Circle of Wagons: The Gospel of Madness (Book 4 of 6) (The Gospel of Madness - (A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series))

by Georg Bruckmann

  I jumped up and made sure. No dust. Nowhere. The apartment had been cleaned.

  No doubt about it.

  I went to the front door and called to Sonja while walking up the stairs.

  "Say, Sonja, when you were .... When you fetched your dead, did you ... uh... clean up?"

  It took a few seconds for her to answer me, and when she did, I could hear her voice say that she thought I was completely stupid.

  "No, why would we do that?"

  I went up to her and explained what I had found.

  "But why would they do that? If they didn't want to stay here, why would they?" she asked me.

  "Maybe it's not a question of logic, but of habit."

  I cleared my throat and continued.

  "It doesn't have to be rational. The question is, who would do such a thing? I think the owner of this apartment, or for all I care, the former owner, is one of the vampires. That would also explain why they chose this apartment of all places."

  "Yes, all well and fine. But does that help us now?"

  That's when she had me. I couldn't think of an answer. The longer it took me to come up with an answer, the more despicable became the facial expression with which she looked at me. Finally, I said:

  "I'll figure it out. You don't have to wait here. I'll let you know as soon as I think of anything."

  With these words I took my findings back and went back to the apartment. I closed the door behind me, then I ran back upstairs and called Sonja, who had already gone a bit far, after me:

  "Sonja, what happened to the door lock? Did you kick the door down or was it already broken when you got here?"

  Surprisingly, she turned around on her lower leg prosthesis and called back:

  "Open!"

  Then she turned away and continued on her way.

  Open.

  That meant the vampires must have had a key to the apartment. Either that, or that the door had been open the whole time, but that was unlikely. I imagined the chronology as follows: The occupant of the apartment was a dialysis patient. When it had become more and more difficult to carry out his treatment, Mrs. Doctor probably approached him at some point and had given him the opportunity to get a place in her wonderful company, and he had consented. He had taken from the apartment what he needed and cleaned it up. It didn't really matter when that had happened. Then at some point we came along. Wanda, Mariam and I, who had confused everything for these people, had made it impossible for them to continue in their usual manner. They had to leave their vampire den. But they had to stay somewhere. And that's when he remembered his apartment. Here they could do what they had to do, quietly and safely from accidental discovery. Of course the apartment was too small and far too close to the area of the polyclinic and the High People to settle down for good, but for this one, repulsive kidnapping, for this one bloody raid the apartment had been suitable. And whether this vampire had wiped away the traces of their actions out of remorse or old habit really didn't matter.

  Until know I had ignored one single room. The living room. I opened one closet after the other. One drawer after the other I pulled out. The first thing I noticed was that the owner of the apartment was Hubert Bramstedt and was seventy-three years old. Then, after digging through old telephone bills, reminders and tax assessments, I finally found the file folder that had to do with his illness. Hubert Bramstedt was actually a dialysis patient. He had been caught relatively young, at forty-five, and had since been treated in various institutions. It's amazing what pre-war medicine had been able to do. Once again I asked myself how things would be if all the Gustavs and vampire doctoresses, simply all the doctors had become extinct at some point without having teached offspring. But that wasn't interesting at the time. Much more interesting were the addresses of the institutions in which Bramstedt had been treated. There were eight of them. The last three of them in Heidelberg. Then Weinheim, Viernheim, Mannheim, Hechingen and Stuttgart. If one now assumed that Heidelberg was burnt ground for the vampires, and that they moved north as it seemed, Hechingen and Stuttgart could be crossed out. The dialysis centers in Weinheim, Viernheim and Mannheim remained.

  I knew it wasn't a real lead, but it was a possibility. And if I wanted to torture the formula for the antidote Gustav needed out of that miserable bitch, then I had no other option.

  I needed a vehicle.

  A vehicle and some people with guns.

