We reached the Resistance safe house just as the sun slipped behind the western horizon and dusk purpled the landscape. Almost on cue, an ethereal and menacing howl drifted up to meet the moon that already hung in the darkening sky.

  That seemed to be the final impetus that Fritz needed to trot the last several hundred yards to the open doors of the barn. The bastard went right for the trough filled with oats even when I tried to stop him. I had to awkwardly dismount while pressed up against a wall.

  “See, I told you the mules would get us here before dark,” Kris said as she expertly guided her mule in beside Fritz and slid out of the saddle.

  “Yeah, barely. And where is ‘here’ exactly?”

  The barn and nearby farmhouse could have been cloned from the same set where I had met with Vaclav and his merry men. Except, where the first Resistance safe house looked like a working farm this one looked abandoned to all but weeds and bats. The house next door lay in shambles with a collapsed roof and a human skeleton hanging out of one the windows. The barn still stood and seemed solid enough. Its interior was even clean, and the troughs filled with oats and water. Someone still maintained the place despite its disheveled appearance.

  “We are south of Zwickau and not too far from the frontier. Now close the doors and help me care for these mules.” Another howl echoed out of the glooming woods and I didn’t need much inducement to pull the barn doors closed and wall myself away from the terrors lurking in the darkness. Kris lit a kerosene lamp that at in the corner, filling the whole barn with a cheery, yellow glow that allowed me to see that the barn’s windows had been covered or blacked out by one means or another.

  Dealing with damn mules was a pain in the ass (pardon the pun). Apparently, you don’t just need give the damn things food and water you also have to brush them down like grooming a dog. Such a sucky mode of transportation, and I’ve heard horses are even worse though I don’t think that is possible.

  “So, where do we sleep?” I asked once we had finished with the damn mules. “That farm house looks like a death trap, literally, and there doesn’t even seem to be enough hay in here for us to bed down in.” I really hoped that there was bed nearby. I hadn’t slept rough since being on the Mexican Front (with the exception of a few weeks of E&E training but more on that later). The mule ride had left me feeling like I had jumped off the Scandinavians’ World Tree and hit every branch on the way down… with my ass. I wanted an actual bed.

  Kris just smirked at me, I think she knew exactly what I was thinking, and walked over to a clear part of the floor and thumped her foot in specific tattoo against the aged boards there. Things were silent for a few moments and then that section of floor swung upwards to reveal a bearded face lurking underneath. Other than hair I could make out a pair of mistrustful blue eyes and a lopsided slash that might have been a mouth. Those eyes darted first to Kris and to me where they narrowed into suspicious slits, it was then that an ancient Lugar pistol snaked up through the trap door to aim at me.

  “Wer ist das?” demanded the hairy face.

  “Someone who is tired of having guns aimed at him,” I replied sourly in German before Kris could respond.

  “He is a friend,” said my ex while shooting me look that I remembered all too well, the look that said I should shut my mouth or pay the consequences. It used to be a look that I could ignore but she didn’t carry a gun back then.

  “A friend?” the hairy face and gun revealed themselves attached to a short, barrel chested being that heaved himself up out of the hole in the floor. When I say he was short I don’t mean that he was smaller than average I mean that he was less than five feet tall and his massive beard nearly touched the floor.

  “A dwarf?” I asked a little incredulously. I had, of course, met plenty of dwarves. After the Resurgence they had popped up everywhere as magic awakened dormant sections of their DNA and changed normal people into creatures from legend. The same as it had with elves, werebeasts, orcs and others. Dwarves at least stayed sane and relatively human though the process. In America they had largely successfully reintegrated back into human society, unlike elves, and there were even dwarf politicians and generals. Unlike in Europe where the dwarves had largely returned to their old ways in service if the Old Gods. That made the presence of a dwarf in the Resistance a little noteworthy.

  “A person,” he growled back as he flexed his formidably muscled arms and hands, one of which still held a Lugar. “The Resurgence may have stolen my looks and height but only I can surrender my humanity. Who is this scheissekopf?” he asked Kris. “He sounds like an English speaker. British? Canadian?”

  “We are trying to keep this compartmentalized, Johan,” replied Kris.

  “You know that I will die before I talk. The Volk will not even bother to keep my kin and I alive if they catch us.”

  “Still, it is the principle. Just call him a friend and leave it at that. Quick, let us get below. It is an unfriendly night out there.” Another howl, this one closer, rent the air of the barn and the mules stirred uneasily in their stalls.

  “I think not that I will call this one a friend,” grumbled Johan as he opened up the trapdoor further and ushered us down a ladder into a candle lit cavern beneath the barn. I grabbed my gear, mostly just the guns the Resistance had given me, and followed.

