Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger (58 page)

Her aghast scream seeming to go on and on, revolving around the atmosphere that was a desolate keen, Scarlett clutched the wall top in white-knuckled fists as she watched the body of Roxana plummet, arms outflung, falling away from Drill’s dropping figure.

Though Kathaarian was only a handful of stories in height, it wouldn’t have mattered had it been a single level dwelling. Nobody landing on the ground below was going to survive, regardless if the initial fall didn’t kill them on impact, because both of the falling souls were going to land right amongst a hotbed of hungry humanivores. And they did, almost concurrently. Roxana smacked the street first, landing on her back with all her limbs splayed out and the ensuing crunch was horrendous and final, an instant pooling stream of dark red spilling out around her head, in runnels that followed the spread of her tousled hair.

Drill was either more fortunate, or extremely less fortunate, depending on which death might be viewed as more acceptable. His careening body actually landed atop a cluster of undead, a family including two young children, who must have been out for what they thought would have been a pleasant family outing. Now they were all prowling insatiable zombies, hunting through their hometown to eat those of their fellow residents who hadn’t yet succumbed to infection or death.

The shock of Drill’s hefty weight capsized the pack of family undeads, obviously turned as a group and still retaining enough of their memories to decide to hunt and seek flesh together, and two of them, one adult, one child went down. The other two, however, didn’t lose their footing. The father, dressed in simple slacks and a button up shirt, both of which were now ripped and spattered with spots of blood, turned eerie eyes skywards as if whatever piece of brain might still be remotely ticking, was wondering why food was falling from the sky now.

Then, like his son, a kid no more than ten years at the time of infection, now a ravenous little monster, he fell upon the screaming shape of Drill and together they silenced the Masters hideous waling with a symphony of bestial grunts and rending teeth. As the rest of the family scrambled out from beneath the unfortunate biker to join the feast, others were already converging on the corpse of Roxana, her skull shattered on impact, her brains and blood leaking into the street acting as an instant dinner bell.

Rusty yanked up his gun, letting Heather fall away, smacking her knees hard against the concrete, and then he snapped off a hasty shot. Dax was blasted backwards in an ungainly dance that saw his legs tangle and his body fall, the blades of Mother North cleaving nothing but air as she fell from his grasp.

Like he’d been some sprint runner crouched in position waiting for the starter pistol, Seth didn’t see the aftermath of what was happening with the fallen duo on the street because he was up in a split second, surging as though that starter gun clapped its outburst right in his ear. With both hands clasped so tight around the handle of his cleaver they may as well have been part of the implements design, he brought it up and down in such a savage motion that his intended action resulted in far more violence than he might have been expecting. The heavy blade of the weapon powered into the back of The Deadwalker’s head, the sheer impetus of Seth’s attack carrying his whole body down behind it and the cleaver interred itself so deep, it was still shearing through bone and brain as the guitarist buckled and cracked the rooftop with his knees. His skull was virtually broken in two, blood pissing all over Seth’s hands, and a mash of grey gunk slopped out of the ruined aperture that was a human head only mere seconds earlier.

Skin got off a shot, but to no avail; the bullet ricocheted off a Funeral Moon held aloft in the hand of Tempest as he and Black arrived in a whirling dervish of death and destruction. This Moon utilised as a shield, the other as the lethal weapon it was, Tempest eviscerated Rusty like he was gutting a fish, slicing the Freezing Moon up between his legs, separating his testicles with a cruel blade that halved him as efficiently as a circular saw.

Entrails flopped in fleshy ropes amidst buckets of blood that poured from the two sides of the Master’s body, his innards coming out in a hideous gory stew, steaming and splashing on the ground.

Then the head of Skin became a bouncing, rolling, bowling ball that bobbled away across the roof top in a spiral of blood drops as the Blizzard Beast in the fists of Black took it right off the squat man’s shoulders, leaving a bloodied neck stump shooting gore. A surprised expression of disbelief seemed to stare out of the eyes of the decapitated cranium until it smacked against the leg of a table and came to a stop, facing away, gazing eternally into pools of shadow.

Struggling to retrieve his cleaver from the mush of Deadwalker’s destroyed head, the blade almost shearing right down through the roof of the man’s mouth, Seth saw through the haze of blood falling in a gory rain over the heads and shoulders of everybody, that Scarlett had finally arrived too, her face streaked with tears, but her expression grim.

She came in a flurry of hacks with her machete, slicing and dicing, and taking pieces off GatlingGrinder like he was a prime piece of beef being dissected for a banquet. As with Seth’s brutal assault on The Deadwalker, Grinder never saw it coming. The blade of the machete was slashing through meat, showering blood, and cutting off segments before he was even aware of it, and Scarlett’s attack was so frenzied and furious, Seth wasn’t wholly sure of what he was watching, what parts were flying off the man.

