Biography of Bernard "Bjorn" Reed
A huge thank you to @innkmarie for the wonderful commission illustration.
His father, Henri Reed, a frenchman, had submerged his entire life in the military and possessed a moral compass of dubious integrity where human life was concerned. His mother, Brigitte, née Eisenhart, was german, a rather stern woman with a heavy hand, a lawyer by profession. The family lived in the suburbs of Villedor. Bernard was destined, through connections, for a career in law, whether as a lawyer and for that reason his record of arrests had to remain spotless and his marks impeccable. He also pursued athletics and attended the shooting range, following in his father's footsteps.
Family rules did little to keep Bernard from courting trouble, the neighborhood was a restless one, where you either fought off the hooligans or found yourself kicked senseless in a muddy puddle. The police were overwhelmed, and children banded together in groups just to make it home from school. A hunger grew in Bernard for the kind of power and strength his father wielded, the means to strike back, while at the same time he studied the law, determined to know his rights whenever the police came rounding people up.
His father would later recall Bernard's adolescent years and remark that the odds had been fifty-fifty, that instead of choosing the justice of the law, he might just as easily have chosen vigilante justice and drifted into a gang. Despite his father's severity, it was with him that Bernard spent the greater part of his time; there, he found rest for both mind and soul, emptying a magazine into the targets at the shooting range.
His mother beat the folly out of her only son with physical force, whereas his father could shame him with a single look. Bernard considers women every bit as dangerous as men, if not more so for they are more cunning and he doesn't underestimate an opponent simply on account of gender.
In his youth, Bernard only got into fights when he was defending someone. He was fairly large and strong for his age. Though he himself took his share of beatings, battered to a bloody pulp more times than he could count. The local bandits came to know of this rabid fool who, with each passing year, grew smarter and stronger. He learned early on to darn his own uniform and clothes, bringing them home torn and filthy to his mother would have been a suicidal mission.
Thanks to the discipline instilled in him and the circles his father kept, by the time graduation approached, Bernard Reed had nevertheless caught fire with the notion of defying his mother and enrolling in the police academy.
Two years later, at twenty, he would take to the streets on patrol, and the familiar faces, the mugs of thugs he had battered a hundred times before, would begin surfacing more and more often behind the bars of the precinct holding cells; now Officer Reed dealt with the bastards within the letter of the law. Power and impunity intoxicated him. He could strong-arm a thug into cuffs for resisting arrest or for so much as a foul word slung in his direction. His partner, John, would tease him that they were literally overfulfilling the arrest quota, and that soon there would be no cells left, they would have to start stacking the prisoners on bottles instead.
After the requisite year of service, Bernard submitted his application for advanced qualification to the special forces, the border protection group. The retraining took roughly five months. During this stretch of time, he grew altogether estranged from his family. They still exchanged letters, but the relationship grew steadily colder, and his mother began dropping hints about marriage and children, it was high time, after all. Back in his adolescence, Bernard had dated both girls and boys, but nothing serious had ever come of it, and later, with his studies and police work, there had simply been no time for such things. He was also in no hurry to chain himself to the couch with a bottle of beer, a shooting gallery on weekends, and a screaming baby in the cradle.
Bernard Reed would spend nine years in the special forces, guarding the nation's borders. Keep the terrorists and the questionable bastards out, and the police immediately find themselves with less work on their hands. Grounds for refusal were never in short supply, it was simply that too many took bribes. Bernard has stories to tell. Over the course of nine years, he had ample time to listen and to breathe in the tales of others. From time to time, he would find himself turning over someone else’s life in his mind, their plans for the future, while listening to the lies about sick children who simply couldn't get by without their father, the same man with seven kilos of narcotics stashed under the bottom of his car.
Bernard met The Fall at his thirty. Rumors had been circulating for days that something was coming, but there was no way to prepare for what arrived. A hundred soldiers stationed at the border, far too few for the apocalypse. Many deserted out of fear for themselves, for their families. There were those who tried to blend in with the civilians and evacuate, and at once the rats surfaced, the ones who would trample over anyone to save themselves, alongside the doomed heroes who charged headlong into death. Some simply snapped, their minds couldn't bear the strain. A nation's border is the most dreadful place to be in the hours when a state of emergency is declared.
More dreadful still was the order from command to hold the line to the last man.
After the first wave of the infected, there came a brief reprieve, just long enough to catch one's breath after all the horror they had witnessed. It was during one of those days that the commander, an austrian, Graham Hargrave, laid a stack of contracts on the table. They could refuse, transfer to another command, or sign on for several months in an experimental GRE program, and they were far from the only ones to receive the invitation. Thanks to their commander, they were all still alive, though worn down to the marrow. The second wave of the infected would most likely have swallowed them whole and drowned them in a sea of corpses, and all they wanted was a chance to breathe. Just to sleep more than a couple of hours, without sitting propped against a wall, clutching a rifle to their chest. The commander was the first to scratch his sprawling signature across the page. It was not desertion, it was a promise to return and defend with renewed strength. In the end, they spent far longer than a few months in the GRE laboratories, nearly an entire year.
"Arrogant idiots... We burned with the will to survive. The world was crumbling, falling apart, if not today, then tomorrow, the fucking apocalypse and the end of humankind..."
"Waltz didn't experiment on children alone. There were two objectives, a vaccine and a serum. One for the good of the world, the other for the good of the government..."
"They promised to turn us into super-soldiers, like Captain America from the comic books..."
