Corporal Hesha Brander realizes she’s not going home as soon as the guns start again.

That’s fine, she tells herself as she presses her back deeper into the muddy shellhole she’d spent the last hour in. It’s fine that she’s going to stay out here in the damp, sucking grey of no-man’s land. It’s fine that she’s going to remain under this chalk-colored sky, peppered by a cold drizzle. Cautiously, she crawls up the wall of her little crater and peers out over the lid. Ahead- not so far- looms Haker’s Ridge. The place she and a thousand other soldiers hauled their shivering bodies out of the forward trench earlier that day to take. The enemy has artillery batteries up there, atop that jagged wall of dark rubble. The fact that those big guns have started belching black smoke and thunder into sky again means none of her fellows have succeeded.

That’s fine. It’s fine that they failed, and that Hesha isn’t going home, because the last thing she’s going to do in her little life is take out those fucking guns.

She does a quick scan of the colorless, crater-riddled bog around her. Plenty of corpses, which she takes care not to look too long at. All she needs to see is that none of them are up and lurching around. She climbs out, gritting her teeth through the cold exhaustion gumming up her body, and carries on.

This is a fine enough place to die, Hesha thinks. A useful place to die. Better than the slow hungry death back home, in the city of Cratavn’s agricultural sector. What good would it do humanity to clean stables and shovel hay for skinny, foul-tempered horses? How was she helping by working herself to the marrow and drifting back to her little boarding house, to another ration of watery stew and another fitful sleep in a cramped hall with twelve other girls? Serving in the city wasn’t so different from serving in the trenches. The difference was that in the city you couldn’t be sure what you were doing was even helping.

That’s why it’s good that Hesha is staggering across the uneven earth, mud grabbing at her boots with the reek of shit and chlorine gas and burnt meat filling her nose and not but bile in her stomach. At least she’s doing something out here. Taking the fight to the tide of death threatening to drown mankind. She knows it. Just as long as she doesn’t look too close at any of the bodies half-sunk into the mire.

The ridge is getting closer. She blinks through the exhaustion pulsing in her head.

The toe of her boot catches on something. She jumps back, swings the barrel of her rifle down- and finds only a small loop of barbed wire, trampled down into the earth. She lingers a moment. Finds her feet too heavy to take another step past the wire. Like there’s a whole wall of it, still intact and coiled in her way, waiting to pull her all apart if she tries to pass. She wonders if the stables had been so pointless. They still use horses at parts of the front, don’t they?

Up on the ridge, the enemy guns fire another salvo, shrieking over her head towards friendly lines.

Hesha steps over the little curl of wire and continues. Up ahead she spies the remnants of a barricade along the base of the ridge- broken arms of wood and torn loops of wire. Someone made it this far, at least. Maybe some of the lads are up on the ridge. Maybe they just need one more pair of hands to finish the job.

Something stands up behind the barrier. It’s not one of the lads. Too stiff. Grey as the mud whereas Cratavn’s uniforms are green.

Throwing herself down behind a splintered tree trunk, Hesha waits. In the lulls between salvos she catches the groan of rusted metal and pop of stiff bones. Screwing her eyes shut, Hesha inhales, exhales, twice. Nice and long, a little trick she developed to steady herself. Then she peers out. Milling around the barricade are enemy- the Host. Two of them, corpses so rotten they’re the grey-green of the mold that grows on old meat and held together by a second skeleton of crass, keening machinery. One of them is missing its whole right forearm, a rifle jerry-rigged onto the stump at the elbow so it can still shoot at the living. They stiffly prowl behind the broken fence, milky eyes sweeping over her shelter from desiccated faces.

Hesha takes her two breaths again. Then she slides her rifle onto the trunk, takes aim at one’s head, and fires. Its skull bursts, dark gore spilling out as it crumbles. With a bare-toothed grimace of triumph, Hesha ducks back down as the other returns fire. She works the bolt while bullets hiss over her head, waits for a break in the gunshots, and pops back out. The second ghoul is shambling past the barrier towards her, oblivious as the remaining wire slices into its legs. She hasn’t time to aim but takes her shot and hits it in the chest, staggering it back. As it recovers, she works the bolt, fires again, and it goes down.