Eventually Scarlett ceased her relentless slaughter, slumping to her knees in the welter of blood drenching the rooftop, the splatter and puddles of it spanning a distance of several metres away from where the wholesale slaughter took place. Seth dropped down alongside her, his slippery cleaver dropping from his sticky fingers.

Groaning, Dax clutched at his shoulder, blood spiling between his fingertips, struggling to right himself or at least prop himself up. The hasty shot fired by Rusty hadn’t done near enough damage as the biker would have liked.

As Heather crawled through the blood to join Scarlett and Seth, Tempest hunkered down alongside her, a hand gently stroking messy hair back out of her eyes. There wasn’t any need for him to stand alongside Black. The Subversion boss stood over the splayed figure of SamEdi, the bespattered blades of the Blizzard Beast on the death metal vocalist’s throat.

“You know what my favourite Undead Fleshcrave song is?” Black asked the downed frontman, receiving a garbled plea as response. “None of them. I fucking hate your undead themed, brutal death metal shit. But for now, it’s a toss-up between ‘Bleeding an Eviscerated Corpse’ and ‘Scattered Meat Smorgasbord’.”

Then he handed the Blizzard Beast back to Tempest, and withdrew his katana from the scabbard strapped across his back, formerly hidden away beneath his now absent jacket.

SamEdi lost all semblance of his guttural grave dirt vocal timbre when he began screaming, then the fever pitch escalated as Black pierced his abdomen with the razor sharp blade, and very slowly and deliberately sliced the frontman’s stomach wide open, folding back the skin and muscle, exposing gleaming internal organs.

After all of the truly heinous and supremely violent things Seth had both seen and done, this was perhaps the most hideous of all, yet any nausea he might have felt otherwise just simply wasn’t there. No horror, no feeling, nothing but a desensitized triumphant sense of relief, even when Tempest and Scarlett picked up the Blizzard Beast and Mother North respectively, and began to join Black in hacking SamEdi into his very own Scattered Meat Smorgasbord. At some point Seth even picked up his bloody cleaver and Heather took hold of the discarded machete Scarlett wielded before, and then they both took part in the dismemberment as well.

CHAPTER FORTY NINE-WELCOME TO HELL

They left the rooftop awash with blood and scattered hunks of meat, mutilated corpses leaking brains and evacuated bodily fluids into a hideous stew, a deathly stench trailing into the air. The sounds of the undead apocalypse below faded as they re-entered Kathaarian.

Mostly they travelled in profound silence, with Dax limping behind the pack, a pariah, largely ignored.

Few words were spoken after an initial exchange when Seth went to finally return Mother North to Black.

“Nope,” the big Subversion kingpin shook his head firmly, his long black locks wet with blood that trailed over his shoulders. “She’s yours now, Seth. She’s chosen you. She wants to be with you and I reckon you want to be with her too. Besides, you aren’t only going to need her in the future, but you might be needing her again very soon. I don’t think our black metal saviours in there, are in any way friends to us.  The reason they are here was to kill us.”

“How do you figure?” Seth queried, his disbelieving joy at the gift Black so nonchalantly bestowed upon him, tempered by the Subversion man’s sombre statement.

“You didn’t see who their head honcho is?” Black asked. “The one calling himself Vengeance Priest?”

“No, not with the corpse paint. Even so, I didn’t get a good look at him anyway. Who was it?”

“You’ll see,” Black replied simply. “Prepare to be astounded. And prepare to put Mother North to use once more. I’m not so sure they still aren’t out to kill us.”

They had the chance to already…
Seth was going to say, instead he lapsed into silence alongside the rest of them, Scarlett by his side, her hand clasped in his once more, both slick with blood.

Black walked on ahead, his sword sheathed again, Blizzard’s instrument having been posthumously bequeathed to him, and Seth and Scarlett trailed in his wake. Behind them came Tempest with Heather, her arm wrapped about him and several long paces behind them all was the figure of Dax, relieved of all weaponry.

Sporadic occurrences of lurking undead greeted them on the journey back into the bowels of Kathaarian, but nothing like the plague epidemic which was underway outside. Since there were already some of them loitering inside the walls of the establishment, it wouldn’t be long until more streamed in, but for now it appeared as though the food sources outside were sufficient to keep the majority roaming out there. Any of them that did cross the path of the returning Subversion survivors were nothing of concern.

Nothing that couldn’t be dealt with, swiftly and violently.

The two factions met around halfway, traipsing in their blood-soaked packs through the intermittent lights of the mostly eerily quiet establishment, walking warily through long spans of shadowed hall to patches of illumination.

