Fall of Macharius

Chapter Ten

A warning klaxon woke me. I sat up too quickly and felt dizzy. I glanced around, wondering what was going on, what the panic was. The constant repetitive blaring sound was a sector callout alarm, the sort that you normally only hear in a hive city when there has been a catastrophic failure of life support systems. If that had happened I was in the worst possible place, garbed only in a medical smock, without weapons or equipment.

Another darker thought occurred to me. The heretics might have broken through; they might have invaded the last bastion of the Imperium on this planet. Our defeat might already have been accomplished.

I looked around to see what I could see. Sisters Hospitaller were moving through the chaos. Their faces showed no emotion but they had been trained to deal with the carnage of the battlefield and not to panic. I noticed a medicae adept moving between the beds. His stride was swift, his manner urgent. I saw fear in his eyes. I pulled myself out of bed and stood in front of him.

‘What is going on?’ I asked. He made to brush by me.

‘I don’t have time for this,’ he said. I put a restraining hand on his shoulder and he shrugged it off. I applied one of the holds I had been taught in basic training. I have got a lot of use out of it over the years. Even in my weakened state I was capable of holding him in place. I could tell from his expression he was finding the experience painful, even as he struggled to break my grip.

‘If you keep this up you will either break your arm or dislocate your shoulder. In fact, I might do that for you.’

He listened to my words for a moment. They seemed to take a few heartbeats to travel from his ear to his brain. He stopped struggling.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Now tell me as quickly and clearly as you can what is going on.’

‘The alarm has sounded.’

‘I know. I can hear it. Tell me why.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Guess.’

‘There are rumours of a heretic army in the streets of Niflgard. Of a new plague breaking out. I’ve been hearing them all day.’

No point in asking why no one had told me. No one tells the patients anything in a place like this. I let him go and he scuttled off, looking backwards over his shoulder, angry and afraid. He was not used to being manhandled. He would not have lasted a minute in the streets of the hive where I grew up.

I walked over to the wall, where the emergency rebreathers should have been kept. The cases were open and they were all gone. I guess they had been stripped away and sent to the front a long time ago. Either that or they had been stolen and sold on the black market.

You can fashion an emergency rebreather against certain types of gas from a sheet soaked in your own urine. Don’t ask me why it works, but it does. I lifted a sheet from my bed and tore it into strips just in case. If I had possessed an alembic I would have prepared some urine as well, but I did not. I stood there for a moment, wondering what was going on. I needed to find out more. If the heretics really had broken through, Macharius would either be counter-attacking or regrouping at the space port for evacuation.

I needed clothing, gear, weapons and equipment. A hospital was not a place to find any of those. I might be able to scavenge scalpels or a surgical chainsaw but that would be about the limit. Still, it was better than nothing.

I was feeling stronger now. Adrenaline has that effect. One minute you might feel weak as a newborn kitten, but if your life is in danger, you can find the strength to wrestle an ork if you need to. I strode past a bed on which a figure lay covered in a grubby white sheet. Poor frakker, I thought. A cold white hand grabbed my wrist.

My response was reflexive. I chopped down with my free hand, breaking the grip, then stepped back. As I did so the figure under the sheet sat up. If it was a joke, I thought, it was being executed with spectacularly bad timing and poor taste.

It was not a joke.

The sheet fell away to reveal a dead man. His skin was grey, not with ill-health but with the chill of death. It was the colour of processed meat ground from bone and gristle in a distant food manufactorum. His eyes were an odd bloody red with that hint of corpse-light green burning in their depths. A slight trickle of greenish pus ran from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth when the body moved.

The corpse wheezed and gurgled not because it was breathing, but because its lungs were being compressed within it by its movements, and then it seemed the phlegm was being forced out.

What I noticed most was the smell. It was as if with every false breath it were emitting the stench of all the putrefaction within its body, all of the pus and phlegm and rotting innards. It was a stench to turn the stomach and sour the heart and I had no rebreather. Just the stink of it paralysed me for the moment it took to get from its bed and grab at me. They say that fingernails still grow after death and this corpse had long ones that bit into my flesh. I grunted with pain and responded as I had been trained to too long ago on Belial.

