by William King
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.’
I pulled on the boots. ‘Sounds like it was all part of someone’s plan,’ I said. ‘General Richter’s, maybe?’
‘They’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to put anything past you, haven’t they, Leo?’ said Anton.
‘He’s right though,’ said Ivan. ‘It’s all too closely timed for it to be any other way.’
‘I would have thought you would have your work cut out for you defending the space port.’
Ivan looked away. Anton looked at the ceiling and whistled. The elevator kept going down. I adjusted my helmet and then my rebreather. ‘We were off duty when the word came in to pull back, that we’d be taking to the ships in an hour or so.’
‘How long ago was that?’ I asked, while I loaded the shotgun. It felt good to be putting ammo in it again.
‘About half an hour ago.’
‘So what you’re really saying is that you deserted your post to come here and get me out.’
‘It doesn’t sound like such a good idea when you put it like that,’ said Anton. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have come.’
‘We’d just have been waiting to board a shuttle anyway,’ said Ivan. ‘This is way more exciting.’
Neither of them seemed particularly bothered that they might not be able to get back to space port in time to escape the impending catastrophic collapse of Niflgard into plague-ridden madness. I was very grateful to them both and I struggled for the perfect words to express my feelings. ‘You’re idiots,’ I said eventually.
‘You’re welcome,’ said Ivan.
The doors opened again. Corpses crawled across the lobby. Some of them were eating others. Some of them were fighting. All of them looked up with glowing reddish eyes when they smelt fresh meat.
I stepped forward, pumped the shotgun and pulled the trigger.
Eleven
In my experience there’s nothing that clears a hospital lobby quite like a blast from a sawn-off shotgun. The hail of shot tore through the walking dead, severing a few spines and causing them to fall and not rise again. Many more were blasted off their feet. When they rose, there were holes in their flesh. A few limbs dangled from strips of flesh.
Anton opened fire with his sniper rifle. He was more subtle than me and more effective. Every shot took one of the dead men in the head. Ivan had meanwhile decided that he wanted to try out my chainsaw and I saw no point in objecting. The sister kept behind us as we fought our way out of the building.
The street was like the inside of the hospital only on a larger scale. There were bodies everywhere, many of them moving, some of them armed, and all of them looking hostile and hungry. Their nostrils twitched and their heads turned as we pushed our way through the doors with the former patients, staff and guards in hot pursuit.
Anton had left an open-cockpit groundcar outside the enormous building. Around it were a bunch of dead bodies. I mean really dead, with smashed heads and ripped torsos. I could pretty much reconstruct the route he and Ivan had taken into the hospital from the layout of the corpses. There was a lot of greenish slime strewn around as well.
A roar of engines announced the presence of gunships overhead. They were racing somewhere in the distance. Shortly thereafter we heard the distant thunder of explosions. I have no idea who was performing airstrikes or what against, but it fed the general atmosphere of chaos and confusion and provided a momentary distraction that let us move a few paces closer to the groundcar.
More and more of the walking dead men were coming towards us. I ran over to the vehicle and jumped in, the others piling in all around me. I heard a scream and saw the sister had tripped and a horde of the dead had set on her in a frenzy. The way her screams suddenly stopped told me she would not be joining us.
I activated the vehicle and the engine roared to life. I pushed it forward aiming directly for the crowd. There was going to be no other way to get through. The balloon tyres screeched. There was a shuddering bump as the first of the corpses impacted on the radiator grille. Another went cartwheeling away from the force of impact. The car wobbled slightly on its suspension as we went over some more corpses.
The walking dead did not care how fast we were moving. They threw themselves at us. Most of them were knocked clear but one of them managed to get itself onto the bonnet of the vehicle and started to climb its way up. Ivan stood on the bucket seat and swept his chainsaw down. It was not the cleverest thing to do under the circumstances. Gore splattered the windscreen. Some of it arced over the armourglass and sprayed us. I flicked the wipers on and leaned to one side so I could see round the murky windshield. It almost cost me my life.
A dead man stood there. I ducked back in just in time to avoid hitting him. The force of the impact would most likely have broken my neck. I could see through the gaps where the wipers had removed the blood now. In the mirrored reflection I caught sight of something climbing over the back. It was the upper half of the corpse that
had been thrown beneath the vehicle. Its hips and legs had been torn away, but its arms still functioned well enough.
