He stared at the carnage he had wrought.
More soldiers were crawling from the truck’s sideways cab, one reaching for a sidearm. Yet another emerged from the covered rear, struggling to bring a Mauser rifle to bear.
Giovanni closed his eyes, waiting for the feel of the slugs tearing out his chest.
Instead, gunfire erupted all around him.
The Germans’ bodies fell twitching to the gore-slick road. Masked gunmen, sprinting from the cover of dark doorways and narrow lanes, ran to the wounded or dead Germans and shot them repeatedly in the head. Several motioned other civilian men from the rear of the truck, one of whom had been wounded in the gunfire and had to be carried. When the gunmen had made sure all the German soldiers were dead, they stripped the bodies of weapons and ammunition.
A gangly young man in a rakish beret walked up to Giovanni, who stood still stunned by what he had done, grasped his hand and pumped it enthusiastically.
“Grazie, signore. Lei e` un eroe!”
You are a hero!
“No!” Giovanni spat at him, breaking into a racking cough as the dust swirled around them. “No,” he repeated softly in disgust at what he had done.
“Si, certamente.” The young man was clearly in command of the rag-tag group of gunmen. He wore a tweed coat crossed by bandoliers – shotgun shells – and in his hands he held a fine Beretta hunting shotgun. He had a German Luger pistol holstered on his hip. He smiled broadly under a thin moustache. “I am Corrado Garzanti, field commander of the local brigade.”
“Partigiani?” Partisans?
“Of course.” He gestured at his men. “We were about to ambush the collection patrol when you took matters into your own hands, eh? Very nicely done.” He pointed at the bleeding bodies.
“How? How did you know? To be here, right now?”
Corrado waved the question away. “We have sources. People who listen and report. We expected them. We did not expect you, however.”
Giovanni’s head spun a little and he stumbled sideways, almost losing his footing. Ragged bursts of gunfire and screams came from farther down the street and he whirled, apprehensive.
“It’s just my men taking care of the command car. Those dirty German bastards are never going home.” Corrado reached out and steadied Giovanni before he could collapse.
“I think you had better come with us. It won’t be safe here very soon. We survived the bombing, but the bastards will be out looking for revenge. Damned bad idea to be out on the street then.” He waved at one of his men. “Dario, come here. I want you to escort our hero home to pack his things.”
“No, no, it’s not necessary.”
“Oh, it is. If they find you, they will hang you with metal wire from a lamppost. It’s what they’re doing these days. Among other things. Come with us. We have a safe haven. It’s not a palace, but it’s a good home. And they don’t know where it is.”
“No, you don’t understand, I have a wife and a child. I have a family! I can’t go away with you. What happens to them?” Giovanni swayed and the partisan leader steadied him again.
“Clearly, you cannot just go home. Va bene, we take you there and you take your family with you. We have enough space. Most of us have lost our families, but there are a few.”
“Corrado,” said Dario, pointing at his watch. “It’s almost time for the lupi.”
“I know—”
The air raid siren ground to life again, its insistent wail gathering strength as the rumbling of invisible aircraft reached them.
“Arrivano ancora!” Corrado shouted. Second wave! His men knew what to do. And suddenly Corrado’s fist jabbed out and caught Giovanni’s jaw, snapping his head back and dropping him like a broken doll.
“You and you,” Corrado pointed at the strapping Dario and another man. “Take him between you. He’s coming to the sanctuary. He has no choice now.”
Giovanni moaned as hands grabbed him.
Maria.
He lost the light at the same moment the first string of bombs stitched their way toward the harbor, taking down a block of tenements and shops in a cluster of explosions, jetting gas fires, and a spreading cloud of dust and debris.
Giovanni welcomed the darkness.
2
He opened his eyes and immediately closed them. His vision was a blur of indistinct shapes – darkness broken only by flickering blobs of light. A church? He smelled candles. He tried to move his head and stopped when it seemed his jaw would break.
Somebody had hit him. There had been an air raid. There were guns and a shooting.
