He blamed it on the constant crackling rain, which caused a background noise and distorted and covered up the approach of the animals in this way.
Rolf stared at the spectacle as if spellbound. One rider after the other approached slowly, whereby about every fourth of the animals was also led by a Deg on foot. Each of them was just as ragged as the other, many wrapped in a mixture of old, plundered clothes and unprocessed skins. Heavy bows, many of them surprisingly less primitive, industrially manufactured, spears and clubs, were their standard equipment. With increasing horror Rolf counted forty animals. Only about thirty of them carried a rider, while the other horses - the slower and more compact ones, as it looked - had been loaded with countless bags and sacks. Certainly food supplies and other utensils.
So many. Fucking hell.
The foremost of the riders had stopped in front of the group of five degenerate riders and had just swung himself out of the saddle. The one on whose head Rolf had aimed - it was perhaps this Christiano - stepped forward and spoke to the newcomer. To Rolf's astonishment, there was no trace of friendship or even sympathy between the two men.
No handshake.
No brotherly embrace.
The man in Rolf's crosshairs suddenly turned his head, and it seemed to Rolf that he was looking at him directly. Rolf got goose bumps, although he knew that there was no reason for it.
The moment dragged on for a second or two. Then the man suddenly looked away again and devoted himself to the newcomer. They apparently talked quietly and objectively, and gradually the other members of the cavalry came to them and climbed from their animals.
All in all, the palaver of the two leaders lasted barely a minute.
When the men, affirming each other and shaking hands in the end, set themselves in motion together and their subordinates followed them. At the reins the animals were led into the main station.
Four of the new ones stayed outside, probably to support the degenerates at the main entrance, who were originally assigned to the guard, in their task.
Rolf crawled away from the edge of the roof.
What did what he saw mean to him?
Sure, even more enemies to fight.
But was that all?
Mounted troops... that made sense in a world like this, of course. And it did not conflict with the commandments of Cardinal da Silva.
My God, some of the horses even wore armor, Rolf thought.
I wonder if they were some kind of special ops unit.
Or was the leader simply a horse lover and had arbitrarily decided to lead his troop in this way?
There's more now.
Okay, so bring it on, he laughed silently. Pah. The cavalry's in a hurry to the rescue. Always the weakest part in a Western.
Rolf knew the ruins of the house, on the roof of which he had set up crow´s nest 4, inside and out, and therefore moved with almost sleepwalking certainty when he started his way back to his base camp. He left the rifle in a hiding place in the stairwell. He was still thinking about what the arrival of the riders might mean, when the rattling of the horse's hooves sounded again.
Are they riding again?
No.
It's coming from another direction.
And there aren't that many animals.
Four or six maybe... what are they up to - and why don't they go with the others?
His curiosity was aroused.
Rolf cautiously sneaked into one of the empty apartments that had been abandoned a long time ago. He had already explored them when he had set up the crow's nest on the roof, but you never knew. He listened, but he could hear nothing but the leisurely trotting of the hooves of the horses. He didn't dare use the little flashlight he had attached to his MP. They were not allowed to see any light from the outside, and they were close to him.
Soon he reached the ground floor.
For some time, he followed them through the streets of Frankfurt only by the sounds they made, just like the ghost they saw in him.
Like fucking Batman.
He listened, always reoriented himself as best he could, trying to keep the distance constant without falling into their field of vision or moving too far away from them.
When the noises of movement finally stopped, he pondered for a few seconds, processed the manifold acoustic impressions in his head into an overall picture, and then scurried into a house entrance on the opposite side of the street, hastily gaining access to an apartment on the second floor, from there onto the balcony.
They're very close. On the other side of the block.
It was a long jump, but he caught the railing of the balcony of the neighboring house, without having slipped or making any noise. With his knife, which had already cost some Degs their life, he picked up a slanted, dirty window. The quiet squeak sank into a horse's whinny, which echoed eerily in Rolf's ear.
He was sweating. He didn't know whether it was the effort to be fast and silent at the same time that made him sweat, or the fear of missing something. He hurriedly left the apartment, crossed the hallway to get to the other side of the building. The apartment door was open, a circumstance that saved him from also having to break open this door with his blade.
Outside it was insignificantly brighter than in the building itself. However, the few light particles that fell through the either broken or dirty and dull windows into the surprisingly neat living room, which had already been run down before the war, were sufficient for him to orient himself.
Curious, he sneaked closer.
He paused again to listen as he reached one of the broken windows. From street level two floors below him, whispered orders approached.
"Go. Get them in here!"
Another voice answered:
"Si. All right."
"Quick now. Christiano's people don't need to see our prey. They're ours. Make it quick before they hear anything."
Rolf had to fight the temptation to stretch his head out of the window so he could see what was going on below. Just as he was about to lose this fight, he noticed that the horse people and their prey were reflected in two windows of the building opposite.