‘Anton, behind you,’ I shouted. He twisted and stood in the back seat, aimed and fired. The corpse was thrown backwards. We hit a speed bump, probably another corpse, and he teetered forward, almost losing his grip on his gun.
‘Try to be a bit more careful, would you, Leo? You’re not driving a Baneblade now,’ he shouted. Something plunged from an overpass bridge above us and landed right in the cockpit. It gave a gurgling growl and reached for me. It snagged my arms and sent the steering wheel to spinning left. The groundcar lurched in that direction, racing along a pavement, heading directly towards the wall.
In the confined space of the groundcar cockpit Ivan could not bring the chainsaw to bear without hitting one of us. There was not even a place where he could set it down. He cast it away and it scythed through the air behind us, decapitated the walking corpse of a woman and buried itself in the chest of a huge man who was lumbering along after us.
Ivan grabbed the corpse and pulled it off me. The bionic systems of his arms whined as he struggled with the dead man. It tried to bite him and broke its teeth on the plasteel of his bionic limb. Ivan tugged its arm from its shoulder. It came free with a strange sucking, popping sound and started to wriggle around like a snake, grabbing at the steering wheel.
Ivan somehow managed to pull the rest of the monster clear and toss it over the side. It fell into another crowd of walking dead. The arm, meanwhile, had locked its fingers around the steering wheel and would not let go. I twisted the wheel to the right just in time for us to avoid hitting the wall and found I had aimed the vehicle directly at a lumen column. I kept twisting and the car went into a spin, the great balloon tyres screeching as the whole vehicle started to rotate.
Somehow we missed the lumen column although it scraped the paintwork along the side of the groundcar. We spun almost to a stop. It was a bad place for that. We were now facing back in the direction we had just come, our bonnet pointed right at an onrushing horde of corpses.
‘Well done, Leo,’ Anton said. ‘You sure you don’t want me to drive?’
‘Shut up and keep shooting,’ I said, and executed a three-point turn that almost reversed us into a wall and crushed several more dead bodies.
‘How long ‘til final boarding now?’ I shouted.
‘About twenty minutes, so you might want to put your foot down.’
He wasn’t kidding. It was going to be touch and go. I got us aimed along the road again and accelerated as fast as I could, praying to the Emperor that no more dead men decided to perform feats of acrobatics.
I managed to get us onto the access ramp for the main highway. Overhead a massive airship crashed into the side of a starscraper. I wondered whether the plague had taken the pilot or whether one of the dead was at the controls.
As I gunned the engine I got a clear view of the streets below the great roadway. The dead were everywhere, fighting with the living. Some soldiers were still holding out, garbed in the uniforms of the local militias. Things were not going to go well for them when the heretics entered the city. They would not go well for us either if we were found here.
The air was cool as it swept by us, though, and my rebreather kept out the worst of the pollution. Anton studied the horizon with his sniper-scope. Ivan sat beside me and stared off into the distance, bionic arm hanging out over the side of the car as if we were out on some pleasure trip.
Ahead I could see the massive forms of the orbital shuttles on the space field. They looked as big as starscrapers themselves. I knew we would need to find a place on one of those. ‘Which shuttle were you assigned to?’ I asked.
‘What does it matter?’ Anton asked.
‘I’m going to drive right up to it and we’re going to dive out and hope someone recognises us.’
‘We’re wearing our uniforms,’ Anton said. ‘What’s the problem?’
I shut up. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was worrying about nothing. But when you’re caught up in a massive retreat through a city being overrun by heretics and hungry dead men you tend to worry about these things.
The road sped by. I weaved through a number of cars that just seemed to have been abandoned or crashed and left to burn. The plague had most likely got to their drivers. Up ahead I saw a roadblock. I looked at the dashboard timer. I reckoned we had fifteen minutes.
The men wore the uniforms of the local militia and they had weapons pointed directly at us. I toyed with gunning the engine and trying to crash through, but it was a risk. They might shoot us and the force of the impact might wreck the groundcar.
I hit the brakes.
‘Where are you going?’
‘The space port,’ I said. ‘Urgent communication for Lord High Commander Macharius.’
They stared at us and our blood-spattered vehicle. I could see they were wondering exactly what was going on. They recognised the uniform, though, and the voice of authority, so after a few moments of dithering they let us through.