Santa Maria, he thought, I was doing the shooting.
Bit by bit the memory came nosing back and he started to put the pieces together. He realized he was shivering.
Where was he?
His moan brought one of the blobs suddenly closer. A cool touch on his forehead triggered memories and thoughts, but blinking brought forth only tears and pain.
“Sono io, Giovanni,” a calm but shaky voice spoke in his ear. “Sono io. Stai tranquillo.”
Maria! Thank God!
His hand gripped hers and brought it to his chest. He still couldn’t see very well, but the simple gesture slowed his heart from its onrushing pace and brought the tranquility she’d wished upon him. He started to rise but she pushed him back firmly.
“No, you might be hurt. And we have to stay silent.”
“What?”
“Shhhhhh.” Her hand caressed his face. “Trust me.”
He noticed movement behind her, more blurs making jagged little gestures. He smelled sweat and bodies. “What– Where are we? Where is–?”
Suddenly he was seized by the thought of what he hadn’t heard or yet felt. His son.
“Where is Franco?” he groaned, his voice rough.
“I don’t know,” she said, crying. “He was–”
Somebody stepped closer and whispered in a clipped voice, “Be silent or you’ll get us all killed!”
Giovanni felt Maria’s hand caress his face and softly cover his lips. He kissed her cool skin, but his mind reeled. His son wasn’t here, wherever here was. Maria was here, and these others, but not Franco.
His memory slotted into place and he remembered the firefight in the street. How he had ended up with a machine gun, and turned it on the hated German.
The bombing raid. The partisans.
Corrado Garzanti was the rogue’s name.
Corrado had hit him.
The bastard.
Giovanni’s legs trembled as he tried to stand. He reached for Maria.
Sounds – crashing, smashing sounds – from above and nearby reached them and his heart started to race again.
Corrado materialized beside him – a blob with glasses pinching his nose. “Listen to me,” he hissed into Giovanni’s ear, “they’re close to finding one of our secret entrances, and if they do we are all fucked in the ass. You understand? We have to slip out and fight them, kill them all before they can report. Are you up to it?”
“Up to it?”
Killing people?
Who was this idiot, asking him to kill…
Corrado’s band of partisans was gathering just behind, preparing by checking guns and knives, facing a wall that until now Giovanni had thought solid. But there was a vertical slit, a sort of narrow sloping passage, and the men were slipping through one by one.
“We’ll need you. Here.” Corrado handed Giovanni an old revolver, which he took but loosely. Corrado plucked it from his hand and tucked into Giovanni’s belt for him, where it felt alien. Then someone else handed him a Beretta submachine gun on a sling. He took it, reluctantly. It also felt strange in his hands, heavy and awkward, but not very different from the German gun he’d used to good effect earlier. This one was heavier, the stock wood and the barrel shrouded with extra metal. He looked back at Maria – but a tall man behind him was crowding him toward the passage.
It appeared he would have to pay his way.
The tall man and another fell in
behind him, and all he could do was nod and try to smile at Maria before she disappeared behind them, but he had lost sight of her. And then he was stumbling into the passage. It was a ruined staircase, brick and mortar debris underfoot. Boots and shoes scraped in front of him, climbing, so he followed instinctively even though he could barely see.
They climbed single-file, seemingly endlessly until they reached a collapsed corridor. Then Giovanni smelled the evening air. They were outside, emerging from a hidden fissure between leaning stone walls. The short column of men snaked around the corner and he realized they were attempting to flank the German patrol before the shelter was sniffed out.
He gripped the Beretta’s stock tightly, his mind a jumble of fears.
They were nearly around the ruined building’s front corner when someone’s shoe kicked over a pile of debris, which groaned and came tumbling to the ground in a clatter of stone and wood, raising a cloud of dust.
An angry shout in German, and then another, and then there was a submachine gun burst and Giovanni realized the partisans, not yet in position, had been forced to open fire without cover. They were outlined against the wall.
