Part 1 – The Thing in the Tree Line

Grafenwöhr Training Area, Bavaria
Winter 2024

Staff Sergeant Jake Morris liked Germany a lot better from a coffee shop window than from the back of a Stryker.

The country was stupidly pretty—half-timbered houses, church steeples, fairy-tale castles perched on cliffs. Even the forests looked like something out of a storybook, dark and deep and ancient. When he’d first landed at Ramstein two years earlier and then bused down to Graf, he’d thought, Man, I could actually dig it here.

Then they’d taken him out to the woods at 0200 and made him low crawl through frozen mud while artillery boomed in the distance.

So, you know. Mixed feelings.

He sat on a busted plastic chair in the smoke pit outside the battalion barracks, breath ghosting in the cold. Snowflakes drifted down through the glow of a single yellow security light. A ring of other soldiers—E-4s, E-5s, a couple of butterbars who probably shouldn’t have been there—huddled around the space heater someone had “acquired” from a supply closet.

It was the usual pre-field ritual: coffee in paper cups, dip cans, cheap jokes. Phones were out, volume low, someone streaming a horror channel on YouTube.

On the screen, an animated logo faded: The Smoke Pit – Strange Stories from the Military.

Jake smirked. “We’re watching a smoke pit channel in a smoke pit,” he said. “Very meta, guys.”

“Shut up, Sarn’t,” Specialist Reyna said, eyes glued to the video. “This is the new one. All Germany stories. Dogmen, werewolves, whatever.”

“Dogman is just a tactical furry,” someone muttered.

Reyna kicked lightly at his boot.

On the phone, a narrator with a gravelly voice was talking about US bases in Germany, about how many troops were still here, about medieval castles and old folklore.

“…and if you ask the servicemen in these following stories,” the narrator said, “these German folktales aren’t just myths or legends.”

Jake took a drag off his cigarette and watched the light catch in the drifting snow.

He’d always been a history nerd. Most guys went to Prague or Amsterdam on four-day passes to drink and forget the Army existed. Jake did some of that, sure, but he’d also spent weekends poking around ruined abbeys, Roman walls, any castle he could get a ticket to. The Brothers Grimm had been German. So had half the monsters he’d been scared of as a kid.

Vampires, werewolves, witches in the woods.

The video rolled into its first story: a recon/sniper team at Grafenwöhr, night exercise, something pale in the tree line.

“Yo, this one’s our backyard,” Reyna said. “GTA, baby.”

Jake snorted. “Yeah, right. Some pogue in Kentucky made that up after his third Monster.”

“Swear to God, a guy in RSTA told it in the field last rotation,” Reyna said. “Said it came from a real team. Out by Range 301 or some shit. They were doing hide-and-seek with snipers and saw something on thermals that wasn’t supposed to be there.”

On the screen, the narrator read the anonymous soldier’s words. Night-vision goggles. Thermals flickering to life. The woods going hot on the display.

“…and I saw it. Something was there in the tree line. It looked human at first. Pale, gaunt, too skinny. Its limbs were long, almost exaggerated, and it had the unmistakable posture of something trying and failing to mimic being human…”

The pit went a little quieter.

The guys all knew the feel of thermals, the weird flat way humans glowed on the screen. You knew what a deer looked like, what a troop looked like under those ghost colors. The way the narrator described it—trying and failing to mimic being human—made Jake feel a little colder.

“Sounds like Air Cav on a Monday,” somebody joked, but the laugh was too loud, too forced.

The story kept going. The thing standing up, tall and hunched. Watching. Then bolting—too fast, inhumanly fast—into the woods. The team chasing. The growl.

Jake could almost feel it: boots slamming frozen leaves, breath in your ears, then that sound cutting the night off at the knees. He’d heard weird noises in the woods here—boar squeals, fox screams, stuff that made you want to lock your door and not Google anything.

“…part human, part beast,” the narrator read. “All malice.”

The anonymous soldier’s team had bailed out of the pursuit, realizing this wasn’t part of the exercise. Later they’d learned their supposed ‘opposition force’ was on the other side of the training area entirely.

Jake flicked ash into a water bottle, trying to look like he didn’t care.

“Why do you listen to this crap before going to the field?” he asked. “You’re gonna spook yourselves and ND into a bush.”

“Because we’re bored,” Reyna said. “Also, shut up. That’s not the only story out of Graf. My platoon sergeant swears he saw something white and skinny cross a firebreak one time. Said it moved like a spider on two legs.”

“Your platoon sergeant can’t walk a PT test,” Jake said. “His opinion is invalid.”

But he found himself thinking about the deep parts of the GTA, the dark pines and old concrete bunkers, the little German villages just over the wire. He thought about history layered under their live-fire ranges—Imperial German troops, Wehrmacht units, now Americans. A hundred years of soldiers tramping the same forest.

What else had been there, before any of them?

On the phone screen, the video wrapped up the pale crawler and segued into German werewolves.

“All right, enough,” Jake said, standing and stamping out his cigarette. “We got SP at 0500, gents. Pack your crap, check your NODs. Last thing I need is one of you crying to higher that a fairy tale ate your ruck.”

“Aw, Sarn’t, come on, there’s another one—”

“Bedtime, Specialist.”

They groaned and dispersed, shoulders hunched against the cold.

As Jake walked back toward the barracks, he glanced once toward the dark line of trees beyond the floodlights.

They looked back at him, unblinking.

He told himself it was just shadows.

---

Grafenwöhr Training Area
A week later

Three days in the box, and Graf felt less like a picturesque German forest and more like one of the lower circles of hell.

Snow had turned to slush and back to ice. Artillery rumbled day and night. Somewhere up the hill, a platoon of Bradleys was tearing up a stand of pines, their 25mm cannons coughing. Jake’s platoon had been playing OPFOR for the last twenty-four hours, freezing in camouflage while pretending to be Russians.

That night, he got tagged to augment a recon element for a simple training scenario: hide-and-seek, just like the video. One team set up a hide site. Another tried to find them.

He didn’t say anything when the route overlay looked suspiciously like the story Reyna had repeated—same general area, deep woods, narrow road.

“Spooked, Sarn’t?” Reyna whispered as they dismounted from the GMV and pulled security.

“Spooked I’m gonna catch frostbite,” Jake said. “Other than that, I’m great.”

They moved out in a staggered file down the narrow road, white light off, NODs clicked down. It was dead quiet, just the crunch of boots and the whisper of gear.

“Pace is good,” their recon NCO murmured. “Eyes up. Check tree lines.”

Jake’s world was shades of green. Trees, snow, fence posts. Every now and then, he flicked his monocular up to give his eye a break and immediately regretted it—naked darkness rushing in like a wave.

To pass the time, he quietly recited an old Latin phrase he’d picked up in some book: si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war.

Maybe if he’d been less distracted, he would have noticed the rustle sooner.

It started off to their right, somewhere beyond the ditch—subtle, like a deer moving. Then again, a little closer.

The point man held up a fist. The line froze.

“You hear that?” someone whispered.

“Probably a boar,” Jake said automatically.

“Thermals,” the recon NCO said quietly. “Check it.”

Jake flipped his NOD up and swung his thermal monocular up to his eye. The view flickered—black, white, then ghost-gray shapes emerging from the background.

Trees. Rocks. Cold ground.

And something else.

“There,” he said before he could stop himself. “Two o’clock, fifty meters. Behind that downed tree.”

