The Hounds of Avalon

The army had dug in along a ridge of hills south-east of Moffat in the Scottish Borders, but they were barely prepared for the near-arctic conditions. The ground was as hard as iron, frozen to a depth of at least twelve inches underfoot, and the wind that blew from the north felt harsh enough to take the skin from their faces. Overnight the temperature plummeted to minus ten, worse with the wind-chill factor.

‘Bloody hell, Hunter. This is a nightmare.’ Clevis stamped his feet and clapped his hands as he circled the campfire, little more than the tip of his broken nose visible in the depths of his hood.

Hunter looked out over the tent city and the constellation of campfires spread across the hillsides, each one trailing a thick line of black smoke up to the colour-leached dawn sky. ‘You know what I’m thinking? This is a new Ice Age.’

‘It’s not bloody fair. We’d barely got over the Fall when the plague came along. And now this.’ Clevis sounded petulant, but he was barely seventeen, hardly trained, emotionally immature. And Hunter had to take him on a potential suicide mission. Clevis shouldn’t have been there at all, but with forces so badly depleted they had to make do in many different areas, even if that meant sending a barely trained youth on a Special Forces operation. They needed the numbers to make the plan work and Hunter just had to hope that the others would cover for the lad. Clevis really didn’t know how unfair it was, but Hunter did, and that knowledge troubled him deeply. He liked Clevis; for all his faults, the boy was decent-hearted and truly believed in the cause for which he was fighting.

As Hunter surveyed the snowy wastes stretching away towards the sooty streak of black on the horizon that signified the enemy’s location, he realised that Clevis was staring at him. ‘I’ve told you not to do that.’

‘Sorry.’ Clevis wiped the back of his hand across his dripping nose. ‘It’s just, I was thinking-’

‘Well, don’t.’

‘How many men have you killed, Captain?’

One hundred and sixty seven.

‘I can’t remember.’

Every face locked in place, eye colour, hair colour, method of dispatch.

‘It’s a dirty business, Clevis, but we do it so other people don’t have to.’

He would never forget any of them.

‘What’s it like?’ Clevis asked hesitantly. ‘I mean, when you actually… do it?’

‘Stop asking impertinent questions. We’ve got a job to do.’ He prayed that Clevis could escape any killing. The act was like a worm in an apple, getting fatter by the day with each mouthful it devoured. Nobody was immune. Hunter consoled himself with the knowledge that Clevis would probably be dead before he had the chance to raise his weapon.

‘We begin Operation Clear Skies at oh-seven-hundred hours.’ The General rested his two meaty fists on the trestle table in the conference tent and surveyed Hunter’s team. ‘By that time, you will be deep in the heart of enemy territory. Your mission is to cause as much disruption to the enemy’s lines as possible. Chaos and confusion are the order of the day. Let them know we are not weak. That we are not going to roll over and die. By the end of this day, I want them reconsidering their decision to invade.’

Hunter cast a surreptitious glance across his team. Apart from Clevis, there were four others, all hard men, all aware of what potentially lay ahead for them. Bradley was from Kent, a scar running down his left cheek like an exclamation mark, the result of an Iraqi bayonet. Next to him, Coop was slight but more focused than anyone Hunter knew; he was from Birmingham, but with strong Jamaican roots. Spencer was a hard man, and silent, Ormston a sneaky little shit who was surprisingly reliable in a crisis, both of them from some Godforsaken industrial town or other in the north. They rarely spoke about their pasts; the present, for all its misery, was clearly so much more appetising.

It was Ormston who raised his hand to speak first. ‘Excuse me, sir, but do you have any idea what might be waiting for us over the hill? I heard there was a film-?’

‘Very poor quality. You wouldn’t learn anything from it that would help you,’ the General lied. Even Hunter hadn’t seen the video, but he knew exactly why it was being kept from them: no one would venture over that hill if they knew what horrors were waiting for them. But wasn’t that the case in any war?

