Raven Guard: Fighting Scary Monsters With Even Scarier Ones.

Red Swarm

I woke up in a pile of rotting flesh outside an abandonned Chapel-Barracks, groggy and sore. ...Usually not anything to question when you're deployed to a war zone, but usually there's somebody LEFT by the time you come to.

Nothing looked the same by the time I scrambled out of the rotting pile of unrecognizable gore. It looked like an Exterminatus had hit near here; everything was deader than usual. The ground was dry and sucked of any life it had earlier; dry, barren and a sickly shade of orange. It's hue matched that of the sky; as sickly as the ground, blocking out the sun with a solid wall of dark brown clouds. I brushed some sticky fragments of what looked like ligaments off of my pauldron, pulled my bolter out of the fleshy pile I woke up in, and began "investigating."

Investigating, as in looking if I can add some corpses to the fine little collection scattered around the Chapel-Barracks.

Looking at the corpses of my Brethren, it looked like they had it pretty rough; a few holes here and there, decapitations and the occasional halved body. If I woke up any earlier I'd be in a swamp of blood and chunks, but everything had all dried up it seems. I continued wandering around the warzone, finding what remained of our Armory a few hundred feet away from the Chapel-Barracks; a smouldering ruin, is what it was. Half of it was a heap of ash and semi-broken metal supports, the other a blackened, burnt structure. Stepping inside, all I found was useless equipment not worth salvaging, and the crusty skeletal figure of what appeared to be a Servitor, propped up against the wall. I grunted in frustration and quickly stepped back outside.

I coughed as I breathed in a mixture of sand and lingering ash. It was then that I realized I had forgotten my helmet back in the organic mess I woke up in. I checked my bolter and began trudging back, stepping over and around my fallen brethren.

"The heretics shall pay," I grumble to myself as I step over a horribly disfigured corpse of my Brother; His left shoulder was gnarled and ripped to the point of no return; sagged and soaked flesh hanging off of his torn muscle tissue. The tainted stone beneath his carcass was dyed a darker shade of orange from the bleeding, but has since been soaked in and dried. The armor on his torso and left side of his helmet had been ripped to shreds, shrapnel broken off and plunged into his skin in certain areas; a thick arrowhead of torn armor poked out of what was his eye, the surrounding patches of skin stained yellow from vitrious fluid that had leaked out of the punctured eye. Not pleasant, but such is what we had been trained for. This horror is also our duty.

At last, I had gotten back to the damned pile. Inspecting the pile before diving in to retrieve my helmet, I see that the pile was not of any specific corpse, but simply bits and pieces that had made up my Brothers only recently ago; Hearts, lungs, kidneys, intestines, the like, all piled up in a soaking, crimson heap that emanated a disgusting scent. I mused about it for a moment.

Shaking my head, and disregarding the notion, I begin digging through the heap. I find disfigured arms, legs, hands and feet along my way until I find my helmet mashed into a dried up brain near the bottom of the pile. It smelt disgusting and was coated in fluids, but was still intact and usable. Wiping the fluid and little chunks of pink off of the eyes, I slipped it back on my head. My breathing became filtered and I no longer choked on dust and ash. I adjusted the helmet on my head as I saw fit and began walking to the Chapel-Barracks to gather a few things before I got out of this scene.

Approaching the door into the Chapel-Barracks, I was forced to kick it down as something had it jammed closed. As the door fell inwards, I could hear a distinct, slimy rip coming from the inside. Looking in through the doorway as some daylight shone through, I saw that the ripping sound had come from yet another corpse of my brethren; A hole in his abdomen exposed his digestive track, and a segment of his intestines had lodged in between the door and the wall. As I had kicked the door down, it must have ripped the intestinal tube apart. The dried up organ coiled up into a ring and retracted back into the gaping hole of the Marine's abdomen like a sort of organic spring. I offered a short prayer for the poor Brother and began searching for my footlocker.