I lashed out with my foot, catching it between the legs. Its movements were slow and clumsy and it made no attempt to dodge. My kick had no effect. The corpse felt no pain. I had turned its testicles to jelly and got no reaction whatsoever. It was dragging me closer to its foul-smelling mouth. Its teeth were bared as if it intended to bite me. Its face had a look of total, all-consuming hunger.

I brought my arms up inside its grip, my forearms against the internal arc of its elbows. It was strong, but my motion broke its grip and jerked its arms apart at the cost of leaving some of my own skin beneath its fingernails. I pulled at the sheet it had left on the bed, tossed it over the dead man’s head and ran. It did not make any sense to stand and trade blows with something that felt no pain, particularly not when other corpses were rising from beneath their sheets and making a grab for the living.

There were at least a score of them, but they induced a panic disproportionate to their number amid all those beds crammed with the sick, the dying and those trapped in fever dreams. To many it must have just seemed like another aspect of their nightmare, until they died with the teeth of a walking corpse buried in their jugular.

I needed to find a weapon, any weapon. I saw a medicae adept lying on his back with a dead man on his chest that gnawed at his throat and pulled out his entrails with bloody fingers. On a trolley near at hand were medical implements, including a surgical chainsaw.

Grabbing it meant getting closer to the feasting corpse. I told myself it seemed busy and lunged forward. My action distracted the dead thing from its meal. It looked at me with its reddish eyes. I saw a network of small broken veins within them. Tears of blood spilled down its cheeks and a line of mucus like the trail of some daemon slug dripped from its nose and down over its chin. It wheezed its stinking breath. There were flies all around it. They seemed to have come from nowhere; perhaps they had hatched within its flesh.

I grabbed for the chainsaw. There was no way to find the activating rune quickly so I lashed out, burying the serrated teeth in the dead man’s forehead. They bit deep and small fragments of brain and juice flowed out, but he kept coming, reaching for me.

I found the runic activator on the grip and invoked a basic technical chant I had learned when I served on Baneblades all those years ago. By chance or the Emperor’s Blessing the blades whirred to life, sending gobbets of flesh and splinters of bone spraying away.

I pushed forward and the blade bit into the skull and passed through, slicing the head in two all the way down to the spine. I twisted at the top of the spinal cord and pulled the weapon free. The dead man dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.

I let out a faint sigh of relief. I had found a weapon that worked and a way of putting the things down. That was the best I could hope for under the circumstances. I turned to look at the medicae but he was most definitely dead, his skin already turning a strange greyish green. He looked not unlike the walking corpse.

A thought struck me. These were not infected heretics who were rising this time, these were our own men. Had the disease mutated again, found a way to jump to the uninfected living and lie dormant until they passed on? If that was the case the plague was definitely growing stronger and more deadly.

Why now? Why were they all rising at once? Had some dark ritual been performed that caused them all to rise and hunger? I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably never know, that I didn’t even really want to know, and looked around to see what I could see.

A group of walking corpses was pressing a Sister Hospitaller back towards the door. The woman was trying to keep them at bay, swinging surgical implements at them, slicing flesh, but the walking dead men paid them no attention. I came up on the group from behind and sliced off heads and limbs with all the élan of a woodcutter chopping down trees. It was a crude technique but it was effective.

The ones with the severed heads fell at once, and the others kept coming until I decapitated them. When I finished I turned to the woman. She stared at me. I could not have been a pretty sight, a tall man in a besmirched medical smock wielding a chainsaw and covered in gore. She reacted pretty well, all things considered.

‘Thank you,’ the sister said. She was tall and dark-haired, and had a calm beauty that would have aroused my interest under somewhat different circumstances.

More and more dead bodies were rising and not all of them were coming out from under white sheets. The medicae adept whose chainsaw I was wielding came lumbering towards me, as if determined to reclaim the tool of his trade. He was hampered somewhat by the ropes of intestine wrapping themselves round his leg and forming slimy pools at his feet. Behind him came more and more dead people, arms outstretched, tears of blood running down their faces, uncanny hunger burning in their eyes.

The disease had certainly mutated. The dead were rising much more quickly and the plague seemed to be being passed on from the dead to the living, perhaps at the moment of death.

