Forgotten Soldier

It had once been a man, though that truth no longer meant anything to the thing stumbling through the frozen fog. The corpse moved with the tide of the horde, dragged forward by a hunger it could not name. Its boots scraped along ice and broken stone, one leg stiff where bone pushed through rotted cloth. Around it, hundreds shuffled and lurched, their bodies swaying in the same slow rhythm, pulled by the distant thunder of cannon fire. The sound stirred something deep in the creature’s ruined mind. A memory. A battlefield. Smoke. But memory shattered quickly, replaced by instinct. The fog rolled thick across the riverbanks, and within it the dead gathered like a living storm. Their eyes, clouded, pale, empty, turned toward the barricades. The cannons roared again, and the front ranks burst apart in sprays of frozen flesh and bone. Bodies fell. Limbs scattered. The horde did not stop. Those behind simply stepped over the ruined remains and continued forward. The corpse felt the tremor of the explosion through the frozen ground. Pieces of its kin rained around it, but the creature did not flinch. Pain was a language it no longer understood. Ahead, faint shapes moved behind wooden walls and sharpened stakes. Living shapes. The scent reached them, warm blood, breath, fear. The horde quickened. The corpse’s jaw hung slack, teeth blackened with rot as a guttural sound crawled from its throat. Around it the dead began to moan, a terrible choir rising through the fog. The barricades grew closer. Cannon fire flashed again, lighting the mist in brief orange bursts. For a moment the creature saw everything clearly: soldiers, smoke, fire… life. Then the fog swallowed the light. And the dead kept coming.