‘The frontal assault will give them hell,’ the General said. ‘You have my word on that. We’re throwing everything at them, every weapon at our disposal apart from nukes.’ He hesitated; such weapons were clearly still an option for another time. ‘The strategy is for massive shock, devastate their forces within the first twenty-four hours.’

Hunter fought the urge to smile. If wishes were fishes they’d need a sea of batter.

‘God be with you,’ the General said. ‘Go into the fray with good heart. It is a just fight, for the future of our country and our people.’

The General nodded and Hunter led his men out. They made their way in silence across the camp site until Bradley stopped suddenly and exclaimed, ‘Bleedin’ ’ell. Look at that.’

The sky behind them was black. At first, Hunter thought it was a whirlwind of dust, but as it drew closer he could see irregular edges and rapid movement within the body of the darkness.

‘Birds,’ Spencer said flatly.

‘Crows.’ Coop looked at the approaching cloud uneasily.

‘Now that ain’t natural,’ Bradley said in hushed tones.

The crows’ actions became even more unnatural as they neared. Initially, their cawing was discordant in the early morning peace, but gradually they fell eerily silent. They descended in a wild flapping cloud over the hillside behind the camp, settling on trees, hedges, fences, filling the fields so that the snow was obscured by an oily blackness; it looked to Hunter like some horrible pollution was running down the slope towards them.

Once they had landed, the crows fell still. It looked to all the men as though the birds were watching the camp with their gleaming eyes, waiting. Hunter knew the symbolism and wasn’t about to say anything, but Coop spoke up. ‘They used to say that crows gathered before battles, waiting to feed on the dead, as if they knew exactly what was going to happen.’

‘Yeah, but look how many of them there are!’ Ormston said. ‘They must be expecting a right bloody feast!’ He laughed loudly at what he thought was a great joke, but he was the only one and eventually his humour drained away until there was only the soft whisper of the wind across the snow; and the men watching the crows; and the crows watching the men.

The chopper swung in low over the snowy wastes before hovering over the dust-off point. Hunter and the rest jumped the remaining six feet into the heart of the blizzard raised by the whirling blades. They were already under the cover of nearby trees as the deafening drone of the helicopter receded behind them.

Polar fatigues helped them blend in as they moved swiftly and silently along the hedge lines to a deserted farmhouse overlooking the enemy encampment. Hunter made his way quickly to a bedroom that still smelled of its former occupants and found a window that allowed him the best view with the hi-res binoculars. But he only needed his eyes to learn the true meaning of ‘encampment’. The enemy filled an entire valley, lining the floor and the hillsides for a good ten miles, packed so closely that not a single square of white was visible. The scene was unspeakably eerie, for there was none of the back-and-forth movement that Hunter would have expected in a camp; the enemy stood stock-still to a man, resembling a Chinese terracotta army, all facing the direction where the Government troops were preparing for the attack. The chilling scene suggested that the enemy were machines that did not need to move or talk or eat or feel any emotion; they were simply waiting for the moment when they would be unleashed to crush anything in their path.

Clevis slipped in next to Hunter and froze the moment he looked out of the window. ‘Jesus Christ. We don’t stand a chance.’

Hunter used the binoculars to get a better look at the enemy. The ranks comprised many different types, many different species: tall, willowy men stood next to squat, brutish troglodytes; things with a hint of the reptilian next to others that were almost as insubstantial as ghosts. But all of them looked as if they had died and been remade: weapons had been embedded into their bodies, swords emerging from forearms, nests of spears protruding from ribcages, exposed bone visible everywhere. And there was an odd purple mist drifting from their eyes and mouths. Even more disturbingly, some of the enemy were human. They looked very much as though they might once have been the residents of the area, now transformed like all the others.

Hunter could feel Clevis shaking next to him. Without looking, Hunter said, ‘On the positive side, I can only see swords and… pikes? A few axes, spears…’

‘See?’ Ormston brayed. ‘ They don’t stand a chance.’

