And it wasn't just him. The whole group had been tense. The rapes the night before had given her pleasure, even though one of the little wankers had bitten her breasts far too hard - but they had all not been really in the right place, Maria had noticed. Something seemed to scare them.
When they came across the patrol of Christiano's people on the outskirts of Frankfurt, it almost came to a fight. The captain of the foreign group, Christiano´s son Milan, as she had picked up, had insisted that they should come to the station. Had indicated and claimed that Christiano had more shots to call than Viktor, the leader of the rotten pig gang that Maria had captured.
Viktor had only agreed to account to Christiano after a ten-minute long and ever louder discussion and all sorts of threats. It was all about some cycle that Christiano had gone through more often than Viktor. And now they were here, tense and nervous, and somehow it seemed as if they had lost much of their self-determination.
That's nice.
So they noticed at least a little bit what it felt like to be tied up and used. She decided that if she should succeed in fucking a small extra ration out of the blonde boy with the whip despite his tension, she would share it with the others. At least with those who needed it most.
Although she had always managed to keep the fruits of her labors to herself, over time it became exhausting and depressing to be exposed to the hostility of the other prisoners. There were some men, but mainly women among them, who were after her and did everything they could to make her look bad in front of the pig gang. So she'd start giving up her whore pay. She needed friends, she reluctantly admitted to herself, for Maria had felt in the last days that the charm of the new thing that she exerted on her masters, the charm of having a willing slut among the prisoners, who even seemed to like what was done to her - well, this charm was slowly diminishing.
Not that the extra rations she had earned in this way had become smaller - but she now had to make more efforts to earn them. Anyway, it wouldn't do her any good to moan.
Use what you have, she said to herself. And ignore the disapproving looks of others.
She looked over at him and gave him a smile to make him forget his whip.
Viktor
"No! No, we're not taking the horses downstairs. They'll break their legs. Christiano can take that off his face!"
His horse, a courageous but sometimes vicious mare named Sibelle, over time had grown more fond of his heart than he wanted to admit to himself.
"Christiano will not be particularly pleased if his orders are not obeyed," replied the woman who led the welcoming committee that Viktor received in the station concourse. Christiano had summoned the people, then apologized, and quickly disappeared into the depths of the hall.
"I'm sure he just hasn´t thought about how horses and stairs do not get along very well. We'll find another place for the animals," said Viktor as he looked through the large hall.
He had never been here before, but he recognized Christiano's leadership style at first sight.
Fucking hell, he thought.
His blood was almost frozen in his veins when he discovered Christianos son Milan among the men and women of the patrol that had intercepted him on the outskirts of Frankfurt. A little devil. Almost as bad as Christiano himself. But he had not been able to escape his order, even though he was almost on his way to the Cardinal. He had only wanted to take a few more prisoners - to then take the quickest route back to Rome to deliver his bounty and receive his just reward.
The Cardinal advocated conflicts and struggles among his people. Only in this way, he said, could a leadership remain truly elitist. He put it another way, though. Talked much more bloated. The basic statement could be summed up quite well in one sentence:
Only those who are willing to die for power are worth it.
Well, Viktor didn't want to die and at the moment Christiano was far superior to him, also in terms of the sheer number of his subordinates. Not a good idea to mess with him now. This might look different in a few months, but at the moment Viktor unfortunately had no choice but to bow to Christiano's wishes.
"When will he see me?"
"As soon as he wishes. Your men can rest back there."
The woman nodded in the direction of the northwest corner of the spacious station concourse, where a fire was burning in a large metal grill. Benches and couches had been placed around the fire. It looked as if they wouldn't even get tents to keep the cold wind away from them. One more humiliation that Viktor had to endure. He and his people would wear it with composure. They were used to the cold. Were used to being out in the wind and weather and moving around day and night. The horses, especially the animals' innate instinct for danger, helped them to do so, and their skins kept them warm.
Nevertheless, Viktor would not forget this humiliation - just like all the others who Christiano had given him in the few years he knew him.
Again Christiano´s bitch addressed him.
"All right, then. So be it, house your horses in this area and make sure they don't run around the camp unattended. I'll make sure you get enough to eat and water for the animals. And keep peace with our people."
Viktor just nodded. Then he went ahead of his people, leading his horse at the reins and did what the cunt had demanded of him. His time would come.
On the way through the station hall he recognized some of Christiano's preferences. As on the forecourt of the station, bizarre and obscene works of art had been erected from naked corpses. In many places crosses had been erected. Some of them were only held upright by stretched ropes, others were fixed with the help of stacked boulders. On each of these crosses hung somebody - or something that was left of somebody.
Further - other - works of corpse art had been set up at the foot of these crosses.
His horse snorted reluctantly. The smell of death, which hung in the station concourse like thick fog made the animal nervous. Viktor passed a pile of corpses and was surprised that it lacked Christiano's usual attention to detail.
But only until he noticed that the eyes of some of the supposed dead were still moving. Then he noticed the wafer-thin wire cords.
