by Goforth, Jim
From the ruins of one of the multiple food stalls they burst, a ten or more strong contingent of freakish beasts, some with incongruous hairstyles like towering Mohawks or swinging plaits, some in the expected costume of Blackwater Park townsfolk, others in mundane ordinary clothing, some comprehensively plastered in tattoos. All with the same crimson facial embellishments which definitely weren’t from slurping on ketchup or other food substances obtained from the stall supplies.
The temporary stall was destroyed, torn apart by the hungry horrors as they ransacked the place and obviously feasted upon the proprietors and staff, trapped inside before they got a chance to run. Now the group swarmed and swamped RunningWild, ClumsyGirl, and Thomson, their speed unexpected and blindingly quick.
The self-centred rent-a-cop was quickest off the mark as the trio were faced with the assault and he grabbed ClumsyGirl in both hands, gripping her by the shoulders. As she screamed in terror, realising what his agenda was, he thrust her out before him, shielding his figure from the immediate onslaught, and grey, flaking skin covered hands snatched her, hooked fingers digging deep into her flesh. A punk zombie with a towering purple Mohawk, resplendent in safety pin piercings, chains swinging from ripped leather clothes, clamped onto one of her breasts with a gaping snaggletooth maw and wrenched forcibly, shaking its head like a pit-bull with a mouthful of meat. Blood fountained in a gory spray that pitched more red vapour rain into the sky, and the shrill shrieks of fear ramped up into a terrible high-pitched keen that lanced Seth’s ears.
She was fucked, well and truly, there was nothing he, Black, or Nate could do for her. Thomson let her bleeding body fall away from him, into the clutches of more undead freaks, her breast completely ripped away from her body, a fleshy sac in ripped fabric hanging from the mouth of UndeadPunk. Snarling mouths closed around her throat, buried into her abdomen, chewing right through her clothing as she went down under a torrent of feeding frenzy zombies.
Horribly mesmerised, RunningWild reacted far too late. They got him as well, snaring him in myriad deadly grasps, so many teeth and finger claws ripping into him that he was just a mass of bloody torn flesh, meat for the insatiable beasts being torn from his bones.
Nate had his pistol reloaded now. He lifted it and took aim. He didn’t fire on any of the undead monsters, he didn’t hope to have any impact on quelling that hideous tide. He squeezed the trigger and smashed a bullet into the skull of Thomson, dropping the cowardly sonofabitch down among the hordes of rapid feeders.
“Don’t want that motherfucker getting a second chance at reanimation,” he said laconically to Black and Seth, both of whom nodded, Black with a malicious twist curving the corner of his mouth.
Then they acquiesced with the command made by Black. They hauled ass.
Seth was beside himself with panic and gut-churning fear, desperate to be on the move and getting the fuck out of this general vicinity. He needed to be up there, where the vague bulk of the stage they’d all been aiming to reach was just visible amidst air heavy with blood spray and scent, other pungent, foul odours like vomit and shit hanging around rancorously as well.
Avoiding the throngs of humanivores wasn’t a difficult task right now, not when there was fresh meat sprawled on the bloodstained grass for the hungry fiends to tear into, though some still loitered upright, gauging whether to attempt an attack on the running trio.
There were still abundant undead freaks present all through the Park, but Seth noticed that the army didn’t really appear to be expanding and growing as rapidly as he might have expected. Perhaps they’d exhausted the majority of their meat sources in the region, or maybe they were now spreading out onto the surrounding streets, searching further afield for new blood.
In any case, the folk who were evidently Blackwater Park residents seemed to be simply vanishing. If they hadn’t already been eaten so comprehensively they couldn’t rise again as reanimated corpses, or had indeed been morphed into legions with the undead, they were gone. Possibly, many of them also made it outside the killing grounds, flooding the city streets, seeking sanctuary in the city they knew and dwelled in.
It was a conundrum, but it wasn’t one Seth let his worried mind linger on; he’d bigger concerns, namely finding Scarlett and the others alive up ahead. He was already leaving behind a tangle of broken bodies being savaged and mauled by feral undead and he sure as fuck didn’t want to run into a similar knot of bloodied tragedy, particularly with Scarlett, Mark, and Miranda counting among the meals for the monsters.
