The acid rain showed no sign of stopping.
The dark red wastewater on the trench floor had risen to our ankles, seeping wetly through the gaps in our boots. A thorn-like pain stabbed through every joint in my toes, but no one dared take their boots off. We all knew that the moment we did, the corrosive chemicals in the mud would strip our skin apart like leather. A faint, corroding hiss came from the filters of our gas masks, and only the sporadic artillery fire in the distance told us the front was still alive.
But the rebel cultists did not come.
It was eerily quiet within the thick fog of No Man's Land. It would have been better if they had come screaming and charging at us. Silence was like acid rain that slowly ate away at a man's mind. My eyes stung from staring into the unseen fog beyond, and even the sound of a small clump of dirt collapsing left my senses honed sharp as blades.
"I hate it most when those bastards go quiet."
Lazar muttered softly, his head resting against the trench wall. His eyes were bloodshot, and the fingers gripping his lasgun barrel twitched faintly.
"No telling what they're planning. Either they're massing artillery... or digging tunnels underneath us."
Without a word, I scraped mud and fragments of our comrades' bodies out of the drainage channel with an entrenching shovel. Every time I went back and forth through the passage toward Third Squad's sector, I encountered the soldier I'd tossed a rain poncho to during the day. With the poncho still pulled over his head, he crouched beneath a trench support beam, hugging his knees.
Each time I passed, he looked up at me through a gap in the poncho with bloodshot eyes and muttered the same words like a machine.
"They'll come again... There'll be more of them this time... We're all going to die..."
At first, I ignored him. But when I cleared the drainage channel for the third time, his low murmur began circling in my ears like an auditory hallucination.
There'll be more of them this time. We're all going to die.
Then I realized it. The miserable words he kept spitting out were the very words I had been endlessly chanting inside my own head. I had not been looking at him with contempt. Through his mouth, I was hearing the fear I had locked away in the deepest part of myself, clear as day. My fingertips froze with a prickling numbness. Everyone here was being stained by madness, and I was no exception.
That night, when the fog grew so thick that I could not even see my own hand, it finally happened.
Scrape.
I opened my eyes at the sound of earth collapsing. Someone was climbing over the trench lip by the passage to Third Squad's sector. It was the soldier who had spent the day muttering mad things. He had left even his lasgun—his lifeline—on the trench floor, clawing at the wet dirt wall with his bare hands as he tried to climb out toward No Man's Land. The sound of his bloodied, split fingernails raking down the earth wall echoed horribly.
"If I stay here, I'll die... Die..."
I lunged forward and grabbed the hem of his trousers.
"Are you insane? Get down!"
I roughly dragged him back down onto the trench floor. He landed in the mud and thrashed wildly, clutching at my flak armour. His grip was grotesquely strong, like an animal facing death.
"Let go! I have to get out! They aren't coming over there! If we stay in the trench, we'll all die! We'll be wiped out!"
His face pressed close against the lenses of my gas mask. Skin raw from acid rain and wastewater. Pupils stretched wide as if they might split from fear. In his eyes was the same pure madness and terror I had felt just hours ago, when Dorn's brains had splattered across my cheek.
The strength drained from my fingertips.
What will change if I drag him down? When the next charge comes, we'll be buried just like him anyway.
A moment's hesitation weighed down my trembling hands. Before reason could compel me to seize him, my heart—having sympathized too deeply with his utter despair—froze my body in place. Trying to stop him felt like denying myself.
In the gap opened by that brief hesitation, a huge shadow fell from the darkness.
Perfectly maintained black leather boots stepped into the lapping wastewater and stopped.
It was Commissar Vorkov.
Vorkov rested a gloved hand, unstained by even a drop of blood, atop his holster and silently looked down at the two of us tangled in the mud. There was neither anger nor excitement on his face. Only the indifferent detachment of an overseer looking at a broken machine. The moment that merciless gaze settled on us, even the air in the trench seemed to freeze.
"Where do you think you're going?"
Vorkov's low, dry voice cut through the sound of the acid rain.
The soldier trembled, unable to speak. The fingers gripping my trousers spasmed madly. He knew as well what it meant to stand before that black coat.
"Answer me, Guardsman. Where were you intending to go after abandoning the line?"
Vorkov stepped closer. The soldier's raw lips trembled as he mumbled, lowering his head toward the trench floor. No defiance or will remained in his voice.
"...Home... I want to go home..."
Those were the last words he left in this world.
Bang!
The heavy report of a bolt pistol tore through the trench. Its deep, booming blast, on an entirely different level from an ordinary lasgun, rang in my ears.
As if crushed beneath immense gravity, the soldier's upper body snapped backward. The instant the large-calibre bolt round struck his head, bone and brains exploded in every direction. Blood and fragments of brain covered the lenses of my gas mask. A hot, wet warmth seeped through my gloves.
Slump.
The headless corpse sank heavily into the mud. Vorkov glanced indifferently at his black leather glove, lightly spattered with blood, then took a white cloth from inside his coat and slowly wiped it clean. His movements were impeccably neat and brisk.
"There is no 'home' in the Astra Militarum. The Emperor's frontline is your only grave."
Vorkov murmured the words to all of Second Squad, who had been watching, then vanished into the darkness to the sound of cold boots without waiting for an answer.
Perfect silence fell over the trench. Even the rain seemed to hold its breath. Lazar, Brix, and Sergeant Yakov could not say a word. Avoiding one another's eyes, they stared fixedly at their weapons.
With my gloved hand, I slowly rubbed the dark red blood from my gas mask lenses. Through the smeared stains, I could see the soldier's cooling corpse. Blood flowing from the headless body mixed with the wastewater on the trench floor and ran black.
I was sickened by my own moment of hesitation. Here, sympathizing with fear and pitying it was not mercy. It was merely the surest shortcut to having your head blown apart by a Commissar's bolt round. Those who held on to emotion died first.
I clenched my trembling hand tight. The last human warmth rising inside me cooled completely in the cold acid rain.
Comments (0)
Please log in to leave a comment. Login or Register