Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger

by Goforth, Jim

  The trio of Masters exchanged bemused glances, expressions of comprehension dawning on their faces.

  Dax was edging closer to the scene himself, staying as swathed in shadow as possible, skirting towards where the party stood, Heather’s face a grimace of terror, Roxana likewise, though attempting to cover it with an impassive shroud.

  “Wrong,” SamEdi looked smug. “They’ll be granted safe passage in our company.”

  “I don’t see how. You control the minds of mindless creatures, do you? Seems legit.”

  The eyes of Dax suddenly caught sight of Scarlett and Seth, and widened temporarily. A scowl soon covered his shock and defiance sparked on his visage.

  “Bullshit!” Dax blasted, stepping from his shadowed position. “Nobody is buying that rubbish, Sammy.”

  Scarlett and Seth froze, almost simultaneously. What the fuck was Dax doing? The more Seth watched him steal furtively through the dark undercover of the structures casting shadows, the more he was convinced that Undead Fleshcrave and their hired hands were unaware of Dax’s presence. And now he’d stepped right out into the open and announced it, very possibly on the brink of betraying Seth and Scarlett too.

  Drill snaked a thick, heavily tattooed arm around Roxana’s throat and squeezed in a chokehold, dragging her backwards and perilously close to that remarkably small brick perimeter. He cast himself a glance down at the seething mass of undead horror spewed out all over the street in a bilious swarm, and quickly looked away, possibly running cogitations through his head regarding Tempest’s blunt accusations that Undead Fleshcrave could walk unassailed through that mayhem.

  “Hold up, bud,” Rusty said to Dax. “Best cool your jets there, boy.”

  Dax neither held up, nor cooled his jets. Mother North clenched in his gory fists, he continued to stalk across the rooftop, towards the collective and their helpless prisoners.

  “What are you fucking doing?” SamEdi wanted to know, and he certainly wasn’t the only one. Back some distance behind him and his cohorts, Seth and Scarlett crouched by the border wall, wondering the same thing. No doubt Black and Tempest were in the same place of query.

  “These guys,” Dax addressed the bikers, waving one blood dripping hand at the members of the band. “Need you and your weapons to bail them out against us, because they haven’t got anything sufficient to stop us. But after that, they don’t need you. The zombies won’t harm them, they probably won’t even be aware they’re walking among them to get in their vehicles and ride off to carry on unleashing their little Armageddon. They only need you around as long as you’re useful. After that, there are no fucks given about what happens to you. Holding out for that money is futile, ‘cause you ain’t fucking getting it. You won’t be alive.”

  “Ya better stop your walkin’ right now,” Drill suggested, but hesitation cruelled his tone. He edged even closer to the precarious wall and the expression in Roxana’s eyes showed she couldn’t keep her stoic face on anymore. Terror glinted there, knowing without having to look just how perilously near to the drop down into undead hell she was.

  Dax didn’t stop, he kept on coming.

  “Fucking shoot him!” SamEdi ordered, his guttural voice rolling like thunder.

  “I’ll throw this bitch over,” Drill warned and Rusty echoed a similar statement regarding putting a bullet in Heather’s skull.

  “Dax, don’t!” Black barked as the tense bikers milled around in the fashion of agitated dogs, ready to attack given the glimmer of an opportunity. Though they’d twice heard it that the Fleshcravers were immune to assault by the undead, it didn’t appear to be sinking in or sitting as true with them.

  “Ain’t nobody safe from those motherfucking flesheaters,” Skin said resolutely. “Nobody. Ain’t nobody can just walk among ‘em without getting bitten. You take us for fools, boy? I ain’t buying that horseshit.”

  Drill hauled Roxana up and his greater height ensured he could hold her up above the wall, her feet barely touching its rim.

  “Stop where you are, fucker,” he warned.

  “Do what he says, Dax!” Black’s voice cracked again, rolling with urgency across the roof top.

  Dax held up the same bloodied hand in a dismissive gesture.

  “I’ve got this,” he snarled. “I’m the one here with the stones to do this, to take charge. I’m the man for it and I always have been.”

  From his slow, but steady stalking prowl, he suddenly exploded into a full scale lunge, a frenetic ball of aggression, looking to dismantle everybody before him, though his targets were the members of Undead Fleshcrave, in particular, SamEdi.

  Scarlett’s horrified cry was lost in the uproar which erupted in conjunction as Dax, savage eyes for SamEdi only, swept Mother North in a giant arc. The lethal beauty clipped Drill as it came around, blades aiming to sever and shear through SamEdi flesh and completely fucked his equilibrium. Uttering a shriek that bellied his tough guy biker exterior, Drill tripped against the short perimeter wall and pitched over the edge. And so did Roxana.

  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.