Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger (42 page)

Then he and Black, both simultaneously stage-dived from the front of Stage Four, launching themselves right out over the mass of teeming humanity—and unhumanity―swarming around below, the pair of them crowd-surfing across the whole congregation, to Seth’s stunned disbelief. To the best of his knowledge, neither of them were in any way armed; he was certain every member of the group relinquished their weapons and placed them inside the Subversion instrument cases to smuggle inside with the band.

Almost mesmerised by their reckless actions to the point where he remained rooted to the spot, Seth nonetheless came to his senses and scurried back to the amplifier he’d been using before. The lead, wrenched out of both the amp and Mother North as he toppled over the edge of the stage, was curled on the deck in erratic twists, and snatching it up, he plugged it back into the lethal beauty.

The bikers weren’t sitting around wasting any time. Instead of simply hanging there waiting for the prone Biblebashers to ‘turn’ as the towering man with long black hair, tattooed face and neck and eerie eyes made reference to them potentially doing so, they hauled the death metal assailants to the edge of Stage Four and tipped them over with solidly prodding boots or shoving meaty hands. The splayed, presumably unconscious, hunks of Biblebasher crony meat, thumped awkwardly on the earthen floor below, though Seth only caught glimpses from the corner of his eye. Most of his attention was captivated in visual horror by the hellish inferno and orgy of blood, death, violence, and undead metamorphosis swamping Blackwater Park everywhere.

Undead Fleshcrave played on, pounding their gruesome tune, which, of course, wasn’t really anything resembling a tune at all, just a call to arms for zombie squadrons to rise from the brainfucked hordes here to worship death metal. A disastrous dinner bell heralding a fleshy feast of gargantuan proportions.

As pallid-faced, bloody-mouthed, lank-haired, and shaven-headed freaks swelled in congested knots throughout the vast sprawl of the open air venue, screams of total terror now rent the night air in a horrible melange with the ugly music. Pandemonium reigned supreme. Those who weren’t susceptible to being rendered technically brain-dead by the high pitched buzzing screech of the Trigger intro and the ensuing blitzkrieg of instrumentation and guttural vocal mantra from the Fleshcravers, now found themselves in an absolutely fucked up world of bedlam they wouldn’t have ever dreamed possible, regardless of the brutal savagery of the lyrics and imagery they saturated themselves in here, witnessing these bands. For the casual music fan, just there to observe some live heavy music, or the random wanderer in off the street, it must have been akin to being propelled right into the epicentre of some kind of hell. A living, bleeding, screaming, zombie horror flick wrenched forcibly off the screen and dropped right down into their midst.

Seth wanted to look behind him, back where he knew his friends must be. He desperately wanted to see that they were all still there, alive and breathing, though he guessed Black and Tempest might have told him otherwise. At least the bikers—The Revenge Masters was the name Seth recalled seeing on a backpatch―hadn’t elected to roll them off the stage as well, so he figured they were aware of which side they were on. In any case, it was those down in the pits of a materialising hell who were most important right now, Mark, Dax, and Miranda were safe, at least temporarily.

What was more, it was nigh on impossible to yank his gaze away from so much suppurating, violent, visual horror below and spanning out over the whole spread of Blackwater Park, try as he might. Anywhere his gaze travelled out there landed his horrified eyes on things dredged up from nightmares, even the realities of seeing this undead epidemic form back in Armada paled in comparison.

He shaped a chord on Mother North’s long, shapely fretboard and then her power dragged him seductively back in, and he was playing. He almost recoiled from the weapon as he acknowledged what song he’d almost instinctively started to play, the feral filthy blast of Carpathian Forest’s ‘Doomed to Walk the Earth as Slaves to the Living Dead.’

A more appropriate song he couldn’t have picked, but the connotations of the title disturbed him, even more so with the painful knowledge in the back of his mind that Carpathian Forest were the favourite band of his dead—and undead—love Julietta.

Rapidly, he abbreviated the track and segued into something faster, more aurally vicious and laced with furious tremolo picking. Marduk. Christraping Black Metal. It didn’t sound complete or perfect, or anything of the sort, not without the accompaniment of a brutal rhythm section anchoring the high venomous velocity of the guitar, but the violence of the riffing sang from Mother North, pouring out of the Marshall in a cavalcade of sonic savagery that drew astonished stares from the Revenge Masters.

The black metal venom shrieking like an agitated banshee into a night sky already awash with ugly death metal noise from the Fleshcravers, a symphony of screams from those hapless souls finding themselves the nominated Scattered Meat Smorgasbord and myriad other melanges of terror sliced a sharp swathe through the gruesome soundtrack of the bloodstained evening. As Seth watched, his eyes for some reason glued to the feral five piece responsible for throwing open the gates to undead hell, he couldn’t fail to miss what happened.