"We thought we'd already walked through hell, what was some serum to us? ...Fuck. There aren't even words for what it was like. Shit. We, battle-hardened soldiers, were dying in pure fucking agony every four days, it was unrelenting hell with no way out. It nearly broke us back then. They were pumping something like that into children, and here were twenty grown men, dying like goddamn flies..."
"And then the aftereffects began. Enhanced strength, hearing, vision, all that stuff they'd promised us. Even the libido came back..."
"And then the fire broke out. Sabotage, I'm telling you. We carried the children out through the back way. Chaos on the streets, hell on earth, scientists beaten to death with baseball bats, strung up from lamp posts, those fucking journalists everywhere. And there we were, thirteen men and a brood of kids of all ages. And we had absolutely no fucking clue what was happening, or what to do. In the end, we found a cop cowering at the far end of the parking lot. He radioed someone, and the children were taken away. And we stayed behind, in uniform, weapons in hand, fresh from the testing grounds, saddled with the responsibility of Waltz, burned to God knows what degree, and his sick little daughter..."
"And then came the fucking missiles, "Black Monday", chemicals raining down on the city, civil war, the splintering into factions. Wanted to be superheroes, did we? Be careful what you fucking wish for..."
"We were damn lucky that the military, Colonel Williams to be precise, scooped us up along with Dr. Waltz. Funny thing is, they didn't even bother interrogating us much. They were critically short on manpower. Back into service we went, and thank God they didn't disband us at that point. We remained a special unit with off-the-charts performance metrics, the kind could throw straight into the heat. And we survived, somehow..."
"Once Waltz was back on his feet, he showcased us in full as the fruit of the GRE experiments. By that point, other surviving soldiers from the GRE program had already begun flocking to Lower Dam Ayre like flies to honey..."
"We were his personal fucking squad of mercenary bodyguards, Waltz's loyal hounds. That's where the name came from: "Waltz's Dogs". Think of us as rabid beasts on a leash. I was lucky enough to draw the short straw, to become the new commander and get close enough to Waltz that my word carried weight with him. Now do you understand why you're still alive, Hakon?.."
"The military had power, resources beyond anything the police or the volunteers, the future peacekeepers, could ever dream of. We stayed put and didn't stir. Those of us who held high rank knew who stood behind perfection: a major, a bastard and psychopath who had finally got his hands on real power..."
"When things got really bad, the Colonel agreed to let the serum be recreated for his own soldiers. Yeah. Except Waltz couldn't produce the same serum. You've seen those renegades. Black veins, distorted vocal cords, a few screws loose, even worse than us. An obsession with strength and a different kind of... excitement. And the longer you shoot up that filth, the less brain matter stays inside your skull. Still, I've got to hand it to Waltz, the man managed to build an entire faction of super-soldiers, rabid and dumb as hell, but fucking terrifyingly strong..."
It was during that period that Graham Hargrave, their commander, tried for the second time to sign them up for Waltz's serum. They were already giving their own biomaterial to help recreate it, turning up in the laboratories when called. Some of them managed to exchange a few words with Mia, gravely ill, strapped to a hospital bed and tethered to machines. Waltz himself looked like the living dead; perhaps somewhere in the formula he had made a mistake.
Graham turned infected right there in the laboratories. Bernard, John, and the others, summoned urgently by radio, were forced to kill their own commander, a man they had served alongside for more than fifteen years. In his hunger for greater power, Graham had overestimated his own limits, and not a single man in the unit would repeat his mistake.
When a semblance of the serum was finally successfully created and its unsavory side effects came to light, the decision was made to form additional squads from soldiers who had received the serum before The Fall. They took the existing name from Bernard's unit, "Waltz's Dogs", operating outside the rank system, with their own network of tags, maps, ciphers, chevrons, and a web of connections spread across the city. Ten squads of soldiers, either on inhibitors or the old version of the serum, were tasked with keeping the renegades in check throughout the city, enforcing discipline, and eliminating the "mad dogs."
Not long before the events of the canon, Waltz assembled all the Dogs to issue an order: to locate the GRE key, so that X13 could be cracked open like a tin can and the power restored to the medical equipment inside. By that point, Waltz had already begun experimenting on himself. He disregarded the risks, resigned himself to a fresh missile strike on the city, and deemed it a necessary evil for the greater good. Bernard, who had devoted his entire life to saving people, flew into an instant rage, because Waltz, unhinged by grief, was prepared to destroy the last surviving city.
Bernard struck first, a blow to the jaw, but Waltz seized him by the lapels and slammed him, back and skull, against the wall. After that, everything blurred into a fog; the adrenaline had triggered the serum's effect of pure, animal fury. With considerable effort, they were pulled apart. Waltz had proven the stronger, and Bernard had been left clinging to the edge of life, yet he refused to back down from his conviction that the plan was utter shit and that he had no intention of signing himself or his men onto it. For insubordination and assault, Waltz could have finished Bernard off on the spot or had him publicly executed, but he didn't. In the end only regeneration and surgical intervention saved Bernard and Waltz from death.
Waltz didn't rescind the order to search for the GRE key, but he altered the end goal. When one of your best and most trusted men fights you to the death over a city and its people, it forces you to think. The new objective was to crack open X13 and haul out all the equipment, generators, supplies, and everything else that had been gathering dust in those warehouses for a decade and a half. The GRE key itself was to be found solely to keep it from falling into the wrong hands, the hands of a bastard and psychopath like Major Matt, for instance.