by Goforth, Jim
“Sure as hell do,” Mark shot back, eyes flashing with fire as if he thought Blizzard was baiting him, intimating he hadn’t actually carried out these deeds he spoke of. “Fat bastard in a Possessed shirt. Then I accounted for his pal in a Mortician shirt. They were part of the gang that came for us down there.”
Mark waved back down the road as it stretched out under the rolling wheels of the truck, disappearing behind them along with the rest of Bloodbath Beach and the slaughter sands, the pockets of undead now spilling out to migrate into other parts of town. He neglected to mention his moment of sickness, conveniently omitting the part where he hurled up everything in his stomach while he lay weakened beside the road.
“Glad to hear it,” Blizzard responded offhandedly, not even bothering to take his attention away from his cleaning efforts, wiping zombie gore away from his weapon.
“What about you then, Seth?” Mark challenged, apparently looking to deflect the focus away from himself, satisfied he’d met whatever obscure criteria might exist to ensure one was able to adequately cope in the way of maintain survival. “Was that your first kill? Just back there, now?”
“No,” Seth replied quietly.
“Oh?” Mark looked confused, intrigued.
“I killed another beforehand. It was…well…it was Madeleine.” Seth murmured, trying to keep his voice in a low enough tone that it didn’t carry above the engine up to where Lizette was sitting, her expression dark. It wasn’t a successful tactic for she appeared to have the radar sonar of a bat and she looked up from her obviously deep cogitations, her expression darkening even further as she caught his sorrowful glance. He broke eye contact and stared away, off at the landscape rushing by, the spread out residences, caravan parks, businesses, and so forth of Noumena gradually giving way to empty plains.
Mark looked like he wanted to further press for more details on how that came to be, he even craned his neck as if he was trying to see all the heads accountable inside the Tundra, wondering if Madeleine was there and Seth was pulling his chain. The tone in the voice of his mate suggested otherwise and the blackening scowl adorning the face of the woman with the eyebrow ring was further enforcement Seth wasn’t having a lend of him.
Initially, Seth was under the impression that somehow, at least three of the women present in Black’s entourage were perhaps romantically involved, or otherwise taken in some form of relationships with the three men who constituted Subversion. Looking at Lizette’s unfavourable reaction to the death of Madeleine, even though she’d turned into one of the fleshchomping meatseeking humanivores they were all now programmed to kill, he and his friends included, Seth’s thoughts wandered on a different parallel. Like maybe Lizette and Madeleine were more likely a romantic item than either of them with any one of the black metal trio.
So, did that mean Roxana and Scarlett were involved with Black, Tempest, or Blizzard at all? Both of them? Either of them? None of them?
Seth had no idea why he was even contemplating it, how it was imperative in any way, but the original thought that Madeleine and Lizette may have been more than mere friends or zombie-making hunter companions set him off on a train of thought which arrived at these various curious stations.
Silence stole over all of the members sitting in the Tundra’s tray, Blizzard completely happy to carry on cleaning and polishing the Beast, almost in an adoring fashion, though unlike Black’s Mother North, he didn’t consider the item a loving lethal lady, he referred to it as an ugly and deadly critter. That was true enough; Seth plainly recalled the first damaging strike with the wicked blade and then the sudden backswing, decapitating three attackers in a couple of fluid motions.
With the other two members and owners of the extraordinary instrument weapons sitting in the front of the Truck, keeping a vigilant watch on any more humanivores which might advance from there, there hadn’t been any opportunity to see anything else but the Blizzard Beast in action. With all of those in the back eventually all pitching in to deal with the temporary onslaught of undead and then being ably assisted by new zombie-killing devotee Dax, there hadn’t been any need for Tempest and Black to unleash the awesome might of their dangerous tools.
It wasn’t such a dark night that it was pitch black out here, but once the actual town of Noumena was behind them, so too were distinguishable landmarks and buildings. Watching it flow by, to Seth it all just became indistinct, open plains, fields, unused plots of land merging into one another, everything becoming the same.
