Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger (3 page)

The pit was already seething with activity; head-banging, moshing, fans hurling themselves against the barricades, fists and metal horns raised in the air.          

Seth could still see no sign of either Eric Baron and his cronies, or Buck and the girls.
He wondered whether they were somewhere down there in that swarm of bodies, worked into a frenzy by the brutal barrage of death metal by the Undead fivesome.          

SamEdi gripped his microphone like he wanted to choke it to death, growling like a feral beast, his face a blood splattered and green-gooped mess in a grimacing snarl. His bandmates windmilled without missing a beat, drummer Grinder a furious dervish with legs and arms moving so rapidly they were a blur.          

Seth gazed in consternation at the crush at the barricade, thankful Julietta had the good sense to stay out of that.          

And this was only the first track from the band; it was only going to get crazier from here on out.           And crazier it did get, much messier too.          

Three tracks in and the ferocious five piece decided interaction with the baying crowd was a must.           The Deadwalker and FaceGnawer temporarily exited the stage as SkinCarver regaled the moshing mass with an insane display of soloing, peeling out a crescendo of squealing notes over a pummelling drum line, and then the duo returned, both carrying big metal buckets which they deposited at the front of the stage.          

The bassist picked up his instrument and chimed in with the rhythm of Grinder, but the other guitarist and SamEdi proceeded to plunge their hands into the buckets, withdrawing them packed with what looked suspiciously like dripping entrails.          

"Jesus..." Mark hissed as SamEdi ripped into a section with his teeth and then sprayed a mouthful out into the crowd. "Is that...?"          

The Deadwalker didn't waste any time or effort biting at the offal, he just flung it out into the mass of people, splattering the gruesome titbits against faces in the crowd. A mixed reaction came from those who were the recipients of this, ranging from shocked to overjoyed.          

"Fuck, is that real?" Lincoln wanted to know, though a rancorous putrid odour souring an atmosphere already heavy with alcohol, perspiration, and smoky smells seemed to suggest that indeed the band might actually be hurling real innards from some as yet unidentified source into the congregation of heaving metal fans.          

"I think so," Seth murmured, staring in morbid fascination.          

"That's disgusting," Miranda declared. "I hope Callie and the others are smart enough to get their butts out of there if they are down there."          

"Ha-ha, sucked in, if they are," Lincoln declared. "That'll learn them. Guts to the face."          

"You idiot," Miranda scowled. "That's just rank. Damn death metal bands."          

"Hey, what about the black metal bands with pigs’ blood and that kind of thing?"          

"I'd rather get a face full of pigs’ blood than a big fat pile of pigs’ guts in my mouth."          

"Who says it’s pigs' guts?" Lincoln said with a mock creepy tone to his voice, trying to inject a suitably gruesome chuckle in as well.          

"Lincoln, I wish one of those handfuls of ....stuff would land in your face."          

"Not going to happen," Lincoln grinned smugly.          

Seth just continued to stare as the duo dealing out the grotesque offerings continued to fling the gunk into the thrashing pit, splattering pieces against people, bits flying off onto the floor while the octet of burly security guards didn’t do a single thing about it.          

They remained like Royal Guards, faces impassive, arms folded across their enormous chests.           Surely this wasn't in the performance contract? The venue couldn't be overjoyed by this sort of activity. The liability could be massive if somebody slipped on the mess; it could end up like Powderkeg all over again, maybe worse.          

Perhaps the feelings of ill ease Seth was troubled with earlier were in some way a harbinger of this, something bad arising from the gory innards being tossed with gleeful abandon by the Undead Fleshcrave sickos into the pit.          

That portentous sensation hadn't departed yet either, and seeing the flailing entrails, a sickly mist showering in the air and the security doing jackshit about it enhanced them. Though he hadn't seen anything more of Baron or his buddies, he hadn't caught a glimpse of his own absent friends either, nor had he spied Black and his associates since the group separated.          

The crowd all around him and his friends didn't make it easy either, jostling against them as they writhed and moshed to the music.          

