Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger (55 page)

Illogically, Seth was struck with the ludicrous notion that if the trio of Subversion as Hunters needed to be a complete unit to carry out their despatch of Undead Fleshcrave, then they were already destined to fail. Their lanky blonde bassist lay in a broken sprawl, mowed down before the unit were able to engage.

He saw that Black’s abrupt, unexpected assault on one of the unwary, sickened Masters had brought success, at least for him, though he hadn’t the chance to wrestle a firearm away. Instead he was making use of the biker, a broad-backed individual running to fat, as a shield against those who’d opened fire in a panic, the man’s greater girth proving to be an asset.

There were some dark shapes spread out on the floor amidst the tangled wreckage of overturned chairs, but Seth couldn’t ascertain whether that was due to the fact they were still in reposes of sickness engendered by the Trigger or whether they were unfortunate recipients of bullets blasted from Renegade Master guns. Whatever the case, he couldn’t exactly tell where Miranda and Mark were, it just seemed to be a bizarre flurry of panicked activity, the lot of them milling around like a frightened herd of animals, clueless and rudderless, not sure which direction they were supposed to go.

As Seth feared from the get go, his crew were sadly lacking in defence skills for the most part, with the exception of the Subversion members, their affiliates, and his friends. All the others swallowed up in the maelstrom brought nothing to the table, and were lambs to the slaughter. The Masters had bolstered that lagging crew, shored it up with their immediate desire to slot in and help in the battle against the undead armies, eased Seth’s mind, but that was all for naught, all a charade. Now that was snatched away, the bikers playing for the other team all along. And the pitiful conglomeration of folk left wouldn’t have stood a chance had they been armed with anything. With nothing, they were looking down the barrel of a bloody slaughter before the morphing death heads were even let loose from the cages.

The pincushion Master being swung around by Black took a few bullets in his broad back, but he was far from dead. He managed to get a huge meaty paw on Black and barrelled his weight against him, the enormous bulk of it enough to drive even the powerful Black back, the Master’s own frantic attempts displaying an insane strength.

Black was slammed back bodily, and into the bars of a cell. Seth gasped, his heart threatening to evacuate his body as hands lurched through the gaps, fingers clasping, seizing. With a Herculean effort, Black bent his arms backwards at what must have been an excruciating angle, and then shrugged out of his leather jacket, slipping loose, leaving nothing but the garment in the clutches of the swarming fiends.

The Master wasn’t prepared for the solid shelf of Black’s forehead bashing against the bridge of his nose, resounding with a crack that was extraordinarily loud even in the swirl of chaos all around it, and blood jetted, splattering both Black, and over his shoulders, into the hellish mass throwing themselves in a hungry fervour against the bars. The scent of blood further drove the undead into slavering tantrums, their grunts, groans, and hideous collective of sounds swelling into a nightmare montage. Black capitalised on his slim window of opportunity, stepping out of the circle of the Master’s arms, to the side, then behind him.

Both hands thumped against the bristly back of the biker’s skull and forced the man’s bleeding face right up against the bars, pushing inexorably further, as if he were hell-bent on thrusting the Master’s entire head inside the cage. That in itself wasn’t necessary though. Enough of the bloodied visage was mashed up against the bars, flesh pushed in through them, and the ravenous zombiebeasts inside went insane to obtain the proffered meat.

The scream that erupted from the unfortunate soul destined to be entrees for the undead was a haunting one that jerked chills up Seth’s spine, as he witnessed the nearest death head, a hulking brute in what he supposed was an Incantation top, push his own face right up against the trapped visage of the screamer, sinking teeth into whatever flesh was available, ripping away great bloody flaps, leaving exposed muscle in strings. More death heads pushed and shoved like insane shopaholics at a Boxing Day sale, hooked finger claws raking and ripping off their own pieces of flesh, more teeth clamouring to get to the meat.

The zombies contorted their heads, their whole bodies in bizarre knots in order to force themselves closer to the tantalising morsel the Master presented, others wising up and snatching his hands to yank them inside. The gun he’d been clasping vanished inside as well, dropping uselessly to the floor of the cell, an item undesired by the pack of humanivores as they sought the blood and the flesh, yanking more ear-splitting screams out of the doomed biker at the same time as they yanked his arms right off.

