The days blurred together within the camp for everyone, but most of all for the young boy who had been interned there for what seemed to him like a lifetime, but had been, in reality, a little over a year. Nobody held prisoner in the camp really knew what day it was. Some had an idea, but nobody could really be sure. Birthdays and holidays passed like all the rest. Hard.
Some, like the boy, were tortured daily. Some underwent experiments. Some were worked almost to death, others past death. Some disappeared, and were never seen or heard from again. The rising and setting of the sun were some of the few reliable records of the passing of the days. Another was the arrival of the train. Every day, a train with more prisoners would arrive. Some were shot where they stood. Some would be marched straight into one of the buildings rarely anyone came back from. Others would be herded into the barracks. Day in, day out, the train fed the lifeblood of the horrible monster that was the Auschwitz compound. On that day, like any other day, the train chugged into the camp. The prisoners barely paid it mind anymore. No use getting to know the people on the train, you or they would be dead soon, anyways.
The soldiers who kept them prisoner marched up to the doors of the many cars of the train, and made to fling them wide to bring out the fresh meat inside for sorting, but as the first one laid a hand on the door, an eerie howl erupted from the car just behind the locomotive, and the door burst out from the car with a mighty crack!
A sound of automatic gunfire rang out in the camp, and dozens of SS officers and German soldiers down the length of the train fell in crumpled heaps that twitched in agony. But those sounds didn't draw as much attention as the ringing of gunfire on something metal. Every eye in shot of the train, prisoner and soldier alike, turned toward the lead car of the train as a pair of red boots hit the ground with what felt like the sound of a mighty drum. At the head of the group was a man clad in the brightest reds, whites and blues the boy had ever seen.
His blue helmet bore a distinctive white A, and on his left arm was a circular round shield, with magnificent red and white stripes, a blue center dot, and a bright white star in the middle. The machine-gun in his hands poured bullet after bullet into the torsos of Schutzstaffel officers. Next to him was a woman in metal armor as magnificently colored as the man's shield, the reds, blues, and golds gleamed in the sunlight like beacons of light through what was once a never-ending night. Her shield was almost too bright to look directly at, and her sword sang as it cleaved through the air, and the necks of the German soldiers.
The young boy's heart soared at the sights of the colors alone, but as soon as he'd seen the man's shield, he felt something he hadn't felt in what seemed like most of his life. His entire body shook with a joyful energy he'd never expected to feel. Captain America was here. Captain America was here, in the camp, with an army, and he was going to free all of them.
"Kapitän Amerika!" The boy shouted at the top of his lungs. "Kapitän Amerika ist da!" Captain America is here!
Bucky took aim at the nearest anti-aircraft tower, and pulled his trigger twice. The nearest guard dropped when the bullet entered his skull. The operator dropped a mere second after. Barnes aimed at the next one. Two more pulls, two more dead soldiers, and repeated with each of the remaining three towers. Mere seconds after they left the car, Auschwitz's air defenses were out.
"Anti-air towers neutralized!" Bucky shouted to Steve.
Steve nodded in acknowledgement. "Roger that. Teams B, C and D, you're clear to take the anti-air stations!" He shouted. "Make contact once the towers are secured or destroyed!" The leaders of those groups nodded in acknowledgement, and fanned out to man the towers.
Diana cut her way through swathes of the soldiers who had come to meet the train. She did not speak a word, but her eyes betrayed the regret with every slice. She bashed one oncoming soldier with her shield, and cut through the torso of another one with her sword. The blade sang as it cleaved through leather, cloth, body, and bone alike.
"Sir!" One of the one-hundred and seventh soldiers shouted to Steve. "The prisoners, they're chanting something!"
Logan punched, kicked, shot, and tore his way through Germans like they were made of butter. He cut a line in the horde toward a nearby guard tower, where he figured he'd find a radio. The wild man had a wild idea, and it would do them some good to capture that tower, anyways. Logan
Far away from the train station, across a line of barracks, there were rows upon rows of new barracks under construction by inmate laborers. By slaves. The prisoners were afraid to even glance away from their work on what would be another cramped "accommodation" for future prisoners, but one chanced a glance up from his work as a voice sounded across the camp's loudspeakers. "Red Alert!" A frantic voice crackled from the intercom. "All soldiers, report to ze train station!"
Suddenly, the guards swarmed away from the construction site, south, toward the train station, toward the sounds of a firefight inside the camp.
Another prisoner dashed toward the building party with an abandon and spring in his step the man had never seen in this wretched place. The skinny lad collided with an oncoming soldier with a ferocity that threatened to knock the healthy German private down. A line of soldiers formed to prevent him from progressing, but his enthusiastic resistance proved difficult to restrain. Likewise, the man's shout reached the ears of dozens as the Germans tried to push him back.
