Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger

by Goforth, Jim

  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.

  Lincoln was still alive at this point, his eyes wide with horror and pain, but clearly he wasn't going to be for long.

  He stared in morbid disbelief at the ragged hole in his abdomen, trailing snakes of intestines, and below that, the missing section between his legs.

  "We can't...oh my god!" Miranda shrieked. "Do something!"

  Black turned around, his eyes somehow expressing an apologetic sorrowful tinge within the usual eerie stare, and then, as the four girls at the door bordered the path for Seth, Julietta, Mark, Miranda, Dax, Blizzard and Tempest to come through, he lifted his katana and brought it down fiercely.

  His blade sliced Lincoln's head from his body, toppling it among the cluster of zombie corpses.

  CHAPTER FOUR-ESCAPE

  "What did you do?" Miranda bawled at Black as he emerged from the chaotic room of pummelling death metal zombie triggers and undead flesh-eaters, his sword blade dripping fresh blood. "What did you do?"

  She beat at him ineffectually with open palms that closed to fists.

  "Would you rather he die as quick and humanely as possible, or would you rather he die in the most horrible, screaming agony you could imagine, still alive while he is being chewed to pieces?" Black was looking at her, but speaking to them all. "I made the choice for you, and it's one I would like granted to me if ever the situation arises."

  "You killed him, you killed him, you killed him...” Miranda's words faded into a choked torrent of sobs as she collapsed against Mark, burying her face in his chest.

  Glancing back into the green haze of the room, now rendered a ghastly red by a persistent shower of blood, Seth was infused with a morbid need to see Lincoln's body, to know he was dead. To ensure his friend wasn't suddenly about to rise to his feet and become one of these terrible creatures, one of the walking dead. Shambling out of the mayhem with knotted ropes of gnawed upon intestines spiralling in coils out of the great cavern in his abdomen, a big bloodied hole where his genitals once existed.

  He knew that Lincoln was well and truly dead, though he hadn't personally seen Black kill him, but the words of the Subversion frontman, though not outright saying so, stated enough to conclude that it was indeed the case.

  He couldn't see Lincoln's body, or if he was seeing it he couldn't exactly tell which one it was, there was a tangle of bodies inside and beyond that, more violent death unfolding.

  And somewhere in that charnel house of horrible death metal hymns that morphed average fans into bloodthirsty undead beings were three more of his friends, essentially deemed already dead by Black and his posse.

  Seth didn't want to believe that, couldn't believe it, but an awful little voice in the back of his mind whispered otherwise.

  After all, without the appearance of Black, Blizzard, Tempest and their zombie-chopping blade ensemble, he and his bunch of friends would have been a black metal banquet for the deadite death heads, so how could he expect Buck, Callie, and Adrianna to have been similarly fortunate? Especially if they'd been down in the pit, as Callie had been hinting she was planning to be once the headlining act hit the stage.

  It was inconceivable to think the trio had eluded the gnashing, flesh-tearing teeth and organ-searching hooked fingers of the zombie hordes.

  He didn't want to dwell on the thought of them trapped in the mosh once the Zombie Trigger was switched on, violently inflicted with the sickness that had swamped all of Seth's friends and then swarmed under a deluge of brutal zombie beasts driven by maddening hunger.

  Unfortunately, the cogitations were there already; it was too easy to imagine his trio of absent buddies falling victim to the undead the way Andy had, the way all the others who weren’t susceptible to the trigger had. Blizzard and Tempest yanked the weighty double doors closed behind them, cutting off Seth's view of the hideous activity seething within and the hellish sounds of the Undead Fleshcrave's music as it continued throwing its insidious tentacles of discord over the entire arena.

  This probably wouldn't keep the fiends inside for long, it was merely another device to separate them and the undead army, but as these heavy doors were brought shut it was with an air of finality that eliminated any slim hopes Seth may have held for his friends inside to miraculously escape the bloodbath.

  He didn't want to think about it, he had to concentrate on making sure Julietta didn't suffer the same fate. Or worse. If there could possibly be anything worse.

  They were in a long hallway; to the left would lead them out the way they and every other patron of the concert had entered; to the right was anybody's guess.

  Obviously heading left was a no brainer, but for one major obstacle.

  A thick cluster of security guards, akin to those standing impassively at the front of the stage while the Zombie Trigger took hold and pandemonium ensued, stood in an impenetrable cordon down the end of the hallway, barring any thought of exit through the main doors.

  "Jesus Christ!" Mark exclaimed. "What now?"

  He directed the frantic query at Black, staring at the Subversion head honcho over the top of Miranda's tousled blonde hair, her face still pressed against him.

  Dax wasn't paying any attention to Mark, he was staring in disbelief at the closed doors behind which the horror undoubtedly continued. Beyond which lay the separated head and body of his eviscerated friend.

