SNAFU: Wolves at the Door

Because not far from the clearing away from which he stumbled, Giovanni found a child’s shoe, tattered and blood-stained. And memories of the previous night, horrible memories that he had buried to protect his sanity, flooded back in one irreversible rush.

He screamed, and he was certain he would never stop screaming.

He was able to loot someone’s abandoned clothes from the debris of a ruined building. Then he stumbled back to the shelter.

9

In the coming days, Corrado’s men met German patrols made up of humans less frequently, while their encounters with the supernatural members of the Werwolf Division increased. The Werwolf members had been left as a rear-guard, and while Hitler’s regular ground forces retreated through Northern Italy and met up with those retreating from Normandy, the monstrous soldiers took over the last-ditch duty of harassing the partisans who paved the way for the Allied forces that advanced from the south.

And during those days, Giovanni Lupo became Corrado’s best werewolf fighter. In his hand, the Vatican blade became a scythe that mowed down every wolf who dared attack him.

Father Tranelli noted that Giovanni seemed to have become feverish and reckless in his encounters with the monsters. “He is on a mission,” the old priest said to Corrado. “A holy mission, perhaps. But he may not see the end of this accursed war if he doesn’t watch himself. What of his wife and son?”

Franco grieved for his friend Pietro, but worry about his father seeped into his grief. And Maria Lupo wondered at her husband’s newfound obsession with killing werewolves. Although the few wives who remained with their men told her how heroic her Giovanni was, she wondered what had made him so dedicated to killing at the constant risk of his own life.

For his part, Giovanni grew silent and, despite his great love for his family, distant to the point of being morose.

Corrado often looked at him with some vague suspicion on the tip of his tongue.

The fighting intensified, and Giovanni found himself celebrated as the unit’s best and most skillful wolf-killer.

It was cold at night, so no one questioned why he wore gloves on patrol. Only one person noticed that he wore them in daytime, too.

Franco.

10

Corrado’s partisan brigade was pinned down by rifle fire from a crow’s nest of granite boulders above the sloping mountain path.

They’d been climbing, their guard lowered because the territory had been recently cleared of Germans. But the first rifle rounds brought down two good men and Corrado shouted at the rest of his column to seek cover as best they could. One side of the path dropped off, forming a deadly steep cliff. The other side afforded little cover.

While the partisans were kept down by the accurate gunfire, a pair of Nazi werewolves pounced on those in the rear.

The snarling of werewolves and the screams of men being slaughtered behind them were punctuated by rifle fire that kept the rest of the partisans pinned and helpless.

Giovanni started snaking back down the path, retrieving one of the daggers from under his coat. The other dagger was with a second patrol.

“Get down!” Corrado hissed. “You can’t take them on yourself!”

Giovanni ignored him. The brigade had run out of silver bullets days before, so the wolves would be able to work their way back up the path and butcher each partisan one by one, unless someone counterattacked. And the holy weapon was the only way to win a clash with the shapeshifters.

He scrambled down the rocky incline, past the huddled partisans, avoiding their eyes. In a minute he had reached the slight turn in the path they had recently traversed. The snarling continued, but the screaming was silenced – the men were surely dead.

The first of two werewolves materialized as if magically on the path just below him, its eyes widening with glee and gluttony at the sight of prey, but he was ready, the dagger held close to his body until he could smell the beast’s breath.

When the wolf’s muscular legs propelled it into an uphill lunge for his throat, Giovanni judged the timing perfectly, unsheathing the dagger just as the animal reached him, sidestepping it and throwing it off-balance long enough to drive the dagger’s point through its neck.

The wolf’s scream of tortured pain effectively hid Giovanni’s. His hand smoked where the silver scorched his skin and flesh, turning it black. The pain was excruciating, but he still managed to stab the wolf once in the heart as it collapsed at his feet, its wounds flaming and its blood boiling in the veins.

Giovanni whirled to face the second wolf, but this time he’d misjudged the angle of attack and the red-eyed demon knocked him painfully to his knees. He tried to bring the dagger around, but it was still buried in the dead wolf, which was flickering like a candle back and forth from monster to human.