“Let them out!” SamEdi’s guttural roar suddenly split the middle of the Zombie Trigger in half, his almost indecipherable mantra ceasing instantly to be replaced by his clear, loud directive. “Open the cages! Let them all out!”

“Hold up!” Nate hollered back, somewhere off to the left, up ahead of where Seth crouched, hoping to remain in shadows long enough to locate where Mark and Miranda might be. “Hang on, let me get my men out!”

“Open up the cages!” SamEdi boomed back, not shifting on his stance. Behind him, the horrendous compositions instrumentation hammered on unabated, but without the lyrical additions of the guttural vocalist. Instead his eyes blazed unholy fire as he blasted the directive at Nate. “Open the fucking doors! Now! Or forfeit your reward. The job’s not done until it’s done!”

“Fuck you then!” Nate howled. “Let ‘em out yourself then! My boys aren’t your fucking stooges to be cast to the wolves like your fucking Sentinels! Come on, boys, fall out, let’s roll outta here, there ain’t gonna be no reward for us anyhow!”

Seth felt some hint of grim satisfaction there, realising that one of the thoughts he’d had fluttering through his mind appeared to be somewhat on the money after all. Undead Fleshcrave and Global Death cared zero about any collateral damage, any hired hands roped in to fulfil their goals were all expendable pawns, and the Renegade Masters were no exception, as gullible and trusting as Seth and his own band of friends could consider themselves to be after believing the Masters were firmly on their side.

He felt a flurry of hope jab at him as well. If Nate was going to pull his men out without releasing the squalling, squabbling, undead hordes trapped inside those cells, then there was every chance he and his friends were going to make it after all.

“Come on, big man,” SamEdi smirked, his chuckle an insidious bubble of sound reverberating into the microphone and around the room. “Your boys are all well-armed. You have plenty of time to escape. There’s easier meat than you lot to go for first. Use your loaf. You want a big pay day or you want to put yourself right in Global Death’s sights by running like a little bitch?”

“Jaz!” Nate was bellowing, his eyes still locked on SamEdi as the shiny domed vocalist leered down at him, the other four members still churning out brutal death metal, but now it just appeared to be a looping section of the Zombie Trigger instrumentation, as if SamEdi’s vocals were required to keep it rolling. It didn’t really matter anyway, the damage was already done, the switch already flipped. All sets of cages on each side of the room were filled with snarling hungry zombie brutes and torn bodies. There were no more to turn, except those still free in the uncaged area of the room. “Jaz, where’s the keys to this door? Get this fucking door open, hun?”

Seth knew Jazmyn wasn’t likely to respond to that anytime soon, she was a crushed head mess of sloppy red mush, but Nate didn’t appear clued in on that little fact just yet.

Elsewhere in the place, the flurries of action all ceased, everyone at a sudden standstill as this new development emerged, putting the brakes on everything. A Mexican standoff.

Nate hadn’t called for his men to hold their fire or anything of the sort, and neither had Black instructed anybody to halt their rushed haphazard plan to rush the Masters, but simultaneously everybody held off doing everything. All of them understood the implications of Nate’s refusal to throw his men to the dogs like disposable soldiers. If he wasn’t prepared to go ahead and let the zombies out to run amok and endanger everybody, but the impervious Fleshcravers onstage, then quite possibly nobody else was going to die inside this impromptu performance place.

“What’s it going to be?” SamEdi growled, his patience wearing thin, his wary eyes flickering from not just Nate, but around to all the others in the room. The other Masters, Black and his associates, now with very few still situated in their original seats. Knowing that his protected position no longer was as safe as it had been prior, the folly of tipping his hand a little early and letting the Masters see that they were not indispensable, or truly valued members of this exercise, laid bare. Leaving him in a precarious position.

As Scarlett slipped down low into the shadows and slunk over to where Seth crouched, her figure a bloody drenched shape, Seth clung onto that fiery little spark of hope trying to fan it into a bigger blaze, daring to hope that the result of this stand-off meant somehow he and his cronies weren’t about to join Blizzard, Jazmyn and those other dark body masses slumped on the floor among upturned chairs.

A fraction belatedly, Seth acknowledged the importance of Nate’s panicked earlier statement, calling out to Jazmyn.