  “What’s his problem?” I hissed to Kris in English once we reached the foot of the ladder, the dwarf was up above us, fastening the formidable number of locks that held the trapdoor shut.

  “He does not like you. I thought that was obvious. I cannot say that I blame him much.”

  “I did pick up on that,” I replied sarcastically. “But why doesn’t he like me. I mean isn’t a grumpy dwarf just a little stereotypical?”

  “That’s racist,” Johan growled in English up above us. The dwarf let go of the ladder and fell the last half dozen feet to the ground where he landed with a solid thud right in front of me. He glared up at me from under his heavy brows and looked like he wanted nothing more than crush my kneecaps with his bare hands.

  “Every new person I know is one more person that can betray me and my kin to the one-eyed god. The Resistance brought you into my home and I can only hope that they have a good reason, but I do not have to like it. Now, shut up and follow me.” He turned around, which was good because then he couldn’t see me roll my eyes, grabbed a brace of flickering candles from their holder on the wall and stomped off down a passageway that was the small cavern’s only exit. We were forced to either follow him or be left in the darkness.

  I really couldn’t see much of the cavern beneath the barn or its passageway in the weak light of the candles. All that I could really tell was that they had been carved out of the raw dirt with little embellishment and were at least sized to fit normal humans. The tunnel sloped downwards and I figured that we had walked probably a couple hundred yards before the tunnel flared open into another cavern, this one was far better lit, large and surprisingly had three small cottages arrayed around a central court (they probably called it a hof or garten) that held tables, chairs and a large, crackling fire. I examined the cavern’s ceiling for some sort of chimney or vent for the fire’s smoke but I could not discern one from the shadowy recesses above me. Around the fire gathered a dozen short and stocky figures, most of them bearded.

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  “Great,” I muttered to Kris. “They’re probably going to sing about gold and mining all night.”

  “Shhhh, you are being racist.”

  “What? I’m just saying that there is no way that we are going to be able to sleep on our beds of stone and axes.”

  “Quiet.”

  “Now we shall enjoy the famous hospitality of the dwarves…” I was now affecting a Scottish accent by way of John Rhys-Davies.

  “Stop it!”

  “…malt beer, meat ripe off the bone. And they call it a mine… a mine.”

  “Actually, we call it a commune,” growled our guide. “And if I hear one more Gimli joke I will feed you to the werewolves myself.”

  “I guess he isn’t a Tolkien fan,” I grumbled right before Kris dug an elbow into my side.

  “Will you shut up?” she snarled. “Johan is serious about feeding you to the wolves.”

  “I am,” the dwarf agreed.

  “What about you?” I asked Kris.

  “He likes me, and I don’t mock his condition.”

  “This is true,” confirmed the dwarf.

  We had neared the fire and the rest of the dwarves there turned to examine us with both interest and suspicion. No one seemed as overtly unfriendly as Johan but no one was rushing over to greet us either.

  “These two are from the Resistance,” announced Johan by way of introduction. “If the dumb, blond one is too annoying we can throw him back outside.” With that he stumped into one of the cottages and slammed the door, presumably to do whatever grumpy dwarves did in their off time.

  “Do not mind him,” said one of the other dwarves said he handed me a plate of food. “He just went to sharpen his axe.”

  “No way,” I replied incredulously and I was treated to a very un-dwarven giggle.

  “I’m kidding. Come, you and your friend can sit over here.” The dwarf led us over to one of the tables at the edge of the common space and motioned us to sit. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Aber naturalich,” replied Kris magnanimously.

  “Danke, it is not often that we see someone from outside of the commune. My name is Heidi.” I covertly checked out the dwarf as she sat across from us. Now that I knew what to look for, I could see that beyond the blond beard Heidi had more delicate features than Johan and a subtle swelling at the breast and hips.

  “I have so many questions,” burbled the lady dwarf. “Tell me, how goes the Resistance. Has any progress been made against the False Gods’ tyranny? Does America still stand?”

  “Badly. No. Yes.” I replied shortly before diving into my cabbage and kugel, riding mules can work up quite the appetite. Also, I figured the less I talked the less likely I would be fed to werewolves before the end of the night.

  “Do not mind him, he is an ass. I’m Kris, you can call him Tom.” The two ladies shook hands and then immediately dropped into the chatter that women seem to take to so effortlessly. At least the chatter was more interesting than it would have been pre-Surge, less clothes and celebrities and more geopolitics and smiting.