All the same, the fears constricting his bowels, knotting his stomach, and thumping his heart, burst free in hideous reality when they arrived. The ground was a field of slaughter, and one where it wasn’t easy to identify who comprised the multitude of bodies, either being ripped apart by lurking undead, or those already picked at by the zombie vultures.
There were so many dead encompassing the bloodied grounds here that the appearance of Seth, Black, and Nate barely created a stir among the packs of zombies feasting on the spoils, dining at this sumptuous banquet of raw flesh laid out for them. They were hardly noticed at all, and even if they were, it was virtually without interest, as if ripping at the meat already available was a far more viably easy option, and there was no immediate need to launch any attacks at the newcomers.
“Jesus fucking Christ…” Even the big, unflappable Renegade Master, Nate, was taken aback by the carnage strewn across the grass, so much blood and death in sight even the most hardened of souls couldn’t have remained unshaken.
There seemed to be a disproportionate amount of severed heads, most of them largely ignored by the sanguinary savages which were displaying their preference to delve inside the cavities of the bodies, digging for succulent innards and more fleshy segments than whatever meat could be gleaned from the myriad decapitated craniums.
His gun cradled out in front of him in a two-handed grip, one meaty paw clasped under the butt, the nose aiming diagonally down, but ready to snap shots off, Nate’s expression abruptly went grim. He nodded brusquely at one of the shapeless masses of bloody meat on the ground, and whilst the person formerly comprising this raw hunk of human beef was totally unrecognisable, the Renegade Masters jacket backpatch still identifiable in the mire was unmistakable.
Which one of the three bikers it was from the main body of the pack was anybody’s guess, but without doubt, it was one of Nate’s buddies here, in a slump of blood and chewed flesh.
Then Seth saw what appeared to be a female body and he froze instinctively, fear clubbing him with cruel fists. Though he could tell it wasn’t Scarlett just from the attire, it was the clothes the faceless victim was wearing which immediately made him acknowledge that it was one of theirs. The visage of this woman was obliterated; it was nothing but a raw slab of beef, bleeding profusely, almost looking as though it had somehow been skinned or had some giant industrial disc sander grind all the features away.
Black saw this figure too and actually hunkered down alongside it, reaching out a cautious hand, not to see if the person was still alive, for clearly they weren’t; merely a last sombre gesture of farewell.
Seth realised that it was the girl Lizette, the one who’d borne him such animosity over the death of her girlfriend at his hand, and he felt sharp pangs of sadness, grief, and regret stab into him. About a heartbeat later he realised who, or rather what, all the headless figures were. Those who hadn’t been extensively mauled and mangled were wearing a uniform style of attire, clothing that, though bloodstained and shredded, exhibited enough to show they’d all been dressed virtually identical.
Sentinels.
“Black...” Seth said quietly, not wanting to draw any attention from the ensembles of feasting zombies with volume to his voice, his mind racing almost too fast to keep up with. He hoped what was only slightly more audible than a murmur would carry to the Subversion boss and that there would be no need to repeat it louder.
Black wasn’t so overcome with emotion by the sight of L
izette’s ruins, in fact he seemed, as usual, completely impassive, with the usual threat of violence and fury simmering beneath his surface, that he didn’t hear his name and he turned his gaze to where Seth stood.
With his arms feeling as though they were alien objects hanging heavy and painful off his aching shoulders, Seth still managed to hoist Mother North one-handed as he gestured with a finger towards one of the decapitated Sentinels, who was still clad in the most complete uniform of the Undead Fleshcrave bodyguards.
Black merely nodded once, signifying he knew what Seth was referring to.
Seth tried to piece things together as he traipsed carefully around the reddened ground, the whole region slippery with blood and human refuse, the scattered meat smorgasbord in all its foul glory.
The crescendo of gunshots. That would have been the whole entourage of Sentinels, rising up just as Tempest and co. arrived at the death metal supremo’s performance stage, blasting as the approaching group fell into the ambush.
