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.