  Wanda and Mariam

  Two days later Wanda, Mariam and the tied doctor Mahler were in the middle of the ruins of Heilbronn. For lack of a better idea, they had simply run off in the direction in which the Motorized had disappeared with their convoy. Their prisoner had stopped swearing and cursing them on the afternoon of the first day of their journey, after Wanda had punched her rifle butt in his nose and threatened to gag him when she had had enough of it.

  Instead, he now rubbed his neck every ten seconds since then, which showed an ugly, purple squeeze. Wanda still couldn't say exactly how it had happened. Whether the man had been so shocked by all the violence that had befallen him and his dead friends all at once that he had no longer wanted to live, or whether he had thrown himself and the chair off the table and strangled himself in an attempt to free himself from his shackles.

  Wanda and Mariam first hadn't noticed the sound that arose when the back and forth swinging chair with Mahler tied to it was repeatedly knocked against the tabletop. Wanda had searched the body of unfortunate Robby for a few seconds to find a clue to the whereabouts of the Motorized, and Mariam had stood guard and tried to look brave.

  Poor kid, Wanda had thought.

  After all, it had been Mariam who had first sharpened her ears, listened and finally pointed out to Wanda that something was wrong. With a loud curse, much too loud, considering the situation the two were in, Wanda had jumped up and ran back, back into the room where she had left Doctor Mahler on the table, tied to the chair and with a noose around his neck. She had been able to cut the wheezing man loose just in time. His face had already turned blue and his eyes had protruded far out his skull. Nevertheless, he had shrugged back when Wanda pulled her knife to cut the power cable that had dug deep into his throat so he could breathe again. So maybe this was no suicide attempt after all, or if it was, then perhaps the fear of death had convinced him that he would rather stay alive after all.

  Wanda had watched him almost for a second as he sat on that chair and struggled for air. What a miserable show he gave. Did he really have no idea why all this happened to him? He had to know something. In Robbie's bags, she had found no indication of what the Motorized ones wanted to do with this Mahler. But she and Mariam had refrained from completing the search of the body that night. After this silliness of their prisoner they did not want to leave him alone. They spent the night with him in the school storage room. At that time he had still refused any food intake, had been stubbornly silent and had not answered any of Wanda's questions. A few times she had been close to get him to talk with more forceful methods, but she couldn't do that in Mariam's presence. Apart from that, the man had been so close to death so many times in the last few hours, and if he still didn't want to talk now, it was unlikely that she would have succeeded in threatening or exerting even more violence.

  Doctor Walter Mahler was in a state of emergency, a state he had perhaps not experienced since the war. Now, however, he seemed to have taken some in his stride. Most of the time Wanda let him walk in front of them, and the fast, steady movements of his head told her that he was very much aware of his environment. She had tied his hands behind his back with Robbie's last cable ties. She had also taken Robbie’s radio with her and switched it on from time to time because she hoped to be able to capture some communication scraps from the Motorized that were supposed to tell her where they were. However, she didn't do this too often, only about every hour or so, because the battery indicator in the walkie-talkie's display only showed two bars. It was a small Motorola device and the four channels it offered she had quick
ly scanned through. So far, however, without result. Wanda estimated the range of the device at three to five kilometers. That was damn little when you consider how far the convoy might have moved away from them already. But, Wanda told that to herself, it was better than nothing, and the possibility of intercepting these people's radio traffic increased their chances considerably.

  "Okay, we'll stop here and take a short break."

  Mariam, who had preceded about fifteen meters, paused, turned and slowly came back to Wanda and Doctor Mahler. Then she let her backpack slide from her shoulders and loosened the tense muscles as she asked:

  "How long?"

  Wanda looked around. They were in the middle of a big street, the Kaiserstreet, if Wanda had interpreted what was left of the street sign correctly. The city was as spooky as most cities these days, albeit in a different way. Following the river, they had wandered along the Neckar Strait. When they had come to a small bridge, they had crossed the river, wedging themselves between a multitude of vehicles that, probably in an attempt to leave the city center, had crashed into each other, thus obstructing the following. In some of these vehicles there were still dead bodies to be found, and Wanda couldn't help but grin when she noticed that most of them were still strapped on. Security first. Suddenly Mariam had yelled out frightened, when ten meters before them a single, old dog fled from them over the roofs of some vehicles.

