Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger (36 page)

“What are the chances of Undead Fleshcrave not even being here? What if they aren’t playing here and we’re all just assuming they are going to?”

Momentarily silent while she sorted out the food and handed Seth’s to him, Scarlett then shook her head vigourously and dashed his slim hopes of that being a possibility, at least in both of their minds.

“They’ll be here. Somewhere. This is just about perfect for them. This is a masterplan, like Black says, this coup will be a major one for Global Death if it comes to fruition. We’re here to ensure it doesn’t.”

“Fuck,” Seth scowled at his hamburger, feeling some of his good feelings and hopes evaporate a little as it appeared she didn’t quite share the belief that it might just be a big coincidence. “I was kinda hoping maybe we did have the wrong end of the stick, and we’d have a little more time before all hell breaks loose.”

“Who knows?” Scarlett shrugged, and though shadows pooled over her gorgeous countenance, making her look a bit malevolent shrouded in darkness, he could see that she was drumming up a smile for him. “Maybe you’re right. In that case, that makes Global Death and Undead Fleshcrave incredibly stupid at missing the chance of a lifetime to unleash maximum chaos. And I really do not think they are that stupid.”

“Maybe they are,” Seth persisted, but he did so without much conviction in his voice. She was right, of course. This would make the carnage splattered over the streets of Armada, the complete desecration of Noumena, look like the work of amateurs. If Undead Fleshcrave could switch on the Zombie Trigger here, in the middle of such a prolific assemblage of death metallers, band members, and fans alike, the fallout would be immense and devastating. “I guess…I wouldn’t really know as much about this whole deal as you, Black and the others.”

There was silence for a while as they concentrated on eating, and Seth tried to pull his mind back to happier realms, back to the point he’d been before he’d voiced the suggestion that maybe the DM supergroup wouldn’t even show and then Scarlett spoke up again.

“You know, before, when I said everybody leaves? Everybody goes away…”

“Yeah,” Seth glanced at her. “Yeah. I said I wasn’t going to.”

“I meant everybody else in my life. Everyone except Black and the Subversion guys. They’re the reason I’m doing what I’m doing. Why I’m with them here, to do this, and have been from the start. My mother, my father…well, to be honest, I couldn’t be happier about that piece of shit being gone…but just everybody who has ever meant something, or supposed to be anything to me in my life, has just gone away. Left. Abandoned me. Died. Been killed.”

“Oh…” Seth replied lamely, not able to dredge up much more than that as her solemn revelations spilled out bluntly, but she wasn’t finished yet.

“My mother walked out on me when I was young. So young, I can’t even remember anything at all about her. I only know what she vaguely looks like from old photos that my father absentmindedly left around the house. Then, when she left, he decided his best chance of finding any solace was in drugs. That completely changed him, or maybe it just brought out his real persona, but for the most part, he ignored me altogether, my older sister took on the responsibility of raising me. Then, when she figured I was old enough to do the job for myself, she up and left as well.”

“Jesus,” Seth breathed quietly, not really intending to interrupt. “Nice.”

“Not really. She was a hell of a bitch too. She died as well,” Scarlett said curtly. “And once I hit puberty, started developing tits, all of that, well…Drugged up Daddy Dearest suddenly began to develop an interest in me. And not a fatherly one.”

Seth felt his skin crawl, his stomach tense up into a tightly constricted knot, as more of her revelations emerged, the hair on the back of his neck prickle. A nausea, slightly milder, but not unlike that which struck him as the hideous strains of the Zombie Trigger first assailed his ears began to lurch in his stomach. All the nasty thoughts of the evening’s planned bloodshed and other associated unpleasantries skulked away into the very back of his cogitative recesses as these new imagined horrors started to make themselves known, rolling from Scarlett in a flat voice that simmered with anger despite its monotonic timbre.