Hunter pushed past them to carry out a weapons check and prep them for what was to come. They had small arms and SA80s, but their most effective response was the small but devastating plasma explosives they carried in their backpacks. Each one would take out fifty of the enemy at least — a drop in the ocean compared to the thousands that lined the valley, but if the explosives were used effectively they could make their mark.

Coop took out his cross and chain and kissed it before slipping it back into his parka. The rest of them looked to Hunter, still and silent with their thoughts. He checked out of the window one more time, then gave the nod.

Ground zero was hell. Shells rained in from the distant batteries with barely a second between each explosion. Thick black smoke mingled with the strange purple mist, blasting back and forth in huge, billowing clouds. The noise was as deafening as a foundry and the ground vibrated as if a permanent earthquake ripped through the strata. Body parts flew everywhere.

The detailed briefing had told Hunter and his team exactly where the shells would fall. Their safe route was prescribed through thick tree cover, but they were still close enough to the carnage to view the sea of arms, legs and heads spread out across the fields. Earplugs protected them from the worst of the noise, but it still felt as if their heads were full of a swarm of bees; Hunter gave his orders via previously arranged hand signals. Occasionally, they would lose sight of each other in the sweeping smoke, and at those times it felt as though they were already dead, walking through some eerie purgatory towards judgment.

Hunter’s mind had the calm of a pool at twilight. He existed wholly in the moment, seeing, hearing, reacting, but not feeling. In that state, he gave himself up to the shadow-figure that rode the mare of his conscious mind, the true Hunter who had made him so good at being fearless, emotionless, inhuman in battle. The Hunter he hated.

The trees and the snow and the mist reminded him of the hills of Bosnia, the stink of the mass graves heavy in the air as he hunted Serb mercenaries. The thunder of the shells was Baghdad all over again, slipping in and out of the shadows of the sun-baked souk.

How had he ever got into it? He’d wanted to be a zoologist. Animals, that’s what he lived for, endlessly fascinating, nature’s little wonders, from the aphid to the zebra and all points in between. There wasn’t a single wrong turn he could identify; it was the cumulation of a thousand tiny steps, each one insignificant in and of itself but all leading him away from the magic path into the deep, dark forest. To this place, where body parts crunched underfoot.

He led the way through the trees into a culvert under a road, then along the path of a trickling brook to a point where a sword of thick forest plunged deep into the heart of the enemy forces. With skill, they could move through the trees unseen, releasing their explosives into the midst of the opposition.

Their hot breath turned the air white as they gathered in the dense vegetation beneath the shadows of the branches. Hunter checked his watch: nearly time. The fields ran away from the forest down a slope to a road winding along the valley bottom. When the smoke and purple mist cleared in a gust of wind channelled along the cut, Hunter saw the enemy still standing, their ranks now mottled by circular blast marks. He could feel the unspoken questions radiating from the men around him: Why don’t they run? Why don’t they attack? Why are they waiting to die?

Hunter looked at his watch again and then signalled to the others. Quickly donning masks attached to portable oxygen canisters, they dropped low. Though they were beyond the estimated blast area, they still had to be cautious.

The shelling stopped. In the disturbing silence that followed, Hunter’s ears still rang, but he removed his plugs to listen for the drone of the approaching jet. It was a Tornado GR4, one of the few they still had left after Newcastle. When it was overhead, Hunter shielded his eyes.

The fuel/air explosive was detonated fifty feet above the valley. Those immediately beneath the blast were vaporised instantly, others nearby seared by the tremendous heat. Hunter and his team were far enough away that the shock wave didn’t burst their eardrums or rupture their lungs. The oxygen was sucked out of the air in the immediate vicinity of the explosion, which would have been devastating for human troops, but Hunter doubted its effectiveness on this enemy. He was proved right when the thermal winds cleared and he looked up. On the periphery of the blast zone, the enemy still stood, waiting, but there was now a massive hole in the heart of the force where flames raged out of control.

