Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger (56 page)

A pathway was cleared quicker than he might have expected, but then again, with the number of forces looking to eliminate the undead threat, he supposed he shouldn’t have been astonished. He didn’t know who else may have witnessed the fleeing Undeaders making the most of the chaotic diversion to try and slip away unobserved, but with Scarlett hell-bent to catch up, he didn’t really get the opportunity to stand around and do a head count. He was painfully aware that Scarlett abruptly presented an ultimatum to him by her actions, whether she intended to or not. Pick her or pick his friends. Complete the mission and trust that these war-minded black metal militants here would be able to prevent his friends from becoming food for the beasts, or stay and fight and hope he could assist in keeping them from falling prey to the hungry hordes.

On the spur of the moment, he picked her.

CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN-VENDETTA ASSASSIN

Outside the concert room that was to be their tomb, mauled by mutated death heads in a final mocking salute from Undead Fleshcrave, Seth was expecting to find himself and Scarlett in the subdued light of Kathaarian’s maze of halls. And they may well have been, but it was so fucking dark he could hardly tell. Seeing two feet in front him was just about an impossibility, the whole place was severely cloaked in shadows, lurking with unseen menace.

After the swirling, eye-scrambling sickly green radiance from inside the gig room, stepping into sheer dark was unnerving and equilibrium shifting. Scarlett pulled to an abrupt halt with Seth falling in tow alongside her.

“Fuck, where to?”

The temporary relief at escaping from the slaughterhouse inside, in a battle waged between black metallers and zombified death metallers, slipped away, usurped by the same creeping unease which plagued Seth for days and days now.

In dark hallways, they trod very cautiously, barely able to see much more than clumps of shadow, any one of which could have been a member of Undead Fleshcrave looking to somehow eliminate their pursuers for good, furious at being thwarted at the death once more. As far as Seth knew, the band didn’t have weapons of any sort on them, but it was probably naïve to think they didn’t. He expected they had at least one more back up plan to ensure they slipped away from dipping another city into apocalypse once more, though the concert should have been their crowning glory.

There was no sign of any of the fleeing fivesome, nor was there any Tempest or Black to be seen. Of course, it was almost too dark to see each other, bar the pale globes of their faces, looking streaked with black from the blood on their skin.

What became of the formerly dim soft light glow saturating the establishment, Seth had no clue, but it left him on edge, filled with trepidation.

Maybe it might have been a smarter plan to stay behind in the hellish inferno back behind them; at least he would be largely aware of what was going on.

A door creaked, then crashed open, spearing a splash of light onto the carpet, and then a figure smashed into Scarlett, pitching her to the floor. Both her weapons spilled away, out of the slab of illumination and into the dark beyond. The insane grinning visage of SkinCarver loomed over her in the light from the room he’d burst from. He hefted a pair of carving knives which looked like they’d been appropriated from a chef’s block, and Seth assumed the room the Undeader barrelled from was the Kathaarian kitchen. Apparently the band had placed all their eggs in one basket, with the presumption that their enforced intimate concert would see their relentless Hunters finally laid to waste, or so it seemed if they were relegated to raiding kitchen utensils to serve as self-defence. Seth almost laughed out loud. He lifted Mother North, the connection he was certain that now existed between himself and the beauty.

“Are you for real, ScumCarver? Kitchen knives? I guess we can settle the age-old debate right now. Black metal trumps death metal.”

The Fleshcrave lead axeman didn’t look quite as concerned as he should have. The leering smirk didn’t slide off his visage.

“I don’t think so, corpse paint clown. Only death metal is real.”

Pain exploded in Seth’s spinal area in a fiery blossom, his entire back screaming in agony as something massive smashed into it, dropped him immediately to his knees, spilling Mother North from spasming fingers. He wasn’t sure if he’d been shot, stabbed, bludgeoned or any of the above, but it felt like an unholy combination of all three. He pulled off a valiant attempt to look around, and FaceGnawer clobbered him with his bass guitar again, this time smacking him in the chest with a blow that felt like it cracked half a dozen ribs and mashed his heart into a flat hamburger patty. He stayed on his knees though, swaying like a doomed man about to have a final fling with the executioner.