For a moment, it looked human. Upright. Thin. Too thin. The heat signature was all wrong—too long in the limbs, the head slightly off. It was as if someone had taken a person’s outline and stretched it on a rack.

“It’s standing up,” another voice breathed over the squad net. “You see that? That… that a dude?”

A cold knot formed between Jake’s shoulders.

“Probably one of the snipers playing opfor,” he said. “Maybe they sent them early as a curveball.”

“Snipers don’t stand like that,” the recon NCO muttered. “They don’t stand at all if they can help it.”

“Hey!” Reyna hissed. “Look—”

The thing moved.

One moment it was leaning against the tree, hunched and motionless. The next, it turned and bolted into the woods.

He’d seen fast men before. Sprinters, athletes.

This was faster.

It crossed the thermal display in a blur, more like a smear of heat than a figure, vanishing behind trunks in seconds.

“Holy—” someone started.

“Move!” the recon NCO snapped. “We’re not losing whatever that is. Let’s go!”

They plunged off the road and into the trees.

Branches slapped Jake’s face. Snow exploded under his boots. He kept the thermal up, trying to catch another glimpse, but the world was a mess of hot-and-cold—their own bodies, tree trunks holding afternoon warmth, random heat spikes.

“Sergeant, I lost it!” Reyna panted. “I don’t see—”

The growl cut through the forest.

It didn’t sound like any animal Jake had ever heard. It was low, deep, like someone had taken a human voice and dragged it down a well, layered it with static and animal hate.

It hit him in the chest, in his teeth.

He stopped dead. So did everyone else.

“What the hell was that?” someone whispered.

“Back to the road,” the recon NCO said, voice suddenly very calm. “Now. That is not part of the exercise. Back to the road. Move, move.”

They didn’t argue.

Boots pounded. Gear clacked. No one talked.

Back on the gravel strip, Jake sucked in cold air, lungs burning.

“Could’ve been a boar,” he said weakly.

“Boar my ass,” Reyna said, eyes wide behind his goggles. “Wild pig doesn’t stand up like my ex-girlfriend and then outrun a truck.”

When they finally linked up with the “enemy” sniper team at ENDEX, the other guys shook their heads.

“We were on the other side of the area the whole time,” their team leader said. “Didn’t send any guys your way. Hell, we heard something screaming out there and decided to stay in our hide.”

Training was training. They turned in their blanks, thumbs scraped in weapon clearings, got graded on their movements. No one put “chased a pale nightmare” on the AAR.

That night, back in the barracks, Jake sat on his bunk with a towel around his shoulders, staring at his phone.

He pulled up YouTube, scrolled to The Smoke Pit channel, and found the “Pale Crawler in Grafenwöhr” episode.

The anonymous soldier’s story tracked a little too closely for comfort.

Jake shut the app and tossed the phone onto his pillow.

He told himself it was coincidence.

He didn’t sleep well.

---

Schwangau, Bavaria
A month later

Leave helped. It usually did.

Jake took a four-day and did the tourist thing—train rides, cheap hotels, more pretzels than any human should eat. He decided to scratch an item off his personal bucket list: Neuschwanstein Castle, the fairy-tale fortress built by Mad King Ludwig.

He ended up in Schwangau, a town straight out of a postcard. Snow on the rooftops, the Alps looming in the distance, the “fairy castle” glowing on its hill when the sun hit.

Instead of staying on post and drinking himself stupid, he booked a bunk in a small hostel on the edge of town. The place had a balcony that looked over a patch of woods and, beyond that, the dark stripe of the autobahn.

His hosts were a middle-aged German couple, Klaus and Anna. They were pleasantly amused by his terrible German and his sincere interest in something older than World War II.

“So many Americans, they only want to see the bunkers, the Hitler things,” Klaus said, handing him a beer his first night. “You ask about Roman walls. I like this.”

“What can I say?” Jake shrugged. “I got enough war at work.”

They sat on the balcony that evening, bundled in coats, beers sweating in the cold.

A thin layer of snow covered the little garden below. Beyond the fence, the trees of a small wood huddled together, dark against the twilight.

“So what brings you to Schwangau?” Klaus asked. “Aside from the castle.”

“History, mostly,” Jake said. “I’m kind of a nerd. I’ve been reading about medieval stuff, German folklore. Witches, wolves, creepy castles. When in Europe, right?”

He said it lightly, a throwaway line.

Klaus chuckled, but it wasn’t the amused sound from earlier.

“Well, we have plenty of that,” he said. “Monsters. Witches. Werewolves.”

He said the last word without a hint of irony.

Jake leaned back in his chair.

“Werewolves, huh?” he said. “You mean, like, actual local legends? Or just tourists with too much schnapps?”

Klaus took a long sip of his beer.

“This area,” he said slowly, “used to be three villages, not one town. Long time ago, fourteenth, fifteenth century. The records are… fuzzy, but the stories remain.”

He settled into the rhythm of a tale well told.

“One summer,” Klaus said, “before a harvest festival, a child came into the main village. She was covered in blood. She was from one of the outlying places. The villagers tried to help her, but she died. Before she died, she said a beast had destroyed her village.”

Jake listened, the hairs on his arms rising under his jacket.

“The men took their weapons and went to look,” Klaus continued. “On the way, they saw farms ruined. Cattle ripped apart. Houses torn open. It looked like wolves, but more brutal. The first village—everyone dead. The second village—same thing. No animals. No people. Only blood and silence.”

He paused.

“They went to the third village,” he said. “They thought maybe, maybe this one survived. It was not so. Dead everywhere. Except in the town hall.”

“Let me guess,” Jake said. “Something moved.”

“Yes,” Klaus said simply. “They heard something inside. They called out. They were answered with a howl.”

He mimed the sound, low and chilling.

“One man tried to force the door. The beast threw him back through it with such force he flew into the street. The others, terrified, did what terrified men do. They set the house on fire and watched it burn. Nothing came out. The thing inside died, or so they thought.”

The story hung between them, breath smoking in the cold.

“People really believe that happened?” Jake asked.

Klaus nodded.

“Not so many talk about it,” he said. “My oma told me when I was a boy. In these parts, you do not go into the woods alone at night. You do not speak of ‘der Werwolf’ lightly. To even mention him is bad luck.”

He gave Jake a sidelong look.

“And yet here we are, on the balcony, saying his name,” Klaus said. “I should not be telling you this. My wife will scold me.”

Jake smiled, but there was unease under it.

“I mean, it’s a hell of a story,” he said. “But yeah, it sounds like just… folklore. Like, heightened serial killer story or something. People back then didn’t have words for ‘psychopath.’ They saw mutilated animals and bodies and they thought ‘beast.’”

“Maybe,” Klaus said. “Maybe not.”

He lifted his beer.

“Anyway,” he said, “it is an old story. It keeps children from wandering where they should not go. That is what fairy tales are for, no?”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Guess so.”

He let his gaze drift back toward the little stand of trees beyond the yard.

Something moved.

At first, he thought it was just the wind. A darker patch among dark trunks.

Then it stepped out of the tree line into the moonlight.

Jake sat up straighter.

“Uh… Klaus?” he said slowly. “You see that?”

Klaus followed his gaze, and the color drained from his face.

The figure stood maybe thirty yards away, just at the edge of the host family’s property. It was tall—unnaturally so, seven or eight feet by Jake’s guess. The posture was wrong: half upright, half hunched, like something halfway between a man and an animal.

Its ears were what caught him: perched on top of its head, pointed, twitching like a dog’s as it sniffed the air.

