by Goforth, Jim
It spread green fingers everywhere, a thick mist of it hanging in the air, and Seth saw all members of the Undead Fleshcrave on stage with their respective instruments, dragging the terrible sounds from them to inflict upon the crowd.
From the spot where he and his friends were clustered, he witnessed everybody in the front rows and those pushed against the barricade thrashing insanely and then violently vomiting streams of bilious liquid. Some sprayed a green material similar in colour to the lighting, or perhaps it was due to the pervading glow that it appeared this colour, others looked like they were forcibly ejecting gouts of blood.
"Welcome..." SamEdi growled in a terrible triumphant tone, "to your apocalypse." Then he held the microphone aloft in his tight-fisted chokehold and bellowed into it. "Now turn!"
As he did, his bandmates burst into a flurry of violent non-musical instrument abuse, wrenching the most abhorrent collection of sound that had ever infiltrated Seth's ears in a ridiculously fast torrent and SamEdi began to recite a growling mantra of words into his microphone.
The packed pit and its surrounds were alive with multitudes of patrons being violently ill in projectile streams, but that wasn’t all that was happening to them.
Things were happening to their faces and bodies as they writhed in a tormented mass, pummelled physically by the sounds of Undead Fleshcrave.
There were headbangers at the barricade, but they weren’t moshing in time to the music or thrashing their heads just in the air, they were slamming their skulls against the barricade and the walls. As Seth watched in transfixed horror, he saw the guys who'd brought in the full case of beer amidst the hordes on the floor. They were bashing each other and themselves with their glass bottles, busting them over heads, smashing glass in faces.
Blood fountained here and there from the faces of the barricade headbutters, from unseen things occurring deep in the thick of the pit.
A heavyset man in a Deicide shirt swivelled his head and, just before he dove headfirst into a speaker, Seth caught a vivid look at his face. It was suppurating with bubbling lesions and sores, his gums blackened, his eyes sunken in his head and staring crazily. Blood, drool and greenish slime oozed from the corners of his gaping mouth.
"What the fuck?" Mark intended his shocked statement to be a fearful bellow, but it came out in a hoarse whisper as if the atrocious scenes unfolding stole his power of speech and rendered him incapable of more than a murmur.
"No..."Miranda moaned. "This isn't...this can't be...what?"
Death heads everywhere were mutating, before their horrified eyes, into abhorrent-looking creatures with flaking skin, weeping sore-covered faces, and pustules on exposed skin, were throbbing and bursting, exploding messy discharges all over the place.
Undead Fleshcrave loomed large on the stage, leaning over and further driving the insane melee in the pit on to more acts of violence, self-destruction and complete mayhem, urging them into lunacy and bloodshed, with the hideous words streaming from SamEdi's mouth in a mantra.
Seth couldn’t decipher a thing the crazed frontman was uttering, it roiled out in a thick bubbling tirade of ugly vocalisations, but he knew enough to acknowledge that whatever abhorrent words were spilling in tandem with the bestial music were acting as a catalyst in turning the death fans into....zombies?
The barricade bangers were hurling their entire bodies into the unforgiving metal now; some had bashed their craniums so viciously hard against the barrier that skulls were split open, leaking brains were exposed. Yet they didn’t fall down beneath the feet of their equally frenzied companions in mayhem; they persisted in their destructive antics with eyes hanging out of their sockets, blood saturating faces and dripping from lank locks of hair.
Screams were now filling the room as well as the terrible music, the 'Zombie Trigger', and they meshed amidst the chaos in a symphony of sheer terror.
Seth spotted another person he knew, a fellow by the name of Andy Davison, down there in the pit. He wasn't somebody Seth would have ever expected to see attending a brutal death metal concert, since his tastes in metal ran along the lines of traditional metal like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, and power metal in the vein of Dragonforce, but there he was, surrounded by heaving death metal zombie flesh.
Andy didn’t appear to be inflicted with the same epidemic that was blanketing ninety per cent of those in the venue, instead he wore an expression of abject horror and hopelessness as he was slammed between black-shirted, blood splattered bodies.
