Killer Cruise (Project 26 Book 11)

by Mark Woods

  “Yeah, I mean it’s not like you ever let your emotions ever cloud your judgement,” Roman muttered. “You see those two?”

  He indicated over towards the mother and daughter.

  “Notice anything off about them?”

  All three other wolves shook their head.

  “Less talking, more moving,” one of their guards interrupted rudely, pushing them towards another door that presumably also led below decks.

  Lukaas took one last look back at where the three women, including Charlotte, had all disappeared from sight.

  Lottie, he thought, still trying to communicate with her mentally through their shared bond. Go with them for now and I’ll come looking for you, I’ll find you…

  “No need to give you four blood tests,” the lead guard said, as they passed through the door and started descending several sets of stairs. “It’s painfully obvious what you lot are; you smell like wet dog, the lot of you.”

  He opened up another door in the bulkhead and as he and his two partners shoved them through into a long corridor, Lukaas turned towards the closest man and snarled.

  “Try it,” the guard said. “Go on – don’t even think about it, just do it. Make my day, shithead.”

  He lifted his weapon so all of them could see it clearly, even as his fellow guards all cocked their weapons as well, at the same time, indicating just how much of a tightly knit unit they were, obviously used to working together as a team.

  The sound echoed around the small corridor they were in.

  “Silver bullets, arsehole. Just think about transforming and we have orders to take you out. You may be important for research purposes, but make no bones about it, none of you, not a single one of you, are indispensable,” the guard told him, looking directly at Lukaas and singling him out as what he thought was the leader.

  “Silver doesn’t kill me, arsehole,” Lukaas bit back before he could think to stop himself. “It just pisses me off…”

  “How about a knife to the guts?” One of the other guards asked him, as Lukaas felt something sharp prodding against his belly.

  “If I open you up and spill your insides out, let them spill all over the floor, you think you can recover from that, mother-fucker? Well, do you?”

  Lukaas didn’t answer him.

  “That’s what I thought,” the guard said, a smug smile upon his face.

  Lukaas looked at him.

  You’re going to die first, he thought.

  Suddenly, from out of nowhere, the sound of klaxons and sirens started sounding.

  The guards all started looking panicky as the words, “Code Red, Code Red,” could be heard, coming through on the walkie-talkies they all carried.

  “Shit,” one of them said, the lead guard Lukaas thought. “You know what that means – we have a breach! Some fucker’s managed to escape!”

  Lukaas and his brothers seized the opportunity they had been given.

  Before any of the guards could react, the wolf-brothers transformed – splitting their clothes - and quickly turned on the soldiers and began ripping their captors to shreds.

  “Come on! Let’s move it!” Toneye shouted over the alarms. “I don’t know what they’re doing here, on this ship, and I don’t know what’s going on but I know that I don’t like it! Let’s get back to the lifeboats again and get the fuck out of here!”

  “Fuck that! You three go - I’m going after Lottie,” Lukaas shouted back, raising his voice so he too could be heard over the sirens.

  Before any of his brothers could stop him, Lukaas began sprinting down the corridor, headed deeper into the ship.

  “But you don’t even know where she was being taken,” Toneye shouted after him, watching his back disappear up the corridor.

  “She has my mark on her – I can track her. I can find her,” Lukaas yelled back.

  Toneye and Scott just stood there for a minute, looking at Roman and waiting for him to tell them what to do.

  “Fuck it!” the older wolf said finally. “Come on, let’s go get after the stupid bastard! He’s our wolf-brother, we can’t just fucking abandon him. Otherwise the stupid cunt will only end up getting himself killed, and all over a stupid piece of tail!”

  The other three wolves set off in hot pursuit before Lukaas could turn the corner and disappear out of sight.

  Even though they were all officially Ronin – without pack - they were still family, still Wolf-brothers. They were still a pack, of sorts, and the pack always stayed together; always looked out for one another…

  Always…

  No matter what…

  As they ran, through the ship, following Lukaas, the klaxons and alarms continued to sound…

  I just hope we don’t live to regret this, Roman thought…

  ***

  Wilfred, meanwhile, was likewise being escorted below decks – accompanied by two guards, along with his old brother-in-arms, Rogers; the man with whom he had fought alongside and who had helped save him from The War-Wolves back during the war.

  “Nice prosthetic hand,” Rogers said, as the four of them descended down into the depths of the ship. “First time I’ve seen it – though of course, I’d heard rumours - and such fine workmanship as well. Your fellow Hunters must think very highly of you to gift you with it.”

  “I’d hardly call it a gift,” Wilfred replied. “I think you’ll find I’ve paid my dues for this hand a score of times or more at least by now, doing my employer’s dirty work. By being their assassin, their little hitman-for-hire. But then, if you’ve heard of my reputation, you’ll already know all that, won’t you?”

  And that was just about as far as that conversation went.

  “Where are you taking me?” Wilfred asked eventually, when he realised no-one else was going to say anything.

  “Why, to give you some answers, of course,” Rogers said. “That’s what you wanted after all, isn’t it?”

  The rest of the trip was spent in complete silence.

