I was very aware that Mariam had difficulties and didn’t know how to use the cutlery properly. Sure. Nobody had taught her. No reason to do so. She was too young. But she learned quickly. Soon everyone had completely eradicated the portion intended for him and an slightly embarrassed silence spread. Finally Thomas took the floor.
“We’re all tired. But I think that Mariam and you ...”
He looked me in the face for a moment.
“...should sleep through. Wanda and I will take turns with the guard.”
At first I wanted to fend off the objection that I was not able to take on a watch shift, but when Wanda agreed and said that it was probably best - at least for tonight - I let it go and submitted.
I rolled myself up on the couch full, but with a queasy feeling in my stomach. Were they planning something? We had not spoken much and a fight broke out inside me between my own distrust of other people and my body’s merciless need for sleep. It was more of an exhibition match and in the end the need for sleep won effortlessly.
The next morning I woke up kind of hungover. In the living room I didn’t see any of the three, but I could hear sounds of movement in the house. I sat up. Judging by the light, I had slept well into the afternoon. My stomach growled again and I had to piss. I got up on my feet. My shoulder was still throbbing, the coccyx was still hurting like hell, my ribs were constantly sending pain impulses to my brain, but my ankle seemed to be doing a little better.
At least that.
I came to the table where we had our feast yesterday. Lined up neatly, freed from the blood of the degenerates, lay there, between the dirty dishes and the good cutlery, my machete, my cheap survival knife and my crossbow. Also two of the aluminum bolts and four of the homemade ones were ready for me. I could not have wished for a clearer sign of trust. Thoughtfully I looked at the ambivalent still life before my eyes.
In the end I left my weapons on the table and went to see what the others were doing. From above I heard a bright laugh and giggle and the splashing of water on ceramics. Wanda and Mariam must have been in the bathroom washing. I should probably do that too sometime soon.
As I walked on, I casually peered for a water canister. I met Thomas outside the front door. He also smelled a bit of soap and there was nothing left of the sour old man smell I had noticed on him yesterday. I felt like a rotting skunk standing next to him. He nodded towards the pile of corpses at the northern entrance of the dead end.
“The dogs were there. They were really hungry.” He looked at me and then added:
“How are you?”
“All right, considering the circumstances,” I said, and he nodded and hummed softly.
“Last night I was talking to Wanda. We’ve decided to stay here until you’re well again.”
“You don’t have to.” Thomas grinned crookedly.
“You’re barely able to stop us, are you?”
For a moment I wanted to reach back for an answer, but then I let it go. He was right.
Not to let him take initiative out of my hands completely, I changed the subject:
“But I want to go back behind the fence. It’s safer over at the other house. However, we would still have to get rid of the dead and secure the broken, or better right away all of the windows and ventilate properly.”
Thomas nodded again.
“Basically a good idea. But for now,” he tapped me surprisingly rudely against the spear wound on my shoulder, “... we need to make sure you don’t get an infection.”
He smiled at my efforts to dissuade him from burning out the wound, but in the end he let me. I would work with my disinfectant for now and, as soon as my foot was fully usable again, get some antibiotics from some nearby pharmacy that had not been completely looted yet.
While we were still having our little debate, Mariam and Wanda came down the stairs. Both were now newly dressed and each wore a towel wrapped around their heads.
“Bath is free,” Mariam joked and peered at Wanda, from whom she must just have learned this expression, and I smiled at the sight she offered. A garishly patterned towel around her head, a brand-new-looking SkoobyDoo shirt in eye hurting pink, a belt with knife and a field bottle above, which looked much too big on the little girl and - in fact - a yellow skirt and sandals.
Unhandy. On occasion we had to get the little one some more practical clothes. But okay, obviously something else was not to be found in the house probably in the first attempt.
I went upstairs, undressed and washed myself sitting in the bathtub and in pain as best I could. The girls had left me enough water in the plastic canister and also put a bottle of shower gel and towels around the tub in a way that I had to see them immediately. I messed up one of the towels when my shoulder wound started bleeding a little, but that was soon over. Finally, I disinfected the wound. It hurt and I cursed silently. Looking at the injury in the bathroom mirror I was pretty pleased with its condition. So far, no inflammation was in sight.
Not so much with my face. I really needed a shave. I looked around. Ah, yes. An electric razor. Great. Completely useless these days. Just had to wait for the next occasion allowing me to shave.
The rest of the day we spent cleaning up in my original shelter. The Degs’ bodies we carried to the others already gnawed on and torn to shreds by the dogs at the northern opening of the dead end and thrown on the pile. Then followed some cleaning work and then, after several hours of united labour, the puddles of blood had been wiped up, the remains of the burnt curtain thrown into the garden and the broken window had been temporarily suspended with blankets and plastic tarpaulins.
All this time we had casual conversations, and I learned a little about the past of the three. They seemed quite fond of talking about their lives before the war. About her imprisonment with the degenerates ... not so much. Wanda in particular was very silent about this.
In the early evening, it had just begun to dawn, we had brought all supplies and weapons back in my shelter and locked the gate of the fence behind us when a spontaneous thought found its way into my consciousness.
