by Goforth, Jim
Even when Scarlett gently assisted him to move again, heading him back to the Tundra as they all piled back in, the floating shock enveloping him didn’t dissipate. It swirled around him, darker and thicker and more encompassing than the darkest nightmare.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN-CONQUERING CITIES
In the days that followed the cataclysm of tragedy and death occurring on the outskirts of Noumena, things worsened everywhere.
It wasn’t just a case of the threat unleashed by Undead Fleshcrave being confined to two separate locations, it was far more wide-reaching than that, although those two populaces abdicated to the undead first.
While Armada was the original source of the unnatural plague, Noumena was the first true casualty.
In comparison to the large metropolis that Armada was, Noumena, as a relatively small coastal town, was an easy mark to destroy in the wake of the Armada catastrophe. Insidiously, cunningly, and maliciously meticulous in their design, Global Death sent their agents of apocalypse in to achieve their goals and it reaped every reward they planned.
Noumena may as well have been a one horse town when it came to police; their authorities were in no way, shape, or form equipped to deal with the malediction that descended on their town. By the time what members of the local constabulary they had on hand were fielding rampant reports of marauding so-called living dead, walking corpses in heavy metal shirts eating townsfolk and converting them to their undead fleshcraving ways, or leaving them piles of bones and blood, the whole town was, quite simply, fucked.
All and any police from surrounding areas and provinces had been rushed, in code red desperate emergency situations, to contend with the gigantic disaster unfolding in the city of Armada. During this time, the news slipped out and spread like wildfire in a bizarre assortment of Chinese whispers, despite all best efforts to keep it under wraps.
With every able-bodied police officer, detective, military personnel, anybody who was considered to be of any assistance whatsoever, rushed to the Armada nucleus as immediately as they could be, Noumena was stuck well and truly up shit creek without a single paddle of back-up and none to call on when the police there realised just how urgently they needed it.
Undead Fleshcrave screwed them so comprehensively it was barely a day or two before the whole town was overrun completely and the humanivores spread out in mass amounts.
While chaos from the original concert spanned far and wide through Armada, planting the seeds of death and destruction that even the belated military involvement might not be able to curtail, the tiny forgotten distant neighbours like Noumena fed the epidemic, virtually undetected.
Trying to fight the large scale battle in the city meant few caught up in this hellish, unbelievable situation realised that along with planting the seeds of bloody undead mayhem, Armada was also Undead Fleshcrave’s smokescreen, allowing them to infiltrate these small coastal areas and render them zombie strongholds.
As the tide began to overwhelm the place where the Zombie Trigger was first switched on, all these other little places had already lost their grips on any semblance of normality, and here, the undead truly did reign.
***
It wasn’t just the waves and waves of undead fleshcravers that those fighting the losing battle in Armada had to contend with, a blood-soaked war they couldn’t hope to win when the numbers of their enemy increased rather than diminished. For each lot of undead mowed down by those packing serious weaponry, there were more created elsewhere, an infernal parade of zombie dandelions continuing to pop up.
Aside from the obvious threat facing these folk, there were the human vermin, the criminals, the anarchists who’d dreamt of something like this arising, the opportunistic villains and scum of the earth residing in Armada who took this golden occasion in both hands and refused to let it go.
Looting, pillaging, raping, indiscriminate killing. There was nobody to stand over them, preside over their actions and govern them while hell broke loose in such a big way.
Vengeance Priest knew that would be the case. He was banking on it. Way back on that first terror soaked night when the Quo Vadis bar unleashed hell, he could foretell the outcome, predict the result. He knew this would be occasion for the most degenerate criminal element to bubble to the surface and snatch these opportunities, creating more havoc that a desperate failing police force, army, and all combined forces simply did not have the ability to prevent.