  I unobtrusively ate the rest of my food and kept my ears open for actionable intelligence. There was little that the two talked about that I didn’t already know but I did notice that Heidi was downright bloodthirsty with regards to the Old Gods She would have gladly paraded through the streets with Wotan’s severed head if we had presented it to her.

  “If you do not mind me asking; why do you hate the Old Gods so much?” I asked during a lull in the women’s conversation. “Dwarves are treated far better than humans across most of the Teutonic and Scandinavian realms.”

  “What did you do before the Resurgence?” she asked after considering me for a few seconds.

  “Me? I was a student.”

  “Believe it or not, I…” she waved a blunt fingered hand along her course and bearded features. “…was a model. You should have seen me, I was gorgeous and tall. I know it sounds vapid but it was paying my way through college. Then magic came back into the world and interacted with an inactive bit of my genetic code and I… changed. I shrunk a foot in a week and at the same time my shoulders expanded by six inches.” I nodded remembering the newscasts from the early days, right after the Surge, when no one knew what was going on but it seemed like millions of people were infected with an exotic new disease that warped their very bodies. “I could not stop my body from changing but I did try to keep my new beard under control but even by shaving five times a day I could not stop it. It was not long until my beautiful body and face were replaced by this.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said with a game grin. “I think you are still quite pretty.”

  “You are sweet but do not insult my intelligence,” she replied with a glare. “Now I know that many others have fared far worse than myself in the Resurgence and afterwards. How many have died? Millions in Germany alone. And it seems vain to mourn over my lost beauty, but it was the one thing that was fully mine and it was taken from me along with my humanity. All because the False Gods decided thousands of years ago that one of my ancestors needed to be physically altered to make a more ideal servant.”

  “We all here have different stories but it all comes down to the same reasons. We refuse to be servants, even privileged ones, just because of inherited quirks in our genetics.”

  “That has not stopped many of your brethren,” I pointed out.

  “No,” Heidi conceded. “Our path is not an easy one. Humans hate us because they see servants of the False Gods and other dwarves hate us because they see traitors to the False Gods. We are shunned and even killed wherever we may show ourselves. The Resistance are some of the few friends that we have. It is not the same in America though?” she asked eagerly. “I hear that there dwarves and other folk touched by magic that have integrated into your society, and that you resist the False Gods together.”

  “What makes you think that I am American?” I replied cagily. I may have had my cover totally blown but that didn’t mean that I should flaunt my identity to every pretty lady dwarf that asked.

  “Please, you speak German well, but your accent is still quite distinct. The number of times that I got hit on by drunken idiots that sound just like you…”

  Kris snorted into her food, and I think that her full mouth was the only thing that kept a full-blown guffaw at bay. “She has your number,” she said once she had swallowed her food.

  “Well, I haven’t been back to America in a long time,” I said evasively. “But yes. Dwarves are largely accepted into our culture. There are always a few shitheads, and nobody knew quite what to make of them at first, but they have joined the fight against the Aztecs and the Amerindian gods as readily as anyone. I know of dwarves that are military officers and others that are politicians.” I made sure not to mention that dwarves were some of our most valuable spies amongst the Scandinavian and Teutonic pantheons.

  Heidi’s eyes glowed and her features brightened, for a moment I could see the woman that she had been beneath the beard. “I heard rumors but did not dare to believe that they were true. That is the way things can be here! We can come out from under the ground and rejoin humanity!” The joy then fled her face and her blue eyes narrowed. “Of course, that can never happen as long as the False Gods still live. They say that the False Gods cannot be killed, I also hear in America that it is different.”

  “It is. Trust me; when you drop a hundred tons of high explosive on their heads, even the Old Gods can die just like anybody else. The trick is getting them to stay in one place first.” Judging by the look on the dwarf’s face Heidi would have pushed the button to launch a MOAB strike on all the Old Gods and laughed her head off while she did so. The expression on Kris’s face was nearly identical.

  We talked with Heidi for another half an hour before the long day caught up with us and we politely asked to be shown a place where we could sleep. Instead of a room in one of the cozy cottages we were shown to a small shed slightly removed from the cluster of dwarf dwellings. There were two cots inside and little else but at that moment the cots were all that I cared about.

  I didn’t even have the energy to annoy Kris before I dropped into a deep sleep. My sleep was not so deep that I did not dream. My dreams were weird, even for me. Fritz the mule intoned of my destiny in voice like James Earl Jones and Heidi danced with Till Eulenspeigel while Johan chased me with an axe made of midnight. It was the kind of dream that you knew perfectly well was not real but could still not wake up from.

  It took the baying of hounds and the smell of fire to awaken me.