German Lines, Near Aachen – May 10, 1940, 18:05 hours
Captain Ludwig Hoffman pressed his back against the splintered farmhouse wall. The rough wood caught on his torn uniform—still damp with the yellow fluid that had sprayed from Corporal Becker's mouth when the transformation began. He counted his breaths. One. Two. Three. The patrol would pass in precisely seventeen seconds if they maintained their pattern, the same mechanical precision that had marked every infected unit since Forward Base Siegfried fell.
Sweat slicked his palm, his grip trembling on the stolen Luger. Six bullets remaining. He'd counted them obsessively since fleeing Siegfried's compound, the same way he'd counted the seconds between Private Mueller's screams and the wet, rhythmic clicking that had replaced human speech. The mess hall had erupted in chaos—thirty-six hours ago now, though time had lost meaning when men he'd shared coffee with began moving with eerily synchronized movements, swarming the resistant like insects defending a hive.
His throat burned, parched from refusing water since yesterday's discovery of black tendrils writhing beneath a contaminated stream's surface. The headache should have been fever's herald—it had preceded the yellow eyes in every case he'd witnessed. Sergeant Klein, clutching his skull and screaming about whispers in dead languages before the tendrils erupted from his throat. Lieutenant Brenner, whose final coherent words had been a desperate warning about something stirring beneath the earth. Yet somehow, inexplicably, Hoffman's vision remained clear, sharp enough to track his pursuers' synchronized heartbeats through the wall.
Tick. Tick. Tick. His father's watch marked each second—the same timepiece that had counted seventeen minutes for Siegfried's mess hall to transform from breakfast service to charnel house. The luminous dial read 18:06. Darkness in two hours. The French border lay perhaps five kilometers southwest, if the spores drifting like ash from the burning base hadn't already seeded the countryside with infection.
"_Hauptmann_ Hoffman?" The voice belonged to Lieutenant Steiner, though the inflection was wrong—flat, mechanical, drained of the humanity that had once debated strategy over shared cigarettes. "We know you're here. Command wishes to speak with you."
Hoffman held his breath, remembering Steiner's transformation. The lieutenant had been examining a wounded soldier when the clicking began, had turned to Hoffman with that terrible, knowing smile just as thick tendrils emerged from the patient's chest cavity. Now Steiner's boots crunched on broken glass with the same measured cadence he'd once used for morning inspections, but the rhythm matched something that transcended human military precision.
"You've been exposed to classified information," Steiner continued, his voice carrying the same patient authority that had replaced individual will throughout Siegfried's final hours. "You require debriefing and... medical attention."
Through a crack in the boards, Hoffman watched the search party move—five men who'd eaten beside him in the mess hall, who'd shared stories of home and sweethearts before the wet sounds replaced conversation. Gas masks partially obscured their faces, but yellow fluid leaked from Steiner's eye slits, and beneath his shoulder, a dark tendril pulsed with deliberate rhythm.
Hoffman's hand found the document case strapped to his chest. Inside lay the evidence he'd gathered during Siegfried's collapse—orders to deploy infected units as vanguard forces, transcripts of communications between units that spoke in perfect unison, Dr. Ingrid Werner's photograph marking her as Subject Zero. The leather was worn smooth by thirty-six hours of desperate escape, softened by his own sweat and the ambient moisture that had begun seeping from infected surfaces throughout the base.
Radio static crackled—the same frequency that had carried Siegfried's final transmissions before human voices were overwhelmed entirely. "Steiner," a clipped voice demanded. "_Hauptsturmführer_ Brandt requests an immediate report. What is your status?"
Steiner's masked face tilted at an unnatural angle, listening to frequencies below human hearing—the same posture Hoffman had witnessed in the command bunker when Colonel Richter had begun receiving instructions from something that spoke through the ventilation system. "No sign of the target yet, Herr Hauptsturmführer. Continuing search pattern Delta. The area is secure."
"Be advised," the radio voice lowered conspiratorially, "Command confirms the target has stolen biological samples. He is to be contained, not eliminated. Repeat, Hoffman must be captured alive. Brandt out."
The vial in Hoffman's boot seemed to burn through the leather—extracted, not stolen, from Private Mueller's neck as the boy from Hamburg begged for a bullet instead of transformation. Mueller's final words echoed: "It's in the ground... everywhere... below the fortress line..." The same black substance that had seeped from every surface at Siegfried, transforming concrete corridors into something resembling organic architecture.
The patrol passed with footsteps that matched the rhythm of his nightmares—the synchronized marching that had replaced individual gaits, the sound of humanity subsumed into collective purpose. As their steps faded, Hoffman allowed himself a single breath, inhaling the scent of damp wood and decay overlaid with that faint sweetness he'd first noticed in Siegfried's ventilation system hours before the transformation began.
His watch read 18:11. Each second counted toward the darkness that had swallowed his understanding of warfare. The casualty reports—SS eyes only—had revealed the scope: three villages in the Bavarian test site, over two thousand civilians converted within days, buried in mass graves the reports described as "still active." The sun sank faster now, and he needed to move before the same darkness that had claimed Siegfried reached the French lines.
A sharp, metallic click froze him—not boots or weapons, but the chitinous scraping he'd heard against Siegfried's walls in those final hours. The same sound that had preceded every encounter with the things that had once been his men.
