Fall of Macharius

Chapter Six

Not even the stimm could keep me completely awake. I slept standing up, with my eyes open, and I dreamed strange dreams. I saw the faces of people long dead. I remembered girls I had known on half a hundred worlds. I thought about my old man back on Belial, most likely gone to his grave by now.

My head throbbed. My leg ached but when I checked it again, there was no more pus, just a crust that had hardened over the wound. I cleaned it and changed the dressings. I put down my shotgun and picked up a lasgun and sighted along it out into no-man’s-land, trying to get a feel for it in case I had to use it again soon.

I sighted along the barrel and checked the charge. I squeezed the trigger. It pulsed light. No real recoil I could detect, which was strange after using the shotgun for so long. The helmet I had been aiming at turned cherry red at the impact point. I could still hit with the thing then, which was good news, considering my trusty shotgun might soon be worthless to me except as an ornament. I let out a long breath. Sweat ran down my brow. My mouth felt dry and my nerves felt stretched, both symptoms of the fact that I had probably been using too much stimm.

‘Nice to see you haven’t lost your touch,’ Anton said. ‘You can still hit the side of a barn door at short range.’

‘Do you even know what a barn is?’ I asked.

‘It’s an ancient device,’ he said. ‘From the Dark Age of Technology. That’s where the saying comes from. It was most likely a war machine of some sort. Maybe a tank.’

I decided to let him steep in his ignorance. With my sweating and dry palms and racing heart anything else seemed too much like hard work.

‘Hello! What’s that?’ Anton said. Shadowy forms emerged from the murk, moving very slowly. I sighted at one. It was a heretic, but there was something odd about it. It shuffled along like a sick man and it did not seem to have any weapons in its hand. A shot rang out from beside me. Anton had put a bullet between the heretic’s eyes. He did not seem to be having any trouble finding ammunition, but then he always made friends with the ratlings wherever we went.

‘Got him,’ he said with some satisfaction. A mass of lasgun pulses went off down the line. Nervous soldiers were firing in answer to Anton’s sniping, or, at least, so I thought. Eventually they petered out, as the soldiers realised that another heretic attack was not inbound.

‘Tough shot,’ I said, unable to keep a note of bitter irony from my voice. ‘Particularly with a sniper rifle. You must be really proud of yourself.’

‘Every time a heretic dies, the Emperor smiles,’ Anton said.

‘You sure about that?’

‘I’ll find out if I ever get to Terra.’

‘Because we must have kept a grin on his face every second since we got to Loki,’ I said.

‘You always have to quibble about everything, don’t you?’

‘And if you multiply that across every world the crusade is fighting on…’

‘It’s only a saying…’

‘And if you add in all the heretics the Adeptus Astartes must be slaying yesterday, today and every day…’

‘You’re not going to let this rest, are you?’

I could see more figures moving out in no-man’s-land. They were visible amidst the clouds of mist that floated there, not even making any effort to use them for cover.

‘Looks like the heretics have decided to take another swipe at us,’ Ivan said. He aimed his laspistol at the nearest figure. It kept coming.

‘Must be on combat drugs,’ Ivan said.

‘You think?’ The rest of the figures were shambling forward now. Anton pulled the trigger and another one fell and did not get up.

‘That’s how you do it,’ he said with annoying satisfaction. More and more heretics were visible now, moving towards us with staggering slowness. I aimed and fired and burned one down. It kept moving even when its uniform caught fire from the concentrated las-pulses. It made no sound. Not a single shriek of agony escaped its lips.

Something was very wrong here. The rest of the heretics behaved the same way. I saw one of them cut in two by a burst from a heavy bolter. Its hips and legs kept wriggling like a snake after it has been decapitated. Its upper torso dragged itself along.

‘What the…’ I heard Anton mutter. ‘That’s one tough heretic.’

‘There’s something strange here,’ I said.

‘Sorcery,’ Ivan said. ‘Daemon magic.’

‘Most likely.’

‘Just when things were going so well,’ Anton said. There was a childish whining tone in his voice. ‘That’s not fair.’