The door was locked behind them. Jazmyn had the keys. And Jazmyn’s battered corpse was only several feet away from where he and Scarlett hunched in the corner, trying to avoid getting pinpointed in the green glow of intermittent light as it persisted with its constant strobing and flickerings.

If either one of them could crawl back to the bloodied, pulped head mess and dig around in whatever pockets may be in that outfit she was wearing, underneath the filmy cloak. Which had to be completely saturated in gore.

Searching through the bloody mire of Jazmyn’s body and her blood-drenched clothes didn’t rank as supremely high on the wish list of Seth, but it wasn’t as if he wasn’t already awash with blood, albeit old drying stuff. Being covered in a deluge of fresh gore was no joy, but it was far preferable to feeling his own spurt in hot gushes from his own body if those ravenous humanivores got to him and started ripping in with their teeth.

He imagined that sharp animal canines would be painful enough with their ability to pierce and puncture, but the thought of squarer human peg teeth having to put more physical effort in to sink into flesh and then tear profoundly at it to wrench the bloody meat away left him even colder.

If he could manage to locate the keys and get the door unlocked…

CHAPTER FORTY SIX-UNLEASHING THE BLOODTHIRSTY

The idea had merit, but was fraught with other issues. Seth needed to obtain those keys, somewhere in the blood-spattered clothing of Jazmyn, without being noticed by Nate. Then if he wanted Mark and Miranda safe as well, he needed to gain their attention, which might prove to be a difficult task, since he still had no clue where they were. It was a terrible possibility that if they weren’t crouched together on the floor then they were among the bodies strewn there.

As for Black, Tempest, Dax, Roxana, they weren’t immediately going to bolt for the escape route, because regardless of how they ended up in this room, they were in here with the targets of their relentless pursuit, the mission which had carried them all a long way from Armada, decimated many of their troops, and left them at this rapidly approaching culmination.

Well, maybe not Dax. Given his impassioned outburst regarding survival, perhaps he would be first to bolt for the door if he saw it crack open and offer a passage to escape, but not Black and Tempest. Like they said, it wasn’t about them staying alive, it was about Undead Fleshcrave being dead.

Which then brought Seth to the difficult proposition of Scarlett. As much as he desperately wanted to spirit her out of this perceived escape route he was so tantalisingly close to―
once he got his hands on those keys
―was she just going to go with him, leaving the others to their devices? Abandoning Black and the rest, since it was clear they would pull all stops out to ensure their hell-bent mission was achieved?

As much as he might have wanted to believe she would immediately jump at the opportunity to flee with him, he had a terrible sinking feeling she too, wanted to see the death metal zombie-makers dead first.

“Hold up a second,” Nate addressed SamEdi, and since he lacked the microphone the vocalist used to bellow over the outlandish noise swell emanating from the hungry and getting hungrier caged undead, the band also ceased playing their unmusic, and the sudden lack of pummelling soundscapes was eerie and bizarre. “Hang on, I’m giving it some thought. Boys, start moseying over this way. Everybody be cool. Jaz, get them keys ready.”

Again, Nate wasn’t looking back towards Jazmyn, he was keeping wary eyes on the band as if he suspected they were holding cards they hadn’t yet played, but were quite capable of.

“We’ll let ‘em out, but
only
when all of my people are over here and ready to get out in a flash. You dig that?”

Shit!
Seth concluded that Nate was still going to try and scrap up his promised pay day from Global Death. He just wanted to do it on his terms. Meaning the rest of the crew were still fucked. Still no weapons. Even less chance of getting them. No Masters left to use as Black inspired human shields. The lot of them meat for the humanivores.

“Jaz!” Nate barked again, and this time her continual lack of response drew his attention away from the stage―to where he was expecting his traitorous concubine to be. Saw nothing. Vision slipped down, spotted the body of Blizzard. Then the pulped watermelon head of a comprehensively gore soaked person that could only be Jazmyn. “What the…?”

“Time’s up!” SamEdi’s laughter resonated like swampy water and behind him, GatlingGrinder stood up from his stool, triggering a panel on the back wall behind him, hitting a series of switches located there, changing a whole host of small flashing red pinpricks of light to green. Metal shrieks issued as the doors of the cages housing the undead death heads came grinding open.

The other door came open too, but not in conjunction with the opening cells. This sudden occurrence was no part of an Undead Fleshcrave manifesto.

