Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger (45 page)

As for the rest of the group, they were a shambles, a stumbling, panicked, terrified mass of hopeless humanity fearful of getting massacred and eaten by the humanivores. Even Mark and Miranda looked as though they belonged in the centre with the rest. Heather appeared to be holding her own, or at least maintaining composure for now, faced with the horrific blood-soaked scene spanning all across the entire grounds of Blackwater Park. Maybe she was in some type of shock, or she’d witnessed enough horror—including those perpetrated by humans themselves―over the days since her rescue from the Quo Vadis parking lot to be steeled enough against these sickening sights.

The security guards, basically rent-a-cops, certainly hadn’t adapted as well as the bunch of bikers. They were as terrified as the women and the other metal fans in the centre of the bunch, driven in a screaming, panicked horde, and probably couldn’t be relied on to do anything that would assist if the whole lot of them were suddenly overrun by a pack of undead mutants they couldn’t contain.

Seth was trying to look everywhere, and yet not look everywhere, at once. He needed to know exactly where the next threat might be coming from, but by the same token, there was so much abhorrent nightmarish activity swirling around the massive sprawl of Blackwater Park that seeing all of it splattering against his eyeballs wasn’t something he wanted scorching hideous images into his brain for eternity. Though, at this rate, his eternity possibly wasn’t destined to be a very long one.

Down here on the ground, the night was cruelly alive with an almost perpetual track of screams and terrified, shouted confusion, these sounds mingling with the grotesque utterances of the undead myriads, having long since replaced any of the death metal music formerly regaling the arena. Even those members of bands who’d been morphed by the Trigger mid-performance and had briefly remained on their stages in the throes of riffing or blasting on their drum kits while the dwindling remnants of their brain capacity told them that’s what they were supposed to be doing, now succumbed to the overwhelming desire to rip and tear flesh with their teeth, and bury their horrid faces in warm human blood, and then launched themselves into the crowds to do just that.

The air was thick with the overpowering stench of blood, of rotting meat and shit, an appalling, grotesque cornucopia of smells that, while affronting and nauseating, was the natural aroma to come in tandem with this epic nightmare.

Gunshots cracked or boomed throughout the atmosphere, resonating through the chaotic spree of sound as those bearing arms inside Blackwater Park strived to either fight the undead monsters spawning and growing in proliferation, or to create enough separation to be able to flee the domain. Sirens wailed too, off in the distance, and vaguely, Seth wondered if he should be concerned with that at all. He noticed the hazy orange glows of fires out of the corner of his eye, perhaps intentionally set by folks attempting to use that as a method to separate themselves from the seething hungry beasts or something similar, and wondered whether it was fire engines racing to the scene.

He couldn’t imagine they were going to be of much use in this horror soaked cataclysm, not unless they were able to utilise the powerful velocity of their fire hoses as weapons, blasting the zombies off their feet. Maybe the weakened skull bone capacity would be such that the water spray would be able to completely break the heads of the humanivores apart.

Even if it was police, fire brigade, ambulances, all of them racing to the hellish inferno unfolding in Blackwater Park, it wouldn’t really account to very much. Hauling out the wounded in order to toss them in the ambos wasn’t going to achieve anything but more undead rising, the cops could do little but empty their weapons into the hordes, reload, repeat process, and short of putting out whatever fires were deliberately set to somehow deter zombies, the fires would be useless, unless as Seth pondered, their hoses could act as serious weaponry.

Ahead of the pack, Tempest chopped through an assemblage of portly black-shirted meatseekers of indeterminable sex, adding gory splashes of claret to an already blood-soaked ground, spraying more red mist in the air, droplets hanging abnormally long before splattering on the ground.

With the Subversion drummer and his two frontline bikie sidekicks clearing a passage for the group to come through, aiming for that stage formerly occupied by Undead Fleshcrave, it meant other hazards cropped up along the way for those following. They might not have had the weight of zombie numbers to immediately contend with, but they did have a mass of severed body parts, mangled torsos, and decapitated undead heads falling into the path made by the group forerunners. While essentially those at the head of the party were clearing the way in terms of cutting down the meatseekers before them, they weren’t taking time to stop and sweep aside the corpses and segments thereof they left in their wake, leaving perilous stumbling blocks, never mind the sea of blood gushing from the carnage.

The grass was slick with blood and extremely dangerous, and it was hardly surprising when people lost their footing, slipping in the mire.

