Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger (49 page)

Guns, he guessed, the denizens of Blackwater Park were well and truly accustomed to seeing, hell, some of those loitering ahead in the intermittently shadowed spread of the tunnels were adequately armed with their own weaponry, but things like Mother North, The Blizzard Beast, and the Funeral and Freezing Moons would be something entirely different. Something new, something unexpected and frightening. And coming from a giant festival where death metal was the order of the day, now it would appear there were metalheads coming with instruments indicating that death was the order of the day.

Behind him, Seth assumed the others were being hurried along by the likes of Black, presumably with Black and Blizzard electing to fall back and tail the procession as the rear guard. That was a position he wasn’t envious of, he sure didn’t fancy walking back behind everybody else with the thought in his head that sooner or later some of the humanivores were going to catch on to the fact that they had captive food confined in tunnels below, though it didn’t really matter where he was positioned. With the prevalence of ladders coming down the curved wall on either side of the structure, it was safe to say the entrance and exit points into the tunnel were reasonably common, so being concerned the undead threat would come from behind them wasn’t essentially the only worry.

Though the further they got away from the Park was probably a better bet. At least in Seth’s mind.

Then another horrifying possibility struck him. And right as he considered this, it happened up ahead of them.

CHAPTER FORTY ONE-UNDEAD UNDERGROUND

With all the other trains of thought rampaging through his mind, he wasn’t overly surprised he hadn’t considered it earlier, but in a hideous coincidence, his latest rumination on the situation was brought to life in the narrow confines of the crowded tunnels.

What would happen if some of these people down here were already infected, carrying bites or scratches they’d thought nothing of at the time, just desperate to be away and heading somewhere they perceived as a sort of gateway to sanctuary?

A grizzled older fellow with a bald pate and greying whiskers adorning his chin, looking resplendent in his faded Metallica Ride the Lightning T-shirt, hurled himself upon a quartet of escapees from the undead slaughterground with a savage and hideous growling utterance that chilled Seth’s blood. This foursome was comprised of two young couples, and it was a short statured blonde woman who the infected fiend lunged at, grasping with hooked claws for hands.

She shrieked involuntarily as his fingers dug into the flesh of her upper arms and then the scream shot up in high pitched intensity as the MetallicaZombie sank a mouthful of teeth into the side of her neck, ripping off a flapping chunk of meat that came away with a shower of blood.

The scream, ripping through the confines of the narrow tunnel, reverberated down the length of it and sent panicked shockwaves on the heels of it. Down here they might have thought they were in some type of relative refuge, though surely it would have been in the minds of many that something terrible could still happen. The high-pitched sound instigated a stampede from way up ahead, even if they weren’t quite aware of the reason for it. With most of them on the knife edge of terror as it was, any emanation of fear that echoed through the slender constrictions of the structure they were all amassed in was enough to spark panic.

The trio of others in the unfortunate group immediately attempted to force the feeding fiend to relinquish his hold and he came away from the bloodied neck of the woman, leaving a gaping raw wound pulsing and spraying out spurts of gore, mangled flaps of flesh dangling between gnashing teeth.

Blood poured down over that erratic spike of grey bristles jutting from his chin before he swallowed the section of human beef and then bit a couple of fingers of an outstretched hand, a little too slow in drawing back after trying to shake his limpet hold off the doomed female.

“Ah fuck! Fuck me! Oh, Jesus Christ!” The male recipient of the bite and current not so proud owner of a now three fingered right hand, let out in a girlish shriek to rival that of his female companion, staring in agony and helpless fascination as claret pumped out of the end of his hand in a grotesque display of a bloody water feature.

The woman herself was making no sense in her enunciations, it was all agonised gibberish and indecipherable babblings spilling from her gaping lips, but looking at her face, Seth couldn’t mistake the despair in her eyes, the terrible clarity.

Then Nate stepped to the right, coming out so he wasn’t directly behind the bulk of Tempest. He squeezed the trigger of his gun and shot the luckless bitten woman in the face.

As her head jerked backwards and she slumped down, out of the grip of both Metallica and the pair of her friends still clutching gamely at parts of her, becoming dead weight to them, Nate punched another bullet through the skull of the bloody faced zombie, the projectile singing through the creatures brain, possibly mushrooming around inside that infected, toxic grey mass and turning it into cerebral stew, for it never exited.

