My brain continued to gibber. Panicked thoughts raced through it. What was I missing here? Where were the enemy? They must still be close. I checked the ridgeline of the trench. There were faint scuff marks on some of the crenulations. Maybe the assault team had come over there. Or maybe they had come down that branch in the trench. I moved slowly forward, my finger almost twitching on the shotgun trigger, the weapon heavy in my hand.
We moved along the trench beside the open sewer. Someone had been making improvements recently by the look of it. Pipes emerged from beneath the water as if workers had abandoned an attempt at plumbing halfway through the process. My brain registered that, but my eyes wandered on.
I counted corpses. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. I stopped counting. A whole platoon had gone down here and there was no sign of their attackers. With every step I felt like I was sticking my neck further and further into a trap, moving further and further away from safety. Reinforcements were getting more distant. The chanting of the heretics was getting closer.
A bore-fly landed on my goggles. More joined it. They crawled across the glass, partially obscuring my vision. I shook my head but they did not move. They were bigger than bluebottles, with bloated thoraxes and wings that seemed the same colour as the unnatural oils that floated on the surface of the chemically tainted puddles.
Had the enemy used gas? The thought sauntered across my brain. Images of men with cut throats flickered through my mind. Maybe they had taken out the sentries with it, paralysed some of the men, but there was more to it than that. All of the corpses I could see were wearing rebreathers. Not that it mattered much. There had been dozens of consignments of faulty masks sent to the front. Some said it was simply the usual incompetence of the Imperial manufactorums. Other claimed corners were being cut to fatten the profits of the merchant houses. I had heard Macharius rail against such things often enough not to dismiss the possibility.
Rebreathers, I thought. It niggled at my mind. I knew I was missing something but I could not work out what. I moved along the duckboards over the sewage trench. I thought about all of those naïve newcomers who never checked the filters on their masks, who trusted that they would work and who died, their lungs filling with froth, during the first gas attacks. I had tried lecturing them. I had tried setting an example. I had tried many things, but some people always know it’s not their problem, that death always comes for somebody else, until that final moment when they realise that they are not immortal after all.
I looked down at the latrine trench and saw the brown mix of excrement, urine and mud. I noticed the faint swirls in it that were not caused by the rain and then I knew…
A bump emerged from the muddy mess. I blinked. It took a heartbeat for my brain to process what I was seeing. Something erupted out of the latrine trench. Instinctively I pulled the trigger on the shotgun and the thing came apart. The impact of the shot revealed the red of blood, the pink of flesh and the white of bone. The torn form of a heretic soldier flipped backwards into the mess.
I heard shouts from behind me as surprised soldiers responded more slowly than I had. The enemy assault squad had been waiting below the surface of the latrine trench, breathing through snorkels, examining us through periscopes. Those had been the strange pipes I had noticed at first.
Along the line horrified Imperial Guard soldiers were engaged in close combat with foes who dripped a trail of slime behind them and gurgled a name that sounded like Nurg-Al from deep within their chests. There was an awful suggestiveness about the name. Hearing it made the hairs rise along the back of my neck, and I felt an ominous sense of foreboding that made me want to stop the chanting any way I could.
The attackers were well trained, had the element of surprise and inspired horror and revulsion, but my men were holding their own. They were members of Macharius’s elite guard, after all. They might even have been able to turn the tables on their attackers by the fury of their counter-assault had not more heretics erupted from the bunkers behind us, thrusting with blades, firing autoguns. An attack from two sides was almost enough to erode the courage of any warrior. There is nothing like the sensation that you might be stabbed in the back to get you looking over your shoulder, fighting with less than your customary efficiency and making you think about running for it.
I pumped the shotgun and twisted at the waist. A group of heretics was charging towards me. I took a heartbeat to line up the shot and pulled the trigger. The load of pellets ripped through the enemy, sent them tumbling back involuntarily into the mud and the latrine pit. They would not be emerging this time.
I glanced around and saw that Tomkins was down. His bayonet blade had sliced away mask, cowl and upper tunic from one of the heretics and I had a sudden horrific view of the cultist’s exposed features. His skin was near-albino white. His eyes were bloodshot and marred by tiny broken veins. Boils erupted from his skin. Red rashes ran like rivers between them. He looked as unhealthy as it was possible to be and remain mobile, and yet he fought with the feverish strength of a berserker. This was a product of the vats.
I brought the butt of my shotgun down on his head. His skull broke like an eggshell, spilling discoloured brains everywhere. Flies buzzed around him and I had the sudden violent illusion that they had been released when the bones of his head had shattered. I told myself that could not be the case and took a moment to try and understand the situation.
Most of my men were down. All of my squad and the other two squads that had been following me had been overwhelmed by the double-pronged attack from the trench and the bunker wall. A few were still fighting, but it was only going to be a matter of time before they were overpowered by the scores of heretics swarming over them. The shotgun had bought me an extra moment or two but I was going to be hauled down myself unless I did something.
Autogun bullets whizzed around me as I blasted a path to the trench wall with the shotgun, slung the weapon on its strap and hauled myself up over the lip of the parapet out into no-man’s-land. There was a small gap, a rise at the trench lip, and at the foot was barbed wire. I could see holes had been stealthily clipped through it and here and there bits of dark cloth clung to the metal spike-knots in the wire. This was where the assault team had made its approach.
I had only a second to register this and while I did I was unclipping a grenade from my belt. I lobbed it into the trench and sprang forward, half scrambling, half running along the front of the parapet in case anyone got the idea to respond in kind. A few moments later I heard the explosion rip through the trench and a fraction of a second after that I felt its vibration. I threw another grenade in and kept moving, following the line back the way I had come, hoping that all of my own men down there were already dead and that I was not killing them with my grenades.
The muddy earth sucked at my boots. My gloved hands were covered in the reddish soil where I had put them down to maintain my balance. I heard a horrible phlegmy voice gurgle out orders and saw a cowled head poke up over the parapet ahead of me. I swung the shotgun down on its sling and pulled the trigger. The head vanished in a fountain of blood and bone. I kept running, still squatting down, praying desperately to the Emperor.
The muddy earth gave way beneath my boot. I slipped, overbalanced, began to tumble down the slope towards the barbed wire. I threw myself flat, dug my fingers into the front of the parapet, slowed down my slide. Nonetheless my boot slid into the barbed wire and the metal thorns pierced the fabric of my uniform. As I pulled my leg free, the cloth tore along with the flesh beneath it. I was aware of the pain and knew I was badly scratched but in the heat of the action my body was able to ignore it, the way a fighting man can ignore the loss of a limb until he collapses dead at the end of a battle.