Even though Seth and co. were well back from the stage, it was still getting pretty crazy there too. The best bet might even be to abscond right out of the room, watch the remainder of the concert from the vantage points outside. They would be free of the crush, away from the pervading rotten meat stench, hopefully out of harm’s way.          

Unfortunately, their friends wouldn't be.          

With the buckets emptied, the couple who'd cast the awful mix into the hordes retrieved their instruments to complete the track, appropriately enough entitled 'Scattered Meat Smorgasbord' finishing with an emphatic clatter of cymbals and a belching grunt from SamEdi.          

The lights dimmed down drastically, leaving just one spooky spotlight glow centred on the frontman’s leering mess-streaked visage.

CHAPTER THREE-PIT OF ZOMBIES

An eerie silence descended in tandem with the darkening of the room, a formerly brain damaging crescendo of raucous cacophony dying away to nothingness as the light pinpointed SamEdi's gruesomely decorated face.          

Those bemoaning the fact they'd been rudely splattered with unidentified segments of raw meat, or even any sickly rejoicing in it, were quiet as the freakish frontman commanded attention.          

Seth felt a chill steal over him, goose bumps tickling his flesh, and the feeling writhing deep in the pit of his stomach intensified as he watched the Undead Fleshcraver survey the crowd, his maniacal eyes slithering around the packed out venue.          

Then he spoke, his voice rumbling into the void of silence.         

His speaking tones were almost identical to those he used to belch out his bloodthirsty violent song lyrics, a deep dark growl that sounded as if it had been cultivated somewhere below layers of sedimentary rocks.          

"So everyone here, of course, should be aware that the Undead Fleshcrave have promised that the town of Armada has a massive surprise in store for them tonight. Who is aware of that? Who has been looking forward to that promise?"          

SamEdi had barely finished the query before noise erupted again from the crowd, a cavalcade of cheers, whoops and whistles, punctuated by clapping or banging as people thumped excited fists against barricades or just whatever was handy.          

The frontman held up the hand he wasn't throttling his microphone with and bloody fluid sluiced off it as he did so, dropping out of the circle of light highlighting his face and into the dark.          

Dutifully, the crowd eventually obliged his request for silence again and a bubbling chuckle issued from SamEdi. It sounded malevolent and unpleasant to Seth, and didn’t allay his feelings of consternation at all.           He squeezed Julietta's hand and she squeezed back.          

He had the irrational―
or was it?
—desire to drag her and the rest of his assembled friends the hell out of there.          

For whatever reason, he kept getting plagued with this ominous sensation and he couldn't shake it.          

"Good to hear it," SamEdi continued, his thick growling voice oozing throughout the atmosphere. "Everybody is excited for the bloody mayhem we've promised and no, it wasn't the Scattered Meat Smorgasbord you were all just bathed in. That's just a little precursor."          

Precursor?
Seth asked himself.
Jesus, this is not good. What kind of main event can follow a precursor like liberally dousing the crowd in offal and bloody entrails?
          

An illogical notion that maybe they were actually going to commit some type of heinous violent act onstage, in conjunction with the majority of their track lyrics, crept disturbingly into his mind.          

He tried to banish that thought. It had to be a very remote possibility. Still....          

"Well death metal disciples of Armada, let me tell you all that your town will be the very first to receive this honour, but by no means will you be the last. All true death heads gathered here tonight prepare to have your lives changed. At midnight tonight our album will drop into stores, simultaneously available online. And upon it will be a track that is going to be the anthem for all true death heads countrywide. Worldwide. A universal conquering of the world. And it starts right now. It starts with this, 'The Zombie Trigger.'"          

Abruptly the light vanished and the room went entirely black, so dark it seemed to be completely impenetrable, a sheer midnight shroud of blackness so thick it was stifling. A bizarre sound emanated from the stage, a horrifying, high-pitched humming conglomeration of noise that apparently came from the band’s instruments, but sounded like nothing Seth had ever heard before.          

It appeared to be violating his entire body, infiltrating his ears, stealing into his mind and making him feel nauseous.          

