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.’