I kept walking. With concern I noticed that the flashlight beam had weakened a little - but maybe I was just imagining that. Even in case the flashlight would let me down, I had no choice, because there was only one direction for me anyway. Continuing towards the fresh air.
I was just about to lose myself again into my fantasy of the degenerates, in which they lurked in vain and unsuspectingly, nervously and with uselessly tensed bows in front of the hole in the earth through which I had entered the tunnel, as suddenly the flashlight beam uncovered something new.
An upturned table.
Right next to it a little ... an ... an old oil barrel?
A quick turn of the lamp revealed the improvised barricade in front of me about fifteen meters away.
Behind the barricade shadows moved, then a loud, electric “clack” - and then I was blind.
***
“Drop your weapons and go down on your knees!”, barked a hoarse voice through the tunnel. Since I was unable to respond to the command before the shock, the barking was repeated. With much more emphasis on the second time. A grinding, metallic sound, then I heard the footsteps of several people coming at me. Finally I managed to take my hands off my blinded eyes and sank to my knees. Soon they were all over me, grabbed my arms, pressed me to the ground with iron force and tied my hands behind my back.
“Where does this one come from?”
“I saw him on the bridge. That’s the one who jumped in the river.”
“Then you weren’t lying at all?”
The voice that asked sounded honestly astonished.
“No, you asshole.”
After these sentences were spoken, I was roughly torn to my feet and made move forward by pulling and pushing. After a few meters I heard the rusty grinding, metallic sound again, but this time it was behind me. They had dragged me behind their barricade with it’s blinding then dazzling trap and closed the gap again. I involuntarily wondered how they had so many strong lamps and above all where they had the necessary electricity from to power them?
“Stop!”, someone growled to the right of my ear. “Let’s see what you’re carrying.”
I stood still while they started searching me.
“Is he alone?”
“Yes, I think so. It looked like the other guys wanted him dead.”
“A shame with Mark and Pit. You really should have called for backup. Sure the Ivan will have to say a word or two.”
“Pah! Fuck the Ivan. The bridge was a perfect narrow spot to attack the pack, you know that. If we had let them through, we would have had to hunt them first and who knows what they would have done with the protees in the meantime. I barely made it back myself.”
“Yes, yes. And right after that, you volunteered for basement duty, hero of all heroes. In the end it just happened that way, only now Pit and Markus are dead. Those strangers roam our territory now and you know we don’t have enough capable people to get to them quick.”
The body search continued and they set out to open the backpack, which, unlike the assault rifle and the crossbow, they could not tear from my body so easily, since my hands were tied behind my back. When they had taken the rifle from me, the one who had first spoken of this “Ivan” had whispered a soft whistle, and when they opened their backpack and found the ammunition, the other one gave me a slight blow to the head from behind left.
“Where have you found this stuff, huh?”
“Ugh.” I cleared my throat.
“I... there’s a lot more of that stuff in the tunnel. Help yourselves. Smells a bit like death back there, though,” I understated.
Finally I dared to open my eyes a little and blinked carefully.
I could see more again and turned my head back and forth to get a big picture of the situation. I was astonished to see that the tunnel here behind their barricade was illuminated by many lamps on the floor and on the walls.
“I don’t want anything from you. I am not a threat,” I said, very anxious for a calm, sensible tone of voice, although the treatment I have just received had caused a faint glow of anger in me.
“I can see that you’re not a threat, tied up and all,” it came grumpily from the left.
“Yet you have brought your trouble in our territory, and I don’t like this, nor does the Ivan like it. And our protees will like it even worse.”
The mouth that spoke these words was, to say the least, a prime example of lack of hygiene, poor nutrition and general neglect, and it was in the perfectly fitting face of a sixty-year-old man of sturdy stature, who had his hair far too long and greasy growing out of his skull in tangled, gray-mottled strands.
The one of the two who must have been on the bridge was equal to his friend in terms of the degree of neglect, but in a completely different way. Where the Stumptooth was swollen and red nosed, the bridgeman’s skin stretched across his skull, and on the whole he looked like someone who had fully committed his life to severe drug abuse over the last few decades. He spoke now, and I saw that he also had some teeth missing and that the teeth that were still there looked unnaturally large because his gum had receded.
“So there are guns waiting in the tunnel, yeah? Real guns? Right under our noses? The whole time?”
“The Ivan has forbidden to go into the tunnels and you know that,” it came from Stumptooth.
I asked who the Ivan was, but only cashed a harsh:
“Shut your mouth, dumb-ass!”
Then he went on.
“Remember how we had the struggle with the ones from the mall? That’s when the blender discovered the tunnel. He then sent the rat girl to Ivan’s with a message. When the blender wasn’t back after two days, Ivan told us to barricade the tunnel and guard it, and this we did. Since then, there’s always only been two or three guys here to stand guard. But nobody went in deeper anymore. We’ve had enough trouble upstairs with the mall people. Whoever was down here at the time wasn’t shot at on the surface.”