  Eventually, after what felt like several minutes or more, the small group finally reached their destination, and Rogers opened up a door in the bulkhead that appeared to lead into some kind of scientific laboratory.

  “Here we are,” Rogers said. “Wilfred, my old friend, please allow me introduce you to the man responsible for everything we’re trying to achieve here.

  “Wilfred Bromley, meet Doctor Mengele.”

  “Josef Mengele,” Wilfred said, a little shocked. “Your reputation precedes you. I had heard you were dead - though there were rumours that you might somehow have managed to escape justice and fled to Argentina with several of your brethren. Please forgive me if I don’t shake your hand…”

  He looked at the man standing before him with something akin to disgust.

  “Actually,” the man said, “I’ll think you’ll find you are mistaken. My name is not Josef Mengele. It’s Adalbert; Adalbert Mengele.

  “Josef is my twin brother…”

  Five

  “I must confess,” Wilfred said, looking the man standing in front of him up and down. He was, Wilfred thought, the very spitting image of the photos he had seen of Josef Mengele, taken both before and during the war. “I wasn’t even aware Josef Mengele had a twin brother.”

  “Very few people are,” the man in front of him said, “and to be fair, that is the way I have tried to keep it. The less people who are aware of my existence, the less chance there is of my becoming a hunted man like my brother. My actual given name is Wolff, Doctor Adalbert Edvard Wolff, but I adopted my brother’s surname not long after I first started working with him.”

  “You worked with ‘The Angel of Death’?” Wilfred asked, doing his best to try and fight the distaste he felt at even contemplating such a thing. “You were there at Auschwitz?”

  “No, not at Auschwitz, no,” Adalbert Mengele said. “But I did work at several other concentration camps, conducting very similar research – including one you may be familiar with, the camp known as Helle Haus t
hat I believe The Allied Forces knew better by its English name, Bright House.

  “Josef’s parents lived in the small Bavarian village of Gunzberg. When they first decided they wanted to have children, they struggled to conceive. Josef’s mother was an angry woman and lay the blame fully for their failure on the doorstep of Josef’s father, Karl Mengele, an industrialist who owned a local factory.

  “Believing that his failure to produce a child reflected badly on him as a man, and that others might see it as a weakness, Josef’s father decided he had no other choice and made arrangements to procure a child through other means.

  “Somehow, I know not how, he came into contact with my mother and arranged with her to act as a surrogate for him and his wife and help deliver unto them a child to raise as their own. At some point, during the pregnancy, my mother discovered she was carrying twins, but at the time of their birth, she elected not to tell Josef’s father so she could keep one child back for her own.

  “After many hours of very troubled and difficult labour, my mother held to her part of the bargain and delivered my brother, Josef, into the arms of his future father. Me, she kept a closely guarded secret, and soon after moved away from the area to begin her life anew.

  “Josef’s parents, Karl and Walburga Mengele, elected never to tell their son he was not biologically theirs, and a year later produced another son – Karl Jnr – and then two years after that, another that they named Alois.

  “Josef never got on well with either of his siblings, and somehow seemed to sense that something was wrong. He became obsessed with the science of genetics and the idea that Karl and Walburga were not his biological parents, and refused to follow in his ‘father’s’ footsteps and take over working in the family factory, electing instead to pursue a career in the sciences.

  “Right from his early days as a scientist, Josef showed much promise, but all the time, could not quite seem to shake the feeling that something was wrong. Something was missing in his life, and that was why he did not feel complete – almost as if somehow he knew, knew, of my existence even though the two of us had never actually met, not even at our birth.

  “This probably goes a long way to explaining, I suppose, why in later years he went on to become so obsessed twins, but I digress...

  “My upbringing was vastly different to that of my brother, Josef.

  “Having broken all contact with our father, not long after the birth, our mother – our real mother – began to struggle. The money that our father had paid her for her silence did not last very long. We began to move around a lot, never staying in one place for more than weeks at a time, always travelling, until one day my mother fell in love with a doctor.

  He took pity on her, and in time, even agreed to raise me as his own.

  “But in the meantime, our mother came to regret giving up my brother.

  "Though she had been happy with the arrangement to begin with, she found she could no longer bear to live with herself for what she’d done by separating us and abandoning my brother to be brought up by another family - on the understanding that she would have no further contact with him and never see him again. Not long after she met my step-father and we settled down, she seemed to forget all about me. She began neglecting me in favour of a twin that I had never known, and became obsessed with finding him and tracking my long lost brother down - and in the end, when she failed to find him, ended up instead drinking herself to death.

  “My new father, meanwhile, saw how intelligent I was, recognised my potential and so, because of that, actively encouraged me to pursue an education. Like Josef, though I did not know it at the time, I was drawn to the sciences so that, in many ways, my own life soon began to echo that of my twin brother – even though at that point, we had never met. At some point, I don’t know how – he never spoke of it – Josef eventually somehow learnt of my existence and pulled me into his world. Germany was going through a period of much uncertainty at that time, and my brother, Josef, came to me, introduced himself to me, and helped me to find a place in this new and unsettled Germany we now found ourselves in.