“All’attacco, ragazzi!” Corrado shouted, urging his men on the attack, their intended surprise flanking shattered by the shouting and the gunfire. “Per la patria!” For the homeland!
The enemy was a series of indistinct shapes, like ghosts shimmering in the dark.
A man went down on Giovanni’s left, his chest split open by a fusillade of slugs.
Giovanni screamed in fear and anger and squeezed the Beretta’s trigger, letting loose a burst. Recoil tugged the barrel upward and to the left and he saw his rounds shatter a window too high up to catch any of the enemy. Another man went down on his right, a bullet in the head silencing him forever. Giovanni held the Beretta barrel down and sprayed lead until his breech locked open, the magazine empty. Someone shoved another magazine at him and he reloaded, somehow catching on instinctively. He shot at the ghosts again, and this time one of the shapes threw up his arms and collapsed, broken, against the bricks.
Gunfire raged around him and for a moment he thought the partisans were holding the enemy back, their bursts exacting a terrible toll.
A series of loud snarls broke through the gunfire, followed immediately by an unearthly howling. Giovanni stopped short, a shiver shooting down his spine. Despite the gun battle, this sound was viscerally more terrifying.
“Lupi!” someone shouted. Then the man’s voice turned to a gurgle as a dark, muscular shape lunged from the shadows and ripped out his throat.
Whatever it was, it snarled and shook its long snout and Giovanni heard a slaughterhouse ripping of bone and flesh and the dead man’s head came rolling to a stop at his feet.
Dio mio!
Giovanni couldn’t help staring for a split-second down into the dead man’s terrified eyes, already glazing, and then he stumbled aside until he couldn’t see the head and the jagged piece of spine protruding from its torn neck.
All around him he heard men screaming as more four-footed shapes materialized. For the first time he saw that they were giant dogs—
No, they were wolves.
And they were large… very large…
They lunged at men who shot at them over and over without any effect, their jaws snapping and tearing necks and limbs. Here was a partisan going down under a slashing, biting jaw full of fangs. There was a man with a wolf’s snarling snout buried in his belly, tearing out loops of bloody intestines as he screamed his last.
Out of the corner of his eye Giovanni saw one man shoot a wolf and the animal went down, screaming in rage, trying to reach around its back and bite the smoking wound. The tall man who had been behind him on the staircase leaped onto the wolf’s back, a silver blade flashing, and stabbed it twice in the neck before slitting the animal’s throat.
It all happened in mere seconds, but Giovanni swore he saw the wolf catch fire and squeal in agony as its blood seemed to boil. And then its body blurred, and impossibly, became a naked man, a human, whose greasy hair the tall partisan grabbed with a fist and pulled up, using the glowing blade to sever the head. The partisan tossed it aside with a shout of fury and victory.
Giovanni opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. What he had seen, it was not possible…
The battle had degenerated into single shots and snarls, screams of terror and pain, and gurgling sounds of bloody death.
And he heard the tearing of bone and tissue, the howling of victorious wolves.
How many are there?
He turned in time to see a giant wolf leaping for his throat. With no time to sidestep, he brought up the Beretta’s barrel and let loose a burst.
The bullets stitched across the wolf’s body and head and should have cut him to pieces, but Giovanni was horrified to see that the deadly lead barely knocked the animal off its stride. Its weight smashed into him and slammed him to the ground, jaws snapping at his neck.
The Beretta flew out of his grasp, and he threw up his hands to avert the wolf’s continuous attacks. Giovanni risked one hand and scrabbled for the revolver tucked in his belt, the other hand desperately fending off the wolf’s fangs. Its raging eyes seemed red in the near-darkness.
He brought up the pistol by feel and shoved the barrel under the wolf’s jaws. Those red blazing eyes seemed to roll crazily, and held his as the wolf gathered for a final push. Giovanni pulled the trigger once, twice, three times. The bullets ripped through the fur, bone, and skull.
Giovanni sucked in air and started to throw off the dead animal’s weight.