Clevis and Ormston high-fived before restraining themselves, but Bradley, Spencer and Coop were already coolly removing the explosives from their knapsacks. Equipped with what were essentially hi-tech catapults for launching the plasma bombs, they moved like ghosts through the trees. One after the other, they emerged to fire and then retreated back into the forest depths before they were seen.

Scores of the enemy fell with each blast. There was none of the panic and chaos that the General had hoped to engender, but at least they were cutting swathes out of the enemy lines.

The team continued with the guerrilla attacks for ten full minutes, but as the blast from one of Clevis’s launches died away, Hunter saw that a change had taken place. The enemy were moving — but not slowly, not like robots coming alive in some fifties science fiction movie. In the blink of an eye, they were suddenly in rapid motion up the other side of the valley, weapons ready, but still eerily silent.

Hunter was convinced that he and his men had not been seen, but some of the enemy had now turned to the trees where they were hiding. He had the creepy feeling that the enemy didn’t need to see, that they had abilities far beyond anything anyone had imagined.

‘There’s something back here — in the trees.’ Coop’s voice had the first faint tremors of uneasiness.

There was no time to respond: the enemy moved forward too quickly. Hunter faced an attacker resembling some over-muscled barbarian from a Schwarzenegger film, naked to the waist where a blood-stained animal fur hung. He wore a twin-horned Viking helmet on top of a matted mane of red hair and a long fiery beard. Half of his face was exposed skull, and more bone could be seen protruding from his meaty forearms and muscular thighs. Both hands were welded together around an enormous broadsword, bone and flesh merging directly into the metal. Purple mist streamed from his eyes and mouth, as if a fire raged within him.

The closer the barbarian got, the more Hunter felt despair welling up inside him. He realised instinctively that it was another weapon, subtly inflicting psychological damage. And it was effective: he had to fight hard to stop himself giving in to its damp pull.

Hunter switched to his SA80. The bullets cut a swathe across the attacker’s torso, but didn’t slow him for even an instant. The barbarian’s shadow engulfed him, and then the broadsword came crashing down. Hunter had a second to grip the gun with both hands and hold it ahead of him to block the sword. He knew it was futile, but although the gun shattered, it did just enough to deflect the sword from splitting his skull in two.

Instead, the blade ripped flesh as it slid down his arm before slamming against his shoulder blade. Hunter was driven to his knees in pain, but he used it to focus his mind. As the barbarian came at him again, Hunter ripped open his knapsack, pulled out one of his few remaining explosives and hurled it. It was stupid to release it so close to him, but it was a last resort.

The explosive hit the barbarian in the middle of his stomach and he dissolved in a mist of meat and bone. Hunter was thrown backwards ten feet, and when he clawed his way back to vertical his head was ringing. He muttered, ‘Take that, you bastard.’

There was no time to glean even a glimmer of satisfaction. Ranks of purple-misted enemy moved towards the forest, bristling with weapons and filled with a mute, mechanistic savagery. But as Hunter ran back into the cover of the trees, he saw a sight that hit hard. On the tree line, Bradley stopped firing his SA80 and let the weapon fall slowly to his side. In his face was a dismal acceptance of the worst that life had to offer. Hunter knew he had succumbed to the waves of despair that washed off the enemy. A tremble ran through Bradley; the gun fell from his hand.

Hunter yelled a warning, but Bradley was transfixed by a tall, thin figure, almost majestic with its golden skin and long hair blowing in the breeze. The god languorously raised a hand with an arrow protruding from the wrist bone, and then drove it into Bradley’s throat.

Hunter was horrified to see that Bradley even bared his throat slightly for the killing blow. Blood spouted from the wound and bubbled from Bradley’s mouth as he choked and bucked and went down on his knees. The enemy withdrew the arrow with a ripping sound, then grabbed Bradley’s head and twisted sharply.

Still holding Bradley’s sagging head, his killer leaned forward, mouth wide, and exhaled forcefully. Purple mist rushed out of him and with a life of its own flowed into Bradley, into his eyes, his ears, his nostrils, his mouth. Within a second, Bradley began to mutate. Bones shattered and twisted, breaking through his flesh. Though dead, Bradley reached out one twitching hand to grasp his SA80. When his fingers closed around the handle, his skin and bone flowed like oil, merging with the weapon.

