When one of them climbed a breast-high concrete rock, to get an overview I used my crossbow. The bolt struck, and with a much too high scream the figure fell backwards out of my field of vision.
I climbed deeper into this bizarre, chaotic sea of rocks, nudged my shins and tore bloody scratches in my arms as I scraped past a sharp edge of a particularly large piece of concrete and could barely save myself from falling.
While I was still quietly cursing myself, I noticed a black spot in the dirty gray and brown of my surroundings. A black spot about one and a half meters in diameter. A black spot on the ground. A hole that seemed to lead vertically down. Behind me I still could hear my hunters climbing and cursing, but when I turned around I couldn’t see any of them. This hole may have been my only chance. But only if no one would see me go in.
My pursuers had been decimated by me and the fight with the strangers on the bridge, but I could not under any circumstances face their superiority and also a continuation of this chase into all eternity was unthinkable.
I couldn’t do it anymore.
I covered the last few meters to the mysterious opening lurking in the ground in a power-sapping hurry. For a moment I stood there, still undecided and searching for courage somewhere in my rushed brain. When I had found
it, I sat down at the edge of the hole and swung my legs over the brittle edge. Then I repelled myself.
To my great luck I slipped and slid rather than really tumbling, because after perhaps one and a half meters of free fall the hole did not lead down so steeply any more, but the earth formed a kind of ramp, which led down a little more gentle. Nevertheless, my ankle was exposed to another, extremely painful stress test. The scarce light passing through the opening didn’t allow much to be seen, but it was enough to let me sense that I was in a kind of cave that had a diameter of three meters and at whose northern edge the soil had been removed and released a massive concrete wall. In the middle of this concrete wall was another, almost circular hole and behind it lurked a deeper blackness. From there musty and sick-smelling air pulled in my direction. This hole in the earth was not a dead end. I could hardly believe how lucky I was.
While carefully moving towards the hole to examine it more closely, I wondered whether I should lie in ambush with the crossbow. In the dark I would be invisible to my pursuers, whilst they would make perfect targets, as they would stare down into the cave at their feet, illuminated by autumn daylight.
I crouched down next to the breakthrough in the northern wall and made my crossbow ready for shooting again.
The bad smell escaping the hole was now much stronger. However, I could not define it further. Through the telescopic sight I aimed at the rim of the cave above me. I was sure the first of my hunters would show up every moment and stare down at me with murder in his eyes.
And indeed, a dark silhouette emerged. My finger was approaching the trigger. Just a little more pressure, and my bolt would drill into the skull of the degenerate and give him a swift death. I was just about to shoot, when the silhouette became smaller, moved backwards and was no longer visible a moment later. I kept my eye on the rim and listened. Steps of several people became louder.
The dogs are gathering in front of the badger’s den.
Another head appeared up there for a few seconds and then disappeared again, and I wondered whether it had probably been Onehand.
There followed a mumbling and whispering, a louder, protesting word, a thud and then a gasp.
The dogs discussed their approach.
Then the footsteps went away, and I heard nothing more.
Were they on the lookout?
Quite like me, pointing their arrows at the opening in the ground?
Or had they moved on?
They couldn’t be sure I was actually down here. Maybe they’ve continued to search the debris field. Maybe they had left a single guard at the cave entrance that would sound the alarm as soon as I stretched my head out of the opening.
No, at the moment I couldn’t go back to the surface and in the next few minutes I didn’t dare to make the slightest noise either.
I seemed to be forced to stay in this position forever, until at some point I tried to find a position in which my limbs would not fall asleep or cramp as quietly as possible and then kept a constant eye on the access to the surface again.
The foul-smelling wall breakthrough, next to which I huddled, seemed to be my only, halfway safe way out of this situation. It was simply impossible to estimate what was waiting for me up there on the surface.
Well, the same was true for the smelly blackness behind me, but I assumed that I at least would not be spiked with arrows immediately, as soon as my head would become visible in the opening in the wall.
Many minutes had passed and I hadn’t heard the slightest sound that suggested the presence of other people. The cold, intensified by my wet clothes, crept into my bones, became more and more cruel and unbearable. I forced myself to stay a few more minutes, but I was aware that I could not crouch and lurk forever, down in this hole in the ground. Still I had not heard a sound from above or from the black behind me and finally I got up. My left knee crashed so badly that I was sure that one could hear it loud and clear even at the top of the surface.
But nothing.
No perceptible reaction.
I carefully laid down my crossbow on the damp ground and stretched myself, checked the functioning of my limbs and, after I had endured the disgusting, painful tingling accompanied by my improved blood circulation due to the changed posture, I ducked and pushed my body through the northern opening of the cave, which had saved my life in such an unexpected way.
Well.
At least for now.
When I stood up again on the other side of the wall, I realized that it had to be a tunnel or an underpass running from east to west. Of course I could not see as far as the opposite tunnel wall, but the resounding, clattering noises and their echoes caused by a little stone that I had accidentally hit with my foot at least told me, that this black, gigantic and new universe that I had just begun to cross blindly like a mole, had to be something that had been created by human hands. Also, the floor at my feet was smooth and even, which seemed to confirm my assessment.
