Free The Obscurati by Wynn Wagner

had in store for them. Hamlet was in charge of keeping the soldiers corralled in a clearing. They thought he was just one nelly little queer-boy. They were right, but he can also whup about a dozen soldiers in a second. After he dropped a couple of soldiers with his fists, the others became more compliant. That was a mistake, of course. Not that it would have done any good in the overall scheme of things, but they should not have tried to run away. By the time we had them standing still, we had a dozen Nazis. The soldiers had some vague idea that they were in trouble. The idea wouldn’t be vague much longer.
    All five vampires attacked. We took blood directly from their necks, which is usually a sign that the vampire doesn’t intend on letting the human live. Most of the soldiers tried to scatter and save their sorry asses, but Hamlet kept them lined up. (Note to self: do not cross the nelly vampire.)
    We were completely gorged on blood, so Oberon flashed up to the house and came back with several large empty bottles.
    We drained their blood into the bottles. Paco and I held one soldier by the feet while Oberon and Menz slashed their throats and got their blood spewing and draining into the bottles. Holding them by their feet made all the blood drain out. A human has about five liters of blood. Yes, we were hurting humans. They had hurt plenty of others and were cocky about it.
    The soldiers had looked so pleased with themselves when they found all the Jews and gypsies and gays in our basement. There’s something about a slit throat that wipes the smugness off a human face.
    We were set for blood for a long time. Menz had built a cage in the middle of a small creek that was fed by melting snow and ice from the mountains. The water in the creek was always cold, so we could keep the blood in the cage for quite a while. There were so many bottles: fifty or sixty liters. We kept some but sent several bottles to Switzerland, and they never asked where we got the blood, but vampires all over Europe were well fed for a few days.
    Tasty. Send me more Nazis. Deutschland über alles. NS-Blut über alles.
    The soldiers’ transportation was simple to hide: that second group came to the house on motorcycles with sidecars. That meant we had six motorcycles. I wanted to keep one, but Menz said that would just invite trouble. He told me that motorcycles have identification numbers etched into the frame and engine. I didn’t know that.
    Menz promised to get me a motorcycle after the war if the Russians didn’t confiscate all of them. Most of us could lift a train locomotive without any effort, so hauling up a few motorcycles was nothing. We just took them out a few hundred kilometers and dropped them near a mountain road. The German military probably thought the squadron of thugs had met their end because of a bizarre and fiery traffic accident. Bizarre: yes. Traffic accident: not so much.
    Sometimes we would get news that a train would be coming with guns and supplies, headed to the battle lines in Italy or off to the east. When we heard about it, mysterious things happened to the rails. Nobody ever really figured out what went wrong, but some of the spikes holding the rails disappeared, and the gap between the two rails was imperceptibly wider. We could pull out the spikes holding the rails to wooden cross-ties and pull one rail out just a little. Being strong as a vampire is handy. A train full of military hardware and explosives makes quite a flashy show when it derails. Oops.
    We always made sure that the “accidents” never happened at the same place, and it was never too close to Menz’s estate. I don’t think anybody ever knew. You know, but the statute of limitations has expired.
    What I’m saying is that we did our part during the war. I knew it was hard for the Germans to do things against their own country. Everything that happened in Germany started innocently, because we were punished brutally after the First World