The tremolo barbs spiking from Mother North appeared to strike Undead Fleshcrave as if they were genuine physical thorns, or sharp objects hurled like weapons. Lead guitarist, SkinCarver, and rhythm axeman, The DeadWalker, both trading abhorrent licks, visibly faltered, missing their place entirely and stuttering into an erratic skitter of sound. Though the bestial Zombie Trigger seemed to be a giant haphazard wall of terrible noise that just came in a crush of impending doom, there was undoubtedly a structure to its horrible composition, and with his eyes upon the two guitarists, Seth plainly saw that structure disrupted by his antagonistic black metal riffery.

A strange sensation that wasn’t quite joy, wasn’t quite triumph, nor disbelief, but a concoction of all three which also snatched facets of other swirling emotions, pummelled Seth in the chest, and he ripped faster tremolo riffs out of the all-powerful, icy beauty, Mother North. He didn’t even know what he was playing anymore; in the midst of catching this aberrant behaviour on the behalf of the Undead axemen he’d missed his own cues and lost the track of what song he had been playing, but it didn’t really seem to matter. He hammered at the strings, wrenching out giant glacial guitar phrases and passages of his own creation, blending some Transilvanian Hunger era Darkthrone with the might of early Satyricon, tossing in some Mayhem, classic stuff from Dissection and then a bunch of shit he made up on the spur of the moment. Or more appropriately, he thought way back in the depths of his mind, Mother North conjured up for him.

She was the true architect of these chilling sounds emanating from the Marshall amp, soaring through the scream riddled atmosphere to collide with the brutal sonic ugliness engineered by Undead Fleshcrave, and it was her freezing spectral fingers driving those of Seth, and through a dark ethereal form stunting, impeding and interrupting the flow of the Zombie Trigger.

CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE-BLACK METAL WEAPONRY

Now Seth had something to focus his attention on, to fixate on. Something that pulled his horror shocked eyes away from the sanguinary mess, the complete dehumanization of so many, the death, degradation and unholy blood-splattered landscape hurling body parts and meatseeking zombie freaks all over Blackwater Park.

Undead Fleshcrave stumbling, faltering, tripping over their own composition, having it unravel as random tremolo and abrasive black metal discordance headbutted their work, rudely invited itself in to reside and dwell among their chunky riffs, picking them apart with cold skeletal limbs.

The gravity blasts of GatlingGrinder stammered into ungainly fills and stop start staccato bursts that lacked coordination or even rhythm, and without that anchor, FaceGnawer’s bassline undulated into a clunky sounding mire, a fat, oily snake slithering without direction.

Fierce exultant elation threatened to explode from Seth as comprehensively as this viciously counterattacking music was snarling out of Mother North, but he didn’t dare let anything overwhelm him. He persisted with his black metal assaults, some known and familiar songs he knew and jammed occasionally with his buddies sneaking into the mix infrequently, but predominantly it was a free jam of dissonance and tremolo ice. His fingers flexed and flew across the strings, the fretboard, bending and curling, almost in impossible positions and shapes he didn’t think he was capable of, again, something he attributed to the unusual and colossal power of Mother North. He imagined skin peeling off those fingers and blood flowing freely, yet he didn’t cease. He couldn’t. Not now.

He didn’t even realise he had musical company until he heard a low oscillating rumble in occurrence onstage, and then he knew Dax had picked up the thread as well, pitching the evil thick tones of the Blizzard Beast into the musical onslaught on the zombiemakers.

The resonant notes of the Blizzard Beast dropped like well thrown bombs, or musical Molotovs, onto the stage of Undead Fleshcrave, exploding among them as the tremolo air raids of Mother North strafed around the heads of the death metal quintet, raining icicle shards of riffing at the vacillating band.

Eyes locked on the spectacle of the death metal supergroup acting like faulty automatons, breaking down as it were, their synapses malfunctioning as the discordance of the black metal tampered with the flow of the Trigger. The stalking, green sludge, blood splattered SamEdi ceased his triumphant and malevolent stalking around the stage, his choked microphone falling down in his bunched fist to waist level as he temporarily seemed to give up on the insidious mantra altogether.

Then, with renewed vigour, he thrust the mic back to his lips and attempted to persist with the lyric growling, grunting an aside to his bandmates which went unheard by Seth due to the great distance that separated them. He assumed it was some directive for them to pull their shit together and coordinate their actions, bring the Zombie Trigger back into the cohesive curse it should have been. This they did, or made every attempt to with the dual guitarists lurching back into the monstrous chug and FaceGnawer looking to haul his bass back into line with Grinder’s gigantic beats.

