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

  THE GOSPEL OF MADNESS

  Book IV

  Circle of Wagons

  By Georg Bruckmann

  Special thanks to Richard Briscoe and Conny Kirsch. I still owe you!

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  © 2019 Georg Bruckmann. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, without the permission in writing from the author.

  Foreworld VII

  Toni

  One eye at a time, slowly. If you move too fast, it's gonna hurt. But when was the pain the last time you were deterred from doing anything you wanted to do? I mean, look at you! Everything you've done so far has brought you to this point. Pretty pathetic, huh? The best part is you don't even know exactly what that point is. Or where. You really have no idea where you are right now, you stupid idiot, do you? No. You don't. Right now, all you know is you're alone in this room. And that makes you happy. You know somebody tied you to a chair. You know you're naked and you've been beaten. Just like you know you didn't suffer any serious injuries. Not yet, at least. Your situation is still pretty threatening, my friend. And there you sit, gathering courage to open your eyes. I understand it can be comforting not to see. But it won't help you. And anyway, when was the last time you sought comfort? That was long before your mother drowned herself. Comfort is not for you, Toni. You've outgrown that. And if you want to grow further, then there can only be ruthlessness for you. Anything else would lead to stagnation in your development. Then you might as well give up and die on the spot. Then you wouldn't be better than people, would you? And also this self-talk - stop this nonsense, Toni. You've rested long enough. Face the world again. You've been hiding in your head for too long already.

  It took Toni a great deal of strength to fight his way out of his twilight state. He saw pictures and faces in front of him, scenes from the recent past. They intermingled with other scenes and images that lay far back in time or arose from his dreams and fantasies. He knew that. But he couldn't tell which of the pictures whirling before his inner eye belonged in which category. He was totally disoriented. A gala dinner at a hotel. People of color with expressionless faces and in olive green, sweaty uniforms. With guns in their hands. Women in breathtaking evening dresses who awakened hot and violent desires in him. Important and vain men, also in evening dress. Drunken laughter, mixed with relaxed music played by a live band, softly jingling tunes with exotic undertones. A well. A well and a gold mine. A big one. A gold quarry. The vague hint that the gala was about donations. Jeeps with machine guns mounted on them. A school class full of dark-skinned children in a primitive wooden building. Again the festively decorated conference room of the hotel. A speaker on a podium, also in evening dress. Then the kids again. The angle from which he looked down on them suggested that he was the teacher. Father Bianchi. Antoine. He had now shorn his hair short, and he had become edgier. Yet his youthful belief that he was invulnerable and could do anything yet flashed in his eyes from time to time. Individual pictures and memories of Toni's priestly ordination. Then a church, as shabby as the classroom. Toni saw himself preaching. False solemnity for which he felt nothing but contempt. Herod and the others next to him. The soft, pancake-faced Herod had also been to the fundraiser and taken pride of himself. Who was the man next to him who looked like a fat boxer? A senator? No, the wrong word. An ambassador. Yes, the American ambassador. There was another man with those two. A sharply cut face, straight posture and too much gold jewelry. Younger than the ambassador, but with older eyes.

  Ambassadors are always in foreign countries, aren't they, Toni?

  Yeah, that was right. That had to be it. Black kids. American ambassador. School.

  Mission work.

  New pictures. He himself, as he took the vows of the order. The Merciful Brothers of the South.

  Raphael. I'm Raphael now.

  Toni felt an appeal of amusement at this thought, which initially irritated him.

  Raphael. The one who heals.

  Toni made his face grin. It hurt. He had chosen the name himself. Because he had every intention of healing. Just not in the way you'd normally imagine. According to his own standards and values. And on a very large scale.

  For some reason, which he himself did not understand, this thought now allowed him to better arrange the confused images in his head and at least partially assemble coherent memories from them.

  Heat. Africa. He was in godforsaken Africa. Somewhere in the south of the vast continent.

  But what exactly had happened?

  Why was he here?

  Sure, I'm sure now.

  The Order of the Merciful Brothers maintained schools and other humanitarian projects here. But why was he here? He must have had some reason to contact them - certainly anything but humanitarian. It just didn't occur to him, he just knew that he certainly wasn't here to build wells or spread the good word.

  He remembered the pain that his thoughtless and premature smile had just caused him. His left nostril was clogged. Blood for sure. Something had happened. Something he certainly had not intended.

  But what?

  Again, dark-skinned soldiers flashed before his inner eye, not in the shabby village this time, but in connection with the women in the evening dresses and the bloated, fat faces of their husbands at the fundraiser. But not in the conference room. It's outside the hotel. In the street. The women went inside quickly.

  A kidnapping? A hit?

  Deliberately slowly and carefully Toni tried to open his eyes. With the left one, he succeeded immediately and without the necessary movements of his facial muscles causing him further pain. The right one didn't want to react properly. Toni felt the tiny muscles trying, but the eyelid didn't want to lift.

