Mutant Chronicles Read online

  Nathan shook his head to try to clear it but failed. He stared down at Robertson’s body and wished the man had listened to him instead of bickering about orders. If he had, both of them might have lived.

  Nathan flopped over onto his back and saw the Bauhaus soldier standing over him, the tip of his Panzerknacker assault rifle still smoking. The Cog pointed his weapon down at Nathan, his finger already tightening on the trigger. Nathan had lost his assault rifle when he’d fallen, but he still had a Bolter pistol in his belt holster. He commanded his hands to draw it, even though he knew he’d be dead long before the barrel cleared its leather casing.

  A burst of gunfire sounded, and despite himself Nathan closed his eyes. A moment later, he opened them and saw the Bauhaus trooper no longer standing over him but lying in a rapidly cooling pile at his feet.

  Nathan stared up at the man in disbelief, then at the unfired gun in his hand. He turned around and saw Mitch standing there, his M50 lowered back to the ground as his eyes searched the mists behind Nathan for a new target.

  Still woozy, Nathan raised his pistol at Mitch. The sergeant dived forward, out of Nathan’s line of fire, exposing the well-armed Cog charging up behind him. Nathan squeezed his pistol’s trigger and pumped three sharp shots into the man. The last one caught him in the face and obliterated his head.

  “Fuck,” Mitch said as he got back to his feet. “For a second there I thought you were going to shoot me.”

  “For a second I was.” Nathan looked Mitch in the eyes. That had been too close. He felt fear clawing inside his stomach, trying to gouge its way out. “I don’t make it out of here, you look after the girls.”

  Mitch flinched at that. Nathan knew his old friend would take care of his wife and daughter whether he asked him to or not. At that moment, though, he needed to ask, no matter how uncomfortable it might make Mitch.

  Mitch reached down and hauled Nathan to his feet. “Can’t I just buy you a drink?”

  As they stalked through the trench, looking for other men, Nathan heard the too-familiar muffled whump of Bauhaus grenades exploding in another trench. Those damned potato mashers could blast a whole squad apart if they landed in the right place. He hoped they had sailed wide.

  Then Nathan heard the shell from the big Capitol gun overhead roar. He snapped back his head and stared through the rain into the inky sky.

  The flash from the gun froze the shell in the air, leaving it hanging there for an instant like the sword of Damocles. A heartbeat later, it smacked down in no-man’s-land. Nathan hoped it tore another one of those Bauhaus ATCs apart.

  The explosion’s roar deafened Nathan for a moment, making his ears ring with pain. The blast threw up a tidal wave of rocks and dirt that splashed all the way back to Nathan’s trench hundreds of yards away.

  Nathan struggled to breathe for a moment and wondered if his ears had started to bleed. Even the rain seemed to stop, the droplets being blasted away by the tremendous explosion.

  Then the rain fell once more, as if it had never stopped, and time started rolling again.

  Most of the Capitol soldiers had followed their captain’s orders and fallen back. That left Nathan and Mitch with El Jesus and two mud-caked grunts, Bonner and Naismith.

  Nathan opened his mouth to chew out the men for ignoring his orders, but El Jesus cut him off before he could get started.

  “Can’t get through to Betty, and Marilyn’s fucked.”

  Nathan frowned. That meant the Bauhaus forces had overwhelmed the two nearest trenches. The Cogs must have sent an ATC full of soldiers against each of the trenches. The battle had gone poorly here, and it sounded like the neighbors to the north and south hadn’t fared much better.

  Nathan stopped and glanced around. The tracer fire and shells had stopped, but the sound of small-arms fire seemed to come from every direction but down. They had to figure out some way to hook up with the central command and reevaluate the situation. But which way could they turn?

  Nathan rubbed his chin as he made his decision. “Take Mary Jane and link up with Slick Nancy.”

  The soldiers around him nodded. The circuitous path would take them out through the back trenches and, they hoped, to the rear echelons of the Capitol forces. With luck, they’d get there in one piece.

  Nathan wiped the mud from his face again and realized, maybe for the first time, that he’d lost his helmet. He wondered how bad the wound in his head was. Had the bullet just lacerated his scalp, or was he losing gray matter with every step? He figured if Mitch hadn’t told him to sit down yet he had to be fine.

