Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger (47 page)

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 flesh 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.

So therefore, if the undead existed, one couldn’t rule out the possibility of ghosts, vampires, werewolves, or
anything else
from being a reality.

Blank expressions existed on the faces of some, sheer terror on others, and a complete lack of any understanding on still others.

“They aren’t ghosts,” Nate said brusquely. “Told ya, Blackwater ain’t like any other town. I know where they’ve gone. Any of you Park folk should know too.”

“Of course!” Renee snapped her fingers, nodding in accompaniment with the other biker’s also moving heads in assent and comprehension.

Seth and his friends were none the wiser, as were plenty of others in the congregation. Clearly not all the survivors here were born and bred in Blackwater Park, they must have travelled to attend this festival. It was only locals like the Masters, Renee, and any others, who had any inkling what the bearded giant was referring to.

“Notice the thinning of the Blackwater residents?” Nate pressed on, directing his query to anybody who might be in the dark―which was a lot of them.

While the likes of Blizzard, Scarlett, and Roxana were listening, they were also keeping watchful eyes on the lurking undead. Right now, the zombie freaks nearest to where they stood, over by the stage, were largely preoccupied by feasting on fallen flesh, but that wouldn’t be the case forever and there were plenty more of the humanivores in the park grounds, no doubt spilling out of them too.

The rest paid close attention to Nate, waiting for him to reveal what he knew.

“Blackwater Park is built to deal with shit like this, and all kinds of catastrophes. One of the few cities leading the charge when it comes to being prepared for tragedies, or natural disasters, or well…fucking zombie apocalypses.” Nate stated simply. “Tunnels.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TUNNELS

“Tunnels?” Dax echoed predictably.

“They must have an
in
with somebody in this town,” Nate continued. “Someone who has given them the inside dope, but trust me, boys and girls, that’s where your fucking death metal ghosts are. Fleeing like punk bitches in the Blackwater Park tunnels.”

“Tunnels.” Dax repeated, though this time he said it as a statement rather than an echo, as if he was trying to wrap his head around it.

The Subversion trio exchanged glances, nods of understanding and acceptance of that little nugget of possibility slithering over their respective visages.

“Where are these tunnels? How do we get into them?” Roxana asked, a question all of those who formed the nucleus of the mission to destroy Undead Fleshcrave wanted to know. The others possibly had no interest to know, if it meant continuing the madness of chasing the elusive death metal outfit, though as an escape route that meant they didn’t have to slug their way through the minefield of flesh-eating monsters must have come as a heaven sent option.

Seth felt his heart leap up into his throat as Nate relayed the information;  a sudden surge of jubilation rivalling that he’d felt seeing Scarlett hadn’t been mauled and rent asunder by zombie freaks.

At the same time, apprehension and nervous anxiety crept in too, the differing sides of the coin playing havoc with his thoughts.

If this were indeed the case, perhaps the Undead Fleshcravers were not fleeing, but going down into these alleged tunnels somewhere, possibly with any surviving Sentinels, in order to lay another ambush, set another trap to put paid to their pursuers for once and for all.

Then again, maybe not. If Undead were aware that these Hunters on their tail were the same who’d pursued them all the way from the instigation of this apocalyptic horror back in Armada, then they might assume their chasers were unaware of the so-called tunnels existing under Blackwater Park.

“My guess,” Tempest spoke up roughly. “Is there is some entrance to these tunnels somewhere very near to where we are right now. Which would explain why they chose to have their stage here, and also why they’ve vanished so quickly. Furthermore, that would be where the Sentinels were hiding in wait, ready to open fire on anybody who came to fuck with the Trigger achieving its desired effect.”

“The stage!” Mark exclaimed.

“Bet you’re right,” Dax nodded, a strange grin creeping across his face. “Those motherfuckers lowered their stage right on top of an entry point and now they’re running like fucking sewer rats, trying to escape, thinking we’re none the wiser. Well, fuck that, let’s do this!”

“There’s a whole bunch of entrances here in the Park alone,” Drill said, then amended the statement. “Well, there’s a few anyway. And yeah, one of them is bound to be around here close by.”

“Let’s fucking find it then,” Dax snapped impatiently, obviously keen to make up for lost time, rack up the body count he’d been cheated out of by losing his weapons and becoming cut off from involvement in the Sentinel dogfight.