  “He introduced me to a man who later, would go on to become known as The Fuhrer, putting in a good word for me with the Nazi party, and under our new leader’s watchful eye, together we worked hard to help bring him to power.

  “When Germany went to war, a few years later, The Fuhrer kept us by his side.

  “He wanted us to help build him a master race that could assist him in taking over the world, help strengthen the Reich, and bring him to certain victory – but alas, as you well know, as things turned out, all that was just not meant to be.

  “Whilst Josef was sent to work at Auschwitz, I was given my own project and experiments to work on at Helle Haus – rather ironic really, given that the English translation of Helle Hause is Bright House and my name, Adalbert, supposedly means ‘noble’ and ‘bright’.”

  “You….” Wilfred said, suddenly realising something and finally putting two and two together. “It was you…you that was responsible for creating The War-Wolves…”

  “Hitler wanted the two of us to help him build an army, one much stronger than the one he had already,” Adalbert said, continuing his story and now confirming all Wilfred’s suspicions. “Josef’s task was to help create an army of Super-humans who were impervious to damage and who could not be killed, but my task, my task was much harder. Herr Hitler wanted me to create a whole new species of preternatural creatures, and turn them into weapons we could use against The Allies to ensure certain victory. I began to produce quite viable results too – The War-Wolves, as they would later become known, were amongst one of my greatest and most remarkable achievements – but in the end, as it turned out, it was all for naught.

  “Despite the best efforts of myself and my twin brother, The Allied Forces began to gain the upper hand and just like that, the war was all but over.

  “Sensing inevitable failure, Hitler in desperation ordered me and my brother, Josef, to shut down our experiments and destroy all our research so that it could not fall into enemy hands, and return back to him in Berlin – but it was already far too late. Before I knew it, Hitler was dead, my brother had fled, and the war was well and truly over.

  “I barely had time to flee myself with my research, before your Allied forces stormed the gates at Helle Haus with their armies of stone.

  “Though you will never read about it in any history books, the Allies came in that day and slaughtered every last man, woman and child with men they had fashioned out of clay, and stone, and mud. Not a single person was left alive – and many of the bodies were found later crushed to death, or buried beneath mounds of stone or rubble, almost as if they had been buried alive.”

  “That never happened,” Wilfred said, shaking his head. “Men of clay, and mud, and stone? I don’t believe you. And even if The Allies did send in a team to destroy your research, they were sent out there to liberate the death camps that they found – not kill everyone, every last man, woman and child inside.”

  “I was there,” Adalbert Mengele insisted. “I saw it with my own two eyes, and I know what I saw…

  “Thankfully, I had been able to escape before The Allies invaded or else I would not be still here now to tell this tale, but I was close by and I saw what happened. I saw it all, and I know what I saw.

  “All the time during my escape, I thought that that was it – that I would be caught by the Allies at any moment and killed, executed for my crimes, but fortunately when the Allied Forces did eventually catch up with me, something else happened.

  “They offered me a reprieve instead.

  “I was approached by someone who knew of my research, and told that they wanted me to continue my experiments, in secret, but working for them now instead of my former masters. They told me that although the war I had previously been fighting was now over, now there was a new war to fight – a fight to help protect all Humanity from extinction.

  “What choice did
I have? Of course I agreed…

  “And that’s how I ended up here, on-board this ship.”

  Wilfred turned to face Rogers.

  “And you’re okay with that?” he asked angrily. “You’re okay with this sick bastard just continuing his research and picking up exactly where he left off - even after his so-called ‘Wolves’ that he helped to create back then slaughtered all of our men? Would have killed us too, given half a chance. Just what the actual fuck are you up to here, on-board this ship, that is so important that you could even consider working alongside this fucking arsehole?”

  “It’s exactly like Herr Doktor says,” Rogers told him. “We’re helping him to continue his research. He’s doing for us, the same thing he was doing for Hitler – helping us to build an army.

  “He’s right, you know. There’s a war coming – a big one, a terrible one…and the fate of all Humanity is at stake.

  “But you know this, you’re a Hunter.

  “The war you once knew, the same war we once fought in together, may be over, but now all of us here are preparing for a new war – a war against the Lycanthrope, the Vampyre, and all the other preternatural creatures out there that see us as no more than prey.”

  “You’re using your Doctor Moreau here to create more War-Wolves,” Wilfred said, the penny finally dropping as the knowledge of what was actually going on here finally clicked into place. “That’s what this ship is, right? One big, floating laboratory on which to conduct your evil experiments and help create a new army of War-Wolves…”

  “And what’s wrong with that?” Rogers asked him. “You have no idea what is coming, what’s just over the horizon, and what better way to fight the very same creatures that threaten to destroy us, that see us as the bottom of the food chain rather than where we should be – at the top – than to use our own version of their own kind against them?”

  “How is that any better than what the Nazi’s were doing?” Wilfred asked. “I take it that’s the real reason why you were taking everyone’s blood back up there on deck? So you can use those people you just helped rescue in your experiments? How can you possibly be a part of this? And how exactly do you even fit into all this anyway?”