Abruptly, the Truck slowed down its rapid pace, the careening speed it was going along the blacktop dropping right down, then stopping altogether. Black was pulling over to the edge of the roadside, the tyres crunching in gravel.
“What the hell?” Mark wondered, while Roxana and Lizette both stood up in the tray, gazing over the Tundra’s roof.
Blizzard glanced up from his bass weapon. Done with cleaning it, he’d returned it to the guitar case he housed it in, though he hadn’t yet closed the lid, instead merely gazing down at it as if planning ahead, or mentally counting how many more mutated death heads he would be removing the craniums of in the near future. Or, more likely, how many members of Undead Fleshcrave and their pack of Sentinels he could hone his blade on.
He pushed the case off his lap, but he still didn’t close it, no doubt ready to sling the deadly beast back out if the reason for the sudden stoppage was dire.
Doors came open in the front of the truck, flooding the vehicles interior with light, and gazing through the rear window Seth observed that it was Tempest and Black both getting out this time. Looking further up the road he saw something else, something highlighted in the glow of the Truck’s headlights.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN-ABOMINATIONS OF DESOLATION
There was another vehicle a ways up, in fact, run off the road. It angled right off the tarred section, its tail-end and rear tyres just on the strip of dirt and pebbly gravel bordering the road, its nose hanging down into a slight grass filled ditch beyond that.
Captured in the gleam from the Tundra’s headlights it appeared to be a white or cream coloured vehicle, a four door sedan that might have otherwise seemed to be just any old nondescript random automobile. Except that it wasn’t.
Even from here, Seth could tell that it was the car from the parking lot of the Quo Vadis bar in Armada. Heather’s car.
What in hell was it doing out on this stretch of road, run off the edge and nosediving into a ditch on a route that, far from being the one leading back to Armada, was instead going in the opposite direction? If the plan was to vacate Neptune Towers and Noumena, aiming promptly for the besieged city of Armada, there was absolutely no need for the sedan to be out here.
Seth vaulted over the side and out of the Tundra’s tray. Almost instinctively, he was launching out and he did it fast, too fast, and the bottom of his feet slapped the hard surface of the blacktop with a force that sent shock waves right through his body. He was able to stay upright, but his legs shuddered like they wanted to collapse under him, then he shook off that wobbly sensation and broke into a run.
Behind him, Mark too realised who the car belonged to and the significance of it, probably also in a state of wonderment as to what it was doing here when he’d heard it was going back in the other direction, to Armada. In an even less spectacular fashion than Seth, he exited the back of the Truck, bowling straight over the side, between where Roxana stood and Blizzard hunched now. His landing was far less cohesive than Seth’s was, and with Seth almost breaking both legs or at very least twisting an ankle or two, Mark’s descent was a debacle.
He of course, was on the other side, where the Tundra’s wheels were stationary on the strip of gravel and his boots slipped in the loose rubble. He skidded down through this scattered pebble matter and slipped right off the roadside, feet upending him in an awkward slide that carried him crashing right down through the grass and into the ditch.
Already in full flight, Seth didn’t know Mark had followed him out,
much less that his drop from the Truck managed to pitch him down the grassy incline into the roadside trench. Seth thundered past the truck, even past the steady, but cautiously moving pair of Black and Tempest.
“Hey, steady on there, man!” Tempest advised as he barrelled past. “Cool your jets!”
Seth ignored him. He was beyond hanging around waiting for the two Subversion guys to go and carry out their investigation first. He needed to know if Julietta was okay. Clearly the off-white sedan had been involved in some kind of accident or it wouldn’t be pointing off the road at an irregular angle. One would think they sure as hell wouldn’t have tried parking it like this.
There was no other vehicle in sight, no evidence of anything else that might have presented itself as an obstacle, and although there were a scattering of trees and a few clusters of scrub and bush down in the fields bordering the road, none of them were close enough to be the reason for an accident. Maybe there was some animal deceased on the blacktop further up the road which created this, leading whoever was behind the wheel to veer suddenly to avoid it, ending up nose first in the ditch. Even as he bolted towards the vehicle Seth could see no evidence of that. Unless the instigator of the crash hadn’t been killed on impact, maybe crawling away into the cover of the fields to die.
