanges of words and the hissing and crackling of a burning fire mixed with the noise that occurs when boiling fat drips into the flames. One of the figures poured some water into my mouth, just a little sip, but feeling the cool liquid in my throat had an incredible relief to it. As I was about to swallow, a violent pain seared through my throat and made me emerge from my twilight state.
My eyes were getting sharper again.
Above me, in the sky, the sun almost seemed to have set and the clouds, whirled up into bizarre shapes by the evening wind, still shone weakly in its dying light. For a while I watched this everyday spectacle that at that moment seemed so wonderful to me and I almost wanted to close my eyes and let myself fall back into the comforting darkness of my dreams again, when I remembered.
The fight. The degenerates. The burning house. The prisoners.
Adrenaline and panic made me rise into a sitting position. I regretted it immediately. The pain that flashed through me seemed to come from an impossible number of places in my body at the same time. Willingly I let the old man, who had covered his nudity with a rag as a loincloth, gently push me back into my lying position. He made a calming gesture with his hands.
“They’re gone?” I ask powerlessly.
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
“Only those who still could walk.”
“Which ones?”
“One of the two women and the one you shot in the hand. The others are dead.”
“Good.”
I nodded and he grinned a toothless grin. Horrible images invaded my brain.
I remembered.
I avoid blows and stings, flail everywhere, strike with the machete, hit a hand and stab a face with my knife, leave a fatally injured degenerate behind me and turn to the next. A spear penetrates my shoulder, dull red pain boils up, pain and the fear of death. A punch in the face drives me back and this way pulls the spear out of my body. Panic and nausea when I see my own blood. Hands close around my neck. They are terribly strong and the skin of the fingers feels like sandpaper. Together we roll down the stairs, a ball of human bodies, pain in the back and coccyx. The smoke from the burning curtain bites my eyes, makes them tear. I manage to regain some freedom of movement through the fall and I bite off the little finger of the sandpaper hand. Blood shoots into my mouth, but I suppress the urge to puke and push the blade of my knife laterally through the neck of the degenerate above me. He collapses on me and his weight presses me down. I can’t get him off me. He smiles grimly, his mouth spits hissing, aggressive sounds right into my ear and I see one of his comrades appear next to me and raises a gigantic looking mace with nails on it. He holds it with both arms high over his head, in order to beat it into my face with all the force he has, as an arrowhead penetrates the figure’s chest from behind and a red rain comes down on me. The mace slips away from the ragged creature’s hands and I now can see that it is the woman whose face I had so terribly deformed with the hammer.
She’s come back, some part of me thinks in surprise.
I just perceive the slim female shadow further back with the bow in its hand, then everything grows black when the club, unstoppably pulled down by gravity, hits my head. The people enslaved by the degenerate gang must have taken up arms when they finally grasped the situation. Slower and more cautious than the first time I sat up and what I saw confirmed my assumption.
Around the fireplace, where the impaled animal carcass roasted and develop
ed a more and more delicious scent, lay corpses with terrible wounds. Another degenerate had a spear in his stomach. The dead body of an eight-year-old boy, half of whose blond hair was bloody-red, was buried under him. An old man, naked like all slaves, lay on his stomach with an arrow in his back. Another deg seemed to have been nailed to the wood of one of the carts with a spear. His head hung down limply. I couldn’t see his face and I was happy about it. There were more bodies lying around, but I didn’t pay any more attention. They were not alive anymore and that was good and I turned my attention to the living. Enough death for today.
The old man next to me looked into my face, probably ready to keep me awake if I should give indication of passing out again. On the other side of the fire I saw a woman with a bow over her shoulder and a little girl on the - on our - battlefield gathering weapons that no one else would carry anymore and collecting them on one of the carts.
“That’s Wanda,” said the old man. “She saved you.”
“And the child?”
“Mariam.”
“Who else?”
“None.”
“And you?”
“I’m Thomas.”
I nodded, and when the break that had interrupted our short conversation had become long enough and Thomas realized that I wouldn’t give him my name for the time being, he said:
“Come help me take a look under your clothes so we can see how badly hurt you really are. You almost look like one of them.”
He nodded vaguely towards the dead.
I concentrated on my body. My neck hurt, my left shoulder pounded dull and hot, just like my coccyx. When I tried to pull my bloody, shredded T-shirt over my head, I immediately decided to leave it on. Another ache stabbed my brain. One or more of my ribs had to be broken, judging by the pain. I expressed my concern and Thomas frowned. After a short moment of hesitation Thomas helped me and together we managed, slowly and carefully, to undress my maltreated body down to my underpants. After Thomas had examined me, he nodded.
“No. No broken bones. You will make it, I guess.”
And indeed: My whole body was covered with bruises, scabbed scratches and minor wounds, but apart from the wound in the shoulder, no major injury could be found.
“We’re still going to have to stay here,” Thomas said.
“We?” I asked. He looked at me.
“We need a break, too.”
He pointed in the direction of Wanda and Mariam. Yeah, he might be right.
“And that one...” He pointed to my shoulder.
“… we’re probably gonna have to burn that wound out somehow.”
I avoided his gaze, suppressed the thought of burning flesh, although I of course knew that he was right. An infection of the wound had to be prevented in any case. However, I was thinking more like sterile bandages and antibiotics than glowing iron and even more pain. We would see.
To distract him, I said:
“We should get ready for the night,” and nodded up to the darkening sky.
“Yes. I’ll help them both. Do you want to go back to your house?”
