by Alan Bao
Contents
Cover
Runner – Alan Bao
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Maledictions’
A Black Library Publication Imprint
eBook license
Runner
By Alan Bao
The runner fled across the tundra under a humbling sweep of stars. His breaths came in gasps, the filtration unit in his teeth cutting grooves into his gums. An artefact from home, so long ago; an old keepsake that he’d physically outgrown, kept for sentiment, not field-use.
The runner wiped the salt and spit from his chin as he kept his pace, tasting the gunmetal of the antique rebreather. His regiment-issued mask had been destroyed when he’d made his escape from the battle, just as the death-fog caught them. Every time he stretched or contorted his face, he could feel where the material had melted into his cheeks, turning the skin into unfeeling leather, chemical calluses that traced rivers down the sides of his jaw and onto his chin and neck. The hive behind him was almost certainly gone, along with whatever was left of his regiment. He wondered who’d get the blame, when the news got out, if there was still anyone left alive to blame.
Nobody had thought much of it when the long-distance comms first went out, regimental equipment being what it was. Even on the second night, when their repeated queries to command went unanswered and rumours began to swirl about wet, inhuman mutterings on the vox-channel, most of the men had written them off as ghost stories cooked up by bored conscripts. Trenches were dug by the book. There was a perfunctory doubling of the night guard. The men whittled away the time playing cards and swapping dirty stories, and the city was mostly quiet.
But then the dead came to life.
The runner had never seen anything like it. The waste disposal chutes were the first to go, as dumped bodies clogged up the system with their sudden, newfound volition. Dead hivers crawled, shambling and jerking, out of the corpse-pits, overwhelming isolated positions, adding those unfortunate souls they caught to their twitching, shambling throng.
On the first day of fighting, the runner had been on rearguard action, fighting for access to a waste disposal pit. He’d got a first-hand glimpse of the vats of garbage and suddenly moving bodies before they flipped the switch for the incinerators – a blessing and a curse, since the living dead that were not incinerated outright staggered from the flames, heedless of the fire and rot that spread around them.
And then came the mist, and the other things.
In his years of service, the runner had fought and killed men of all stripes, on dozens of different worlds. But those other things – they were something else. Man-shaped, maybe – but not men. It was their stench that struck him: like some awful memory made solid, vague shadows in green mist, stumbling halfway between fugue and waking, absorbing las-shots with an apathetic softness that was not entirely flesh. They came and went in inexplicable fog blooms, one of which had caught up with his unit on the third day, while the runner was rotating in with one of the heavy bolter teams – Bigwum and Tinker-man hauling gear, Bullard watching their backs. When the fog bank fell upon them, the runner almost went blind from the stench. He couldn’t see through the tears and the thick, green air, but he remembered the sound of gunshots and Bullard screaming.
And then, as fast as it came, the stench disappeared, along with the mist, the shadows and the top half of Bullard’s body.
On his last day at the keep, the runner was given a water flask and a map to the next regimental command, two hundred miles to the south-east.
He was then relieved of his lasgun.
‘We’ll need the ammo,’ the old sergeant had snapped when he protested. ‘That’s ten pounds of gear that’ll slow you down, and you’re dead anyway if you can’t outrun this. Go and tell command–’
There was a whistle and a blast. A voice called out a belated heads-up as a dead hiver crested the makeshift trench line, exploding in a volley of las-fire. The sergeant swore as he was splashed with viscera, spitting and gagging at the rivulets of fluid that ran down his face and into his mouth.
‘Augh… Tell command we can’t hold. Tell them… tell them the keep’s fallen. Tell them those things are coming to them quicker than–’
Another arc of las-fire, followed by the crack of grenades. The runner and the sergeant stood a moment in silence, watching the rolling green mist bear down upon their position. Deep in the fog, barely visible to the human eye, there were shadows upon shadows, faint suggestions of writhing figures.
The short-range vox-comms became a symphony of gun cracks, pleas and screams. The long-distance comms were as silent as ever.
The mist rolled on, and the roar of heavy bolters and lasguns reached a crescendo. Over the stench and noise, the sergeant screamed, in a tone that the runner had never heard before from the grizzled veteran. Before the mist closed in and everything went green, he could hear the old man screeching, his voice cracked in panic, almost in tears.
‘Go! Go! Tell them!’
About a day out from the hive, the plains began to level. The keep still towered over the fields of permafrost behind him, but it was grey and muddled with distance. The burgeoning demi-hive that sprawled under the shadow of its protection was already well out of sight.
The hive had a name, of course. The whole world had a name, as did the system it inhabited. But, as the runner had learned throughout his tours of duty, names were mostly ornamental things, and always secondary to function. To most of the grunts in the regiment, this was just another world that they did not know, where they would fight another thankless war they could not name, in defence of (or perhaps in opposition to – who knew?) the innumerable ranks of locals who wore finery they had never seen, and spoke in tongues they could not understand.