In the moonlight, the wounds caused by his bullets began to close up and disappear. The wolf’s red eyes found his and it seemed to smile at his shock and terror.
Then he was awash in a gush of gore as an anonymous hand bearing a flashing silver blade slit the wolf’s throat just before it could press its advantage and bite off Giovanni’s face.
It was the tall man from the tunnel who’d done it, a grim smile on his face as he nodded and then jumped to the aid of another partisan locked in a struggle for his life with yet another impossible animal. The tall man’s blade slashed, opening the wolf’s throat. The animal’s shriek of pain and rage as the blade burned through its flesh and tendons would haunt Giovanni to the moment of his death. And so would the sight of this dead wolf blurring into a dead human. To his right, where his lupine attacker had been, now sprawled a dead man. The tall partisan severed both heads with grim efficiency.
“Must make sure, eh?” he said gruffly.
Giovanni got to his knees unsteadily. The battle was over, won apparently, by Corrado and his men, but at a terrible cost. A half-dozen partisans lay dead, their bodies scattered near the side of the building, grotesquely disemboweled. Five naked, decapitated men marked where the wolves had died. Several uniformed German soldiers also lay dead, their bodies riddled with bullets.
Corrado was alive, his coat covered with splattered blood.
“Thank you, Turco,” he said, clapping a hand on the tall man’s shoulder. “Without you, I don’t know–” He stopped, his haunted eyes finding Giovanni’s. “You fought well. You’re one of us now. We saved the shelter, this time. But now you must not watch. Turco, I don’t envy you this job.”
The tall man shrugged. He moved to each of the dead partisans and stabbed them in the heart before sawing off their heads.
Giovanni thought he had been horrified by everything up to now. But this was too much!
He was too hoarse to shout, but almost did. “What sacrilege are you–?”
“It’s necessary, believe me,” Corrado said, making a half-hearted sign of the cross. “We must be sure they are dead, and that they were killed with that blade. Otherwise there’s a possibility…”
Turco was finished with his task. The two rallied the surviving partisans around them. Wounds were inspected. Most were minor, and Giovanni noticed that Turco remained nearby, the unsheathed silver blade touching
every survivor – including himself.
Corrado noticed Giovanni’s questioning look. “We have learned to look after ourselves,” he explained, but it was no real explanation as far as Giovanni was concerned.
Exhausted, his body aching and his mind still reeling at all he had seen, all he wanted to do was climb down those stairs and see his wife.
And then he would go find his son.
Se Dio vuole, he thought. God willing.
3
Corrado had shucked his bloody coat and now wore a thin, once-white dress shirt. He shivered in the night’s chill, present even here in the shelter.
“Now you know what we are up against,” he told Giovanni. “Since late last year, the Germans have sent those things against us, night after night.”
“But… what are they?”
“Do you not remember the stories your parents told you when you were young? They are wolf-men, just like the legends.”
“It’s just too… It’s impossible.”
“You saw it with your own eyes. But for Turco, one would have torn you apart. We know what they are, but they are almost impossible to kill. The Germans are retreating, but they have deployed a rear guard made up, partly, of this Werwolf Division of theirs. The monsters have done their worst in the hills and used to stay out of the cities, mostly, but now they are being used against us here as well.”
“You said you can’t kill them? But they did die.”
Corrado snorted quietly. “Sure, but at what cost. They can be killed, but it takes special…” He leaned over and whispered even more quietly. “That man there, hunched in the corner?”
Giovanni saw a man whose look was haunted. His eyes seemed feverish, his skin pale. He hadn’t been part of the gun battle.
“He’s a priest. He has fought with us. He is a Jesuit. You know what that means?”
Giovanni shrugged. He knew who Jesuits were, of course, but…
“He has done exorcisms. He has faced evil before and survived. And he has brought us more than just his own fighting spirit. From Rome, he has brought us a weapon.”
SNAFU: Wolves at the Door: An Anthology of Military Horror Page 12