(no subject)
Warsaw, Poland
1944
A shell whistled overhead, shrill and piercing and terrifying.
To a man, the entire unit ducked down, taking cover under anything they could find; trucks, or the rubble of buildings already collapsed. An explosion sounded off to the right, and then there was screaming, groaning, the trample of running feet.
Every German instinctively knew what was happening. They had been receiving reports from the Eastern front for weeks now, and the time had finally come. Crammed into cracks of buildings, stuffed among sandbags and fallen stone walls and mountains of the dead, they fired back indiscriminately at the advancing soldiers.
The Red Army was marching in.
Rip van Winkle had been fighting for three years, now. Rendered nearly deaf by the grenades and the bombs dropped practically daily on the Polish city, in the six months she'd been stationed here she had had a front row seat as Warsaw was razed to the ground.
They couldn't keep this up forever. Shifting from foot to foot in the ditch she had dug herself into, Rip centered her archaic flintlock musket on a tank two hundred meters ahead. Her head ached from the cacophony of the shrieks of the wounded and dying and the firing of guns all around her. Inside her well-worn boots, polluted water had seeped in, causing a bad case of trench foot and giving her no small amount of discomfort. Diseased, freezing, and covered in open sores, she and her unit were on their last legs.
To her left of her, a dirt-covered seasoned soldier was kneeling, firing shots from his StG44, screaming threats and cries of Bastards! Red bastards! at those he managed to knock down. Rip was trying her very best not to look to the right of her; she had done so only minutes before, and was met with the open-eyed vacant stare of the dead, a man with a bullet wound in his skull, blood dripping down both sides of his nose and pinkish-grey brain matter poking out from the hole in his forehead. The ground behind him was wet, where she had briefly thrown up before going back to shooting.
Many a man had made fun of Rip for using such a painfully outdated weapon; they swore she couldn't hit anything with such a huge margin of error as 200-year-old muskets had, swore that she would be dead in the time it took her to reload from her first shot. But six months later, she was still alive, and no one was laughing now.
Of course, most of them were dead.
Suddenly, someone slammed harshly into her shoulder, knocking her down and interrupting her shot. Startled, Rip looked up to stare at her retreating lieutenant, as well as a long line of soldiers dragging themselves and their wounded, through the narrow passageway as quickly as they could. Machine gun fire peppered the air and they all simultaneously ducked down; a few stray bullets caught one unlucky man, who slumped over and did not get up again.
Straining, Rip grabbed hold of the arm of a retreating soldier, climbing to her feet and keeping hunched over.
"What's going on?" she spoke in rapid German. "Where are you going?"
"He's given the order to retreat!" shouted the officer over the sounds of further fire power, and pointed back behind him at the warehouse with the barred windows. "We're to fall back at once, and await further instructions!" He made to pull away, but Rip held tight onto his arm clinging to him, her eyes wide.
"There is no retreat!" she yelled back. Next to them, the soldier who had been next to Rip in the trench gave a wild, crazed scream, climbing from his cover, out into the open. He took out a pistol, still screaming at the approaching army, and shot himself in the head. Before he could fall, nine bullets from the enemy had entered and exited through him.
As the frantic lieutenant tried desperately to pull away from Rip's tight hold, she pressed another question to him.
"Have they got out?" she demanded. "Are they still in the building?"
The officer shook his head, professing he did not know, and with a final push, managed to violently shove Rip back away from him. As he took off running after the retreating unit, Rip fell back into the mud, her glasses knocked from her and lost in the confusion. Letting go of her musket, she pawed the ground in front of her, desperate to find them. Miraculously, her hands fell on another pair; someone else, most likely one of the dead lining the trench, had dropped a pair of wire frames amidst the debris and wreckage.
Deciding that limited vision was better than none at all, Rip placed the frames over her nose, snatched up her musket, and tore off in the opposite direction, towards the huge, looming, grey building. Soldiers of varying ranks met her coming the other way, and she was shoved this way and that, as they cried out to her, "Don't you understand? Retreat!", she ignored them. Rip pressed on, finally managing to step up from the ground and into the building, pulling open the heavy door and racing inside.
"Commander!" she screamed, in the dimly lit, abandoned corridors. "Doktor!" When no one met her cries, she stumbled, half delirious, through the hallways. Even in here there were bodies of the dead, stuffed to the corners and pressed along the wall; some German, some Russian, all with grotesque looks of pain and agony on their faces. These weren't the victims of war, though the Russians had fallen into their hands originally as POWs. They had died as casualties of the Doktor's administrations, failed experiments all. Some even bore the hint of elongated, sharpened teeth; others stared up at Rip with eyes the color of blood. None had lasted more than four hours after the procedure, and most of that time had been spent screaming, as their liquified organs streamed out of every orifice.