Goddamn bastards, Rolf thought. Once again it was confirmed what Shepard and Wanda had said about the degenerates.
The prey that one of the horse people had spoken of consisted of humans.
They had to freeze miserably. About three dozen of them. Men and women of all ages, shrouded in rags if they were lucky. Others were more or less naked. They all wore gagging and were inextricably bound together by a heavy rope and from this rope ran individual smaller one and cable loops, which were tightly tied around their necks.
The front end of the dew was attached to two saddles with two thinner branching loops, on which the two horse men sat, whose whispered orders Rolf had overheard.
One of the horses snorted reluctantly and shook his mighty head, and Rolf was amazed at how loud the sound seemed to him. The prisoners were remarkably quiet. It couldn't just be the chains and the gagging.
None of them moved.
None of them raised their eyes from the slush at their feet.
None of them did anything but tremble in the cold and just stand there, while the weight of the thick dew made the loops cut into her flesh.
Could it be? That two riders can control thirty prisoners?, Rolf wondered.
He didn't believe it.
In order to find an answer to this question, he decided to stretch his head out to see better.
He wasn't wrong.
When he let his gaze wander along the strange procession, he still saw two riders, about in the middle of the slave procession, and four who formed the end of the convoy and secured to the rear. They too were wrapped in a mixture of plundered winter clothes and skins. Three of them were still half children. Little boys, more or less, who in a decent world would have just finished school. But now they carried spears and whips, each consisting of a thick branch and power cables attached to it. One of them let the approximately one and a half meter lon
g, knotted cables swing back and forth in front of one of the slaves. Rolf could see that he said something to his peer. When he didn't react immediately, the whip swinger pulled out.
Rolf was already getting ready to hear a tortured outcry. But then he learned that the boy had only made a threatening gesture with the whip.
Until now the situation under him was not difficult to understand.
The horsemen did not want to place their prisoners in the station because they feared that Christiano might take them away from them. Since the prisoners were not simply abused for slave labor, but were to be made degenerate through systematic psycho terror, torture and brainwashing, Rolf could well imagine that some value was attached to them.
He retreated because he knew what was going to happen.
They'd bring them in, most likely to the basement. At least they didn't have to freeze there as much as they did out here. Three dozen prisoners and almost as many new enemies. In addition, there were the captured hurters and red sleeves, and the remains of the groups that had allied themselves with the degenerates to attack the station and the Ivan regime.
Too many?
No.
Rolf had to think. Had to get back to his base. Ivan's bunker. He had to inventory the food again and find out whether and for how long ... no.
There was no point in freeing them. Speed and stealth were his trump cards, qualities you simply didn't have with thirty starved, traumatized creatures in tow - even if the supplies in the bunker were sufficient to keep them alive for a while.
And if I could perhaps only - let's say - take five of them with me, then at least I would have helped them ....
Hadn't he already taken on immeasurable guilt by ... doing what he had done?
Wasn't it his duty to help?
Was it not always one of his outstanding qualities that he could fully subordinate himself to something he was convinced of?
But what was that thing?
His murderous crusade?
Would it give him peace if he saved lives, as a substitute, so to speak, for those he silently had sacrificed?
Who had been wiped out by his obedience and inaction?
If he renounced moral terror?
What if he stopped playing Apocalypse Now?
By the time he reached Ivan's private bunker, he had not yet found an answer to these questions.
Maria
They had divided her and the others after they had untied them and led them into the house. René with his red scarf, which had not yet been taken from him for inexplicable reasons, Bastian and a dozen others had been separated from her and accommodated in the cellar room next door. They themselves and fourteen others had been chased into a musty smelling room with a heavy steel door and had their gag removed so that they could eat some of the rotten garbage they were usually presented with.
Two of the cult guys were guarding her. Bastian´s and René's group would probably be assigned just as many guards. She tried to catch a glimpse of the guards in her room. They didn't seem to be particularly attentive, even though one, the younger of the two, of whom she knew that his name was Abele and spoke only bad German, gave her covetous glances.
That didn't bother her. She had already gotten used to it, and she also understood why she attracted the men's attention. She had only been in captivity for three weeks. They had caught her in Bondorf on her way north. She certainly didn't have a gram too much on her ribs either, but she wasn't nearly as emaciated and weak as the prisoners who had been under the control of these hellish missionaries for a long time.
They did not seem to care a lot, because even if she was the one who was raped the most, the others were not spared. She remembered the first time she was fucked by all the members of the dirty gang.
They had formed a double circle around her. The other prisoners had to kneel inside and the cult guys stood at the outer edge of the circle around them.
She had fought and defended herself and they - they had made fun of her by allowing it. Each of her rapists had had to hunt her down by hand before was allowed to have his way. They had allowed her to defend herself against each individual instead of tying her up or holding her in order to increase the pleasure. Only out of the circle they had not let her.
