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

  Madworld

  Mariam sat on the far right, leaning against the door of the driver’s cabin and had wrapped herself into two blankets. The fluffier one of both at the bottom and facing the body, the coarser and dirtier one above. Armin had said that they should not use the truck’s heater because they did not know when and where they would find diesel next time and because the way was still far. He had stroked his way through the black beard and looked more at Wanda than Mariam, although it had been her who had asked about the heating. He had a scabby wound over his right eye. The fabric of his sweater under his open winter jacket was also soiled with dried blood at one point on the upper right. There he had been hit by a spear thrust. Fortunately for him, the degenerate who had beard the spear had lost his balance and at the decisive moment had not been able to lend the necessary force to the attack. Mariam could still see Armin shooting the Deg in the face, just as she could remember everything that had happened during the crow´s people’s attack. The intoxicated expression of anger and aggressiveness in the man’s face had changed the moment he became aware of his failure, the moment he had noticed that the tip would not penetrate deep enough, and that Armin, angrily roaring, pulled his weapon arm up and bent his index finger around the trigger. No, it had almost changed, Mariam thought. It had not been fear she had recognized on the distorted features. It had been horror, and then, in the next split second, the face had ceased to exist. Mariam now opened her eyes a little. She didn’t want Armin and Wanda to notice that she wasn’t asleep. Her head was turned away from the two of them and leaned against the side window. The vibrations transmitted from the cool glass pane to her head were strangely pleasant, she found. Armin and Wanda spoke to each other, and they did so in a different way when they thought that Mariam did not hear them. Armin didn’t notice, but Mariam was only too aware that Wanda was using her neediness, the little childlikeness she still had, to guide him. It didn’t always work out. Just at the beginning of the time with the Motorized Wanda had bitten her teeth out at him. That was different now. She was now sitting on the truck’s driver’s bench closer to him than to Mariam. Their thighs touched. The girl had placed her backpack between Wanda and herself. She wasn’t jealous of Armin. No. It wasn’t that. It was much more the case that Wanda had changed, and Mariam didn’t like that change at all. It scared her. And now she and Wanda also had a secret from Armin and the other Motorized. None of those secrets one labeled as secret and then told anyway. One of those who really had to stay secret forever. Forever. Wanda talked to Mariam differently when outsiders were present. Because she was afraid that Mariam would inadvertently give away something if the topic of conversation fell on the battle. And since it was only a few days ago, that happened quite often. Mariam did not like the look with which Wanda then used on her. Somehow angry and anxious and pleading and threatening at the same time. Wanda just asked: “When do we stop?” “A few more hours. We’re making pretty good progress right now. Few wrecks, and the roads are fine so far.” “Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow we’ll be in Switzerland, you said?” “Yeah, I think so.” “Stupid that we left so many behind,” Wanda said to him as if talking to herself. “Stupid that so many died, you mean, right? Besides, someone must look after Doctor Mahler and give him a hand. When they’re done, they’ll come and...” Mariam left the conversation between the two and sank again into the vibration and humming of the engine. She already knew how the conversation would go. Armin and Wanda had it several times a day. Armin would soon say that he was still not quite sure that it was not Wanda and Mariam who had led the degenerates to the nuclear power plant. Then Wanda would say that she certainly wouldn’t have killed so many of the attackers in this case, and that Armin should be aware of that. Armin would then hum and give in, and then Wanda would follow up and tell him again and again how important it was to stop the Degs and their Cardinal. That he had just experienced for himself how dangerous they were. Regarding the fanatical contempt for death, with which they had attacked. Armin would then start asking questions and making plans, getting doubts about his plans, discarding them again and then making new plans. Wanda wouldn’t say anything about that and let him think and talk. It was only important to her that he finally understood that the Cardinal was at least as dangerous as the power plants and factories that Armin had made his post-war life task. And I guess that is true somehow. Mariam had no idea how the Degs had done it. Suddenly they had been everywhere. Around her. Were coming from all sides. But she didn’t really want to think about that now. She