Evidently the Black Metal Warriors also chose to exit the concert room via the door behind the stage as the fleeing Undeaders did, following the trail of strewn bodies left behind by all those who’d gone before them, seeking to find those who’d chased after the band, or the other members who’d managed to evade the slaughter of undead and humans alike.

Both groups found each other, and both pulled to a stop at opposite ends of a primarily dark hallway, sparsely occupied by spots of light, both staring in profound silence down the expanse of the passage.

Apparently, either some of the gun-toting bikers were able to strike back pretty resiliently at the invasive influx, or a zombie or two discovered ways around the makeshift armour worn by them because, even from here, Seth could see that the numbers of the other group were also down. The comprehensive spikes, the chains, the metal plates and other items designed to keep undead from penetrating and inflicting infection may well have done that, but without armour from head to toe, the intrusive warriors weren’t immune to bullets. Those who were walking out here in the hallway had obviously prevailed in the bloodshed unleashed in the concert arena, but they hadn’t skipped away without casualties.

Their leader had escaped any rain of fiery bullets, or gnashing undead teeth, the man who called himself Vengeance Priest. Mirroring Black’s movements at the other end of the hall, he stepped forward, out of the cloistered shrouds of the dark, and into a fall of light. While his corpse paint was still mostly in place, it was now starting to streak a little in patches, his identity wasn’t that hard to ascertain.

Black was right. Seth was astounded. More so, he was dumbfounded. Flabbergasted. He was looking at a ghost. In fact, several ghosts.

Vengeance Priest was Buck Quinn. Back in the handful of Black Warrior followers fanned out behind him in the hallway, as equally done up in corpse paint and spiked leather attire, were Adrianna Quinn and Callie West. All believed dead in the disastrous debacle of the first days of apocalypse in Armada.

Seth felt like he’d been clubbed with a wrecking ball, his breath smacked right out of him. Back behind the main body of his friends, he wasn’t even sure if Dax had seen, or acknowledged who this character calling himself Vengeance Priest was, but it was quite clear that not only had he, his sister, and her friend survived the massacre inside the Quo Vadis Bar, but they’d all evolved into Hunters of sorts to rival the likes of Black, Tempest, and the deceased Blizzard.

“So, what’s it going to be, Quinn?” Black spoke calmly, his blood-streaked arms crossed over his chest, his katana in its sheath on his back only a brief flicker of a hand away. “You and your vengeance crowd still fixing to kill us? That’s the reason you’re in Blackwater Park as well, isn’t it?”

“There is no more Buck Quinn,” Vengeance Priest replied gravely. “Buck Quinn and the others you knew died exactly where you thought they did. Back where you left them all for dead. Now there is just Vengeance Priest, there is Natassja, there’s Empress. And yes, you are correct. The whole plan was to hunt you all down and kill you wherever you’d travelled to. For the longest time, that was my chief motivation in doing everything I did, though to begin with it was only
my
master plan, shared with nobody else. It motivated me, it fuelled me, it drove me on, and made me more than I was. Lethal, dangerous, resilient, powerful. Able to strike down great numbers of the undead plague wherever we encountered them, becoming smarter, more cunning, clever. Able to take what we wanted or needed, and with cities just falling all up and down the coast, able to reign where we wanted. The police can’t stop this, hell, the army didn’t get a quick enough jump on it, they can’t hold back the tide either. One simple death metal concert, then a chain of others and the most ludicrous concept one might ever expect to become reality, an apocalypse of the undead, is here.

“And then it occurred to me, why the hell was I investing all my time and energies, all my hatred and resentment into chasing down those I thought wronged us? Because, after all, you didn’t, I’ll concede that now. At the time, sure, blaming you for us being left behind to escape that hell was what I did, but of course, what it really did was make us, shape us, create us. In hindsight, this was inevitable once that Trigger was switched on and kept getting switched on, and now this is the way the world is. The weak get swallowed up and the rest of us endure, persevere, and make what we will of the hand we’ve been dealt. And I’m not going to be someone who runs and hides and lays low, always looking to escape this epidemic. I’m going to rule like a king among it. So, rather than want to kill you now, I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to you for making us what we now are.”

Vengeance Priest ceased talking, and Black gazed back evenly at him, merely nodding once to acknowledge everything the man said.

“And I’ll return thanks for arriving here to throw a monkey wrench in the cogs of this final concert to switch on the Trigger, but I suspect you’ve been watching and waiting for some time to do so.”

“Indeed,” Vengeance Priest nodded back. “But one more thing. We might essentially be on the same side of sorts, but that doesn’t make us friends. Armada has fallen, it is in the embrace of undead chaos, but it is our chaos. It belongs to us. You and yours can have this metropolis, or whatever you see fit, but don’t ever return to Armada. There’s no place for you there anymore.”