He heard a moan from Julietta next to him and felt her clasped hand in his squeeze tighter still, almost painfully so.          

"Ah shit, what the fuck...?” Dax was obviously beginning to feel just as ill as Seth himself did.           There was a horrible dry retching sound adjacent to Seth. He heard an ensuing splatter and he guessed at least one of them manifested their feelings of illness into physical form.          

A conglomeration of noise was now coming from the stage area, though it really seemed to be everywhere, pervading throughout the entire room, some semblance of music though of the most non-musical variety Seth could ever imagine. It made the dissonance and discordant abrasion of some of the black metal offerings he knew sound like sweet lullabies.          

"What the hell is going on?" Julietta whispered nearby, her hand still clasping his so tight he thought his knuckles were going to pop.          

"I don't know. We've gotta get out of here, but I can't see shit."          

The sheer blackness was stifling, frightening and loaded with menace.          

Not being able to see a thing, coupled with hearing the terrible nausea-creating sounds swelling throughout the arena, on top of the ominous feelings of dread already ballooning inside Seth, made him witless with fear.          

What the hell was going on?          

Suddenly light flooded the room, not a bright flash of illumination or an abrupt engulfing of radiance, but the same kind of sickly aura that existed before, a nauseating green glow that didn't light up a whole lot.          

It left the room full of hunched shapes and long dark shadows, malevolent corners and possible threats.
           It spread green fingers everywhere, a thick mist of it hanging in the air, and Seth saw all members of the Undead Fleshcrave on stage with their respective instruments, dragging the terrible sounds from them to inflict upon the crowd.        

From the spot where he and his friends were clustered, he witnessed everybody in the front rows and those pushed against the barricade thrashing insanely and then violently vomiting streams of bilious liquid.           Some sprayed a green material similar in colour to the lighting, or perhaps it was due to the pervading glow that it appeared this colour, others looked like they were forcibly ejecting gouts of blood.          

"Welcome..." SamEdi growled in a terrible triumphant tone, "to your apocalypse." Then he held the microphone aloft in his tight-fisted chokehold and bellowed into it. "Now turn!"          

As he did, his bandmates burst into a flurry of violent non-musical instrument abuse, wrenching the most abhorrent collection of sound that had ever infiltrated Seth's ears in a ridiculously fast torrent and SamEdi began to recite a growling mantra of words into his microphone.         

The packed pit and its surrounds were alive with multitudes of patrons being violently ill in projectile streams, but that wasn’t all that was happening to them.        

Things were happening to their faces and bodies as they writhed in a tormented mass, pummelled physically by the sounds of Undead Fleshcrave.        

There were headbangers at the barricade, but they weren’t moshing in time to the music or thrashing their heads just in the air, they were slamming their skulls against the barricade and the walls. As Seth watched in transfixed horror, he saw the guys who'd brought in the full case of beer amidst the hordes on the floor. They were bashing each other and themselves with their glass bottles, busting them over heads, smashing glass in faces.          

Blood fountained here and there from the faces of the barricade headbutters, from unseen things occurring deep in the thick of the pit.         

A heavyset man in a Deicide shirt swivelled his head and, just before he dove headfirst into a speaker, Seth caught a vivid look at his face. It was suppurating with bubbling lesions and sores, his gums blackened, his eyes sunken in his head and staring crazily. Blood, drool and greenish slime oozed from the corners of his gaping mouth.          

"What the fuck?" Mark intended his shocked statement to be a fearful bellow, but it came out in a hoarse whisper as if the atrocious scenes unfolding stole his power of speech and rendered him incapable of more than a murmur.        

"No..."Miranda moaned. "This isn't...this can't be...what?"          

Death heads everywhere were mutating, before their horrified eyes, into abhorrent-looking creatures with flaking skin, weeping sore-covered faces, and pustules on exposed skin, were throbbing and bursting, exploding messy discharges all over the place.          

Undead Fleshcrave loomed large on the stage, leaning over and further driving the insane melee in the pit on to more acts of violence, self-destruction and complete mayhem, urging them into lunacy and bloodshed, with the hideous words streaming from SamEdi's mouth in a mantra.          