At this point in time Seth had to break his gaze to stare down at the guitar weapon in his perspiring hands, feeling as if he needed to grab control of the wild jam that was spiralling out of the instrument, certain his freestyle bursts of tremolo might be the reason Undead Fleshcrave were able to muster their sinister force and regroup.

He didn’t know what was occurring out in the massive expanse of Blackwater Park aside from the horrendous mass transformations and consequential slayings of unturned souls, but he wondered if the temporary break in the concentration of the death metal group had achieved anything other than briefly fuck up the flow of the song. He didn’t expect it was going to have any sort of effect, such as reversing the zombie state, but hopefully it halted, or stunted it somehow.

A tickling clatter of cymbals issued from behind him, then a crash, swiftly followed by a calamitous rumble, a brutal thunderous roll encompassing toms and snare, before doublekicks also burst through the melee. This time, Seth did cast his glance back over his shoulder, surprise punching into him as he realised Mark too, must be joining the rejuvenated Plaguewielder.

It wasn’t Mark seated behind the kit however, the stool was occupied by none other than the Subversion drummer himself, Tempest, back on stage after his and Black’s suicidal stagedive and crowdsurfing mission to rescue those lost in the mayhem.

Not only that, but the entire expanse of Stage Four was completely packed out, filled to the point of overpopulation by an entire host of newcomers-and original members on the stage-along with the four Revenge Masters, Mark, and Dax.

Seth’s attention must have been riveted on the sight of Undead Fleshcrave on that distant stage, stumbling through their bestial Zombie Trigger, for he hadn’t acknowledged the return of Black and Tempest at all, bringing with them all the absentees. Scarlett, Blizzard, Roxana, Lizette, Heather, all were present and accounted for in the cluster of people now sharing this stage. Not only that, but there were others with them, faces in a differing range of expressions, most of them shocked, stunned, and horrified. To Seth’s astonishment, one of these newcomers was the woman he mentally referred to as SternBitch. This surprised him more than a fraction to discover that she, obviously one of those with a big hand in the whole organisation of this Blackwater Park death metal oriented festival, was not, in fact, a true death head. If she was, then most certainly she should be one of the feral undead roaming the vast breadth of the grounds, an easy target for the treacherous Trigger. Yet here she was, evidently unmarked by the undead birthing sound, surrounded by a cavalcade of others the Subversion crew must have managed to escort up here to relative safety.

He only managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of Scarlett among the crowd of newcomers, enough to see that while she wore a few nasty looking cuts and bruises upon her gorgeous visage, she appeared otherwise relatively intact, and then he returned his attention to Mother North.

Another inspiration struck him and he launched into the evil blast of 1349’s ‘Sculptor of Flesh’, knowing Dax would fall into the groove on the bass easily enough, and figuring Tempest would be more than attuned to such energetic requirements of his sticksmanship. He wasn’t disappointed in either one; Tempest demonstrated in a swift expanse of time that he was a beast on the drums, even with the kit being somewhat damaged in places by the onslaught of Biblebashers.

Seth felt a presence to his right, and though the track required most of his attention to be riveted on the guitar itself, he spied Scarlett standing there with her microphone clutched back in her slender fingers. Before he could take much stock in that, she was unleashing a vicious scream into the mic that rent the night asunder, splitting the virulent atmosphere even further than the nightmare collage of sounds already had. Her vocals sounded truly demented and violently abrasive, her tone even more attuned to black metal than it was with the track they’d first performed as Plaguewielder.

Together the quartet chimed in as a fearsome unit, attacking the Zombie Trigger from a distance, launching savage aerial attacks and sonic mayhem upon the Undead Five, and though the bass playing of Dax lagged a little behind the unrelenting ferocity Tempest unleashed upon the drum kit, it didn’t really matter.

The conglomerate of abrasive war metal sound punctured and broke the structure of the Trigger, eliminated its ability to be the all-powerful, consuming sound, and it was exhibited over on the Undead stage.

Seth wasn’t sure how long they were supposed to do this, or what end it might achieve, but in some way it seemed highly important to do it, battering at the Trigger until they could eradicate it completely perhaps. Drown the ugly death metal destructive force with their counter attack, until…what?

He shifted on the stage, now certain it wasn’t a total requirement to keep his eyes trained constantly on the Undead Fleshcrave squadron. Angling around so he was essentially facing Scarlett, who stood, feet spread wide as she screamed lyrics into the microphone, her black hair streaming back, head tilted so her countenance aimed skywards.

