Fall of Macharius

Chapter Four

I looked down from the parapet of Skeleton Ridge at the fighting below. It was all visible through the magnoculars. The flash of the lasguns, the glare of phosphorescent grenades, the bodies impaled on stakes and trapped in barbed wire. The chatter of autogun fire and the roar of explosions drifted uphill. The bulk of the fighting was taking place below us, in the sector in which the heretics had been allowed to pass.

Tens of thousands of corpses were strewn across the hillside. The heretics had not been allowed to pass on Skeleton Ridge. We had chopped them down every time they tried to mount the slope. At one stage it had come to particularly bitter hand-to-hand combat but we had held out, only just.

‘I hope the Undertaker knows what he’s doing,’ Anton murmured close to my ear. I could follow his thoughts. The heretics were pushing forward in their tens of thousands. They were following the line of least resistance, convinced that they had scored a major breakthrough. In a sense, they had. The question now was whether we would be able to use that against them.

‘It’s a good plan,’ I said.

‘It’s the only plan,’ said Ivan. ‘Look at those frakkers. How can one lousy planet keep producing so many soldiers? We kill millions of them and millions more keep coming.’

‘There’s no more down there than a good-sized hive could produce,’ I said.

‘Yes, but there’s a lot more of them than there are of us. And there’s something strange about them.’

I knew what he meant. When I searched those corpse faces on the hill below us, they were all pocked with boils and suppurating abscesses. Their eyes were pinkish. Their skin was blotched. There was a sameness about them that was not the similarity that all corpses have, the stricken look of the fallen soldier. I looked from one to the other and saw what appeared to be a family resemblance among the faces. Looking at the nearest corpses, something niggled, and slowly what it was that was disturbing me floated to the surface of my mind.

Some of the faces were more than just similar. They were identical, like twins. I counted the same face a dozen times as if it had been stamped from a mould. It dawned on me that if I kept looking I might find it a thousand times. Once I started looking I saw that there was another face, also replicated, and another and another. It was as if all those warriors down there had come off a production line in a Guild Manufactorum on Belial. It was a facility that produced soldiers and it had maybe a dozen models. The warriors facing us were being grown in vats, or something worse, I felt sure of it. I suspected they fought so hard because they knew they were going to die anyway. They all seemed riddled with disease.

Even as I watched, the stomach of one – bloated hugely with corpse gas – exploded, sending a cloud of blood and entrails and something else into the air. The mortal remains spattered to the ground around it, but the extra stuff seemed to float in the air, like spores adrift on the wind.

‘That was quite a fart,’ said Anton, trying to make a dumb joke of it as always, but Ivan was ahead of him.

‘What new hellishness is this?’ he asked. More and more of the corpses were exploding, entrails bursting out, clouds of spores hovering over them. I glanced around and shouted, ‘Everybody make sure your rebreathers are tight.’

The men were Lion Guard. They should not have had to be told, but I like to be certain. I walked along the line making sure all of their masks were well adjusted and then I returned to the post where Anton and Ivan were waiting. I raised the magnoculars and checked again, for something had struck me.

I was right. The corpses that were exploding all seemed to have the same face, and it was one I had not seen before in previous attacks. I thought about what the medic had said, about new diseases being cross-bred. Maybe this new type of soldier was a new type of weapon bearing a new type of plague.

Even as the thought was running through my mind, a shot rang out. I looked at Anton who had raised the sniper rifle to his shoulder and fired. ‘One of them was moving,’ he said. ‘One of the heretics. He must not have been quite dead.’

Lasguns fired along the line now, bolts cutting through the gloom. I wondered whether Anton’s shot had triggered a nervous reaction and the men were simply spooked, but a corpse rose from the heap on the hillside and tottered forward a few feet, blood dripping from its eyes like tears. It got caught in the barbed wire and tried to continue, its flesh being raked off by the spikes. Anton’s shot exploded its head and it fell.

More and more of the corpses had started to move, pulling themselves up.