One of the girls in the midst, over behind Miranda was fervently struggling to escalate her pace, not to break free of the group, but to put herself further away from falling back behind it, even though Seth and Nate were now the tailgaters with Dax and Black in front of them. She found herself the first to get wrong-footed by the wet, bloodied ground.

Her desperate running style followed no rhyme nor reason, it was just a rapid one foot after the other motion she was trying to push to high gear, and with terrified eyes looking straight ahead, she wasn’t paying the same attention as some of the others to the gory pitfalls and fleshy hazards adorning the grass. A foot in ankle boots landed on a murk of mushed body organs and her ankle twisted, her body weight collapsing with it. She smacked the bloodslick ground hard, landing on her back, and making her fallen body a sudden and unexpected obstacle for the others, which capsized the person following closely behind her, the rent-a-cop Seth referred to as Thomson.

He let out a strangled yelp as he tripped over her, and then pitched into the abattoir mess splattered over the ground. It was a domino effect that took down SternBitch as well and a tall thin guy in a 'Running Wild' long-sleeved top, with his dirty blonde hair in an untidy ponytail. They all flailed and thrashed in a tangled knot of limbs, looking like a mutated, blood-soaked octopus comprised of human arms.

Only Black, Dax, Nate, and Seth were further back from this human ten pin collective, and as few in the group ahead even looked back to observe the catastrophe befall their fellows, the gap widened between them.

“Jesus Christ!” Black growled as the quartet converged on the pile up.

Thomson was attempting to haul himself up now, squelching in the tacky rivers of blood pooling on the ground among chopped off zombie heads, severed hands, and indeterminable muck. Seth noticed the rent-a-cop wasn’t overly concerned about assisting any of his fallen companions up, his priority seemed to be his own welfare first. He actually used the body of SternBitch as leverage to get himself up, at least to a kneeling position, his chunky hand pressing down on her chest, not particular about the fact his fingers were inadvertently all over her breasts.

His oafish moves of self-preservation pressed her down to the ground, her back shoved firmly into the blood and gunk all over the grass, and she yelped in pain and panic.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Seth couldn’t stop himself from blurting out as Thomson, the knees of his grey pants saturated in gore, made it to his feet, still no thought of extending a hand to any of the others entering his head. Thomson just gazed at him, wordlessly, an expression of disbelief slipping across his countenance as if he couldn’t comprehend why Seth would be asking the question.

Nate was there now, the big man stooping hurriedly to reach into the mess of thrashing limbs, hopeful of disentangling them before the lurkers around them got bold.

Dax and Black moved in as well, though not in order to assist. Black knew better than taking everyone out of the equation and was keeping his eyes peeled as shadowy figures of undead prowlers loitered around, many of them having been drawn from their grounded feasts to hunt some moving prey. His quick-learning understudy, Dax, was proving he was an admirable man to follow Black’s lead, slipping back into that persona he’d been steadily adopting ever since the Noumena bloodbath, ready to adapt to this situation, and also kept a vigilant watch on the surrounding undead.

Seth noticed that Black hadn’t opted to tote the shotgun, or any other form of firearm in lieu of Mother North. Instead, he hefted his lethal katana, its blade already running with blood.

As those two acted as watchful sentries, it was up to Nate and Seth to assist the fallen threesome up as best they could. Not exactly the easiest of tasks while wielding Mother North for Seth, but the Renegade Master had no issue hauling SternBitch out of her bloody piece of ground.

“You helping at all?” Seth barked at Thomson.

“Fuck that,” Thomson replied. “Every man for himself. This group idea ain’t gonna work. Clumsy ass bitches aren’t gonna be the death of me, that’s for sure. Adios to you fools.”

Suddenly he launched himself, aiming at Dax, possibly the only one of the lot who didn’t have at least one eye on him. Granted, Nate was more tied up helping the girls and RunningWild untangle themselves on the bloodied ground, but he didn’t appear a viable option for Thomson, and clearly, the rent-a-cop was looking to disarm somebody to obtain a gun for himself. Obviously signing on as security for this festival hadn’t involved the right to bear arms, or if he’d formerly possessed a gun, he didn’t have it now.

More preoccupied with ensuring he knew when the meatseekers would be coming, Dax wasn’t prepared to be taken out by a desperado dissenter, and while Seth and the others might have been expecting dangerous opposition to arise, none of them were thinking it was going to come from within their own factions.