As the cages released their capacity crowd, the door so close to Seth and Scarlett was forced open in a sudden blast that brought a swarm of newcomers into the room, their sudden engulfing of the entry forcing the hunched duo over there to make haste back into the abruptly highly dangerous areas of the room.

They came in black leather outfits, with chains, spikes, boots, a number of them decked out in full corpse paint, a white base covered in ornate black slashes or patterns, and thick dark rings around their eyes.

They toted weapons. Guns. Bladed things. An arsenal. Which included Mother North, the Blizzard Beast and the Funeral/Freezing Moons.

They streamed in like a wolf pack, the man at the head of the congregation almost the same build and height as Black, his hair a long flaxen wave that glinted green under the sickly illumination in the room, his face profusely littered with black curving spikes of paint over the underlay of corpse white.

“My name is Vengeance Priest!” He boomed in a stentorian bellow that rang over the calamitous noise breaking out. “I came here on a revenge mission to slaughter those who left me for dead, but first I have another bone of contention to pick. Took these off a few scumbag bikers outside—after we spilled their guts on the concrete.”

He hoisted the Blizzard Beast in the air, the red and black entity catching some green jabs of light on its wicked body, and other members did likewise with the Moons and Mother North.

“I believe these belong to you.” The person with Mother North thrust the instrument towards stupefied Seth. Off to the left of the intrusive pack, the leader hurled the Blizzard Beast across the span of the room, where Black reached and plucked it out of the air.

Seth wasn’t too sure if the person in possession returned the Moons to Tempest, because by then the undead hordes were swarming and chaos reigned. It wasn’t chaos which fazed the army of newcomers, for Seth realised, as he watched them swarm into battle with the newly released undead marauders, that was exactly what they’d come for. They’d come dressed for war, specifically with zombies and it wasn’t any sort of spur of the moment decision.

Almost all of them wore spiked bands or collars around places that might otherwise have been prime vulnerable targets for gnashing undead teeth, and elsewhere on their leather clothing they even had lightweight metal plate sections affixed to the material. They all wore long leather boots which were decked out with chains around them, studs and more spiked straps, much of their upper torsos and the like crisscrossed with belts, they also wore gloves. Virtually the only thing which could have been considered detrimental about the appearance of this lot was the fact that the majority of them had long hair, though not all of them wore it loose.

Of course Subversion and their affiliates all wore long hair too and hadn’t yet found it a downfall, mainly because they were so dangerously adept at slaying the zombie hordes. However, this pack of newcomers seemed to have taken their plans to wage war on the undead epidemic to new levels, right to the point of fundamentally making the clothing they wore durable suits of armour against teeth and clawing fingernails. Even their facepaint was in some way a minor preventative measure against scratches.

There weren’t just menfolk in this entourage of black metal warriors—Seth couldn’t shake that tag from his mind—there were numerous women among their number, but just like Scarlett, Roxana, the other females Seth had come to know well in his posse, these ladies were anything but shrinking violets. They were armed up, clad in their battle leathers and spikes just like the guys, and they proved equally as adept at cutting down humanivores.

None of them were prone to stand around flapping their gums; after the brief introduction by the man calling himself Vengeance Priest and the transfer of the weaponry confiscated from the now deceased Renegade Masters to its rightful owners, the Black Metal Warriors sliced through the death metal meat-seekers spilling from the opened cells.

Momentarily stunned to a dumbfounded silence, Nate too, was forced away from that exit point he’d sought to spirit himself, Jazmyn, and his men to safety before releasing the undead. Now he regained composure, but only with vengeful plans to destroy those responsible for the bludgeoning death of Jazmyn. At least those he assumed were to blame. Seth and Scarlett. Ignoring the deadly threat posed by the freed zombies, Nate sought the duo in the mayhem, peering through the flickering haze of sickly green light, then made a beeline.

He was snapping up his gun, trying to draw a bead on Scarlett, when Seth unleashed Mother North, newly reacquainted with the lethal beauty, and already feeling her power seep back into his tired, aching arms. She might have belonged to Black, but for some reason the Warriors presented her to him, which set a few trains of thought running in the back of his mind, though he didn’t have any time to dwell on them now.