Some of these people could not be trusted in any way, nor did Vengeance Priest expect they could be. That much was irrelevant. He wanted numbers and he wanted those with no regard for the authority trying, and mostly failing, to combat the predominant hazard threatening Armada’s livelihood. He wanted those who had no qualms about killing, either the undead hordes, or anybody who opposed them. He didn’t recruit arbitrarily though. As he and his heavily armed band of miscreants moved throughout Armada, further looting and raiding specific locations, he methodically enlisted those they came across based on a variety of criteria. Any who opposed, or chose to act as a solitary practitioner and go their own way, were either left alone to do just that. Or, depending on the circumstances, they were left where they were found. Deceased.
Vengeance Priest, Apollyon, Natassja, Empress, Attila, Demonaz and all those who swept into their orbit, joining them on their bloody crusade that meant not just cutting down the roaming packs of undead they encountered, but taking as they saw fit, whatever they desired. They were all clear on their principal motive, and that was to take a part of Armada for themselves, a stronghold to build themselves into a powerhouse incapable of being shaken. Now was the ideal time to do it and with the sanguinary shitstorm exploding all around them, they sliced with will throughout the besieged city.
Beneath it all though, Vengeance Priest still clutched that underlying motive to his heart in a claw grip, a dark throbbing impetus that continued to fester, grow and warp like a black cancerous entity. He kept it interred within him, feeding it blackened waves of hatred and fury while he continued to hold it secret from his ever expanding band of merciless companions, at least until the time presented itself perfectly to reveal what else burned in his brain.
That time would certainly come, but for now, he assembled an army of likeminded souls, keen to overpower and take control of their own twisted destinies.
CHAPTER NINETEEN-CHASING GHOSTS
Undead Fleshcrave were ghosts. They might have left some alarming marks and intentional evidentiary proof to suggest they’d come this way, and their pursuers were on something of the right track, but essentially they seemed to have disappeared like smoky wraiths, gone underground, vanished. The entire truck containing the quartet of death metal zombie makers and their Sentinel entourage.
Finding the whereabouts of the catalysts of the undead plague might have been Subversion’s predominant issue, but now, it wasn’t their only pressing concern.
As the Tundra trekked along the span of the highway, dangerously overloaded by passengers, those taking turns behind the wheel and inside the cabs kept the radio on almost constantly, occasionally breaking up the monotony of news reports by playing their favoured choices of music, splicing grim realities with grim black metal.
In those times when the radio was on, with news reports filtering from the chaos torn madness of places like Armada and the devastated Noumena, they discovered a disquieting fact. Though the true facts of what beset these towns and smaller surrounding communities slipped out through the cracks in the walls the towns’ controllers desperately tried to build before the media swarmed all over it, it remained completely unknown as to how this calamity came to be, undead hordes in dangerous proliferation, killing and eating people indiscriminately, or causing their victims to rise again, as members of their foul zombie brigade.
There were myriad theories, proposed by all number of folks, from so-called experts in assorted fields to random callers on talkback shows, news reporters’ own hypotheses and plethoras of others. They ranged from the possib
le, probable, or somehow likely, to the absolutely ludicrous and utterly fucking ridiculous. None of them yet hit upon the true reason, or how the outbreak was initially perpetuated, though some steered close to the mark because there was one common factor brought up.
This was the alarming thing. The entire heavy metal community, all those who were a part of it and chose to represent it in the usual way they did, through heavy metal T-shirts, long hair, other alternate hairstyles, tattoos, piercings, various things signifying their connections to metal music, especially of the extreme varieties, were earmarked, targeted, scapegoated, or most correctly in the eyes of those ruling as judge and jury on the matter, identified as the source of the violent upheaval.
It was death metal fanatics, heavy metal people, who were the first to chain off the domino effect, they were the instigators of the zombie pandemic, they were the zombies attacking others and converting them, not to listen to their controversial music, but to eat the flesh of their fellow humans.
It must be the music, said some, veering dangerously close to the heart of the problem without being aware of it, but whatever the case, if you were a metalhead and elected to distinguish yourself or identify yourself as one, then you were public enemy number one. You were on the hit list. Because, quite clearly, as normal as you might appear right at this very second, it was only a matter of time before you turned into a raving, meatseeking, freaky-eyed, claw-fingered, grey-faced, undead entity.
