Operation Gumtree, Part 2 of 4: The Bucharest Vargulf Massacre

Hermann Geiger, one of the scientists behind the horrifying Vargulf Korps turned defector for the Office, is in the hands of the murderer Isaak Gerhardt. He’s been dragged to Bucharest, only to learn that he is no longer a prisoner: he is bait.

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.

The Bucharest Vargulf Massacre is Part 2 of Operation Gumtree. It takes place before The Dragon, the Wolf, and the Maiden and features characters introduced there. Start with Part 1 to avoid spoilers.

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

TUESDAY NIGHT, JANUARY 5, 1943
HOTEL LAC ALBASTRU, DUDEŞTI
BUCHAREST, THE KINGDOM OF ROMANIA

//Translated from German.//

Staccato salvos chattered from the north and west of the hotel. Hermann Geiger tried to duck under the desk, but the chain around his neck went taut, choking him. Glass broke as a window a floor below burst inward.

“Keep writing,” Isaak Gerhardt hissed. He hauled back on the leash and wrapped it around his hand until he'd winched Geiger back into his seat. He leaned in until he was so close that Geiger could smell the blood on his breath.

“Write as if I am about to drag you to your death,” Gerhardt told him. Geiger believed him. “Now listen.”

The shooting picked up steadily, coming from every direction. Geiger imagined he could feel the building shudder as round after round puckered its walls.

A polite knock on their door made Geiger jump.

“Hermann, please, stop embarrassing yourself,” Gerhardt whispered. He picked up his Mauser and called out: “Who is it?”

“It is Konrad, Herr Sturmbannführer,” a meek voice said.

“Come in, it is unlocked,” Gerhardt replied. Geiger forced his jaw not to drop. The gall of keeping a prisoner in an unlocked room, of not locking the door when under siege.

Konrad Schovajsa entered with Dierk, Horst, and another man. Each was empty and pale, with narrow frames, pervasive surgical scarring, and predatory eyes.

Each of these men had been a soldier once. The rest at least kept themselves trimmed and in uniform. Konrad had given up on that. He was a scarecrow of a man whose ragged hair nearly covered his face. He wore whatever clothes he could find. He was no longer comfortable being a human.

“We are under attack, sir,” he said.

“What would you like to do about it, Mister Schovajsa?” Gerhardt asked.

“I would like to eat them,” the mousey little man replied.

“So go do it,” Gerhardt said. Konrad stood straight as a flagpole.

“Really?”

“Please eliminate the occupants of the surrounding buildings by any means necessary.”

“Can we change here?” Konrad asked. His hands were shaking. Geiger doubted whether he would even be able to manage his own injections.

“Of course,” Gerhardt replied. He yanked on Geiger's chain, moving him away from the middle of the room while the four men undressed. Konrad dropped his shirt onto the floor while the others folded their clothes neatly and left them on the dresser. They each produced a folded leather bundle that they carried concealed beneath their shirts. These yielded a series of syringes containing a specifically portioned dosages of the chemicals it took to warp the human body.

While they prepared, Gerhardt strolled to the balcony and opened its glass doors. The gunfire became all the louder.

“Quickly, they will be getting suspicious that no one is shooting back,” he said.

“Yes, yes,” Konrad muttered. The rest of the men had laid out their needles in a specific order. Konrad took the whole bunch in his hand, lined them up together, then rammed them into his stomach as one. Geiger almost gagged. Konrad fell to his knees, doubled over and still. His ribs and spine looked like a pile of sticks under a thin sheet of skin.

The rest of them were more methodical. They injected the series of repair serums first, these allowed their damaged tissues to knit themselves together so fast it was almost visible. They grunted, but stayed standing. The psychological inhibitors went next. They would take a few moments to take hold of the subject's neurological impulses, so they had time to inject the rest. The muscular growth battery went into their abdomens one-by-one. Each injection tried their bodies, and by the fourth each was sweating bullets and wobbling on their feet. They saved Geiger’s creation for last, because it broke them.

Konrad howled from the floor. His muscles were contorting beneath his skin like they were trying to escape. He had already doubled in size. Joints popped and tendons twanged like violin strings. Steam was rising off him. He screamed and arched his back. His skin sparkled; Geiger knew the sight well. Tiny crystalline hairs erupted from his every pore, black as night. They tore outward, growing a few centimeters to become a flexible lattice of interwoven organic armor. A gasp escaped Konrad’s lips, then another scream.

“Beautiful,” Gerhardt whispered.