The runner had a name too – arbitrary syllables that denoted some arbitrary personal identity, long ago. He could not remember the last time he’d used it. In the present, his rank was corporal, his role was to run, and his function was that of a servant to the God-Emperor. The whippings and mind-con of his trainee days had etched that hierarchy of functions deep in his mind, easily superseding the puerile realm of names and individual identities.
The runner steadied his breathing. The frozen plains bobbed by in mist and shadows. In time-hazed memory, he could vaguely recall running barefoot across sun-baked mountain paths, hopping from elevation to elevation in childish singsong. He could recall a time when he was just a runner in his company – one of the many expendable messengers from one of the many expendable platoons – before the intra-regimental game where he earned his title in a day-long foot race, tying his name and function together in a neat little sobriquet.
Then, as now, there had been sweat on his brow and a stitch in his side. But back then, the air had been thick with the hooting of his squadmates and other drunk spectators. Tinker-man and Machinist had snuck extra amasec from the mess hall and were passing it around to Bullard and the other boys who’d come back to the track after the shorter games had ended. The race had started at dawn, and the last competitor had staggered off the track in forfeit hours ago. Bullard had sprinted up alongside the runner, an eye swollen shut from a brutal wrestling match the day before, where he had nearly taken an ogryn off its feet.
‘Oi, little man! It’s been twelve hours. You’ve won. What the frag are you still running for?’
And the runner had laughed, remembering the scent of mountain air and sun-baked peaks. He laughed as he ran, on and on, until Bullard got too winded to cajole him, until the drunken spectators scattered into their respective bunks and the stars took their positions in the black sky.
‘I said, what are you still running for?’
‘There’s no winning this race, little man.’
The stench made the runner’s eyes water. He muttered the prayers of benediction by rote. Bullard’s mouth stretched into a mirthless smile, splitting his face in half. He shambled closer, severed vertebrae snapping and cracking as they ground against each other with each dolorous step. When Bullard opened his mouth in a rumbling laugh, the world disappeared into its black, toothless depths.
The runner squeezed his eyes shut. He forced another litany of prayers from his chest, choking against the foetid stench.
There was a moment of stillness.
When he opened his eyes again, he was on his knees in the salted permafrost, his breath turning into steam over the vast desolation before him. There was no Bullard, no stench, no fog, only the endless sweep of the frozen plains and a sick hint of green splashed on the horizon. Above him, the sky opened in a gaping, existential maw; in front of him, only the tundra, and its promise of a long, cold dark.
‘What are you still running for?’
The runner staggered to his feet, and doubled his pace.
The terrain became hillier as evening fell. The runner clambered over glacial striations, cradling the stitch in his side. Overhead, streaks of orange-red-violet layered themselves across the sky. As the last streaks of violet faded to black, the runner wondered idly how he would avoid freezing to death in the night ahead. Regimental field kits usually included a flint and tinder pack for fire-building, but he’d neglected to grab anything of the sort in his inglorious flight from the keep.
The runner scanned his surroundings. In his peripheries, he caught occasional blurs of motion darting away from the sound of his footsteps. When he flicked on his op-specs, he could see the glint of mammalian eyes, peering cautiously back at him from the darkness. The runner recalled the regimental briefings he had been forced to sit through before planetfall – some appropriately dry vox-tapes about the nomenclature and ecology of the brine-plains, and the scavenging rodents that inhabited them…
His stomach growled. No flint or tinder, aye – but his body was sending biological imperatives he could not ignore. If only Old Sarge hadn’t taken his lasgun…
His pace slowed. The glinting eyes in the darkness came closer. The runner spat his antique rebreather into a breast pocket and slumped down against the side of a dune, feigning weakness. The creatures skittered uncertainly towards him, nearly within arm’s reach, their twitchy little snouts sniffing at the stench of his sweat and exhaustion.
The runner lunged. The rodents scattered, but not quickly enough. He grabbed at the nearest animal; predator and prey, death and renewal, one fuelling the other. The runner yelped as the furry thing turned and bit into his hand with its razor incisors. In the split second his grip was loosened, the animal darted away. The runner sprinted after it, low to the ground, scrambling across rocks and salt crystals, until a loose footing sent him sprawling over a dune-crest.
For one interminable moment, caught between inertia and gravity, the runner sailed through a black, star-speckled sea.
‘What the frag are you still running for?’
Then the ground rushed up and pummelled him in his teeth, his ribs, his back. He tumbled down the frozen dune and landed in a heap at the foot of the hillock, convulsing as his ankle bent backwards beneath his weight. Pain shot through his body and he cried out the prayers of benediction by rote. The words may have been ‘the Emperor protects’ but the meaning was help me, help me, it hurts.
The stars kept their apathetic vigil as the runner quivered and swore on the tundra below. Frustration welled up inside him: he had the damnable rat; if only he had just squeezed and broken its spine before it had the chance to bite…
He shifted his weight gingerly away from the twisted ankle. Now, far from being sated, he was still starving – and on top of that, more weary and broken than he had been before. The futility of it all boiled in his chest, twining with the pain in his leg and the stupidity of Old Sarge’s directive to give up his lasgun – and his own docile idiocy in relinquishing it. Something grey and infinitely overwhelming fell upon him. His frustration gave way to sudden exhaustion, and he let his fists fall limp into the permafrost.