‘Must have been playing dead,’ muttered Anton, but I knew he was wrong. Several of the bodies were trailing their own entrails. One of them had a hole in his chest cavity that showed where his heart had been burned out.

‘Steady, lads,’ I shouted. The Lion Guard kept firing. The ambulatory corpses were put down again.

Ivan said, ‘Tell them to stop shooting.’

I was going to ask why but instead I bellowed the order. I watched and I saw what Ivan had noticed. Each of the corpses staggered forward only a few metres and then collapsed again, and did not rise.

‘Must be some new disease,’ Ivan said. ‘Makes them run around like headless chickens, even after they are dead.’

I kept my eyes on them nonetheless. I was unnerved by this latest development. Corpses moving by some sort of delayed reflex action I could believe, but not hours after they had been shot. Men waking up wounded on a battlefield was a possibility, but not in such numbers and not with such wounds. I felt that some new and evil development in the war was taking place.

I kept watching, but no more corpses exploded. No more dead men stirred. Not yet.

I woke from a bad dream of cadavers gnawing on my flesh. The worst thing about it was the corpses had belonged to Anton and Ivan and now it was Ivan shaking me awake.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

He gestured to the messenger standing by his shoulder. ‘Orders from Lieutenant Creasey, sir. We’re to be ready to counter-attack within the hour.’

I nodded and said to Ivan and Anton, ‘Make sure everybody is ready to move out. Make sure everybody has their grenades ready too. The fighting is going to be close and personal. We’ll be able to smell their bad breath.’

They scuttled away to spread the word. I studied the corpses on the hillside again. None of them had stirred. If we had not all witnessed it I would have suspected I had been hallucinating, that some form of nightmare gas had penetrated the filters of my rebreather.

The messenger was still standing there, looking at me, no doubt wondering why I was studying the enemy corpses so intently. ‘Any message to take back, sir?’

‘Tell the lieutenant we’ll be ready to go,’ I said. He saluted and scuttled away, leaving me staring at the cold and enigmatic faces of the corpses on the side of Skeleton Ridge.

The Lion Guard began to filter down the hillside along the feeder trench. Sandbags lined the way. The stairs were made from planks of wood, bits of metal, old ration tins half-buried in the muddy earth. Anything that would help give a foothold. Obscenities had been inscribed everywhere they could be, along with curses and prayers and the occasional sexually explicit drawing.

At this point the stairwell was only wide enough for one man. I was leading from the front; as I said before, it’s unwise to stand in front of a man with a shotgun. As we moved I prayed that another attack was not launched against the ridge. There was merely a small holding force up there now. We had stripped the defences of every man now that we were trying to close the gap and snip off the salient driven into our lines.

I felt tension building in my body. My mouth was dry. My heart was hammering against my ribs. We were outnumbered and we were weary and we were facing an enemy that seemed to have almost infinite resources in men and materials. In the long run we would lose if things continued as they were. We held only small footholds on Loki now and our supply lines back to the Imperium were long and faulty. The enemy had industrial cities full of productive capacity and access to unholy magic that let them create new armies of obscenely fanatical soldiers. In my youth, I would not have believed in such strange technological sorceries, but I had travelled too far and seen too much to doubt them now.

As I marched I wondered about things. How did those bodies decanted from vats learn? Did they come into the world with blank minds? If so, how was knowledge impressed into them? During the Dark Age of Technology the ancients were said to have possessed machines capable of such wicked miracles, but they had been lost a long time ago. Or had they? Was there something surviving on this world that tapped into those grim secrets?

I took a deep breath and tried to empty my mind of such speculations. It was best to concentrate on the job at hand; that would give me the greatest chance of survival. A faint depression nagged away at me.

What would that survival mean? Just another opportunity to go forth and face death again tomorrow, and the day after that and every day until finally death caught up with me, as it did to every mortal man.

I told myself that the world was getting to me, that the long struggle was bringing me down. I felt another twinge of pain in my leg. Maybe I was coming down with something and my mind was simply responding to my body’s hints. It had happened before.