fell asleep. When she slowly woke up, she looked out the window. Saw how the calm, thawing winter landscape slowly passed her by. They were still leading their trail. Behind them two small transporters and far ahead of them three motorcycles, which explored the route. There hadn’t been a radio call from them in a while. Armin wasn’t worried about that. He took it as a good sign and was quickly annoyed anyway when his vanguard filled the ether with useless chatter. So Mariam was surprised when she heard him ask over the radio if everything was all right. Everything was all right, they confirmed. The next ten kilometers would be free of obstacles, they said. Armin, however, seldom drove faster than thirty or thirty-five things, as he said. Mariam had asked why speed was measured in things when she first heard it. Colloquially, Wanda had answered her and educated her about the kilometers per hour. Again Mariam let herself be lulled by the monotonous driving noises. Why did everything always have to be so terrible? The time of captivity. The time at the station. It had all been terrible in its own way. But that the relationship between her and Wanda now seemed to change in such a way was at least as terrible in a completely different way, Mariam felt. Terrible in a different way than the battle itself had been. The attack of the crow and his people. Some of the images stored in her brain were as sharp as the scene with Armin and the spear bearer. But time was often somehow wrong when she tried to remember more precisely. Mariam knew this, but nothing could change it. After the crow had finished his radio message, for which the man certainly had used a captured radio of the Motorized, suddenly the chaos had broken out not only in the outer edges of the area controlled by the Motorized - her and Wanda and Armin and simply all had suddenly become a part of it. For a short moment something had whistled in the air. Eva had yelled at Wanda that this was all her fault. Eva seemed to really hate Wanda, and more than once the woman’s hand had palpated for the grip of her weapon while the two had yelled at each other. Then Leander grabbed for his head and twisted his eyes. And then he fell over, and his hand was red. A stone had rolled away. Neither very big, nor very small. Also washed with blood. Mariam kept looking out the window. It was like that, wasn’t it? Or had it been different? She now reluctantly lost herself entirely in the memories of the battle. After the radio message of the crow things had remained surprisingly quiet for a long time. No. Not quiet. From further away they had been able to hear shots all along. But it had taken until the fight had come to them. Surely a minute or more. Time was strange in such situations, Mariam found. During this time, Wanda had argued with Eva and had demanded that she and Mariam should be returned the weapons that had been taken from them. The black-bearded Armin had ignored the two’s verbal battle that culminated in them screaming at each other like crazy furies and almost going at each other, shouting orders into his radio as he drove all of them back to the living and sleeping quarters. Mariam assumed that he had intended to entrench himself there with them or at least to arm them decently. Perhaps he had even really intended to comply with Wanda’s vehement demands, which she had now addressed to Armin, since she had not made any progress with Eva, and also to give her and Mariam weapons. But as soon as they had reached the entrance door of the building, some Motorized people who had obviously only now registered that something was going on outside came running right into them,. For a moment, confusion arose. They wanted out. Armin wanted in. A dispute broke out with another man. He was as old as Armin, Mariam estimated, but a little more dainty. Still, he didn’t give in. �
�No. We will not entrench ourselves, Armin. We need to man the heavy machine guns on the truck and send these guys to hell. No matter how many there are. They made a big mistake attacking us here! What do they think they want? What...” Armin reluctantly yielded. Mariam was surprised at his behavior. All the time, whenever she had watched him outside from a distance or even being close to him, she had perceived him as a fearless, even threatening man. That he wanted to be that careful didn’t seem to fit into this image. But all hesitation fell away from Armin at the moment when he had bowed to the will of the other man and accepted that the decision had been made. In time-lapse-like, but partly razor-sharp pictures Mariam experienced again what had happened afterwards. She and Wanda ran after each other. Were among the about fifteen Motorized. Ahead were Armin, Eva and the man Armin had discussed with. Mariam more than clearly remembered the feeling of missing her pistol. The feeling of being worried. The feeling of excitement. A little scared too, but not only that. She remembered how her eyes had hectically scanned everything around her for the first ragged degenerate