The Relentless Dead, page 17
It was no surprise, and probably best, that the workers fled before them, heading for the shelter of their barn. Even the watchmaster wondered if he had made a mistake in not withdrawing earlier. Then a flaming zombie toppled forwards, landing on its face, the fire proving effective after all.
The Attilan horse was back on its feet. Its rider wasn’t. His flak jacket had been shredded, blood seeping through its gashes. ‘Sterilise your wounds,’ the watchmaster ordered. ‘Imbibe your strongest tonic. Sterilise your wounds again.’
Then he turned to the horse. He removed his glove and let it sniff his hand before looking it in the eye. He patted it firmly, then pushed his boot into a stirrup. The rider made a guttural protest, to which the watchmaster responded, ‘Utilising all available resources, and the horse does not appear to mind.’
He hoisted himself into the saddle. The horse was smaller than he was used to, but muscular. It had a full mane, rather than the more practical bristles of its Krieg equivalent, and it wore neither respirator mask nor drug injectors, which would limit its combat effectiveness. Still, it would more than do.
He had heard Attilans commanding their mounts verbally, but such was not the Krieg way. Tugging on the reins, the watchmaster brought his horse around, then squeezed it with his calves, angling his body forward, directing it to charge. The horse submitted to him, and as it picked up speed, he felt the unparalleled rush of natural adrenaline, his pounding heart almost in synch with pounding hooves.
It had been too long.
They rode down a flaming zombie. With a splintering of bones, it fell and was crunched underfoot. A second zombie’s neck was broken by the shovel. One more blow ought to finish it! They ploughed through the rest of the pack, shovel striking left and right. One zombie rounded on them, nails outstretched, but the horse anticipated the sharp tug on its reins that signalled it to rear up and lash out with its hooves.
Wheeling around, horse and rider – barely was there a distinction between them any longer – found themselves face to face with the other Attilan. He gaped in surprise but then, having seen them in action, gave a curt, approving nod before returning to the fray. The rider spurred his horse into their next attack run.
All worries, the frustrations of the past few months, were driven from the watchmaster’s mind in that moment. He was a ridemaster again. He had a mount between his legs, a weapon in his hands, a foe to crush. He was serving the Emperor in the way he had always been meant to, the way he knew best.
He was back in his element.
XII
Graven could hear it again. That infernal scratching sound above his head. An after-effect of the tremor? He thought not. Was something burrowing through the earth up there?
Again he considered turning back, but the tunnel was curving northwards as he had hoped it might. He was so close. Almost at the witches’ temple, and turning back was surely what its occupants wished him to do.
So, Graven and his squad marched on. Until that scratching sound became a violent scraping, then a roar, before, ahead of them, the tunnel roof burst open and the seven Krieg recoiled as soil and rock came crashing down.
Their enemies had blocked their route again – only Graven had heard no explosion, no cause for the sudden collapse, and he could make out something… something shifting in the rubble. Human bones!
There were two of them. Two half-rotted corpses, but somehow animated, impossibly struggling to stand. ‘Fire!’ screamed Graven, but a fusillade of las beams hardly bothered them. He braced himself as the first zombie found its feet and came lurching towards him. It was practically a skeleton, time having eroded any clue to who it might have been in life.
Graven aimed for its chest, praying he might damage some still-vital organ. The zombie shrugged off his beam too and kept coming. A shotgun shell from behind him punched into its eye socket, and it flinched. ‘Its brain! Whatever remains of its brain’ – he grunted as the zombie lunged at him again, clawing at his masked face – ‘controls it. Destroy the brain!’
Reversing his pistol, Graven lashed out with its butt. The brittle bone of the zombie’s skull shattered, exposing grey matter. As more las beams struck it, its animating force fled from it in an instant. It collapsed at Graven’s feet, and he turned to its fellow. The second zombie’s foot had snagged in debris. With a snap, it pulled free but left the foot behind. Stumbling, it broke more bones and fell. Graven stepped to it, pumping las beams into its head until its struggles ceased. He turned back to his comrades.
