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.