grimaces. The group she was running with reached a corner now. Mariam didn’t know if they were going right or not. She didn’t know where the trucks with the big guns were parked. Even within the group there seemed to be disagreement about this. Around her Mariam heard brief scraps of conversation, which seemed to revolve around this question. Just a moment ago Mariam could hear so much from the conversations that she understood that the vehicles were parked at several points on the premises and that it was probably best to split up, when the crow swarm suddenly came down on them. It wasn’t the whole swarm, but in the first moment Mariam saw the degenerates felt the same. Like a swarm of crows. In fact, there were about as many as they were. A handful more maybe. They had just been bent again around a corner of the building, when the crow Degs had suddenly been there. So suddenly that it had been almost impossible for the Motorized to fully exploit the advantage their firearms granted them. Only some of the more alert, including Armin and Eve, managed to fire one or two shots before the melee started. Now, when Mariam thought about it again, she realized that the behavior of the degenerated men and women had not been a coincidence, but a tactic. It had not been the case that the first of them, who collided with the first of the Motorized ones, had immediately started to fight. No. The first of the degenerates simply pushed the first of the Motorized ones aside and splashed past them, into the middle of the group. They tried to penetrate as deeply as possible, preferably to the very end. They did not want a firm front to be formed between the two parties. They wanted chaos. Chaos was their element and where chaos reigned, firearms could not be used effectively without the danger of hitting one´s own people. In no time at all, the two groups had been completely mixed up. Spears and axes were fended off with rifle shafts, or with bare hands. Shots were fired sporadically, timidly in a way that was difficult to describe. Men and women screamed. Mariam stayed with Wanda. She held her hand uncomfortably. So tight, it hurt. Mariam only noticed this much later, when everything had already been over. The root of her little finger still hurt her when she thought of it. “Watch where someone falls. We need weapons. Something we can defend ourselves with,” Wanda shouted into Mariam´s ear. She didn’t have to do that. A part of Mariam’s consciousness had already done this incessantly and had not allowed her to be paralyzed by the omnipresent chaos and horror. There was fighting all around them. Sooner or later, either one of the Motorized ones or one of the Degs would lose his weapon. Then it happened. Almost at the same time a degenerate with several bullets in his body fell right next to her and one of the Motorized ones to Mariam’s right was impaled by a spear, but for some reason was still on her feet. The spear that had pierced the woman had come out of her back. Mariam could see pieces of the intestines or any internal organ shining at the coarse tip. Wanda must have seen the pump-gun, which had fallen out of the Motorized woman’s hands, too, because even before Mariam could react, she fell forward. In order not to also become the target of the degenerate who had killed the woman, Wanda gave her dying body a rough, somehow obscene push from behind. The twitching body wandered quite a way along the shaft of the spear, towards the degenerate, until he could no longer hold the spear and the dead weight on it mercilessly pulled the weapon down. A fraction of a second before the tip of the spear touched the ground, the degenerate succeeded in pulling the weapon out of the corpse again. But then Wanda already had the pump-gun in her hands. Mariam turned away. Not because she was afraid of the sight. She knew what it looked like. By now, she knew only too well. Wanda had aimed at the head of the man and she would not miss it at this distance. No. It really wasn’t the sight that made Mariam turn away. It was simply not necessary for her to see it. She had to get her hands on a gun, too. She heard the blasting loud shot coming off the gun close to her. In the meantime there were even more Degs and even more Motorized ones on the floor. The spears of the degenerates were too big and too unwieldy for Mariam. But they weren’t the only thing to choose from. In these first few seconds of the battle, Armin and Eva had been separated a few steps away from each other. Each of them had to deal with their own opponents, but Mariam noticed that they still tried not to distance themselves too far from each other. From further away Mariam could now hear a big engine and the rattling of heavy machine guns. A sound she hadn’t forgotten since she heard it for the first time in front of the school where they had discovered Doctor Mahler – a felt eternity ago. Screams seemed to respond to this sound in the distance. Wanda also screamed next to her. But not with pain or fear, but with anger, and again Mariam heard the