‘Sir,’ said a Korpsman, ‘your facemask.’
He raised a hand to it. He felt claw marks across his right cheek, three parallel scores in the fabric. They were shallow, but by gloved feel alone he couldn’t tell if any part of his skin had been exposed to the air with all its pathogens.
Right now, there was nothing he could do about it. His attention was taken by more scratching from the roof. More long-buried corpses, digging themselves out of their graves. Digging downwards, aware of the catacombs beneath them. Sensing our presence here too?
He whirled as bones burst from the wall behind him, a cracked skull landing at his heel. Pushing through the dirt, another cadaver was stilled by Krieg gunfire before it could fully emerge. Its skull remained embedded in the wall, the bones of one hand straining out to reach him. Keep moving, thought Graven, but which way?
Though holed, the tunnel roof held. There remained a way past the rockfall caused by the zombies’ emergence. From beyond this, he heard clinks and scrapes. More creatures? An emphatic gesture conveyed Graven’s decision to his squad. Forwards! Leading the way, he squeezed past the rubble, rounded the tunnel’s bend, and knew he had chosen right.
Before him, a cavern opened up, like the one they had discovered four days earlier. Green-and-yellow drapes and banners. A black altar with candles upon it. Wooden benches. Stripped of anything of value, as that other temple had been after its discovery, but not entirely empty yet.
Across the cavern, Graven saw another tunnel mouth, in which a pair of black-robed cultists crouched. They were mining the exit, he was immediately sure of it. Abandoning the temple, making sure they were not followed. He had made it here in the nick of time. Or just seconds too late.
He snapped up his pistol, even as four figures stepped from the shadows of the cavern’s edges. Dark-clad, faceless figures, swiftly closing ranks before him to obstruct his line of fire. His trigger finger froze as he gaped at them, for the first time in his years of service paralysed by sheer incomprehension.
The four figures bearing down upon him were Death Korpsmen.
His own comrades. My dead comrades! Their movements betrayed them, although they – their all-concealing uniforms, at least – had not begun to rot. They were clearly more recently deceased than the zombies in the tunnel and yet they slouched like them, limbs jerking as if worked by puppet strings.
Two of the four still had their lasguns, but left them slung. They advanced towards Graven with gloved hands outstretched towards his throat.
The barn was under siege.
By now, every worker in the hamlet – sixty to seventy in all – had been forced to take refuge within it. The remaining zombies had closed in around them, clawing, kicking, beating at the fragile walls. From every direction, Idelax heard wood splintering and cracking.
Green-hued, rotting hands pried between wall slats, tearing at smocks and skin. Some workers shrieked and sobbed, while the more courageous battered the intruding limbs with tools. Idelax saw three fingers sliced off by a hoe wriggling along the floor like worms until they were crushed by stamping boots.
He sat slumped against a support post. His assigned guard stood over him, rigidly, gripping his lasgun, the Korpsman’s grim demeanour maintaining space about them despite the turmoil and the crush.
His instincts screamed at him to grab his neural whip – no, that was gone, his plasma pistol – and join the battle, but it was taking all his strength to stay awake, to think, to breathe. He hated feeling so helpless. He hated that, for his sake, a soldier was kept from the battle too.
From outside, however, he heard hooves circling the barn and intermittent las fire, and he knew other soldiers were still fighting. Fighting, it seemed, and winning, for the number of zombies hammering at the walls was surely dropping. Or was it just that his senses were fading?
Idelax blinked as, directly in his line of sight, a slat was wrenched out of place and a zombie squeezed itself through a gap too narrow for it, scraping flesh from dislocating bones. Then a blur of armoured flank behind it, a glint of curved metal, and the creature’s head was parted from its shoulders. Dropping into the barn, it bounced into the lap of a cowering, horrified worker, staring sightlessly up at him.
Thank the Emperor, this time I am not needed, Idelax thought.
‘Stand down!’ Graven barked. ‘That is a direct order from your regimental commander. Stand down!’