I turned to the woman and said, ‘It’s time to go.’

She did not need telling twice. We raced towards the elevator. It was already in use. I could see the glowing numbers light in sequence as it approached our floor. More walking dead, I thought. I did not see what else it could be. In this hospital at this moment it was the most likely explanation.

I wondered whether to wait and try to clear the elevator with my chainsaw or to make a break for the stairs. As I wrestled with the thought, the elevator reached our floor and the doors opened. I brought up the chainsaw and found myself looking down the barrel of a sniper rifle.

‘Typical,’ said Anton. ‘We come all this way to collect him and he greets us by trying to chop our heads off.’

‘It would raise the level of intelligence considerably in your case,’ I said.

‘And then he makes a smart remark. Not even a hello, pleased to see you, thanks for risking your life to save me.’

‘Pleased to see you,’ I said and I was.

‘You might want to save the sentimental reunion for later,’ said Ivan. ‘We have other problems.’

The sniper rifle barked. A walking dead man fell, his head reduced to so many blobs of flesh and brain. This in no way discouraged the others.

I hustled the sister into the elevator while Anton and Ivan fired over my shoulder.

‘I don’t suppose you thought to bring my shotgun,’ I said. The door closed, taking off the hand of a dead man as it did so. It crawled around on its fingers like a great spider until Anton stamped on it with his heavy boot. Then he shrugged his left shoulder. The duffle bag hanging from it dropped to the floor with a metallic crunch, just as the elevator began its descent.

‘Is that what I think it is?’

‘I thought you might be missing your favourite toy. I brought you some cartridges too.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. There was not just a shotgun in the duffle bag. There was a uniform and some combat boots as well.

‘You came well prepared,’ I said.

‘We thought we had better when the reports started coming in,’ said Ivan.

‘Reports?’ I asked.

‘Uprising. The whole city was rebelling, or so it seemed. Only it wasn’t that simple.’

‘When is it ever?’ I said. I pulled off the smock and started fitting on my uniform.

‘It wasn’t the citizens who were rebelling, it was the corpses. A whole bunch of them seemed to up and leave the morgues and go on a killing spree, and the ones they killed decided to join them and soon the whole bloody party was out of hand.’

I thought of what I had seen back in the ward. It seemed like the hospital was one of the last places to be touched. It made a certain sort of sense I suppose. It was warded against disease.

Anton decided to join in the explanation, possibly because Ivan was getting too much attention from the sister. ‘And then, wouldn’t you just know it, the heretics decided to attack. A huge offensive, millions of troops, living and dead, pushed all the way to the city wall, and someone opened the gates for them.’

I pulled on the boots. ‘Sounds like it was all part of someone’s plan,’ I said. ‘General Richter’s, maybe?’

‘They’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to put anything past you, haven’t they, Leo?’ said Anton.

‘He’s right though,’ said Ivan. ‘It’s all too closely timed for it to be any other way.’

‘I would have thought you would have your work cut out for you defending the space port.’

Ivan looked away. Anton looked at the ceiling and whistled. The elevator kept going down. I adjusted my helmet and then my rebreather. ‘We were off duty when the word came in to pull back, that we’d be taking to the ships in an hour or so.’

‘How long ago was that?’ I asked, while I loaded the shotgun. It felt good to be putting ammo in it again.

‘About half an hour ago.’

‘So what you’re really saying is that you deserted your post to come here and get me out.’

‘It doesn’t sound like such a good idea when you put it like that,’ said Anton. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have come.’

‘We’d just have been waiting to board a shuttle anyway,’ said Ivan. ‘This is way more exciting.’

Neither of them seemed particularly bothered that they might not be able to get back to space port in time to escape the impending catastrophic collapse of Niflgard into plague-ridden madness. I was very grateful to them both and I struggled for the perfect words to express my feelings. ‘You’re idiots,’ I said eventually.

‘You’re welcome,’ said Ivan.

The doors opened again. Corpses crawled across the lobby. Some of them were eating others. Some of them were fighting. All of them looked up with glowing reddish eyes when they smelt fresh meat.

I stepped forward, pumped the shotgun and pulled the trigger.