This is good. This is useful.

Climbing over her shelter, Hesha keeps on. She’s planning to follow the base of the wall until she finds a way up when her boot catches on something again. Another small loop of wire sticking out of the mud. The difference, however, the thing that makes Hesha swear she’s back in the shellhole miraculously asleep, is that the wire is coiling around her ankle, like a hand.

Barbs pierce her puttees and bite into her flesh, and she screams. Just for a moment, before her leg is pulled out from under her and she’s suddenly trashing on her back in the mud.

Then she’s wailing as more wire slithers up through the mud like worms, languidingly wrapping around her body, like they’ve got all the time in the world. Rain prickles her eyes, she tastes the cold acrid needles on her tongue but hardly notices through the dozens of razors cutting through her uniform, carving weeping red across her skin. Grabbing on what fat and muscle she has left once they coil tight enough. Hesha’s throat is already hoarse from shrieking. One arm is bound against her chest as if to pray. The other is splayed above her head. Several lengths cross her chest and hips while others press together her legs, one pulled straight and the other bent mid-kick so one knee is awkwardly folded over the other.

The wires start to drag her away, over the little rocks and bits of shrapnel buried in the muck. Her helmet slips off and she feels the grime catch and trail in her short hair. She squirms, so weakly it can’t be called a fight. They’ve bound her so tight, there’s so many metal teeth in her skin that she’s sure they’ll rip her into pieces if she moves too much. Screams wither to breathless, quavering sobs.

And then the wires stop. Depositing Hesha at something’s feet.

Another Host. Not like the ghouls she’s just put down, though. This one is tall with an armored hunch of a back, through gaps in which the wire emerges, and stands on a pair of gangly legs, like those of a stork’s. It stares down at her, the top half of its head an almost human face and the bottom half a machine gun woven into the rancid flesh.

Hesha whimpers. Vaguely she remembers her grandfather telling her how he used to go fishing by the sea, before the Host appeared and forced humanity into a single bird cage of a city. How he’d cast the line, wait for that little tug from the water, and reel the fish in. There’s a fast way to kill a fish, so it doesn’t suffer- just hold it down, take a club or a big enough stick, and give it a hard smack on the head, just above the eyes. Any second now the monster is going to fire that machine gun. Will it be in the head, above her eyes so she doesn’t feel it?

The monster stoops lower, suffusing her in its burnt oil and rotten beef stench. Letting her get a good look down the black eye of its barrel. Please, she thinks. Please just shoot. Please it hurts end it now please.

It doesn’t shoot.

“Please,” she whimpers. It hurts so much.

The monster just stares with those empty black eyes. Maybe it’s just going to let her bleed out- she can feel her uniform getting tacky and damp with blood, sticking to the worst of the cuts. This isn’t useful. This just hurts, for no purpose that she can imagine.

No purpose, that stare seems to agree.

Another sob wracks her chest. Was there no purpose? To her joining the army, at least? Would she have done more for humanity sweeping up horse shit?

No purpose, say those hollow eye sockets. None at all.

Hesha blinks. She’s cold and lightheaded- blood loss setting in. Getting loopy. That must be why she’s grabbing onto this so much. That must be why she’s starting to think that maybe there would have been no purpose to any of it.

No purpose. If she didn’t know better, Hesha would swear the thing is talking to her now. Not with words, but like it’s injecting the ideas into her body through the wire, like venom. You tried so hard. You did your best.

Another blink, trying to slow down the blurs drowning her vision. Hesha did do her best, didn’t she? She enlisted of her own volition, while many soldiers now were conscripts. She followed orders, whether digging latrines or putting up new wire, survived a couple forays into no-man’s land, even put some Harrys back in the grave. And it was all for nothing. She did her best, and it was always going to be for nothing.

The edges of her mouth twitch, the implication of a tired little smile. Maybe it’s okay, then. Maybe it’s okay if she did her best for nothing. The outcome was set anyway, wasn’t it? Maybe there’s a relief to that. Knowing she never needed to try so hard, and knowing she doesn’t need to try now.