This was the unsettling concern for all members of the party crammed up and travelling the highway in the Subversion truck. Every single one of them, with the possible exception of Heather, were metalheads, in particular, black metal aficionados, and each one of them looked it too. Making them chief suspects of harbouring some mystery virus or toxin, or whatever crazy notion those in the media were trying to peddle to justify why this horror was happening, which would turn them into undead monsters at any tick of the clock.
With the large number of folk travelling in the one vehicle, it would arouse even more suspicion, instantly draw the watchful attention of any patrolling cops out on the highway, in contact with those in the feral heart of the undead unrest. Once they were pulled over or otherwise detained, the authorities would instantly bear witness to a large number of those type of people the media outlets were now branding as responsible for creating this malady. After the shit that went down in Armada, was still going down in Armada, after the fact that Noumena was now labelled a no-go zone, somewhere to be avoided at all costs until the main hub of horror could be quelled, it was safe to say any police who stumbled across this journeying gang of black metallers, were going to develop itchy trigger fingers at an extremely rapid rate, if recent developments didn’t already have them shooting at shadows.
Black and all his companions knew this was not going to end well.
***
“We need to fuel up, and we need to find another car, pronto,” Black said. “This is too conspicuous, all of us here in the Truck like this. There are going to be all sorts of fucking idiots, bounty hunters, lynch mobs, pack mentality fools starting up a posse thinking that if they can take out any suspicious folks before they turn zombie, then they’re going to save the world. Metalheads like us, travelling en masse, are targets, we’re sitting ducks. Undead Fleshcrave aren’t our only problem now, we’ve got a fuckload more.”
With Blizzard taking a turn behind the wheel of the Tundra, Black was riding shotgun, chain-smoking as he channel surfed the radio, aiming for anything in the way of latest updates they didn’t already know.
The back passenger cab was comprised of Seth, Roxana, and Miranda, though, if Seth had his way, he’d have been happy to remain in the tray, mindlessly and numbly watching the world fly pass, seeing scenery and landscapes flash past, taking in nothing, breeze blowing his hair around, lost deep in his constant terrible cogitations.
As it was, Black was insistent on a constant rotation, switching drivers to keep everyone fresh, changing seating positions so nobody cramped up from being stuck in the one spot for too long. It meant relatively frequent intervals where they stopped, when they could, in order to stretch legs or grab food and drink, toilet breaks, get up and move around, but with the disappearance of their quarry, it didn’t mean they were really either gaining or losing any time by doing this.
“We’re going to need supplies too. We need to stock up on a shitload of things,” Blizzard responded. “Bedding, food, water, all kinds of things. We can’t keep staying at caravan parks, cheap motels, shit like that, not anymore. With the way this shit is being played out, they’re broadcasting the idea that metalheads are all inherently zombies, putting those ideas of lynch mobs into people’s brains. Innocent people with no bearing on any of this are going to die in a war that shouldn’t even involve them. So, further to that, we need fucking guns too.”
“Agreed,” Black said, and a murmur of assent came from Roxana in the back seat.
Miranda looked aghast, but resigned to the fact. After all, she’d heard the news reports too, all the various whackjobs and nutters with their theories on what started the pandemic, what the world needed to do to stem it or attempt to quell it, or pre-empt where the next outbreak was going to occur. Which meant metalheads were all, without question, to be considered guilty of some inbuilt zombie gene before they were proven innocent.
“There!” Roxana called. “Service station on the left. We can at least fuel up there.”
As Blizzard nosed the Tundra in off the highway, Seth was dragged out of morbid mental replays of Julietta’s once beautiful face, morphed into a grotesque undead monstrosity looming in to rip great chunks out of his. This was pretty much his standard train of thought the last couple of days, usually supplanted by an even worse one, where the head of UndeadJulietta completely vanished off her body in a red shower of blood and then Scarlett would be there with that terribly sad expression.
