Thud!
With a dull impact of metal plates and bone colliding, an enemy tumbled from atop the mound of earth into the sewage pit directly in front of me.
There was no time to fire my lasgun. In the narrow, damp trench, its long barrel was nothing but an obstruction. Reflexively, I raised the body of the lasgun and blocked the rusty bayonet he swung at me.
Clang!
The violent impact of grinding metal traveled through my elbow joint and all the way into my brain. His body weight, along with the weight of the crudely strapped-on metal plates, crushed me against the trench wall.
"Ghk...!"
His face pressed close to mine through our gas mask lenses.
His skin was grotesquely rotten, as if burned. His eyes were empty, their eyelids frozen with paralysis. He bore down on the hilt until his knuckles turned white, yet he neither clenched his teeth nor groaned. I could not even hear his ragged breathing. He was like an inanimate object with only one purpose left: to cut my throat.
The smell of burning metal and a stench like rotten eggs stabbed down my throat through my gas mask filter.
"Ivan! Get out of the way!"
Sergeant Yakov's shout erupted from my right.
Gritting my teeth, I kicked his thigh with my mangled knee, then threw my entire weight sideways into the adjacent sewage pit.
Bang! Bang!
Two shots from the Sergeant's laspistol pierced the gaps in the enemy's side flak armour. Red beams tore into his flesh, but he merely staggered dully, without a single scream, and tightened his grip on the hilt again.
Hit a man in the leg and he went down. Put a hole through his torso and he stopped. That was what I had learned in boot camp, and everything I had known about combat until now. But these bastards looked as though the very sensation of pain had been completely numbed away.
To stop them, we had no choice but to shatter their joints completely or blow their heads off. Before I had time to feel fear, the calculations in my head frantically revised themselves.
Crunch!
Lazar screamed to my left.
"Aaargh! Let go, you bastard!"
An enemy had seized Lazar by the nape and slammed him against the trench wall. Lazar hurriedly drew his bayonet and drove it deep into the man's chest three times, but even as black-red blood poured from his chest, the bastard did not loosen his grip. Cracks began spreading across Lazar's gas mask lens.
I snatched up the lasgun that had rolled into the mud. Without even time to disengage the safety, I pressed the muzzle to the back of the enemy's knee and squeezed the trigger.
Hiss!
The large-calibre beam burned through the tendons in his leg, and he staggered, collapsing on top of Lazar. Lazar convulsively shoved him away and crawled across the trench floor.
Strangely black, sticky blood gushed from the holes in his chest and knee, accompanied by a vicious sulphur stench. Steam billowed up from the sewage on the trench floor where the blood touched it.
Are they drugged out of their minds? What the hell did they take before coming here...?
Not knowing the answer, I only gave the steaming wound a brief glance before raising my weapon again. Judgment could come later. First, I had to clear away the lumps of meat in front of me.
"Damn it! The cell won't eject!"
Brix howled from the heavy weapons position. The power cell of the overheated heavy lasgun had warped inside and would not come out.
Then, beyond the immobilized flamethrower vehicle, a second group of infantry began climbing over the trench lip through the fog. They carried rusty sledgehammers, industrial oxy-fuel cutting torches, and crudely bound improvised bombs. Hydraulic cutters—the kind used in Castigar's factories to cut hydraulic pipes and steel plates.
"Brix, get down!"
Sergeant Yakov lunged forward and gouged the back of the neck of an enemy charging in with an improvised bomb using his field knife. The bomb's fuse burned down, belching acrid smoke, and the Sergeant shoved the man's entire arm over the trench lip toward No Man's Land.
Boom!
With an explosion outside the trench, earth poured down like a waterfall. But without even a moment's pause, enemies carrying sledgehammers and tools burst through the smoke and dropped one after another onto the trench floor.
Shell impact interval: three seconds. Brix's heavy weapon silent. At least six enemies remaining. Close-combat range.
Cold figures churned busily through my mind again. There was no room to shoulder my lasgun and aim. Keeping the muzzle lowered, I reflexively pulled the trigger at the head of an enemy crawling along the trench floor.
Hiss!
The red beam pierced his temple. Black-red blood sprayed up in a cloud of steam from the hole in his head. The rusty sledgehammer in his hand dropped heavily right in front of my combat boots.
"Ivan, five o'clock!"
I turned at Lazar's scream-like shout. An enemy holding a hydraulic cutter was using a trench support beam as a foothold, throwing himself down over my head.
I raised the barrel and thrust it beneath his chin. Through my gloves, I felt the tip of the muzzle touch the back of his skull. I hammered the trigger repeatedly.
Hiss! Hiss!
The beams punched through his head and shot skyward. Black blood and fragments of brain splattered wetly across my gas mask lens. The lens was covered entirely in black-red bloodstains, plunging my vision into darkness.
"Aaargh!"
I roughly scrubbed the lens with my gloved hand. Through the smeared blood, the chaos on the trench floor came into view again.
Sergeant Yakov did not even have time to reload; he was crazily smashing the grip of his laspistol into an enemy's face. Brix was prying out the jammed power cell with the tip of his field knife. Lazar, too, was pushing his lasgun bayonet into the throat of an enemy lying on the ground with trembling hands.
There were no human screams. The only ones screaming were us men of Second Squad. Even with limbs severed and holes blasted through their chests, the enemies merely swung their weapons like machines until they crashed onto the floor. At least, that was all I could see.
Click!
"It's working! The cell ejected!"
Brix threw the overheated power cell, glowing white-hot, into the sewage pit. With a sharp hiss, sulphurous smoke surged upward. Brix swiftly rammed in a fresh cell pack.
Rumble...
The heavy lasgun's cooling mechanism began to shriek into operation, and Brix fixed the muzzle on the remaining enemies trying to climb over the trench lip.
Boom-boom-boom-boom!
A rapid barrage of large-calibre beams butchered the narrow trench entrance. Flesh burst apart, and crudely attached metal plates shattered and flew in every direction.
At last, the movement forcing its way over the trench lip ceased.
"Hah... hah..."
The trench was filled with nothing but acrid smoke from burning machinery and grotesquely hot vapor rising from the sewage.
Blood flowing from dozens of enemy corpses sprawled across the floor stained the trench black. Acid rain was falling, yet the blood from their wounds was not easily washed away. Like oil, it floated on the muddy water.
I staggered over and slumped against the trench wall. The inside of my gas mask was already damp with chills and cold sweat.
A dreadful silence settled over the trench. We had not won. We had merely survived the first close-combat sector.
At first, I thought it was only a simple muscle twitch from a corpse.
The fingers of the enemy I had shot dead directly below me trembled mechanically in the mud. But the regularly repeating movement was not a twitch. The tips of his rotten fingers were deliberately pressing into the muddy bottom beneath the sewage, scratching something into it.
Lines appeared, and faint trails rippled across the mud.
I took a step closer and was just about to bend down for a look.
"Ivan! Stop standing around and gather ammunition first!"
At Sergeant Yakov's harsh shout, I reflexively turned my head.
"Yes, Sergeant!"
After answering, I looked back down at the corpse's feet. Its fingers had already stopped moving completely. The unfinished trail scratched into the mud was rapidly being erased by the falling acid rain. Whatever it had been drawing, I could not tell.
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