He swung the deadly bladed guitar and sheared Nate’s gun hand right off. Blood came pumping out in a spurt as the dismembered limb fell away still clutching the firearm, finger stuck inside the trigger guard, and the fresh inundation of gore brought attention—from the undead.

It wasn’t essentially a fatal wound, but it may as well have been. With no visible gun and only one hand to slap around inside his garments for whatever backup weapons he had stashed inside, in the transitory expanse of time he possessed before the death head zombies engulfed him, Nate was on a one way ticket to either joining them in their undead state or, becoming their long awaited dinner.

Seth didn’t get to see any outcome to that however, for Scarlett was screaming at him, yanking on his arm, bidding him to follow immediately. Not to escape out the door, as he’d suspected earlier, but to do precisely what he’d been fearing she wanted him to do. Finish the mission.

Once more, Undead Fleshcrave were on the move. Absconding. Making the most of the unexpected swirl of pandemonium and abandoning their private concert, having attained their goal of pulling the Zombie Trigger and having the mutant results unleashed in the arena.

Leaving their instruments behind yet again, the five piece were scarpering, bolting in a sprawling collection of death metal rats abandoning a ship they’d crashed into an undead iceberg. Down the steps at the side of the stage, SamEdi leading the charge, the others in a staggered line on his heels.

Though they were immune to attacks from the humanivores, they weren’t so much impervious to bullets or blades, so it wasn’t towards the door, all the way through the congested room full of furious, violent activity and spraying geysers of blood that they headed. Instead, they made for the back of the area, back behind the stage, clearly with an escape route mapped out.

Wielding the newly returned Blizzard Beast, Black was making his own plans to follow, slashing and slicing through any undead folly unfortunate to waver into his unerring path. Tempest had identical ideas, and Seth could see that somehow in the melee, he too, had been reacquainted with the Moons, at least one of each.

This was where Scarlett was intimating she wanted Seth to go. Just as he’d feared. She wasn’t going to leave the remaining Subversion members behind, not until the Undeaders were obliterated. And she wanted Seth on-board with that. Feeling his rising hopes that they’d just be able to slip out the open door unnoticed and escape this nightmare as best they could immediately plummet right down into a bottomless pit, Seth hoisted the bloodied Mother North again and got on-board.

Regardless of what decision he made, she would go on ahead anyway. With or without him. He hadn’t yet earned the right to supplant Black and Tempest in her life, no matter if his relationship with her was more physically intimate. Having already lost Blizzard, she wasn’t about to let those other two out of her sight.

Countless hours of Seth’s teenage years, spent hacking and slashing through packs of zombies in video games, had not adequately prepared him for this, tailing Scarlett through the bloody mire to get on the tail of Tempest and Black. Of course, he already knew that well from the gory battles already fought out in Blackwater Park, but in here, this was a totally different kettle of fish. Closer proximity, a denser presence of undead, less place to run and escape without running smack, bang into another pocket of grey, flaky-faced freaks with slavering, bloody maws and death metal T-shirts.

What any perceived video game notion didn’t make one aware of was the grotesque, overpowering stench, the hideous sounds, the very real blood splattering and splashing, the incredible fear of not just being bitten, seized, and torn asunder, but merely bitten just once, scratched by one grimy nail.

Although outside Seth only had himself, Black, and Nate to rely on to help clear out any of the humanivores looking to attack, in here there were a regiment of black metal stormtroopers, dressed up for battle and squandering not one second of time in despatching the zombies. Blades, axes, guns, and an astounding array of undead killing items stabbed, hammered, blasted holes in brittle skulls, and showered blood and fragmented brain matter, dropping undead bodies in tangled corpse piles.

Seth was struck by the bizarre appearance of black metal weapon bearers going head to head against marauding death metal zombies in an unusual clash of extreme metal genres.

One way or another, Scarlett wielded both a pistol and a machete, obviously obtained by one of the black-clad, corpse-painted newcomers, and though she used the gun sparingly, she used the bladed weapon with gleeful―or more likely, desperate—abandon, swinging it until the blade ran red, flinging blood showers off it with every swipe.

Seth did likewise, his arms again forced to shoulder the weight of Mother North as he dismembered humanivores and cleaved skulls, drenching himself in blood, attempting not to hurl as the pungent stench infiltrated his nasal passages with grim determination.