Operation Gumtree, Part 1 of 4: A Bavarian Vargulf in Prague

Hermann Geiger, one of the scientists behind the horrifying Vargulf Korps turned defector for the Office, is on the run. But one can only run so long before their sins catch up to them.

The four parts of Operation Gumtree have been collected in The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: Operation Arm Breaker, which is now available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

A Bavarian Vargulf in Prague is Part 1 of Operation Gumtree. It takes place before The Dragon, the Wolf, and the Maiden and features characters introduced there. It’s not required to read Dragon first, but it is recommended.

Content Warnings: Mild Swearing, Violence, Death, Gore, Body Horror, Nazis

SUNDAY MORNING, NOVEMBER 15, 1942
THE CHATEAU VLTAVA INN
PRAGUE, THE PROTECTORATE OF BOHEMIA AND MORAVIA

//Translated from German.//

Sonderführer Hermann Geiger had taken his usual breakfast at his usual table: the best cup of chicory coffee he'd ever had in his miserable life, splashed with fresh cream, and warm slices of dark bread with hard cheese and salami on top. His was the table furthest from the door, his back flat against the wall that the dining room shared with the kitchen. A cold current that lived in the base of his spine kept his eyes continuously flicking up to watch the door.

The moment the pale, hollow men entered the restaurant, he abandoned his breakfast. It was not their faces he recognized, necessarily, but their gaunt cheeks and cruel eyes, and the way they locked the door behind them. There were three, more than enough to kill one man. He ducked low and sprinted between tables, ignoring the confusion of the diners around him. Geiger scampered up the stairs before these intruders could pull the syringes from their bags. He was in his apartment before they injected the serum into the abdomens.

The screams the subjects made as they transformed chilled Geiger to his bones, even after hearing them half-a-hundred times in his lab. During testing, his subjects reported that the emergence of kristallineballistichefasern was shockingly painful, like ten thousand thorns pushing through their skin from the inside. The shrieks he was hearing through the floor re-confirmed those reports.

Geiger locked his room door, then that of the bathroom, as if they would slow a Vargulf. He began tearing pages from his leather-bound journal and throwing them crumpled into the iron clawfoot tub.

These were his notes regarding the latest iteration of the crystal growth serum, sprawling hand-scrawled molecular diagrams. Once the last page was out, he struck a match and dropped it onto the pile. The yellow paper took to the flame and Geiger's figures twisted and blackened.

He'd thought that escaping Germany with this research would be enough to stop the Vargulf, but they had dedicated too many resources toward his creations. They needed him back.

Geiger listened to the civilians in the dining room one floor below. Chairs scraped and fell, dishes shattered, men shouted and women screamed as they watched the unholy metamorphosis occurring before them. But their screams could not match those of the Vargulf. The pain of their change muted all other sounds. Their cries reached a crescendo that shocked the onlookers dumb.

A sudden moment of silence dropped on the dining room like a bomb. It was that instant of uncertainty as the human mind of the subject was subsumed by the animal mind of the Vargulf. It only lasted a single meditative second. Then they pounced, and the familiar screams of terror and death took back over. More furniture and flatware broke as people tried to escape the monsters they suddenly found among them. A shot rang out, but whoever was firing wasn't given the chance to follow it up.

“Scheiße,” Geiger cursed. He grabbed another notebook and tore it apart to feed more of his life's work to the flames. “Scheiße, scheiße, scheiße.”

Death had found him, and he had no one to blame but himself. He hoped the actions he'd taken in these last weeks would render him a hero in some memories, but he knew he'd done too much to earn a darker reputation. His legacy would not be bravery, but cruelty enabling genocide.

Hermann Geiger knew he was a monster. If he was worse than the Vargulf he'd enabled, he could not say. In his time in the SS, he'd killed by his own hand. In his time with Department Three's Seventh Arm, he'd down so much worse. He was as much to blame for the misery caused by the Vargulf as Johann Metzger, or Sparteführer Abendroth, or the blood-thirsty Isaak Gerhardt himself. It was his creation that made them nigh-invulnerable, his formula that induced the growth of the thick, bulletproof 'hair' in their flesh. Now his sins had come knocking.

The restaurant below had gone quiet. He hoped they were all dead. His contribution to the Vargulf, their pelts, would have rendered any opposition impotent. Even that bullet, fired in vain desperation, had no hope to hurt the creatures he'd made. If the men and women down there were lucky, they had gone quickly. If they were not, they would feel everything the monsters would do next.