First to make it to the car, he saw it was empty. The driver’s side door hung open, as did the rear passenger door behind it. Both other doors were also cracked as if they’d been open, possibly pushed shut by either force, or intentionally by people exiting through them and then closing them. There was nobody inside; no slumped driver hunched over the steering wheel, no passengers resting against the dashboard or with their heads mashed against the inside of the windscreen. No passengers strapped into their seatbelts in the back.
With the headlights of the Tundra boring into the side panels of the tipped up sedan and illuminating the windows, Seth saw a lot more that kicked terrible blasts of fear throughout him. The windows were splattered with blood, both the front and back windows on this side, from the inside. He stooped and stared inside, trying vainly to see if he could spy bodies on the floor, maybe prone across the seats, but there was nothing.
In a stupor of panic, he dashed around to the other side of the vehicle, only to see more blood was splashed upon these windows from the inside as well. He tossed desperate looks up and down the road, realising it was futile to gaze back the way they’d come, but despairingly doing so anyway. Then he blundered off into the ditch, tripping, stumbling, falling all the way down, in a hopeless mirror of Mark exiting the Tundra.
“Julietta!” he bellowed as the ground seemed to take umbrage with him and dropped him in its grassy embrace, slick with dew. The breath punched out of him and his next panicky shouted lament was a laboured one, but he managed to find his footing.
As he did he witnessed a cordon of figures bursting up out of the dark patches of shadow down upon the fields, coming from under trees, out of tangled knots of scrubland.
Somebody back at the truck must have brought a flashlight out, for the beam of it shot down that way, towards the sudden thrashing sounds in the grass and bush, a straight beam of light that captured one of these erratically running shapes. Seth saw enough of it to recognise the sandy-haired man, Doug, one of the patrons of the Quo Vadis beer garden, though he didn’t look quite like the last time Seth clapped eyes upon him.
His green polo shirt, looking bizarrely white in the gleam of the torch, was saturated with blood in a dark spill cascading from his chest down to the stains on his trousers, and the lower half of his face was equally gore ridden, his mouth hanging open as he gave voice to hideous grunting and hissing sounds. His hands were hooked in claws and his eyes rolled around with a savage fervour. Alongside him came the other man, Wayne, great pieces torn out of his own shirt and apparently the body beneath, but he hadn’t been so ripped apart that he couldn’t move. It hadn’t prevented him from turning, it hadn’t slowed down his strange running gait. The latter man looked as though he should be dead, should have stayed dead, was almost certainly completely dead at one stage.
Now he was one of the quicker moving, dangerously freakish undead, stamping all over the shambling notion.
These two went straight down into the ditch from the field side and burst up the other side with a speed that seemed to defy what they were, a pace that scared Seth senseless. They went right for the Truck and all those out on the road and around it.
Two more shapes split from the group they’d all been in, peeling away from Undead Doug and Wayne, and came charging in a barrage of ugly monstrous grunts straight at Seth.
This was unlike the stand and fight relative sanctuary of having Blizzard on one side, Dax and Roxana on the other, with Lizette and Mark nearby in the truck back in Noumena, this was a terrifying case of him being isolated and about to be mowed down by two fast approaching attackers. Before he knew what happened, the nearest hammered into him and smashed him back down into the ditch.
Uttering a frightful hissing sound, mouth agape and drooling blood, eyes burnt holes in a blanket, and face an ashen shade of terrible, was Julietta, her long dark locks of hair slapping against him like bloodied ropes.
“No! No! NO!” Seth screamed, his ragged exclamation deafening himself, reverberating in his ears so piercingly he felt he must be shattering glass somewhere.
The bestial thing that was his love, his girl, the woman who’d fled from Noumena, upset with him and loathe to make him aware of her plans, clasped him in talon-like hands with an increased strength the living Julietta could never have mustered up, and came forward with teeth gnashing.