The hamburgers they’d been indulging in were not bad at all, in fact they’d been quite delicious, loaded with melted cheese, fried onions, abundant lettuce and tomato and succulent beef patties of a higher quality than he’d expected from a temporary food stall set up to cater for a metal festival, but his appetite dissipated as thoroughly as if Scarlett had just announced she believed the meat was actually made of dog shit. The choice blend of flavours faded abruptly, like a switch to his taste buds had been triggered, rendering them useless. He placed the uneaten portion down on the ground, swallowing hard as he gazed over at her.

“First it was just highly inappropriate comments, the sort of shit any dad should not be saying to his teenage daughter. Suggestive shit and then completely vile shit. I couldn’t believe he was saying it, and to begin with, he seemed to think the same thing. He’d wonder why he’d said it, then mumble some lame ass apology and fuck off somewhere else to do whatever he did. Then eventually the apologies stopped, the comments got worse and blatantly sexual, dirty, ridiculous stuff. I guess you can imagine what was going to happen after that…” Her voice trailed off and she stared off into the distance, eyes on the dark shapes of stationary trees, clusters of bush.

“What?” Seth choked out, pretty sure he could guess, but not certain he wanted to hear her put it into words.

“Words became surreptitious touches, things that were meant to be accidents, stuff not done on purpose, though after all the derogatory and nasty shit he said, I don’t even know why he bothered trying to make it appear accidental. I knew fucking better anyway. The same pattern of apologizing was there and then, of course, that disappeared and he tried more overt things. By this time I was trying as hard as possible to spend as much time as I could anywhere but home, which, incidentally, was not the house I grew up in. Once my mother left and dad spiralled into drugs, that’s where the money went. We couldn’t afford to stay there, we ended up in a shitty little caravan in the slummiest fucking park you can imagine. Redneck central, the scum of the earth all migrated to the one spot. My piece of shit excuse for a father was hardly the worst of the lot there, that’s for sure, but then a new bunch of people came along to the park. Wild, reckless, dangerous people. Teenage guys not too much older than me. What do you think happened then?”

“Not sure I even want to know,” Seth muttered. He didn’t want to hear this, he didn’t want to know any more. As bad as it was so far he suspected the tale was about to take a turn for the worse.

“There were about five of them originally, but three of these boys were called Simon, Steven, and Troy. They took a dislike to just about every single person in the park. Except me. And not in any sexual kind of way, they saw right through my sleazy father’s façade, they saw through everybody in that whole damn place. I pretty much had no friends at all, I skipped school so often I wasn’t really there enough to make friends, and most girls just hated me anyway. It wasn’t as if I was too pretty, or smart, or anything like that, I don’t think I was very pretty back then, I guess I was just a weird sullen girl and that was enough to make everybody despise me. Anyway, these guys befriended me and for once in my life I truly had people I could call friends, even though anybody would have said they were bad news from the start…”

“Wait a minute,” Seth interjected as he finally clicked a connection with the names provided. “Simon, Steven, and Troy? You mean…?”

“Well done, Seth, that’s right. That’s exactly how long I’ve known the Subversion guys,” she said, and now she offered him a smile, the shadows still streaking her countenance. “That’s who they were. Never once did any of them try on anything with me, I was one of them, one of their gang, and besides, they could all get girlfriends at the drop of a hat. I spent as much time as I could with them, which only made the minimal time I spent with my slimy fucking father worse, although he did start backing off the sleazy comments and inappropriate touching for a while. He tried his best to warn me away from seeing those ‘lowdown fucking hoodlums’ or getting involved with them in any way, as if his words meant anything to me by then. That all came to a head one night when I was out drinking with them, way too late, beyond the time when he expected me to be home cooking him dinner. I’ll abbreviate it a little, but there was pretty much a full on fight in the wake of a screaming match argument, and Daddy Dearest up-scaled his attentions to hitting me, kicking me, and so on. I got in a few good ones too, but didn’t really stand a chance of doing much more than that. So when he’d knocked me down for the final time, he started ripping my clothes off…”

“Jesus…” Seth fumbled out a cigarette and brought his flask of bourbon along too. They’d purchased soft drinks to accompany their burgers, but right about now Coke alone wasn’t going to cut it. He needed something stronger and harsher, the welcome fire of straight alcohol blazing a hot trail down his throat. Here came the bit he’d known was coming, the part he most dreaded hearing her say and he offered her the flask.