“What the—” Jake started.

“Inside,” Klaus snapped. The jovial host was gone, replaced by something tight and urgent. “Now. Richard—Jake—inside. Sofort.”

Every instinct Jake had cultivated over years in the Army screamed at him not to turn his back on it.

He did anyway.

They stepped through the balcony door. Klaus slammed it, locked it, pulled the curtains shut with shaking hands.

Anna stuck her head out of the kitchen, frowning.

“Was ist los?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Klaus said too quickly. “Go inside, Anna. Stay away from the back windows.”

They killed the balcony light.

For a long minute, the three of them stood in the dim hallway, listening.

Nothing.

No scratching. No howling. Just the distant rush of a car on the autobahn and the ticking of the old clock in the living room.

Jake’s heart hammered.

“What did we just see?” he whispered.

Klaus swallowed.

“We will call the Polizei,” he said. “They will… check.”

Jake expected a patrol car, maybe two.

Instead, within twenty minutes, he watched from an upstairs window as multiple vehicles rolled up—marked police cars, an unmarked SUV. Men got out with rifles.

Jake squinted.

“Those are G36s,” he murmured. “Why do local cops have G36s?”

Their movements were… off. These weren’t sleepy small-town officers shaking doorknobs. They spread out around the property in a practiced pattern, checking corners, scanning the tree line, moving like people who did this for more than traffic stops.

They spent two, three hours combing the area. Flashlights probing the woods. At one point, Jake watched one of them stop, look down, then deliberately scuff snow and dirt over something on the ground with his boot.

“Covering tracks?” he said aloud.

“Probably,” Klaus said quietly at his shoulder.

“In Germany?” Jake asked. “Police covering up… what, exactly?”

Klaus didn’t answer.

Eventually, the officers reconsolidated, talked briefly to Klaus at the front door—rapid German, tight faces—then left.

“We will look around in the morning,” Klaus said, voice tired.

Jake lay awake most of the night, listening for howls that never came.

At first light, he and Klaus pulled on boots and walked out to the line of trees.

The cops had done a decent job. The snow was churned up in weird patterns, as if a five-year-old had tried to wipe a whiteboard clean with his hands.

Still, between two bushes, they found what the boots had missed.

It was a footprint.

Jake stood over it, breath steaming.

He wore an 11-wide in his combat boots. When he placed his foot next to the print, the toes of his boot lined up with the mid-heel of the impression. The print was wider on both sides, by a good half inch at least.

It wasn’t human.

It also wasn’t quite wolf.

If you’d taken a wolf’s paw print into PowerPoint, stretched it sideways beyond the rim of a coffee can, and pulled the toes out longer, you’d get something like what he was looking at. Deep claw marks gouged the snow at the tips.

“Jesus,” Jake said softly.

He took a photo with his phone before Klaus could tell him not to.

“Do the cops know… this is here?” he asked.

“They missed it,” Klaus said. “Or they will pretend they did.”

He looked toward the woods, face drawn.

“You see why people here prefer not to talk about such things,” he said. “To speak of it is… to invite it.”

Jake thought of the pale thing in the Grafenwöhr woods. The growl. The werewolf story, the villagers with torches and burning halls.

He thought of being a trained observer, of being told to report what you saw, not what you wanted to see.

He stared at the print.

“I know what I saw,” he said quietly.

Whether anyone else ever would—that was a different question.

---

On the train back to Grafenwöhr two days later, Jake scrolled through the photos on his phone.

The footprint. The treeline at night, blurred by a shaking hand. A selfie with the castle, grinning like a tourist.

Somewhere in his feed, an algorithm coughed up a link: “The Morbach Monster – Werewolf of Hahn Air Base.”

He clicked.

The video thumbnail showed a shrine in a forest, a candle burning behind glass.

The narrator’s voice floated up over the train’s soft clatter.

“According to the legend,” he said, “as long as the eternal flame at the shrine outside Morbach remained lit, the werewolf’s spirit would be kept at bay. But on one night in 1988, the flame went out…”

Jake turned up the volume, eyes narrowing.

He had the oddest sense that the stories he’d heard in the smoke pit, the thing he’d chased at Graf, the beast he’d seen by Klaus’s woods, and this “Morbach monster” were all pieces of a puzzle he was only just starting to see.

He didn’t know yet that his next field assignment would take him within shouting distance of Morbach.

Or that, before this deployment was over, he’d be standing by another perimeter fence, listening to something howl inside the wire.

But he would.

And whatever Germany’s old stories were, they weren’t done with him yet.

Part 2 – The Candle and the Fence

Hahn Region, Western Germany
Spring 2024

Jake hadn’t planned on spending any time near Hahn.

The old Cold War air base was one of those places that kept turning up in other people’s stories—Hahn, Morbach, the ammo dumps in the woods—but for most Army guys at Graf it was just a name on a map. The Air Force had used it, then scaled back. Bits of it had turned into a civilian airport, bits into storage, bits into the kind of vague “training area” that briefings mentioned and then never explained.

Then his battalion got the email.

SUBJ: JOINT EXERCISE – 173D ABCT / USAFE – HAHN REGION
TASK: Provide security platoon for temporary ammo storage site, vicinity Morbach
DURATION: 10 days

“Congrats, boys,” the battalion sergeant major said at formation. “You’re going on a fun road trip. Don’t crash the LMTVs and don’t piss off the Air Force.”

There’d been chuckles, moans, the usual.

When Reyna realized where they were going, he’d elbowed Jake hard.

“Yo,” he whispered. “Morbach. You know what’s out there, right?”

“Wind turbines and German retirees?” Jake said.

“The Morbach monster,” Reyna said. “Werewolf. Shrine in the woods. Candle. You ever watch that Hahn werewolf story?”

Jake had.

He’d watched it on the train back from Schwangau, thumb hovering over the pause button while the narrator described young airmen walking past an old shrine, daring a werewolf to show up because its “eternal flame” had burned out.

He’d listened to the part where the security police on night shift had found three dead deer with their guts ripped out and heard something howl inside the fence line.

He’d listened to “Sierra 7” talk about watching a huge shape jump over a nine-foot fence and lean against a tree, looking back at him through the NV scope.

He’d listened to the part about PRP—personnel reliability for nuclear duty—and how nobody wanted to be the guy who wrote “we saw a werewolf” in an official log.

It hadn’t hit as hard then.

It hit harder now, with orders in his pocket sending him within spitting distance of the place where that story supposedly happened.

“Morbach’s just a town,” Jake said. “And the Air Force tells the spookiest stories because they’re bored.”

“Uh-huh,” Reyna said. “And you just happened to see a big-eared dogman outside Schwangau for funsies.”

Jake glared at him.

“Shut up and load your ruck,” he said.

---

The temporary ammo site looked like any other Army attempt at improvisation: chain-link fence topped with concertina, a couple of semi-permanent structures dropped into a clearing like big green Legos, a gravel access road, a trailer that served as command post.

The forest around it was thick—dark evergreens and bare-branched hardwoods, dense enough that once you stepped fifty meters in, the world shrank to trees and snow and not much else.

“We’re calling this Site Echo,” the Air Force captain said during the joint briefing. He wore USAF blues that looked too crisp for the mud underfoot.

He pointed at the map.

“Ammo will be trucked in from Ramstein, staged here overnight, then flown out via rotary to wherever the hell the generals need it,” he said. “You Army folks are perimeter security. Think of this like a mini nuke surety site, except you’re actually allowed to admit it exists.”

