Something sharp, animalistic penetrated their noses. Tommy stopped and whispered to Mariam.
“We are right. In front of us is the House of Rats. That’s where they live.”
Mariam swallowed.
“We have to get through it?”
“Yes. Or would you rather have tried the redsleeves now?”
She shook her head and Tommy nodded to prove her right.
“Exactly. It is one thing to escape the red guys on the platforms, where there are hiding places everywhere. But it’s very hard in a tunnel.”
“Okay, you’re right... this is the best way, I think.”
Suddenly a smile had stepped on the mostly serious-looking face of the boy.
“Hey, we’re gonna get some really great stuff!”
Tommy’s eyes sparkled with anticipation.
Suddenly a distant but loud blow sounded behind them.
It was as if someone had hit an iron bar against one of the numerous pipes installed on the ceiling. The sound vibrated through the pipes, passed the children and ran off into the black distance. Frightened, they looked at each other. Tommy put his finger over his lips and Mariam could see that he was worried too. Another blow shook the pipes. Then a creepy voice came to their ears. Somehow deep, but so distorted by the tunnel walls that neither Tommy nor Mariam could understand the words, if there were any.
“That’s getting closer!”
Tommy had the same impression. When the strange voice sounded once more, and this time perceptibly closer than the first time, the two kids finally came to life.
Rather, life came into Tommy. He pulled Mariam by the hand and dragged her behind him. Frightened by Tommy’s sudden reaction, her body felt the need to scream, but she bravely succeeded in suppressing they impulse. They rushed on and with each step they took, the animal stench became more penetrating and there were more and more rats at the edge of their ridiculously small field of vision. A new blow vibrated in the pipes and the eerie voice again cut through the stinking air of the low tunnel. A murmur, followed by an angry-sounding yell. Mariam stopped and because she had not let go of Tommy’s hand since they so suddenly were on the run, she forced the boy to do the same.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a giant rat? Or a bear maybe?”
“Bullshit!”
How could the boy be so stupid?
“Bears only exist in the forest!”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, then the rat after all. Come on, now. I don’t want us to get caught, whatever it is.”
Mariam didn’t want that either. After ten more meters, she noticed that something had changed in the tunnel’s usual narrowness. The stench had become more intense as the two, driven by their primal fear, stumbled into a large room far too quickly to be careful. In their back and distorted and reflected from the concrete walls, the terrible noise resounded again and then the beam of Tommy’s lamp captured the room completely.
Rats were everywhere. Jumped over each other. Mating. Eating. Fighting.
But Tommy and Mariam only saw all this for a fraction of a second. For as soon as the light caught the animals, they instantly stopped in their doings, and all their attention suddenly focused on the frightened invaders.
There were hundreds of the big rodents. And here was their home.
Over the years they had obviously dragged quite a few things from the human world down here. Plastic bags, shreds of clothes, pieces of prewar pizza boxes. They obviously ate their dead just as they must have eaten the large dog whose skeleton lay close to the eastern wall of the room. The eyes of the animals shone demonically in the artificial lighting and more and more specimens gathered to take a look at Tommy and Mariam. The beating noise sounded again. And this time it was very close. Mariam glided her gaze feverishly back and forth. The pipes also ran through this room, and at the other end another passage followed.
She was relieved, because despite Tommy’s promises she had feared that they had fled into a dead end. Tommy too alternated between the menacing animals and the no less menacing darkness of the corridor from which they had just come. Again the sound was heard, then Mariam thought she could hear heavy, shuffling steps and a kind of incomprehensible babbling. She ripped Tommy out of his paralysis.
“Come on, now. We have to keep moving.”
“But we can’t just go through them...”
He pointed at the rats.
“...run through or trample over. They’ll attack us for sure.”
Now Mariam was really sure that they could hear footsteps behind them and Tommy must have noticed them by now.
“There!”
He pointed to a rather large piece of cardboard hidden under a layer of small rat bones, excrement and accumulated garbage. The first and bravest of the animals were already running over their feet and Mariam had to force herself not to stomp hard to shake them off. With her eyes widened in fear, she watched for a second as one of the animals began to gnaw at her shoelace. From behind the footsteps came closer and closer.
“Quick, now. We have to turn off the light, or it’ll discover us right away!”
“It?”
“Never mind. Come on now!”
Tommy did not wait for Mariam’s reaction, but took a heart and stepped, carefully pushing some of the rats aside with his foot, towards the large, flat folded box, grabbed a corner and carefully lifted it up. The rubbish and rodents that had been on it slipped down and made a soft, yet clearly audible, dragging noise, which most animals, especially those who witnessed the slide first-hand, acknowledged with a hundred-voiced, angry squeaking.
“Come on, move it!”, Tommy called Mariam and she followed him. He leaned the cardboard with an edge against the wall at an angle so that a cavity was created below it into which the two squeezed. Again the beating sound, so close that Mariam could perceive a kind of glassy undertone. Tommy turned off his lamp now, not a second too soon. Another, a weaker and more organic light, flickering and casting bizarre shadows, already penetrated into the place of their hideout. The two clung together as the sinister creature reached the room, the rat’s nest.