"Jesus, is that...Andy Davison down there?" Mark saw the power metal guy too and acknowledged that the Zombie Trigger didn't seem to have had any effect on him, the same as it hadn't turned the pocket of black metallers here. "What's he doing here? Shit, we've gotta get him out of there!"
"Go down there?" Lincoln, his mouth still trailing vomit tendrils from where he'd hurled his guts up before, exclaimed in horrified disbelief. "Are you shitting me? No fucking way, they're....they're...they're, well...zombies!"
His words mirrored the terrible cogitations of Seth, not just voicing what he thought the death metal fanatics were being morphed into, but also the desire to stay way the hell away from it all.
"Fuck that," Mark declared. "Look at him, he's terrified, he's in danger and he's normal, he hasn't been affected."
Or should that be infected? Seth suggested inwardly.
Mark's valiant proposal to rescue Andy from the midst of the thrashing, slimy, sanguinary cacophony was too late though.
Before any of them were galvanized into any sort of motion they saw somebody emerge from the throng behind Andy.
This was Carl Merritt, one of Eric Baron’s buddies, and his face was a mess of oozing skin and blackened char, as if he'd stuck his countenance down upon a searing hotplate and half cooked it off.
He grabbed Andy around the throat with bloodied fingers and then his black lips cracked open and a set of gnashing teeth ripped into the side of Andy's face. As the power metal aficionado released a shrill scream of agony, ZombieMerritt shook his head like a pit bull, tearing flesh from bone with the same results; a hunk of meat came away with a blood droplet shower.
ZombieMerritt didn't even chew the morsel as it came loose, he just swallowed the chunk whole and plunged his hungry maw back for more, this time gnawing off Andy's entire right ear.
Before ZombieMerritt could devour the entire prize, more bestial, pustule-ridden and horror-faced entities swarmed around Andy's shrieking form and began to attack with clawing fingers and terrible teeth. Miranda was screaming now too, clapping her hands helplessly to her face, almost sinking to her knees in despair. Her shrieks of terror lanced through the mayhem as clearly as any of the other exclamations of fear bursting from those caught in the mosh who were not part of the undead army, and freakish staring eyes aimed her way.
"Oh, fuck," Seth groaned.
Only just now did he realise that whatever ghastly otherworldly power had been unleashed by the Zombie Trigger hadn’t been limited to those milling around in the pit. It extended everywhere, throughout the entire venue, and Seth acknowledged that he and his friends were surrounded on all sides by a cavalcade of freaks intent on devouring the flesh of those not susceptible to the insidious song.
***
As Andy Davison was ripped to shreds of bleeding meat below, along with a plethora of others who hadn't succumbed to the Zombie Trigger, Seth and his friends came to the conclusion that they too were designated meat for the deadwalkers.
There weren't any true death metal fans left inside the Quo Vadis bar who weren't flesh-hungry, malignantly mutated creatures brain-fucked and body morphed by the terrible power the unearthly band invested in their apocalyptic composition, and Seth realised the intent of SamEdi's words prior to the horrific event unfolding.
All 'true' death heads were susceptible to the Zombie Trigger; they were inherently already zombies, the horrific capacity lying inside of them, just waiting for their brains to be first killed by the grotesque instrument
ation, and then their zombified forms kept animated by the brutal dialogue spouted by the vocalist. Now, with the vast majority of concert goers here being true death metal fanatics, that meant this heaving hall of horrors was overrun with skin-chomping, brain-munching, flesh-desiring zombie fiends with the sole purpose of killing and eating all those who weren’t part of their horrible battalion. Meaning Seth’s absent friends were on the menu if they hadn't already become part of the scattered meat smorgasbord.
"What do we do, what do we do?" Lincoln wailed, as panicked as Miranda was, his fists clenched hopelessly at his sides.
If they hadn't been totally encircled by a stalking mass of hungry-eyed oddities in their incongruous death metal shirt uniforms, Lincoln and Miranda probably would have bolted, run for it in desperation and blood-curdled terror.
But there was nowhere to run.