  "What the hell? You're shutting everybody in? There are still people alive in there! Our friends are trapped in there! You can't do that!"

  "Pretty sure we just did," Tempest said solemnly, while Black merely stared down the hallway where the throng of security formed an impassable wall. "Anybody alive isn't going to remain that way for long. You saw what happened to your buddy when he wasted one tiny second. It's going to be a whole lot messier in there now. Anybody fancies the idea of going back inside on a fool’s mission to find people who are already gonna be ripped to shreds can go right ahead, but not through these doors. They stay closed."

  "You can't be serious!" Face streaked by runny mascara from tears still coursing over her cheeks, Miranda raised her head from Mark's shoulder,
trying to pin Tempest in her gaze. The broad-shouldered black-haired Tempest might not have been as towering and physically imposing as Black, but his dark slate eyes and sharp hatchet face adorned with a myriad of steel piercings was just as intimidating at this precise moment.

  "You can't leave people to die!" Miranda wailed. "You just can't do that!"

  "These doors do not open again," Tempest reaffirmed with a dangerous edge grating in his voice. "They stay shut until we get to the truck and back."

  "Back?" Dax echoed. "You plan on coming back? What the fuck for?"

  "That room has to be contained," Black said curtly.

  "Contained?" Again, Dax sounded like an idiot mimic with the inability to do anything but repeat what was said.

  "Yeah."

  There was another table just outside the double doors, further up the wall, this one laden with gig fliers, posters, and other paraphernalia related to this event and others. The taciturn Blizzard moved swiftly to this piece of furniture and upended it without a thought for spilling the contents all over the carpet; gig advertisements with bloody images on them that looked gorier than photographs of an autopsy fluttered everywhere.

  With the table turned on its side, Blizzard stamped on one of the uppermost legs with a savage downward force and it snapped right off with a splintery crack. He snatched it up and thrust it through the handles of the double doors, creating a crude, but temporarily effective means of keeping those doors shut.

  "There are people in there!" Miranda wailed, still trying to ram that point home to people it seemed lost on.

  "Not for long," Tempest persisted. "How many times do I need to say the same thing? I'm very sorry, but your friends are either dead, as good as dead, or liable to be turned into something you really don't want to contend with."

  "Will...will they help us?" Julietta said, gesturing towards the cluster of security way down the hallway, none of whom had yet made any advancements towards them. The hopeless edge to her query suggested she already knew the answer, but she asked anyway.

  "No." Black said. "They're here to ensure nobody like us gets out."

  "What? What?" Dax asked. "What do you mean? You sure as hell seem to know a lot about what the fuck is going on. So what the fuck is going on here?"

  One of the four black-haired women with them finally spoke, the first of them to offer anything to the rushed back and forth of panicked questions and curt responses.

  "Let’s get out,” she said. “And then...”

  The rest of her words were drowned out by a sudden violent hammering against the blocked double doors, a cataclysmic eruption that sparked alarm in those nearest.

  "Shit!" Dax bellowed, envisioning a horde of death metal zombie freaks busting through with clutching fingers and slavering maws.

  "We've gotta move," another of the women prodded, this one in black leathers with her raven hair in two sets of braids, black fingerless gloves on each hand. She was small and compact, but lithe and limber as well, an intense-faced beauty with piercing green eyes.

  As if the uttering of her words were some type of impulse or signal to galvanize the security crowd, there was abrupt motion from those very quarters.

  In a rolling wave of grey security uniforms, the entire congregation of the up until now unconcerned bunch blocking the exit suddenly rushed down the hallway.

  "Move it!" Black commanded, gesturing quite unnecessarily for the crew to bolt right, and whilst the pack of security storming at them probably wasn't as intimidating as being swarmed by flesh-seeking zombie creatures, it was motivation enough for all of them to flee without tarrying, even Miranda.

  The quartet of raven-tressed women moved aside, two to the left and two to the right of the hall, allowing Seth and his friends to run first, and they did so, pounding down the passageway.

  Mark led the way with Miranda in tow, not exactly in possession of a clear idea as to where he was headed, but knowing this way led away from the surge of security chasers. Next came Dax, Seth, and Julietta with the latter’s hand momentarily slipping from the grasp of Seth’s fingers as they ran, spinning him into a transitory irrational panic thinking she'd been snatched from behind. Of course this wasn't the case, as the four women associates of the Subversion trio were following closing behind, Black and his cohorts bringing up the rear. Seth barely dared glance across to make sure Julietta was still running alongside him, let alone hurl a look back behind to see if the security guards were gaining on them. He had a fleeting moment to wonder if the pursuers had guns and, if they did, just how soon he could expect a bullet in the back of one of his group’s skulls, and then Mark was crashing into a doorway, slamming the door open and vanishing through the opening.