None of them dared to stick their heads out from behind the frighteningly thin cardboard to catch a glimpse of what had been chasing them through the passage. Distorted shadows, wafting outlines and again this knocking against the pipes. Some of the rats also seemed to be afraid of this creature, and quite a few also fled behind the box. They climbed over the kid´s hands and faces and heads, squeaking, so it seemed, directly into their ears, peeing on them,trembling and floundering and transmitting their animal fear onto the two children.
The footsteps fell silent. The light was still flickering, but it wasn’t moving anymore. The mysterious pursuer had stopped. Time seemed to run slower. Infinitely much slower. Somehow Mariam managed to banish from her mind the fear, the smell, the rats and Tommy’s trembling, which seemed worse to her than her own. The flickering light had to be a candle or a small oil lamp. It wasn’t bright enough for a torch. This in turn meant that it was not a dangerous creature somewhere from the depths of the tunnels that was chasing them, but a human being. But what was that babbling and that beating, recurring sound? Besides, even if it was a human being - when she or he crawled through the tunnels down here, he or she already was not necessarily harmless. Nevertheless, Mariam took new courage. A person with a lamp in hand could not smell her like an animal could. And he or she didn’t have such a sharp ear either. If they remained quiet, they might not be detected. The flickering lamp light certainly made it quite difficult to illuminate the entire room. So there was a good chance that they would be overlooked. She grabbed the handle of her knife tighter. If the next moment a big hand would reach for her or Tommy, she would use the blade. I really will, she reassured herself. Now she was happy about the all fighting games Wanda had played with her. Now she understood, without really realizing it why it was so important to Wanda that Mariam learned where the impo
rtant veins ran in the human body and where all the other weak spots were.
Hit one of those spots heart, and then run - Wanda had said. That’s exactly what Mariam had in mind.
But no hand came to reach for Wanda or Tommy. After breathless seconds, seconds of not understandable babbling and another glassy blow, the shuffling footsteps resumed, and hundreds of little rat’s feet rushed to get out of their way. Judging by the sounds, many of the animals felt threatened, hissed aggressively and the shadowy figure seemed to be forced to shake off or throw off particularly brave animals that had gone on the attack several times.
Then the steps began to finally move away and the brightness decreased. Mariam whispered into Tommy’s ear.
“We’ll count to a hundred now, very slowly, and then we’ll get up again.”
“Okay,” Tommy replied quietly, and so they did.
Clutching together, they began to whisper the numbers very slowly as they listened how the footsteps moved away. When they had reached one hundred, Tommy separated from Mariam and turned on the lamp again. The rats drove away before them, now even more confused by the events and startled by the new brightness. Tommy’s gaze examined Mariam.
“Am I as dirty as you?”
She had to smile.
“No, you’re even more dirty than I am.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“Then why did you ask?”
The steps of the shadowy figure had almost faded away, and even the strange beating sounded less and less and less and less. The two waited a while, then they set off as well.
Before they left the rat’s nest, they had a short discussion that Tommy, as Mariam had quickly noticed, had only started out of courtesy. He asked her if he’d better take her back. She denied, pointing out to him that he had just trembled at least as much as she had.
“Besides, we’ve already come too far to turn back.”
The further they moved away from the nest, the more branches they took, the fewer rats scurried around their feet. Also the air became noticeably better and finally Tommy stopped.
“We’ll be right there.”
And indeed. About eight meters away from them was a hole with crumbly edges in the concrete wall, reaching from the floor to Mariam’s hip and about half as wide as high.
“But we have to turn off the lamp now so you can’t see the light from the other side. When it’s all dark on the other side, that means that nobody’s there and we can turn the lamp back on, okay?”
Mariam nodded.
“Put one hand on my shoulder.”
She did, and then the two of them carefully felt their way through the darkness. When they almost reached the hole, they flinched. An animalistic, loud scream reached their ears, followed by a noise that sounded like bursting glass again. They waited a few seconds and listened. When nothing more could be heard, they continued on their way. The sound seemed to have come from far enough away and they didn’t think they were in immediate danger. When they reached the opening, they proceeded as discussed. First Tommy, and then Mariam, stared through the hole and when they agreed that no redsleeves with lamps or torches seemed to be patrolling on the other side, Tommy turned on his flashlight again. The dimensions of the parallel tunnel were to a good extend larger and the pipes on the ceiling were no longer part of the picture on this side of the wall.
“Watch out, Mariam. Now we have to go about twenty meters to the right, along the wall, then we will arrive at a door behind which we find everything you need.”
“But if there are guns and bullets and other things, why aren’t the Reds guarding the room?”
“They do. But from the other side.”
“From the other side?”
“Yes. There’s another way to reach that room, I told you, remember? Without the rats and all. But there are the guards who make sure no one comes here without permission. One time they caught me and they really beat me up.”
“What were you doing there? Did your father also want you to get things for him?”