Like his puppet master strings had been abruptly sliced through with a razor sharp blade, old man Metallica hit the deck right behind the woman he’d savaged in a spastic tangle of limbs while the friends of the deceased female screamed and screamed, the unbitten man’s face a tragedy of horrified shock. He hurled frantic outbursts at Nate, spit flying in erratic bursts from his gaping mouth.

“What the fuck? Why the fuck did you do that for? Why the fuck?” He lunged forward, flailing at Nate with a windmill of hands, his words flooding in a torrent that mostly broke down into obscenity punctuated gibberish. Back behind him, moaning and clutching his ruined hand against his shirt, soaking it in blood, with runnels of the crimson gore spilling between fingers, the man’s companion slumped against the wall of the tunnel.

Busy with trying to keep the shocked screamer at bay, Nate appeared not to have realised that the other guy in this besieged group had been bitten as well, even if it was only a couple of fingers. Seth hadn’t missed it. He watched the guys face blanch of colour, pinched with pain as his visage went ashen, and while the remaining woman was caught between going to him or slumping on the concrete floor with her bullet blasted friend, the stricken fellow began twitching, facial tics making his entire countenance look as though he had some sort of crawling insects running crazy under his skin.

Almost transfixed with a morbid fascination, Seth stared, momentarily frozen by the spectacle, while Tempest assisted Nate in subduing the horrified survivor. Back behind them the remainder of the Subversion posse were at a standstill, boxed in by the sudden zombie assault and the ensuing chaos.

Up ahead, the way may have temporarily cleared with those thrown into a panic by screaming and gunshots, but until the situation here was remedied, nobody was getting to take advantage of that.

Screaming man was still flailing like an asylum patient requiring straitjacketing, devastated by what he considered a cold act of murder by Nate, keeping both the big man and Tempest occupied while the other girl still stood in a state of confusion, torn between the two other members of the party, one deceased and the other wounded.

Before Seth’s eyes, pustules emerged on the pallid face of the guy holding up the tunnel wall, suppurating then, bursting with spurts of foul liquid. His skin discernibly cracked, flaking away, and bleeding lesions appeared all over any skin visible, his formerly pain filled eyes losing all of that agonised appearance, instead becoming dead dull orbs in a horror face.

Another gunshot cracked from behind him, so close to his ear it almost burst his eardrum, jerking him out of his horrible mesmerised reverie and the mutating creature before him swallowed a jet of hot lead that crumpled him. Dax pushed through, pistol in hand, that malevolent smirk creeping back onto his face as he viewed what he no doubt considered a job well done. For an ephemeral moment, Seth thought he was about to level the gun at the last member of the decimated quartet and shoot her down as well, but he just spread his hands in an apologetic shrug as she gaped dumbfounded at him.

Scarlett drifted up alongside Seth, a hand lightly going to the small of his back with a gentle touch. She caught his eye, a slight touch of concern in hers.

“You okay, hun? I thought you froze there. A second longer and he would have been fully undead and all over you.”

“Yeah. No, shit, I’m fine. I just…” Seth let his voice trail away, realising he’d been in a daze watching the ugly zombie transformation, yanked back in his mind to the visual exhibition of bloody horror that happened in the Quo Vadis bar, the first unbelievable set of transformations he’d witnessed.

“You fucking choked, Seth, face it, you just fucking choked,” Dax uttered derisively, back over his shoulder. “We can’t afford for that shit to happen.”

“What the fuck? Who the hell appointed you…?”

“Cut it out!” Scarlett issued sharply. “What we can’t afford is bickering. No doubt that guy isn’t the only one carrying a bite or a scratch down here, so we just all have to be on our guard and pay attention.”

“All the more reason to have people we can count on in the frontline,” Dax shot back, momentarily glancing back over his shoulder before returning his attention to the horrified girl, as if expecting her to also turn zombie. “People who won’t freeze under pressure.”

“Keep moving!” Scarlett snapped, her hand still brushing lightly against Seth in a reassuring gesture. He seethed inwardly at Dax, but let it drop without taking any more of his alleged friend’s bait. Instead he nodded and started moving again.

Just up ahead, Tempest was stating to the petrified man in his and Nate’s clutches, in no uncertain terms, why it was essential for the deaths of his friends to have happened.