“That’s right,” FaceGnawer nodded grimly, his expression not nearly as malevolently gleeful as SkinCarver. “Your fancy fucking guitars might be custom jobs built to slice and dice, but the traditional ones will do the trick just as nicely.”

“Lot more fun too,” SkinCarver said maliciously. “But all the same, let me have a go of this baby.”

He referred to the fallen Mother North, sweeping her away from Seth with a booted foot before swiftly stooping to hoist the bloodstained beauty up.

“Stay fucking put, princess!” FaceGnawer warned Scarlett, who was sprawled on the carpet. She wasn’t doing much moving anyway; Seth suspected the unexpected assault from SkinCarver had driven her head into the unforgiving wall of the hallway. Desperate inward prayers for her to still be breathing were probably to no avail anyway, she was destined to have Mother North’s oft-used blades buried in her.

“That’s right. Dying on your knees is the way for you to go. It’s the way black metal died long ago, while death prevails,” SkinCarver spoke, while FaceGnawer held his bass like a baseball club, ready to tee off on Seth’s cranium. Seth thought the band scampered away without their instruments, but evidently he was dead wrong about that. Now he was just going to be dead.

But fuck dying on his knees. With shaky legs and a torso that felt like he’d been chestfucked by a jackhammer, he hauled himself upright. He figured it would probably only take a well-timed blow to the skull from the bass to put him to rest for good, but he knew FaceGnawer was letting the guitarist take the honours of decapitating him with the purloined Subversion weapon.

SkinCarver had a few more words to add, interrupted and hurried along by the more impatient FaceGnawer, but Seth barely heard them, his mind swirling down into a pit of desolation from which he wouldn’t emerge.

In those terrible brief moments between these dark thoughts of the end and when SkinCarver finally swung Mother North, Seth was battered by another furious blow, this time from neither behind or in front. It came from the side, smashing him down, plunging him against the hallway wall.

SkinCarver’s triumphant smirk segued into an expression of abject horror as his lethal swing carried the deadly blades searing through the air in an arc that sliced air where the head of Seth had been, then tore through the throat of FaceGnawer. The bassist was standing just close enough that the disappearance of Seth meant SkinCarver stumbled forward a step or two as he whipped Mother North around, and enough of her wicked blade edge gashed a bloody smile in the bass players neck, severing his jugular, shearing skin and flesh open, bloodying up the hallway with geysers of claret.

Slammed against the wall, sliding most ungraciously down it, Seth realised somebody else had emerged and been the catalyst to lunge into the path of a swinging death blade to bear him to safety.

Dax.

Nor was Dax finished yet. He lunged off the stunned figure of Seth and launched another charge at SkinCarver, hitting him hard in the abdomen with a crash tackle similar to the one he’d performed on Seth, nothing held back in either one. SkinCarver’s grip on Mother North was flimsy at best to begin with, after just chopping his bandmate’s throat open, and the power of Dax’s unbridled assault was sufficient to make him unhand it. Seth pulled in his feet quickly before the falling weapon sheared off a handful of toes, regardless of him wearing steel caps or not, and then watched as Dax squeezed hands around SkinCarver’s throat.

Tighter and tighter, he sought to apply pressure, also using the grip embedded in the guitarist’s skin to raise the man’s head and bash it against the floor. It may have been carpeted, but with the force Dax used while digging clawed fingers deep into the neck and strangling as well, the blows would be enough to stupefy SkinCarver. At length, when the flailing legs of the axeman began ceasing the violence of their actions and a protruding tongue emerged beneath a pair of eyes which filled red with busting blood vessels, Dax released his hold, panting heavily.

Then he promptly straightened, took hold of the abandoned Mother North and methodically hacked SkinCarver into sections of raw meat, spilling a deluge of blood into the carpet.

Seth didn’t stick around to watch the entire dismemberment, the complete dismantling of SkinCarver, which would render his hacked up pieces unable to regenerate in any undead way; he was already crawling around the bloody mess to Scarlett.

She was breathing after all, pulling herself up in a seated position against the wall, gingerly feeling around her head and face for knots and lumps, eyes on the spectacle of Dax playing delicatessen on not just SkinCarver, but now the throat-slit FaceGnawer.

When at last he was done, he stalked over to them, breathing hard, his face almost unrecognisable beneath a sheen of blood, hair that should have been blonde now so drenched and thick with the gore that it looked like blood ropes hanging around his head and shoulders.