Geiger had not recognized any of the men Abendroth had sent after him. This meant they were new converts, new carriers of the fearsome surgeries and foul chemicals that could mold men like clay. They would not be able to control themselves. By Geiger's estimation, the transformation required over four thousand calories itself, with each moment afterward consuming many hundreds more. Human bodies became nothing but loud caloric sources to them. The diners' fates would be horrifying, but every minute their corpses took to devour would be another minute Geiger had to destroy his work.

The last of his papers went upon the pyre by the armful, choking the air in the small bathroom with black smoke. Geiger coughed up a gray mass and spit it onto the tile. He reached beneath the sink and activated his emergency transponder. His Office handler was never more than ten minutes away. He did not know how they'd embedded an agent in Prague, but he was grateful. He had forwarded Pettlebaum the information regarding the Vargulf's chemical aversions. The Office would have had time to craft the weapons Geiger had instructed them to, they must have.

Geiger lowered himself to the tile floor, below the smoke fogging the bathroom. He wedged himself between the toilet and the tub, letting cast iron and porcelain wall him in. He hugged his knees and willed his body into the tightest ball possible. His research was destroyed and his distress call was sent. Now, it was a race: would the Vargulf below satiate themselves on the dead patrons of this quaint Czech restaurant before Pettlebaum could muster his allies and gather his silver weapons?

A knock on the bathroom door interrupted his thoughts.

“In use,” was all he could think to say. He had not even heard the outer door to the apartment open.

“Doktor Geiger?” a man's voice inquired through the wooden door in German.

“Who is there?” Geiger demanded again, his voice carrying more muster. If the man behind the door could speak his name, he was either there to kill him or save him. A Vargulf would have been through the door already, his teeth halfway through Geiger's neck. He was careful not to hyperventilate so as to avoid choking on the roiling smoke above his head.

“The raven flies only north,” the voice offered. It was Official Pettlebaum's challenge, but not his voice. Something must have happened.

“But the crow flies home,” Geiger replied.

The doorknob rattled, fighting against the lock. Geiger recoiled away, as far as the nook he'd backed into would allow. Metal snapped inside the door, and it swung open. From his nook behind the toilet, Geiger could see black jackboots, spotted with red.

“Your Jew friend sends his greetings,” the man said. He dropped a soft mass to the floor. It bounced once, spraying Geiger with cold blood. The head rolled to Geiger's feet, leaving him staring into Pettlebaum's gummy eyes. The booted man stepped away, then gave a curt order: “Fetch him.”

Three immense bodies stormed the tiny room, filling it with a stink of sweat and gore that overpowered even the smoke. Hands gripped Geiger under his arms and grabbed at his shirt, lifting him like a gutted pig, digging into his elbows, wrists, and ankles to carry him swinging between them. The breath left Geiger's body. They were Vargulf.

Gore had soaked into their pelts. Bits of flesh and strips of flayed skin matted the coarse fibers. Inhuman muscle writhed beneath their fur. Red frothed from their grimacing mouths. Bits of scarlet matter clung to their bared teeth.

The organic crystalline hairs that Geiger had worked so hard to create rasped against him like a wire brush. He'd modeled the 'hairs' upon the structure of a rhinoceros' horn, the inspiration for a self-replicating branching crystalline structure coming to him in an amphetamine-fueled fever dream. The rest was derived from years of research and months of human experimentation. It wasn't until his first assistant was devoured that he realized what he'd made.

The Vargulf holding him rippled with muscle. He could hear their stomachs growling. Despite having cannibalized a room full of civilians just moments before, their fast-healing bodies and swollen musculature demanded more. These snarling, starved, enraged things would crack his bones and suck the marrow were it not for the willpower of the man who had taken a seat on the foot of Geiger's bed.

“Should I call you Sonderführer? No, you gave up that honor when you stole from our Führer and ran from me. No, Hermann will do. Hermann, I am disappointed in you,” Isaak Gerhardt hissed. Geiger had never known the first Vargulf before he had taken the serum, so he only knew him as the ghoulish fanatic he had become. Gerhardt thought himself transcendent, the only Vargulf able to maintain control after the transformation. It might even have been true.