A couple of the soldiers chuckled.

“We’ll have our own cops inside the inner fence,” the captain went on. “You’ll have patrols on the outer fence and in the woods. Call signs are assigned, ROE is standard for Germany: weapons loaded mag, no round chambered, don’t shoot any farmers. Any questions?”

A hand went up.

“Sir,” Reyna said, “are we near, like, any local shrines or anything?”

The captain blinked.

“Shrines,” he said.

“You know,” Reyna said, “tiny chapels in the woods, candles that mysteriously never go out, old ladies leaving flowers, possible werewolf seals, that kind of thing.”

A few soldiers snorted.

The captain looked like he regretted accepting joint training.

“There is a roadside memorial about three klicks west of here,” he said. “Little statue, candle. Local forest ranger light-checks it every few days. You are not to mess with it. That’s an order.” He pinned Reyna with a look. “You leave the Germans’ weird religious stuff alone and they’re more likely to leave us alone when we’re doing ours. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Reyna said. “I was just asking in case we needed to tie a goat to it or something.”

Jake elbowed him.

The captain sighed.

“Alpha Flight,” he said, shifting his attention to a knot of Air Force security forces, “you’ll be running inner patrols. Any canine elements will coordinate through you. Army guys, your platoon sergeant and our flight chief will deconflict routes. I want comms tight. No freelancing. If you see anything bigger than a fox inside the wire, you’re on the net.”

His gaze swept the room.

“I know some of you have heard stories about this area,” he said. “Shrines, monsters, yadda yadda. I’m not here to tell you what to believe. I am here to tell you not to take chances. Dump the ghost stories, keep the safety mindset. That’s how everyone goes home.”

Jake felt a hollow laugh somewhere in his chest.

Safety.

Right.

---

Two nights into the rotation, Jake drew the graveyard shift.

2330 to 0630. The hours nobody wanted—too late to go to sleep first, too early to feel like morning. The air had that thick, still quality that comes when snow is thinking about falling.

He was acting as the “site sergeant”—not a formal title, but the guy in charge of the Army side for that shift. The Air Force had their own counterpart, a staff sergeant with a buzz cut and a permanent squint named Simmons.

Alpha Control—their combined security trailer—sat inside the inner fence, a humming space heater, a radio rack, a big logbook on the table. Outside, patrols moved on foot or in Humvees around the perimeter.

Jake was flipping through the previous shift’s log entries, half-bored, half-alert, when the radio crackled.

“Echo 4 to Control,” a voice said. “We got something out by the southern fence. Over.”

Jake picked up the handset.

“Echo 4, this is Control,” he said. “Say again ‘something.’ Be specific.”

Static, then the voice came back, a little tighter.

“Control, Echo 4,” the soldier said. “We got three… uh… super dead deer inside the perimeter. Looks like something tore ‘em up. Over.”

Simmons raised an eyebrow.

“Copy, Echo 4,” Jake said. “We’ll come take a look. Stand by.”

He grabbed his helmet and his M4.

“Let’s go see Bambi,” he told Simmons.

They took a Humvee out—Simmons driving, Jake in the passenger seat. The southern fence was a hundred-meter stretch where the chain link bordered straight onto trees, no clear cut. The outer concertina coil had a shallow drift of snow on it, glittering under the starlight.

Echo 4 stood nearby—two of Jake’s guys, Garcia and Mendez, boots planted, weapons slung, both looking uneasy.

“Show me,” Jake said, climbing out.

Garcia led them ten meters into the trees.

The air smelled of iron.

Three deer lay in the snow.

They were small—roe deer, the kind you saw here, more like big dogs than the white-tails back home. All three had their throats ripped open. Two had their bellies torn wide, ribs exposed, hindquarters and internal organs half-eaten.

Jake had seen ugly things. War did that to you.

This looked worse somehow, maybe because it was so… intimate. No blast, no shrapnel. Just teeth and claws and blood.

“Boars?” Mendez asked, voice subdued.

“Boars usually go for the gut first,” Simmons said. “And they don’t usually hit three at once inside a fenced site. They’re opportunists, not serial killers.”

“You got wolves out here?” Jake asked.

Simmons shrugged.

“Forestmeister says there are a few,” he said. “Protected species. They normally keep their distance.”

Jake squatted, examining the tracks around the carcasses.

They were already churned by the deer’s movement and the patrol’s boots, but here and there, he saw impressions—big, wide paw prints, deeper than any fox or dog would make.

He stood up.

“Call the German ranger,” he said. “We’re going to need him to haul these out and tell us ‘nothing to see here.’”

Simmons shot him a look.

“Dark sense of humor, Sarge,” he said. But he keyed his radio and called Base Ops anyway.

They headed back to Control.

Jake was halfway through scribbling an initial note in the logbook when the night split open with sound.

It started low, like the beginning of a distant train rumble. Then it rose, deepened, turned into something between a growl and a howl that rattled the windows.

It sounded like it was coming from inside the perimeter.

Jake froze with the pen halfway across the page.

Simmons stared at the ceiling, then grabbed the radio.

“All callsigns, this is Control,” he snapped. “Sound off. Did you hear that? Over.”

“Echo 1, roger, we heard it. Sounded close.”

“Echo 2, same.”

“Echo 4, Jesus Christ, yeah, we heard it,” Garcia said. “Sounded like it was right on top of us.”

Jake snatched the handset from Simmons.

“Anybody got canine patrols in this sector?” he asked. “Over.”

“Negative,” came the reply from the entry control point. “K-9 is still en route from base. And they heard it too. Over.”

There was a pause, then a different voice, pitched half-joking, cut in.

“Control, this is Echo 3,” Reyna said. “You uh… you guys think maybe that’s the werewolf?”

There were a couple of strained chuckles, quickly cut off.

The howl came again.

This time, it sounded closer. And pissed.

If the first one had been a warning shot, this was a direct challenge.

Jake felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

“Echo elements,” he said into the net, forcing his voice steady, “treat this as an unknown animal inside the perimeter. Maintain your patrols. Report any visual contact. Weapons remain on safe. No firing unless you or someone else is directly threatened. We are not turning this into a poaching incident on German soil. Over.”

He hung up and looked at Simmons.

“Call Base Ops back,” he said. “Tell them we have a breach by an animal. Big one. Make sure they know it’s inside the fence.”

Simmons nodded, dialing.

Jake stepped out of the trailer.

The night felt thicker now, like the air itself was listening.

Snow crunched under his boots as he walked the short distance to the inner fence line. Beyond, he could see the darker line of the outer fence, the woods beyond that. The area lights were off, at his patrol leaders’ request—bright floodlights cast bad shadows and wrecked your night vision. They relied on NVGs and thermal scopes instead.

He scanned the darkness, subconsciously counting heartbeats.

Another howl rose, from somewhere toward the center of the site.

He heard shouting over the net.

“Echo 2, we got something moving near Storage Bravo!”

“We’re in pursuit, southbound!”

Jake swore under his breath.

“Echo 2, Echo 2, this is Control,” he said into the radio. “Do not pursue blindly. Stay in pairs. Keep us updated. Over.”

“Control, Echo 2, roger, but this thing is—” The rest was swallowed by static and wind.

A minute later, another call came.

“Entry Control, this is Control,” Jake said. “Status of K-9?”

“K-9 just arrived at main gate,” the SP on duty replied. “Dispatching to your sector now.”

Jake nodded to himself.