I understood what he meant. ‘Fair or not,’ I said, ‘we’re going to have to stop them.’

I noticed something else. Many of the heretics were wounded and those wounds were not fresh. They had been inflicted hours ago.

Even as that thought occurred to me, I heard a strange groaning sound from in front of the trench. The bodies out there were starting to stir. I pumped a las-bolt at one of them just as it was rising. Its flesh blackened but it kept moving. I remembered the bodies that had stirred earlier back on Skeleton Ridge; it looked like the same thing was happening again.

The heretics rose. Their eyes were red and they were weeping tears of blood. They did not bother lifting up their weapons. They began to slouch or crawl towards us. One of them was trailing his entrails along behind him; they were grey-furred from one of the local airborne fungal spores, but that did not seem to bother him any.

I took out a grenade and lobbed it among them. They did not dive for cover. They did not pay it the slightest attention. When the grenade exploded, the heretics closest to it were blown to pieces and they stopped moving. The others did not – even if their flesh had been torn open and the bones of their skulls were revealed they kept right on coming. One of them had a huge piece of shrapnel buried in an artery and blood pumped out, but it gave not the slightest sign of noticing.

More grenades rained down on them and tore them to pieces. In the meantime those in the distance kept moving closer. It was as if every heretic we had killed had come back to life to seek vengeance on us. I stopped firing and studied the oncoming horde, looking for some clue to what was happening, to see whether I could find anything that would help us with putting down the red-eyed shambling dead. I raised the magnoculars to my eyes and studied one of the walking corpses.

Its skin was pale and its eyes were red and tears of blood streamed down its cheeks. There was a glow within the eye-sockets like marsh gas seen in the distance, a hint of green under the bloodshot red. Even when a heretic vanished into a cloud of mist you could still sometimes see the dull light of his eyes.

Some of the heretics were chanting. Nuuuughaaal. Nergle. Narghul. Something like that. It was the only sound that escaped their lips. It was as if something had been branded into their brains so deeply they could remember it even after death. Every time I heard the word I felt a pulse of dread inside my skull, as if the mere sound of the name touched some deep-seated source of horror.

Off in the distance now the drums were beating. There were so many of them and they were so in time that I could feel the sound as a vibration in the ground – it seemed that the dead could, too. Their movements started to synchronise, to take on the rhythm of the drum, and they advanced with a raggedness of formation but a precision of step that was eerie.

We kept firing. They kept coming. The only ones who went down and stayed down were the ones Anton shot. What was he doing that everyone else wasn’t? Using a sniper rifle, but I could not see why that should make any difference. It was powerful, but not any more so than some of the heavy weapons being used. Then it came to me. Anton always aimed for the head. He was that kind of show-off.

I tried it myself, sending a lasgun shot into one of the dead men’s eyesockets. Its head exploded in a bubble of super-heated steam and the corpse fell and did not rise.

‘Aim for the head,’ I shouted. ‘That’s where they are vulnerable.’

A few of the men got the message and more of the heretics went down and did not get up again. Slowly word went along the line. The oncoming horde started to slow. I looked at Ivan. There was fear in his eyes and I did not blame him for it. Fighting against enemies who could come back from the dead was a thing to make the bravest men afraid.

‘It’s the gas,’ Ivan said. ‘This is what the gas was meant to do.’

He was guessing of course, but I saw the sense it what he was saying. We had seen bodies come back to life before, temporarily, back on Skeleton Ridge. Maybe the gas was some sort of catalyst. Or maybe it had triggered something. I was not a technical adept, I had no real clue. Maybe all of those bodies out there had been specially prepared in some way before the battle began. Maybe we had not been the only ones setting a trap, and as that thought ran through my mind, another raced up to join it.

I turned around and raced to the other side of the trench, facing towards our second line, and saw that my premonition was correct. Over there, in the salient where we had trapped them, the resurrected heretics were moving again. They were coming towards our lines from both sides now. We were being attacked on two fronts, just as we had done to them earlier. The trap had become a trap. The situation was desperate and becoming more so with every moment that passed.

