Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger (4 page)

***

As Andy Davison was ripped to shreds of bleeding meat below, along with a plethora of others who hadn't succumbed to the Zombie Trigger, Seth and his friends came to the conclusion that they too were designated meat for the deadwalkers.          

There weren't any true death metal fans left inside the Quo Vadis bar who weren't flesh-hungry, malignantly mutated creatures brain-fucked and body morphed by the terrible power the unearthly band invested in their apocalyptic composition, and Seth realised the intent of SamEdi's words prior to the horrific event unfolding.         

All 'true' death heads were susceptible to the Zombie Trigger; they were inherently already zombies, the horrific capacity lying inside of them, just waiting for their brains to be first killed by the grotesque instrumentation, and then their zombified forms kept animated by the brutal dialogue spouted by the vocalist.           Now, with the vast majority of concert goers here being true death metal fanatics, that meant this heaving hall of horrors was overrun with skin-chomping, brain-munching, flesh-desiring zombie fiends with the sole purpose of killing and eating all those who weren’t part of their horrible battalion. Meaning Seth’s absent friends were on the menu if they hadn't already become part of the scattered meat smorgasbord.          

"What do we do, what do we do?" Lincoln wailed, as panicked as Miranda was, his fists clenched hopelessly at his sides.          

If they hadn't been totally encircled by a stalking mass of hungry-eyed oddities in their incongruous death metal shirt uniforms, Lincoln and Miranda probably would have bolted, run for it in desperation and blood-curdled terror.         

But there was nowhere to run.          

Seth observed the same type of overweight girls in denim skirts and Cannibal Corpse shirts he'd remarked upon earlier among the hordes of drooling, slavering entities rolling towards them in a wave of imminent flesh-mangling, alongside big beefy zombies who'd once upon a time been Eric Baron sorts, some slimmer females, fat guys, thin guys; all of them now warped into undead creatures by Undead Fleshcrave themselves, by whatever horrific insurmountable power had been condensed into a simple death metal composition.            

There weren’t myriads of them encircling Seth, Mark and the others because plenty were still concentrating on other targets, lunging over the bar to rip and tear at the hapless bar staff, chasing down other non-turned concert patrons, but there were enough to have the sextet surrounded.          

Miranda appeared to be drowning in a nightmare she couldn't break the surface of; she looked like she just couldn't fathom what was going on, couldn't comprehend that it was real and not some terribly elaborate part of Undead Fleshcrave's stage show involving everyone. Her eyes were incredibly wide and boggling in a face devoid of colour, her hands on her cheeks, drawing lines of blood down them with unintentional fingernail scratches.          

Beside her, Lincoln was in the same horrified fugue, his mouth flapping soundlessly as if he didn't know whether to scream his lungs out or throw up again.         

Oddly, Julietta appeared the most composed of them all, her dark eyes flickering around, seeking an escape route, something to use to their advantage.         

"We're fucked," Dax announced succinctly and unnecessarily.          

"This can't be real," Miranda moaned, on the verge of keeling over with a heart attack. "It can't...it just can't be."          

It looked pretty real to Seth. Illogical, impossible, and absolutely insane, but the screams of the dying, the splashing dollops of blood, the horrendous stench in the air, the shocking violence unfolding in pandemonium everywhere, all looked and sounded pretty fucking real to him.          

"We've got to find the others," Julietta said, maintaining her composure, though a vestige of desperation tainted the tone of her voice.          

"Fuck, we've got to survive first," Lincoln whispered, shaking fingers pointing out where a couple of the zombie entities chased down a shrieking woman with a pink punk hairdo and ripped her limb from limb, plunging their faces into the cavity where her abdomen used to be. "They're just fucking tearing people to pieces! What are we going to do?"          

Seth didn't have a clue what the hell they were going to do.          

There were at least ten or twelve former death metal fans turned to sallow-skinned flesh-craving undead fiends loitering in a rough circle around them, with vacant, but somehow immeasurably sinister, eyes and hooked fingers twitching in preparation to delve inside body cavities.          

Over behind this, he could see more bloody carnage in every single section of the room, while the freakish band continued to play and the mass of security at the front of the stage continued to do nothing but stare into the pandemonium with eyes as empty as those of the zombie hordes.          

Seth had no explanation as to why the flesh-devouring battalions hadn't jumped the barricades to sink their teeth into the octet of security brutes when it seemed they'd gone for every other soul that wasn't one of them.           Then he had no more time to ruminate on this curious conundrum. The dozen or so milling zombies around his friends attacked as if they'd all been waiting for some signal, perhaps a passage in the song to ignite their assault.         

"
Shit
!” Lincoln screamed, his terrified outburst almost as high-pitched and girlish as the simultaneous one torn out of Miranda. Even Julietta gave vent to an involuntary expulsion of shock as the group of nightmare creatures launched.          

Desolately, Seth acknowledged that he possessed pretty piss poor means of protecting her, himself, or any of the others. He had in his hand the plastic cup his drink arrived in-rather incongruous, being served in a plastic container when many walked right in with glass bottles—and that was about the sole extent of his possessions. He had house keys in his jeans pocket and nothing more substantial than that to use as weaponry and he suspected Mark was likewise scantily armed, and so too Lincoln.          

But Dax...he had his spiked armbands!          

That gave Seth a faint glimmer of hope, though it seemed inconceivable that they could battle their way through an undead tide on the strength of a few spikes.          

Then a long, wickedly curving shape came scything through the air with a temporary glint in the sickly green light glow and a cutting swishing sound.          

As it connected with flesh, it made a meaty thunk and then a severed zombie head went on a tumble through the lime-tinted radiation, followed quickly by another, both of them spraying blood in a pinwheel fashion.           The headless bodies of the abruptly decapitated teetered in an upright position for a short period and then toppled over onto the bar floor, leaving a gap in the circle.          

