Banshee

Banshee:

Fifteen minutes ago the sedatives were withdrawn.

She, exhausted on the stretcher, took that needle inside her arm and slowly extracted it as the blood fell onto the floor. It hurt and she screamed, it was the broken cry of who is not able to utter a word.

–Remember, we have a deal.

Doctor Asperger smiled with satisfaction when he pushed the last key on that typewriter he had in his studio, the screen flickered while the document was printed. Then he signed the paper with his quill, letting the smoke slipping away. His muffled steps on the carpet got him closer to that large window framed with red velvet curtains. Through the window he could see a faraway zeppelin, riding past a splendid sky. It was rare for those contraptions to come remotely near the camps, the last thing those wealthy people wished to see while enjoying their cocktails, created contacts and closed contracts, were the wretched barracks of the complex, the trains that occasionally brought more workforce and the ash. Any worker knew that work didn’t make you free, but the camp prisoners have forgotten what the meaning of those words was whereby one could build hope.

He put a cigarette close to his mouth, grabbed a lighter, and inhaled to light it. Then he signed the paper with his quill, letting the smoke slip away. “A pity”, he thought, “they are good material”. To be honest, he struggle to understand why the Directory didn’t use all those children: they weren’t going to do better in that orphanage at any rate. Perhaps it was some kind of divine mercy he couldn’t fathom: in his opinion the analyses weren’t conclusive and it would have been more desirable, therefore, taking advantage of all they had.

It wasn’t long ago that the private Zoller had been moved to the Experimentations Pavilion. Most of the patients seemed to have some sort of cognitive delay and they couldn’t or they didn’t wanted to speak, so it was a very calm place, if any, he listened some noises from time to time. Fortunately those times of the Eastern Guerrillas have come to an end and the youth hadn’t to finish wars the elders commenced.

When he turned round a corner he saw that nurse with a girl in her arms.

–Excuse me, mistress… Richter? –he blocked her way, showing a smile so perfect and amiable that it looked obviously coercive–. Do not worry, I don’t want to bother you, I only wanted to know if you could provide me with the patient’s transfer permit, either way, you will have to show them at reception… –he had a worried expression when he looked at the girl–. Is that the patient number eight? She needs a special authorisation…

Guard Rieb considered himself a survivor, that’s why when he heard a shriek so high that reverberated metallic and inhumane on the walls, he diced to do nothing with the outmost professionalism. He stood up looking at the surveillance screens as a piston went up and down inside that mechanism that made them work: on those images he saw the adjoining corridor and on that corridor he saw private Zoller, however, on private Zoller he couldn’t see private Zoller’s head and that made him draw some conclusions.

Therefore he heavily leaned back on his chair, turning the page of a pulp magazine.

When a couple of minutes passed by, he looked at those spinning gears under his clock glass and action the lever to sound the alarm.

Yes, he was a survivor.

The alarm made a deafening loud noise and the patient Zlata Rosenbaum wasn’t particularly fond of Mia Richter carrying her at her back, she didn’t like physical contact nor that hurried runaway which, apparently, she was taking part of.

Of course she had agreed to this, Richter was in need of a certain strange poetry as a vengeance and regarding herself, she wanted to escape from there.

 A car should take them away in case everything went all right.

But that camp wasn’t the only prison Zlata was: since she rarely could control her body, she felt like a spectator trapped in her own mind, not being able to interact with whatever happened around her. She barely could point at thing or use that keyboard to convey her messages, yet Mia had been at her side, teaching her how to communicate.

Mia even bought her a device that she could wear on her wrist with a small keyboard, a bit more difficult to use, a shining screen and a silver and mahogany lid to avoid rainwater. Mia always took care of her and gave her a gift no one else had given to her: she treated her like a human being. Mia believed she was intelligent and thought that the success of the Banshee project may be used as well to improve Zlata’s bodily reactions to her own brain commands.

Zlata knew Mia had been studying the doctors’ books in order to help her and Mia knew that contravening this sub-project guidelines, linked to the Aktion T4 programme, could put her in danger and she always had put Zlata before her, nonetheless.

