It was like a dozen explosions had gone off at once, plants and trees erupting as if they’d just combusted from within. The zombies—those Lorenzo could see—they were burning too, starting with the parts of them that were the most flammable: the clumps of weeds and grass embedded in their bodies. They reeled in apparent confusion, their arms pumping in futile slow-motion, patting themselves down, trying to extinguish themselves, succeeding only in setting fire to their hands or bumping into each other and spreading the flames to their comrades.
Lorenzo was amazed at the severity of the reaction, until he remembered that Rogar III had felt fire before—from the Jungle Fighters’ small campfire of two nights ago to the all-out attempts by humans and orks alike at deforestation. It knew what fire could do to it, and—Lorenzo knew this didn’t make sense, but he was suddenly sure of it, more sure than he’d been of anything his instincts had told him of late—it was afraid of it. The deathworld itself was afraid, and in its fear, it chose to attack the creatures that had hurt it so much, while it still had the means to do so. And it sent its soldiers forward…
The Jungle Fighters drew their lasguns as six flaming zombies—those that could still walk—came stumbling towards them, trailing smoke, like a small army of infernal daemons. They let off a fusillade of shots, to no effect, and Greiss sent another blast of fire the zombies’ way in the hope of hastening their demise, before abandoning the flamer and leaping aside, not an instant too soon. A zombie hurled itself at him, and hit the ground where Greiss had been, setting light to the undergrowth. It tried to stand again, but scorched earth was sloughing from it like dead skin, withering to ash, and the bones of its purloined skeleton were beginning to show through and it could no longer lift its own weight.
The rest of the squad dropped their packs and tried to scatter, but they couldn’t go far, confined to the narrowed corridor their knives had cleared. The same couldn’t be said of the zombies: their movements were slow and awkward but unhampered, the foliage itself seeming to part for them. They separated too, each choosing a target. Lorenzo found himself side by side with Braxton, both trying to press themselves back into the jungle, thorns tearing at their jackets and their hair, nettles stinging their hands, as two flaming zombies homed in on them.
He heard a yell, “Aim for their kneecaps!” and he followed Armstrong’s suggestion and tried to shoot the nearest zombie’s leg out from under it. He got in four shots before it was upon him. It raised a ponderous fist, and Lorenzo wasn’t sure who its target was—him or Braxton—but then the fist came down towards him, and he ducked, and he tried to scramble past the zombie’s leg, but his hand recoiled from a flaming footprint in the grass. The zombie swung around to follow him but a bone snapped, and its leg buckled, and Lorenzo knew his las-shots had done some good after all.
The zombie was falling—but it managed to turn its fall into a lunge, and Lorenzo couldn’t get out of the way in time as the creature, now little more than a burning skeleton, plummeted towards him. For an instant, he was staring into its hollow eye sockets—piggy ork eye sockets—and they seemed to be mocking him. A tusked mouth gaped in a rictus grin. Lorenzo brought up a foot, planted it in the zombie’s stomach and tried to fling it over him. It fell apart with the impact of his boot, and though the bulk of its mass passed safely over his head, Lorenzo was showered with bones and mud and burning leaves.
He rolled, to put out any flames that may have taken hold of his clothing. Then he sprang to his feet, lasgun in hand, to find that the other zombies had suffered the same fate as his. The combination of flames and las-fire had destroyed their cohesion, and they were collapsing at the feet of the relieved Jungle Fighters. Two skeletons were relatively intact, and as Lorenzo watched they were drawn into the ground. Storm reached one before it could vanish, and drove his gun butt into its spine, breaking it. The other—the skeleton of the monster that had attacked Greiss—escaped.
The Jungle Fighters relaxed and regrouped in the sudden silence, dozens of small fires flickering around them until the rain extinguished them.
“Think that’s the last we’ll see of them, sergeant?” asked Myers.
“I hope so, Bullseye,” growled Greiss. He cast a disparaging eye over the discarded flamer. “Because this thing’s just about on empty.” Myers and Storm packed up the device anyway, in case they were being watched—although for the first time in two days, none of the Catachans felt as if they were.