That's new.
Christiano had ordered the dead to be bound together with those who had fallen in disgrace for some reason. Two of Christiano's spear bearers stood nearby and took a look at the heaps of people from time to time. Surely they had the task of preventing escape attempts.
Creative, I'll give him that.
Probably, Viktor thought, Christiano had wanted to express a small philosophical statement here. Something about life and death or immortal love. Yeah, I guess it was something like that. Those who were still alive were to merge their flesh with that of their dead friends and family members. Nice idea.
Viktor wasn't very prissy about that. As far as the hygienic conditions in the camp were concerned, however, he just shook his head gently. Of course, it was clear that in a Cardinal's war camp one could not maintain the pre-war standards. But the disgust that Christiano allowed here could significantly affect the power of his troops. And that wasn't just about the bodies. Christiano's people just pissed everywhere. Already in the short time, in which he was here, he had been able to observe this several times. Even the open plastic buckets, which stood next to the storage places, the cooking places and food supplies, left no doubt about their purpose.
Disgusting. Disgusting and stupid. What's the matter with Christiano?
Viktor hoped that whatever Christiano wanted from him would be done quickly before any kind of plague would break out. The smell and the ubiquitous rats and mice were the smallest problem.
And something else caught Viktor's eye when he took the saddle off his horse with routine hand movements at the place assigned to him.
During their past encounters, and especially during their conditioning in Rome, he had come to know Christiano as an incredibly determined and fanatical advocate of the Cardinal's doctrine of salvation. In the time that followed, it was har
d to find someone who had burned more books and smashed more computers than this man.
Now it looked a little different.
His people ... they were kind of ... sluggish. Something paralyzed them, it seemed. From the outside, everything was actually normal. They re-formed their prisoners, applying the methods dictated by the Cardinal´s will - but still: for such a large operation under Christiano's leadership, there clearly was a lack of dedication. The fanatical spark that Christiano had always been able to ignite was nowhere to be seen. Of course, about every other day Christiano sent a handful of people to plunder and destroy relics of the Old World - but given the multitude of useless and lazy hanging around and eating and drinking men and women, Viktor was disappointed. Had the fucking asshole lost his drive? If that was the case, then perhaps it would be a good time to challenge him to a duel and his troops his own.
Viktor's mouth turned to a smile as he thought about what a triumph it would be. His men were strong. In contrast to Christiano, he had not simply incorporated as many as possible into his troop, but only the best and most promising. A Killer each and every one of them. They were everywhere around him now, also busy taking care of their animals and getting a quick, stealthy look at the station.
Viktor was sure that at least half of them knew exactly where and how many of Christiano's people were on guard duty and which ones were distracted and tired. Lüders was his favorite. A silent man with alert, cold eyes, behind whose forehead far more thoughts found their place than his always calm facial expression would have suggested.
Two minutes later it also was Lüders who typed Viktor on his shoulder from behind and drew his attention to the fact that Christiano, accompanied by a small bodyguard, was moving towards them through the station hall.
"Viktor, dear brother! Let me embrace you again!"
Christiano rose up before Viktor and spread out his arms. Viktor forced a smile on his face that was as joyful as it was fake. But then, instead of returning the kindness, he asked rigorously and outright:
"We didn't hug before either. What's going on here, Christiano? Everything here doesn't really look like you."
Christiano froze.
He lowered his arms.
"You must help me, Viktor," he whispered with a serious face. Then Christiano came closer to Viktor and brought his mouth close to his ear.
"They're scared."
"Scared?"
"Yes, fear."
"Why?"
"They fear the ghost."
Viktor wanted to laugh. Then he saw in Christiano's face he was serious.
"The ghost? I don't understand?"
Christiano shooed away two of Viktor's people from one of the benches with a gesture of his hand, and then gestured to him to take a seat next to him. Then he began to speak quietly and Viktor listened.
Circle of Wagons
Mariam looked at Wandas back. They had been on the road for five days now, close to the old main road, and her initial urge to look around to see if Shepard wouldn't suddenly show up behind them had faded already. It hurt her soul to leave him and Gustav behind, but Wanda kept saying that there was no other way, that she couldn't stand to wait any longer.
Mariam understood that, but it worried her how Wanda had changed. She would have loved to have walked day and night, only allowing them a rest when Mariam had reached the end of her strength, and there absolutely was no other way. And when they sat by the campfire, in some abandoned house or other sheltered spot, Wanda spoke only what was necessary and besides that just stared into the flames. Only when they went to sleep and Wanda allowed her to cuddle up to her did Mariam's sorrows vanish for the night, only to return in the morning when she looked into Wanda's hard face. She was always awake before Mariam, and she had always prepared everything to march on.
It had been the same today, and now Wanda went ahead and led them through the main street of a small village near a river that was called the Neckar as she had told Mariam. The houses lining the wide street, which ran parallel to the Neckar River and followed its course, were small, crouched, partly dilapidated and gray. After a quarter of an hour, in which Mariam had watched Wanda how she had let her suspicious gaze wander from right to left, as if she wanted to look right into the empty houses, they arrived at a beautiful, sandstone paved pedestrian zone, which branched off from the main street at right angles.
