Were- Read online

  Us? I thought. Who is this “us?” SS officers, I supposed, but of course I could not know until he told me.

  “Goebbels himself came up with a better plan. When the Homeland falls, the enemy is going to hunt the SS down and kill us all.” He shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “Unless we can hide like wolves, in the darkness of the night. Why not be wolves, then? Safe in the forests, the hills, during the day, but at night, we kill. We take our revenge. They will pay in blood for their victory.”

  He sat smiling at me, a bland-looking youngish man in uniform, calm, relaxed, even, but utterly mad, crazed by defeat. I shivered—oh, I went cold, colder than the snow of the horrible winter past. At that moment I saw my plan. A madman can be led by his madness.

  “Do you understand now?” He leaned a little closer to me. “Do you?”

  “Oh yes. Of course. But who’s going to take the wolf form? Not everyone can.”

  “That’s true. I’m hoping I can, but who knows? We’ve been reading, searching the old books. Young people are the best. We’ve recruited some of the boys from Hitler Youth, the true ones, the young men who have the true German spirit. They’re eager to learn. Most are twelve and thirteen, still young enough to learn.”

  To myself I thought: Your god will punish you for that, if Russians don’t get you first. Aloud, I said, “I must have time to think. You’re asking me to betray a sacred trust.”

  “Very well. I’ll come back tomorrow.” He got up and went to the door, only to pause and look back. “But remember, the Fatherland is a sacred trust, too.”

  I smiled and nodded. He saluted me and left.

  In the morning Wülf returned soon after I’d eaten. We talked a little, meaningless greetings, just as if courtesy could still matter after the horrors of the last seven years. Finally I stood up with a carefully arranged toss of my head and a defiant tilt of my chin.

  “I’ve decided,” I said, “for the sake of the Fatherland, I’ll show you. But we must have the proper place. Moonlight. And outside somewhere.”

  “Outside?” He frowned, a little suspicious.

  “You think I’m going to run away. All right, is there a building here with a flat roof? Too high for a wolf to jump from?”

  “Yes, there is, the old stables. Very well.”

  My turn for the suspicious smile. “I must be naked to effect the change. Can you keep the guards from—”

  He patted the revolver at his hip. I smiled.

  “Excellent!” I said. “Now, the old books say that the moon has to be full, but that’s not true. Well, it’s not true if you do the proper meditations beforehand.”

  “Meditations. Huh, I knew we needed more information.”

  “Much more, apparently.” Which was certainly true. “Let me show you the change first. Then the instructions will make more sense. Tonight will do. I could see the moon last night through the cell window. It’s just a quarter moon, but it’s enough for you to see by.” I paused to think. “Or maybe not quite enough, especially if you want to take notes. You’d better have a lantern there, too. A good bright one.”

  “I’ll do that.” Wülf got up and made me an odd little bow. “I’ll come here an hour after sunset to fetch you. I’d let you out of this wretched cell now, but it would make the others suspicious if I did.”

  “I understand. I’ll need to rest beforehand, anyway. This will do.”

  “Heil Hitler!” Wülf saluted as he spoke.

  “Heil Hitler!” I said the hated name for the last time. “For the glory of the Fatherland.”

  And then, thank my own gods, he left.

  That afternoon, I slept and dreamt of the mountains. When I woke, I ate the decent meal the guards brought me. I took the blanket from the bunk and folded it neatly into a bundle. I’d need something to lie upon while I changed. Wülf arrived a little while after I finished, and together we walked out of the prison house into the clean sunset air. The quarter moon already hung pale in the sky above the wooded foothills to the west. In the darkening east, the Evening Star glimmered.

  Two guards fell in behind us as we walked across the cobbled yard toward a flat-roofed building by a broken stone wall. I had arrived in this place blind-folded. Now I could look around and see that it was a small schloss, an old stone manor house, a single squat tower. Wülf noticed my curiosity.

  “My family owned this,” he said. “I’m the last of them. Who knows who’ll have it now? Probably some stinking Russian.”

  “Spoils of war, eh? Perhaps you can make them pay for it with blood.”

  “That’s my fondest hope.”

  A sturdy ladder was leaning against the stable wall, which rose about twenty feet above the cobbles. One of the guards clambered up first. The other ducked into the stable and came out with a lantern. I climbed up to the roof, Wülf followed, and finally the last guard. While the guard lit the kerosene lantern, I spread my blanket out on a reasonable clean spot near, but not suspiciously near, the edge of the roof. I could see that if an animal larger than a rat jumped down onto the stones, it would at the very least break a couple of legs.

  “Very good,” I said. “Now. Notice that I am positioning myself to look at the moon. You know the face there belongs to one of the old Germanic gods, right?”

  “Right,” Wülf said.

  “So as you lie down, invoke him.” I was inventing lore as fast as I could. “His name is Máni. Next, I need to disrobe. The guards—”

  Wülf told them to turn their backs. He knelt by the blanket. I took off my clothes safely in front of him, who lusted for lore, not a woman. As I lay down on my back, I spoke the names of three runes. I don’t remember which ones. They had nothing to do with the change, but Wülf in his ignorance wrote them down in a small notebook.

  By then the night had grown dark. The lantern light cast a dazzling pool around us, bright enough, or so I hoped, to make him night-blind. I stretched my arms out to each side and began to chant some meaningless babble. I repeated it several times to allow Wülf to write it all down. While I chanted, I prepared the hawk image in my mind.

  Now the crux—I would have to change faster than ever I had before. I forced the image from my mind until I saw it hovering above me. One deep breath—a shriek—the hawk came to me. Every muscle in my arms and back burned with the shock as I merged myself with the image. I leapt into the air, wings beating, but I had forgotten how weak I was from my long confinement.

  A woman’s legs hung from the hawk’s body, meaty, thick, heavy. I swooped over the roof and beat my painful wings. Hampered by the weight, I plunged down toward the cobbles below, but at the last moment my legs transformed, thin now, and light. I flew. I gained the sky at last. I heard them shouting below, heard shots, too, as they fired at me. I spiraled and swooped in as twisted a course as I could fly. The shots missed.

  As I soared into the night, the last thing I heard was Wülf’s voice, crying “Come back! Come back! The Fatherland...”

  I flew higher and left the voice behind.

  * * *

  You know how I survived in the hills, until not the Russians but Americans came. Now you know everything. Put it in our village archive so we may always remember to live in fear.

  ATTACK OF THE WERE-ZOMBIE

  FRIENDSHIP WITH BENEFITS

  Sarah Brand

  What most people don’t understand about the Infected is that they’re usually not dangerous unless they want to be. As long as they don’t bite you, you won’t turn into a vampire or a werewolf, and good luck convincing someone with the fae virus to put her teeth anywhere near you. But zombies are definitely unsafe, and you shouldn’t get too close. A friend of mine was only mostly a zombie, and whether we were close is up for debate. Still, it didn’t end well.

  Adam has this band called Flux Mortician that plays every now and then at the Black Cat, one of my favorite DC bars. The second time I met him, he mentioned how much he was enjoying Atlas Shrugged. I paused to check for irony, found none, and agreed th
at really long books were great. For instance, the seventh Harry Potter book was also long. Which House did he think he was in? To Adam’s credit, he went with it.

  I don’t date libertarians, so romance was never in the cards. But I kept hanging out with certain mutual friends of ours, which meant spending time with Adam, and he grew on me. He loved Flux Mortician with a seriousness I reserve for virology, but whenever one of his bandmates wanted to do something risky—a crazy drum solo, a cover of “Chandelier,” whatever—he went with it. I never once heard him ask if they thought they could pull something off.

  Also, he checked some important boxes: tall, dark eyes, and a tenor voice that could narrate my physical chemistry textbook and still sound like punk rock. I thought he might be secretly fae. Yes, I’m shallow. Sue me.

  Then some dude with feminist views and progressive politics dumped me next to the biography shelf at Politics and Prose—during a werewolf attack, if you can believe it—and I was done. If I was destined to fall for emotionally unavailable losers who just saw me as a distraction, I wouldn’t fall for anyone. I’d protect myself by sleeping with someone with whom I could never, ever possibly fall in love.

  I got to the Black Cat early that Friday night. Adam was always the first one there, and I found him at his usual spot at the bar. Two chairs over, a fae boy and a pretty werewolf were holding hands, talking to each other in low voices. I let my gaze linger on the couple for just a moment, then pushed my envy aside. I wasn’t going to get hurt again, which meant a boyfriend was the absolute last thing I needed.

  Adam nodded at me. “Lexie said you broke up with that guy,” he said. “You doing okay?”

  “Yeah.” I kept my voice light. “But my life is pretty tragically devoid of kisses right now. I’ll have to do something about that.”

  He snorted. “I bet Marcus would help you out.”

  My face scrunched up before I could stop it. Flux Mortician’s drummer had a thing for me…and every other woman in our group. “Is he actually a vampire?”

  Adam raised his hands. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  “Well, I have pretty specific requirements for friends with benefits,” I said. “First, it has to be someone I’m attracted to. Second, it can’t be someone I secretly want to date. Third, I have to trust him not to be an asshole.” I had never actually had a friend with benefits, but those rules seemed sufficient.

  “Makes sense,” he said, draining the last of his beer.

  I hesitated, but backing down has never been my style. “So, uh, how about it?”

  He narrowly saved us both from a spit-take. When he recovered, he just looked at me for a moment, eyebrows raised. “Is that an actual offer?”

  I could feel my face heating up, but I nodded.

  “Our friends come first,” he said. “I don’t want things to get weird. We’d act normal around everyone, I assume?”

  I hadn’t even considered letting our friends know what was going on. “Yes, please,” I said.

  He was dangerously charming when he smiled. As our friends straggled into the bar—much too close to sunset, curfews to protect us from the Infected be damned—I pushed that thought to the back of my head. This was going to work.

  * * *

  After the bartenders kicked all the known Infected out, Flux Mortician’s show lasted for two hours, and the party afterward went until morning. It was too dangerous to roam the streets after dark, the logic went, so we might as well be in an amazing bar, with wonderful people, having a fabulous time. And drinking, which can help everything seem more amazing, wonderful, and fabulous.

  By sunrise, I was mostly sober. I bought one last bottle of water from the bartender, made sure I had my things, and waited awkwardly on the corner of 14th and U until Adam shuffled up to stand beside me. “Still want to do this?” he said.

  Even bleary-eyed and unshaven, he was beautiful. “I do.”

  As soon as I said it, I flinched—did that sound too much like a wedding thing?—but Adam didn’t seem to notice. “You’re closer, right?”

  We rode the metro in silence, which might have been companionable if I hadn’t been wondering the whole time whether it was awkward. When we were back out on the street, about a half-mile from my apartment, Adam glanced over at me and burst out laughing. “What?” I demanded.

  “Well, you have to admit this is pretty surreal, right?”

  “More surreal than the Infection bringing on the Twilight universe?” There were probably better literary comparisons, but I’ve never been a fan of urban fantasy, especially not once it turned into urban fact. “Vampires, werewolves, zombies—”

  Which, of course, was exactly when a zombie crashed out of the bushes and lurched toward us. It was fast, just like the government had warned us about, and it smelled like my brother’s refrigerator. Adam stepped in front of me, and the zombie halted. It sniffed the air, an uncannily human look of confusion on its rotting face. Then it turned and loped away.

  Adam kept walking, like nothing had happened. “I knew it!” I said. “You’re a fae, aren’t you?”

  He laughed even harder at that. “Nope, just me.”

  One street over from my apartment building, there’s a brick wall next to the sidewalk that comes up to my shoulder, which is to say it isn’t very tall. As we walked past, without warning, Adam picked me up and swung me onto the ledge. Then he reached up just a bit to kiss me, his lips warm and soft against mine. I bent my head and kissed him back.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I saw the height differential and I had to take it.”

  “No need to apologize at all.” Clearly this had been the best idea ever.

  We reached my apartment building, and I led him inside.

  * * *

  We didn’t sleep together, mostly because after the night at the Black Cat, we both really needed some actual sleep. “See you tomorrow afternoon?” Adam said.

  Some friend of Adam’s had an alt-rock band, which was playing over on H Street. “I’ll be there.” And I would. But first things first: I had science to do.

  I had originally partnered with the NIH to do my dissertation research on flu vaccines, but then my lab had been drafted into looking for ways to prevent Infection—especially with the zombie virus, given that zombies had almost no self-control when it came to biting people. They left other zombies alone, but that was about it. So, we were developing a disease model that would let us simulate potential vaccines.

  Even setting ethics aside, getting blood samples from zombies was tricky, but the principal investigators thought we could develop a vaccine with the data we already had. After months of fighting with our aging CAD software, I wasn’t so sure, but I was willing to keep trying. Scientists all over the country were working on the problem, so even when I was the only one on duty at my lab, I never felt lonely for long.

  Maybe I could just marry molecular biology. Our children would be beautiful when viewed through a microscope.

  I spent the entire night at the lab, drinking far too much coffee and analyzing the latest promising virtual molecules until mid-morning. A few hours before Adam’s friend’s show was supposed to start, I went home and changed into my cutest dress, the skirt of which is probably a tad too short, but I’ll only be in my mid-twenties once. I put on eyeliner, which I never do, and carefully packed my purse with everything I could possibly need if I wound up at Adam’s place after the show.

  There’s no good way to get to H Street, but even running late, I made it just before the friend’s band went onstage. Adam was already there, along with our friend Lexie and a couple of others, not to mention the dozens of strangers that were crammed into the tiny bar. Act natural, I told myself, even though I’m a terrible actress. Fortunately, once the band started playing, no one was paying any attention to me.

  Unfortunately, Adam wasn’t paying attention to me, either. He had one drink, then another, and he barely said anything at all. That was my first clue that something was wrong. Normally, when we’
re out with our friends, he never shuts up. As the music pounded in my ears, he leaned against the nearest wall, then slowly slid to the floor.

  By the end of the concert, he had recovered enough to stand upright. “I’m heading home,” he told me. “Go with Lexie. We can hang out later.”

  I couldn’t argue without breaking the “act normal” rule, or worse, being a pushy jerk. I swallowed my disappointment and nodded.

  It was about five o’clock, with the sun on its way down but not quite there yet. As Lexie and I walked into a nicer, less crowded bar, my phone buzzed. It was a text from Adam, and autocorrect had not been kind to it. Whey ate you guys?

  Like an idiot, hoping that somehow this day would still turn out the way I wanted, I told him. About ten minutes later, Adam staggered in, made straight for the bar, and then came over to our table with two shots in one hand and a beer in the other. He did the shots in rapid succession, then cracked open the beer. “I thought you went home,” I said. He wobbled when he shrugged.

  Lexie stepped forward and pried the beer out of his hand. “Adam, you are drunk. Go home.”

  He stared at her for a moment, and then without a word to me or anyone, walked out the door. Something about his gait was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  When the sun really was about to set, we settled our tab and stepped out onto the sidewalk. Ahead of me, I saw Adam, who apparently hadn’t made it home after all. But why were people running from him and screaming?

  Then he turned around and I screamed, too.

  He was a zombie. The flesh on his face was rotting away, and when he moved, he lurched. He took a step toward us, and I froze, some moronic part of me not wanting to leave him like this.