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It Bleeds – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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IT BLEEDS

David Guymer

I don’t know this world. I don’t know this battle. There have been so many that one bleeds into the next, all the years of my life nothing more to me than a red smear across a hundred burning stars. I don’t know this world, but I know that I hate it. Polluted rain patters against my armour like stub-rounds off a tank, acid run-off trickling through the maze of dents and scratches that have never been repaired. It winds down the rusted chains that drape my harness, scrubbing ineffectually at the tarry handprint that has been on my breastplate for longer than I can remember. At my hip, it pools in the eye sockets of a skull with the broad features and heavy structure of a transhuman. It’s fixed to my armour by a bolt and a chain. A short passage of knife-cut symbols marks the frontal bone. I don’t know what they mean, but looking at them fills me with a rage I struggle to contain.

Sometimes, I think–

Sometimes, I wonder–

‘Hnnng.’

The sudden clenching of my brass teeth is a grating squeal vibrating through the base of my skull as the Nails whip my brain with pain agonists, cytokines and targeted electric shocks. My whole body spasms until the pad of my thumb finds the activation stud on my chainaxe. The motors send the belt-driven teeth whirring. I press it again, like a trained dog. Congealed lumps of flesh and chips of bone pelt my damaged faceplate, and I sigh in relief as the migraine eases, slightly.

With the red fog clearing, I experience a prickling sensation of lucidity and look around myself in disgust. The horizon is one of jagged manufactorum stacks, chimneys reaching up into the upper atmosphere to belch their pollutants into a nascent planetary ring system. The ground beneath me rumbles. The atmosphere weeps. Fiery red streaks run down its dirty, coal-black face, World Eaters drop pods and assault boats, falling out of orbit in crazy spirals into the vociferous welcome of flak guns and the sonic-boom shout of interceptors. I smell the promethium. I taste the fyceline.

I don’t know this battle.

I wonder how I got here, and what happened to the rest of my squad.

The Space Marine stands huge in front of me.

‘Hnnng.’

I cough up blood this time. It splats the inside surface of my helmet’s snarling grille. I shake my head, and force myself to focus.

Space Marine.

He is one of the newer breed that emerged from Terra in the wake of the Blindness: taller, faster and stronger than those who had come before them. His armour is a metallic turquoise, but with a subtle, shifting tone that varies its hue for each sporadic burst of crossfire or passing gunship. His raiment is that of a Champion. A high gorget shields the vulnerable rotator cuffs around the neck joint and most of the helmet, up to a pair of golden, sharply accented lenses. A rain-sodden back banner flutters in the heat haze from his reactor pack, displaying what appears to be a heraldic sea dragon devouring a planet. The pain of the Nails settles into a dull throb, the implant’s deceptively subtle machina animus placated by the hatred this symbol stirs in me.

I bare my teeth, confused, and enraged by my confusion.

‘I have hunted you across three systems, brother.’

The Champion brings his sword into a two-handed guard, activating the disruption field as his alternating blue-green gauntlet closes over the grip and throwing off a cloudburst of flash-evaporated gore from the blade. The weapon emits a low-frequency hum that makes my eye twitch and triggers a shower of parasympathetic spite from the Nails.

His voice though, is worse, as strident and hateful as a knife drawn across glass.

‘Can you still speak? Or are you just another of the Foresworn’s rabid beasts?’

I hate fighting Space Marines.

They are tough bastards to kill, and I would sooner spend the time it demands glorying Khorne with the butchery of weaker men. The Blood God has always favoured quantity over quality, and I am keen to oblige.

The Champion lowers his sword a fraction, as though the irritant hum of his weapon is preventing him from seeing me properly.

‘Well?’

And Space Marines, for some reason, always want to talk.

Who does he think he is?

A mongrel infant. A Champion of genetic freaks.

I bare my cracked teeth in a snarl and shake my head as though that might be enough to dislodge the cybernetic pain device embedded there and let me just think. The rain fogs my lenses. One is cracked. The other has never worked properly.

I rev my chainaxe until red smoke bleeds from gore-clogged motors and reality fades…

I wake the way I always do: with screaming.

The carbon-alloy restraint bars pinning me to my upright cryo-slab tighten in response, row upon row of microscopically thin phlebotomy spikes puncturing my skin and dosing my veins with anticoagulants and counter-adrenals. Hundreds of tiny bleeds dribble down my horribly scarred nakedness, where they drip from my toes to the metal floor. To either side of me, as slow and crusted as a Death Guard’s lungs, exsanguination pumps wheeze, drawing gurgling vitae out through bronze filtration loops, osmotically extracting the sus-an hormones from my system. The air is unpleasantly warm, and smells of blood and chemicals. I have been brought out of my nightmares into the madness of an asylum. The convalescent wails of my fellow maniacs, each one as damned and exalted as I, ring from the huge, hollow pipes that clutter the ceiling. They hang from cryo-slabs of their own. Carcasses in an abattoir. Waiting to be bled, ground or minced, depending on the whim of the Foresworn.

The Butcher’s Nails affect us all differently. I know this. I know that I suffer it worse than most. There is a reason for that, niggling away somewhere inside my brutalised excuse for a subconscious. Wherever it hides, it daren’t come out. The Nails make me dangerous, even by the standards of warriors who think nothing of training with live ammunition and active chainaxes. The warband’s butcher-surgeons keep me cold until there is a real battle to fight, lest I satisfy the Nails with the blood of the ship’s crew and my own brothers.

I try to remember how many times I have gone through the revivification procedure, but I can’t. All I know is that it’s been more than once.

‘Brother…’

The word triggers something in my memory. The Nails jerk me fully conscious, and my eyes focus on the vulture that peers up at me from the gantry floor.

There are only a handful of names I can recall with ease. Most of them belong to dead men. Ghosts from another life. None of them are my own, but there are worse things to forget than your name.

Perun Tiyr, once Apothecary to the Eighth Company and now Chief Vivisector to the World Eaters warband calling themselves the Foresworn, is one I can remember.

‘Brother.’ His voice has a caustic tone that works through to the hyper-stimulated pain centres of my brain like an acid. The hand he places over my restrained wrist, level with his shoulder, is fever-warm and moist. He smiles at me the whole time and I bare my teeth back. The metal pegs are blunted from years of grinding. Even in my coma, I am told, I rage. ‘It pleases me to have you back, brother. Your insanity is a source of endless blessing to me. The in-system deceleration should take several days, and my apprentices have been anticipating the chance to look inside your head one more time.’

He is not speaking figuratively. This, too, I know.

‘B-b-b–’

I struggle to speak. My brain is misfiring and my mouth is still feeling the numbing effects of the torporific chemicals used to render me unconscious for warp transit.

‘B-b-b-hnnng-blood.’

The Vivisector chuckles to himself. Like me, he no longer has his own teeth. Two rows of bolt-shells have been carefully hammered into his gums in their place. He likes to tell us they are still live. I have no idea whether or not it is true, but can only assume that it is. It’s the sort of insanity I would indulge in if I had his freedom. He turns from me to examine a screen bank that flickers with pictorial displays of my vital signs and a constant effluent of runic screed. The chirurgical appendages nerve-spliced to his thoracic spine twitch as they translate the angry impulses of his own Butcher’s Nails. Bloody scraps of flesh and torn fabric hang from the metallic pseudo-limbs like scruffs of feather, which is why he has always put me in mind of a vulture: hunched and bloody, with keen eyes and wanton appetites.

‘You will have it, brother,’ he said. ‘Very soon.’

‘B-b-b-b–’ The combined effort of thought and speech brings a rusty liquid dribbling from my nose. ‘N-n-n-n–’

Tiyr grimaces, easily amused but just as quickly bored.

He gives the screens an impatient tap, watching as they fuzz out and then back in again, then turns back towards me. He leans in as though his bloodshot eyes aren’t more than perfect enough to make me out from a safer distance. The Nails affect all of us differently, but they draw us all, to varying degrees, towards self-destruction. I’m thoroughly restrained, but the Nails flay my nervous system in defiance of it, and Tiyr knows full well that I would tear the meat from his face with my teeth if only he would come close enough.

‘Blood,’ I manage to spit.

‘Soon,’ he says.

‘W-w-w–’ I struggle to force the words through pain-clenched teeth. ‘W-w-w-where?’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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ISBN: 978-1-80407-176-2

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