I glanced out through a hole in the parapet intended to allow a man to shoot from it. I caught sight of the battlefield below us. Flares of light drifted overhead. A shell exploded somewhere. Through the soles of my boots I felt the vibration of its distant detonation.

Lines of the enemy were still moving across no-man’s-land, heading into the deep breach in our lines. The enemy moved slowly but surely. They chanted their gurgling prayers and moved in time to their drummers. They did not seem to have any idea of their own mortality, of the fact that they could die. I thought again of empty minds, and newborn bodies emerging from vats, of unholy innocents being dispatched to fight in a holy war. I felt oddly sorry for them for a moment and then I squashed the feeling as a thing I could not afford.

I was in the trenches proper now. Grosslanders held the position, weapons at the ready, and we Lion Guard filtered past them in the gloom, making for the enemy.

The duckboards of the trenches shifted underfoot as we passed. Bodies lay everywhere. Some of them had the bloated stomachs and twisted faces I remembered from the assault on the ridge. I wondered if they had stirred after death as well.

How many had died here? How many hundreds of thousands had fallen? A bleak vision entered my mind, of all those bodies stirring and beginning to move in the service of some evil power. In those haunted trenches, beneath that evil moon, visible even in daytime, such a thing seemed possible. The Emperor knows I have seen stranger things during my time in his service.

Perhaps there was something about this world that fed on death. Maybe all the killing leached into the soil itself and then fed its dark energy back into those corpses. I told myself to stop thinking about it. There must be other simpler explanations. A disease that temporarily restored motor functions, causing nerves to misfire and muscles to spasm. That’s all it was.

I could hear the gurgling chants coming closer now. The earth vibrated under the tread of that oncoming horde. I felt exposed and vulnerable, the front runner of the tiny force that was attempting to stop that irresistible tide. My leg gave another twitch. Black despair swirled like poison in my brain.

The trenches widened out. More bodies sprawled everywhere. Headless, limbless, reduced to bloody pulp by the great ravening beast this war had become. I could hear yelling now. The gurgling voices had a hint of triumph in them, as if every soldier in that onrushing army were utterly certain of victory. They had good reason to feel that way.

I tried to picture the map of the trench complex in my head. I thought I had it all down. My battles along this front line had given me a great deal of familiarity with the layout over the past six months.

Up ahead I caught sight of the first of those brown-clad, mud-covered, sickly looking soldiers. I crouched low, held the shotgun ready, took a deep breath and prepared for combat.

I raced forward and pulled the trigger, blasting a hole deep in the enemy ranks. I pumped it and fired again and then again. The heretics went down like puppets with their strings cut. They had not been expecting this attack. They had thought that the fighting was still a long way ahead of them.

They reacted sluggishly, as they usually did, with the lethargy of men long confined to sick beds, or whose minds were slower than they should be. They were not very good soldiers, those vat-born heretics. There were just a lot of them.

I saw the uniform of an officer and I shot him, knowing that would slow their responses even more. In these sorts of regiments, the enemy officer corps were the only ones among the heretics who seemed remotely normal, who could respond with alacrity to any new threat. Their followers obeyed them implicitly. In a very real sense they were the brains and nerves of the enemy army.

The officer went down along with a bunch of his minions. Ivan swept by me, lobbing a grenade, and then pulling the trigger on his laspistol. Anton moved up to my side and began shooting with his sniper rifle at any enemy that even hinted at turning in my direction. The rest of our men moved forward sending a hail of grenades and small arms fire into the heretics. We smashed into their line like a bayonet tearing through diseased flesh. In my mind’s eye I could picture other squads of Lion Guard on the far side of the salient doing the same thing. The jaws of the trap were starting to close. The question was, who was being trapped, the enemy or us?

We charged forward through the trenches, killing as we went, blowing them up with grenades, setting them alight with incendiaries, blasting them with shotguns and lasrifles. They could not stop us; we had them flanked and we were far, far better fighters. Most of the heretics were worse than even the greenest recruits, but there were just so damn many of them. We cut through them, cleaving their line, but such were their numbers that they simply filled the gaps we made like water flooding into a trench.