Brutal thudding and whishing sounds emanated off to his left, horrid grunts abruptly ceasing as one of the others must have put paid to the second fiend destined to dine on Steak Seth, but that was irrelevant and unimportant to him right now as his mind capsized in disbelieving terror and dismay.
His wailing demoralized mantra faded into choking sounds of undulating fear blending with grief, an array of horrible things flooding him, uncertain of exactly what about this whole situation made him feel the worst.
Then before those bloody jaws and grinding teeth could tear into his flesh, a blade skewered through the left eye socket, punching out in a blood slicked tip, drenching him in a red spray. It quickly whipped out, then whipped through the air with a whistling sound culminating in a meaty clunk and the horrible visage of the once upon a time achingly beautiful Julietta went away. Dismembered.
Standing behind the headless body as it collapsed forward atop Seth, with a long bladed weapon not unlike Black’s katana, was Scarlett. A sorrowful expression adorned her visage, sadness and unavoidable resignation in her eyes. She shook her head regretfully in a barely perceptible motion and then punted the body off him with a solid push of her boot. As the decapitated form of Julietta slumped and flopped into the long grass alongside him, Seth scarcely acknowledged Scarlett assisting him to his feet and heading him back up the incline and towards the Tundra at the roadside.
Up beside the road, the threat was suitably nullified. The bodies of Doug and Wayne were splayed on the gravel strip, the former missing his head with that particular item some distance away from him, leaving an arc of blood splatter across the small rocks and dirt. UndeadWayne’s skull was caved in to the point where most of his face had dissipated, leaving behind a gaping hole with jagged busted bone fragments surrounding it and a soupy mush of grey matter gunk. Beneath this, his bottom jaw hung visible with teeth exposed; the rest of his visage disappeared into the abstract mess.
The corpse of the zombie originally accompanying UndeadJulietta coming to attack Seth lay over in the ditch as well, a dark mass of indistinct shadow where it wasn’t entirely possible to see just how it had been eradicated. As for Julietta herself, she sprawled where Scarlett left her, fingers frozen in a perpetual claw-like curl, head elsewhere in a bloodied nest of her own hair.
Mark was no longer ass up in the ditch. He stood over beyond
the rear of the Tundra, on the edge of the road. Embraced tightly in his arms was the sobbing figure of Miranda, her face buried in his chest. Over nearby where these two stood were Roxana and Lizette, and with them was the owner of the white sedan, Heather, her face also a streaky mess of tears.
Black stood nearest the two dead bodies of Heather’s former travelling companions, his Japanese sword in hand while Blizzard and Dax both stood behind him, armed as well. Blizzard brought forth his newly cleaned Blizzard Beast, though the lack of blood on the blades of the monstrous weapon indicated he might not have gotten the opportunity to use it. Of Tempest there was no immediate sign, until feet crunched in gravel from behind and the last member of Subversion joined the rest.
“What happened here?” Black addressed Heather, the nearer of the two surviving girls, though the question was directed at both. “Neither of you been bit?”
“No,” Heather shook her head vehemently, her eyes puffy, her cheeks red under the car’s interior light, glinting out the open passenger doors. “No, we didn’t get bit.”
“Looks like someone did,” Tempest commented as he lit himself up a cigarette, then tossed his packet to Blizzard, who did likewise. “Big time.”
“I thought you were going back to Armada,” Black said, his dark eyes penetrating Heather. “What’s the story here? How the fuck did you end up here, crashed into the ditch, everybody morphed into fleshcraver form, bar you two gals? Pretty sure Seth over there would love a damn good explanation.”
Heather choked out another big sob, trying to avoid staring at the bodies of Wayne and Doug, then rubbed her eyes and running nose with the back of her hand.
“We…we fully intended to,” she finally said, her voice incredibly shaky. “Doug was adamant…insisting we do so. Eventually we all decided against it, we voted going back there…to that place...how it had been…seeing all of that was not a good idea. At least not right away. So…we decided to go the other way, as far away as we could get…”
