There were sounds of violence behind us again, much closer.
‘They’ve met some of our lads,’ Anton said. Obviously we were not the only people pulling back to the second line. Equally obviously somebody had decided to make a stand. It would not do much good against the overwhelming number of the enemy, but it might give us time to escape.
Anton was looking at Ivan. I could tell what he was thinking. He wanted to go back and get involved in the scrap. I shook my head. ‘Useless,’ I croaked, my mouth suddenly very dry again. ‘You won’t help. You’ll just get yourself killed alongside them. Macharius is going to need every man who can fight. Get back to the second line and find cover there.’
I was proud of myself for forcing out such a long and coherent sentence and I grinned. No one seemed pleased by my eloquence though. They scowled as if I had just told them to eat a great pile of corpse innards or take a swim in the latrine trench. They wanted to fight. Back there, comrades were fighting and dying and the sounds of that combat played on their nerves and damaged their image of themselves as fighting men.
I wanted to say they are dying so you can get back to the second line and fight another day but I resisted the urge. It would not have helped and, anyway, they could see the sense of it themselves, or if they couldn’t, nothing I could say would change things.
They picked themselves up and moved on. Behind us the sounds of combat told me that it would not be long before the battle came to us. The heretics were advancing fast.
‘It’s no use,’ Anton said. ‘We’re surrounded.’
I had blacked out for a moment and I had no idea what he was talking about. My leg felt as if someone had been pumping toxic sludge into it. A small daemon was beating time on my forehead with a sledgehammer.
‘What?’ I said. It was not the most intelligent thing I could have said, but you try asking smart questions when you’re full of the latest plague on Loki. It took me a few moments to realise what he was talking about. The heretics had advanced unopposed on either side of us and it looked like they had made even better time. Of course, they were not slowed down by the walking wounded like we were.
‘Heretics ahead of us and on both sides, sergeant,’ said Ivan, managing a reasonable facsimile of respect for a superior on the battlefield. ‘We’re cut off from the second line.’
He sounded quite calm, but it was always difficult to pick out any emotions in his speech. Even before he lost half his face he was a cool one. I looked at Anton. He was sweating and a little pale. The scar was writhing on his forehead, which told me that he was at the very least tense.
‘We’ve been in worse situations,’ I said. I managed to sound calm, too, which was quite an achievement under the circumstances.
‘Care to remind me of one?’ said Anton. ‘I’m having some difficulty remembering any at the moment.’
I took a deep breath. The truth was, at that moment, I was not too troubled at the prospect of imminent death. At least it would stop the daemon pounding on my head with its hammer. And I would not have to worry about losing my leg.
‘You sure they are ahead of us?’ I asked.
‘If they’re not, our own boys have changed uniforms and decided to shoot at us,’ said Anton. I could tell he was in the mood to be sarcastic. He often chose the most unhelpful times for that.
More clouds of the phosphorescent gas were drifting by. There was a slight breeze and it swirled like the mingled ghosts of all the countless dead who had fallen on the trench-scarred valleys and plains of Loki. There were times when I felt certain that it formed daemonic faces who leered down at me. I wondered if any of the others were seeing them or whether it was just me.
I tried to visualise the map of the trench system I carried in my head. With a huge effort I dragged it up from the illness-clogged sumps of my mind. ‘Try the left passage, down along Dead Man’s Trench,’ I said. ‘It’s narrow and it looks blocked but there’s a way through the wire if you are careful.’
‘Field engineers have probably fixed that,’ said Anton. He seemed only too pleased to be able to contradict me, the frakker.
‘Oh, that’s all right then,’ I said. ‘Let’s just wait here and die because you’re too lazy to go and check.’
‘Illness doesn’t make you any less mean-tempered,’ said Anton.
‘Head for Dead Man’s Trench,’ I said. ‘That’s an order.’
It was the last thing I managed to say for a while. The daemon faces in the mist were whispering to me and I could not quite make out what they were saying.
Dead Man’s Trench had not been repaired. It was long and narrow and for some obscure reason it had been blocked off by barbed wire. The wire was rusty and there were scores of skeletons caught up in it. Some of them wore our uniforms, some of them wore the enemy’s rags. None of them looked like they would ever march in a parade line again.
No one had used the trench for quite a while. It had a reputation for being haunted. Even grizzled veterans swore the spirits of the dead gathered there under the skull moon. Soldiers are prone to telling such horror stories, but there was something about the atmosphere of the place that made you believe the tales.
You could pick your way through the wire if you were careful. The dead men did not object, they just looked at you with big, empty eyes that asked why you were still alive and they weren’t. Today I noticed that there were lots of little daemons scuttling among them, clutching their fat bellies and laughing at me, at mortality, at the futility of life in general. It was strange that no one else saw them. They were ugly little critters with a curious humour in their mocking eyes.
We moved carefully through the trench, following the paths that Anton and Ivan knew were there, and we could hear the heretics chanting in the earthworks that ran parallel. We were in the worst sort of death-trap if any of them decided to walk through the gap between the lines. They could shoot down at us from the parapets and we were slowed by the barbed wire.
I could appreciate the danger in the lucid moments that I had when the daemons weren’t frolicking around me. It did not make me any happier. Anton and Ivan were taking turns supporting me and I did my best to guide my feet and not get myself snagged on the barbed wire. Just look at what had happened the last time I had done that.
The sound of combat still drifted over us. Sometimes the poisoned mists deadened it so that it sounded leagues away. At other times, it appeared to be coming from the next trench or even right by our ears. Our lads were putting up more resistance than had seemed possible at the start of our retreat.
My limbs felt like lead now and my uniform was soaked in sweat. The crust on my leg wound had broken and greenish stuff was leaking through. I wasn’t just worried about the fact that I had been infected with the corpse-walking disease, I became convinced of it. Those little daemons were pointing at me and laughing because they knew it, too.
I looked at Ivan through feverish eyes and said, ‘If I die, put a bullet through my head. I don’t want to come back like those deaders.’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Anton, a little too cheerfully for my liking.
‘On second thoughts, Ivan, you do it. Wait until I kill the idiot boy first,’ I said.
‘The sergeant is hallucinating,’ Anton explained helpfully to the rest of our squad.
‘Will do,’ muttered Ivan, words garbled by his metal jaw. I did not know whether he was talking about doing it before or after I got Anton. Either would suit me.
We were reaching the end of Dead Man’s Trench and there were definite sounds of fighting ahead. I clutched my shotgun tight.