My gaze was searching for Wanda’s face. Still pale and not moving, she looked back at me.
Distanced. Solidified.
“He’s dead,” she finally said.
“Why?” I asked.
She looked down and shook her head slowly.
“Guilt. It was the guilt.”
“I don’t understand. You were all prisoners, weren’t you? You’re not to blame.”
Was that the touch of a sneering smile?
“Later. Let’s bury him first.”
I stopped talking, just nodded.
We had decided on the front garden. None of us were looking for unnecessary fights, so we didn’t want to lack the protection offered by the high fence. My injuries continued to cause me pain and the physical work didn’t make it any better, but a look in Wanda’s face told me that she wouldn’t help me.
Around noon we finally stood next to the mound around the pit. Thomas’ body lay beneath. We had rolled it in a sheet after noticing that Mariam couldn’t keep her hoary eyes off the dead, flaccid face. Where his arms touched the sheet, it already shimmered red through the fabric. I heavily leaned on the spade that I had taken from the cellar and used to dig the grave. Wanda really hadn’t been much help here. While I had been working, she watched with an expressionless face and only rarely had her gaze touched the dead man to her feet.
Now that we were ready, I waited.
When Wanda still held her eyes upon the clouds after a while, I finally asked:
“Last words?”
She looked me briefly in the face, then she knelt beside Thomas´ wrapped head and stroked absently with the hand over it for a moment. Then, after a last second of hesitation, she rolled the corpse into its grave. The sound it made must have been quiet, but it seemed loud to me. Loud, profane and inappropriate. She rose and reached out her hand towards the spade. I handed it to her. After she three times had shoveled earth onto the dead body with her motionless face, she rammed the spade into the ground and stopped at the edge of the pit.
Then she pulled up snot and spit it to the grave. She turned to me.
“Close it,” she said voicelessly, and as she turned around and went back into the house, I could see that her face was no longer expressionless and rigid.
I did as I was told, and as I shoveled in pain, I thought about the scene that had just taken place.
What had happened between them? I just couldn’t make sense of it. At some point I was done shoveling and was more than happy that I had needed much less time to fill up Thomas´ grave than to dig it.
I pushed the spade into the ground, just like Wanda had done before, and took a deep breath. Only then did I realize that Mariam had stood behind me all the time and watched silently.
“What happens if we die?”, I heard her little girl voice ask. I couldn’t think of a suitable answer.
“Come on,” I said instead, and she took the hand I gave her. We closed the front door behind us and at the kitchen table we found Wanda. She was sitting at the end of the table facing the door and it was clear that she had been expecting us.
The book lay in front of her.
Her nails dug into the leather cover as she lifted her head in our direction.
“Sit down.”
I obeyed, took Mariam on my lap, where she quickly and exhaustedly fell asleep, even before Wanda had said another word. Slowly and haltingly she began to speak.
Her capture. The first weeks full of fear, shame and pain, when her parents were still among the prisoners. Then the miserable, agonizing death of the parents, the permanent mistreatment and rape by the degenerates and even by some of the the other captives. Their joining and the dying of the weak, the constant fear. She unleashed an endless litany of torture suffered, torture and humiliation inflicted under duress on others, making people with names and faces appear in my mind’s eye just to fade away again. Some of them she just didn’t mention anymore. She told me how they had moved through the land, destroyed and in ruins by the war, how all they had been given during this whole time was the bare necessities of food, just enough to be able to march on without falling over.
She also reported how the degenerates attacked other groups and small, scattered settlements of other survivors, described power struggles within the degenerate gang, duels, intrigues and secret murders. Often she digressed in detail and when she did, I could best get an idea of the whole, terrible thing. When she lost herself in atrocities and strung words together endlessly, I would listen with one ear and the free part of my brain would put the confused, seemingly incoherent information together to form a bigger picture.
I had been wrong. Behind the actions of the degenerates, under all the absolute urge and murderousness, a red thread lay hidden, a method. On the one hand, their pack had grown steadily, although now and then also degs had died in fights or had simply been left behind if they had sustained injuries and therefore became a burden for the group.
In the beginning there were only five men who had joined together to form this gang, but when I met them, their number had already grown to about twenty. Wanda’s tale led me to believe that the new members of the degenerates were former prisoners who had undergone brainwashing through brutal rites, forced and endured acts of violence that could hardly be surpassed in malice.
In principle, this recruitment scheme was identical to the one used everywhere in countries where some self-proclaimed bringer of salvation sent child soldiers into battle instead of being in the front line and risking one’s life for some sanctimonious purpose.
Out of the sudden all of this seemed to me devilishly well designed, systematic and within its own terrible logic also quite inspired by intelligence.
Human values were reversed, one’s own tendency to evil was legitimized, even distilled out, the victims were given the opportunity to become perpetrators without having to deal with their own conscience, since it happened under duress and incentives were created by a system of rewards and privileges to practice anticipatory obedience. And all this again and again and over and over, until the slaves were other people than those who had been captured by the gang.
