Void Stalker by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

just as his legless torso struck the mud road. The life was gone from his eyes before his skull cracked open on the ground, spilling its contents into the dirt, leaving him long dead before Variel started skinning him.
    Amar Medrien pounded his fists on the sealed door.
    ‘Let us in!’
    The shelter entrance for three streets of his subsector was in the basement of the Axle Grinder, a dive bar set on a tri-junction. He never drank there, and the only time he’d spent more than five minutes in the place was the Grey Winter four years before, when most of his district had endured three weeks underground during dust storms that ravaged their homes.
    He stood outside the sealed bulkhead with a tide of others, locked out of their assigned emergency shelter.
    ‘They locked it too early,’ voices were saying, back and forth.
    ‘It’s not a storm.’
    ‘Did you see the fires?’
    ‘Why did they seal the doors?’
    ‘Break them down.’
    ‘The archregent is dead.’
    Amar ran his fingers along the door’s seams, knowing he wouldn’t find any sign of weakness, but with nothing left to do in the press of bodies from behind. If they kept packing the basement – and the flood showed no sign of slowing – he’d be crushed against the old iron before long.
    ‘They’re not going to open it…’
    ‘It’s already full.’
    He shook his head as he heard the last remark. How could it be full? The bunker had room for over four hundred people. Close to sixty were still out here with him. Someone’s elbow dug into his side.
    ‘Stop pushing!’ someone else shouted. ‘We can’t get it open.’
    Amar grunted as someone shoved him from behind. His face thumped against the cold iron, and he couldn’t even get enough room to throw an elbow back to clear some space.
    The tinny whine of the door release was the most beautiful song he’d ever heard. People around him cheered and wept, backing away at last. Sweating hands gripped at the door’s seams, pulling it open on hinges in dire need of oiling.
    ‘Merciful God-Emperor…’ Amar whispered at the scene within. Bodies littered the bunker’s floor, each one mutilated beyond recognition. Blood – a slow river of the thick, stinking fluid – gushed out across Amar’s boots and over the ankles of those waiting behind him. Those who couldn’t see what he saw were already shoving against those in the front rows, eager to get into their false solace.
    Amar saw severed limbs cast in every direction; blood-spattered fingers gently curled as they dipped into the bloody pools across the floor. Body upon body upon body, many strewn w h ere they had fallen , others heaped in piles. The walls were flecked with graceless sprays of red over the dark stone.
    ‘Wait,’ he said, so quiet that he couldn’t even hear himself. The shoving from behind didn’t cease. ’Wait…’
    He stumbled with the pressure, staggering into the chamber. As soon as he crossed the threshold, he heard the roar of a chainblade revving up.
    Streaked with blood, most notably a fresh palm-print on the faceplate of his helm, Uzas rose from his hiding place beneath a cairn of corpses.
    ‘Blood for the Blood God . ’ H e spoke through lips stringed by spit. ‘Skulls for the Eighth Legion.’
    The archregent looked down at the fires, and wondered how metal ships could burn. He knew it wasn’t the hull itself catching flame, but the flammable contents within the vessel’s body. Still, it seemed strange to watch smoke and flame pouring from ruptures in the walls of his grounded ship. The wind couldn’t steal all the smoke. Great plumes of it choked the air around the observation spire, severing his sight beyond the closest buildings.
    ‘Do we know how much of the city is burning?’ he asked the guard by his desk.
    ‘What few reports we’ve had suggest most of the population is making it to their assigned shelters.’
    ‘Good,’ the archregent nodded. ‘Very good.’ For whatever it’s worth , he