C13 Christmas insanity

Nadja was sitting at the desk inside the paramedic’s container and was glad that she had finally found somebody. A living, breathing human being she could talk to and who did not simply want to kill and eat her.

She had always been a talkative person and she needed the constant interaction with other people like others needed the air for breathing. If stranded on an isolated island all by herself, she would go crazy after a short period of time, talking endlessly to herself, and finally, if this did not yield any results, she would put an end to it.

Some would call that crazy for sure, but that was just the way she was. When the dilemma had started she was on the autobahn on her way to Leipzig in her orange Skoda, after she had spent the night in Berlin with friends, partying hard all night long. She had partied like there would be no tomorrow, with everything that goes along with it.

And by that she did not only mean drinking alcohol by the liter out of clear bottles. And now this stupid thought had become the harsh reality. There was no tomorrow and the parties were history now.

She grew up in a hick town near Warsaw without permanent electricity and no internet. She came to Berlin nearly a year ago on a scholarship. And because it had been Christmas again she had been caught up by the catastrophe in the middle of a traffic jam on the autobahn.

She had only just managed to escape from amidst one of the wild crowds of people and had fled into the woods, where just a little later she had been grabbed by the Bundeswehr and brought into this camp where she was penned up with random strangers whose stories all somehow had sounded alike. Unprepared and out of the blue it had hit the people. Markus could only nod in sympathy as the Polish woman told him about the examinations which she had to endure.

Then the attack of the insane mob had followed. A fierce fight for this base had erupted in which the soldiers out of inexperience or scruples had fallen back fast. Nadja and the old man had been inside the examination container at that time. They had been pushed hastily to the back area – just exactly where Markus had found her – and they had locked the door.

Suddenly she had been sitting in the dark and was only able to judge by the piercing screams, interspersed with gun fire, what was happening outside. Petrified she had sat in a corner, crying her soul out of her body, her hands covering her face.

That was how the first hours had gone by inside her prison. The gunfire lessened, but the screams of the insane grew louder and louder until it peaked into a hurricane made of raspy voices in which the desperate screams for help by the soldiers drowned. She had hid under the operation table, the one the furthest away from the door. She had crawled under a thick wool blanket and had covered her ears with her fingers.

She had made herself tiny and pulled her legs close to her body, the way she had always done it when she was a child and her father was about to punish her for something trivial and she had locked herself in her in room. It had taken a long time for the rampaging and roaring to calm down and to finally get lost completely in the distance.

Apparently the horrible mob had moved on. Nadja could not remember exactly for how long she had remained in that position, shaking and actually already done with her life – or when she had found the courage to open her eyes and to remove her hands from her ears.

That was also when she noticed that the old man had died, just like that. He was lying in a bent position with his hands pressed against his heart, his eyes closed, looking like he was sleeping. But he had been cold and stiff already and he had emptied the content of his bowels into his corduroy pants, which made her vomit once more.

Most of all she could not stand the strange silence which had been surrounding her then after all the rampage, clawing into her spirit with icy fingers. It took forever before she had been brave enough to sneak to the door and to find out that it was locked. After she had realized that there was no escape from this prison, she crawled back into corner and prepared herself to die.