Seconds after he had died, Bradley was standing next to the god that had killed him, moving with the same mechanical tread into the forest to search for his former comrades.

Hunter searched through the trees for the others, cursing to himself. How could you hope to defeat a force that could turn even your own fallen to their ends? The more they killed, the stronger they got; they didn’t feel, they didn’t think; their only purpose was to destroy.

Hunter needed to get this information back to the General, but as he sprinted through the trees, Ormston staggered into his path. The transformation that had overcome him was unnerving: his face was drained of all blood, and his constant shivering revealed a man terrified of his own shadow. ‘They’ve got Clevis,’ he said with a voice like a bird in flight.

All Hunter’s training told him he should not be distracted from getting the vital intelligence back to his commanding officer, but he couldn’t get Clevis’s frightened face out of his mind; the boy still had an innocence that Hunter barely remembered, but knew was worth saving.

‘Show me,’ he said.

Ormston looked sickened at the prospect. Instead, he pointed back through the trees and then zigzagged away frantically. Hunter knew Ormston wouldn’t get far in his state of panic.

Behind him, the enemy crashed through the thick vegetation at the forest’s edge. Drawing a knife from his boot, Hunter moved stealthily away from them in the direction Ormston had indicated. He soon spotted movement deep in the shadows amongst the pines. With his breath clouding in the freezing air, he hid behind a tree to steady himself before proceeding on his belly through a thick carpet of fern. Some kind of strange structure stood nearby.

Raising himself up slightly to get a better look, Hunter saw something that looked like a doorway constructed out of meat, yet it seemed to have grown out of the spongy vegetable matter of the forest floor. When he looked through it, he was shocked to see stars gleaming in alien constellations, planets circling seething suns that had never been glimpsed by human eyes.

He recoiled sharply. It felt as though something was looking back at him, peeling his flesh and bone aside to get deep into the core of his mind. The sensation made his skin crawl. Looking around, he saw other similar gates situated randomly at other points in the immediate vicinity.

A cry rang out — he recognised the voice as Clevis’s. Hunter moved as quickly as he could without revealing himself and came upon a scene that was even more shocking than anything he had yet seen.

A thing completely constructed out of bone was clutching Spencer, who flailed wildly. His skeleton was being drawn out of him, easing through skin and muscle as if they had the substance of water. A pile of shapeless black skin lay nearby, which Hunter took to be the remains of Coop, and within a few seconds Spencer’s pink skin landed next to it with a sickening plop.

With a disgusting flourish, the bone-thing absorbed Spencer’s red-stained skeleton into its own mass. When it had finished, Hunter could see Spencer’s vacant orbits staring hollowly out of the centre of the monster’s chest.

The bone-thing, which was larger and more terrifying than any of the enemy Hunter had witnessed so far, was not alone in the gloom of the forest. Other equally imposing figures stalked around the area in ritualistic patterns, as though they were drawing invisible lines on the ground. Hunter saw something that was alive with forest birds, their flapping, twitching bodies forming a kind of skin. Another figure was made out of snakes, frogs, newts and other lizards and amphibians, green and slick, catching the light as it moved. The third had larger woodland animals wrapped into its frame, rabbits, foxes, mice, squirrels wriggling as if they were trying to break free from an invisible cage. And it was this one that dragged Clevis behind it as though he was a spoiled child refusing to go to school.

Hunter had a split second to weigh the situation. He was smart enough to know that any attempt to save Clevis was hopeless, yet even so he leaped towards the animal-thing with a wish and prayer. His only hope was that the fury of his attack would allow Clevis to break free and that in the confusion they could both escape into the undergrowth. But when he plunged his blade into the depths of the snapping, snarling mass of fur to no effect, he knew the game was up.