sound of the pump-gun piercing the general fighting noise. The fighting had meanwhile shifted to an approximately ten-meter-wide alley between two of the buildings, without Mariam being able to tell how this had happened. Somewhat to the left of Mariam, a Motorized with two arrows in his head just collapsed and the two Degs he had fought with turned to new opponents with animalistic triumphal howls. Something strange had happened to Mariam about the sight of the two arrows sticking out of the unfortunate man’s skull. Then this thought was suddenly superimposed. Overlaid with horror, when a fur-covered degenerate with a rage-distorted face and an underarm-long knife pushed a Motorized aside and jumped at Mariam. Feverishly, she had continued to look for a weapon she could use. She hadn’t found any. The degenerate was getting closer and closer, he was already pulling out to a blow from diagonally below, when Wanda was suddenly next to Mariam, operated the repeating mechanism of the pump-gun and shot. This time the girl couldn’t avoid the sight. Wanda had been so fast that the face of the degenerate had had no chance to change its expression. There was a bang, veils of blood floated in the air, then, suddenly, the left eye, most of the man’s nose and lower jaw had disappeared. A high, complex, strangely artificial and false sound was heard, then the guy collapsed and lay face down. Prompted, the big blade rolled in Mariam’s direction. She was still far too perplexed to react, but Wanda took a quick step forward, picked up the knife and pressed it into Mariam’s hand. It felt like a sword to her. Again two of the huge figures around Mariam stumbled and went to the ground. Again with arrows in their bodies. Only this time it was a Motorized one and a degenerate women, which had been shot by the own people through the thigh. The woman staggered towards Mariam, an astonished expression in her eyes, and before Mariam knew it, she had stretched out her arm with her new sword-knife. All she had to do was wait until the tumbling figure with the pain-distorted face would have impaled herself on the blade. Time slowed down, and as the degenerate stumbled upon Mariam and her new weapon, the girl realized that the angle at which the arrow protruded from the woman’s thigh was somehow wrong. Yeah. That’s what she had noticed about the arrows on the double-headed man. The angle. From above, diagonally. Mariam almost forgot the degenerate and looked around for the archers. Suddenly, it seemed to Mariam, the woman was over her like an evil grizzly bear and pushed her over. Would push her over if she didn’t lift her knife and hold the blade tight. She did, and
the bear woman, crazy with panic and pain, drove Mariam’s knife into her own solar plexus with a disgustingly obscene smacking sound. Mariam had no idea what had been going on in the woman, so much was this behavior against everything that one´s own survival instincts should make one do. Either she hadn’t registered Mariam at all or she simply hadn’t taken the little girl with the knife seriously enough. Mariam didn’t want to come up with another explanation. And now she had other problems as well, because the degenerate woman was still in full swing. Heavy as lead the weight of her dying body pressed Mariam back and down at the same time, until Mariam inevitably stumbled, had to let go of her big knife and lay half buried under the dead degenerate. She must have screamed, for she saw Wanda whirling around to her, her eyes wide open, frightened. Mariam had sat down halfway and tried to pull her legs from out under the heavy torso. When Wanda registered it, she seemed reassured. Meanwhile, she no longer held a shotgun in her hands, but a small pistol, and for a moment Mariam thought that Wanda would soon come up with the idea of hiding her among other corpses. The thought did not please her, even though it seemed terribly logical to her. But then Wanda turned around and continued shooting. Again arrows struck all around. Mariam could hear the bodies fall. She stopped her efforts to come out under the dead torso, and at the edge of her perception, far out, behind the trampling legs, the shots and the screams around her, Mariam saw a strong degenerate knock Wanda over and swing to strike while standing over her. Wanda fired two times on the chest of her attacker and he staggered. Mariam immediately renewed her efforts to get back on her feet. Something hurt her back when she did it. Also Wanda had arrived up to then again on the feet and in the proximity of Armin and Eva. Even further away from all this, a deep engine noise slowly approached, becoming louder. *** Armin steered the truck around a tight bend, and Mariam’s head hit the side window a little too hard. Mariam looked over at the two adults. Wanda had put her head on Armin’s shoulder and her eyes half closed while the black bearded man concentrated on the street and listened to the rare radio reports of the scouts coming in from time to time. Mariam was glad that Wanda didn’t seem to notice her