“You can stick with us, both of you,” Tempest included the girl frozen before the gun-toting Dax in that statement. “If you choose. Otherwise, just stay out of our way and look out for each other. Any little bite, any scratch from one of these zombie motherfuckers and you are going to turn, as well as anybody else you see it happen to.”

With that said, Tempest and Nate released the man, tossing glances back to ensure the rest of the congregation were still following in formation, and then proceeded hastily down the now surprisingly cleared tunnel. Dax grinned at the surviving woman, as if his expression was meant to allay her fears when she’d just witnessed him shooting down one of her friends or her boyfriend, zombified or otherwise, and then took off too, putting himself up at the front along with the forerunners, where he obviously thought he should be.

“Come on,” Scarlett said to Seth, though she might have been aiming the words at the fear stricken duo as well.

This pair hesitated, but only briefly. With one on either side of the tunnel, they didn’t want to be separated by the other approaching members of the Subversion contingent and rapidly scurried to be with one another before they were caught up in the flow. On the heels of big Nate and Tempest, the expedition through the underground tunnel continued.

***

As he walked in tandem with Scarlett, behind Tempest, Nate and newly self-appointed, de facto leader, Dax, Seth acknowledged the futility of this whole mission here in these tunnels.

Never mind the fact that Undead Fleshcrave had such a head start on them, compounded by the clustered crowds also electing to go subterranean and flood the underground passageways, further blocking up the chance to move quickly, as well as the presence of bitten and infected folk either swiftly turning zombie, or gradually morphing into undead biters later, at which point were they going to assume the death metal zombie makers had decided to exit the tunnels?

When were they thinking the fleeing Zombie Trigger switchers were planning to go up to ground level again? What perceived safe place did anybody imagine the fivesome had in mind to take cover in?

Were Tempest, Black, and the other designated leaders just going to travel until they ran out of tunnel or ran into more hordes of cowering concert-goers or townsfolk skulking down here in the belief being underground was going to keep them safe from the undead Armageddon above, choking the passages to the point where there was no more progress to be made?

Right now it was extremely clear, as most of those who’d either witnessed the turning of Metallica Man, or heard the slew of screams and gunshots, stampeded ahead in order to escape the perceived catastrophes going on in the tunnel behind them, as if they’d be able to escape it.

It was also evident there were more infected lurking amongst those, either way up ahead in the tunnel, or among those who fled, not yet realising the wounds they were carrying were going to curse them to turn sooner or later, and running now wouldn’t allow them to outrun the malady. As Tempest and co. led the brigade, followed by Seth and Scarlett, then the rest in a variety of formations, they saw more bodies strewn in the tunnels, some spread out across the floor, heads blown off or faces pockmarked by bullet holes, others in far messier reposes of death. Blood trailed all across the stone floor or puddled in sticky coagulating pools, and while most of the corpses encountered along the way appeared to have been infected, turning mid escape and having their eventual shooters fortunate enough to possess firearms, able to shoot them down before they created more havoc, there were also uglier sights. Here were visions of people who’d been ravaged and ripped apart by undead monsters down here, to the point where they wouldn’t be reanimating to join the zombie squadron.

Here was a severed arm, leaking gore from a ragged, bloody stump, there was some hideous squashed watermelon shape which may have once upon a time been a human head.

The smell was loathsome, abhorrent and cloying, horrible death and rotting meat blended with the dank, moulding decay aroma as well as pungent shit and piss stenches, as though people were so terrified they’d voided their bowels or pissed themselves in fright, or did so at the point of death. Either way, the unpleasantness of the whole situation was further exacerbated by these ghastly odours, infiltrating nostrils with a burn that was rancorous and nauseating.

The two newcomers, dragged violently into the maelstrom of this group of black metal storm troopers and their cohorts, drifted back behind Seth and Scarlett, finding some sort of solace with the Goth couple, also strangers to this horrific situation. Seth had no clue of the names of the new twosome, but he’d heard the Goth duo refer to each other as Lilith and Gavin, and between the pair of them, they were attempting as best they could to allay the fears of the shell-shocked pair who’d witnessed their friends die in horrifically violent manners.

They’d come quite a long way, moving in as fast a fashion as possible, among scattered bodies and pieces of bloodied meat, traversing the tunnel which, though red with slippery blood, remained reasonably clear, aside from intermittent people who crouched against the walls, or huddled together, afraid to keep moving.