“Say, say.”, I asked.
“Where’s that book the leader was reading yesterday, anyway?”
They looked at me - and no one said a word.
Mariam stepped nervously from one foot to the other until she finally grabbed Wanda’s hand and stood so close to her that they touched. Thomas, who had stared at me like everyone else, could not stand my direct look. Instead, he directed his eyes towards the ceiling of the entrance area for a moment.
“Actually we wanted to burn it,” he finally started slowly and hesitantly as Wanda cut him off much louder than necessary.
“Not actually! We still want to burn it! We have to burn it! You got that, asshole?”
Wanda was obviously getting agitated and I understood less and less. She reacted way too strongly to my question. Too angry, and suddenly the hair on my arms stood up. Distorted faces and cramped postures. Mariam was clearly afraid.
What happened here?
Maybe I should ask more forcefully for the book to be shown to me?
In the beginning it had only been a vague curiosity, but now, witnessing their strange behavior, this curiosity continued to grow. No, I wouldn’t let it go. But then I looked at them again. Maybe it was best to let them be for now. At least for the moment - before the mood completely changed.
Thomas had clenched his old hands in fists and his ankles stood out white. For a moment he held Wanda’s gaze, then he lowered his head, seemed to collapse and stood tensed as if waiting for something to happen.
Wanda’s right hand, which had moved to the knife on her belt, paused there and then, perhaps to justify her subliminal readiness to fight, stroked Mariam over her head and finally she laid her hand on the girl’s shoulder in a futile attempt to give comfort.
I wanted to ease the tension that had built up between the three of them and myself, but especially between Wanda and Thomas, so I clumsily changed the subject a
nd raised my hands soothingly.
“What’s there for dinner?” I asked.
This maneuver was so obvious that I would have been embarrassed if I hadn’t seen the shadows on the faces of the former enslaved. There was something about that book and I would find out what it was. For now, however, I was more than relieved when the tension seemed to evaporate almost too quickly.
“I’ll see what we have left,” said Wanda, turning her back to us and walked towards the kitchen where we’d stored our supplies in a kind of a “prehistoric tradition”, even though there had been no functioning power grid for years to put a refrigerator or stove into operation. She pulled Mariam along with her, and when I heard them rummage around in the kitchen, I stepped up to Thomas.
“This is not over yet!” I said quietly.
I thought the old man was the weakest link in this chain of traumatized, self-proclaimed secret bearers and when I spoke the syllables, I immediately felt sorry for them, because I had placed such a threat in these five words that Thomas seemed to sink into the ground right away. He began to tremble, his jaws opened and closed, but not one word came over his lips, not a single one. With tears in his eyes he stared at me, then he rushed after Wanda and Mariam.
I was left behind helplessly with nothing but questions in my head. Finally, I turned around, walked up to the front door that had been made almost unusable by the degenerates’ attack, and for the tenth time I checked the results of our poor repair efforts.
A strong person would have shattered our improvised carpenter’s mess into a thousand pieces with a single kick, but we were definitely safe from the dogs tonight. Even if one of them would make it over the fence against all odds. I had never been good with people, even not before the war. I couldn’t read very well between the lines or interpret nuances, was often too direct, offended people.
I had to give the three some time, I said to myself, because one thing was clear: they had suffered more than just external wounds and injuries, much more, while they were forced to roam the devastated lands with this gang of degenerates. If I wanted to understand them, I must not forget that. I thought again about Wanda’s face when she had rebuked Thomas. At that moment she had not been far from pure, animalistic desire to kill. I shuddered when I wondered what my own face might have looked like when I had fought and killed the degenerates, whose attack I had deliberately provoked, right here, in this House that was now our refuge. Chasing them away hadn’t been enough for me, I now understood. I did make them come at me so I could kill them all - or die in the attempt.
Maybe I should just go and leave the three of them to themselves.
At some point, when the rumbling and whispering behind the kitchen door had faded away, and instead the clattering of dishes got to my ear, I turned away from the front door, made a few steps, knocked, waited a moment and then entered.
The table was set and a plate was also ready for me. I sat down. Wanda and Thomas pretended that this scene back before the door was not real, as if it never had happened. A miserable charade.
Mariam, however, barely touched her food. She felt the tension between the adults and fearfully let her eyes roam between us. Slowly, while we were chewing, something like a fake conversation developed. Meaningless, fearful and false. Soon I left the three.
Before getting up, I asked Thomas, who had been assigned the guard right before mine, to wake me when it was my turn. Then I went into the bedroom upstairs, which I now somehow regarded as my room, despite the fact that it was absolutely clear to me that I would not stay here forever.
I briefly thought about closing the door behind me, because this whole thing had not exactly helped to increase my trust in the three of them. On the other hand, Thomas would notice the locked door if he wanted to come in and wake me, and then he would probably develop a suspicion towards me in turn.
So what should I do?