Hoffman raised the Luger. The farmhouse door inched open with the preternatural slowness he'd witnessed when Corporal Becker had turned from his breakfast, his face already beginning its terrible transformation. Each creak was a note in the symphony that had replaced human sound throughout Siegfried's compound.
"_Hauptmann_?" Steiner's voice, now layered with that wet, clicking undertone that had claimed every throat in the base. "You look unwell. Let me help you."
In the doorway stood what Lieutenant Steiner had become—the same systematic rewriting of human biology Hoffman had documented in his desperate notes. Gas mask torn, revealing a face where dark tendrils pulsed beneath waxy skin. Eyes that had once been clear Bavarian blue now glowed with milky luminescence. But the smile remained perfectly normal, unsettlingly sane—the expression Steiner had worn when discussing weekend leave just days before the excavation began.
"The others don't understand yet," Steiner said, the clicking a rhythmic accompaniment to words that carried inhuman patience. "But you will. It doesn't hurt. It... clarifies."
Behind him appeared the other four—men whose names Hoffman knew, whose families he'd met, whose transformation he'd witnessed with the helpless horror of watching his world dissolve. They moved with fluid coordination, segments of the single organism that had consumed individual will and replaced it with collective consciousness. No weapons drawn because they were the weapon, extensions of something that had waited for this moment.
"Projekt Siegfried isn't just a weapon," Steiner continued, black fluid seeping from beneath fingernails that had once been meticulously clean. "It's evolution. The next stage."
Hoffman's finger tightened on the trigger—the same gesture he'd made when Private Keller had reached for him with tendrils emerging from his palms. "Stay back."
Steiner lurched closer, his tendril-veined hand reaching with inexorable patience. "You think you're fleeing to safety, Captain?" His neck cracked audibly, head tilting at the impossible angle that marked transformation's final stage. "The rot is everywhere. Even in their great Line."
The clicking grew complex, and Hoffman felt the familiar pressure change—the same sensation that had preceded every hive mind communication, when the collective consciousness spoke through human throats. The temperature dropped a degree, just as it had in Siegfried's corridors when individual voices joined the greater harmony.
One of the soldiers convulsed, dropping to all fours with rapid clicks—the same sequence Hoffman had catalogued in his notes—before rising with movements fluid as oil on water. Hoffman flinched but held his fire, remembering how bullets had merely slowed the infected, never stopped them.
"Siegfried was just the beginning," Steiner resumed, yellow eyes fixed with predatory patience. "Both sides... such eager gardeners for the new world."
"I said stay back!" Hoffman's voice cracked with the desperate authority he'd used in Siegfried's final moments, when command structure had dissolved into chaos and clicking.
"You've already been exposed," Steiner said, inhaling deeply with systematic thoroughness. "At Siegfried. Everyone was. Your skin should be mottling by now. Your throat constricting, producing chitin. But the spores in your lungs are dormant, Captain. Waiting. You're fighting them somehow. That's why you're so valuable to us."
The sweetish-metallic odor intensified, carrying memory of Siegfried's transformation—the way breathing had become contamination, the way the very air had thickened with alien presence. "We need to know why you're immune. Just like the Werner woman. Just like the ones we can't convert."
Hoffman fired. The bullet struck Steiner between his luminous eyes—the same shot that had failed to stop Sergeant Klein. The lieutenant staggered, then straightened with impossible resilience. Black tendrils knitted the wound closed instantly, the same healing process that had made firearms useless against Siegfried's transformed garrison.
"That was unnecessary," Steiner said, the pleasant smile never wavering. "We share the same body now. The same will."
The other four rushed forward in perfect coordination, movements synchronized with the inhuman exactness that had overwhelmed Siegfried's defenses in less than an hour.
Hoffman dove through the window—shattered glass and rotted wood exploding around him. He hit the ground rolling, the maneuver drilled into him long before he'd learned that human tactics were useless against inhuman intelligence. Behind him, the five figures emerged as one entity, moving with the unnatural speed that had pursued him through thirty-six hours of nightmare.
The forest loomed ahead, its shadows hiding the same horrors that had transformed the Bavarian countryside into feeding grounds for something that had waited beneath the earth. Beyond it, the French lines—his only hope. His watch read 18:17. Darkness in less than two hours, the same darkness that had claimed everything he'd once believed about humanity's place in the universe.
The clicking grew louder behind him, accompanied by wet sounds of movement that had haunted his escape from the moment he'd fled Siegfried's compound. He had to reach the French, had to warn them about what was already festering within their fortress walls—the same rot that had consumed his base, his unit, his understanding of what it meant to be human.
Hoffman plunged into the treeline. Branches grasped like the tendrils that had emerged from his comrades' throats. Artillery shells began their mournful descent, screaming through twilight with the same inevitability that had marked every stage of the infection's spread. His lungs burned, but the fever that had claimed so many at Siegfried still hadn't appeared. Whatever kept the spores dormant within him might be the only key to stopping this escalating horror.
The German advance pressed forward, an unstoppable tide carrying infection toward a France that had no idea it was already seeded with the intelligence that had transformed Siegfried from fortress to hive. But Hoffman ran faster, driven by thirty-six hours of accumulated terror and the desperate hope that the vial in his boot and the files pressed against his chest might still matter.
Behind him, in the gathering darkness, the clicking grew fainter but did not cease. The entity was patient. It had waited for this moment. It could wait a few more hours for Captain Ludwig Hoffman and the secrets his immunity might unlock.