Huge numbers of heretics still shambled in from no-man’s-land while their brethren were going to hit us from behind. Even as that thought struck me I noticed that some of the corpses that had not yet been picked up by the burial detachments were also stirring. I dived down from the parapet and smashed the skull of one with the butt of my lasrifle. It fell back into the mud and lay in a puddle of brain and blood and greenish goo.

More of the corpses rose and began to move. If they had possessed brains enough to use their weapons we would all have died in those few moments, attacked by surprise from within our own trenches. As it was, things were still touch and go. A squad of riflemen obeyed my shouts to come help me and we clubbed and shot and sawed off heads until the heretics moved no more.

Lieutenant Creasey had noticed what was going on and he was dividing the force by squad, sending half to cover the salient and keeping half facing no-man’s-land to take out the incomers. I stood up, wheezing and feeling weak again. I was starting to reach the limits of my strength, where neither stimm nor painkillers would help.

‘You all right, Lemuel?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ I responded. I was not looking at him now. I was looking at the dead heretics. He followed my gaze to see what was holding my attention. Something was happening to the corpses we had put down. Their flesh sagged and what was within it, muscle, sinew or vein, was starting to liquefy into a greenish toxic sludge that seeped out and formed puddles around them. It was nasty-looking and something in my mind screamed at me not to touch it.

‘At least when we kill them this time we don’t have to worry about them coming back,’ Creasey said. He was probably right, but something worried me – surely it could not be that simple. I headed over to the inner trench, the part facing out into the salient.

Thousands of walking corpses came towards us, moving slowly, as easy to hit as targets on a shooting range. We kept firing and they kept coming with a relentless, terror-inducing urge to get to grips with us. They seemed mindless and that just made them all the more frightening. Normal men would have fled in the face of the casualties we were inflicting on them. These heretics just kept shambling forward.

Our lads kept shooting, but not everyone can make a headshot every time, particularly not under the circumstances prevailing in those trenches, with mist, bad light, and the sure and certain knowledge that somewhere at your back was another undead monster just waiting to kill you.

I felt it myself, a crawling between the shoulder blades, that had me constantly wanting to turn my head. The assault continued, the dead men kept coming and we kept shooting. More and more bodies fell. As time wore on, the process of dissolution came over the heretics by itself. The bodies did not seem able to keep moving for more than a few minutes before they disintegrated into their component slime, leaving only corroding skin and soiled uniforms.

All the while this went on, the drums kept sounding in the distance like the heartbeat of an angry god.

We stopped them eventually. Or perhaps they stopped themselves, whatever was in them burning them out and reducing them to protoplasmic sludge. The assault lasted for over an hour and by the time it was finished we had taken scores more casualties and used up even more ammunition. My head was swimming.

I slumped down with my back to the parapet. I was starting to burn up and my leg was hurting once more. I thought about the sludge the walking dead had turned into and the pus that had leaked from my wound and my feverish mind found a connection between them.

It seemed to me then that I was just like those walking corpses and that sooner or later I was going to die and be returned to my component parts. I was going to rot on the ground unless I was burned. The sickly stuff oozing from my wound was just a foretaste of that. Even as this cheery notion trudged through my mind, another, even cheerier, followed it.

I started to wonder if I had been infected by the same disease spores as the heretics, if I had somehow picked up the contamination from them. I was sweating. My breathing rasped within my chest, and I was making the same sort of gurgling wheezing noises as they had. It seemed all too likely I was going the same way. Perhaps I had even been infected by the same heretical madness. That might explain why my thoughts had been so disloyal and my feelings so depressed.

Another star shell burst overhead as the drumming reached a crescendo. Heretics were chanting again, the same name over and over again, and it seemed to me that my own wheezing breath was pitched in time to it. Nuuuurghuuuul. Nuuuurghuuuul. Nuuuurghuuuul. Why were they not chanting Richter’s name? His men had used to do that back when they fought for the Emperor. And what was it about the name that seemed to echo within my soul and awaken my darkest feeling of dread?