From here, he could both witness the awesome spectacle that was her in full voice, as well as all other actions in occurrence on Stage Four. The group of fearful newcomers, including SternBitch, a few other metalheads who obviously didn’t rate death metal as their ultimate genre, and a pair of security guards were crowded together behind where Dax thrashed the Blizzard Beast, struggling to keep his rhythm aligned with Tempest’s. Mark and Miranda were over there as well, wrapped in each other’s tight embraces, both marked with injuries inflicted by the ruthless beatings of the stage invaders, and whilst some of the newest arrivals were staring in open mouth, wide-eyed shock at the chaos and bedlam of undead running rampant through the Park, and very nearby below, Seth’s friends were gaping in awe at the makeshift four piece ripping out black metal to thwart the Zombie Trigger.

The four strong army of bikers stood in a tight knot, wary eyes on proceedings everywhere, taking in as much of the unbelievable scene as they could from all angles.

Black and his Subversion associates were hauling the instrument cases which usually housed Mother North, The Blizzard Beast, and the Moons into what available space was left in the centre of Stage Four, just behind where Scarlett raged in vocal abrasion so caustic it tore at the fabric of the night.

Behind them all, Tempest battered at the somewhat dented and dishevelled drum kit like a demented dervish, long black hair flailing all around his head and muscled shoulders, his body in a perpetual state of motion.

There were at least twenty five people crammed onto the stage, possibly more; Seth wasn’t sure how many others came up along with Black, there could have been some behind the considerable bulk of the two security guards and the bikers in the centre who tended to obscure his vision a little.

Abruptly, Black made a cutting motion across his throat to Seth, swivelling in a semi-circle to include the rest of the players, requesting they cease the music. Puzzled by the entreaty, particularly now, where the four of them in tandem appeared to be hammering sonic weapons into the metaphorical musical coffin of the Zombie Trigger, Seth nonetheless complied, the savage tremolo scream of Mother North dying away to silence.

The drums of Tempest ceased instantaneously, as did Scarlett’s ferocious shrieking vocal abrasion, while predictably, Dax trailed to a halt a few seconds behind all the others, a fat thrum of bass resonance fading in the wake of the dispersal of everything else.

“Okay, listen up and listen hard!” Black announced, his harsh voice ringing with an authoritative command, audible despite the crescendo of terror ringing out in a melange all around the Park. “I don’t want to repeat myself at all, so no interruptions. We don’t have much time, in fact, we have fuck all time. In about two minutes, which is the absolute maximum amount of time I’m giving myself to talk, me and my people are going to be making preparations to get down off this stage and then we are going to go and do what we came here tonight to do. Which, for the slow kids in class-hang on, that’s probably a little unfair since most of you here don’t have a clue what the fuck is going on unless you’re aware of the situations like this happening all along the coast, but anyway—is go and kill Undead Fleshcrave. None of us are safe up here, don’t get it into your heads that we are. Sooner, rather than later, those undead down there—yes, zombie motherfuckers who exist only to rip your flesh off your bones and eat it―are going to come up here. There’s just about nowhere in this park safe for anybody and the longer we sit here, the bigger a target we make ourselves. So when I say my piece right here, the band is going to start playing again and when I say the word we are all getting the fuck off this stage, we are going to kill those death metal freaks over there responsible for this catastrophe and then we are getting the fuck out of this Park. Anyone who likes the idea of staying alive in any capacity, and potentially not joining the legions of the undead, or becoming meat for them, I suggest coming along. Alternatively, feel free to stay here and wait for them to come to you. Or make your own way to where you think you’re going to be safe. Entirely up to your own discretion. And I’m done talking. Tempest, Seth, Scarlett, Dax, resume black metal hostilities.”

“Wait, wait, wait!” This came from SternBitch, a desperate and panicked edge to her voice. “You’re suggesting we go down…there? And…what…kill that band? What the hell do you mean by that?”

“Exactly what I said,” Black replied brusquely. “Eradicating them is the only way to eliminate them being able to unleash the Zombie Trigger—that’s the composition that created this whole world of undead shit—and while we intended to do that prior to them getting the opportunity to flip the switch on the Trigger, shit happens, we got screwed out of doing that. Nonetheless, that’s what we came here to do, that’s what we’re going to do. Unfortunately, the whole place is swarming and crawling with undead motherfuckers who want to eat us all, but shit, what are you gonna do?”

Another chorus of outcry issued from the rest of the congregation assembled over behind where Dax stood, awaiting the opportunity, or rather, the command to come from Black again, considering SternBitch interrupted the first directive, but Black held up his hand.