  Bonner noticed Nathan rubbing his bare head, and the soldier took off his helmet and tossed it to the captain.

  “Sir!” Bonner said. “Heads up!”

  Caught off guard, Nathan still managed to snatch the helmet out of midair. He stared at it for a moment, then realized he needed to give it back. He’d lost his own equipment, and there was no reason for Bonner to suffer for that.

  As Nathan held the helmet out to Bonner, Mitch started to chew the man out. Nathan had heard the diatribe before. “Never give your gear to another man, especially your helmet. It’s fitted to your fat head, not his!”

  Although Mitch didn’t seem like he gave a fuck about anything, Nathan knew that his sergeant cared about the men who served with him. Moments like this only drove that home. Nathan had commanded dozens of sergeants over the years, but none of them had been as loyal to his men as Mitch.

  “You keep that fucking bonnet on!” Mitch said to Bonner.

  The young man nodded silently. He opened his mouth, maybe to explain that he’d only been trying to help a superior officer, but the bullet that blasted through his skull, bursting it like a blood-filled balloon, cut him off.

  Even as Bonner’s body fell, Mitch, El Jesus, Naismith, and Nathan returned fire. Whether or not they hit anything, they would never know. They ran off in the other direction rather than take the time to check.

  5

  Mitch Hunter had seen enough of war in his life. He’d joined the Capitol forces as a way to serve his corporation, the one he’d been born into. His parents had been Capitol citizens, and his ancestors before them, as far back as anyone could remember. They’d all served in the forces. That’s what they did.

  Now, for the life of him, Mitch couldn’t understand why.

  Maybe the worlds had changed. Maybe it had been him. He’d killed people on four different planets, several asteroids, and three moons, including Luna, which he hadn’t seen once on his entire tour of duty here.

  Sure, in most cases those people had been trying to kill him too. He’d been defending not only himself but Capitol’s interests around the system. But he’d had his fill of blood, no matter how noble the reasons for which it had been spilled.

  He didn’t know what he was fighting for anymore. He just knew he wanted to survive it.

  Mitch moved up to take point as the four soldiers made their way north up the trench. He would have hoped that Nathan had guessed right and that his plan would steer them clear of the fighting until they could rendezvous with the rest of the Capitol forces.

  But Mitch had given up on hope. Take each moment as it comes, and react with your gut. That’s all he had left.

  El Jesus came stumping up behind him, as subtle as an elephant and just as solid, his shotgun at the ready. Nathan and Naismith brought up the rear, with the captain sometimes reaching out to lean on the private’s shoulder to steady himself.

  Mitch crouched low and moved fast, his rifle out in front of him, his finger on the trigger. The trick with chasing through the trenches like this wasn’t in shooting anything that crossed his path. It was in making sure he didn’t shoot somebody on his side.

  No trace of the yellow gas curled through the trenches here. The rain seemed to have finally stopped too. Now that he thought about it, it had been waning since the Cogs had launched their attack. They’d probably waited until the weather cleared a bit so that the rain wouldn’t wash their dam
ned gas out of the air. Then they’d hit, and hit hard.

  Mitch came to a corner and slowed as he reached it. As he curled around it, he froze.

  “Top?”

  El Jesus’s voice sounded like that of a little boy. Mitch shook his head without looking back, signaling for the man to be quiet.

  Every instinct he had screamed at him that something was wrong, but he couldn’t say why. Then he knew.

  It was quiet.

  He could hear gunshots and cannon fire, but off in the distance, far away. Here in the trenches, there wasn’t a sound louder than the squelching of the boots of the three troopers coming up behind him.

  He considered calling out, but he knew that was the wrong thing to do. Someone might be hiding out there—someone from Bauhaus—and shouting would give away his position.

  Mitch crept forward a bit, and as he did, the mists began to peel back like layers of curtains. The trench widened out here. They drove supply trucks this far into the place and dumped off goods that sometimes even made it to the troops stationed farther in.