Unlike his gore-soaked lessers, only Gerhardt’s hands were painted red. Pettlebaum's blood. He leaned back on the bed and held up the trinket he was playing with so Geiger could see. He was rolling a shining bullet between his ruddy forefinger and thumb. The gleam reflected in his sunken eyes. He continued:

“I thought you were one of us, one of our brothers, one of our pack. Never, never a traitor.”

“Whatever I am, at least I am human,” Geiger managed. Gerhardt's curs were digging their fingers into his flesh now, eager to take him apart.

“Put him down,” Gerhardt ordered. The pair of creatures holding his arms dropped him, bouncing his head off the hardwood floor. Their hands had stained his shirt red. The Vargulf still clenching his ankles snarled at Gerhardt; it had other plans for its squirming prey.

“Drop him, now!” Gerhardt snapped. The Vargulf chuffed at him in response. Gerhardt's eyes narrowed, and he tossed the bullet at the insolent monster. It hit the Vargulf's shoulder, eliciting a grotesque hiss of searing flesh upon impact. The Vargulf yelped and dropped Geiger's legs, bounding a couple meters away, nursing the sudden, smoking wound.

Geiger saw where the bullet had landed, steaming flesh still adhered to it. It was made from silver, just as Geiger had advised the Office. Silver was the most readily-available substance that could induce a chemical reaction in the Vargulf's organic crystalline pelt. It was the only weakness in his formula. He smirked despite his circumstances. Pettlebaum must have gotten this information out. Perhaps that is why Geiger had not recognized these Vargulf; maybe the Office had finally killed some of them.

“Do you find hurting your pack is amusing, Herr Geiger?” Gerhardt asked. He stood over the fallen scientist, hand on his holstered Mauser. He nodded at the two Vargulf who had obeyed him without hesitation. “Dierk, Horst, enjoy yourselves.”

The pair needed no further instruction: they pounced into the smoky bathroom and started brawling over Pettlebaum's head. The disobedient Vargulf made as if to join them, but was stilled by a glare from Gerhardt.

“Not you, Konrad, you must earn your treat,” Gerhardt chided. Konrad whimpered and nursed the pitted burn on his shoulder.

The Nazi officer sighed and sat back down on the bed. He leaned over, resting his elbows on his knees so he could talk to Geiger. The light caught the small wolf-skull-and-crossed-bones pin on his collar, an emblem Geiger had once worn as well.

“I would not have found you had you kept running, Hermann, I would like you to know that. The auditors would not have found your Jewish handler and I would not have eaten him alive. I would not have had Dierk, Horst, and Konrad kill a dozen people downstairs. I would not have left clues for your Jew's comrades to follow into my trap, and I would not have turned their painful deaths into a certainty. Know that this was possible because you became lazy, and because you fell in love with one inn's blend of chickory coffee.”

Geiger's stomach dropped. He'd hidden himself here for two weeks after never staying still for more than three nights, bouncing all over Czechoslovakia. It was the coffee. He was a creature of habit, and after running from Department Three and their bloodhound auditors for so long he had missed having a routine. This tavern, and its coffee, had felt like home.

“Do you see the smoke? I destroyed my research,” Geiger told him. “I will not create it again.”

“We do not need you to,” Gerhardt replied. “You have done enough that other men of stronger will can continue your work. Your legacy will live on.”

“Those are not my legacy,” Geiger spat. The Vargulf in the bathroom snarled at one another, still battling over their 'treat.'

“No, they are not,” Gerhardt said. “You will not be remembered as one of the great minds of German chemistry, nor as a hero of the Reich. Your legacy will be as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, an immortal warning to others. Mothers will tell their children: 'Always keep your word, young Hans, you don't want to end up like Wormy Hermann.' I will bait my hook with you and I will club any trout you draw out. Your death with cause the deaths of so many more. That will be your legacy.”

Konrad snorted, growing restless where Gerhardt had exiled him in the corner, away from his comrades' grisly meal. Gerhardt noticed the seared Vargulf's agitation and finally relented, saying:

“Fine, enjoy yourself.”

Konrad yipped with glee, then leaped over Geiger to collide with his pack-mates. He snarled and wrestled their treat from their claws. It cracked open like a nut and their quarrel started anew as all three Vargulf scrambled to get a taste of the soft pink meat inside.

Gerhardt stood, and held out a red hand, offering to help Geiger to his feet.

“We are going on a long journey, Hermann, all of us,” he said, ignoring the snarling and slurping across the room. Gerhardt's grin was diabolic as he added: “It wouldn't be the same without you.”

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Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin.