Spinnen

Nazi zombie fic. An American company fighting in the Ardennes find themselves pitted against a horrific experiment gone wrong and a monstrous populace, with the help of a young woman and and an injured German soldier.

Bernie is supposed to be odd. Bear with me. She's not a very good girlie-girl, and might have been better off in the 20's in Chicago. No well-behaved women ever made it into the history books, after all.

Also, Dead Snow made me giggle. Never tell emergency services that it's Nazi zombies. Wrote this because it seemed like a good idea at the time...a few months ago. Haha. Oh, the lulz. Look, this isn't meant to be deep, just entertaining. Shut up and read and tell me what you think, and please correct me if I get things too terribly inconceivable (i.e., if I get the technical details like references to the military wrong). I own the story and blah blah blah.

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Chapter 1 –

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The distant sound of a horse galloping broke the utter silence and haze that lay upon the Ardennes, as X Company advanced by morning light towards the little village of Vivy-sur-Or. Platoon Sergeant Frank Robinson, along with most of the men under his command, turned to look alertly in the direction whence the muffled thudding came.

The Nazis had put up a stiff, bloody resistance, but now they were in a lull; what in the name of the blessed Saints could this be?

“Shit,” somebody muttered. “Krauts?”

“We can't see a damn thing in this fog,” Withers muttered unhappily. He was limping a little from a bullet which grazed his calf, but was otherwise unhurt and it was unlikely to impede him. He was pretty lucky, considering how he'd gotten that little love-tap.

“Well, keep your pants on, he's heading straight for us; we'll find out soon enough,” Fromm replied, slipping his trigger finger into position.

Piercing through the snowy mists that enveloped the landscape that morning, a massive, black rider on an equally huge black horse took shape within the flat light that was punctuated by the dark scars of trees.

It was surreal and the men were momentarily transfixed by the strangeness. The horse bore down upon them, and for those who knew what to look for, it was immediately apparent that the rider was no expert. They were being tossed around in a way that looked rather painful.

“Spitz, get 'em down,” Robinson snapped suddenly, and the redheaded Private quickly moved to do just that. He shouted—“Halt!”—and when that didn't work, he fired over their heads. The horse spooked, a shrill shriek pierced the air, and both mount and rider crashed to the ground, though the load managed to roll off in time to avoid being crushed.

“Shit! Shit!”

The Americans froze; it was a woman's voice and a half-panicked one, and furthermore it was clear English. Spitz darted in and grabbed the horse's reins before it could bolt or accidentally stomp upon the speaker, and the rest watched the bundle convulse—suddenly, a pale, blond-haired woman in an olive shirt popped up, very dirty all over, who totally ignored them to rake amongst the blankets some more.

“Günther! Günther—Wie geht's!”

She dug a head out of the blankets and stared down at it intently. It looked terribly worse for the wear.

“Shit,” she cried again, helplessly. “Come on, man! Hang on, damn it!”

“Who are you? Hands where I can see them!” Robinson snapped, feeling enmity towards that man in the blanket, if he were a Nazi, and if this was some sort of trick...

This brought her out of her single-minded preoccupation, and her head slowly pivoted, until Robinson felt her greenish eyes take him in—and then, once she had seen him, she looked at everyone at once.

“Y'all are American?” she asked, a bit apprehensively. She had a flawless American accent herself.

“Yeah,” Robinson replied. “We're Americans. Who are you?”

She winced, and licked her lips against the chill.

“We came from Vivy-sur-Or.” She said it as if that meant everything, and there was no reason to elaborate. Her seriousness didn't mean anything, not to the American soldiers, except that Vivy-sur-Or was their objective, and though she observed their confusion keenly, she looked away from their questioning stares, and turned to the direction she had come from. “You're heading straight for it. Don't go there,” she said, with wearied candor. “There's nothing living left to shoot. Bypass it.”

“Sorry, sweetheart, orders are to take it,” Cobbs, one of Robinson's squad leaders, snapped.

She bristled faintly.

“Don't call me...no,” she said, a little flatly, “No, don't go to Vivy-sur-Or. Just bypass it. You can come back later and bomb it off the face of the Earth. It's a living hell.”

“Why's that?”

She blinked at him blankly.

“Everyone came down with something that made them go completely mad,” she said. “Everyone alike. We're the only two who escaped.”

“So he's not sick?” Everett asked, nodding at the unconscious Nazi laying supine in the snow.

“No, he's just injured.”

“What disease is it?”

The young woman shrugged, and looked worriedly at her companion.

“I don't know what it's called. Whatever it is, it's...bad. It's highly contagious. Really bad.”

“Really?” Robinson asked. “You don't look sick.”

“Well, the Black Death didn't kill off all of Europe, now, did it? It's a contact disease; it spreads by exchange of body fluids, which is made easier because—”

“So how did this son of a bitch end up in such a sorry state, but he isn't sick?” Cobbs asked.

“He was thrown into a wall and fell off a roof.”

They almost thought it was funny, how seriously she said that. He fell off a roof?

The German's eyes twitched, as if he sensed he was being spoken about, and they suddenly opened, accompanied by a shuddering sigh.

“Bernie? Was war das für ein Geräusch?”

“Die Amerikaner,” she replied. “Keine Sorge.”

He stiffened, especially when his vision drifted to Everett holding a gun above his head, but ultimately relaxed and shut his eyes again. It occurred to Robinson that he really wasn't fond of this foreign language stuff, especially when it came to people he was going to have to make a decision about.

“What did he say?”

“He just asked me what was going on.”

“So what did you say to him?”

“I said to not worry, it's the Americans,” she replied. “We left the town to surrender. So, we surrender. Take us to a POW camp, please.”

“So you are a Nazi?” Everett asked.

“No, I'm not,” she replied.

“Then a German.”

“No!”

“Then what are you surrendering for?”

“Well,” she said crossly. “What else am I supposed to do? You're pointing guns at me, too.”

“Are you working for the Allies, then?” Robinson asked. He was really losing patience with the woman, and they didn't have much time to spare.

She looked at them hostilely.

“I'm trying to help you!”

“Watch that mouth,” Robinson warned. “Is he able to walk?”

“We can set him on the horse,” she suggested. “He can walk, but he's got a badly sprained ankle, and his arm is busted. He'd be slow.”

“For falling off a roof he's lucky he didn't break both legs,” Cobbs said dryly.

“He fell into the river.”

“How far is it till we reach Vivy-sur-Or?” Robinson interrupted, as the woman bent down to take advantage of some loose blanket.

“It's just ahead; the village is at the bottom of the valley. Probably about a hundred feet away is the edge of the valley, and then there's half a football length of open field.”

The Platoon Sergeant thought about it a moment, and then ordered the man put on the horse sideways, like a saddlebag. The woman looked on unhappily as she reassured the half-conscious German that all was well—or at least, that's what she said she was doing. He didn't look all that convinced.

“He needs real medical attention,” she complained, as she led the horse, hugging herself to preserve what little warmth she could generate. Her clothes were too thin for this weather.

“Didn't you remember a jacket?” Cullen asked, sliding up beside her and staring at her with bright golden eyes. He was a cheerful guy from California, and fancied himself a lady's man.

“What is the obvious answer,” she retorted sulkily, in between blowing on her freezing fingers.

“Sorry,” he replied. “So where are you from?”

“Texas.”

This took them—she spoke quietly, but word traveled down the line—by surprise. Robinson, especially, turned to eye her, and he was pretty sure she was lying, if for no other reason than that she was so suspicious.

“You can't be from Texas.”

She looked at the golden-eyed young man and squinted.

“Aren't you the expert on the subject. Well, I am. I'm not German.”

“Everett's from Texas, too,” he effused. “He said he was from...Zavala, wasn't it? Know where that is?”

“I'm from Dallas. No.”

There was one other man there who was also from Dallas, who declared to his friend that there could be no way she was telling the truth—and by now they were just delving into denial. There was no way to really know the truth.

At this point their advance was met by a soft decline in the landscape, and an open field.

“This is the valley,” the woman said to Robinson, over her shoulder. She leaned in close to the horse for a little bit of warmth and petted its neck. The German muttered something and she replied: “Nein, du brauchst es mehr.”

Robinson's bright gray eyes narrowed, but he, and two squad leaders, moved to the rim of the valley and looked down. They could see a dim cluster of shadowy man-made structures in the distance that were very obviously Vivy-sur-Or.

The horse threw its head and snorted nervously, and fidgeted.

“The fog is clearing,” Sprat, another one of the squad leaders, said, sounding quite positive about it. His observation was correct; the town of Vivy-sur-Or was soon visible as the men dug in for an assault and the woman and the horse and the German were sent further back to company command to wait and get the German medical treatment before they could be further dealt with.