Page 6 of Act of Brotherhood
Hans shivered. “To hell.”
With that, he stepped into the elevator and the rest of the men followed. The fact they all fit with room to spare said something about the size and capacity of the thing. They weren’t small men.
What did the dirtbag need with a secret elevator at all, let alone one that could fit four alpha males with ease?
Garth wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.
The farther down they descended, the more dread began to fill him. People didn’t bury things this deep in the earth unless they didn’t want others knowing about them. From the looks of it, this was something no one was meant to see.
Hans put a hand to the cold metal of the elevator wall and lowered his head. A pained cry came from him. As quickly as it had started, it ended, and he righted himself.
No one commented.
There were some things you just let a man have and didn’t talk about. Emotional outbursts were one of those.
The elevator came to a stop and the doors slid open. As Garth exited, confusion came over him.
To his right were five exam tables like one would find in a gynecologist’s office. The kind of tables that had stirrups to put one’s feet in. Although, he’d never seen stirrups come equipped with manacles. These did. His gut clenched. The exam tables were made to hold someone against their will.
“No,” he said in a hushed tone.
“Fuck,” returned Gram, his voice a whisper as well. “I do nae think any of us want to own this place now.”
Rurik stepped past them, staring around the room, his attention going to a wall lined with glass-front cabinets. In the cabinets appeared to be everything from medical tools and devices, to medicines of some sort or another. It was a one-stop shop for the weird, the wacky, and the medically creepy.
There was no mistaking the equipment in the giant room. It was for testing of some kind, and with the exam tables, Garth’s gut told him the testing had something to do with women and babies.
The entire thing was like something out of a horror movie and any minute now, Dr. Frankenstein might walk out with his assistant, ready and willing to commit acts that should not be spoken of, let alone committed.
Hans came to a stop next to Garth. Their shoulders touched. Garth knew Hans had demons in his past that shaped the man he was today. He knew that more than once when a fellow operative had referenced the word Nazi around Hans because he was German, and had indeed lived in Germany during the Nazi occupation, Hans had lost control of his typically even temper.
Garth also knew why.
Hans and his brother, like many others, had been subjected to horrific testing at the hands of Nazi doctors and scientists during World War II—prior to that, even. During a time when most people knew very little in regard to what was really going on in the name of science.
Most assumed eugenics and attempts to change men and women into something else started with the Nazis. That Hitler and his teams of twisted scientists were the first to commit heinous acts under the guise of science. They weren’t. In reality, it went back much further and had many more players than just the Nazis.
America had its own ugly history with it all, but it had done a far better job of burying that information and hiding it away from most textbooks.
The quest for superhumans and super soldiers was hardly new. There were people in the world who would stop at nothing to achieve them. The Nazis were some of the worst offenders by far. Garth had fought in both World Wars, and there were things from the second one that he would never be able to shake from his memory.
As he looked around at the large lab, he was instantly reminded of some of the testing facilities the Nazi’s had during World War II. History sugarcoated the full truth behind the breeding programs, reproduction experiments, and the torture in the name of research. The numbers of dead and the atrocities associated with the Nazi’s quest for racial hygiene had been far beyond what the history books spoke of. It was beyond what many historians even knew or thought they knew.
Garth had been part of a unit of men who had happened upon a number of Nazi testing locations. What he’d seen still haunted him, and those facilities greatly reminded him of the lab he was in now.
Humans who studied the time period in history were under the illusion that there were a set, known number of locations where programs and testing took place. That wasn’t the case. There were hundreds of secret locations, and they weren’t limited to Germany. While some were used for humans, the lion’s share of them were for supernatural creation and reproduction—for trying to interbreed various species.
And while history whispered of Ilya Ivanov’s attempts to create ape-army super soldiers through crossbreeding humans and apes, it didn’t speak of the actual success—or the fact that apes were not the only animals used in the testing. It also didn’t mention the success the Nazi’s achieved in manipulating the makeup of supernaturals and actually creating some from scratch. There was a whole lot of fucked up that the history books didn’t touch on.
Garth’s gut told him that the lab they were currently standing in had ties to it all. That it had something to do with breeding.
Monsters. Fucking monsters.
Garth knew men who had been subjected to the testing against their wills—some inflicted by the Nazis, and some done by governments no one would ever believe took part in it all. He knew men who had been forced to attempt to breed the natural way, no matter that neither participant was willing. He knew some who had been taken, held, experimented on, while also having their seed taken from them to be used later.
To this day, no one could account for where all the samples and test results from World War II had gone. The disbanding of the Nazi labs and testing sites should have closed all the doors, ended all the worry, but it hadn’t. It had opened Pandora’s box—freeing so many villains to go to ground, taking with them the majority of their research and results. In their wake, so many were left dead or damaged.
Hans and his brother Jannick were just one example of the broken left behind. The twins had been playthings for some of the worst scientists in the Reich. Dr. Mengele who was a scientist back then, often referred to as the Angel of Death, had a well-known hard-on for twins. They were the perfect subjects for his fucked-up tests. He could do as he pleased testing wise with one twin and use the other for a baseline of comparison. He could follow the test subjects through every stage of the testing from start to finish—making sure they died at the same time, so the autopsies could be done together.