“Hang on,” Seth voiced his concerns. “What if they’re down there setting another trap? I’m assuming that’s pretty much what…happened here…”

He studiously avoided catching Scarlett’s gaze, not wanting to see any hurt reflected in her eyes, as he danced around mentioning any names of those who hadn’t made it so far.

“They’ll be running,” Nate was confident. “They won’t think any of you know jacksquat about the tunnels, that’s obviously been an ace they’ve held up their sleeves the whole time. Get in, play that fucking brain killing zombifying fucking music and then, on the advice of whoever in town is feeding them the goods, slip away like fucking thieves in the night.”

“To carry on and potentially hit another town, or a whole spate of them,” Tempest finished. “So maybe Blackwater isn’t their coup de grace, the big finale, or anything of the sort, just a very big notch on the belt of Global Death. Set up to be a grand finale if they somehow got sprung and stopped, yet manipulated enough so if they slipped the noose once again, there’s still hope to infect more towns. You’re right, big man, these fuckers don’t have a clue we’ve got the inside scoop on the tunnels now too. They won’t be expecting us to keep coming. Dax, you’re right too. Let’s find this entrance pronto.”

As the various main players in the conversation were speaking, after posting his concern about the possibility of a trap, Seth had been in the process of edging around the fringes of the group. He’d kept a nervous, watchful eye on the assorted scattered knots of feeding humanivores, all of whom still seemed more engrossed in the available meat they had, than chasing down new flesh, and none yet threatened to make any moves towards the cluster of bloodied folk beside the stage.

His motivation for moving from his original position was simple. Scarlett. Never again did he want to be separated from her in that fashion, having her so far ahead in another group he couldn’t even see her and not know what might be happening to her. The terrible expanse of space between losing sight of her and eventually being able to clap eyes on her once more had been devastating, nerve-wracking, and horrendous, not knowing whether she was a bloody pile of flesh and bone being mauled between the teeth of the hideous undead fiends.

Losing her was not an option, not after he’d lost Julietta, not just once, but twice, and then, ultimately, in a twist of fate, at the very hands of Scarlett herself.

He wasn’t putting himself in the position to be away from her again.

Though her attention was mostly fixated upon Tempest and Black as they reined everybody into a close-knit formation, again keeping the more adept at weaponry and zombie slaughter on the outside where possible, her eyes flickered over to him as he drifted up alongside her. Now she allowed a smile to turn up the corners of her gorgeous lips and she stretched out her free hand to him. He dropped Mother North back to a one handed grip, ignoring the searing burn of pain as all her weight shifted to that single limb.

The frantic swinging, chopping, hacking, and dismembering of undead beasts sure did a number on every muscle from his shoulders right down to his hands, and he was feeling it even more now, but the feel of her skin against his went a long way towards alleviating that, at least inside his head.

The whole tunnels notion brought to light by Nate had him drenched in relief that he wouldn’t essentially have to immediately start swinging with Mother North again, provided they made it down underground without issue. On the other hand, if his suggestion that Undead Fleshcrave and whatever remaining Sentinels that were with them were lying in wait to spring an ambush was true, then he’d hardly get the respite his limbs were badly screaming for.

Scarlett pulled him into her with that one-handed tight grip, pressing the length of her divine body against his and kissed him passionately, her tongue slithering in between his lips, hers clasping on them. Though both of them were festooned in a mixture of blood, perspiration, and assorted other muck picked up along the way, none of that was any concern to Seth; his only interest right now was her shape against his, her kiss sparking his being with an adrenalin surge of delight, a power charge to counteract his dwindling batteries.

“I thought you were…” His voice, already a hushed murmur, trailed off into nothingness, as if even uttering the words would in some bizarre way jinx the fact that she was still alive. She placed a finger over his lips, further ensuring he kept those words unsaid. Though she’d evidently been of a similar mindset, and thinking the same of him once the two factions inadvertently split, she elected not to voice that either.

“I’m not. And nor am I going to be,” she whispered back. “Don’t worry about that.”

He knew she was saying words he wanted to hear, the same sort of sentiments he wanted to communicate to her, even though neither one of them could guarantee it in the slightest. Saying it with some measure of confidence was one thing, having it actually pan out that way was entirely another, and Seth was all too painfully aware of that.