  When they had reached the other end of the bridge and moved carefully through the adjoining area with many large apartment buildings and some schools, administration- and office buildings, Wanda wondered what had driven these people to such a hasty escape.

  It wasn't obvious because almost all the buildings were undestroyed. Some of the facades had bullet holes, including those caused by small guns or a mounted machine gun, as used by the Motorized ones, but there was no great bombardment. There was a truck that crossed and blocked the road then forced them to turn north and occasionally a destroyed military vehicle was to be seen. Not that they wouldn't get past the huge vehicle, but for Wanda it seemed as if this roadblock had only recently been set up on purpose. And if that was the case, then there must also be people there who had had a reason to do so. Wanda didn't want to meet them. To be on the safe side, she had nevertheless checked her new sub-machine gun. A little while later, after turning east or northeast again, they saw the Heilbronn railway station to their left. Or what was left of it. The whole area had been devastated, and the large building lay in rubble and ashes. Only remnants of the southern outer wall remained. All the rail lines they could see had been torn and bent as if by titan hands, and were jutting into the sky in absurd angles and twisted in even more absurd ways, and lying close beside them, like dead primeval snakes of sheet metal and steel, deformed trains and individual wagons lay scattered all around.

  Wanda thought to see bleached bones sticking out of the muddy ground here and there. But she could be wrong. That wasn't important either. The important thing was that they got ahead.

  "Not long. Just to get something to eat and rest for a moment," Wanda said and dropped her backpack and rifle on the ground as well.

  "Would you like something to eat now, Mahler?"

  Her prisoner had already sat down on the floor and stared stubbornly straight ahead, even before Wanda had put down her luggage.

  "All right, then not," Wanda commented on his terribly childish behavior and began to rummage around in her backpack. Mariam did the same with hers.

  "I have carrots and peas," Mariam let the grown-ups know.

  "Fine, that's fine. I have liver sausage."

  They always ate what they had first fished out of their backpacks. In this way they avoided eating the tastiest things first. Wanda didn't really care, but Mariam had come up with this little ritual and insisted on keeping it. They tore the tins open and began to eat with their fingers and sometimes with the help of the tips of their knives.

  "Why is this so round?"

  Wanda immediately realized that Mariam meant the roundabout on the edge of which they were.

  "I don't know either," she said. She now had no patience to explain to the child that there had once been so many functional vehicles that methods had to be devised to guide them past each other as smoothly as possible. On the other side of the roundabout, the road passed into another bridge, one without obstacles this time, which in turn crossed a river. Wanda wondered if they might be on an island, and if this second river was also called Nectar. Mariam tried to persuade Doctor Mahler to eat something, and while Wanda listened to the girl´s futile efforts, she let her gaze wander.

  The buildings on the other side of the bridge also looked intact for the most parts. It seemed as if the air strikes had been confined to the station and some larger, official buildings. Then she noticed something else. To the right of the street, above the roofs of some blocks of flats, a church tower rose.

  How far might it be away? Two hundred meters? Three hundred? If they climbed up there, would the range of the walkie-talkie be greater from up there? Wanda had now eaten half the contents of the liver sausage tin and changed tins it with Mariam. How high might that church tower be? A hundred meters? No. Less. About seventy, maybe. A statue had been placed at the top of the tower. Probably someone holy, Wanda suspected. If one wanted to assume that it had about human size, then Wanda had estimated the height of the tower approximately correctly. Be that as it may, the tower was the highest building in the vicinity, the highest point. Even if she was not successful with the walkie-talkie from up there, she would still be able to get a remarkable overview of the surroundings. She had made up her mind.

  "Come on, Mariam, eat faster!"

  Wanda tipped the rest of the canned vegetables into herself and took her belongings back.

  "What's the matter?" Mariam wanted to know astonished and a little reluctant. Wanda, who still had her mouth full, pointed in the direction of the tower. Mariam followed her gaze, frowned, looked at it doubtfully, but finally shrugged her shoulders.