This time though, he managed to pull his thoughts away from there and to their latest destination as pointed out by Roxana.
It was indeed a gas station, at least in the context that it had a couple of petrol pumps out the front. Other than that, it sure wasn’t some giant state of the art super centre brimming with modern amenities. There were no supermarkets, fast food outlets, coffee shops or anything like that attached to this place, nothing like the ones situated around the city areas.
This joint was ancient, decrepit, looking like it should have been left somewhere behind in time. It was a gas station and that was about the extent of it, little more to it than that. For people on lengthy drives, travelling between cities and the tiny towns and communities out here on the road, all it provided was fuel and whatever basic necessities might be inside the dingy little station itself.
“Christ,” Blizzard said. “You sure this place is even open for business any longer?”
“”Shit, there’s loads of places just like this along the way, out on these highways.” Black replied. “They don’t need to be big modern monsters with Wi-Fi and video games; all that kinda shit, they just pump petrol, maybe fill up your tyres with air and run a squeegee across your windshield. Send you on your way. Ain’t ideal right now, when we’re needing to stock up on a fuckload of other things to keep us from going into overly populated areas, but it will get us gas to keep on rolling to somewhere we might be able to get that stuff.”
There were a handful of other vehicles around, Seth noticed, but none of them seemed to be occupied or attended in any way. They sat around the side of the station as if they’d been parked there for some time. Certainly none of the traffic they’d encountered on the highway, and whilst there hadn’t been prolific amounts, there was some, had pulled in here ahead of them. Maybe folks saw the aging status of the joint and figured if they weren’t yet pushing the red on their fuel gauge, maybe they should carry on and hope to come across another more appealing one.
Seth couldn’t care either way; right now he was happy enough for the chance to get out of the vehi
cle and walk around. It felt like he’d been sitting in the back of the cab for too long, trapped with only his thoughts, not adding a word to the conversations carried out by the others. It all washed over him, white noise, meaningless at this point in time, even though Miranda hadn’t shied away from joining in. She wasn’t nearly as withdrawn or devastated as one might think following the harrowing events of several nights prior, but perhaps she was acclimatising to the situation a whole lot quicker.
He was out of the Truck mere seconds after Blizzard pulled it in alongside one of the pumps, Black also exiting the vehicle. Others spilled out as well, most of those in the tray glad to be able to take some time, no matter how brief, to stretch their legs. Toilet breaks were going to be essential as well, in fact Heather and Miranda were the first to pair up in order to go locate the facilities, neither waiting for the other women to accompany them.
“Be careful!” Black shot after them, the same warnings he or any of his other cohorts issued to anybody electing to wander off on any of their previous stoppages, fuel up sessions, or rest breaks. “Keep your damn wits about you at all times. Remember, we have other shit to deal with now.”
Heather didn’t especially look like the type of person about to draw the attention of any gung-ho firebrand idiots out to get a posse of metalhead decimating souls happening, but Miranda did. They’d all managed to get together a few changes of clothes at one of their last major stops in civilization, but that was prior to the news that folk looking like alternative, long-haired, black shirt wearing, heavy metal people were suspect in the cause of the undead epidemic and consequently they’d all opted for their general favoured clothing.
Seth was walking away from the Tundra before any of the others elected to join or catch up to him. The same as he’d done each time they’d stopped or made a break, or even when they’d chosen to pick a spot to stay for the night. Which probably left Mark thinking he was now stuck with a lunatic friend who’d lost the plot and eagerly thrown in his lot with the Subversion psychos, happy to be a part of their violent zombie killing games, a headcase who’d lost his mind in an entirely different way, seeing his beloved girlfriend turned undead and then beheaded as she tried to munch his face off, and a girlfriend who suddenly bore no grudges against those who’d made her strip and flaunt her body to prove she wasn’t bitten by zombie mutants.