Seth observed the same type of overweight girls in denim skirts and Cannibal Corpse shirts he'd remarked upon earlier among the hordes of drooling, slavering entities rolling towards them in a wave of imminent flesh-mangling, alongside big beefy zombies who'd once upon a time been Eric Baron sorts, some slimmer females, fat guys, thin guys; all of them now warped into undead creatures by Undead Fleshcrave themselves, by whatever horrific insurmountable power had been condensed into a simple death metal composition.
There weren’t myriads of them encircling Seth, Mark and the others because plenty were still concentrating on other targets, lunging over the bar to rip and tear at the hapless bar staff, chasing down other non-turned concert patrons, but there were enough to have the sextet surrounded.
Miranda appeared to be drowning in a nightmare she couldn't break the surface of; she looked like she just couldn't fathom what was going on, couldn't comprehend that it was real and not some terribly elaborate part of Undead Fleshcrave's stage show involving everyone. Her eyes were incredibly wide and boggling in a face devoid of colour, her hands on her cheeks, drawing lines of blood down them with unintentional fingernail scratches.
Beside her, Lincoln was in the same horrified fugue, his mouth flapping soundlessly as if he didn't know whether to scream his lungs out or throw up again.
Oddly, Julietta appeared the most composed of them all, her dark eyes flickering around, seeking an escape route, something to use to their advantage.
"We're fucked," Dax announced succinctly and unnecessarily.
"This can't be real," Miranda moaned, on the verge of keeling over with a heart attack. "It can't...it just can't be."
It looked pretty real to Seth. Illogical, impossible, and absolutely insane, but the screams of the dying, the splashing dollops of blood, the horrendous stench in the air, the shocking violence unfolding in pandemonium everywhere, all looked and sounded pretty fucking real to him.
"We've got to find the others," Julietta said, maintaining her composure, though a vestige of desperation tainted the tone of her voice.
"Fuck, we've got to survive first," Lincoln whispered, shaking fingers pointing out where a couple of the zombie entities chased down a shrieking woman with a pink punk hairdo and ripped her limb from limb, plunging their faces into the cavity where her abdomen used to be. "They're just fucking tearing people to pieces! What are we going to do?"
Seth didn't have a clue what the hell they were going to do.
There were at least ten or twelve former death metal fans turned to sallow-skinned flesh-craving undead fiends loitering in a rough circle around them, with vacant, but somehow immeasurably sinister, eyes and hooked fingers twitching in preparation to delve inside body cavities.
Over behind this, he could see more bloody carnage in every single section of the room, while the freakish band continued to play and the mass of security at the front of the stage continued to do nothing but stare into the pandemonium with eyes as empty as those of the zombie hordes.
Seth had no explanation as to why the flesh-devouring battalions hadn't jumped the barricades to sink their teeth into the octet of security brutes when it seemed they'd gone for every other soul that wasn't one of them. Then he had no more time to ruminate on this curious conundrum. The dozen or so milling zombies around his friends attacked as if they'd all been waiting for some signal, perhaps a passage in the song to ignite their assault.
"Shit!” Lincoln screamed, his terrified outburst almost as high-pitched and girlish as the simultaneous one torn out of Miranda. Even Julietta gave vent to an involuntary expulsion of shock as the group of nightmare creatures launched.
Desolately, Seth acknowledged that he possessed pretty piss poor means of protecting her, himself, or any of the others. He had in his hand the plastic cup his drink arrived in-rather incongruous, being served in a plastic container when many walked right in with glass bottles—and that was about the sole extent of his possessions. He had house keys in his jeans pocket and nothing more substantial than that to use as weaponry and he suspected Mark was likewise scantily armed, and so too Lincoln.
But Dax...he had his spiked armbands!
That gave Seth a faint glimmer of hope, though it seemed inconceivable that they could battle their way through an undead tide on the strength of a few spikes.
Then a long, wickedly curving shape came scything through the air with a temporary glint in the sickly green light glow and a cutting swishing sound.