  Usually this intersection stood clogged with troops coming and going. Guards were stationed there at all times. Right now, though, no one was there at all.

  No, Mitch corrected himself as the mists thinned more: no one alive.

  Corpses littered the ground from one side of the trench to the other. Mitch’s guts tensed from the fear that the rest of the Capitol forces had been slaughtered, leaving only the four of them to stand alone against the Cogs.

  As he moved forward like a strong and silent tiger, he got a better look at the fallen. They’d been torn to pieces. It seemed like a helicopter had crashed here, rotors first, and chewed through everyone in the place. But no charred hulk of a vehicle lay resting in a crater in the center of the trench, just arms, legs, heads, torsos, and parts impossible—or plain painful—to identify.

  “Jesus Christ God almighty,” he said to no one.

  Mitch heard someone behind him—it had to be Naismith—puke into the bloodstained muck.

  “Motherfuckers,” El Jesus said in a voice weighty with horror and rage.

  Mitch pointed to a shoulder lying off to the left. It bore the insignia of a Bauhaus Blitzer, one of their special forces. Remnants of other Bauhausers lay scattered about the place, mixed in with the Capitol corpses in equal measure.

  Mitch heard El Jesus stifle a gasp. Whatever had happened here, it had killed everyone around, regardless of which side he’d been on.

  A voice in the back of Mitch’s head screamed at him to turn back, to go racing down the trenches in the other direction or leap up the nearest ladder and charge off into no-man’s-land or straight into the open fields behind the front. Instead he picked his way forward, trying to avoid stepping on anything that had once been part of a living man.

  Several times he failed.

  At one point, Mitch stopped to look at something that seemed like a bloody mask half-buried in the mud. In an instant, he realized he was staring at the back of a severed face.

  As he bit back the bile that threatened to rise in his throat, Mitch heard movement from above the trench. He swiveled to the left, training his weapon above the trench’s lip, right about where a soldier’s chest would be if he charged at them out of the darkness.

  Nothing stood there. Nothing moved at all but the mists, which swirled about in a pattern that reminded Mitch of a speedboat’s wake.

  After a long moment staring up at the settling mists, Mitch turned back to the open part of the trench and came face to face with a dark-haired, sharp-chinned man in a Bauhaus officer’s uniform.

  The man seemed as shocked as Mitch. He must have just emerged from one of the other trenches that emptied into this central area and then stumbled into Mitch and his friends. Right now, though, how he’d gotten there wasn’t important.

  Mitch swung the butt of his rifle about and smashed the oberleutnant in the face. The Cog staggered back, bleeding but unfazed.

  Mitch resolved to hit the man harder this time and brought the rifle around in a sharp, twisting jab. Once he knocked the man down, he would have enough room to train his gun on him and blow him away. Better yet, he’d keep the man silent and question him about any compatriots hiding nearby. He didn’t want any gunshots to bring them running.

  Instead, though, the oberleutnant blocked the incoming blow with his arm. He then grabbed Mitch with his free hand and pulled him into a savage headbutt.

  Mitch reeled back, the rifle tumbling from his hands and disappearing in the mud. He knew he’d never find it in time. Opting for a silent kill, he drew his combat knife instead. The Cog did the same.

  Mitch held his ground and waited for the oberleutnant to come to him. He knew that the others would come to his aid in mere seconds. He only needed to keep himself alive until then.

  The Cog seemed to sense this and launched himself at Mitch. He feinted to his left, then stabbed right, his well-oiled blade gleaming in the dim light. Mitch blocked the man’s arm with his left hand and then drove in hard with the knife in his right.

  The Cog leaned in under Mitch’s strike and tried to headbutt him again. This time Mitch was ready. He snapped his neck back and took the blow on the tip of his chin.

  The oberleutnant kept at him, this time bringing up his knife toward Mitch’s guts in an attempt to disembowel him. Mitch knocked the man’s hand away, but the Cog kept hold of the knife. In a smooth move that Mitch had to admire, the man switched to an overhand grip on the knife and then put all his strength and weight into stabbing it down at the sergeant.

  Mitch reached out with his left hand and caught the oberleutnant’s wrist. The point of the knife came jabbing straight toward his face, stopping only inches from his eye.