The animal-thing turned towards him and stared with eyes made up of the multiple orbs of the creatures it possessed, and then reached mouse-fingers for Hunter’s face.

‘Hunter!’ Clevis cried tearfully. ‘Get me out of here!’

Hunter wrenched his knife free and staggered backwards. A buzzing arose behind him.

The animal-thing saw Hunter’s interest in Clevis and dragged the youth forward. There was no sadistic glee or malice; it acted with the neutrality of someone brushing away a minor distraction, dragging Clevis in tight against its chest where the fox and badger heads snapped and tore at his flesh. Clevis’s cries were muffled by the fur, but Hunter could see his eyes swivel towards him, pleading.

Hunter attempted another attack, but the buzzing was all around him now, and before he could move he felt a seething at his neck that grew tighter and held him fast. He could only watch as Clevis’s features were torn apart, his lifeless body leaving a red smear as it slid down the animal-thing’s torso to the ground.

Choking, Hunter was lifted effortlessly off the ground and turned around. The source of the buzzing was now apparent. The thing that held him was made of insects, in the same way that the others had used other kinds of natural matter to give them corporeal form. The insect-thing withdrew its grip, but Hunter was still magically suspended in the air.

It stood before him, eight feet tall at least. As it surveyed him, once again there was no recognisable emotion, not even curiosity. Hunter had trouble focusing on the creature, for its body was such a writhing mass of insects that its outline appeared permanently blurred through movement: bees, flies, wasps, gnats, beetles, roaches, all these and more crawled and wriggled, burrowing or attempting to take flight without ever being able to leave the creature’s gravity.

Hunter stared into its insectile eyes and got the same feeling he had experienced staring through the meat-doorway: an alien intelligence travelling back along his line of vision to examine his own mind forensically.

The insect-thing held out one hand, palm upwards, and a swarm of insects rose off it, sweeping towards Hunter. He closed his eyes, turned his head away, but they enveloped his head, forcing their way into his nostrils and through his clenched lips. The buzzing filled him, followed by the sickening sensation of crawling creatures working their way into his nasal passages.

He fought the urge to choke and vomit, and then suddenly all sensation was lost. His consciousness was circumscribed by the insectile buzzing, inside him, outside, everywhere.

And then he wasn’t there at all.

Insects crawled around the edges of his vision, but he knew that it was not his eyes but his mind that was examining the fractured hallucinatory images he could see. It took a second or two for him to realise that the creature was attempting some form of communication, but it was so inhuman that there was no frame of reference. The images shattered, twisted out of shape, moved from incomprehensible alien forms to pictures he could almost recognise. It felt as if he was tuning across the wavelengths to find a channel he could understand.

The process came to a halt with an image of a wasp as big as a bus nestled in a strange, irregular landscape that appeared to be made out of the same kind of meat as the doorways. It buzzed up and down the scale, insistently, distractedly, but the meaning was lost to him.

Yet some form of comprehension began to grow deep in his subconscious. A power as big as the universe had become aware of humanity. Its nature, if that was the right word, was to oppose life, not only in its form, but also in its essence: what it meant in terms of positivity, advancement, connectivity, hope, goodness — all the things that on his better days Hunter dreamed life really was about.

This power, this Anti-Life, was a gulf of nothingness that went on for ever, yet could be constrained on the head of a pin. Trying to comprehend what it really was made Hunter feel sick. He forced his thoughts to move on, but before he left the subject he realised its motivation: the eradication of everything it was not. The Anti-Life could not rest until humanity was gone or circumscribed. A name came and went, not from the thing itself, but from somewhere without: the Void.

And so it had come to Earth, acting through agents and generals and outriders who prepared the way for its ultimate ascension. Again, Hunter discovered names that existed somewhere, but did not come from the Void itself. The zombie-things that leaked purple mist were called the Lament-Brood.

