‘Aim for the heads!’ shouted Bolus at the recruits. He snapped off a shot at a lurching shape, pierced already with half a dozen black holes. Though the flesh was cauterised, the wounds leaked black fluid. Bolus cursed as his shot tore off the thing’s ear, and he adjusted his aim.

Varens felled the one behind Bolus’ mark, trusting the acting sergeant to make his shot next count. He had a glimpse of a filthy officer’s uniform on the dead man, a priceless power sword scabbarded at his side.

‘Men! They are dead, but they will die anew. Hit them in the heads!’ shouted Varens.

Bolus’ second shot was true, taking the approaching plague walker full in the face. Its head disintegrated and it fell down, chest rattling as it died its second death.

The fog darkened directly in front of their line. Scattered silhouettes became a shadowy mass.

‘Damn it, there’s a knot of them coming this way.’ Bolus picked up the vox-horn from the vox-operator’s pack. ‘This is acting Sergeant Bolus, Fourth Squad, Second Platoon, requesting fire support on my quadrant immediately.’

The veterans of the Espandor war reacted quickly. A heavy bolter dug into a projecting bunker almost fifty metres away swivelled and banged loudly. Compact, self-propelled munitions burned through the mist on streaks of flame numerous enough to light up the trench in yellow firelight. The bolts cut the dead to pieces, burying themselves in their flesh and exploding, scattering gobbets of rancid corpse meat over Varens’ unit.

The men on the line let out a premature cheer. But the dead were not done with them.

Several standing dead remained. A dozen more hauled their broken bodies across the mire with crippled limbs, ignorant of pain. Lasbeams snapped out at them, but too many of the recruits fired wildly, and things that should have died in the mud of the kill zone reached the trench line. There, they simply toppled forwards, landing with bone cracking force in the mud at the bottom of the trench, or fell onto hapless troopers. Those that didn’t land upon a target flopped about, stiff arms and legs twisting as they struggled to right themselves, teeth snapping at the limbs of the living. Most of the recruits remembered the drill and moved out of the way, but not all.

‘Quick! Don’t let them bite you! Kill them!’ ordered Varens. He drew his pistol and put a shot into the head of a foe struggling with a new recruit. ‘One bite and you’ll be like them. The heads, the heads! Aim for the heads!’