  No gunshots had yet reverberated throughout the hallway, so Seth assumed―hoped—that the cordon of chasers weren't armed; he couldn't quite imagine why security at a metal concert would need guns, or at least prior to this horrendous night he couldn't have, but in his panicked mind it seemed perfectly logical for them to be bearing firearms.

  Mark and Miranda literally disappeared from view, but as he and his two companions entered through the open doorway Seth realised why.

  The doorway led directly to a flight of concrete steps down which the duo were careening, vaulting them in twos and threes.

  Seeing a broken neck in somebody's near future, Seth barely had time to consider the ramifications of one of the frontrunners stacking it on these precarious stairs and tumbling in a tangle of limbs to the bottom before he himself was leaping, stumbling and charging down them. He heard feet thundering behind him, clattering down the steps, then he was hitting the bottom, Julietta a hair’s breadth behind him.

  He hazarded a look back up the flight and saw the quartet of women coming down fast. The other three were still at the top and, as he watched, head still spinning and somewhat mesmerised, he saw a grey-sleeved arm flash through the decreasing doorway gap as Black attempted to close it.

  The blade of Black's katana flashed briefly in the glint of light shining from beyond the door and then severed the reaching hand at the wrist, cleaving it clean from the arm. As a gory spray of blood fountained from the stump, the disembodied hand flew from the force of the savage slice and tumbled like a pale bloodied spider down the stairs, raining red droplets over the concrete.

  Hypnotised by the bouncing dismembered hand, Seth watched, entranced as it continued to fall down the steps, wondering if it was going to come all the way down with its hooked fingers and bloody spray.

  "Keep moving!" A voice snapped at him; one of the girls.

  He only now acknowledged that Mark and Miranda, even Julietta, had carried on ahead and he made to follow, overcoming his morbid curiosity about the descent of the severed hand.

  Turning right on the advice of the foursome of women who shadowed him, he discovered they were in another hallway lined with various doors. This, he ascertained, must be some kind of secondary area for toilets and the like. Where the hallway led, he didn't have a clue. Out, was what he was fervently hoping, running into some kind of dead end would be all kinds of fucked up. Especially if the hounds on their tail were packing guns and ready to seek bullet-driven vengeance for the actions of hand-chopping Black.

  The thunder of running feet on the hard surface of the floor sounded as though someone had released a herd of wild horses to gallop through the lower level hall, all boots and heeled shoes ramping the noise level up immeasurably.

  A nauseating concoction of aromas permeated this passageway, only slightly less revolting than the atrocious rotting carcass smell saturating the band room. Stale beer, disinfectant, urine, perfume, old lingering tobacco, all in a nostril-stinging miasma, were the most prominent odours, though there were other indeterminable ones wafting in there too. Seth was glad he was running through the area; he couldn't fathom having the stomach to walk through here.

  The floor was strewn with refuse and litter, puddled with suspicious liquids such that a wayward foot landing in one of
these pools would spell certain disaster.

  Seth envisioned his luck running out swiftly, having safely descended the flight of stairs only to go ass up in a puddle of piss or spilled alcohol.

  The luck did run out, but it wasn't due to a careless boot skidding in a slippery mess on the floor.

  It came as Mark and Miranda reached the end of the hall, coming to a screeching halt at a closed door.

  A locked door.

  Seth didn’t need to see the score, since Julietta got there a little ahead of him and wasn’t having any better luck than Mark before her in trying to get the door open. One would have thought the entire collective of death metal zombies were just about to overrun them and feast on their flesh the way Miranda hammered on the door and then slumped hopelessly down, sitting with her back to it, head in her hands.

  Seth guessed he could hardly blame her dramatic reactions; she knew Lincoln was dead, Buck, Callie, and Adrianna were still trapped inside the undead hellhole, presumably in torn body sections, and they were forced into a dead end here by security guards who apparently wanted them fed to the zombie freaks.

  What was more, their rescuers from an initial scattered meat smorgasbord comprised of choice cuts of their own sides of beef were dubious company indeed; it could easily be a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire.

  Running full tilt at the door, Dax didn't even try the obviously useless tact of attempting the door handle; he shoulder charged the thing.

  It stood firm as he bounced backwards off it, face twisted in a grimace of pain.

  The panicked thumping of Seth's heart escalated. Their absent friends were trapped inside and they were as sure as hell trapped here, run into a corner by a cavalcade of grey-clad security personnel who were going to be bearing down on them any tick of the clock now; that is, unless they’d all stopped to deal with the one-handed overzealous fellow with the misfortune of reaching through the doorway gap.

  Then Black, Tempest, Blizzard and the women were all there as well.

  "Locked?" Tempest asked the obvious.