Or no people at all. Question of definition.
Rarely did one of the prisoners openly resist or try to refuse all this. Whoever did try was cruelly and bloodily executed in front of all eyes. So it had happened to the little girl, who I had previously thought was a pseudo-superstitious victim to keep the dogs away from the group.
She had refused to whip her own mother with barbed wire. Therefore, a few days later and after a group rape, she was tied to the motorcycle offered to the animals. The same fate had befallen the mother that same night, but I had already been away then, fleeing the place of my failure under the cover of darkness.
I was incapable of any real emotion while the picture of what had happened to them was assembled in my head, but simply analyzed Wanda’s words. At some point, after another of the countless raids committed by the group, Thomas joined the gang as a captive. He and Wanda, who had clung to their humanity as best they could, had become friends. And that’s when the whole drama got even worse. Open friendships among the prisoners were not tolerated, and all of a sudden the two had become the preferred targets for any sadistic impulse of the slavers, and after Wanda was caught stealing food, Thomas was forced to punish and torture her until she was half dead.
He did it to save his own life, that was clear, but Wanda could see the beast in his face as she called it, could see it grow and take possession of him. At some point in the course of these abysmally cruel punitive measures, something broke out of Thomas and Wanda could see that he had lost his humanity, or whatever you want to call it.
From that day on, something lurked in his gaze and in his words. Something that came out more and more often. He had apologized to Wanda incessantly and repentantly, justified himself and fought against it, but it was not only Wanda who could see what grew inside Thomas. The leader of the degenerates could see it too. And he chos
e to feed it. Thomas would soon be one of them.
Every time there was someone to punish - and this happened at least once a day - Thomas had to carry out the punishment. They gave him more and better food and all kinds of other privileges. Sometimes the other prisoners even had to carry him when he threatened to collapse during their hard marches. One day before I started my attack on that pack of soulless creatures, he cut a 15-year-old boy’s throat in front of everyone and then held out his hand to receive his reward. In a conversation between the two aides, which Wanda had recently been able to overhear, she had learned that in two days he was to be officially made one of the Degs in one of their barbaric rituals.
Today, the exact day we buried him.
The ambivalent relationship between him and Wanda became even more understandable when Wanda told me that he had shared his privileges with her. He, struggling with his dark side and plagued deep inside by his conscience while at the same time doing unspeakable things, shared his bloodstained food with Wanda, his warm sleeping bag bought with pain and anguish, and she accepted everything because she wanted to survive.
But she hated him all the more, because he this way also shared his weakness with her, stained her, made her his accomplice and alienated her from the other prisoners.
After her punishment she was too weak to refuse the food and the few comforts. She said to herself that she had to keep her strength to perhaps flee at some point. She hadn’t even thought of something like revenge and when my first bolt found its target and the great shouting among the degenerates broke out, she had only hoped that now everything would soon be over. Only when it became apparent that with a little luck this fight would be the last of the degenerate hunting group, the prisoners had reacted and attacked their guards and killed them while paying a high blood toll. Deep inside she had expected that she herself, or maybe at least Thomas, would die in the chaos of the battle, maybe all of them.
But things had turned out differently. The degenerates had lost the fight. Most were dead, a few had escaped and Mariam, Wanda and Thomas were the only surviving prisoners. When they rushed to my aid and then treated my wounds, the conflict between the old man and the woman receded into the background. Their world had changed fundamentally yet another time. They were suddenly free again and I needed their help. Yesterday, however, when I had addressed the book, the dwelling conflict had come up again and, after I had laid down in my bed and Mariam also had fallen asleep, Wanda had given Thomas the choice either to kill himself or to suffer through her doing to him what he had done to her. The old man had made his decision.
Wanda stopped talking, gave her sore voice a break. We looked at each other.
As hard as I tried to find something in my head, there was nothing I could say to alleviate Wanda. Finally, I hesitantly pointed to the book in her hands.
“It’s the cause of all this,” Wanda said and pushed it over the table towards me.
Wanda looked at me suspiciously, but also expectantly. For a moment I looked directly at her face, then I steered my attention back to the book in front of me. I let my fingers glide gently over the leather cover. In red, somehow handwritten looking letters it said:
THE RETURN TO INNOCENCE
I raised my head, looked at Wanda questioningly. She said nothing, made a gesture.
Just read.
I opened the book. A cover page. Again it said:
The Return To Innocence
Gospel of the New World
From Cardinal Raphael Da Silva
Basilica of St. Pietro, Vatican City, 2017.
Wanda, who must have noticed my wrinkled forehead, left her seat and went to the kitchen door.
“I’m putting Mariam to bed. Then I’ll go upstairs and keep my eye on the street. You read.”