The way she screamed.
How she had scratched and bitten and beaten.
It hadn't helped, and at some point she realized that her resistance only made it more interesting for the bastards. Too late, but at least.
The first had at some point managed to hit her against the head, and she had become dizzy. As a precaution, he had boxed her again in the abdomen, somewhere near the bladder, and she had lost a few drops without being able to do anything about it. That broke her resistance. All who came after him have had easier play, even if she had still fought back half-heartedly.
She didn't really mind.
Not any more.
She had fought back out of pure stubborness. She had always earned her living this way. She was pragmatic on this point.
She had it - men wanted it.
Sometimes even the women.
That's the way it was.
What had caused this reluctance, this disgust in her, was the way they did it. Not even the most unpleasant clients had done it in such a disgusting way - and if they had, they had always had a guilty conscience and attacks of self-hatred when they finally were satisfied.
Even after the war she had secured her survival with her body, and even these deals - whether tacit or officially negotiated - had largely taken place with a minimum of human dignity.
It wasn't hard for her. She was a pretty thing, but too small and not resistant enough for the new world. And she was alone, too. She wasn't ashamed of it. She just did what had to be done.
With shivers she remembered how one of her new masters had greedily pushed his tongue into her mouth and thrusted into her already aching vagina. He had tasted of a mixture of brandy and maggot infested meat.
But she hadn't bitten. Rather, she had put herself in a better position, had shifted her pelvis by a few degrees, so that it became more pleasant. Fortunately she was wet from the seed of the predecessors of the tongue kisser, and with time a pleasant deafness spread inside her. At some point, there were maybe five of the guys left who hadn't come yet, this feeling of numbness turned into a feeling of lust.
At first, she wouldn't let it happen.
Then something happened inside her that she didn't have a word for.
A switch's been flipped. She couldn't describe it better herself.
She started dreaming herself away.
She closed her eyes and blinded all the bad smells, all the coarse fingers with her dirty nails groping and squeezing and pinching at her, turning them in her head into tender, friendly touches.
She started to go along with the thrusts instead of just lying there and suffering.
That was better.
On that day, she had just enough self-control to keep those scum from noticing that she was coming.
She turned her thoughts back to the present. The boy with the whip made of cables, which she knew could bite incredibly painfully, looked at her, and for a second she returned his gaze and smiled shyly. Then she slowly closed her eyes.
The old game.
If she remembered correctly, he had been one of those who made her have an orgasm on that first day. Not that it mattered. She had used her newly discovered self-manipulation more and more often and successfully in the following time to make it more bearable for her. She had even perfected this skill almost so far that she could successfully banish any thought of illness and pregnancy to the furthest corners of her brain.
Almost.
Mostly.
Now she felt good, considering the circumstances. Her willingness to devote, her ability to turn the crude acts in her head into something good, made her popular with those of her tormentors who simply wanted to satisfy their urges. For the real sadists she was fortunately uninterestin
g in the meantime.
She stopped screaming when they hurt her.
On the contrary.
Sometime in the second week she had brought her self-hypnosis technique so far that she could put herself into a trance in just one moment and simply feel every kind of touch as pleasurable in this state. It didn't matter whether one stroked her or tore her skin open with dirty fingernails. She believed that she could remember a name for what she was doing. The thingy-syndrome or something. Of course, everything hurt when it was over and she let her trance fade. Then she felt desecrated and soiled. But she somehow managed that, too. The cult guys who liked her made sure she was okay. In return, they were allowed to enjoy blowjobs without having to fear that their little cocks would be bitten off. Life was more important than dignity, and more important than self-determination.
That's the way it was.
But that didn't mean she didn't hate those damn pigs. Most of the other prisoners avoided her. Maria could not get that they could not understand what she was doing. Nor could Maria understand that they did not do it themselves. It didn't get any easier. Only with René and Bastian had she been able to establish something like a friendly relationship. That, she knew exactly, was subliminally due to the fact that the two young men also desired her.
René, perhaps in the purest sense of the word, because he was always attentive and friendly towards her. Once he had even covered her with his own thin blanket after three of the slavewomen had taken hers away from her.
Bitches should freeze, they said.
Bastian's affection was just as polite, but only on the surface. He certainly had no poker face and Maria always knew exactly what he was thinking. Unlike René, he liked to watch her get fucked - even if he would never admit it.
She wondered whether that was the intention that they had her locked up separately from the two of them today?
It's possible.
Yes, the blonde one with the whip.
Not that he hadn't beaten her with it already. He enjoyed doing that. He liked to see people crouching down anxiously in front of him, and he also liked to see skin burst and blood appear. Today, however, he looked a little lost. As if his friends had left him in the schoolyard without telling him where the party was to take place in the evening.
Circle of Wagons: The Gospel of Madness (Book 4 of 6) (The Gospel of Madness - (A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series)) Page 5