It was a desperate ploy. A hope that some defiant spark remained within his former Korpsmen, an instinct to obey him. A hope that seemed rewarded as the zombies hesitated – but only for a moment, before they surged forwards again. His Korpsmen no longer, if indeed they ever had been. Though they bore his regiment’s number, 401, on their shoulders, what if Graven hadn’t brought them to Oleris? What if they were not slain in these tunnels, but elsewhere, months ago?
He couldn’t let himself think about it. The four zombies were upon him, pushing him into the bottleneck of the tunnel at his back. Rather than allow that, Graven made a break to his right, along the cavern wall. One zombie turned to follow him and he snapped off two shots at it over his shoulder.
Its fellows reached the tunnel, bumping into each other in its mouth. They were greeted by las fire from the Krieg within, failing to slow them down. One jostled its way past the others to plunge into the opening. The other two remained hard on its heels, straining to reach past it.
Bracing himself, Graven fired at his zombie’s head and melted through a gas mask lens, exposing an unfocused, rheumy eye. He was cut off from his comrades, but that was the risk he had taken. The zombie’s fingers brushed his chest as if unaware of the gloves blunting its scratches. Falling back, he imagined its mouth similarly stretching open, its mask keeping it from biting.
Seizing his advantage, he allowed it closer than otherwise he might have done. His next shot burst its weeping eye, but his attacker would not drop. Graven let his pistol go and grabbed his sword. Activating it, he thrust it through the zombie’s chest. Undeterred, it simply pulled itself along the burning blade. Its fingers found the colonel’s throat and dug into it. Its weight pressed Graven up against the wall as the zombie choked the life from him.
Hearing a whisper in his mind, unsure if it was real or not, he tried to scream to blot it out: I did not cause your death! He had no voice.
Graven wrestled with the zombie. He found that its muscles hadn’t wasted, its strength a match for his. He strained to work his sword inside it, pushing through vitreous resistance, rending nervous tissue. He managed to wrench one clinging hand from him, allowing him to suck in a shuddering breath.
Having gained space to do so, he delivered a jaw-cracking uppercut, which sent the zombie sprawling, freeing his sword in the process. Almost instantly, it came at him again, impaling itself for a second time. The fact that it flinched not at all from pain – its single-minded, fearless purpose – was throwing off his instincts. Even the most stoic of us, in life, would have flinched!
Once more, Graven was driven back into the wall. Once more, bones broke behind him, splinters jabbing his back. The zombie was clawing at the tears in Graven’s mask, seeking out the flesh beneath.
And then it fell away from him. His sword had done its worst, at last. Bisected through its torso, the zombie’s two parts hit the floor, its legs still kicking blindly. Head and chest strained back towards Graven on their elbows. He had dislodged the zombie’s plasteel helmet, knocked its mask askew. He averted his eyes from the half-exposed, rotting face of a former comrade. As if I might have known it, he remonstrated with himself, but still he didn’t look.
Graven’s power sword flashed blue as it swiped through the zombie’s neck. He looked for his pistol on the ground, but stepping to it, he came under autogun fire. He dived for the only cover he could see, behind the black stone altar. He felt a bullet punching into his backpack and prayed it hadn’t damaged his rebreather unit.
The shots had come from the exit tunnel. Cautiously, Graven raised his head and the two cultists fired at him again. He was pinned down. Behind him, he could hear his Korpsmen fighting, but he couldn’t reach them.
His hand went to a frag grenade, clipped to his belt, but he was loath to use it, to collapse the tunnel as the cultists wanted. He reached up instead and grabbed a lit candle from the altar, lobbing it in their direction. Alarmed cries told him that the cultists were scrambling for cover from what they presumed to be a bomb with fuse wire burning. Graven took his opportunity to race across the cavern and snatch up his gun. Whirling around, he strafed the tunnel mouth.
He waited for the dust to settle. He saw and heard no cultists. Had they fled? Could he have killed them? Were they waiting silently in ambush? Had they set their charges? He edged forwards, laspistol levelled in one hand, sword clutched in the other, straining for a better angle down the tunnel.