The gun in Dax’s hand spilled from his grasp, flying a distance away on the bloody, saturated ground as Thomson cannoned into him, snatching for the weapon. Dax went down under the greater weight of the man, a panicked yell of despair and surprise escaping his lips.

Involuntarily, Seth let out a startled shout himself. He figured he should have seen that coming, though he was actually expecting Thomson to just up and run off like an idiot. Evidently the rent-a-cop was a little more perceptive of what he might require to hopefully prolong his existence.

Now Nate had SternBitch up and RunningWild managed to right himself on shaky feet, and the pair of them were assisting the final woman up, leaving Black the only one remaining vigilant with the encroaching undead swarms, and Seth stupefied by Thomson’s abrupt surprise attack.

Thomson and Dax rolled in a clinch, spraying blood from the offal and mess strewn across the Blackwater Park grass.

Temporarily frozen, Seth eventually went for the pair, his intent to wrestle Thomson off his friend, either that, or plant a Mother North blade deep in the stupid sonofabitch’s back.

Then the humanivores poured out of the perpetual haze of blood mist. They came from all directions.

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT-SENTINEL SMOKESCREEN

To begin with, Mark didn’t even acknowledge they’d lost members of the congregation in the mad panicky dash across the blood-slickened grass, didn’t even realise four of their number were left behind in the red mist, their progress curtailed by an unfortunate misstep.

Intent only on keeping up with the group leaders as they hacked and slashed through feral undead enemies that loomed up before them and desperately hoping he didn’t have to engage in anything along those lines, Mark kept his eyes forward at almost all times, aside from quick furtive glances across to his right to ensure Miranda was still keeping up as well. She was, her breasts jiggling frenetically as she ran, encased only in her bra, the garment now spattered with dots of blood, her naked lower torso likewise decorated in sanguinary paint.

Heather was over beyond her, as well as a couple of other women and two guys with traditional heavy metal shirts, one Mark knew was Iron Maiden ‘Killers’, the other he had no clue about. Roxana and Lizette were there as well, outside the main body, while the burly security guard guy, jogging now and puffing, was starting to sweat profusely. Scarlett was on the far side of the bunch, so too the biker with the long red shock of hair. Up ahead of them, his ugly lethal bass weapon in hand, and slicing through any zombies who veered too close, was Blizzard, not far off the pace from the trio of Tempest and the two Renegade Masters.

Others lurched out of various areas to join their group, almost as if the weapon toting runners were some form of migrating bird flock and they saw fit to be part of it. A skinny Goth guy with unruly spikes of black hair and a touch of eye shadow and makeup on, and his short female companion, cinched up in a purple corset, her own mascara streaked and running in jagged black lines down her face, stumbled into the slipstream from the side, begging not to be cut down, vowing they weren’t undead as several knife wielding members almost acted on instinct. It wasn’t until Mark started to feel vulnerable over his side, observing that the right side was stacked with Lizette, Scarlett, Blizzard, and Rusty, while he could only see Roxana up ahead of him and further on, the other biker flanking Tempest, that he came to realise his other more violence-savvy compatriots were AWOL, not on the heels of the rest of them as they had been.

That caused him to finally fling a glance back over his shoulder, praying he didn’t step on a crushed cranium or hunk of bloodied meat and go ass up on the horrid bloodsoup all over the ground, and he saw that Seth, Black, the other biker, and Dax were nowhere in sight. Neither was the other security dude, nor the attractive, but severe looking woman who’d been part of the festival organisational brigade. It seemed there were other members lacking as well; the few newcomers who’d invited themselves to run with the group didn’t quite make up for who was suddenly conspicuously absent.

Mark faltered, almost slipping in the soupy blood mess that streaked the grass in runnels, turned blades crimson and hazardous. He returned his attention to the front, just briefly, then looked back behind him again, literally turning his body sideways on an angle as he ran so he could see better what was behind, what
should
have been behind him. But wasn’t.

There was nobody behind him and his other companions. Where there should have been a whole bunch of people, there was nothing, just the swirling blood mist that shrouded the whole region.

It was as if the whole lot of them had simply been swallowed up by some enormous inexplicable force, obliterating all presence of them.

If they were somewhere there, way back behind in the distance, Mark couldn’t see. With his black eye swelling up, his visibility was already pretty limited, but he knew it wasn’t so bad he wouldn’t be able to see people back there where they should have been. He couldn’t see Stage Four anymore either, just milling shadow figures and a perpetual wash of gory red in the air. He sure as hell couldn’t see Seth, Dax, any of those he could have sworn were in tow mere minutes prior, those who possessed serious weaponry and potential to protect the rest.