  Sticky?

  Swollen?

  Toni left it there for now. What his left eye showed him was enough to keep his mind busy.

  He was definitely not in a hotel room. That he should have derived from high temperature of the room, he thought. Unclimatized. But it was only now, when he saw the raw walls, some of which were clad in corrugated iron, which surrounded him and through whose cracks glistened bright sunlight that hurt his eyes, that Toni realized that he had been taken.

  By whom?

  Where to?

  He tried to figure out how firm and how exactly he was tied to the chair. Slowly he lowered his head. His bare legs seemed thin when he looked down at himself. He tried to move them to see his lower legs as well. He couldn't. They were fixed under the seating surface of the chair in such a way that they were slightly bent backwards.

  Certainly ropes or cable ties.

  He tried to move his arms. A mechanical pull at his foot, and now Toni understood. They had connected his hand to his ankles behind his back and thus fixed him to the chair. He wondered if he could move the whole chair around. He tried, but he didn't succeed.

  Why not?

  I don't know.

  Again he looked down. Something on his upper body was weird. The skin fell wrong and then Toni realized that he had been fixed to the backrest just
below the rib-cage. The wire was so thin that he hadn't immediately noticed it, because it cut deep into his lean flesh, and it had been tightened as much that it seemed to disappear into him. Now Toni also noticed a large bruise on the outside of his right thigh. Apart from that and his face, Toni could not detect any injuries.

  The fact reassured him a little.

  But what didn't calm him down was that he hadn't been able to move the chair. He had shifted his weight jerkily in alternating directions several times. Nothing had happened, not even a sound had been created which could have indicated a movement of even one millimeter. The chair had to be anchored in the coarse-pored concrete of the floor. This in turn suggested that the room in which it was located had been set up specifically for such purposes.

  An interrogation room.

  A torture chamber.

  A slaughter room or something like that.

  Not good.

  Toni deliberately expanded the range of his senses. There was another table to his left, about two meters away. Objects were lying on them, he could have guessed that in the semi-darkness. Was the rectangular outline he could see a typewriter?

  Behind the table there was another chair, but no one was sitting on it. On the wall behind it, the one that was directly in front of Toni, he could guess the contours of a door from the sunlight penetrating the miserable built wall from outside. Otherwise, his left eye found nothing remarkable.

  Or is it?

  Ropes or cables or chains hung from the ceiling. Two of them had light bulbs on them.

  Light bulbs?

  Now Toni also became aware of the deep humming that had been there the whole time. A chugging generator at some distance. Toni closed his left eye again and started to listen.

  Animals.

  Birds.

  Gentle wind.

  The rustling of leaves and trees.

  No street noise, no honking of horns and no loud screaming, as had been usual in the vicinity of the hotel. But yet, quietly, far away, the noise civilization, almost inaudible.

  Or was he just hoping?

  He wasn't in town anymore, that much was clear. Not so far away he could hear an engine noise, but that could be anything. A single vehicle somewhere on a road. A boat on one of the countless small rivers that existed here, or an airplane at high altitude, perhaps even a helicopter. But whatever it was, it was far away.

  What about smells?

  Can they tell me anything?

  No exhaust gases, or if it does, it's weak. Probably from the generator. A mixture of all kinds of organic smells. Smells that Toni knew only too well. His own body. Old piss on the floor. Old sweat and old blood. Shit too, of course. The cabin smelled of fear and men. And it smelled of death. Some death was there, too.

  He thought it felt a bit strange to be in a weak position, contrary to his usual habits. Toni had some experience with places like this. Only that on previous occasions he had been the one actually sitting on the chair behind the desk. And that person was the one that was missing right now.

  Toni's head began to hurt, and he stopped his attempts to find out about his surroundings for the time being. As well as he could, and that wasn't particularly good, he tried to bring his naked body into a more comfortable position. His whole body was terribly tense. If they´d let him sit like that for a long time, they wouldn't even have to bother torturing him.

  Toni was still able to suppress his pain. He had always been good at that, outstanding even. Therefore he could not draw any conclusions from the nerve signals of his skin and muscles to find out how long he had been here. But he didn't feel hungry, and so Toni was of the opinion that he couldn't be here too long. But his mouth was pretty dry and he was thirsty.

  Now that he was thinking about it, Toni blamed this thirst for not being able to think properly. He was sure he was dehydrated.

  Dry as the highlands of Merkanto.

  That's what they said around here, he remembered.

  Was that the name of the small, civil war-torn country he was in?

  Merkanto?

  A new picture all of a sudden. Plantations on cleared soil, surrounded by rain-forest. The face of Signore Vascotto. A port. Cargo ships. Then his brain replaced the ships with helicopters. Ugly old things Toni had seen in movies about the Vietnam War. Then again the village, the well and the jeeps with the heavy machine guns.