Scarlett accepted it gratefully, swigged deep and then stared searchingly at him.

“Can you guess what happened next?” She asked.

“Yes,” Seth grated out, taking his own healthy slug of the bourbon. “And I wish it didn’t…”

“What happened then?” She prodded, seemingly wanting to hear the words come from him, as if she were some perverse masochist.

“He raped you,” Seth said bluntly, feeling the sick feeling in his stomach swell like it were about to balloon up and out of him. “That sick motherfucking bastard beat you up and then he raped you. And you were unable to stop him.”

“Well he sure as fuck wanted to do so for a long time, that much was obvious, and I have no doubt he would have succeeded. Except for one thing.”

“What?” Seth almost whispered, not sure whether she was confirming or refuting the worst.

“I hadn’t been left alone there with him, not for long anyway. Only long enough for the boys to go to their van and return. They must have heard the fight start and made the decision to do what they did right then and there. Maybe they were planning to do it all along.”

“What?” Seth repeated, aware of his inability to say much more.

“They smashed in the trailer door and well…they smashed in Daddy Dearest too. Literally. They…well…they fucked him up completely.”

“Bashed the slimy prick?”

“Nope. Killed him,” Scarlet finished bluntly, though Seth detected a hint of savage joy lurking in her voice.

“Fuck!” The monosyllabic quality of Seth’s responses returned with a vengeance.

Scarlett reached across to take hold of his cigarettes and light one for herself.

“Yep. It was the three of them―Simon, Troy, and Steven—who were there. They just hauled him off of me before he could finish getting himself ready for the deed, and then they laid in, fists, boots, and I think they must have gone to get weapons as well: Troy had a hammer, Simon had a knife. They ended up using them too. And Steven grabbed a bottle from somewhere in the crappy little caravan where I lived, but was never home, and that was the end of that.

They took me away from there, back to stay with them after we all just threw together a bunch of belongings. I didn’t have much, but it was mine, so I took things important to me and clothes, shit like that. Then we got the hell out of there, out of the park, out of town. We couldn’t run and hide forever, though. Of course things culminated in the worst way we knew it would. They all went to prison and I was alone again. Despite the situation, the three of them defending me, any way you want to cut it, they were always going to do time for the way they elected to prevent DrugDad from raping me and how he ended up dead. They took it, they accepted it and they all went away together, locked up and destined to become even harder, and more dangerous than they already were.

I took it harder than they did, that was pretty much the end of my world right there. Nick and Brett were cool, and nice enough, but I wasn’t as close to either of them as I was the others, and eventually they went away too. We drifted apart, and I ended up floating around the country like a gypsy, working waitress jobs here and there, other random things, menial jobs, but enough to get by. I managed to find a place to stay, sharing a dingy little apartment with another girl I worked with, nothing special, but I couldn’t afford anything special anyhow. She up and bailed, left me in the lurch, owing all the rent and utilities, so I ran too, back out into vagrancy and of no fixed address. Then, eventually, Black, Tempest, and Blizzard came looking for me and found me. They were given ten years, they were all out in six. They tracked me down and I’ve been with them ever since. That is why I would stand by them through anything, I swear by them and I owe them my existence. They saved me back then, not just from my father, but again when I was at the point where I was considering doing absolutely anything that would keep me afloat. Almost as if they knew what I was contemplating, they appeared. I don’t believe in god, I don’t believe in miracles, or anything like that, but…”

Her voice tapered off into a prolonged moment of silence, and Seth gently added,

“But you believe in them?”

“Yep. Pretty much. Absolutely. Anyway, obviously there is much more to the story, all the things that transpired from that point on that have led to where we are at now, and no doubt you would have a fuckload of questions about all that, but that’s a story for later. For after all this. I just wanted to tell you what I meant by everybody goes away, and if you’re in anything with me, I want to know that you’re definitely in it for the long haul. I mean, even Black and the guys went away too, though they were forced to. I’m so used to being left alone that anyone vowing they won’t leave is strange and alien to me.”