A paternal voice chortled in his head.
Numbness crawled through him then, through his arms and legs, chest and spirit. He thought of how easy it would be to simply lie there, to let the darkness fall around him, to let his body heat leak away in wicks of steam, to let the little rodent creatures nip at his flesh until he was nothing more than hair and bleached bones. He wished for nothing more than to curl up in apathy, until he turned into dust, until the rodents themselves decayed into nothing, and the whole damnable star system spun away into the infinite, entropic darkness without so much as a whisper or a eulogy.
The runner closed his eyes. His Imperial conditioning urged him to invoke the name of the Emperor for strength – but all that emerged from his chest were defeated little sighs. Starlight formed gossamer webs through his tears, and a sudden memory struck him: rope-bridges and footpaths, glinting under a warm yellow sun, spider-webbing into the distance between the mountain peaks. Long ago, his mother had leaned down and scooped him up above the cloudless plateau, crooning a name he had not used since he had been taken off-world.
‘Wanlek,’ she cooed in his birth tongue. ‘Wanlek, ak-chi atwa pat mogwil…’
The runner pulled himself into an agonised hunch and sipped sparingly from his canteen. He forced his mind away from the warm, hazy past. Here, in the present, he was alone, injured and freezing, with no food or shelter in sight. If he laid down to sleep now, he’d surely freeze to death.
The pain in his ankle simmered to a dull throb. The runner forced himself to a standing position, and slowly, laboriously, hobbled over the next dune-crest. A squall of wind gusted over the frozen salt-plains.
Gripping his coat tight around him, the runner hobbled deeper into the impenetrable night.
Dawn broke over a savage land, painting jagged shadows over salt fields and ridgelines. The morning mist traced streaks of white and green across the horizon, obscuring the half-running, half-hobbling man that was the only visible life for miles around.
The runner squinted against the sun, which was cradled like a red, swollen wound inside the mist. His left ankle was constricted and swollen inside his combat boot. Friction blisters had formed and popped and formed again during the night, and each step he took was now pained and squelching.
The sun glared in his eyes.
Once, long ago, his mother had told him a story about how the sun got its place in the sky – how it would fall into the abyss every night, and be pulled out again by the ancestors who toiled in their guardianship over the living.
He could not remember how that story ended now – though he could remember the commissar who had whipped him for telling it to his fellow recruits during the early days of his indoctrination. The Imperial Faith was never one for syncretism. He’d eventually learned to recognise and avoid the zealots in the officer corps – the self-styled pontiffs for whom every arse-lit fire was the Emperor’s Light, and any murmurs otherwise were grounds for a beating.
Still – the prayers were a helpful routine. They kept the exhaustion at bay, and distracted his mind from the pain in his feet. The runner had been using the Fede Imperialis as a mnemonic device for most of the night, synchronising each syllable with his own footfalls.
Our Em
peror deliver us from plague, deceit, temptation and war.
Our Emperor deliver us from the scourge of the Kraken.
And thus, each word brought him that much closer to regimental command, where warmth, safety and a well-earned rest awaited.
The runner slowed his pace and tipped his canteen to his ragged lips, noting how it was less than half-full. He wondered vaguely how long he had until the water ran out. He tried out new angles for his feet to hit the ground, so that his friction-flayed soles might have some reprieve from the pain that shot through them with every step.
And when his denial lapsed and his mental barriers weakened, he wondered about the voices.
It had started sometime during the night. An odd thing. In the darkness, he could’ve sworn he heard footsteps at his back, like an army marching through a bog, slogging along in low but jovial conversation. Some of the voices he’d recognised: Bullard, Old Sarge, Machinist and Tinker-man, and the mess-hall goons in his regiment. Sometimes they sounded so close as to almost be speaking directly to him – but whenever the runner chanced to look backwards, there was never anything but bare tundra.
Now, as he hobbled on his course, the army at his back marshalled again. He could hear a murmuring simulacrum of Bullard’s voice, the stomp of his heavy footfalls, the grinding of his severed spine as he kept pace with the runner’s footsteps.
‘Must be a hassle for you to keep following me around, Bull,’ the runner said to no one in particular. ‘That spine of yours sounds like it hurts something awful.’
‘It isn’t. And it doesn’t.’
The runner stumbled about and stared. The voice rattled him – more so than even the fugue-visions of the first day. Those, at least, he could put down to trauma. This, though – this was Bullard’s voice, close and conversational, articulate and real.
The desolation of the empty tundra stared back at him. Mist curled around his feet like so many longing fingers. The runner brought a hand to his forehead and felt a cold sweat, maybe a light fever. He let loose a feeble curse and turned back to his course. He had enough to worry about without contending with the possibility that he may be losing his mind.