A mere couple of weeks ago it would be completely inconceivable to imagine that he and those members of his clique of black metal friends still in the land of the living would be surrounded by the land of the undead, miles and miles from their home city, his girlfriend to become first his ex, then a zombie, then killed by a woman who would take her place romantically, while multiple other close friends were gone forever. Now, death was not only a constant threat from roaming rampant packs of once-ordinary death metal fans turned ravening fleshcravers, but from gun toting bodyguards, to the very band who’d instigated what was essentially the zombie apocalypse, and he and his pocket of associates were consigned to be the agents to prevent the unbelievable menace from spreading even further than it already had, an epidemic which was proving to be nigh on impossible to contain.

He could scarcely recall what it was like before this nightmare, and his surviving friends bore little resemblance to what they’d been prior to that fateful concert in Armada.

Good time clownish practical joker Dax had morphed into a gung-ho borderline lunatic who thought he had what it took to match it with the dangerous leaders of this whole insane death mission, and Seth’s best friend, usually a staunch and fiercely loyal soul, had gone the other direction, driven into a fearful existence where all he wanted was to be far away from it all with Miranda, wanting no part of the enforced violence and brutal survival tactics they had to engage in.

Seth shuddered to think of how the outcome would be unfolding if it was only Dax, Mark, and Miranda he had to rely on to keep them all alive.

Dax would be so rash and militantly exuberant to launch into attacks that his careless negligence would have them all slaughtered and feasted upon, while the reticence of Mark would have them killed equally fast.

Even with the guys of Subversion and their sexy women associates—whose numbers were dropping alarmingly―and the stalwart biker newcomers, plus all the others swept up in the current, Seth wasn’t certain that somebody wasn’t about to get them all killed.

And even though it might mean being able to avoid the undead explosion above ground, he sure as hell wasn’t ruling out that possibility of brutal, bloody death happening once the party descended down into these alleged tunnels running beneath the populace of Blackwater Park.

***

For some reason, Seth was expecting a sheer rabbit warren of tunnels, a maze network where it would be almost impossible to guess in which direction the Undead Fleshcravers might have fled, with so many crisscrossing passages and intersecting shafts that the hiding places or options to go would be infinite.

He was wrong.

They discovered the entrance, as correctly suggested by Mark, underneath the stage. It was essentially a mostly hollow creation, where obviously the Sentinels were lurking prior to looming out in ambush formation. Once inside, they found ladder structures led down from the entrance into the bowels of the Park.

One by one, led by Tempest and Blizzard, prepared for any instance of an underground attack being launched by Fleshcravers and Sentinels lurking in wait, they climbed down the ladders to drop to a relatively narrow stone floor.

The tunnel they all emerged in was a long, straight entity with no signs of intersecting passageways or random deviations, nor places where an entire band could secrete themselves or any bulky bodyguards.

It was roughly circular in shape, around ten feet or so in height from the floor to the curving roof, composed entirely of big cinder block bricks, lined by a handrail all the way down the left-hand side, with ladders leading to other entry/exit points appearing intermittently along the entire span of it.

It wasn’t, as Seth was also expecting it to be, as dark as fuck down there either.

There were lights set into the roof, though not all of them were in operation. Those casting some semblance of illumination were sporadically placed along the line of the tunnel’s top, though not by design, more because some of them had expired, or possibly been deliberately destroyed by vandals.

Consequently, there was lighting, but it was erratic, with long sections of dark shadow loitering between patches underneath the illumination, where the curving walls, the handrails, and ladders were clearly visible. It was an unnerving experience being there, but at least there weren’t yet any masses of flesh hungry undead to contend with. Any of those Blackwater Park denizens who’d’ been transformed into meatseekers apparently hadn’t retained any thoughts or memories in their mutilated brains of the tunnels that stretched below their city, or if they had, they hadn’t yet considered climbing down there, not with the abundance of running, screaming, panicking human beef available up at ground level.

Had any of them been cluey enough, or able to use rational thought, or in any way been able to make use of thought patterns that might still be present, they would have discovered meals served up to them, human spam in a can.

Because as Seth himself finally joined some of the others who’d already descended into the bowels of Blackwater Park, he discovered why it appeared as though uninfected residents were simply vanishing from the Park.

They too were taking to the tunnels as a means to escape. If Black and co. were of the mindset of hitting the tunnels and making haste after the departing death metal villains, they were sadly mistaken.