As it connected with flesh, it made a meaty thunk and then a severed zombie head went on a tumble through the lime-tinted radiation, followed quickly by another, both of them spraying blood in a pinwheel fashion. The headless bodies of the abruptly decapitated teetered in an upright position for a short period and then toppled over onto the bar floor, leaving a gap in the circle.
Through that expanse of space came Simon Black, Steven 'Blizzard' Callihan and Troy 'Tempest' Sawyer.
In Black's hand he wielded a bloodied katana, the very weapon with which he’d cleaved two zombies’ heads from their necks. His associates were also armed with bladed weapons. Blizzard had a Fairburn Sykes fighting knife in each hand, Tempest came with a Bowie and a Gerber knife.
Both of these men with their dual knives entered the circle on either side of Black and decimated a zombie apiece, Blizzard punching both his blades into the ears of the nearest on the left, a shaven headed man with a long braided beard and a Decapitated T-shirt.
This deadwalker unleashed a guttural incantation that spiralled up into a screech as Blizzard yanked his knives out and whipped them back and forth across the being’s greying throat.
Tempest cracked his Bowie blade down on the back of the neck of the one to the right, aiming to drive enough force to sever the spinal column, and while the knife might not have sheared right through, it dropped the undead beast to its knees.
This created a whole lot more space and Black issued an authoritative command to the stunned collective formerly about to be engulfed by demented deadheads.
"Come on! Move, now!"
They hesitated, all of them, with Miranda still wide-eyed in a state of shock that was only enhanced by seeing Black behead two of what were formerly everyday extreme metal fans like the rest of them, with one brutal swing of his Japanese sword while his companions took down two more with savage knife strikes.
"Now!" Black roared and his free hand flashed out and seized the arm of the nearest person, Julietta.
Prompted, she stumbled with him, and Seth was quick to follow, his head spinning.
He noticed that it wasn't just the trio from Subversion who were running the rescue bid; over by the exit door were the four girls who had originally joined the threesome when they'd come back inside from the standoff with Eric Baron. All of these women were hoisting a selection of bladed implements as well, two of them with blood dripping from their points.
They swiped and slashed at any undead who wandered into their orbit, looking to keep the path clear for Black to bring the besieged black metallers free.
As Lincoln shouted “what the fuck!” in a demented, panicked litany and Miranda issued a shril
l wailing keen, Blizzard and Tempest put themselves behind the main body of the group, fending off any zombies who lurched close.
One slipped through their guard, a big burly number in a bloodied denim jacket with multiple band patches decorating it. Slippery ropes of entrails hung over this creature’s shoulders, either from Undead Fleshcrave’s scattered meat smorgasbord, or perhaps from the innards ripped from the victims in the pit, though that didn't seem too likely considering this pocket of fiends swarming them hadn't originated from the initial place of pandemonium.
This sloping-browed brute with messy auburn ropes of greasy hair reached with grimy hands at Dax and, unlike some of his companions, this fellow wasn't so stupefied with terror and shock that he didn't realise he'd entered the concert with inbuilt weapons.
Dax slung his right arm in a great arc, raking his spiked armbands across the gruesome visage of the lumbering beast, puncturing eyes in a gory splatter of fluid.
This was enough to give him separation from the would-be meat muncher, and he ran in a stumbling gait after the others, with Tempest and Blizzard backing after him, blood-streaked blades extended in front of them.
They neared the exit where the four women stood guard, yelling urgent encouragement to them.
"Our friends are still in here!" Julietta pleaded to Black, who shook his head solemnly, his long black locks flying around his face.
"Forget them, they're gone. You lot are lucky to be getting out of here."
"Bullshit!" Lincoln howled. "We can't leave them!"
"You want to stay and be gravegoblin fodder, be my guest," Tempest grated from behind him. "The rest of us are getting out of here."
Digging his heels in, Lincoln stopped to wheel around and face Tempest, indignant fury traversing his pockmarked face.
It was a mistake.
They were a whisker away from the door out, shielded by the gals with the all black outfits and gleaming bladed weaponry, and Lincoln’s abrupt halt stilled the forward motion of the escaping congregation.