“Good,” he muttered. “If this is a big stray dog, at least we’ll have something it’s scared of.”

He grabbed one of his foot patrols, Spc. Ortiz and PFC Lambert, as they passed.

“We’re going to the south fence line,” he said. “If it tries to bail, I want eyes there.”

They jogged through the cold, breath fogging.

When they reached the fence, he posted Lambert by the line.

“You,” he said, “stay low, stay behind that berm, and keep your eyes on the tree line. Don’t go hero. If you see anything bigger than a raccoon, you yell. Got it?”

“Yes, sergeant,” Lambert said, eyes wide but steady.

Jake and Ortiz moved up to a small rise that gave them a better overview.

Behind them, the site looked almost calm—structures looming, small points of light in windows, a generator’s distant hum. In front of them, the world was slippery darkness.

The radio crackled with overlapping transmissions.

“Echo 1 to Control, we lost visual. I repeat, we lost—”

“Echo 3, it’s moving fast, heading west toward—”

“Canine, this is Control, reroute to—”

Then—screaming.

High, raw, a man’s voice breaking.

Jake swung his M4 around instinctively.

“Lambert?” he barked, adrenaline spiking.

He turned just in time to see something huge clear the fence.

It came from Lambert’s position, a blur of motion that vaulted the nine-foot chain link topped with razor wire like it was a speed bump. For a split second, it was caught in the spill of a distant floodlight.

Dark. Massive. Four limbs that looked like they could be either legs or arms, depending on its mood. A head that seemed too long, ears high and back.

Then it crashed down on the far side, snow exploding under it, and vanished into the treeline.

“Jesus Christ,” Ortiz breathed.

“Lambert!” Jake shouted, scrambling down the hill.

Lambert was on his back in the snow, eyes huge, chest heaving.

“You okay?” Jake demanded, dropping to a knee beside him.

“I’m fine,” Lambert gasped. “I’m fine. It just… it just jumped right over, sergeant. I turned and it was—”

He gestured helplessly.

Jake squeezed his shoulder.

“Breathe,” he said. “You’re good. You did exactly what I told you. You yelled.”

In Jake’s ear, the net buzzed.

“Control, this is Echo 2,” someone was saying. “We’re repositioning. Whatever this is, it’s heading toward the south fence—”

“Already got eyes on,” Jake cut in. “It just went over. All units, be advised, unknown animal has jumped the outer fence and is now outside the perimeter, south sector. Control, have lights turned on my sector, then off again in ten seconds. I need a quick look.”

Simmons’s voice came back.

“Copy, Echo,” he said. “Lights on in three, two, one…”

Floodlights snapped on.

The world went white-hard.

Jake and Ortiz both flinched, squinting as their night vision got nuked. For a second, the fence line and the first rank of trees were stark, colorless shapes.

Nothing moved.

“Lights off,” Jake said. “Lights off.”

Dark rushed back in, bringing stars and afterimages.

He lifted his rifle, flipped the NV monocular back down, and scanned.

At first, he saw nothing but grainy shapes.

Then, at two o’clock, maybe 200 meters out, he saw it.

It was leaning against a tree.

Not like an animal resting. Like a person. Upright, shoulders hunched, one arm—forelimb?—bent back against the trunk. It was tall enough that its head nearly touched a branch that Jake knew from walking the fence line was a good seven feet up.

In the green glow of the NODs, it was a deep, solid mass—no reflective patches, no gear, no obvious clothing. Just dark heat against darker bark.

And it was looking at them.

Jake knew on some rational level that NV couldn’t show him “eyes” the way movies did. But he felt the stare all the same, a prickle across his skin.

He keyed his mic without looking away.

“Echo elements, this is Echo Actual,” he said quietly. “Unknown contact at my two o’clock, 200 meters, just beyond the south fence, stationary. All units hold your fire. Repeat, HOLD FIRE. Ortiz, you see it?”

“Yeah,” Ortiz whispered. “Yeah, I see it. It’s—what the hell is that, sergeant?”

Jake didn’t answer.

He watched the thing.

It didn’t move right away. It just… existed. A wrong-shaped gap in the night.

Then, as if bored, it shifted. Turned. Melted into the deeper darkness of the trees.

One second it was there.

The next, it wasn’t.

He lowered his rifle slowly.

“Control,” he said into the radio, forcing his voice to steady, “contact has moved off. Appears to have left the immediate perimeter area. Maintain patrols. No one goes outside the fence until dawn. I say again, NO ONE goes outside the fence until daylight. Over.”

Simmons hesitated.

“Copy, Echo Actual,” he said. “K-9 is on scene at the fence. Dog’s not… reacting well. Handler says he’s refusing to go near the area. Over.”

Jake closed his eyes briefly.

“Roger,” he said. “Keep him inside. No point spooking him more. We’ll debrief all this at 0400.”

He turned to Lambert and Ortiz.

“Back to the trailer,” he said. “We’re regrouping.”

---

The next few hours felt both endless and weirdly compressed.

Patrols went back to their routes, jumpy but professional. The forestmeister showed up around 0230—a wiry, middle-aged man in a green jacket and hat, eyes sharp. Jake escorted him out to the deer.

The ranger examined the carcasses in silence, taking photos, jotting notes. He had the smell of someone who’d spent most of his life outdoors—pine, tobacco, something like old leather.

“Boar?” Jake asked, more for form than because he believed it.

“Nein,” the man said. “Not boar. Teeth marks are wrong. Claw marks too deep. Wolves, maybe. But…”

He trailed off.

“But?” Jake prompted.

The forestmeister shrugged.

“Wolves here are usually shy,” he said. “And they wound, then follow. They do not usually kill so clean and then eat so… quickly. This is… unusual.”

“Could they jump a fence?” Jake asked. “Nine feet, razor wire?”

The ranger lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug, half-shiver.

“This one could,” he said dryly.

He laughed once, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

By 0400, Jake had all his patrol leaders back in the Control trailer drinking bad coffee and looking like they’d aged ten years.

“All right,” he said. “We’re going to write this up. We’re going to be honest, but we’re not going to be stupid. Understood?”

They nodded.

“Here’s what’s non-negotiable truth,” he said. “We found three deer inside the perimeter, throats torn, partially eaten. We heard an unknown animal vocalization inside the fence line. We saw a large, wolf-like creature jump the fence. The forest ranger says it’s consistent with a wolf attack, but unusual.”

He paused.

“What we are NOT going to do,” he went on, “is use the word ‘werewolf’ in anything official. We’re not going to say ‘dogman,’ ‘monster,’ ‘Morbach whatever.’ That stays in this trailer. Because if we put that in a report, higher’s first question isn’t going to be ‘how tall was it,’ it’s going to be ‘what were you smoking.’”

Reyna shifted in his folding chair.

“What about… you know, nuclear surety stuff?” he asked. “PRP? That Air Force story—”

Simmons nodded grimly.

“If we say we saw creepy cryptids on duty around ammo,” he said, “some O-6 at Ramstein is going to pull our certs and send us to piss in cups. I got a baby on the way. I am not losing my PRP over a ghost story that happens to be true.”

They chuckled a little at that—nervous, but bonding.

Jake took a deep breath.

“We do owe each other the truth, though,” he said. “So, off the record: you write down what you saw, in your own words, and we keep those copies for ourselves. If you want to keep a journal, do it. If you want to tell this story someday, tell it. But the official log will say an unknown wild animal, probably a wolf, breached the perimeter, killed three deer, and departed. The German authorities were notified. End of story.”