“No. My father doesn’t really want anything since my mother died. I mean, he takes care of me, especially when I have to scream again. But otherwise he just sits on the ground all the time thinking. I was just bored, and I was walking around. And well, after seeing the redsleeves guard this room so well, I just had to take a look.”
The sadness that had made his face look old for a moment evaporated and an infectious grin emerged.
“I’ve been there a few more times since then. I never took much because I didn’t want the redsleeves such the platforms again. Ivan gets really mad when they find something that belongs to him.”
Mariam swallowed.
Shepard and the big Rolf had recently even killed people who had stolen things. She’d noticed. Wanda then had explained to her that Shepard was only pretending to be a Red, but Marion didn’t completely understand. What stayed left inside her was a bad feeling. But also the knowledge that Wanda wouldn’t send her to get things if it wasn’t really important.
Apart from a few broken boxes and a barrel lying on the side, between them and the door there was nothing that could have provided them with cover, and so they crept down and as quietly as they could. When they had reached up to three meters, Mariam stopped and pointed to the door and then sensed that something was wrong. And indeed. The heavy metal door was not completely closed.
“Wait a minute,” Mariam whispered and poked Tommy in the shoulder.
“How would we have gotten in there if the door had been closed?”
Tommy grinned again, but only for a fraction of a second, until a thought had unfolded in his head.
“That should be the least of your worries now. But if you want to know for sure...”
He pointed towards the door, but a little higher.
“...the grille is loose. You can take it out and climb into the room. Adults can’t get through there, but you and I can.”
“Great. And how were we supposed to get up there?”
Tommy pointed successively first at the barrel and then at the crates.
“By building us a ladder. We just had to put it all back down the way it is now, so no one would notice that someone was here.”
Mariam felt a little stupid. She could have seen that for herself, she thought, but Tommy didn’t seem to resent the question. Instead, he whispered on.
“But more importantly, if the door’s open, maybe someone’s in there right now.”
“What if someone just forgot to close the door?”
“Do you want to take your chances?”
Mariam shook her head, then she thought. If it was redsleeves occupying the room, they would have made more light. They would already have seen it from that hole in the wall. So it had to be someone who had the same plan as Mariam and Tommy. It had to be a thief. A thief, as she was herself. And a thief probably wouldn’t stop beating them up or chasing them away. A thief had to fear for his life when he stole from Ivan.
“Turn off the lamp. We’ll go back to the hole and wait.”
Tommy agreed.
In the absolute darkness of the rat corridor, the only thing that gave them security was the presence of each other and the strange comforting touch of the cold concrete to which they pressed themselves so as not to lose their orientation in the blackness. They were quiet as a mouse and time seemed to pass much slower than usual. For many minutes the only sound they heard was their own breathing. But in the end, their patience was rewarded.
With a squeak that seemed terribly loud in the previous silence, the door of the weapons chamber finally swung open and flickering brightness penetrated into the corridor. Mariam held her breath.
A tall, slender figure stepped out of the room. It staggered and talked to itself mumbling. It had also thrown two large bundles over it’s shoulders and held an oil lamp in its hand, exactly as Mariam had suspected. That must have been the shadowy figure that had been chasing them through the rat corridor. The figure began
to shuffle slowly, and somehow strangely in their direction.
“Shit! He wants to go back the same path he came along,” whispered Tommy, who had apparently drawn the same conclusions as Mariam and was already trying to feel his way through the darkness.
Away from the tunnel opening, away from the figure, back deeper into the reich of the rats, albeit in the opposite direction to what he thought the figure would go. Mariam watched the bizarre scene for a moment longer. She saw now that it was clearly a man and that he was masked. Dark, dirty clothes and a black wool mask over the face. The figure took a few more steps, then stopped, stood for a few more seconds in the same spot and seemed to think about something. Then it turned around and shuffled back, briefly leaning against the tunnel wall on two occasions, closing the door with an over-cautious movement. With a key!
Mariam thought he was a strange thief.
“Come on now”, Tommy whispered out of the darkness and Mariam tore herself away from the sight and crawled carefully towards his voice. Tommy had taken the logical course. Namely away from the rat’s nest and deeper into the rat’s corridor. They crawled about five meters, then lay flat on the ground. It was cold and Mariam was a little disgusted, but her clothes had already been ruined by the rats anyway. Tense, they kept an eye on the spot where they suspected the hole in the wall and soon flickering lamp light was shimmering through the opening. Now they could only hope that the figure really wanted to take the same path back through the rat corridor that it had come along.
In the reflection of the lamp light, they first saw the large pockets being pushed through the hole, then the figure forced itself awkwardly behind. Something seemed very strange to Mariam. Strange in a more meaningful way than this whole adventure already was. She had the feeling that she absolutely had to understand something, yet she simply couldn’t get it. When the figure was finally in the rat’s corridor, it breathed hard and grumbled. Yeah, that was definitely a man. He could not walk upright in the rat’s corridor, but began, bent far forward and pulling the two bags behind him, to make his way back. They waited until his light had disappeared around a bend.
Under Ivans Knout: The Gospel of Madness (Book 2 of 6) (The Gospel of Madness - (A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series)) Page 11