From deep within its gloom, a stentorian voice intoned a single word: ‘One!’
A bright flash dazzled Graven as a burst of plasma streamed towards his head. He felt its searing heat as he threw himself away from it – had it been a better shot, he would have stood no chance.
Now he heard footsteps – clanking, metallic footsteps – stomping up the tunnel towards him. A shape gained definition in the shadows – not a spectre, but something more massive and solid – and that voice rang out again: ‘Two!’
This time he was ready for the blast, diving back towards the altar as it struck the wall behind him, melting skulls. Another followed, then another, just missing Graven’s trailing feet. ‘Three! Four!’
The shooter was counting his shots.
‘Five!’
The next bolt pounded into the altar itself, taking a sizeable chunk out of it, and Graven could see his foe now, clearly, in the tunnel mouth. He saw his – its – unwieldy suit of power armour, looking like the corroded scraps of other suits. He saw the many skulls with which the creature was festooned, the yellow-and-green banner mounted on its back. A Traitor Marine! His throat dried. The whole of his kill team was hardly a match for such a monster, and he was facing it alone.
‘Six! Seven!’
Two more blasts rocked the altar, and Graven thought the next one might go through it. Nor was the traitor waiting for its weapon to recharge, which meant it was supercharging it, risking that it might blow up in its hands. I might have a fighting chance if it did!
If he stayed where he was, he was dead. Try to run and he was dead. The output of his single pistol would hardly graze that armour, so he holstered it. The colonel had his sword, although its light was dimming. His final act would be a desperate charge while praying for a miracle. At last, he would rejoin his fallen comrades. Abstractly, he wondered if they would welcome him, if he had done enough.
As soon as the next shot comes, I make my move.
The next shot didn’t come.
After several seconds, Graven risked raising his head again – and locked glares with the traitor, still blocking the tunnel entrance, through the recessed eyepieces of a bone-white, skull-shaped visor. Incongruously, tucked into the crook of its left elbow, he saw a large, ivory-framed abacus. Perplexingly, the traitor continued to hold its fire. Its pistol charge finally exhausted? Or might it have malfunctioned? Is this my chance to make a break for it? Or a trap?
Crouching between its armoured boots, trembling in its foreboding presence, the black-robed cultists had resumed their work, and now it seemed completed, because they scuttled off into the darkness. The Traitor Marine remained a moment longer. Then, unhurriedly, it turned its back on Graven as if judging him insignificant, and it too stomped away.
The explosion came before it had even left his sight. The tunnel roof collapsed, throwing up a cloud of dust that billowed out into the cavern. Graven didn’t wait for it to settle. He couldn’t reach the witches’ temple now. His comrades were another matter. Blinded, he followed his ears back to the entrance tunnel. His squad had withdrawn some way along it, but they were still fighting.
His toe nudged a body, slumped against the tunnel wall. A masked Death Korpsman. One of them, or…? Without stopping to examine it, wasting time, he couldn’t tell. Its skull had been staved in, however, with a marked lack of blood. A zombie. It must have been a zombie! Which leaves two.
He came up behind them, in the light of lumen cubes. They were clawing, snapping at the Krieg engineer, who had resorted to fending them off with his shotgun butt, just trying to slow them down. His comrades fired past him when they could. The rearmost zombie must have heard Graven’s approach, because it spun towards him. Its gloves were shredded, exposing gnarled fingernails.
It swiped at him, missing. He drove the point of his sword up through its respirator tube and mask, through the roof of its presumably gaping mouth, into its brain. It slumped against him, dead. Again. As he pushed it aside and turned his attention to the lone remaining zombie, it succumbed to its injuries too.
It landed on its back at Graven’s feet, staring up at him almost plaintively through its gas mask lenses. Stooping beside it, he reached for its dog tags, bracing himself to read them. He recognised the numbers stamped into the tarnished metal. A Korpsman from one of his other squads. Why did I ever think it might be otherwise? Deep down, he knew the answer to that question.