Ortiz raised a hand halfway.

“So… we’re lying?” he asked.

“We’re… editing,” Jake said. “We’re choosing which part of the truth we want the bureaucracy to chew on. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last.”

He met their eyes, one by one.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t know what that thing was. Big wolf, freak mutant, leftover Nazi science experiment, whatever. I know this: it was real. We all heard it. Some of us saw it. We’re not crazy. But if we try to make the institution accept that reality, the institution will do what it always does when reality is inconvenient: punish the messenger.”

He shrugged.

“We still did our job,” he said. “We secured the site. Nobody died. Ammo didn’t grow legs and walk off. Sometimes, that’s all the Army cares about.”

They finished their coffee in silence.

When dawn finally seeped into the forest, the world felt less haunted.

Sort of.

---

The following afternoon, after sleep and chow and too much thinking, Jake found himself on the bus headed back toward main post. They passed through a stretch of road lined with trees. On the right, tucked into the brush, a small shrine flashed by—a stone Virgin Mary behind glass, a metal stand with a candle.

“Driver, stop,” Jake said suddenly.

The driver, a bored German contractor who’d thought he’d done his time with American soldiers, sighed and eased the bus onto the shoulder.

“What now?” he asked.

Jake stood, grabbed his patrol cap, and stepped down.

“If he gets us killed by some Bavarian witch,” Reyna muttered, “I’m haunting his kids.”

Jake walked up to the little shrine.

The candle inside was burning.

He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

He thought of the Morbach story. Of drunk airmen mocking the shrine when its eternal flame went out. Of that night’s patrol, chasing a howling thing over a fence.

“Not taking any chances, huh?” Simmons had said earlier, when they’d rolled past it the first time in a Humvee and Jake had insisted on checking.

He reached out, palm flat against the cold stone of the shrine’s base.

“Whoever you are,” he murmured, “Madonna, forest spirit, weird German folk magic… keep your day job.”

He stepped back, gave the Virgin Mary a half-sheepish salute, and headed for the bus.

“Candle’s lit,” he told Reyna as he climbed back on.

Reyna gave him a look.

“You believe that stuff now?” he asked.

Jake thought of the Grafenwöhr crawler, of Klaus’s balcony, of the thing at the fence.

“I believe in not being an idiot,” he said. “Minimum, leaving that candle alone doesn’t hurt. Maximum, it keeps us from being on some YouTube channel in thirty years.”

Reyna considered that.

“Fair,” he said. “Very fair.”

The bus pulled away, engine rumbling.

In the side mirror, the shrine receded, candle flickering against the gray.

Jake leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.

If anyone had told him when he enlisted that he’d be factoring folklore into his risk assessments, he’d have laughed. Hard.

Now, he wasn’t so sure laughter was the right response.

---

That evening, back at Graf, he sat in the smoke pit again, phone in hand.

The guys were trading stories, bragging about how a “wolf the size of a truck” had jumped the fence. The details had already started to warp into legend.

“Had to be, like, ten feet tall,” Garcia said. “Glowing red eyes, chainsaws for teeth.”

“Bro, it was maybe wolf plus one,” Ortiz said. “No chainsaws. Just a whole lot of nope.”

Jake pulled up the Smoke Pit channel and scrolled.

He found the Morbach monster episode.

He listened again to “Sierra 7” describe the night in 1988—the deer, the howl, the fence, the thing leaning against the tree.

He noticed little differences. Details that time and retelling had blurred. The location names. The exact weapons. The model of NV scope.

But the bones of it were the same.

He looked up at the guys.

“You know what freaks me out?” he said quietly.

“What’s that, Sarn’t?” Reyna asked.

“That story,” Jake said, nodding at his phone. “Thirty-five years ago. Different base, different war, different generation. And we just lived a remix of it.”

They were quiet a moment.

“You think it’s the same… thing?” Ortiz asked.

“Maybe,” Jake said. “Maybe it’s a population. Maybe it’s a story that gets retold every time some soldier hears a fox scream and needs to explain it.”

He shrugged.

“Does it matter?” he asked. “We saw what we saw.”

Reyna shivered and zipped his jacket up higher.

“You ever think we’re walking around in some old fairy tale and don’t realize it?” he asked. “Like we’re the peasants in the Brothers Grimm stories, but with night vision and M4s instead of torches and pitchforks?”

Jake thought of Klaus’s werewolf story. Of Peter Stump and Thomas Schweitzer and villagers who’d called brutal killers “beasts” because they didn’t have the language for “serial murderer.”

He thought of Jake’s fiancée, the criminal psychology nerd, pointing out how people had once turned human monsters into literal monsters… and how that didn’t explain everything.

He looked into the dark beyond the smoke pit lights, at the forest that ringed Grafenwöhr like a jagged black wall.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, I do.”

He took a slow drag off his cigarette.

“But you know what?” he added. “Fairy tales aren’t just about monsters. They’re about people getting through them.”

The guys snorted.

“Leave it to you to make a horror story motivational, Sarn’t,” Reyna said.

Jake held up his phone, the Morbach video thumbnail glowing on the screen.

“Look at it this way,” he said. “One day, some poor bastard in 2050 is going to be sitting in a smoke pit at Graf, listening to a video about ‘Over the Fence – the 2024 Morbach Incident,’ and making fun of us.”

“And then something will howl,” Ortiz said.

“And then it’ll be his problem,” Jake finished, grinning.

They all laughed.

The sound carried out into the dark, thin and bright against the night.

Somewhere beyond the wire, deep in the German woods, something moved between the trees.

It paused, ears pricking at the echo of human voices, then slipped deeper into the forest, leaving only tracks that would melt with the morning.

Part 3 – Teeth in the Story

Summer 2024
Grafenwöhr, Bavaria

The forest looked different in summer.

It shouldn’t have—not really. Trees were trees. The same pines, the same old bunkers hidden under vines, the same muddy tracks now packed and dusty. But after Hahn, after Morbach, after seeing something sail over a fence like it was nothing, Jake couldn’t look at a German tree line the way he used to.

He still did his job. Patrols, inventories, training schedules. Soldiers didn’t get to say “sorry sir, the woods give me the creeps” when there were ranges to run.

But he noticed things now.

Tracks where none should be.

Little roadside shrines tucked into the undergrowth.

How quietly the German civilians stepped around certain topics.

“One more pale-crawler video and I’m sleeping with a crucifix,” Reyna muttered one evening, flopping onto a plastic chair in the smoke pit.

“Careful,” Ortiz said. “You’ll poke your eye out.”

Jake sat with his coffee, watching a new batch of FNGs—jeeps, as the old heads still called them—cluster around a phone.

“…and then the villagers cut off his head and put a stake through his heart,” the narrator on the screen was saying. “They buried him under a crossroads near Morbach, and built a shrine to the Virgin Mary over the grave. As long as the candle burned, they believed his werewolf spirit would stay trapped…”

The title read: “The Morbach Monster – Modern Werewolf in Germany?”

“See?” Reyna said, jabbing Ortiz with his elbow. “Told you I didn’t make that up. 1812 French deserter turns into a werewolf, gets cursed by some farmer’s wife, goes on a murder spree. German villagers roll up with silver and Catholic guilt. Boom. Morbach.”

“Pretty sure the evil part was the murdering,” Ortiz said. “Not the Catholic part.”

Jake listened absently as the video wandered into criminal psychology.

“… some historians suggest that Thomas Schweitzer was less a supernatural monster and more a proto–serial killer. People in the early 1800s didn’t have a concept of ‘serial murder’ as we do today. Faced with mutilated bodies and animalistic brutality, they may have rationalized it as the work of a beast—or a man cursed to become one…”

“That’s what my fiancée said,” their writer chuckled in the after-action credits. “That stories like this might be proto–true-crime tales, made digestible as monsters.”

The narrator shifted to Peter Stump, the “Werewolf of Bedburg” in the 1500s. Torture, confessions, black magic belts, cannibalism. The burning. The political angle—Catholics vs Protestants, scapegoats.

Our monsters, Jake thought, looking around at the listening faces, change costumes. The teeth stay.

He stood up.

“All right, horror hour’s over,” he said. “We got squad live fire at 0600. Hydrate, check your NODs, and don’t blame ‘the Morbach monster’ if you ND into your own boot.”

The jeeps groaned but dispersed.

When they were gone, Reyna stayed.

“You believe that theory?” he asked. “Serial killers instead of werewolves? That Schweitzer guy was just a psycho with a knife and people couldn’t handle it?”

Jake thought of the footprint behind Klaus’s house. Of the thing at the fence. Of the pale shape at Graf.

“Sometimes,” he said. “Sometimes a monster in a story is just what happens when regular humans are too scared to admit regular humans can be that evil.”

“And the other times?” Ortiz asked.

Jake took a sip of coffee.

“The other times,” he said, “I keep my candle count up and my mags loaded.”

They laughed, but there was an edge to it now.

Nuremberg
Month later

He met her at a museum, which felt, in retrospect, exactly right.

The 173rd had gotten a weekend pass, and Jake had hopped a train to Nuremberg to wander through Roman ruins and old churches instead of sitting in the barracks playing Call of Duty.

He was in front of a glass case displaying a thin, yellowed pamphlet from 1590 when someone behind him said, in lightly accented English:

“You picked the most cheerful exhibit.”

He turned.

She was maybe late twenties, dark hair pulled back, glasses, a messenger bag slung across one shoulder. The name tag on her lanyard said Lena Voss – Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Visiting Researcher).

Jake gestured at the pamphlet.

“What can I say?” he said. “I like my history with a side of horrific crimes and religious hysteria.”

The display placard read: “Peter Stump, the Werewolf of Bedburg – 1590 pamphlet, English edition.”

Lena smiled faintly.

“It is one of our greatest hits,” she said. “Murder, cannibalism, incest, witchcraft, the devil giving out magic belts… the sixteenth-century version of a Netflix true-crime series.”

“You do this for a living?” Jake asked.

She nodded.

“I’m writing my dissertation on early modern criminal cases and how they turn into folklore,” she said. “Especially werewolf trials. Peter Stump is… not a nice man to spend a lot of time with in the archives.”

“Army,” he said, jerking his thumb at his jacket. “Jake.”

“Lena,” she said. “You stationed nearby?”

“Grafenwöhr,” he said. “Mostly tanks and mud. Sometimes pale crawlers.”

She tilted her head.

“Pale… crawlers?” she repeated.

He chuckled.

“Long story,” he said.

They ended up grabbing coffee in the museum cafe. Then beer at a nearby pub. Talking came weirdly easy—maybe because her research dug into stories he’d been swimming in for months.

“So you think Stump was just a psycho?” Jake asked at one point. “Killed people, blamed the devil, got turned into a werewolf in the public imagination afterward?”

“‘Just’ is doing a lot of work there,” Lena said. “But yes. He confessed to terrible crimes under torture. The werewolf angle may have been added to make his execution a moral spectacle—to purge the community, to send a message in the middle of religious war. Or maybe he really believed he had a belt from the devil. Either way, we don’t need literal fur and fangs to explain his behavior.”

She frowned thoughtfully.

“What interests me,” she went on, “is how those stories then get recycled. People in the nineteenth century telling each other about ‘the werewolf of Bedburg,’ turning him into something supernatural because ‘serial killer’ as a clinical category didn’t exist yet. Now we have the reverse—we have serial killer as a category, and some people want to re-mythologize everything as cryptids and dogmen.”

Jake stirred his beer.

“What about when there is something out there that doesn’t fit either category?” he asked.

She raised an eyebrow.

“Like?” she said.

He hesitated.

“You ever been near Morbach?” he asked.

Her eyes flicked up, sharp.

“The shrine?” she asked. “The candle?”

He felt a small chill.

“Yeah,” he said. “You know it?”

She nodded.

“It’s in some of the local oral histories,” she said. “The Schweitzer legend. French deserter in 1812, curse, werewolf, rampage, decapitation, eternal flame to keep his spirit bound. Most historians I know think Schweitzer, if he existed, was a very nasty man who killed people, and the werewolf curse is an overlay. But the shrine is real. So are… stories.”

She watched him.

“Have you seen it?” she asked.

“I’ve seen the shrine,” he said. “And the candle. And something else close enough to it that I’m not ready to call coincidence.”

He told her, in careful strokes, about Hahn. The deer. The howl. The fence. The thing by the tree.

He left out certain details. Other soldiers’ names, unit designations. But the bones of it were there.

She listened, face serious.

“When was this?” she asked.

“This year,” he said. “Which matches… a lot of older stories I’ve heard, right down to the poor bastard in K-9 whose dog refused to leave the truck.”

She tapped the rim of her glass.

“I’ve read accounts on old forums,” she said. “1980s security police, same base, same general setup. No verification, of course. Anonymity is a curse for historians. But the details are… consistent. Three dead deer. Something jumping a nine-foot fence. Night vision. A shrugging forestmeister who says ‘this one could.’”

She gave him a sideways look.

“Do you think what you saw was the same thing they saw?” she asked.

He thought about it.

“I think whatever it is,” he said, “doesn’t care about our timelines.”

They walked out into the evening together, city lights reflecting off wet cobblestones.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You’re going to tell me about the pale crawler next.”

He laughed.

“Have you got all day?” he asked.

Two weeks later
Grafenwöhr

The exercise that closed Jake’s German chapter was supposed to be routine.

Final FTX before redeployment. One last run through the motions. Night defenses, patrols, OPFOR, the usual. After that, they’d start packing connexes and arguing with customs.

On their last night in the box, his company was assigned security for a mock depot deep in the forest. The setup looked like a dozen others he’d seen—tents, conexes, pallets, a perimeter of wire and sensors.

It also, uncomfortably, felt like a less important cousin of Site Echo.

“Full circle,” Reyna said, adjusting his NVG mount. “One more dark fence line to walk, one more German tree line to stare at regretfully. Going to miss this.”

“Liar,” Ortiz said.

They moved out.

The pines loomed tall and black, the spaces between their trunks filled with layers of shadow. The air was still, heavy with summer humidity and the scent of sap.

Jake walked the perimeter with his squad leaders, checking claymore positions, confirming challenge-and-password, making sure nobody had decided to “be creative” with their sectors of fire.

Halfway through, his radio crackled on the platoon net.

“1-6, this is 1-3,” one of his team leaders said quietly. “You might want to get eyes on my sector. Over.”

“1-3, this is 1-6,” Jake replied. “What’s your problem, over?”

“Probably nothing, over,” the team leader said. “Just… getting a little déjà vu. Over.”

Jake’s stomach did a slow, thoughtful flip.

“On my way,” he said.

He and Reyna cut across the interior.

“Bet you five euros it’s a fox,” Reyna said. “Bet you ten it’s not.”