Dax might be something of a loose cannon, and someone who fancied he was in the same league with Black and Tempest, but it was this fearless fanciful attitude which made him someone who’d launch into battle with these undead freaks with no qualms and reap violent rewards. Now he was absent, so too the most lethal of them all, Black. And Seth with that deadly Mother North. Plus the big biker boss. All of them, just gone.

“Ah fuck!” Mark moaned, and his dismayed statement carried across to Miranda, who tossed a panicky look of query and consternation his direction.

“What?” Things were already bad enough as far as she could tell, she could hardly foresee what could make it worse to draw the fearful expletive from Mark.

“Seth, Dax, everybody else back there...Gone!” Mark gasped, unable to run, breathe, and try to force out a bunch of words simultaneously.

“What?” Miranda gasped again, aghast, her agitation now spreading to Heather. She turned to look too, needing to see it for herself to believe, though clearly Mark wasn’t making it up.

That took all her attention away from her forward progress, and the spill Mark was fearing would come to claim him snatched Miranda instead. She skated in the slippery perilous blood all over the grass and tumbled forward, arms flailing. In a last ditch desperate attempt to maintain some semblance of footing, she flung out a grasping hand and her fingers snagged Mark’s arm. He went down with her.

Miranda’s ungainly twist to see behind caused her to land first on her shoulder, and then the side of her face slapped the wet grass, splattering in the blood of chopped down undead and ripped apart human victims.

Mark dropped his gun as he fell in order to throw his palms out and managed to temporarily hold himself on the flat of his hands, then his skin slid in the crimson gore and he went face first into the mire too.

Self-preservation was strong in Miranda, she was skittering up to her hands and knees in a flash, desperate not to remain on the ground for any period of time, let alone with her face squashed into the spilled blood of others. Heather stopped as well, throwing out hands to assist, and Mark, recoiling in disgust as he felt the blood trickling down his skin, felt around for the dropped firearm.

The rest of the group proceeded ahead, but not for long. As all three of those left behind in their wake made it to their feet, drenched in the blood from the earth, they saw why.

Forward progress was suddenly at a stalemate, nobody was proceeding any further to approach that Undead Fleshcrave stage, though essentially they were there at its foot.

A great wall of the grey clad hulks who acted as bodyguards and protectors to Undead Fleshcrave, the Sentinels, obscured any opportunity to gain access to the stage.

Though there was approximately twenty of them, to Mark it seemed like they spanned as far as the eye could see, a giant barricade of humanity, impervious to the hordes of undead; most, if not all of them, armed with guns.

As he, Miranda, and Heather made this terrible observation, gunshots cracked with deafening reports in this close proximity, not the distant gunfire of rebelling Blackwater Park residents fighting against growing zombie armies, but bullets blazing from the guns of the Sentinels.

The short biker at the head of their party, took a bullet to the face, blood puffing out the back of his head in a spurt, and he did a spastic backwards dance before tumbling groundwards.

A woman just behind Tempest and the other Renegade Master, in a staggered position in the gap between those two leaders, was hit twice, one volley punching her in the breast, the other ripping a bloody hole through her cheek.

The burly security guard, rent-a-cop flung up his hands and uttered a strangled shout, and Mark saw blood blossom on his bulky chest as he staggered a few steps backwards, then fell on his knees, clasping haplessly at his punctured pectoral.

As screams of disbelief and shock, coupled with the agony of the dying, erupted into the already chaotic mayhem soundtrack, another shot blasted, and to Mark’s horror he saw Lizette’s face disappear in a storm of spouting blood and torn flesh, the shotgun fired only once at the Biblebasher zombie crew, spiralling out of her nerveless fingers. Then, she too, followed its trajectory to earth, already running with the blood of multitudes.

“Oh shit!” Miranda moaned, then bent double and heaved violently. A spray of vomit jetted from between her lips, adding further unpleasant spatter to the mire. Alongside Miranda, one hand of support still resting on her naked back, Heather was as pale as a ghost, choking and sputtering as if she too wanted to eject her stomach contents, but she stoically held on and managed, at least for now, not to join Miranda in spewing streams of acidic bile at her feet.