The five creatures he had come across in the forest were the Void’s generals, leading the charge against humanity. They had no form in and of themselves; they were ideas, nothing more, clothing themselves in the matter of the physical world, negativity given shape and identity. The Lord of Bones, the Lord of Birds, the Lord of Lizards, the Lord of Flesh. And above them all, the force that would see humanity wiped away — the King of Insects.

Hunter was not a religious man, but childhood images of Satan haunted him; here, he felt, was true evil: dispassionate, relentless, capable of causing death on a grand scale, without any meaning at all. A quote came to him from a Sunday School class: Revelation 19:19 — ‘Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to make war against the rider on the horse and his army.’

The giant wasp’s message was clear: there was no hope, it really was all over and the world was about to be remade in the image of Anti-Life. Hunter tried to imagine what that would be like, but all he kept coming back to were those self-same childhood lessons, with their talk of hell and burning souls.

The wasp was so huge that it could not take flight and so it pulled itself forward obscenely on its spindly legs, until its head filled Hunter’s vision and he could see himself reflected a thousand times in its multifaceted eyes. The wasp opened its maw wide, trailing strands of sticky acids, and lunged. The stinking, wet dark closed about Hunter hard and he was sucked in and down.

And then he was hovering in the air once more before the King of Insects, wasps and flies crawling all over his skin, across his eyes and lips, skittering legs and wings setting his nerve endings afire as revulsion filled him. It felt as if his time had come and he was pleased at how calm he felt. Those who kill for a living think about death a great deal. He had once seen a man plead, sobbing, offering to give up his girlfriend in his place, even though he knew it would do no good. Hunter had always hoped he would be brave enough to go with dignity.

But instead of delivering the killing blow, the King of Insects twisted its outstretched hand and then snapped it shut. Hunter felt a squirming in his belly, rising up his spine, growing faster until it reached the back of his head, and then he shot out of himself as if strapped to a rocket.

Hovering somehow amongst the tree branches, he looked down to see his body still hanging in the air before the King of Insects. A second later, an irresistible urge drove him up through the trees and into the grey sky. Hunter felt simultaneously detached and queasy, as though he was in a dream on the verge of turning into a nightmare. Far below in the blasted valley, hundreds of scattered enemy corpses formed fractal patterns in the thick snow. Gliding forward over the next ridge, he caught the familiar wisps of purple mist drifting in the wind. It had just started to snow again, adding to the otherworldly ambience.

But when he had a clear view of the white landscape, raw emotions broke through his detachment. It was carnage, worse than any battlefield he had ever seen. The Lament-Brood were a purple-edged wave swamping the feeble ranks of the army. Guns cut them apart, but it took at least fifty rounds, and as quickly as one fell, six others took their place. The enemy were brutally efficient. Rusted swords cleaved heads, hacked off arms, left trails of steaming entrails in the churned, red snow. Spears rammed through flimsy skin and muscle, arrows plunged into eye sockets. The despair the Lament-Brood engendered was a weapon in itself, and many soldiers simply laid down their arms to have their bones snapped and life extinguished by dead but powerful hands.

It was a rout beyond any defeat the army could have envisioned. As fast as men fell, they were brought back to unnatural life to swell the ranks of the enemy, going on to kill their friends and colleagues with vigour. Explosions roared flames and gouts of smoke high into the air as ammunition was detonated and batteries overrun. Fire raged in several of the tanks in the front line. There were no tactics, no weapons that would make any difference. It was only a matter of time.

And just as that thought entered Hunter’s head, choppers carrying the General and other COs rose up behind the lines. A retreat had been ordered, but it was too disorganised to be effective. Men tried to pull back, but the Lament-Brood kept coming, picking them off as they fled.

It’s all over, Hunter thought, dimly grateful for the remaining detachment that still swathed him.

One final shell was loosed into the sky before the enemy swamped the lines. It rushed towards Hunter, passed through him and came down beyond the ridge. When the explosion resonated all around, he suddenly felt as if a rope at his waist had been tied to a speeding car. Yanked backwards, he flew over the valley and down towards the forest, now blazing from the strike which had impacted right at the point where his body had been suspended.