“There were more of those things out there.” Armstrong pointed out to Greiss. “You only burnt the front ranks of them. There were at least a dozen more behind—they escaped into the ground when they saw the flames.”
“Not to mention all the other orks that must’ve died on Rogar these past few years,” said Lorenzo.
“And Guardsmen,” said Braxton quietly.
Greiss nodded. He knew.
“Do you think they can move underground, sergeant?” Braxton asked. “Or will they have to resurface where they went down?”
“I don’t know,” said Greiss. “What’re you thinking?”
“That it might be the right occasion to break out those mines.”
Greiss studied Braxton for a moment, then a grin tugged at his lips. “I like the way you think, Guardsman. Right, troopers, all the shredders you have, hand ’em over. Patch, you’re with me. You saw where some of them walking corpses disappeared, right? Well, the next time they try climbing out of their graves, they’ll have a nasty shock waiting for ’em. Lorenzo, Braxton, you get back to clearing the way. Once these babies are laid, we’re going to want to get out of here real quick.”
“Yes, sergeant,” said Lorenzo.
Greiss had half-turned away when a thought occurred to him and he looked back at Braxton. “Let me see your knife,” he demanded. Braxton showed him the small, blunt blade he had been using, and Greiss expressed his contempt for what he called an “Imperial pig-sticker”.
Lorenzo had noticed that he had been wearing two knives today, and he’d guessed where the second had come from. Still, he felt his eyes widening as the sergeant drew Woods’ devil claw—at over a metre long, more a sword than a knife—and handed it to the Validian. “Here,” he granted, “you should find it easier going with this. It’s only a loan, mind.”
Braxton accepted the claw, and turned it over in his hands. He admired its well-honed edge, and gauged how light and well balanced it was thanks to its hollow blade, half-filled with mercury. “Yes, sergeant,” he said, in a voice full of awe.
“I can see now why you think so much of him,” said the Validian, when he and Lorenzo were alone together. Greiss and Armstrong were still some way behind, laying mines, and Myers and Storm had taken this opportunity—while their progress was impeded—to fall back and hunt jungle lizards and anything else they deemed edible. Lorenzo and Braxton were left with the repetitive and wearying work of swinging their knives, forging ahead—though Lorenzo had to admit, it was going a lot faster now that Braxton was properly equipped.
“Who?” he asked.
“Sergeant Greiss.”
“Of course we do. He wouldn’t have that rank if he hadn’t earned the respect of all of us.”
“I didn’t realise. At first, he seemed—I don’t know—surly, I guess. Distant. Disapproving.”
“If you’re looking for a soft approach,” said Lorenzo, “I’m afraid Catachan doesn’t breed ’em like that.”
“I guess not. But now I’ve seen Greiss in action—the way he leads from the front, keeps this squad together, keeps us focused on the mission. And the way he… I mean, he really does care about his troopers, even if he doesn’t always…”
“He’d give his life for us,” said Lorenzo simply, “as we would for him. Your point is?”
“I’m used to sergeants who do things by the book, that’s all. Same with the commissar. If Mackenzie had survived, if he could see Greiss now…”
“If he’d been willing to look,” said Lorenzo pointedly.
“Yes. I just
think, Mackenzie, he was like most of us. We don’t know till we see for ourselves. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you, for Greiss, for all of you, being brought up on a world like this. A deathworld. But I’m starting to understand, and Mackenzie—I think he would have understood too, in time.”
“You don’t think he’d have filed his complaint against Old Hardhead? You don’t think he’d have had him shot?”
“We’ll never know,” said the Validian. “Best thing, I think, is to let it lie. I certainly won’t be saying a thing.”
Lorenzo was about to agree when he spotted something. A triangle. Silver. He could easily have mistaken it for an exotic leaf, lying flat against a branch, had the pattern not connected with something in his memory. A warning. Braxton’s knife hand was moving towards it, and Lorenzo batted it away even before his conscious mind remembered what the pattern represented. The triangle wrinkled, as a snake head jerked out from beneath it and made a stab at where the hand had just been.