  "I can eat in the walk, too."

  She shrugged her shoulders again.

  Doctor Mahler took a quite weak but yet painful kick in the back when he made no effort to get up by himself. And then they were on their way again. To the left of the bridge, as Wanda saw when she turned her head, there was another, much smaller island, dominated by the ruins of a large building complex, which must have once been a hotel or a kind of congress center. The architects had used almost the entire surface of the island, and where the blueprint had left room, there were large debris under still winterly meagre vegetation. Wanda had waived gagging Mahler all the time because she had hoped that he would begin to speak on his own at some point. She did not know exactly what it was that she had her decision revised now as they had crossed the small bridge without any problems. She attached the gag, which made Mahler wheeze nasally. Mariam had gone ahead again in about ten meters distance and had stopped when she had noticed that Wanda had stopped at the end of the bridge. At this point the Kaiserstreet was still about as wide as the bridge, about twenty meters, and to the right and left it was lined with large commercial buildings which showed no visible destruction. They went further and left the buildings behind, crossed a street cutting theirs at right angles, then Kaiserstreet became somewhat narrower. Over the next fifty meters, multi-story residential buildings stood close together and were flanked by wild, rampant trees that had been planted for urban development reasons. Despite the generally spooky atmosphere, Wanda was able to notice that the overall picture of the city from here became a little more pleasant in a certain way. She couldn't think of a better word. Before the war, she might have called it homely. But nobody lived here anymore. In other ways, the sky seemed to darken more and more as they penetrated deeper into the city. The branches of the trees stretched across the street like greedy skeleton hands, casting strange shadows in the pale sunlight. That must have been noticed also by doctor Mahler, because he stopped, until Wanda pushed him further forward. Sh
e tried to take a look at the apartments behind the dull, dusty windows of the houses.

  Had there been a scurrying shadow?

  And over there?

  No.

  There was nothing.

  A gentle gust of wind made two of the wooden skeleton hands above them grasp one after the other, and the noise made Wanda flinch. Mariam before her seemed to be unaware of the threatening atmosphere in which Wanda suddenly found herself trapped. Undauntedly, she continued to progress until Wanda called her.

  "Stay a little closer with me, will you?"

  "Why? We've been doing this the whole time."

  "Yeah, but something's different here... I don't know. Just stay close to me."

  Mariam nodded.

  "Okay."

  Soon they had left the avenue with the threatening trees behind them, and to their left, to the north, the buildings receded and a generous, courtyard-like square followed. It was surrounded by other buildings, most of which were former cafes and restaurants. Mariam had let herself be carried away by Wanda's tension and held her pistol in her hands. Wanda also had unlocked her MP.

  Nearly nothing could be heard from far away, but brief dogs barking and the noises, which the light wind produced. But apart from that, nothing more.

  "Look, there's the tower up ahead," Wanda whispered. Mariam nodded. She noticed that, too.

  "What's this big house? It's one of those churches, isn't it?"

  "Yes, exactly."

  "Pretty big."

  "Yes. They needed room for a lot of people. They met there to pray and sing."

  "To pray? Like the tent-men do?"

  Wanda didn't really know what to say. Yes, the degenerate also prayed. Just differently. Yes, they also had their Bible. Just different. Yes, they also held church services. Just different. They even had their own songs. Ugly. She ignored the question. She had always avoided talking to Mariam about religion anyway.

  "Come. Let's take a closer look."

  The mighty Gothic building looked even more impressive from up close than from a distance. The high tower that Wanda wanted to reach seemed to have a more ornate and artistic facade than the rest of the building. It was probably built in another epoch, later probably. Wanda, Mariam and most likely even Doctor Mahler found this out after they had circumnavigated the impressive building and searched for an access to the tower. Wanda looked up. She was able to recognize expansive gargoyles in many animal shapes. Amazing, she thought, that in former times one had had time for such antics. Yet the sight of the elaborately crafted tower filled her with melancholy reverence. Would humanity ever again be able to conceive such works?