It would have been beautiful, Mariam had corrected the thought, if the first accumulation of corpses had not already been visible after five meters. The girl didn't look too closely, but she noticed that the bones were shimmering out here and there. Although the age of the corpses suggested that there was no acute danger here, Wanda let her hunting rifle slide from her shoulder and instructed Mariam to draw her pistol. Under Wanda's guidance she had practiced the movement with which she obeyed many times, and the strange, threatening feeling that the weapon had triggered in Mariam at the beginning only rarely came up.
"There's more bodies in the back."
Wanda waved Mariam towards herself, and now the girl could see it too. It was not always immediately visible under the slowly disappearing, perforated snow cover. Sometimes the dead, some of whom had already been completely skeletonized, lay scattered, then again piled up as if by human hands.
"Let's get out of here," Mariam asked.
"Don't worry, whatever happened here, it must have been a long time ago."
"Still..."
Wanda agreed, although she would have liked have a closer look at the shops along the pedestrian zone, and soon they had left the small village behind them.
Every few kilometers, a village or small town like the previous one nestled against the river, and when it became evening and time for a campfire, they had crossed quite a lot of them. They all looked the same to Mariam, and they were all deserted. More or less, at least. In the third small town they crossed the next day, they found signs. Smeared cardboard boxes, and hoods torn off from cars and set up on edge, suggested that they better leave Ingersburg quickly and under no circumstances should go up Martiniusstrasse if their lives meant anything to them.
They stopped at the aforementioned road, which branched off from the two-lane highway. The road climbed gently upwards and after fifty meters made a bend. The sides were lined with houses, some of which were half-timbered and others more modern. Tire tracks had compressed the snow in places, led along the entire length of the road in its middle, and ended in a turning circle, where Wanda and Mariam now stood.
"The road is guarded by someone."
"Yeah. Come on, let's go."
The next day, when they had both risen with clammy limbs, since their fire had already burned down before dawn, they heard the noise of engines approaching the ruin of the lone house, standing a little outside a village, which had served as a refuge for them.
The noise became louder and louder, swelled, and soon they could see that they were several large vehicles, while crouching pressed to the sides of the window frames so as not to be discovered. First, three vans passed through their field of vision, similar to the vans used by the vampires in Heidelberg. Just that some changes had been made to the vehicles. The sides were covered with metal plates and loopholes had been welded into them, from which the barrels of rifles protruded. Two trucks followed, which had been similarly transformed into rolling fortresses. In addition, on the roofs of the large ocean containers pulled by the deep humming machines, further superstructures had been installed, the purpose of which neither Wanda nor Mariam immediately grasped - apart from the rotating machine gun mounted on top of each of the vehicles. At the moment the heavy weapons were not manned, but Wanda could see that there were hatches behind them.
After the second truck had passed by, two more vans arrived at some distance, then a group of four motorcycles, two of which were about to overtake the convoy and take the lead, while the cars slowed down and finally stopped.
"Quick, we have to go up, so we'll see more!"
Wanda already w
anted to hurry up the stairs, but then she stopped again and took her hunting rifle with her, which had leaned against the wall.
"Come on, Mariam, I want to see what they're up to."
Why?, Mariam asked herself. Until now, they had avoided everything and everyone in whose vicinity they had come. But then she shrugged her shoulders inside. She also wanted to see what the people were doing in the cars over there.
The front vans across the road had formed a semicircle around the nose of the front truck and the vans that had followed now shielded the rear of the second truck from the road.
"Where are the two motorcycles?" Mariam asked herself in low voice.
Wanda answered just as quietly:
"I think they sent them ahead to investigate the area. As scouts or something."
Some vehicles had their doors opened and men and women got out. They stood together in small groups and spoke quietly. Wanda could not see any excitement or urgency in their gestures. They felt safe. She took a step back from the window and used the scope of her rifle as binoculars. Seemingly each of these people carried a pistol and a rapid fire rifle. Thin black cables winded from the collars of the clothes of most of them and ended in ear studs. They seemed very well organized. All the more it surprised Wanda that she could not discover any kind badge on them. This wasn't a left over military unit from the war that had somehow survived, and it wasn't a newly formed militia with homemade identification marks either, as far as Wanda could tell. Yet they seemed like a disciplined whole, and when a tall, dark bearded man got out of the back truck and went over to those chatting, the conversations stopped and they listened to what he had to say to them. They did not adopt an attitude, nor did they salute. No, certainly not military.
The dark bearded man, who seemed to be their leader, had a woman with short-cut, reddish hair give him a cigarette and light it. After inhaling deeply three times and expel the smoke again, he grabbed his ear, froze for three seconds, then said something to the others.
Circle of Wagons: The Gospel of Madness (Book 4 of 6) (The Gospel of Madness - (A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series)) Page 6