I gratefully accepted this order. I waited for the kitchen door to close behind them, then turned the cover page. Before I really started to read, I collected my thoughts. The last days had been extremely eventful, my shoulder wound was still pounding and above all Thomas’ suicide still kept me very busy. Curiosity, however, ensured that I eventually somehow managed to dispel the billions of thoughts and emotions in my head and to concentrate on the book to some degree at least.
You who still walk on earth - hear the gospel of a dying world.
You who still walk on earth - see the blessed way I show you.
You who still walk on earth - hear what I, who touched God, have to say to you.
You who still walk on earth - hear what Jesus, lying son of God, does not dare to tell.
Those were the first lines my eyes found. But there was more. For every line that immediately caught my eye, there were ten others in this strangely printed looking handwriting. I quickly realized that these were translations. Directly below each other, line by line in different languages everything was repeated.
My over the past years rusted school education enabled me to safely identify Latin, English and French after a while. Two of the lines had to be written in Spanish and Italian, then there were two lines that I would put to some Scandinavian country. I also thought to guess Dutch. Or was it Walonian? Two more lines I had no idea of. I pushed my upper body back in the chair, overwhelmed for a moment by the effort the obviously confused evangelist had made here. For a moment I let all the pages of the book rustle past my eyes like a flip-book. Indeed. This system ran through the entire writing. An almost unimaginable effort. Well. There was one good thing. The many pages were actually only filled to a tenth with content. So I would finish reading much faster than I initially thought.
I read on.
The suffering that has afflicted us, destroyed our world and led many of us to eternal damnation - it is an old suffering.
Since Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, since Prometheus brought fire to men, we have been doomed. Since that moment we are all cursed, for our forefathers have reviled God and we must repent for it.
These days of war and death that we, the last children of sin, are the days of purification, the time of catharsis.
It is ten times ten years left for us to regain the love of the Lord.
Ten times ten years to make up for the mistakes of countless generations of human life.
Each of us must strive to recover our innocence.
Each one of us must strive to prove his purity before the eyes of the Lord.
We, the last to walk on earth, must go back in time, far back, back way beyond the commandments that the Lord gifted us, and even further back.
Back before the Fall.
Back to paradise.
For it is our hubris, that so-called knowledge, that has led to our damnation.
It is our desire to shape the world.
Our desire to create the greater things.
Our desire to be like God.
It is the knowledge of our own being.
The urge to be more than a child of God.
The urge to rise above.
Everything that led to this time of death and damnation springs from our original sin.
We, the children of God, are not made to dream of more than food and reproduction, more than innocent lust and blessed thoughtlessness.
Cursed be the knowledge - for it takes humility.
Cursed be the pursuit - for it is an abomination to the Lord.
Cursed be morality - because it was made by us.
Cursed be love - for it springs from an unclean mind.
Cursed be the law - because it was made by us.
Cursed be the speech - because it does not belong to man.
Cursed be our medicine - for it defies the lord’s own wish.
Cursed be all technology - for it’s defies the Lord’s world.
Cursed be your marriage - because it’s against God’s will.
Cursed be the goodness - for it is false and pale.
Praise be to the fight - for it calls the Lord to watch.
Praise be to our urge - because it is clean and pure.
> Praise be to those who know no conscience - for innocence is theirs.
Praise be to rapture - for its calls the Lord to us.
Praise be to the dumb - for the Lord does always walk along with them.
Praise be to our rage - because it is clean and pure.
Praise be to those who seek forgetfulness - because innocence is their goal.
Praise be to those who seek to forgetfulness - because purity is their goal.
Praise the one who lives my words - for blissful he will be.
Praise the one who spreads my words - for it is innocence he brings
Slowly, the knowledge about the degenerates I had been able to gather in the past merged with the new information.
Cursed be all technology - hence the degs camped in the street instead of seeking the security of the walls and doors in the millions and millions of abandoned houses on our raped planet. That’s why they equipped themselves with homemade weapons instead of guns and pistols and all the other modern murder toys left in the world. There really were enough of them available in case one looked in the right places. Praise the one who spreads my words - hence this constant recruitment and abduction of people. A mission order.
What I couldn’t understand was how someone could believe this complete nonsense, how one could actually be convinced that the path to salvation was not in our own hands and in the preservation and application of the way too little knowledge about technology and medicine that we had left as a collective.
I didn’t use guns because they made too much noise. The degenerates didn’t use them because they condemned technology. Well, after the fight in the house, which I only survived by a hair’s breadth, I would probably have to reconsider my attitude towards firearms - at least that’s what I decided for now.
I read some more.
Next followed some pages on which the fine Mr. Raphael Da Silva justified his status as sole bringer of salvation. He described in anointing words that under the influence of ritual self-flagellation and drugs he had heard the voice of God and received his divine mission. But before he had devoted himself to writing his pamphlet, according to his own statement, he had been subjected to the seven stages of purification.
The Rats of Frankfurt: The Gospel of Madness (Book 1 of 6) (The Gospel of Madness - (A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series)) Page 7