It must have been an ambush, the grey-clad brutes must have been in hiding somewhere, well out of sight, or Tempest wouldn’t have charged and taken his whole bunch of followers into the face of massive gunfire.
Or had he? Obviously he and Blizzard, and potentially some of the others, had unleashed a terrible retribution on the Sentinels, for it looked as if the grey wearing bodies here, most of them lacking craniums, seemed to far outweigh the shredded remains of other bodies. Or maybe they were all buried beneath the feeding undead. After all, the Sentinels and Undead Fleshcrave were of no interest in the way of providing food for the zombies. They were impervious. Which was why their mutilated bodies were largely ignored; these injuries had been caused by Tempest’s people.
So then, what happened? Were they swamped by undead hordes while they tried to destroy the Sentinels?
Seth cast a fearful look over at some of the clusters of death metal undead and Blackwater Park denizen zombies, munching away at human flesh as if they were attending an al fresco buffet, wondering if the torn up remains of Scarlett were in there somewhere.
The fear of discovering that was a reality was far outweighing the notion of those undead beasts suddenly launching at him, looking to put him on the menu or at very least convert him to one of their kind.
Under which collective of undead eaters was the torn flesh and bones of the woman who’d captured his heart so wholly and suddenly after he felt like the loss of Julietta would render the organ a completely useless one in terms of feelings like that for anybody?
Mark and Miranda? Heather? Tempest and Blizzard themselves? Roxana? All those who’d been swept up in the furious charge through the zombie hell of Blackwater Park? Were they all under there, being gorged upon, gnawed to pieces, left as nothing but piles of bones?
Seth couldn’t see any sign of the deadly Blizzard Beast on the bloody ground, though he could see a host of scattered firearms laying amidst the human wreckage. Whether they belonged to the Sentinels or some of them to his people’s bunch, he couldn’t tell, but he imagined the bass guitar weapon belonging to Blizzard would be a pretty conspicuous item. Unless it too was buried underneath the feeding hordes, or was further away and out of the sphere of his vision…
“Hey, over here!” A familiar voice called urgently and Seth was yanked from his horrible cogitations and observations of the clustered undead.
Over beyond the carnage and the hunched packs of feeders there were two figures, both waving frantic hands to draw the attention of Seth and his two companions as best they could without alerting the humanivores.
Dax and SternBitch.
Black straightened up, standing after his long moments beside the terrible debris that was Lizette, casting his eyes around the scene as if he too was attempting to ascertain how many others were acting as meals for the packs of meatseekers, and then strode to where the pair were flapping their arms around.
Seth wondered if the Subversion leader decided there weren’t any more of their party in that mess or merely acknowledged that even if there were, there was precious little he could do to alter the fact. It may have been cold, but Seth knew it was cold hard realities that Black dealt in. Foraging through the bloodied remnants of gnawed upon corpses wouldn’t provide definitive answers anyway.
Nonetheless, Seth desperately needed to know, but it didn’t seem as though Black was prepared to squander any more precious seconds here on this field. He headed straight towards Dax and SternBitch, stooping briefly to pick up one of the fallen pistols on the ground, and Nate, not too far behind him, also had designs on scooping up a couple of the discarded or lost firearms.
Seth did likewise, hunkering down to grab for one of the least blood-spattered items, though finding one without some sort of sanguinary mess on it was an impossibility. Then he made haste on the heels of Nate and Black, fervently hoping he wasn’t leaving the beautiful Scarlett behind as bloody half-masticated mush inside a ripped bundle of rags.
“Come on!” Dax urged, almost dancing from foot to foot. He too had helped himself to a pistol from those in the blood covering the grass and Seth was rather surprised at the restraint he’d shown not to open fire with it on the zombies who were possibly feasting on their friends right now. “Over here, beyond Renee and me.”
So that’s what SternBitch’s name is, Seth thought illogically before replacing the random musing with wondering what was behind the pair.