I had put on the crossbow again and felt myself along the wall in the direction I liked to believe was east, because I had the unfounded hope of somehow getting back near the narrow bridge that was to lead me back to Wanda and Mariam. Somewhere there would be another way up. Wouldn’t it?
Every few steps I stopped and listened into the impenetrable darkness. My presence here didn’t seem to have been noticed by anyone or anything. Occasionally my feet hit an obstacle, but as I found out, whenever I knelt down carefully and felt with my hands into the blackness, it was always something broken or something dead. An old wooden fruit box, a car tire, a rat carcass, a bunch of damp, cold blankets or rags and the like. Once I came across the body of a big dog that must have made its way down here somehow. It wasn’t skeletonized yet, but despite that I couldn’t say if it had actually died recently or if it was the cold darkness down here that hindered it’s decay.
After these experiences, which I guess I had made in the first thirty minutes in this stinking blackness, my initial, anxious caution gave way to a somewhat more confident routine. I still took a break every few steps and listened, but I wasn’t as tensed and nervous as in the beginning. But I was still miserably cold. Also the omnipresent stench down here, which I in the beginning perceived as really unpleasant - I almost didn’t even notice it anymore.
While my right hand continued to keep me in contact with the wall of the tunnel, I felt around with my left hand in the pockets of my jeans.
And indeed, there it was!
A disposable lighter.
I had unconsciously hoped the whole time that I would have one with me. Of course, it would be wet and not work right away, sure. While I continued to fumble my way through the blackness, I shook the lighter o
ut for several minutes while walking, flint-stone down of course. Didn’t work yet.
When I thought I had shook enough and once again hit a soft obstacle with my left foot, I stopped. Hesitantly and carefully groping, I stretched out my fingers towards the unknown thing at my feet.
It was a leg.
A leg that stuck in a pair of trousers and ended on a shoe or on a boot. Crouching I groped further up, in the direction of the upper body. The flesh under the fabric held my touch and felt quite firm. When my hands arrived at the dead man’s hip and sensed the cold metal of a belt buckle, I got all excited. Hastily and eagerly I felt from the buckle to the right and left. There were bags attached to the belt, bags that could only be made to hold tools.
Or guns.
Or replacement magazines.
Or flashlights.
I felt and felt and indeed - on the left side of the dead body my hasty fingers could identify an elongated cylinder that became thicker upwards. I had to take a deep breath. Slowly and carefully I pulled the object towards the head of the body, and finally I held it in my hand - the flashlight!
I held it in my hand, the tool that with a little luck would make my way up so much easier.
I held my breath as I pushed the switch forward with my thumb.
Nothing.
Disappointment.
Anger.
The fucking thing stayed dark.
Damn it.
Already I wanted to throw the useless, eternally extinct light source from me, then I thought of something better. I unscrewed the battery compartment at the lower end of the round housing and diligently placed the lid next to my right foot so that I could find it again without any problems. Then I let the two batteries slide into my hand and carefully placed them on the floor, too. I took the whole lamp apart as best I could in the darkness and rubbed off every single piece on the dead man’s trousers firmly and carefully. With forced calm I then put the flashlight together again and checked with extreme meticulousness the firm fit of every single part. Especially with the bulb and its frame I took my time almost infinitely. At some point it was done. I operated the switch, and the brutal brightness pricked into my optic nerve, which had become accustomed to darkness, ate into my brain and made an universe of rainbow-colored stars appear before my eyes.
I wheezed.
A few, infinite seconds later my sense of sight had normalized and I had the flashlight beam cut through the blackness around me. The first thing I noticed was that the dead man at my feet must have been a soldier of the old Bundeswehr.
All other perceptions merged into a complete picture only after a few seconds of dull staring.
The body in front of me wore camouflage, the old, black-red-golden German flag was represented in some of the sewn-on badges and under the helmet a gas mask covered the dead face. What was that guy doing down here? Was he hiding? Had there been a battle here? In a few moments, I would start looting the body. But first I wanted to get some kind of overview.
The tunnel was nearly ten meters wide and I had done well to hold myself close to the wall. For, as I could now see, the whole tunnel was paved over and over with corpses, and by no means all of them wore uniforms.
Some leaned and sat across the wall. Men, women and children. Soldiers and civilians alike. The cause of death was not immediately apparent in any of them. No gunshot wounds, no bloodied clothing. No sign of violence. But still, the postures in which these people had died indicated great pain. Eyes and mouths torn open. Cramped facial features disfigured by spasms. Miserably perished.
The strange smell that had escaped from the passage came to my mind.
Then my eyes fell on the dead man’s gas mask at my feet. Hectically I looked over this forgotten cemetery in the middle of which I found myself.
I was dizzy when I noticed that almost without exception each of the uniformed corpses wore such a protective mask.