  As the Cog grunted in frustration, Mitch brought his own knife around toward the man’s exposed neck. A single, sharp blow, and the man would be dead, his blood gushing out of his throat.

  This time, Mitch ended up the frustrated one. The Cog spotted the incoming blade and managed to get his free hand up in time to grab Mitch’s wrist in a grip like a vise.

  The two of them stood there, holding each other’s knives at bay with one hand while trying to stab their foe to death with the other. The deadly dance paused when both men froze at the sound of a half dozen weapons being cocked at them.

  6

  Mitch recognized the sounds of his compatriots’ weapons being chambered with bullets and shells. The pump action on El Jesus’s shotgun was unmistakable. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to feel too good about it. The three Bauhaus troops who’d appeared behind the oberleutnant dampened his relief.

  Standing in the middle of a vicious knife fight surrounded by a gunfight, Mitch remained calm. “Panic never helps,” he’d often told his soldiers, even in the face of certain death.

  He hoped the oberleutnant had trained his men as well. It would take only one nervous trigger finger for this standoff to devolve into a bloodbath, and there had been enough death that day. The stench of the already rotting corpses and the freshly scattered bowels would have been enough to make Mitch’s head swim if the last remains of the Bauhaus gas attack had not already taken care of that. He breathed through his mouth and strove to stay cool.

  The oberleutnant took advantage of Mitch’s apparent hesitation in the middle of their fight to renew his efforts with his knife. Mitch’s grip on the man’s wrist tightened in time. He pushed the Bauhaus knife away and at the same time pulled back on his own blade.

  The oberleutnant—Mitch could read the name Steiner on his chest now—held Mitch’s arm just as tightly, suspecting the sergeant of some kind of trick.

  “Murderer,” the Bauhauser said in his German-accented English, his voice shaking as he spoke. “Has war driven you mad?”

  Mitch said nothing, just stared at the man with cold eyes. He didn’t struggle with Steiner any longer but held him right where he was. He didn’t want to kill the man, but he would not hesitate to drop him if necessary.
/>
  Nathan spoke up from behind. Mitch never took his eyes off Steiner, never gave the man another chance to make a move.

  “My men didn’t do this.”

  Steiner gaped at Nathan’s words, grasping their enormity. If the Capitol troops hadn’t done this, then who could have? As Mitch watched, he saw the answer dawn on the oberleutnant’s face. Disgust and rage followed close behind.

  “You accuse me?”

  Mitch barely parted his lips to spit out his soft-spoken accusation. “Yeah.”

  Steiner’s lip curled in hatred.

  Mitch understood. They were both professionals, veterans of countless wars. But the carnage here had gone beyond all that.

  Mitch didn’t care too much for humanity as a group. He’d seen too much of the worst of people over the years. But whatever humanity might be, this was a crime against it.

  Mitch stared into Steiner’s eyes. As far as he could tell, the man’s horror and disgust were real. He and the other Cogs hadn’t committed this atrocity either. But if they hadn’t, who had?

  Mitch heard someone behind him starting to get sick. The tension—or maybe the awful smell—had gotten to Naismith again. Mitch hoped that one of the Bauhaus troops wouldn’t see this as his chance to drill the private into his grave. His grip on Steiner’s wrist tightened, and he felt the hand on his arm do the same.

  Mitch risked a glance back toward Naismith to see how the man was faring. The soldier leaned forward and opened his mouth to puke. As he did, a blade the length of a sword emerged from between his teeth like a horrible bone-colored tongue.

  Naismith tried to scream but gagged on the boneblade instead. Then the blade jerked backward just as fast as it had appeared, pulling Naismith’s corpse back into the obscuring mists with it.

  Everyone but Mitch and Steiner spun about to face the encroaching mists. Mitch was ready to go for his sidearm too, but he didn’t trust the oberleutnant not to stab him as soon as he dropped his knife.

  One of the Bauhaus troopers fell over then, his body slapping into the gore-crusted muck without a word, much less a scream. Something in the mists, which seemed as close and cloying as ever, dragged the body away, blood still gurgling from the dying man’s mouth.