“I think we should both talk less,” said Lorenzo, “and pay more attention to where we’re going.”
Braxton nodded. But it wasn’t long before he spoke up again. “I just wondered,” he said, “if I should say something. To the others. Let them know. That they can trust me, I mean.”
Lorenzo smiled tightly. “They know. Old Hardhead in particular.” He indicated the devil claw in Braxton’s hand. “Trust me, he knows.”
Then Greiss and Armstrong came pelting towards them, sweeping Myers and Storm along in their wake.
They had barely come to a halt when a series of explosions from behind them rattled the ground and shook leaves from their branches. The trap had been sprung. Greiss’ cruel grin exposed his teeth and flared his nostrils. They all waited for a minute, listening for the shuffling footsteps of zombies, squinting through the rain for the shape of an ork, but there was nothing.
And, a few minutes after that, Braxton found a trap. A snare in the undergrowth, ready to tighten about the ankle of an unwary traveller and hoist him into the trees. A sign, Lorenzo agreed when the Validian pointed it out to him, that orks had been here. Crafty orks. Then he inspected the snare more closely. It was fashioned from creepers—but, far than having been knotted together by hand, it seemed to have grown into its unnatural shape.
“Rogar’s still learning,” he murmured as Braxton used his devil claw to slice through the snare. “It’s learning from us.”
They forged on well into the night, making up for their late start, until Lorenzo’s body wanted nothing more than to shut down. He’d been running on adrenaline, but now even this was spent. The acid rain hadn’t let up, and despite his precautions Lorenzo’s face and neck were red raw. The wound in his side felt like it was ablaze. He had begun to wonder if Sergeant Greiss would ever call a halt to this torture, though of course he would never have complained.
At last, Greiss accepted that even his squad needed rest. He warned, however, that they didn’t have much time. He intended to move out early in the morning—and until then, the Jungle Fighters would have to keep watch in three shifts of two in case the blue light returned.
For the first time, Lorenzo didn’t volunteer for first watch. Greiss detailed Myers and Storm to that duty, and Lorenzo was grateful to be placed on the third and final watch with Armstrong, possibly in deference to the fact that both were wounded. Only as they set up camp—positioning their plastic sheeting not to collect water tonight but to deflect the rain—did he realise how tired the sergeant himself looked.
They built the biggest, hottest fire they could, despite the risk that it might be seen. They did it to spite what they now saw to be their real enemy: Rogar III.
Lorenzo was asleep almost before his head touched the ground. But it seemed like his eyes had only been closed a minute when the shouting began.
He thought he was dreaming again, at first. That dream from the previous night, before the ork camp, when dead comrades had pulled him down into the earth to join them. Only this time it was real, and it was the earth itself that pulled at him. Lorenzo was already half-buried, he tried to stand, to tear himself free, but he couldn’t gain leverage and the pull of the earth only increased.
Quicksand? He was sinking, though the ground had been perfectly firm when he had lain down on it. He fought the urge to lash out, because he knew he would only go down faster. Somebody was shouting his name, yelling at him to wake, and the rain was still drumming on the plastic sheets above his head, searing them brown.
This was worse than quicksand. Lorenzo knew how to deal with quicksand, knew how hard it was to actually drown in it, but this—this was Rogar III itself, grasping at him, drawing him to its heart. His first instinct was to unsheathe his Catachan fang, though he had no use for it yet, because if his legs went under he didn’t want to lose it with them.
With a supreme effort, he raised his head. The whole campsite was a quagmire. Armstrong and Myers had been caught sleeping too, and were being sucked under. Greiss and Braxton were standing but buried up to their knees, it must have been their watch when the planet had struck. It was Braxton who had shouted, presumably unable to see from where he was that Lorenzo had already woken. There was no sign of the campfire: it must have been pulled under and smothered.