Konrad stood after a moment, terrible and ravenous. The transformation had taken every calorie in his body. He was starving, his body was strong enough to pull a person to pieces, and his mind had been dulled to an amoral, hyper-aggressive mass. He seemed a foot taller, and twice as broad. The fiber pelt across his wide chest rasped with each shuddering breath. His hands were locked into the shape of claws and his mouth was of full of protruding, deformed fangs.

Konrad's eyes locked onto Geiger. He had wanted to kill him before the change. Now he needed to. Gerhardt stepped between them. The standoff continued for another minute while the other three Vargulf recovered.

The four creatures shivered and twitched, waiting for their orders. Only when Gerhardt was certain they were in control of their faculties did he step aside.

“Go,” he said. “Kill them all.”

The Vargulf did not move toward the door, but instead to the open balcony, high above the gunfire. Konrad waited behind, watching his pack mates hop over the railing and begin scaling the building. He chuffed, then strolled past Geiger, who flinched away.

Konrad stood tall on the balcony, watching the muzzle flashes below. He spread his arms wide and howled into the night, silhouetted by the light behind him. His terrible cry carried across the neighborhood, bouncing between the apartment buildings and businesses. The gunfire shifted upward. Bullets crashed into hotel room, shattering every window, perforating the outer wall. Furniture, panelling, and wallpaper came apart under the barrage. Konrad stood still and let the lead thump against him.

With one last snarl, Konrad turned and took a few paces back inside. Bullets bounced off his bare back and skull. He came to a stop a meter in front of Geiger, winked, then spun and sprinted out the ruined balcony door. He launched himself with a mighty leap and disappeared into the night.

The screams began seconds later. These were met with a chorus of howls, furious and inhuman. Gerhardt had unleashed his Vargulf upon one of Europe's largest cities.

Gerhardt gave Geiger's leash some slack and wandered over the balcony to listen to his Vargulf hunt. A rattle of gunfire pierced the air before it was abruptly cut off with a woman's interrupted shriek and a ravenous snarl.

“Likely Konrad,” Gerhardt noted. “When given the choice, Konrad prefers to hunt females. Get up, continue the letter.”

Geiger numbly pushed himself off the floor and returned to the desk. Somehow the pen was the wrong shape to fit in his hand. His whole arm felt paralyzed. He was surrounded by monsters. It was not a new occurrence, but until recently he had been among their number. Being their enemy, their prey, was chilling. He was their squirming bait on a good day, a steak behind glass on the others.

Gerhardt noticed that Geiger's pen had not resumed moving.

“Please, Hermann, I thought you had left the last of your fortitude in the moth lamps,” he said, his smile carnivorous. Geiger shuddered at the thought of his dangling cell, and the endless, humming light within. He forced himself to began writing again.

Gerhardt read over his shoulder.

“Yes, desperate but measured, perfect,” he murmured.

Geiger's hands shook as he scrawled the note on the back of a crumpled food wrapper. Perhaps Gerhardt thought it was part of his act, or that he was afraid. He was afraid, but his month in a swinging, blinding, coffin-sized cell had left him with a tremor. Whereas he was once renowned for his precise illustrations of chemical interactions, now he could barely scrawl a simple plea for help.

Another shriek caused him to jolt. The Vargulf were killing everyone.

“Hermann, calm yourself, they are only communists,” Gerhardt said. He placed his hand on Geiger's shoulder, making him jump again. Gerhardt stood back, astonished, insulted. He snarled: “I am the best friend left to you, Hermann.”

The look Geiger gave him must have indicated he disagreed. Gerhardt snatched up the leash with both hands and yanked it so hard that Geiger choked and was thrown from his chair. He landed on his side, hacking and groaning.

Gerhardt crouched over him, sneering.

“Do you know why you are here, Hermann? Because I want you alive. The Sparteführer ordered your death by consumption some months ago. I disobeyed her orders to preserve your life. You owe me a debt. You should show some gratitude.”

“Thank you,” Geiger stammered. More screams sounded outside to be immediately replaced by victorious howls. More deaths, the worst he could imagine.

“Get up,” Gerhardt sneered. He looked down on Geiger like he was disappointed. He dropped the leash like it was slimy. Geiger clutched at his bruised throat and struggled to his knees. Gerhardt went back out to the balcony.

“Listen to them,” he hissed. “Your children.”

Geiger tried to block out the sounds. The Vargulf were not his. He was more of a midwife than a parent. Doktor Metzger had been the one to envision them. Beatrix Krone Breiner had come up with the muscular augmentation serum. Metzger made medicines that healed them, and the breaks and cuts that prevented their physiological expansion from killing them. Geiger had simply created their fur, the ballistic crystalline hairs that protected them in combat. It was as much chemistry as it was biology. He was their barber, not their creator.