The way he asked told me, he didn’t think much of the idea. Probably none of us wanted to spend the night in a house full of dead people, but I added:
“It’s got a fence.”
“Yes, it does. But I think there’s enough meat for the dogs out here. We can probably do without the extra protection for one night.”
He looked in the direction of the bodies. I proved him right. The dogs wouldn’t bother us when when they could get so much carrion here without a fight.
Sitting on the floor, I watched as Wanda, Mariam and Thomas carried everything that seemed useful to them into the corpse-free house next door on the west side of the dead end.
Plundered pre-war food, several of the blue garbage bags, which, as I now knew, probably contained the hunting spoils of the degenerates, two large canisters of water and a handful of smaller cans with food, weapons and all kinds of other equipment found way into our new shelter. I wondered what had happened to my own weapons. I’d ask for them later. The three managed to finish their work in a relatively short time. Besides collecting the possessions of the degs, while cursing and panting, they had also dragged the corpses a good distance northwards, almost to the open side of the dead end. That was good. There was no need to see the dogs eat.
The bodies of the other prisoners were wrapped in tarpaulins and laid in the front garden of the house. Finally the three turned to me and Wanda and Thomas came to help me up. Mariam, who had looked shyly at me the whole time, stayed behind and watched. When they pulled me on my feet, a blazing pain shot through my right ankle.
“Shit!”, I cursed into myself with my teeth bit together. So something was broken after all.
In the end I leaned equally on Wanda and Thomas and together they dragged me past the heap of weapons and other stuff onto the leather couch that stood in the living room of our new common shelter. Mariam had taken the roasting spit, which looked far too heavy for her size, from the fire and closed the front door behind us, a little clumsily and with great concentration, without dropping it.
We left the fire burning.
For a while I sat on the couch with my eyes half closed and watched the three of them busily putting together a kind of meal from the fried meat and some canned food.
Judging from what I could see from here, the interior of this house was a little simpler and of lower quality than that of the house I had previously chosen to hide in. But this I only noticed in passing, because at that moment I was just incredibly happy that none of my new acquaintances seemed to expect me to participate in the work, and more than once the past effort let me nod off for a moment.
Every time I fought my way back from sleep to reality, into my pain-filled body. I was just too curious about these people and in an irrational, dark corner of my mind I still thought it was possible that they might kill me if I lost consciousness - even if Thomas had behaved exactly the opposite way so far.
Someone had put two candles on the table and lowered the shutters, so that we wouldn’t make an easy target in their light, because it had become completely dark outside in the meantime.
They haven’t stayed naked for a long time. I was sure it was pretty much the first thing each of them had done after the fight - put some clothes on, I mean. The nudity had not only been a humiliation that the degenerates forced upon their prisoners. The resulting absolute defenselessness also created a psychological barrier to prevent the slaves from even thinking of anything like resistance or flight. You couldn’t feel more vulnerable or powerless. Given this, one must value even higher that they took initiative and joined my suicidal attack on the degs.
Wanda moved through the room with a strange kind of elegance, but limped slightly on one leg and a fine red cut ran across her left cheek. Her hair was dark, somewhere between black and brown, shoulder-long and slightly curly. At first glance, she seemed very slender, but on closer inspection, one noticed that it was simply emaciated due to too bad and too little food. This was also true of Thomas. Of the three, Mariam looked healthiest. Although her small body was covered with scratches and scars like everyone else´s, I was sure that the adult prisoners had given the children much of their own scarce rations and had only taken for themselves what was absolutely necessary. Somehow this thought almost made me happy, because it showed that I had made the right decision. That they were worth putting my life at risk for them. As noble as that may sound, in reality I could not say exactly whether I was really concerned only with the lives of the prisoners, or whether I just could not cope with my own original failure a week before. Was that it? Something in between, I guess. Maybe a death wish, too. Who cares? The three of them now sat at the table and distributed our dinner onto the plates.
On four plates.
I accepted this silent invitation, hoisted myself off the couch and limped to the free chair. Until now no one had said a word more than necessary, but when I sat down at
the table, the first knot loosened. Mariam was waiting until I had carefully placed my aching bones on the unpadded chair, then, abruptly and uninhibitedly, with her two small hands, she started to a strip of fried meat and then a ready for baking bread roll, that Thomas had toasted over a candle flame and finally started to shovel all of this in her children child’s mouth, swallowed hard, coughed and spit the barely chewed food back onto her plate.
Thomas grinned slightly, then he said dryly:
“Maybe we should use the good silver after all? Or what do you think?”
The dam was broken. We all started laughing unrestrainedly, couldn’t stop at all. Also Mariam, at whose expense we were having fun, joined in, and we had to make sounds like a bunch of lunatics on speed. It wasn’t just Mariam’s little slapstick. The idea of eating with a knife and fork seemed completely absurd to all of us now, long after the collapse of the old world and after all the killing that lay behind us all.
When we finally had calmed down again and the memories had faded and disappeared again, but then more endurable incarnations, Wanda said:
“You know, maybe we should actually do this,” got up, rummaged through some drawers and then handed out knives and forks to all of us. For a moment I hesitated, but when Mariam and Thomas reached for the cutlery and turned it between their fingers, I also reached for it, carefully speared a piece of meat on the fork and cut off a piece with the knife. Shortly afterwards we all ate in silence and enjoyed the taste of food, the vague feeling of nostalgia and the simple fact that we were still alive.
The Rats of Frankfurt: The Gospel of Madness (Book 1 of 6) (The Gospel of Madness - (A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series)) Page 5