The outcome was set. The monster’s wires no longer hurt. The fire of its teeth are fading to warmth. It’s almost comforting. Their razor embrace could be her bedsheets tangled around her as she tosses and turns, or a lover’s arms embracing her. You did your best. Time to sleep.

Sleep. Hesha is so tired, isn’t she? She’s always been. Ever since she was born in an under equipped little hospital at the edge of the agricultural sector. There was that one girl at the boarding house she was sweet on. Nadine, with those tired but kind eyes and pretty black curls. She imagines these are Nadine’s arms and legs around her now. Why not? The outcome is already set. Humanity will never see the ocean again. Someday, Cratavn’s walls will fall and the Host will take Nadine and the other girls and the horses and everyone and everything else to come and sleep with Hesha, out here in the mud and wire.

Everyone and everything. The wires tighten a little more and Hesha barely remembers it’s supposed to hurt. All together.

Hesha’s mouth twitches again. She’s too tired to even smile but doesn’t want to look ungrateful. Then, she lets her eyes flutter shut, her duty done, and allows that peaceful darkness to swallow her.

And then she wakes up.

It’s hot and damp, wherever she is. She feels it prickling all across her body. Decay and refuse sting her nose and the muffled chug and clatter of machinery churns the air. Her eyes are open- she didn’t open them, though. She knows without trying that she can’t move. She is dead. Her corpse lays somewhere dark and sweltering, chemicals sizzling across her body, like this is the belly of a massive beast.

There’s a sense of motion, like she’s laid on a conveyor belt. Above her, Hesha can faintly make out rugose flesh, glistening in the near-dark and crowded with machinery she can’t identify, rolling past as she’s ferried along.

All together. The thought comes from elsewhere- slipping into her mind just as the wire’s barbs had forced their way into her skin. This intrusion is welcome, however. What it’s saying is right. Someday, everyone and everything are all going to be together, here in the mire.

She stops. Above her, shadowy mechanisms clutter the ceiling. She wishes she could move. That way she could squint to get a better look. She could stand up to examine the objects, run her cold fingers over them. She wishes her body had the capacity to shudder with sickly anticipation.

Sleep?

No, she wants to be conscious, or whatever passes for conscious to a corpse. She can feel the unlife of this place pulse and stew around her. She can feel it flow thick and icy through her body like blood once did. Hot acidic air settles in her open wounds and she realizes she must be nude. Again, a bubbling of excitement. She has never seen a Host that wears clothes. This isn’t a stomach but a womb, where she will be remade.

Soon. The thought flows into her through the cuts, like that chemical atmosphere, into every laceration at once. This is how she realizes that it’s not a single thought entering her- not a single other entity. It’s coming from all around, a thousand thousand other minds reaching out to her. Biting into her, coiling around her, just like the wire did. Wrapping her in comfort, like Nadine might have, if Hesha had ever worked up the nerve to say something. She is surrounded by companionship. More than she was in the trenches or in the boarding house, because these minds love her. She isn’t merely someone who ended up at their side, not someone who must be tolerated or with whom brittle friendships might be made out of necessity. They sought her out. They welcomed her in. They want her.

All together, her new comrades repeat. That’s right. That’s why they can afford to love Hesha Brander. They aren’t trying to push back a devouring midnight Hesha now knows to be inevitable. They are those consuming shadows, and they have saved her a place at their table- a place in their stiff, wintry arms. No more sweating in the dust and shit telling herself it means something. She did her best. Now it’s time to eat. She’d drool if she could.

The machinery above begins to creak and shift. Armatures lower themselves towards her. Suddenly the scream of a buzzsaw fills the cramped air. A scalpel descends towards her belly, positioning its point at the cavity just beneath her ribs. Off to the side, a rifle hangs at the ready. As the saw’s edge inches down towards her right forearm, Hesha listens to its shrill cry and hears only the most beautiful inexorability.

***

But there are exceptions.

If another wave of troops were to be hurled across no-man’s land at Haker’s Ridge, they might come across a new thrall shambling through the desolation. They’d know it to be fresh by the early stage of its decomposition, and by the lack of mud and rust on the machinery puppeteering its stiff body. But some of them would also know the face it wears. A girl, as young and gaunt as most of them, her short hair clumped with mud and her bloodless lips curved in a peaceful, empty smile.