“Wait!” Dax suddenly burst through, pushing past Seth, Scarlett, and Black to stand in front of them. “Wait a minute. Buck…I mean, Vengeance Priest…I’m coming with you. Let me join your group. I’ve no business with any of these people…”

“What’s more,” Black interjected harshly. “You aren’t welcome here anymore. You’re a loose cannon, you’re a liability, and you can’t be trusted. If they’ll take you, good luck to them, but you will never be welcome to ride with us again. There’s a lot more I could say, but I won’t. Go on and run along. I almost hope they don’t take you, and then you will see just how far you are going to make it in this fucking debacle, but that’s not my call.”

A scowl flitted across the face of Dax, but only momentarily. An earnest look, almost of desperation, supplanted it as he turned attention back to Vengeance Priest and his silent soldiers. They stared back, impassive, stoic, unreadable under their corpse paint for long moments, then Priest gestured with his hand, waving Dax over.

“Come on then. I see you’ve worn out your welcome here. Better hope you don’t do likewise here. We don’t suffer fools too lightly either and you’re going to have to be part of the machine, or you’ll be feeding the undead.”

Immediately, Dax was gone, scampering away to join the others without a backwards look at Seth or anyone. Seth expected to feel pangs of something, some regret, pain or sorrow jabbing twinges into him, but he didn’t. He only felt hollow and empty about the desertion of Dax, the friendship expired a long time ago, almost following a similar trajectory as his relationship with the long departed Julietta.

“As for your other friends, what’s left of them are still inside. There aren’t too many of them, but then again there’s a fair few of us missing too. But that’s been how it’s gone from the start, we lose numbers, we gain numbers. That’s the way this world is going to operate now, the smart and the strong will prevail, and the rest will fall by the wayside. Since I’m assuming you’ve done what you came to do, and Undead Fleshcrave are but resemblances to the pieces of scattered meat they grunt about in their songs, then our time here is done.”

“As is ours,” Black replied simply, choosing not to elaborate on that remark any further.

With that, Vengeance Priest marshalled his remaining Black Metal troops, including the latest recruit Dax, and continued on down the hallway, some nodding solemn acknowledgement of sorts to Black and his companions, others merely staring straight ahead and ignoring them. Seth saw the woman who he’d known as Callie, but now went by the moniker Empress glance ever so briefly at them, perhaps taking in the absence of some faces she might have expected to see there, then away again. After all, Vengeance Priest stated the way things had run with them, quite obviously it was something which had impacted on Seth and his crew too.

Then they were gone, treading off down the primarily dark hallway, swallowed up in shadows.

Where they were intending to exit, or how they were planning to contend with the swarming throngs of undead, Seth hadn’t a clue, but it wasn’t his concern nor did he want to make it his concern. His interest remained only in seeing whether Mark and Miranda were among the survivors inside, and then, how all of them were planning on escaping Kathaarian.

Amidst a staggering sprawl of bodies, broken, bloodied, segmented, and in a blood flooded floor almost an inch deep in places, Mark and Miranda were among the survivors as were Renee, Lilith and Gavin. But no others.

Everybody else, including a host of the Black Metal Warriors and all of the Renegade Masters who hadn’t escaped the room before the war ensued were dead. Almost every single corpse riddling this ghastly performance room of pain and sheer brutality bore death wounds to their heads in some way, the proof that they’d all been destroyed as undead or killed prior to morphing into zombies.

Seth could imagine what horrors unfolded in this room to leave it in a state of utter bloodshed and sprawled corpses spread from every corner, some still in the cells or half hanging out doorways, the air alive with a pungent mixture of foul smells, but he didn’t delve too deep into trying to recreate it all in his mind. There was little enough room left for such hideous scenes in his head as it was, those many terrible scenes already witnessed pushing happier pleasant things into a tiny corner of it.

He didn’t know whether the survivors here were ordered to wait inside this horrible death laden area by Vengeance Priest, or if they’d done so of their own accord, frozen in the shock of still being among the living, but they gradually begin moving once they recognised those who’d returned.

While Black and Tempest prowled throughout, searching bodies, looking to see if there was anything the vultures hadn’t already appropriated, Seth, Scarlett, and Heather went to the others.

“Dax?” Mark queried.

“Gone,” Seth told him. “But of his own free will. He left to…join them.”

“Them?”

“Vengeance Priest and his gang.”

“Oh…right. Listen, Seth, I wasn’t seeing things was I…Vengeance Priest was actually Buck wasn’t he?”

“Was being the operative word. He isn’t Buck anymore. Not the Buck we knew. There’s nothing of the guy who was our friend left, and he both blamed us and then thanked us for the opportunity to become something other than what he was. And as for Dax, he’s long since revoked his friendship with us. There’s no getting any of that back.”