  Toni knew that among all the information in his brain a logical reason for his being here and in this situation was stored, but he just could not access it. In this posture, with this thirst and with this headache he did not deem himself to be able to use one of the meditation techniques which he had acquired. He tried it anyway, tried it with all his mental strength, but all he achieved was that his headache got worse and he felt wetness on his face. He had a nosebleed. The plug had come loose. With his tongue, he tried to catch the blood. He couldn't lose any more fluid.

  Something changed outside, and Toni stopped his efforts to listen more closely. A vehicle approached. It took a while until it had become clear to Toni that it was heading straight for his position. But then it all happened pretty fast. The car stopped and the engine was turned off. Doors opened. Footsteps on the floor. Several people. They were getting closer. Then a noise, and then suddenly it was cruelly bright in the smelly hut. Toni had to close his left eye to prevent the piercing pain in his head from getting worse. People came in, and with them the smell of cigarette smoke, sweat and alcohol.

  Toni heard the chair being pulled over the wooden floor and someone sitting down. Some kind of container was opened and things were placed on the tabletop. Things made of paper and plastic, and some of the resulting sounds left an impression of heaviness and metal in Toni´s mind.

  Carefully blinking, he gradually opened his working eye bit by bit. The dark-skinned man on the chair behind the table was massive and muscular. He wore a beret on his head, the red of which had already faded. To the right and left of the door stood two guards with Russian assault rifles and pistols on their belts. They were all Africans and Toni couldn't remember seeing them before. Toni's throat escaped a loud, pitiful, ruffling breath. He hadn't noticed at all that he had held his breath when they came in. The brawny black man with the beret looked up from the papers he had studied.

  "Ah, Brother Raphael, you're awake! How gratifying that the side effect of the drug is slowly diminishing. Unfortunately, I don't have much time for you. Business, you understand? You would be doing me - and yourself of course - a very great favor if we did not have to prolong this matter unnecessarily."

  From awake, intelligent eyes, the man threw a long look at Toni. Then he followed it up:

  "Did you understand what I said, Brother Raphael?"

  Toni was still so busy analyzing the new situation and trying to understand what it meant to him that he did not react. Where was he? Why was he here? What kind of side effect, and what was that all about?

  The man waited a moment, then he went on.

  "You don't really want to be the ten thousandth Christian martyr, do you? You see, we're way past that point now. Doesn't suit you. We sent someone to your school and to your cabin. We have all your records. Even your letters from the Vatican. I must say, you're a strange preacher. We already know quite a lot, and every day we learn more about you. We've collected a few pieces of information. Even have concrete evidence and witnesses."

  Toni began to look around involuntarily.

  "Of course not here in this hut. But we do own more of these places, you can be sure of that. In any case, we already know almost everything about you. What we don't know is who exactly you're working for. And by that I don't mean your order, Brother Raphael."

  Every time the man with his heavily accented English pronounced the word 'brother', he stressed it as if it were a severe insult.

  "My organization, or my army, if you prefer, doesn't like it very much when white people come here to enrich themselves by exploiting our country. They've done that long and hard enough.
Our so-called government, of course, sees those things a little differently, but that is a problem that we will soon have under control. In addition, not even this corrupt bunch of weaklings would be particularly pleased with the operation you've conducted here. What grows and prospers here belongs to my people! I will not tolerate strangers behaving as if they still were the masters and we were the slaves. Do you understand, Brother Raphael?"

  Toni was still trying to get his barely working mind to put the new information together with the old images already flashing around in his head into something that made sense. Again, he didn't respond.

  "I asked you if you understood," the man with the beret asked again.

  Finally Toni managed to nod.

  My organization, he said.

  My army, he said.

  That, and everything else he had said - all of a sudden Toni knew who the strong black man before him was. Aksulu Mobanta, a former Merkanto army general who had turned his back on the government and was now waging guerrilla war against it.

  Apart from occasional attacks and massacres, however, his movement had never produced anything worth mentioning. In the last five years, it had become quiet. Otherwise, Toni´s superiors would never have sent him here with someone like Herod to do missionary work. It was generally assumed that the CIA or some other Western secret service had provided peace and quiet. Either by bribery or murder. The West wanted the oil, the gold and the diamonds, and had certainly acted in agreement with the official authorities of the country. That's what people generally thought they knew.

  Well. Apparently that assumption was wrong.

  Mobanta's voice now sounded impatient when he said:

  "I didn't hear anything, Brother Raphael. Say you understand!"

  "Yes. Yes, I understand." Toni croaked more than he spoke. It hurt his throat, and his voice, accustomed to preaching, yet sounded weak and pitiful. He got angry about it.