"Captain America is here! Captain America!" The man proclaimed at the top of his lungs.
The construction detail all turned from their work at the sound of those words. They couldn't believe their ears. Surely it was a trick of some sort?
The intercom crackled to life again, but no words sounded out across the loudspeakers, but instead the howl of a wolf. The German soldiers quaked in their boots at the Howling Commandos' signal. It was no trick.
Three of the soldiers turned back to the work contingent, their rifles leveled at the men.
"Get back to vork!" One of them screeched as he frantically switched his aim from one target to another.
The man looked upon the soldiers. Not a minute ago, he labored under the terrified thought that the soldiers would cut him down with those guns, but now? He could hardly feel even the most minute aspect of fear, and his compatriots seemed much the same. Their capacity for fear had been replaced in an instant, with now indomitable courage.
They advanced on their captors en-masse, which caused the soldiers further panic. When he'd closed enough distance, the man shoved one of the soldier's rifle's out of the way and punched him in the face. The others jumped on their captors and hacked away at them with tools, boards, and fists.
The man? He grabbed and shouldered a rifle and opened fire on an oncoming group of soldiers who'd noticed the commotion. Three dropped from the bullets, and five scattered behind the flimsy barracks for cover. The other prisoners stripped their fallen captors of their weapons and equipment, and fired upon any German soldier they could see. The uprising had begun.
In the medical testing chambers of Block Ten, Doctor Isabella Maru punched her desk as yet another test subject's skin boiled away behind the glass. "Damn the Red Skull!" She shouted. "What use is a formula for Aryan perfection if the subjects retain no characteristics of the Aryan race?!"
An old, bearded man, Doctor Klaus Schmidt, smiled wryly at her. "Do not let ze Fuhrer hear of your distaste of his friend. He is patient vith your research, but if such talk reached his ears, he vould be less zo."
Maru waved away his concerns. "Feh. Schmidt recommended me personally after Mengele's departure. If he has a problem with how I talk, he can come fix the formula his damned self."
Schmidt shrugged at her response. Then, faintly, he could have sworn he heard a growing roar of... A group of people chanting? He shook his head, and cleaned his ears. "I must be hearing things, vat is zat infernal racket?"
The chanting from outside the block grew. "CAPTAIN AMERICA! CAPTAIN AMERICA! CAPTAIN AMERICA! CAPTAIN AMERICA!"
Schmidt's face dropped as he peered outside the window to witness the camp engulfed in a riot. "Aw sheisse!"
Maru joined him at the window. "Dear god, what is happening? I thought you said these prisoners were hopeless!"
Schmidt shook his head. "Evidently not, my dear." He stepped back from the window, and struck Maru on the side of the neck, knocking her out, cold.
A bullet whizzed through the air from above the Commandos' position. It was aimed square for Morita's head, but Diana struck it out of the way with her bracelet.
"Up there!" She said, pointing to a bridge between two guard towers, with a line of snipers assembled along it.
Diana ran toward the tower, and kicked one of the ground soldiers in the groin. As he fell, she used his helmeted head as a springboard to leap onto the shoulders of the mob of soldiers. She hopscotched from one to another, then used the barbed wire fence as a ladder. She jumped up to the bridge and cut the supports, sending the guards tumbling into the sea of barbed wire and spikes below.
"WHOO!" Bucky shouted, as he and Steve crashed through waves of Germans. "That's one hell of a woman, there, Steve!"
As Diana ran across the scaffolds and walls, she cut down snipers, used her lasso to pull the legs out from under guard towers, and made large slashes in fences between previously blocked-off areas of the camp.
One of the prisoners pointed up at Diana as she dashed past. "Folge ihr! Folge der Wunderfrau!" Follow the Wonder Woman.
"Die Wunderfrau!"
Dugan kicked in the door of Block Ten, and he and the others marched inside. There, he found a woman who was, unmistakably, Doctor Isabela Maru on the floor. He nudged her with his boot, and she stirred, groggily.
"Get her up and bind her." He said to one of the soldiers who'd accompanied him.
In a moment of sick curiosity, Dugan peered inside the experimentation chamber, and made a face in disgust. "You sick bitch." He said as he undid the deadbolt on the door, and pried it open. Inside the room were two bodies. One was a figure who looked like he'd been skinned alive and dehydrated. The other was a sickly-looking thirty-something man who breathed quite raggedly. Both of them were naked. Both of them lay on hard metal gurneys.
"Hello, do you speak English?" Dugan asked the man.
The man's eyes fluttered open, and he moved his head limply.
"Yes." He said in a dry whisper.
Dugan helped him into a sitting position. "You got a name?" He asked the man.
The man nodded. "Sebastian Shaw."