SNAFU: Wolves at the Door

By the time he ripped the dagger out of the corpse, the second frenzied wolf snatched his hand with its jaws and he dropped the dagger with a scream of pain and frustration.

Holding his burned and wounded hand, Giovanni backed up against the rocky slope, knowing the nearest partisans watched helplessly a few meters away, their guns useless and their heads still pinned down by the sniper fire from above. The wolf’s jaws trailed bloody drool as it approached, its eyes staring intensely at this new enemy. Its scrabbling paws avoided the toxic dagger, but its body prevented Giovanni from retrieving it.

Before he knew what he was doing, Giovanni felt the rage take him.

He had secretly learned a little about his new condition in recent days, but he barely understood how the beast inside his bloodstream could take over.

He tried desperately to reverse the feeling, but he felt the changes inside his body and the terrible itch of his fur suddenly sprouting along his arms and back, and then—

—then he was Over-over-Over, lost inside the instincts and defensive rage of the Beast he barely understood.

The last his human ears heard was the shouting of his partisan companions, horrified by what they saw: one of their own now taking the form of the wolf – the dreaded enemy.

His ruined clothes dropped beneath him as his wolf’s body took the enemy wolf by surprise.

Jaws snapping at each other, the two werewolves closed and fought, biting and retreating, their claws slashing.

Growling, shrieking, they attacked and feinted, bit and retreated, rolling over and over, the advantage constantly switching.

Lead bullets struck them both, but did no damage. Their fangs drew blood from wounds that hurt excruciatingly, but which began healing and closing up almost immediately.

Suddenly the beast that had been Giovanni was backed up against the hillside, his paws losing their purchase on the rocky path, and the other wolf seemed about to go in for the kill.

But instead the German regained his human form and, while Giovanni tried to make sense of it, reached down and snatched up the dagger and its scabbard. Naked, he sheathed the dagger and inserted it into his mouth, then – before Giovanni could act – returned to his wolf form and bounded away down the hill and around the curve.

The wolf that had been Giovanni regained its footing and scrambled down the hill, human screams following him until he was gone.

The other wolf had too much an advantage, and even though Giovanni had the other’s scent in his nostrils, he couldn’t see and was forced to run blindly. In his brain, where Giovanni and a terrible monster both jostled for control, all he could think was that he had lost one of the special daggers.

And that he could never go home, for now he was unmasked as one of the enemy. A monster.

I am banished.

11

They’d long since told him his father had died, but he knew they still whispered about him and his mother when they thought he was asleep.

His father was a hero. He was a monster.

He could never return.

Franco understood then that his father was still alive, but that he was dead to them. Because he had become a monster. He had become one of them.

There was no consolation in anyone’s eyes, and Franco felt the hate that begun to bloom against his mother and himself. As if they had helped his father fool the partisan brigade! As if Giovanni Lupo had intentionally put one over on them.

“We should have never allowed someone named Lupo to join us!” one shouted in a drunken rage. “Never again!”

There was muttered agreement.

Then they turned and stared at his mother. And at Franco.

Their days with the partisan brigade were numbered.

And early one morning, after the new year had come, he and his mother took their few belongings and stepped into the hidden staircase exit, the staring eyes of Corrado and the Jesuit Tranelli and the few remaining men and women of the brigade boring into their backs, refusing to stop them or send them off with a wish of luck or farewell.

And they had headed for his uncle’s farm in the hills, neither of them knowing whether the older man still lived. Their trek took two weeks of arduous climbing along narrow paths, always on the lookout for desperate German soldiers left behind to die.

At the end of 1944, the partisan resistance had risen up against the weakened German occupiers and formed provisional governments which sought and received foreign recognition as sovereign states, but the Germans and the remainder of the Italian forces still loyal to Mussolini were successful in quelling the rebellion and executing its leaders.

Now, all the disparate partisan units could do was await the Allies, whose painstaking advance had been mired by the vicious rear-guard action of suicide patrols who would fight to the last man, and elements of the Nazis’ Werwolf Division.

They didn’t know it wasn’t merely a code name.