Seth couldn’t decipher a thing the crazed frontman was uttering, it roiled out in a thick bubbling tirade of ugly vocalisations, but he knew enough to acknowledge that whatever abhorrent words were spilling in tandem with the bestial music were acting as a catalyst in turning the death fans into....
zombies
?          

The barricade bangers were hurling their entire bodies into the unforgiving metal now; some had bashed their craniums so viciously hard against the barrier that skulls were split open, leaking brains were exposed.           Yet they didn’t fall down beneath the feet of their equally frenzied companions in mayhem; they persisted in their destructive antics with eyes hanging out of their sockets, blood saturating faces and dripping from lank locks of hair.          

Screams were now filling the room as well as the terrible music, the 'Zombie Trigger', and they meshed amidst the chaos in a symphony of sheer terror.          

Seth spotted another person he knew, a fellow by the name of Andy Davison, down there in the pit.          He wasn't somebody Seth would have ever expected to see attending a brutal death metal concert, since his tastes in metal ran along the lines of traditional metal like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, and power metal in the vein of Dragonforce, but there he was, surrounded by heaving death metal zombie flesh.          

Andy didn’t appear to be inflicted with the same epidemic that was blanketing ninety per cent of those in the venue, instead he wore an expression of abject horror and hopelessness as he was slammed between black-shirted, blood splattered bodies.          

"Jesus, is that...Andy Davison down there?" Mark saw the power metal guy too and acknowledged that the Zombie Trigger didn't seem to have had any effect on him, the same as it hadn't turned the pocket of black metallers here. "What's he doing here? Shit, we've gotta get him out of there!"          

"Go down there?" Lincoln, his mouth still trailing vomit tendrils from where he'd hurled his guts up before, exclaimed in horrified disbelief. "Are you shitting me? No fucking way, they're....they're...they're, well...zombies!"          

His words mirrored the terrible cogitations of Seth, not just voicing what he thought the death metal fanatics were being morphed into, but also the desire to stay way the hell away from it all.          

"Fuck that," Mark declared. "Look at him, he's terrified, he's in danger and he's normal, he hasn't been affected."          

Or should that be infected?
Seth suggested inwardly.          

Mark's valiant proposal to rescue Andy from the midst of the thrashing, slimy, sanguinary cacophony was too late though.          

Before any of them were galvanized into any sort of motion they saw somebody emerge from the throng behind Andy.          

This was Carl Merritt, one of Eric Baron’s buddies, and his face was a mess of oozing skin and blackened char, as if he'd stuck his countenance down upon a searing hotplate and half cooked it off.          

He grabbed Andy around the throat with bloodied fingers and then his black lips cracked open and a set of gnashing teeth ripped into the side of Andy's face. As the power metal aficionado released a shrill scream of agony, ZombieMerritt shook his head like a pit bull, tearing flesh from bone with the same results; a hunk of meat came away with a blood droplet shower.          

ZombieMerritt didn't even chew the morsel as it came loose, he just swallowed the chunk whole and plunged his hungry maw back for more, this time gnawing off Andy's entire right ear.          

Before ZombieMerritt could devour the entire prize, more bestial, pustule-ridden and horror-faced entities swarmed around Andy's shrieking form and began to attack with clawing fingers and terrible teeth.           Miranda was screaming now too, clapping her hands helplessly to her face, almost sinking to her knees in despair. Her shrieks of terror lanced through the mayhem as clearly as any of the other exclamations of fear bursting from those caught in the mosh who were not part of the undead army, and freakish staring eyes aimed her way.          

"Oh, fuck," Seth groaned.          

Only just now did he realise that whatever ghastly otherworldly power had been unleashed by the Zombie Trigger hadn’t been limited to those milling around in the pit. It extended everywhere, throughout the entire venue, and Seth acknowledged that he and his friends were surrounded on all sides by a cavalcade of freaks intent on devouring the flesh of those not susceptible to the insidious song.