I slumped forward for a bit. Blackness overcame my mind. Strange dreams swirled around me. I saw a mountainous thing, huge and unclean, all green and brown. It clutched its stomach with enormous paws and laughed, and as it laughed thousands of tiny versions of itself poured out of every orifice, like snot, like diarrhoea. Its belly rippled in time to the drumbeat of its heart. All of the little daemons chanted that strange and disturbing name over and over again. I saw them dancing across the battlefield, climbing into the corpses through noses and mouths and ripped flesh and then reanimating the bodies with their evil essence.

Breathing was getting harder and harder and harder. I felt as if I were drowning and at the same time burning. The skull moon beamed down and its face was that of the great laughing daemon. The clouds were the colour of the daemon’s skin and when it rained, millions and millions more of the daemon’s tiny offspring dropped from the skies, riding within raindrops as they fell.

Lightning split the sky. It flashed like a thousand artillery pieces going off – Basilisks and Medusas and the like. The tiny daemonlings hit the ground and bounced and scurried all over the battlefield with sinister, supernatural energy.

They were all rushing towards me, swirling around me, clambering over me, their tiny talons buried into my flesh, particularly around my leg. They forced themselves into my mouth and nostrils, choking me. They tugged at my hair and clawed at my eyes. I writhed around trying to crush them, but there were too many and they kept on coming…

My eyes snapped open and I came awake to see Anton and Ivan looking down at me with worried faces. ‘Wake up, Leo,’ said Anton. His hand was drawn back as if he was about to administer a slap. ‘It’s just a bad dream.’

The mouthpiece of my rebreather was filled with drool and snot. I took a hasty breath, pulled it off and switched it for a new one. I did not feel any better, but at least I did not feel like I was drowning any longer.

‘We’ve got company,’ said Anton. I pulled myself upright, weak as a kitten, and looked out into no-man’s-land. Another massive force of heretics was moving towards us. They were not shambling dead but fresh soldiers, newly decanted from their vats and ready to do battle.

I groaned, not so much from pain but because I had grasped Richter’s strategy now. He could just keep throwing more and more troops at us, alternating waves of living and dead until they ground us down and swept us from the face of the planet.

I looked around for my shotgun, checked that it was loaded and prepared myself for death.

They came on and on, marching in time to their drums and their phlegmy chanting. Their green and brown banners so like and yet so unlike Macharius’s own Lion banner fluttered above them. They held their weapons at the ready and fired as they marched, not stopping until they were cut down. Their shooting was not particularly accurate, but it did not have to be – there was a lot of it.

I propped myself against a sandbag and lined up the shotgun where I could reach it. I was not planning on using it until the heretics were very close. I raised my lasgun and fired it, simply snapping off shots. The heretics seemed better trained than the last bunch, who had been mere cannon fodder. These took advantage of cover, threw themselves down in shell-holes and gave covering fire to some of their comrades as they advanced.

They were advancing along a broad front. We no longer had choke points on Skeleton Ridge and Plague Hill and there was no chance of catching this bunch in a trap.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up and saw Lieutenant Creasey. A frown was chiselled on his craggy brow. ‘Word has just come in from headquarters. We’re to begin withdrawing.’

‘Me and the lads are to be rearguard,’ I said. I could see it coming and it suited my mood. I felt as if I was dying anyway and I wanted to take a few more of the heretics with me.

He shook his head. ‘You’re to lead the first squads out.’

I wondered how this decision had been achieved. I even considered arguing the toss for a second but then I nodded. There was no point asking who would be commanding the rearguard. I could tell from the expression on his face. ‘Good luck, sir,’ I said.

‘Thank you, sergeant,’ he replied. I saluted and lurched along the line, tapping the men from my unit on the shoulder. Anton and Ivan tagged along at my heels as if they feared I would fall and wanted to be in a position to catch me. Anton somehow even managed to get his head under my shoulder and was half carrying me along.

‘Let go of me,’ I said, my words only slurring a little. ‘I can walk.’

He shrugged and stepped away. I took a couple of steps and fell on my face. Ivan reached out with his bionic limb to help me up. ‘That went well,’ I said, but I made no objections when they kept supporting me.

We began to make our way back through the trench system, while the sound of fighting reached a crescendo behind us.