Through that expanse of space came Simon Black, Steven 'Blizzard' Callihan and Troy 'Tempest' Sawyer.          

In Black's hand he wielded a bloodied katana, the very weapon with which he’d cleaved two zombies’ heads from their necks. His associates were also armed with bladed weapons. Blizzard had a Fairburn Sykes fighting knife in each hand, Tempest came with a Bowie and a Gerber knife.          

Both of these men with their dual knives entered the circle on either side of Black and decimated a zombie apiece, Blizzard punching both his blades into the ears of the nearest on the left, a shaven headed man with a long braided beard and a Decapitated T-shirt.          

This deadwalker unleashed a guttural incantation that spiralled up into a screech as Blizzard yanked his knives out and whipped them back and forth across the being’s greying throat.          

Tempest cracked his Bowie blade down on the back of the neck of the one to the right, aiming to drive enough force to sever the spinal column, and while the knife might not have sheared right through, it dropped the undead beast to its knees.          

This created a whole lot more space and Black issued an authoritative command to the stunned collective formerly about to be engulfed by demented deadheads.          

"Come on! Move, now!"          

They hesitated, all of them, with Miranda still wide-eyed in a state of shock that was only enhanced by seeing Black behead two of what were formerly everyday extreme metal fans like the rest of them, with one brutal swing of his Japanese sword while his companions took down two more with savage knife strikes.          

"Now!" Black roared and his free hand flashed out and seized the arm of the nearest person, Julietta.
           Prompted, she stumbled with him, and Seth was quick to follow, his head spinning.          

He noticed that it wasn't just the trio from Subversion who were running the rescue bid; over by the exit door were the four girls who had originally joined the threesome when they'd come back inside from the standoff with Eric Baron. All of these women were hoisting a selection of bladed implements as well, two of them with blood dripping from their points.          

They swiped and slashed at any undead who wandered into their orbit, looking to keep the path clear for Black to bring the besieged black metallers free.          

As Lincoln shouted “what the fuck!” in a demented, panicked litany and Miranda issued a shrill wailing keen, Blizzard and Tempest put themselves behind the main body of the group, fending off any zombies who lurched close.         

One slipped through their guard, a big burly number in a bloodied denim jacket with multiple band patches decorating it. Slippery ropes of entrails hung over this creature’s shoulders, either from Undead Fleshcrave’s scattered meat smorgasbord, or perhaps from the innards ripped from the victims in the pit, though that didn't seem too likely considering this pocket of fiends swarming them hadn't originated from the initial place of pandemonium.         

This sloping-browed brute with messy auburn ropes of greasy hair reached with grimy hands at Dax and, unlike some of his companions, this fellow wasn't so stupefied with terror and shock that he didn't realise he'd entered the concert with inbuilt weapons.          

Dax slung his right arm in a great arc, raking his spiked armbands across the gruesome visage of the lumbering beast, puncturing eyes in a gory splatter of fluid.          

This was enough to give him separation from the would-be meat muncher, and he ran in a stumbling gait after the others, with Tempest and Blizzard backing after him, blood-streaked blades extended in front of them.         

They neared the exit where the four women stood guard, yelling urgent encouragement to them.          

"Our friends are still in here!" Julietta pleaded to Black, who shook his head solemnly, his long black locks flying around his face.          

"Forget them, they're gone. You lot are lucky to be getting out of here."          

"Bullshit!" Lincoln howled. "We can't leave them!"          

"You want to stay and be gravegoblin fodder, be my guest," Tempest grated from behind him. "The rest of us are getting out of here."        

Digging his heels in, Lincoln stopped to wheel around and face Tempest, indignant fury traversing his pockmarked face.          

It was a mistake.          

They were a whisker away from the door out, shielded by the gals with the all black outfits and gleaming bladed weaponry, and Lincoln’s abrupt halt stilled the forward motion of the escaping congregation.          

From underneath a merch table set up near this door slid a female zombie, one of the overweight numbers in too-tight black pants and a 'Waking the Cadaver' top. Her pustule-riddled face emerged between Lincoln’s thighs as fleshy sausage fingers seized his legs and dragged the weighty body up.          

It was one of the very few times Lincoln had ever been in a position with a woman between his legs like this.          

It was also the last.          

Gnashing teeth clamped around his groin and a cavernous mouth closed around it, grinding and gnawing in deep.          

A terrible scream of agony ripped from Lincoln’s throat as blood welled out around the creature’s face, saturating the denim of Lincoln’s jeans, and it was an automatic impulse for him to beat with his fists upon the dirty blonde hair of the undead assailant.         

The crotch chopper tore her face away and with it came Lincoln’s genitals and a great mouthful of denim and fabric, probably a zipper in there somewhere too, leaving a bloody, raw-edged chasm in the man’s pelvic region.         

The savage shock and the weight of the zombie bitch between his thighs dragged Lincoln down to the floor and this time the undead penis gulper landed her teeth a little higher up, biting into his stomach with horrible flesh-rending sounds.          

"No!!!" Miranda screamed in an ululation of desolate despair, but there was nothing any of them could do now.         

Lincoln was cactus, his face contorted with the most excruciating agony as the nightmarish fiend ate her way through the skin, the subcutaneous tissue below and deeper, striving to bury her face in the ropes of internals and meaty organs inside.          

Tempest punched his Bowie knife into the base of the zombie woman’s neck and this time he did drive it right in enough to sever the spinal cord, almost getting it lodged before Blizzard assisted by stabbing both his blades into the wound, sawing and cutting it wide enough to release the Bowie as its serrated blade ripped more bloody gouges.