He thrust the principal blade of the guitarweapon straight into the floor, driving it through the carpet to stand in the wooden boards below, though he kept both blood dripping hands on the neck of it.

“Jesus, Dax...” Seth started to speak, but Dax cut him off curtly.

“Save it. You’re not cut out for this, Seth. You’re no leader, you’re not going to last this apocalypse without somebody else pulling your ass out of the fire. And that’s the last time I do it. After this ends, I have plans on what I’ll be doing, but it doesn’t involve you. So, I’ll be borrowing this deathwhore right here and putting her to good use in the way only I can. You sit tight here and let the real men of the apocalypse handle business.”

Then he yanked Mother North back up out of the floorboard, leaving a spreading puddle of blood to soak into the carpet, and swiftly strode off, aiming not into the kitchen area, but further up the hall, vanishing once the dark beyond the illumination from the open door swallowed him up.

An eddying mixture of things swam within Seth in a whirlpool, a humiliated burn jostling around relief, frustrated anger, and emasculated fury, and he didn’t know which one to settle on. In reality he almost felt reassured by the brusque, demeaning dismissal by a man he realised no longer called him a friend, and were Scarlett not present, he might have taken that as his cue to abscond for good, seeking safety and some form of passage away from the undead hellhole he knew Blackwater Park would now be outside.

But she was. And she wasn’t going to acquiesce to Dax’s command, his self-appointment, once again, as the man who could finish this.

“You taking anything that lunatic says to heart?” Scarlett asked abruptly and Seth realised she was giving him an out too. If he suggested he was, then she was probably planning to tell him to run along and seek cover somewhere else. Which he was no longer prepared to do.

“Fuck no. Aside from the thinly veiled implication that we are no longer friends in any capacity.”

He stood, his whole body feeling like he’d come out of a brutal death metal pit full of insane moshers dressed in full body armour, and hauled her up with him. Despite them both looking like refugees from a Slayer composition, Scarlett pulled his body against hers and kissed him.

“For the record,” she said quietly. “He’s wrong. Somebody is always going to be looking out for you and vice versa. He’s the one who isn’t going to last the apocalypse. When you reach the point where you think you are above having your ass pulled out of the fire by your friends and those stuck in nightmare situations as well, where you think you’re going to be able to take on everything thrown at you without some support, regardless of who it is from, then that’s where you’re lost. And that’s where Dax is right now. He thinks he has somehow ascended everybody else around him, and while that arrogance and belief in what he thinks he’s capable of might keep him going for a while, in the end he’ll come undone. Unless he wises up, real quick. The reality is that the undead apocalypse is already here. We didn’t get around to nullifying Undead Fleshcrave soon enough. They always had an answer, a backup plan, some other nasty little surprise lying in wait. So no matter if we get the rest of them or not, Global Death’s plans are already coming to fruition. There’s lots more Dax is going to have to contend with. And if he doesn’t think he needs his friends, it’s going to be a painful reality for him to wake up to.”

Not sure if it was a pep up talk, a reassurance, or just a grim portrayal of the reality that would unfold, no matter what the outcome was of this possible final clash, Seth merely nodded, trying to will the assortment of pains riddling his body into some semblance of numbness. He smarted at the blunt attitude of Dax, the brazen arrogance displayed in just appropriating Mother North as his own. Mother North was Black’s of course…

No, she’s mine. She wants to be with me…

But then again, Black wasn’t around to stamp his authority on the fact. Who knew where Black was? He’d vanished on the tail of the Undeaders along with Tempest, he hadn’t been seen since. Maybe some ambush had been pulled on those two, a more successful one than FaceGnawer and SkinCarver’s attempt on Scarlett and Seth.

Before Seth could start descending into his usual quandaries, Scarlett was recovering the weapons she’d spilled on the carpet. Then they raided the kitchen as well. In there, Seth obtained a cleaver, a nine inch bladed beast with a black moulded plastic handle, its weight impressive and comforting in his hands. He took a couple of knives as well, fashioning a sheath of sorts to carry them on his belt, though the cleaver he kept in his hand. It might have been a poor substitute for the awesome might of the majestic Mother North, but it was probably better than the carving knives SkinCarver thought he would bring to the party.