Finally, so not to be completely without protection, I placed a chair in such a way that the door, if one would open it, had to bump against it. On the edge of the seat I placed a half-filled glass of water, which I had taken from the kitchen. If someone wanted to rip the door open and storm into the room, he or she would make a lot of noise, and if someone was creeping up on me, chances were good that he or she wouldn’t find his way around the chair in the dark and stumble over my little alarm system - even in case the intruder wouldn’t hit it with the door right away. I was confident that the noise would be loud enough to wake me up. Relieved in this way, I took off my boots, loosened my belt and stretched out on the bed. My crossbow, loaded with a feathered bolt and cocked, lay next to my boots, the machete within reach as usual.
As I stared at the ceiling, the thing down there did not leave me alone.
This book - what about it?
The thought of it haunted me more than I wanted - that I didn’t know where they had it. Who had it. I guessed Wanda. Should I try to search through their things while I was awake during my shift and they were all asleep? What did it say? Why did she want to burn it so badly? Couldn’t they just throw it away? It was just a book, wasn’t it? What harm could a book do?
Yeah, a book. Right. Why should a degenerate, a looter, an outlaw, a human animal be interested in reading? It was clear that Wanda and Thomas thought it was somehow bad that it was a problem for them, so much so that Wanda had reached for her knife - but why?
My thoughts turned in becoming more and more confused circles until I finally dawned into a restless sleep and in my dreams I fought all the battles of the past days again and again and when I woke up bathed in sweat, it was bright outside.
Thomas didn’t wake me.
I sat up, looked around the room hectically. Everything seemed to be still in place. The chair, the water glass, my weapons - everything was unchanged. I swung my feet out of bed, put on my boots as quietly as I could and closed my belt. I listened deep into the house, trying to hear signs of activity, of life.
Nothing.
In my mind’s eye I saw the three lying in their blood. Slaughtered by degenerates who were now lurking silently in the shadows and niches of the house, just waiting for me to show up.
I sneaked to the window. The dead end was just as we left it. The burnt down fireplace, the pile of corpses at the northern end, which seemed to have lost a little volume overnight, the locked gate in the fence, which had protected us so well so far. Everything was as it should be - and yet I felt that something was completely wrong.
Silently and still sweating out of all my pores, I first took the glass of water from the chair so as not to trigger my own small alarm system myself in the end, and in this way unintentionally make my presence known to an invisible enemy. Before I threw it towards the bed on which it landed, almost without making a noise, I drank it in one go.
What you have, you have, right?
Then I carried the chair over to the bed and put it down gently. The way to the door was now clear and I grabbed my crossbow and machete. Before I left the room, I put my ear on the wood of the door again. Still Nothing.
When I finally pressed down the handle carefully with the right fist, in which I also held the machete, and opened the door, it gave off a quiet creaking and I lifted the crossbow in my left slightly higher and took a quick step back in anticipation of an attack.
But no battle cry, no sound of death bringing footsteps coming at me out of the twilight of the house.
Just silence.
Now the door was completely open and my gaze glided hastily to the right and left over the upper end of the stairs and the locked doors in the corridor that connected the stairs with the rooms on the upper floor.
No movement, no sign of life. I waited another second until I had enough courage to finally leave the bedroom. The machete raised for a blow and the crossbow stretched in front of me, pointing in the direction I was walking, I worked my way carefully to the landing and peered over the handrail, to which the remains of my net were still knotted. Below, as far as I could see f
rom here, everything seemed to be just as I had left it. The front door was locked, our improvised repairs were also still intact.
No, we hadn’t been attacked by degenerates that night and I hadn’t been spared by a miracle either, just to wake up this morning as if nothing had happened.
Idiot.
My fear died down a little. Whether it was because I didn’t notice any signs of struggle and noises, or because a person only can endure a certain amount of tension before the mind sought ways to calm itself, I don’t know.
In any case, I changed my approach. I no longer tried to be quiet at all costs and pushed the machete back into the sheath with a muffled but well audible sound. Now holding the crossbow loosely in both hands, I went down the stairs. Downstairs, arriving in the entrance area, I once turned slowly round my own axis.
All doors to the rooms on the ground floor were closed and now I could hear something. From the living room a quiet child’s weeping and a calming woman’s voice mumbled muted, tender-sounding words.
I lowered the crossbow, went to the living room door and entered. Thomas sat in the single leather armchair, which completed almost every couch set in the world. His wrinkled arms hung down his right and left armrests, his head had sunk powerlessly on his right shoulder and his dead eyes looked me directly in the face. First I cringed, then I looked a second time, and while Mariam kept crying, and Wanda, pale and mask-faced, turned to me, I saw the big puddles of blood that had spread across the floor from Thomas´ slit arteries.
Mariam freed herself from Wanda and took a hesitant step towards me and when I had put the crossbow down and held out my hand to her, she ran towards me on her little feet, pressed her crying face to my stomach and kept sobbing. I could feel her heart beating furiously and even after I absorbed this scene of death, which the autumnal morning light bathed in unreal colors for a while, she showed no intentions to let me go.
The Rats of Frankfurt: The Gospel of Madness (Book 1 of 6) (The Gospel of Madness - (A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series)) Page 6