at the time. She still didn’t know how to deal with her now. Mariam remembered how she had finally discovered where these damn arrows had come from. The outside staircase of the large building opposite. There they stood. Completely undisturbed and unnoticed in the chaos of battle. Five degenerates. They seemed to make no difference whether they were shooting at their own people or the Motorized ones. One of them was laughing, and Mariam felt like his laughter was for her. She had to tell them. She had to tell Wanda or Armin or Eva they were there. At the moment none of the Degs paid any attention to her, but nobody cared for her either, so she had to be careful - very careful - if she wanted to wrangle between the fighters towards Wanda. She did not want to scream so that a degenerate would not become aware of her after all. Especially not one of the archers. The arrows scared her more than a degenerate with a spear. They were so fast. There was hardly anything you could do about them. Mariam circumnavigated some of the fighters until she could finally see that Wanda, Armin and Eva had managed to form something like a team of three. They must have run out of ammunition, for they now also carried spears. At least that was true for the two women. Armin himself swung a fire brigade axe in his right hand and held a kind of wooden forearm shield in his left, which seemed to consist of a thick board with two rope slings. He must have taken it off one of the Degs. Armin attracted the attention of the degenerates and concentrated on fending off the resulting attacks, while Eve and Wanda would stab the encumbered Degs with their spears. At the moment they seemed to be quite successful with this tactic. Just when no one was between Mariam and the group of three, Eva had managed to ram the spear a few centimeters above the point where the clavicles meet down the throat of a degenerate woman who had jumped on Armin with two knives. Mariam looked up at the stairs where the degenerate archers were. She was horrified to notice that they were looking in her direction. She screamed for Wanda. Wanda turned around. Mariam pointed with outstretched fingers at the danger. Wanda followed her gaze. The archers pulled the tendons. Mariam couldn’t say exactly who they were after. Only it was one of them they aimed at. Mariam saw Wanda trying to grasp the situation with wild, hectic looks. Wanda registered where Armin was. Where Mariam was. Where Eva was. Then where she stood herself. Through this process, triggered by Mariam’s call, Armin and Eva had moved a little away from Wanda, advanced further to clean up the battlefield. It might have been two steps. Armin with his shield drew the attention of one of the crow degenerates again and Eve lurked a step behind him, ready to strike with the spear. Wanda jumped forward. She grabbed Armin´s collar from behind, tore it back and gave Eva a push at the same time. Pushed her where Armin had been just a second before. The arrows hit. Most in Eva’s chest, but the tip of a single arrow Mariam saw coming out on the back of her neck, close to the spine. Armin had fallen backwards over a corpse. The moment Eva died, he was busy getting up again. The engine noise from earlier was now louder. Armin screamed like mad when he saw Eva lying on the ground, peppered with arrows. Then the machine gun of the arriving truck rattled off, and the archers were history within a fraction of a second. Later, during the following interrogations, it turned out that one of them must have been the degenerate who had given them the ultimatum via radio. The crow. There still had been a few smaller skirmishes during which Mariam had stayed close to Wanda. This, in turn, had always remained close to Armin, who seemed to have slipped into a hateful, furious madness. They chased the last remnants of the degenerated army off the site, and it took Wanda a lot of persuasion to stop the semi-irrational and now slightly injured Armin from following the fleeing further into the forest strip that separated the neighboring town from the power plant site. Mariam scared away her memories with an almost violent effort of will. All that followed now was more or less a hell of slaughter and executions, through which she had stumbled inactively but with her eyes wide open. During the following interrogations of the injured degenerates by the Motorized she had not been there. She had only heard the screams. Leander had risen again from somewhere, had taken her by the hand and brought her back to the room where Wanda and she had spent the night. He must have fought, too. At some other place probably, because Mariam couldn’t remember seeing him in her group. One hand he had wound in a bloody shred of cloth and from a laceration on the left side of his skull blood had also run out, down his neck and crusted there. Now she remembered. He’d gotten slingshot from the very beginning. “That was pretty ugly, wasn’t it? A lot of them all at once. I’ve never seen anything like it. But we really showed them, didn’t we?”