‘Just as well,’ said Anton. ‘I was going to shoot them if they didn’t.’
For once nobody bothered to contradict him. I suspect we had all been thinking the same thing. Up ahead white contrails scarred the sky like the talon marks of some great beast. Even as I watched, the massive squat shape of a shuttle lifted itself into the sky. It was like watching a starscraper take flight.
‘Frakkers are leaving without us,’ Anton said. He meant it to sound like a joke but there was a faint panicked squeak in his voice. ‘Might want to put your foot down, Leo. Shake a leg.’
I was already accelerating, pushing the groundcar up towards the limits of its speed. The roadway here was fairly clear, with less evidence of the plague and the walking dead. My hands felt clammy on the wheel. I was starting to think we might not make it, that we would be stranded in this mad city with an enemy army incoming and no way to escape. I doubted the heretics would be very friendly towards any outworlder they found. I was sure they would find some unclean use for us in their dubious rituals.
There was an odd feel in the air, an ominous expectancy that hovered over the doomed city. The wind carried it through the polluted clouds. It throbbed in the vibration of the great cogwheels whirring on the sides of the starscrapers. The smokestack towers breathed it out along with their freight of effluent. It took me a long moment to realise what it was.
It was the feeling of defeat, that we had been beaten and that we were not going to recover from this. For the first time since we had begun to follow Macharius on his long fiery road across the stars it felt as if we had no hope of victory, that all that was left for us to do was to flee like whipped dogs, tails hanging, and try to get away as far and as fast as we could, leaving the traitorous General Richter in possession of this planet and its vital production facilities.
I watched the road fly by and I tried to absorb it. In all my years I had never really felt it, even when we were surrounded by the hordes of the Angel of Fire back on Karsk. There the Imperial forces had been stabbed in the back and overwhelmed by treachery, but I never doubted that once the Imperium’s full might was brought to bear victory would be ours even if I did not live to see it. I did not feel that way now. We had come too far, lost too much, perhaps even our sense of mission.
I tried telling myself that I was just recovering from being sick, that I was still weak, that it was just the lows my body was feeling manifesting themselves in my mind, but I knew it was more than that. I felt that the war was lost, and that even just escaping the surface of this blighted world was most likely beyond our grasp.
Naturally I did not share my thoughts with Anton and Ivan. I did not really need to. I could tell from their hangdog expressions that they were feeling exactly the same way.
We reached the gates of the space port. In the distance I could see that there were still scores of shuttles on the ground. Men were still clambering aboard and vehicles were still rolling up the ramps.
I could see Guardsmen guiding a few battered Leman Russ tanks with hand signals. A few more of them watched the perimeter guns pointing outwards. I wondered if they had enough ammunition to make good on the implied threat.
I pulled up at the gate. Nervous-looking men in the uniform of the Grosslanders turned their weapons on us. They were white-faced. They knew the hour of evacuation as well as we did – they had not been given the order to withdraw. They were wondering whether they would get off-planet just as much as I was. They had that narrow-eyed, sweaty look that soldiers sometimes get when they know that their line of retreat is fast being closed and certain death is approaching. To their credit, they still stood there.
I gave my name and rank and regiment. Anton shouted the password of the day. Their officer stared at us suspiciously. I knew exactly what he was thinking. It was extremely unlikely that three ragged and blood-spattered heretics would roll up at this late hour, with a story as unbelievable as ours.
In the minute he took to debate this, three of the big ships took off, leaving misty contrails behind them as they shucked off the chains of gravity and left defeat below them. Eventually, after what felt like hours but which could only have been minutes, he waved us through.
I weaved through the traffic as deftly as I could towards the towering shuttle that bore the Lion symbol of Macharius. It was still there, of course. It would not be done for the vessel of the Lord High Commander to be seen to leave while any of his men remained on the surface. Not yet anyway. Not unless things got really desperate.
I heard the sounds of gunfire from the edge of the field and then a massive explosion. I glanced right and saw smoke rising in great towers and then a horde of heretic infantry carriers flood onto the space field through the gap. It appeared the war had reached us even here.
Men were already moving to intercept the heretics before they could reach the great spacecraft. It was an act of desperation. Those soldiers knew that if the enemy reached the spacecraft then none of us would be departing.