Storm was doing better than any of them. He was on his hands and knees in the mud, but pulling himself along with his powerful muscles, almost swimming, his teeth clenched, face red with exertion, until he came to the edge of the Catachans’ small clearing and his flailing hand caught a tree branch. He had something to hold on to now, and he could begin to haul himself upright.
Lorenzo was determined to follow Storm’s example. But suddenly, the earth beside him seemed to explode, and he recoiled and sank a little further as a figure erupted from beneath it. A large, hunched figure with tusks protruding through a matted layer of plants and dirt. An ork zombie.
And there were more of them, bursting from the ground all across the clearing, outnumbering the Jungle Fighters and surrounding them. In contrast to their floundering targets, they waded easily through the mud, their ponderous gait now seeming only too fast.
The nearest zombie loomed over Lorenzo, and raised both fists above its head as it prepared to strike him dead.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lorenzo brought up his right hand, his knife hand, to protect his head, and tried to do the same with his left, but the earth had it. He pulled at it, and brushed something below the surface: a familiar shape. He wrapped his fingers around it, feeling like he was squeezing cold slime until they closed around hard metal. With a gut-wrenching effort, he brought his hand, and his lasgun, tearing out into the open and braced the weapon in both hands above his face.
The ork zombie’s blow landed, hit the gun, and Lorenzo felt the vibrations juddering through his bones and thought he’d lost another lasgun, thought it would snap in two, but somehow it remained intact. He realised that his shoulders were in the earth again, the impact and his own efforts driving him downwards.
The zombie was preparing to strike again, and Lorenzo turned the lasgun around and pulled the trigger, but it jammed. Mud in the barrel. He could just reach the zombie’s leg with the tip of his knife, and he slashed at it, scoring a groove, but it didn’t react. The quagmire was sucking at the back of his head, caressing his ears with cold tendrils.
He couldn’t beat the monster. The best he could hope for was to keep it from killing him long enough for the planet to take him, to fill his nose and mouth with its substance and suffocate him.
He couldn’t beat the monster. So he stopped fighting it.
A clump of flowers protruded, ridiculously, from the zombie’s thigh, and Lorenzo strained to reach them, trusted them to support his weight as he hauled himself up, mud slurping and sucking at him but losing the contest of strength. With both hands full, holding his lasgun, his knife and the flowers, he couldn’t defend himself against another double-fisted blow to the back of his stooped head. He
took it with gritted teeth, blinded for a moment as he almost blacked out. He felt as if his skull must have cracked. Then he felt the flowers give way, their roots torn clean out of the zombie’s earthen flesh.
Lorenzo was falling back, and he couldn’t shift his trapped legs to steady himself, but he threw out his arms and found the zombie’s legs, and he hugged them tightly, holding on for his life. This had the useful side-effect of unbalancing the zombie, which reacted too slowly, toppled, and splashed into the quagmire on its back. Lorenzo was scrabbling, clawing at its cold, wet mass, using it like a log in a river. He climbed onto it, dragging his legs after him, he pulled himself along the zombie’s length, yanking dead leaves from the vegetation that coated it, simultaneously trampling the zombie further down.
He hauled himself upright as the zombie’s head sank underground. He used its chest as a springboard, pushing off it, leaping for the edge of the clearing. He landed with both feet in the mud, and was instantly buried up to the waist again, but as the top half of his body fell forwards, he was able to grab at a branch and, like Storm before him, use it as a lifeline.
He glanced over his shoulder, to see that the zombie was thrashing about, resurfacing and beginning to stand—and that another was heading his way. There wasn’t time to free himself completely from Rogar’s grip. He settled instead for dragging his backside up onto the dry ground beyond the clearing, his legs still in the mud but his shoulder hooked behind a tree, bracing him, allowing him to resist the suction force from below. He plunged his fingers into his lasgun barrel and scooped out as much mud as he could. Then he dug the butt into his shoulder, aimed for the second zombie and fired. The gun whined and let out a feeble light. The second zombie lurched closer. Lorenzo pumped the trigger again, and on his fourth attempt, the lasgun finally coughed up dirt and struck true.
[Imperial Guard 02] - Death World Page 16