But this time she had asked for something in return and Zlata couldn’t stop thinking of the only thing she could force her body to do one hundred percent of the time: that scream, that spectral shriek impacting against men who asked too many questions. She couldn’t stop seeing those corpses covered in blood every time she closed her eyes.

But everything was better than the training sessions.

Trainings have involved dogs, dismembered, who didn’t even feel pain but howled out of fear, and their remains piled up on a heap aside the next terrified dog shivering or trying desperately to escape before her. Perhaps because of that a piece of her soul had died. Recalling the dogs was much worse than thinking of these guards. She wanted to cry but she was trapped and her body didn’t let her to.

And it happened what always happened when she had those flashbacks, when she came back to that devastating week. Her fury has been there, lurking in her memories, blending in her sadness, feeding on fear, growing and spitting its hatred until it emerged free in her awareness.

It was always the same, it happened from one second to another.

She wasn’t able to feel the anger until it turned into the whole world.

Suddenly that rage was there and took over.

Suddenly that rage was herself,

At least now she could cry.

Mia knew what she must do: letting Zlata some room, being with her. Zlata hit her and kicked her and cried as the nurse tried to protect both of them. Fortunately, she had managed to get her inside a small cabinet, inside the administrative building where he was to be found.

Ironically the blasting alarm kept them concealed.

Mia remember how they have tortured Zlata during that week and how she could intercede on her behalf in order to stop that practice by doing things she didn’t want to think of.

She knew it wasn’t intelligent let anger control you, but she had kept it inside as she had a plan and she was going to need it at the right time.

For the time being they had an advantage, most of the guards weren’t soldiers and, even when many of them didn’t have to patrol near the Experimentations Pavilion, they had heard rumours enough to run over there at a remarkable slow pace, cultivated from several years of experience in not being dead.

Doctor Asperger had a revelation.

That alarm noises got him out of his reading and as he came back to the real world gave birth to that thought.

He just realised that the opposite to love wasn’t hatred but fear. It was a conceptualisation error quite easy to understand: from the “what we desire for the other person” point of view, happiness or unhappiness, a thriving life or a miserable one, were attributed either to love or hatred. However if we changed the vanishing point, if we reflected about our own feelings, love and fear where perfect antagonists: the former made one feel safe and at home, free in his own world, the latter made one feel unsafe and jailed inside the prison of one’s own mind.

Perhaps jealousy was seen as a sign of love despite that it was a form of fear, perhaps those children who wore his syndrome as a star somehow were free anywhere.

Even at the orphanage, he thought, because a twisted mind could get to a flawed conclusion from the most truthful premise.

He tapped his elegant tobacco pack and took a cigarette he was not going to enjoy.

His cabinet door burst open.

Richter the nurse was grabbing the patient number eight’s hand.

–What is this nonsense?! Why are you storming in my study like that?! –he started yelling.

But Mia Richter answered in a whisper and he strained to hear her. As far as she knew, if you spoke that way to whoever was screaming at you, they stopped doing it to listen.

–You sent my son to the orphanage Am Spiegelgrund –she said coldly. She had a gun on her other hand that she was trying to conceal. Come to think of it, revenge wasn’t something intelligent to do with her anger.

–Oh, I understand now –he replied, unaware of the weapon, with that patronizing tone of a man who knew he had a limited group of equals among which his unplanned conversational partner couldn’t be counted–. Do you believe that since I signed up those documents, therefore I gave the orders myself? –a snort drifted in his arrogance–. Women are weak and irrational creat…

His head exploded before the Banshee scream.

–Thanks for helping me –Mia told Zlata, hesitantly–. Don’t worry, I’ll keep up my end of the deal: we’ll get out of here.

None of them felt better and probably they were worse human beings by now. Yet there was something both of them loathed about good men not saying a word about what bad men did.

Bansheepor Marta Roussel Perla se distribuye bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0 Internacional.
Basada en una obra en https://parafernaliablablabla.blogspot.com/.