I smashed the head of one foe with the butt of the shotgun, stuck the barrel into the mouth of another, which broke his teeth. When I pulled the trigger, his skull disintegrated and the heretics behind him fell. Clouds of smoke were everywhere from the small fires started by the incendiaries, chemical blazes that not even the constant rain could douse.

I faced a heretic officer. He was huge and blubbery, with rolls of fat that distorted the shape of his uniform. A tiny red mouth was visible in parchment-pale skin. He was a head taller than me and weighed three times as much. Numerous chins compressed against his neck as he screamed and gurgled his hatred. Like most of their officer class, he did not seem to have any boils or rashes. His eyes were pink, though, and a mesh of tiny red veins was visible beneath the skin of his cheeks and forehead.

His movements were slow and lumbering. I pointed the shotgun at him. A body came falling from my right and deflected my aim as I pulled the trigger. The giant loomed over me, and I found myself locked in a bear-like embrace, my face pressed deep into folds of fat, flabby fingers pressing at my throat. I smelt sweat and something sickly sweet, like curdled milk.

I tried to pull away, but for all his softness the giant was strong. I heard his breath come out in phlegmy wheezes. I heard his stomach gurgle. I had dropped the shotgun. I brought my fist around and buried it in his belly. It was like poking the side of some huge balloon. My hand sank in and then simply recoiled as if I were hitting rubber. I looked up and saw that he was smiling serenely as he choked the life out of me, a look of dreamy satisfaction on his blubbery face.

I reached down with my right hand, hoping to grab his nads and squeeze them, and I found nothing. He was a eunuch. Absurdly I wondered if all the officer caste were. I slumped down, faking a loss of consciousness, my fast-weakening fingers fumbling for the bayonet I had strapped to my boot. I pulled it free from the sheath and I stabbed upwards into that vast belly.

He gave a high-pitched scream and his hands spasmed, and I feared in that moment he was going to crush my windpipe. He toppled backwards, clutching at his stomach, a dark red stain spreading across his uniform tunic. I stabbed again, aiming below the ribs, into the belly once more, blade pulling upwards to cut internal organs. His shrieking continued.

Another heretic closed with me and I slashed his throat. I looked around desperately for my shotgun, a weapon I had carried through more than two decades of campaigning, and which had saved my life on multiple occasions. I had a superstitious dread of losing it. I saw it lying in the mud and I dived for it, almost shaking with relief when my hand curled around it. I returned my bayonet to its sheath and checked the shotgun to make sure it was working.

A brief lull settled on the position. For a moment there was a quiet that sounded almost like silence compared to the roar of battle that had gone before it.

I saw Anton looking at me and glanced around to make sure Ivan was all right. He stood propped up against the side of the trench, his bionic arm covered in blood. The rest of the squad were stretched out behind us. Everyone looked tired, but moved with the nervous brittle energy that adrenaline and the knowledge that you are standing on the knife-edge between life and death brings.

‘Tougher than he looked, that last big frakker,’ Anton said, ‘but I knew you could take him.’

‘You could have lent me a hand.’

‘You didn’t need one and I was busy with some heretics of my own.’

‘What now?’ Ivan asked.

‘We push on,’ I said. ‘We try and link up with the boys from Plague Hill. I reckon we’ve only got about another league to go.’

‘What about holding the line?’

‘Leave it to the lads coming up behind us. We need to break on through and seal off the salient if we’re going to have any chance at all.’

Ivan raised an eyebrow and directed a look of the uttermost cynicism towards me. Clearly he felt that our chances were not great. What could I tell him? We needed to follow on through to give ourselves a fighting chance.

Anton’s eyes suddenly narrowed and I heard his gasp of fear. I turned to see the corpse of the officer pull itself upright, its fat arms stretching out and its pudgy fingers flexed like claws. An obscene gurgling sound emerged from its mouth – there was an awful suggestion of humour in it. Its glance swivelled to meet mine and I saw hunger and hatred there.