Only the uniformed ones. And it hadn’t helped them.
What my brain concluded from this information almost made me faint. I dropped the flashlight, slapped my hands over my mouth and nose and staggered against the wall, paralyzed with fear.
***
I can’t remember how long I stood still in the middle of the underground mass grave. My heart threatened to burst my chest, my limbs were soft as rubber and my skull hurt from the loud throbbing of my arteries. The flashlight had rolled a few meters over the ground and its beam lit up an old woman’s face, distorted in death and rotten, wearing a house coat, casting monstrous shadows on the other side of the tunnel.
Only slowly I realized that I would not die immediately.
Whatever killed these people - I assumed it was a gas that the soldiers’ respiratory masks had nothing to oppose to, or a warfare agent that was absorbed through the skin or something else, that the disgusting but always amazing human will to destroy was able to invent - it was either already completely gone or the concentration was so low that my circulatory collapse was the only thing it’s could cause.
At least for now.
I repressed the word “late effects” from my brain and laboriously and weakly I crawled on the dirty-wet ground the few meters to the flashlight and again took it into my possession.
This tiny effort caused me a heavy sweat and so I lay down on my back again, next to the old woman for a few minutes, staring at the rough concrete ceiling of the tunnel and doing nothing else but to concentrate on my breathing.
At some point I managed to get the furious, panting movements of my lungs back under control and take slow, steady breaths.
Hyperventilating has never helped anyone - a pseudo-wisdom of my PE teacher that I thought I had long forgotten, a shadow out of time, as spooky and surreal as the shadows of the dead in this tunnel.
But there had to be something about the saying, because slowly the paralyzing nausea vanished.
I kept breathing for a few more minutes until I thought I could get up.
Then I did exactly that.
On still slightly shaky legs I picked the crossbow off the ground and suppressed the vague urge to vomit. Leaning against the cold concrete wall, I waited for another sweat to break out, and when it was over and I had managed to see my situation objectively again, I took some cautious and then increasingly confident steps into the middle of the tunnel.
Above me were degenerates who were probably on the lookout, and then there were the three figures who had attacked Onehand´s hunting group.
Well. Actually, there was only one of them left.
I wondered if there were any more of them up there.
But it didn’t help. I couldn’t go back the way I came. All I had left was to flee forward, and I could only hope that in the threatening darkness, somewhere at the end of the tunnel, there was a way to the surface. An exit that Onehand and his Degs hadn’t discovered yet.
The thought of the feverish Mariam, who was waiting for her medication in our fenced-in domicile, I successfully suppressed. It wouldn’t help me to go crazy over it right now.
Hyperventilating had never helped anyone.
More alert and sober than before, I looked at the dead around me. Not far in front of me lay the bodies of three soldiers. Next to one of them was an assault rifle that had slipped out of his cold hands. They all had guns in their holsters. I went over to them and began to loot.
After a few minutes of searching through pockets, pulling out the loot and rolling around the bodies, I was the owner of a dirty, olive-green backpack containing two pistols, five full replacement magazines, two water bottles, a pair of high-tech-looking binoculars, some field rations sealed in silver foil and two replacement magazines for the assault rifle.
I had tried to place these objects in the backpack’s pockets in such a way that they would not rattle when I walked and, having pulled it on my back, was relieved to discover that I had been quite successful with this undertaking. I put another gun in the pocket of my parka and then slung the belt of the assault rifle over m
y head. I was aware of the fact that I had very little knowledge of firearms, but I at least knew that it did not make much sense to some test shooting down here.
First, the noise could give me presence away and second, a shot down here in the tunnel would surely shred my eardrums into little pieces. So I simply hoped I wouldn’t need the weapons while down here, grabbed my crossbow tighter and set off.
I alternately put one foot after the other on the concrete floor, careful not to kick one of the bodies. I let the beam of the flashlight glide permanently from right to left like a primitive radar.
After a few minutes of sneaking, walking around the corpses and peering forward, the dead lay suddenly no longer as dense as before and the air also got a little better. It still seemed to me somehow musty and smelling of fungus infestation and decay, but this haze was now and then interrupted by a gush of freshness. After another minute I felt a steady stream of fresh air blowing towards me and pushing back the poisonous, invisible mist I had just passed through.
It was an incredible pleasure to suck the cool air deep into my lung and after a few more minutes I had left behind the mysterious mass grave and the painful throb in my temples became less intense with each step.
Where fresh air came from, there had to be a way to the surface. And so I accelerated my steps and was almost convinced that I had successfully tricked the degenerates. While Onehand and his cronies had been lurking in vain outside the hole in the ground for quite some time, I had moved away from them step by step, would circle around them and return to Wanda and Mariam.
I smiled inside at the thought. The tunnel in front of me was now completely empty. No dead bodies, no garbage, no orphaned belongings. In front of me just normal darkness, around me just ordinary concrete, cracked and damp.
The Rats of Frankfurt: The Gospel of Madness (Book 1 of 6) (The Gospel of Madness - (A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series)) Page 10