“And then Ivan simply forgot about the tunnel again, or what? Stupid! If we´d had decent weapons on that bridge today, we would have had that one...”, he gave me a weak punch,
“... and those other wankers shot before they even set foot on our bridge - and Markus and Pit would still be alive.”
“You better shut up!”, it came from Stumptooth.
“Don’t say anything against the Ivan. You know very well what happens to the ones who open their mouths too wide, don’t you?”
“Yes, yes, the Ivan. Don’t cross the river, don’t go further from the station than to our lookouts, everything is very dangerous and we need to keep the good weapons for emergencies only. It’s funny how all of Ivan’s boys have guns. Yuck! Do you remember when Fairy-David came here with a handcart full of booze and food? Ivan beat him up so bad, he’s been blind in one eye ever since. And that’s happened only because he dragged the stuff from a store in Bockenheim to us, from outside our territory. He was so proud, and rightly so, if you ask me, but Ivan, he must have his hand on everything.”
He spat out.
Slowly a picture of the situation began to emerge down here, and if Ivan really was the kind of guy as the emaciated bridgeman described him, then I would rather not get to know him. As in so many other places, here too a primitive society had developed, an archaic, local power structure, led obviously by this Ivan. Apparently they hadn’t heard anything about Da Silva’s degenerates’ propaganda yet. No wonder, I thought, if they’d simply take down anyone who wanted to enter their territory. For the time being they had spared me. But when one is superior to someone to such an extent, one can certainly afford a little temporary mercy. The trap with the strong lamps and spotlights directed into the tunnel had been very effective. I wondered again where they got their electricity from.
As if on cue, Stumptooth got excited.
“Let it go. Put his stuff back in the backpack. He can carry it himself. This tied up. I’ll take him up to the Ivan. You better not go there when you’re in mood like this
. We’ll have to darken again here too, in case the pack that hunted him ...”,
He pushed me again.
“... will dare to show up here, too. I’ll send two more boys to reinforce the barricade. Should be there in fifteen minutes, okay?”
While the drought was tampering with my backpack again, he mumbled.
“Yeah, but tell them to hurry and bring something to warm up, or I’ll start seeing mice here.”
The tugging on my backpack had stopped and a bump against my shoulder made me understand that I should get moving. Strangely enough, the backpack seemed a little lighter than a few seconds ago. The skinny bridgeman must have taken one of the guns.
Well, so be it. Somehow those two experts also had managed to overlook the other gun in my parka.
However, as it soon turned out, this was not part of a stroke of luck.
Stumptooth set a leisurely pace, and as we left the enlightened area behind the barricade, he turned on his own flashlight and lit the floor in front of us. After a few minutes of silent marching, in which the only noise worth mentioning came from the quiet rattling of the crossbow and the assault rifle, which Stumptooth had hung carelessly over my head again and which lightly beat together at every step I took, the tunnel made a bend and ended after a few meters at a heavy and massive looking metal door.
Stumptooth, who had been behind me on my left all the time, now stepped past me, pulled the door open with a little effort and again bright, electric light fell into the tunnel. Bright enough that I had to squint my eyes another time, but by far not as glistening as the spotlights mounted on the barricade.
“Welcome to the rats,” he said while he kept the door with one foot from closing again. As I passed him and to make matters worse, he made an ironic bow.
Clown.
But I didn’t care anymore the moment I stepped through the door.
Station, I thought first ... we were in Frankfurt Central Station, somewhere below street level. I had been here from time to time a few years before the Great War. But what I saw now only shared the hectic bustle with what I could still remember. Everywhere on the subway platform we just entered, and also on the tracks, wild looking arrangements of camp beds, old mattresses and sleeping bags had been set up. Every five meters there was an electric hot plate or a small fireplace. It seemed as if this camp had already existed for quite some time. Where once commuting workers, bankers, students and other people had populated the platform, it was now ragged figures who flocked around the fireplaces or lay or sat under their blankets at their sleeping places.
“These are our protees. All broken and useless.” Stumptooth drove me forward.
“Don’t you stare so stupid. Go on! We have to go to the Ivan.”
He was right in a way. As he pushed me through the crowd, I stared and and was stared at right back. Women, children, old men. Many were missing a hand, an arm or a leg, some even both. They were all dirty, and the stench they emitted was at least as strong as the one in the tunnel, albeit of a completely different kind.
I tried to estimate their number. There were at least eighty people living down here, alone on this platform. There was cooking, eating, urinating on the tracks a little further away, clothes being repaired, an old, naked man who must have lost an ear somewhere and sometime during the war was taken in by two women, in the midst of all the other figures and washed with rough care and within this lively, dirty chaos, little children with no less serious injuries, and also some who were suffering from bizarre adhesions and ulcers, romped around.
The people here - they were all hurters.
“The healthy live upstairs. They are protectors or providers,” it sounded from Stumptooth. When he said those words, I looked more closely and managed to see some kind of structure in this chaos. Every ten or fifteen meters along the railway line there were people whose otherness caught my eye only at second glance. They were attentive, looking here and there. Sometimes they exchanged words with the surrounding hurters, or received a bowl of stew or a piece of cooked meat. At the end of the subway platform there were barriers and improvised barricades, similar to the barricade in front of which I had been captured. In the area around these miserable fortifications, the concentration of protectors - for these people had to be right that - increased.