“Listen to them!” Gerhardt shouted. Geiger pushed himself up and set his chair up then slumped into it. The screams and shooting had stopped; the Vargulf were hunting and the dissidents were trying to hide. “Your children are perfect.”

“They are not mine,” Geiger whispered.

“You made them,” Gerhardt replied.

“All I wanted was to protect German soldiers,” Geiger said.

“Have you experienced a transformation?”

“I have not,” Geiger said. He knew that Gerhardt was aware.

“Your means of saving our countrymen killed them outright,” Gerhardt said. “It is like acid, burning out from the inside of your skin. Or a million wasps between your muscle fibers, chewing their way free. Half of your subjects died in testing.”

“I know they did!” Geiger snapped.

“So to make your bulletproof soldiers, Metzger had to make his tissue regeneration formula. To prevent those soldiers from becoming walking tumors, Breiner crafted her masterwork. Combined, you birthed the Vargulf.”

“But you made them monsters,” Geiger countered.

“Monsters? Men could not handle your creation. They needed to be wolves, Hermann,” Gerhardt replied. He listened to the shrieks outside for a moment. “Your wolves are out among sheep. What would you expect them to do?”

“They were meant to survive, not to do these awful things,” Geiger said.

“Survive? Survive?” Gerhardt gasped. He stalked away from the balcony. Geiger did his best to avoid cowering. The Vargulf commander was almost yelling. “Do you remember the time between the wars? When it was illegal to be a German? When the vulture nations took everything? When everything we had and made was burned and spat on and we thanked them for it? That was surviving. That is how they wanted us to be.”

“You are too young to remember that,” Geiger whispered. He had scraped by after the war. But Gerhardt must have only been nine or ten.

“I was raised in the orphanages, I remember all of it,” Gerhardt said. Geiger's jaw dropped: the facilities for war orphans had been awful. Disease, abuse, hunger, exploitation.

“I am sorry, I - !” he stammered.

“Killed my father on the front? Gave my mother influenza? Stole the food I was supposed to eat? No?” Gerhardt sighed. He drifted back, away from Geiger's leash. “You did help me, though. Early supporters of the Party raised the money to adopt me. You, as much as the Führer, pulled me out of the pit the Allies dug for us.”

Geiger stayed silent. The Party had been a means to an end for him. Their network found him a job. They'd stopped his family from starving and had given him an income and a home. They'd also dragged him into creating something awful.

“We are done surviving,” Gerhardt told him. “Now, we thrive. We take what we want.”

A Vargulf roared in triumph as an orange flash lit the night outside. Flames licked up from the windows across the street. Geiger knew that there'd be orders to let it burn. Bucharest’s fire brigades would have to wait until Gerhardt’s monsters were satiated.

“Who are they?” Geiger whispered.

“Oh, murderers, rapists, similar men of singular will,” Gerhardt said. “Hand-picked from the Heer and various penitentiaries and asylums.”

“No, not those things,” Geiger muttered. Another Vargulf howled, eliciting a new round of screams and gunfire. The renewed chaos only lasted a few seconds.

“Oh, you mean the meat, the prey,” Gerhardt said. He leaned against the doorframe and smirked at his captive. “Tell me how we arrived at this hotel.”

“By car,” Geiger recalled.

“Official Nazi Party Mercedes Benz, shining and bedecked with little red flags, occupied by men of the SS in full dress uniform, yes?”

Geiger nodded.

“Sometimes, one presents a target too enticing to ignore,” Gerhardt replied. “They are Communist agitators, a well-known thorn in the Conducător's side. Thus far, his men have not been able to round them up. He asked if the SS could send a message to other dissidents, and we just happened to be passing through.”

Another rattle of gunfire started up only to be cut off abruptly. Geiger could smell smoke.

“No one will be able to ignore this message,” Gerhardt said. “Not even the Office.”

Geiger signed the fake but real plea and Gerhardt snatched it out of his hands. He read it over once, then strolled around the small, bullet-tattered room. He smiled, then stuck it behind a framed painting of a windmill, which he left ever-so-slightly askew.

“Your little friends will be here, I have no doubt of that. They crawl around under these old cities like vermin,” he said. “They will not ignore the slaughter out there, and they will recognize our work, easily. And what will they find when they trace it here? Their old informant, crying for help.”

Geiger slumped in his chair.

“I was easy bait for simple agitators, some cheddar for stupid mice,” he said, indicating the screaming people getting torn apart outside. “But your officials have more specialized taste. They leave cheddar for their little mice to nibble on. They won't come out for less than a creamy, rich Obatzter perhaps, a cheese like you. An irresistible cheese. And when their little whiskered noses leave their little holes to sniff around for you, I shall be there waiting to snap their little backs.”

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Copyright © 2023 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin.