Re: Blood and Iron

Somewhere in the hills outside Vic, Catalonia

The old sheep barn stank of manure and damp hay, but it was the only shelter left that wouldn’t sell them out.

Three men crouched in the shadows, rifles across their knees, eyes darting at every creak of the warped timber walls.

A single lantern burned low, throwing jittery shadows up the beams.

“Tell me again,” muttered Raúl, wiping sweat from his brow, though the night was cool.

“Those weren’t old Civil Guard with Mausers. Those rifles; modern, detachable magazines, both semi and automatic fire?”

No one answered. From the far corner, Tomàs, with a bandage dark around his thigh, let out a nervous laugh that died halfway.

“They’re not local. That’s the point. You think the King’s men are capable of ambushing our ambushes? They stripped the police stations, you remember? Our neighbors, the same men who used to shake us down for bribes, tore off their badges and ran for the coast the moment our comrades in Barcelona started stringing up aristocrats. There’s no Guardia left to organize squads like this.”

Martí, the eldest of them, leaned back against the wall. His breath whistled through a gap in his teeth.

“I’ve heard rumors of men like these operating beyond the Alps, beyond the Carpathians the last few years.”

He sat up, gaze moving across his two comrades as if telling ghost stories by the hearth.

“They wear no uniforms, blend in with locals, wield advanced weapons, and have no regard for the rules of war. These aren’t dogs of Madrid. They’re foreign wolves disguised as men.”

A hush fell. Even the wounded man seemed to stop breathing. Outside, the wind stirred the olive groves, branches scraping the roof with dry claws.

At last Raúl whispered, “Then what do we do? Move again? Hole up deeper in the hills?”

Tomàs shifted, wincing as blood seeped anew. “Move where? Every farm between here and Manresa’s half-emptied already. They’re torching safe houses. Nobody’s hiding us anymore; not after the last patrol dragged out a dozen ‘suspects’ and left them hanging over the village well.”

He closed his eyes, voice breaking. “My cousin was there. A girl of sixteen. They left her too.”

Martí set his rifle across his lap, old wood slick where his hands had worn it smooth.

“Then we do what we said from the start. Fight. And if it’s these foreign jackals come to crush Catalonia, we kill them too.”

A cold voice interrupted from the darkness, Spanish thick with a heavy German accent, words distorted by the gas mask that drowned them out.

“Then perhaps you should have started by building a proper barricade, instead of sitting around a lantern ranting about ghosts in forests and mountains.”

They all jerked toward the sound. A figure stood there; dressed like a local, but with a rubber mask concealing his face, tinted amber lenses catching the lantern’s glow with a murderous gleam.

The red guerillas reached for their rifles but froze. They were surrounded, half a dozen more shadowy shapes emerging from the barn’s edges, weapons trained steadily.

The leader, Fritz, identified by the patch on his webbing, held up a cannister in one gloved hand, thumb on the pin.

He gave them a slow, almost courteous nod.

“Courtesy of the Fatherland. His Majesty, the Crown Prince of Tyrol, seldom blesses his enemies with this gas. Fear not. You’ll be dead before I finish this sentence; the fate of all Bolsheviks, I’m afraid…”

And he was right. He pulled the pin, tossed it lightly.

The canister bounced once, hissed, and belched a thick gray vapor that rolled low across the straw.

Fritz watched them try to scream, hands clawing at their throats, eyes bulging. Their bodies spasmed, tendons locking, as blood vessels burst in bright red trails.

By the time the smoke thinned, they were all collapsed, still gripping hidden pistols and grenades they’d meant to use the moment anyone tried to arrest them.

Fritz sighed, shaking his head.

” What a shame… the ose was too high. I couldn’t even finish my monologue.”

Beside him, Kurt’s eyes were hidden behind his own amber lenses, but his voice carried dry exasperation.

“You really ought to see someone, you know that?”

Before Fritz could retort, another mercenary lowered his rifle, voice edged with awe.

“Jesus… not three breaths passed before they were down. This isn’t sarin; or we’d be dead too. What the hell did we just use?”

Fritz kicked one corpse with a steel-toed boot, eliciting no twitch. His tone was almost casual.

“The boys back home call it Schwefelgeist. Type-S. As lethal as sarin, maybe more so, but it doesn’t soak through skin. You only die if you breathe it. Exceptional assassination tool. Designed for terrorists, brigands, gangsters, warlords… or dictators who’d rather go out shooting.”

Kurt glanced sideways at him, uneasy.

“They did surrender though…”

Fritz’s reply was cold and flat.

“On the surface. Check their waistbands; I’ll wager half your month’s pay they were reaching for something.”

And sure enough, knives, small revolvers, even crude bombs lay at the corpses’ sides.

Kurt fell silent, just watching.

He wondered, in some corner of his mind, if this was more merciful; to end men like this in one breath, than to fight running battles through villages and leave half the town in graves.

But such moral calculus was beyond a gun for hire like him. That was for priests, philosophers, or princes.

And the men of the Werwolf simply moved on, vanishing into the Catalan night to prepare for their next hunt.

A thick, lethal gas had suffocated many men on this night; but not a single innocent among them.

By the time the sun rose on the morrow, the poisonous miasma was gone.

The people awoke to a peaceful day once more, never knowing what had transpired while they slept.

Because these were not ordinary wolves who had found their way to Catalonia, Navarre, and Aragon.

This was a pack that specialized in covert operations, leaving not the slightest trace of their hunts behind.