“We owe everything to Ivan. Stop, stop here!”
A touch of pride resonated in these words.
We had come to a stop close to two protectors, a man around fifty and a woman who seemed a little older, and Stumptooth fulfilled his promise and sent them down to the skinny bridgeman. They trotted off grumbling and Stumptooth drew me towards an escalator that had died a long time ago.
“Go! Upstairs!”
“How many people live here?”, I couldn’t resist asking.
“All together about four hundred,” came the mumbling answer.
“You’re not a spy, are you?” he asked back suspiciously but stupidly and watched my face with nearly hilarious concentration.
“Ivan says the enemy is lurking everywhere and that we are safest underground. Only the strongest should be up, because that is where the danger is greatest, and much of the rays that cannot be seen. Not everybody can take it. And those who can’t stand the rays will be strange. I’m one of the strong, just so you know.”
As if I would dare to doubt his words even slightly.
“How long have you been here?”
“Some of us have always been here, already before the war. Even Ivan. He had a booth here.”
“A booth?”
“Yes, he sold here...”
He spoke the last word in a special way and I immediately understood what he meant.
“So the Ivan is really Russian?”
He looked at me in surprise and then said, shrugging his shoulders:
“Probably, bravest of all law abiding citizens. He’s not saying it. Somewhere from the east. You can hear it. I don’t care. Ivan has always been Ivan. Keep walking, yeah?”
We had now reached the upper end of the escalator, and while Stumptooth indulged in a sip of the flask he had fumbled out of one of his pockets, I was amazed when I let my gaze wander across the spacious station concourse.
Everything seemed to be in order up here. Every twenty meters there stood the two-man-groups of guardians that seemed so common in here.
Where there had been lively chaos down on the subway tracks, there was a strong sense of organizedness. As we crossed the hall, I noticed carefully stacked and arranged water and food supplies, two improvised workshops where repairs were done and a tent pitched in the middle of the hall with a red cross on it, which was probably a kind of sick bay or hospital.
There were more tents, and there were also some trains on the tracks which, it seemed, were also used as shelters or dwellings. The large glass dome that spanned over the tracks had holes in many places, and here and there steel struts hung down in crazy angles.
We just passed a larger group of protectors who were audibly debating what to make of today’s incident on the bridge, Stumptooth said:
“We’re almost at Ivan’s,” and nodded towards another tent guarded by men with red bands all around over the worn out jacket sleeves. Each of them carried a hodgepodge of improvised weapons, and some of them even had a pistol on their belt or a rifle over their shoulder in addition to the usual knives, clubs and homemade spears.
“You better not try anything funny,” Stumptooth warned me as he approached the guards.
“Take everything off him and empty the backpack. He’s from outside, and he’s got something that Ivan will be very happy about,” he turned to the redsleeves, which looked really pleased when they took the pistols, the assault rifle, the crossbow and the rest of my stuff.
I prepared myself, because now I had to convince this Ivan to let me go again. One of the redsleeves pulled back the tarpaulin and once more Stumptooth pushed me forward into the unknown.
***
I could hardly believe what my
eyes passed on to my brain. The inside of the tent, into which Stumptooth and I had been led, was diffusely illuminated by some, apparently indiscriminately attached lamps. Numerous antique, or at least antique looking furniture lined the outer edge of the base, and in the middle of the resulting room, slightly raised on a pedestal, a greenish, moth-eaten armchair stood enthroned.
On this armchair was the bizarre figure of Ivan. A bushy full beard covered much of his face, but I could still see that it was criss-crossed by deep furrows. The eyes lay deep in their caves and shimmered feverishly. Ivan was no longer a young man, but he radiated something, a kind of vitality that I have only seen in a few people so far.
The pedestal was flanked by two of his boys with the red armbands. I inevitably and not entirely seriously wondered if he would like to see me kneeling before his throne, but when he said nothing, but kept staring at my, certainly torn, miserable figure, I did nothing like that, but kept looking around the tent.
Behind the back wall there seemed to be another separate area. Certainly for sleeping or maybe a private kitchen. By and large, the tent looked like the tent of a medieval warlord, or at least like most filmmakers had imagined such a tent before the war.
Did Ivan feel like such a warlord?
The large street map of Frankfurt, which was spread out on one of the tables, and on which red, black and green figures were placed, at least suggested this. On the numerous tables at the edge, which, together with some cabinets and shelves, traced the outer outline of the tent, there was all kinds of other stuff. There an old cavalry saber with an engraving I could not decipher, next to it a coffee machine and a microwave, whose glowing lights indicated functional readiness, here a few old flintlock pistols together with all possible accessories next to a stuffed buzzard, in whose claws an equally prepared rat seemed to squirm. Everything here was stuffed with junk, which had obviously been towed from the surrounding orphaned apartments and houses.
The Rats of Frankfurt: The Gospel of Madness (Book 1 of 6) (The Gospel of Madness - (A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series)) Page 11