As he approached, eyes nervously skittering around for any blindside assaults from the undead, he could already tell that the Undead Fleshcrave stage was now devoid of presence. Briefly, he dared hope that Tempest, Blizzard, and some of the others made it through the barrage of Sentinel bullets and managed to account for the Fleshcravers as well, decapitating and dismembering them as brutally as they’d done with their grey minions.
Then he saw what―or rather who—Dax referred to, and the relief and fierce joy that detonated inside him was of such strength that it was almost a physical pain.
***
No dismembered bodies of the Undead Fleshcrave members were prone on the stage, which still boasted stacks of speakers, amplifiers and other assorted paraphernalia from the death metal band’s performance, the stage itself was devoid of human―or even zombie—presence, but just alongside it were a cluster of people, some who Seth had been recently wondering if he was seeing in states of mutilation whilst being devoured by meatseekers.
There was Scarlett, her beautiful countenance a grim expression of equal parts grief and anger. There was both Mark and Miranda, typically entangled in each other’s arms as much as possible, there was Heather, looking wild-eyed and wild-haired, splattered in blood and packing a pistol. There was Roxana, also liberally doused in blood, her hair in disarray. And there were Tempest and Blizzard themselves, armed with their awe-inspiring bloodied weapon instruments.
There were some others too, of course, a couple of the Renegade Masters and a handful of the people who’d joined them after the takeover of Stage Four, as well as some newcomers, faces Seth didn’t recognise. He guessed they’d somehow been entangled in the mad rush, caught up in the push across the ground like snow gathering on a building snowball, and now remained in the company of people who seemed in some way better prepared to contend with this hideous calamity.
As he observed the collective of people Dax and Renee were hurrying him and his two companions towards, he realised that it was the short, stocky biker identified as Burt who was absent. Meaning that gore splashed leather jacket on the earth belonged to him. The other two, Rusty and Drill, were both here in the small congregation.
Though there were some strangers in the group, their presence didn’t appear to have swollen the size of the collective. In fact, it looked immensely shrunken, and Seth knew exactly why that was.
Lizette, Burt, the other rent-a-cop, Thompson, many others who’d formerly been comprising this group once the lot of them split inadvertently in two factions were no longer here. They were raw bloody chunks of fle
sh or mangled corpses back in the bloodmist, killed not by the undead, but by the ambush hails of Sentinel bullets.
And as for Seth, he and his group were arriving sans members as well, almost half their number stricken down by humanivore assaults.
Out of the lot of those who’d been able to survive the undead onslaught to the point where Tempest instigated them all to make the suicide dash towards Undead Fleshcrave’s stage, their numbers had been severely decreased, decimated, albeit apparently not to the point the brutal Sentinels had been.
Seth beat down the almost overwhelming desire to run to Scarlett and wrap her up in his arms, but the expression of mingled anguish and rage adorning her face suggested she was in no mindset for that to happen. Undoubtedly, she’d borne witness to Lizette being cut down in a blast of hot lead and that was exhibited right now on her features.
However, as she caught sight of Seth coming towards the group in the company of Black and Nate, the relief blossoming on her visage mirrored what he was feeling now, and he realised seeing him alive tempered the sorrow of losing other friends.
As Nate exchanged accepting looks with his fellow Renegade Masters regarding the absence of one of theirs, Black herded his charges into the midst, and then turned eyes towards Tempest His dark gaze was questioning not about what had occurred, but rather about the location of their intended targets—the focus of their death mission.
“Vanished, like ghosts,” Tempest answered the unasked query, his agitation ramped up to highly irritated and borderline dangerous levels, the tension simmering and humming in his voice. “Gone, like fucking spirits! These Sentinel motherfuckers blindsided the lot of us and Undead have slipped into the cracks like they are fucking made of mist!”
“Are they ghosts?” Somebody was asking, a panicked hum of terrified voices issuing from those who’d been roped into this nightmare or managed to draw themselves into it. On any other occasion that might really have been an illogical or ludicrous thing to ask, but here and now, it was as reasonable or feasible as anything else one could possibly ask. After all, zombies were real, they were all around them. Threatening, dangerous undead monsters who’d been their peers and fellow townsfolk earlier in the day.
