“Compound Seven has been fully administered into his bloodstream. What do we do now?”

“We wait.”

A silence broke the two voices. After a moment, the first speaker tentatively asked, “Sir, is this such a good idea?”

Another silence, drastically more formidable than the first, informed the speaker that his question was a grave mistake.

“Wilkins, Wilkins.” Admonished the second speaker finally. “We have already established that I will accept no hesitation in this endeavor. At the next interval, double the dosage of Compound Seven.”

Wilkins’ mouth fell open. “Sir, that will kill him--“

Bang.

A gunshot echoed around the small, sterile laboratory, staining the floor with a thin trickle of Wilkins’ blood. As the man’s wide eyes stared up at his employer and murderer, Avery Snyte, the elder scientist pocketed the weapon and resumed his analysis of the test subject floating in the large, glass cylinder.

Wilkins’ head slumped, and the last sight of his thirty-nine year existence was the test subject slowly opening his eyes, the madness and hate within evident.

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Cradling his AK-101 assault rifle in the crook of his arm, ex-Spetsnaz mercenary Tyoma Vasiliev gazed out into the blizzard pounding the facility his company was contracted to guard. His men walked in front of him now and then, as part of their patrol routes, and he responded as Wolf 1 when the radio check-ins required.

But his instinct, honed by years of training and combat, rang out loud as a freight train. Something was definitely wrong here.

Everyday, stranger things happened in and around the laboratory cradled in the Italian Alps. It began with the men who entered the facility. Nothing wrong with that, Tyoma reasoned as he allowed them in. When they exited, however, was when his suspicions were aroused. For what they held between them was certainly not conventional stock for a laboratory.

They carried a bodybag.

It only got stranger from there. Every few days, more men came and escorted more “guests” off the premises. And the first time Tyoma heard the screams, the distant screams of pure agony and terror, flowing through the air vents and down to his ears, he knew something was amiss.

And the final, and most disturbing event, came the day before. When on Wolf 3’s check-in, he reported the gruesome finding of Wolf 8 half-buried beneath the snow at the bottom of a drainage canal. Claw marks adorned him, that seemed to slice through the Kevlar in his body armor like a wet tissue.

But a death in his business, gun or claw notwithstanding, was in the line of work. Tyoma honored him as a comrade and a friend, but the contract still stood.

Iron Wolf never gave in without a fight.

And they never lost.