“Shut up,” Jake muttered.

They reached 1-3’s position—a low rise along the north fence, facing into a cut where the forest dipped.

The team leader, a calm, competent corporal from Texas, nodded toward the trees.

“About five minutes ago,” he said softly, “I heard something moving out there. Figured boar or deer. Then I heard… something else.”

“Growl?” Jake asked.

The corporal hesitated.

“More like a… half-growl,” he said. “Like someone trying to make an animal noise and not quite getting it right. Put my NODs on it. Thought I saw something pale between the trees. Tall. Skinny. But then it was gone.”

Reyna exhaled sharply.

“Pale crawler,” he whispered.

Jake ignored him and lifted his binocular NV.

He scanned the tree line.

Trunks. Underbrush. Bits of moonlight.

Nothing.

He was about to chalk it up to combat jitters and too many YouTube videos when, somewhere deeper in the woods, something called.

It was not the same full-throated howl he’d heard at Hahn. It was higher, thinner, threaded with a weird… broken cadence.

Like someone imitating a coyote after watching one movie and calling it good.

It made his skin crawl.

“That’s not in the training packet,” Reyna said quietly.

Jake keyed his mic.

“Red Platoon, this is Red 6,” he said. “We’ve got unidentified animal noises in 1-3’s sector. No visual. Maintain positions. No one breaks the wire unless I give the word. Over.”

Acknowledgments came back, clipped and steady.

He lowered the radio.

“Seen enough?” the team leader asked.

Jake studied his face. The kid wasn’t rattled easily. He’d seen him under indirect fire and during a Bradley fire control failure. If he was asking for confirmation, something was off.

“Yeah,” Jake said finally. “You did right. Keep your guys sharp. And if you see anything that looks like it came out of a creepypasta, you call me before you go chasing it.”

He and Reyna walked back toward the CP.

“You figure we’re just primed now?” Reyna asked. “Like, we hear every owl and raccoon as Dogman Lite because we’ve been mainlining horror content?”

“Maybe,” Jake said. “Maybe not.”

He thought of Lena, her careful distinctions between myth and crime, between metaphor and courtroom documents.

He thought of Canaris with his clipboard, trying to warn people who didn’t want to hear uncomfortable truths. Different war, same human tendency.

“Let me ask you something,” he said finally. “If you had to pick: serial killer in a wolf costume, or a real werewolf?”

Reyna made a face.

“That’s not a choice,” he said. “That’s like asking ‘get stabbed or get shot.’”

“Humor me,” Jake said.

Reyna kicked at a rock.

“Serial killer,” he said reluctantly. “At least then it’s just human evil. You can shoot it, arrest it, whatever. Werewolf means the universe has… rules I don’t understand. And I hate that.”

Jake nodded slowly.

“Yeah,” he said. “That tracks.”

He looked at the forest.

“Except sometimes,” he went on, “I think the universe has rules we don’t understand whether we like it or not. And pretending it doesn’t just so we feel better doesn’t strike me as smart.”

Reyna sighed.

“Great,” he said. “Now I’m going to worry about both.”

They reached the CP—a GP medium tent with radio antennas poking out like makeshift trees.

Before he ducked in, Jake turned back one last time.

The forest loomed.

Nothing moved.

“Maybe that’s all it is,” he said quietly, more to himself than to anyone else. “A story. A way of saying ‘there’s bad stuff out there, so don’t be stupid.’”

He went inside.

Behind him, a wind rustled the top branches.

If there was anything else out there, it stayed silent.

Six months later
Stateside

The strangest thing about getting back to the US was how new everything felt and how old the stories suddenly seemed.

The trees in North Carolina didn’t look like German pines. The coffee shops played different music. The shrines were different—crosses on hillsides, memorials at intersections where drunk drivers hadn’t turned in time.

Jake sat in his small off-post apartment with a stack of printed pages.

On top was a slim sheaf: after-action statements from Site Echo, redacted names, dates. Behind that, printouts of old forum posts—Sierra 7’s story, copied before the site vanished behind broken links. Then screenshots of YouTube comments, some trolling, some disturbingly detailed.

On the table, his phone buzzed.

A text from Lena:

Found another pamphlet about “wolf-men” in 17th century Franconia. Legal records say “serial murderer,” but villagers called him “der Hundmann.” Thought of you.

He smiled, thumb tapping a reply.

We got “dogman” sightings in Kentucky, too. Guess monsters deploy worldwide.

Be careful over there, she wrote back. Your forests are new. Your stories are still being written.

He set the phone down and looked at the pages again.

Pale crawler at Graf.

Big-eared watcher at Schwangau.

Fence-jumper at Hahn.

Half-heard howl in the woods on a training lane.

Peter Stump, confessing to horrors under torture.

Thomas Schweitzer, deserter turned monster in a story written decades after whatever really happened.

Villagers who couldn’t imagine a human being that cruel, so they gave him claws. Soldiers who couldn’t imagine their own eyes lying, so they filed what they saw under “wolf, unusual behavior” and moved on.

He remembered something Lena had said in Nuremberg, over beer and bad pretzels.

“Folklore is what you get when fear and ignorance have a baby,” she’d said. “But sometimes there’s also… something else. A kernel. A pattern. The map isn’t the territory, but you’d be a fool not to carry a map.”

Jake opened a notebook.

On the first page, he wrote:

OVER THE FENCE – Notes

He started to list events, places, dates. Not to prove anything. Not even to convince himself he wasn’t crazy.

Just to make sure, in a world where institutions didn’t like uncomfortable truths, that at least one person kept the weird stuff in order.

Outside, kids yelled in an apartment courtyard. Somewhere down the block, a dog barked at nothing.

He thought of the Smoke Pit channel, of all the soldiers who’d sent stories in anonymous emails and DMs.

Not to go viral.

To not be alone.

He wrote:

– Lesson 1: The fact that something fits into an old story doesn’t make it untrue.
– Lesson 2: The fact that something can be explained as human evil doesn’t mean there’s nothing else out there.
– Lesson 3: Whether it’s a werewolf, a serial killer, a big wolf, or a glitch in your NODs, you still have to pull security.

He closed the notebook and sat back.

In the end, he didn’t know what he’d seen.

Maybe he never would.

Maybe in twenty years, some grad student would find his journal in a box and write a paper about “folkloric narratives among U.S. soldiers in Germany.”

Maybe some future Staff Sergeant would sit in a smoke pit and play a video called “Over the Fence – The True Story of the Grafenwöhr Werewolves” and laugh until something howled.

Jake got up, went to his kitchen drawer, and pulled out a small votive candle—one of those cheap ones you bought by the dozen.

He set it on the windowsill, flicked a lighter, and watched the tiny flame dance.

It wasn’t about warding anything off.

It was about remembering.

Remembering that some truths get buried because they’re inconvenient. That some monsters wear uniforms and paychecks. That some stalk the tree line and wait until you turn out the lights.

He raised his coffee mug to the little flame.

“Here’s to you, Schweitzer,” he muttered. “And Stump. And Sierra 7. And every poor bastard who saw something he wasn’t supposed to and kept his mouth shut to keep his job.”

He took a sip.

“Here’s to the ones who talked, too.”

Outside, a dog barked again.

Jake listened.

The sound was ordinary. Domestic. Nothing hunting in it.

He smiled.

Then he blew out the candle, turned off the kitchen light, and went to bed.

Whatever was lurking in the German woods could stay on that side of the ocean.

For now.

THE END