Shuddering, Rip managed to feel her way around the building, relying on instinct and memory to get her to the dining room. That was where she had last seen the men in charge of Operation #666, and that is where she hoped to find them.
Instead, when she rounded a corner, Rip found herself staring at something she had never expected to see.
A small, smartly-dressed little girl with long, black hair turned, and smiled at her. And her mouth was a row of fangs.
The German sniper hefted up the rifle, directing it at the girl's blurred frame, but she was halted in her attack: a sudden blow to her head from behind knocked her flat on her side.
Rip closed her eyes, and blacked out.
--------
When she awoke again, Rip felt sure she was dreaming.
Gone were the sounds of gunfire, the bombs and the screams and the dirt and the blood. Her eyes drifted to the fast-moving ground, and all she saw down there was a rush of green and white; fresh grass poking up through the melting snow. Her body was jostled, as the ground was uneven and rough. But it was morning, and it was peaceful; the sun, which hadn't appeared for two weeks, was now shining on the back of her head, making her black hair grow hot and frizzy.
She was being carried, but by what? Not a car or a tank, surely; she could see the ground in front of her, and if she wanted, could reach out and just barely touch the grass she was being sped along through. And it was far too quiet to be a motorcycle, so it must be a person...but no person could move this fast! Especially not when carrying another soldier.
Shifting only slightly so as not to dislodge her position, Rip's hand drifted down to feel what was underneath her. Instead of the leather and metal she expected of a terrain vehicle, her fingertips met with tense, elastic muscle and smooth, silky fur. It was some sort of animal, then, but a huge one, bigger than a horse. And there was fur beneath her fingertips, so what did that mean?
Opening her eyes fully, Rip leaned her head forward, observing what was carrying her. To her eternal shock, she was staring at the back and head of a gigantic white wolf.
Giving a startled scream, she jumped and fell off, hitting the ground hard and rolling to a stop. Her body ached with various sores all over, but it was nothing compared to the fear in her heart. A wolf! A wolf as big as a horse!
She made to move away, but the wolf had already noticed she'd fallen off. It turned, snorting, and pawed its way back over to her. Despite Rip's efforts to stand, she still felt dizzy from the combination of exhaustion, disease, and lack of food. It easily pinned her down, setting one large paw on her forehead and pushing her back. Trembling, Rip reached for her pistol at her side, only to discover to her terror that it was no longer there. In fact, none of her weapons were where she had left them.
Meanwhile, the wolf, it was...
Rip's eyes went very, very wide. There, right in front of her, the monstrous beast begun to change. It started to shrink into itself, transforming from four legs to two. Fur disappeared, falling off in massive clumps as the screeching and grinding of a skeleton rearranging itself drove her nearly to madness. The snout disappeared, as did the claws and tail, while white hair sprung from the top of the shapely human's head. In just under a minute it was all over, and the sniper was gazing, shocked beyond words, at the all-too-familiar presence of the silent Captain.
He was toned, muscular, tan, and naked, but seemed neither cold nor shy. Instead, he reached down, offering a hand up to Rip. Warily, still half-believing she was in the middle of a dream, Rip grasped hold of the Captain's hand and pulled herself up with his help.
For the first time, she noticed they were standing in a wide open field, with not a farmhouse nor a fence nor any scrap of life to be seen for miles. In the distance, Rip recognized the familiar outline of the German alps, but from an entirely new direction. She realized then that they must have traveled southwest, further than she could have possibly imagined. So that would mean in front of them must be the Austrian border.
Meanwhile, the Captain had left Rip to her own devices, wandering to a nearby stream and crouching down. On all fours, he kneeled, licking water from the stream as if he were a dog.
"You are a werewolf." Rip spoke at last, finally finding courage enough to follow him over. Beside him, she reached down with cupped hands, drawing water and drinking from her palms. The Captain paused, glanced over to give the sniper a meaningful look, then returned to quenching his thirst.
"I suppose," she said again, after a long silence, "we are falling to the back-up plan."
Another pause, and another look. But then, Rip would be far more surprised if the mute Captain actually did give any sort of confirmation whatsoever. She would just have to assume she was correct.
They drank together in silence until both were done, and Rip stood up. Beside her, the Captain was transforming again, and this time she looked away. Her stomach felt queasy every time she saw flesh bend, tear, and break, even though he never made a grimace or grunt of pain. Even so, she still winced as the grinding of bones against bones was heard behind her.
When she looked back again, the white wolf was kneeling down, waiting for her to climb back on. This she did, with only the slightest hesitation. The Doktor had said once that Rip would see things that would seem unbelievable, impossible. But for now, all she could feel was overwhelming gratitude that this beast, this man....whatever he was, had rescued her from the pits of hell.
As the ground beneath them began to blur again from the rapid speed at which they were traveling, Rip paused to spare a single glance over her shoulder at the retreating mountainside.
It would be the last time she would ever see Germany again.