What the fuck?
Mark inwardly screamed, watching as the corpse of Lizette drop in an awkward tangle splay of death, her face literally blasted apart. He wasn’t any sort of expert on bullets or firearm projectiles, or how they might operate in different ways once fired from a gun, but he didn’t think it could be a normal bullet causing that sort of hideous facial damage to the taciturn Subversion team member.

Back in Armada, Dax, Buck, and Lincoln used to sit around in the midst of drinking sessions while they all played black metal albums and talked general shit, and the trio often went off on tangents regarding guns, weapons and things like bullets, mostly brought on by their various obsessions with creating bullet belts with live rounds.

Mark vaguely recalled mention of hollow tips, expanding bullets, frangible and armour piercing varieties, though he wasn’t entirely sure the difference between them, or whether they’d be able to do that to somebody’s countenance. He guessed it was highly probable, though he did remember somebody pointing out that these types of projectiles were created not to leave any exit wound, but rather to either expand upon penetration of the target, or to break up inside and mushroom around the victim. The results here looked like the bullet had taken her whole face off, expanding as it may have exited, or caused the whole visage to explode in a mushroom cloud of bloody gore and mutilated flesh. Whatever the case, Mark felt like throwing up as badly as Miranda was doing right now, but sheer stupefied brain-numbing fear kept him from doing anything, even diving on the ground to avoid another round of murderous gunfire.

Where the hell had all the Sentinels come from? They weren’t in evidence anywhere while Plaguewielder performed the impromptu set on Stage Four, not before the assault by the death metal thugs, and certainly not after. Not while Undead Fleshcrave cut loose with the insidious Zombie Trigger, and not while Seth’s astute black metal riffing and tremolo ice impacted on that Trigger, deadening its attempts, sent the Fleshcravers into damage control.

And not even when the whole lot of them began their frenetic, haphazard battle dash across the undead riddled grounds of Blackwater Park, their savage leaders led by Tempest, slicing a bloody swathe through any zombies in their way.

The Sentinels were never there once. They’d never been seen, never emerged, never made their presence apparent. Until now.

Tempest sure fucking wouldn’t lead them all straight into a vipers’ nest, he wouldn’t have charged the Undead Fleshcrave stage with the violent fervour he did, if the Sentinels had always been barricading it. Because they hadn’t been. They’d emerged from somewhere, looming out of the bloodmist as if they were materialising spectres; evil, vengeful ghosts rising out of the havoc created by the zombie puppets birthed by Undead Fleshcrave, themselves also mere marionettes with death metal strings yanked and manipulated by Global Death.

As the creeping, crawling fear spread all over Mark, rooting him helplessly in the one spot, vulnerable to the very real likelihood of a hail of bullets opening his whole head up like an exploding watermelon, he was struck by the chill of thinking that perhaps they were some hideous ghostly manifestations, these death-dealing Sentinels.

Or more likely, they’d been ensconced inside the stage, beneath it. As the stage eventually lowered the band down to ground level, somebody triggered off the waiting Sentinels, that the brutal five piece were about to be set upon by the approaching Subversion faction, that thorn in their side which plagued them ever since Armada.

Though it was probably only a handful of seconds between the first cavalcade of gunblasts from the Sentinels, it felt as though time stood still or was moving sluggishly around Mark. It was like he was trapped in some strange undercurrent of treacly atmosphere, very much like the swirling bloodmist surrounding them, and it held him in a terrible thrall, making him a sitting duck. He realised he’d never recaptured the gun he’d let slip from his fingers to lessen the impact as he fell to the ground with Miranda, and he also acknowledged he’d never get his hands on it before slugs ripped through his body or perforated his face in a leaden bite of death.

He saw the guy in the Iron Maiden shirt swivelling around, his face splattered with Lizette’s blood, his expression a horrified mask of terror, the whole act of being cut down by raining bullets eclipsing the fear of being massacred and masticated by undead monsters. The fellow was clearly turning in a bid to run back the way they’d come, a vain attempt to outpace flying bullets.

Abruptly, he jolted forward in conjunction with another short sharp series of popping cracks, the expression of fear swimming on his features shifting into one of pained surprise, and his arms jerked spasmodically out in weird angles. A gout of blood punched out of his chest on the tail of a bullet, ripping right through the face of Eddie the Iron Maiden Mascot as he loitered with a scowl and a blood dripping hatchet on the front of the man’s T-shirt. His run to escape a trail of bullets scoring through his flesh was a painfully short-lived one as another thumped into the back of his head.