Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger

by Goforth, Jim

  "Fuck. Motherfuck." Dax fumbled for his pack of cigarettes, dredging another from the dwindling supply. "So no chance of them getting nabbed before we―well, you—have to 'do what you have to do'?"

  "Zero to none."

  "Okay then, how exactly are you planning to do this then? Run them off the road? Yeah, good luck pitting this against a bus, I mean Tundras are tough motherfuckers, but still..."

  "I don't think that's what they have in mind, Dax," Mark interjected.

  "What then? Going head to head with them seems a bit unlikely to succeed."

  A fleeting grin crossed Black's menacing visage, then vanished, replaced by the customary impassive, unreadable expression.

  "What is going to happen is when we hit the next town these Fleshcraving sons-of-bitches are heading to for their next scheduled show: we are going to get Subversion on that bill."

  CHAPTER TEN-APOCALYPTIC RAIDS/VENGEANCE PRIEST

  Armada fell fast and it fell in a tempest of blood, an orgy of death and devastation.

  On any given Friday night police presence was immeasurably bulked up to deal with the standard alcohol related incidents and all the other crimes and misdemeanours cropping up so frequently once the weekend started to kick in. In no way under the sun were they prepared, or in fact equipped, to be able to contend with a situation of the magnitude of the abomination that descended upon the city.

  Even in a city teetering around the hundred thousand population mark there just weren't enough police on duty to deal with the swarming, seething mass of undead fiends that had their number escalated rather than diminished no matter how many the first round of officers who attended the scene managed to put down with bullets.

  It hadn't taken too long for the panicked police to acknowledge they were going to have to use extreme force, draw their weapons and unload round after round at the mass that just kept coming, attacking pedestrians, bystanders, anybody alive and in the vicinity, and it wasn't that much longer after that that they realised that their shots had to count. They had to be head shots only; putting two or three slugs in a zombie chest was futile, clipping a limb was useless.

  By that stage it was too late to stem the flood, to turn back the tide. Once all the folk in this populous part of the city, a well-frequented place of entertainment and drinking holes, had either fled or been ripped apart, or bitten and turned, the growing undead army spread to other areas. They swarmed in off the streets, pouring into bars, pool halls, gaming venues, nightclubs, late night eateries, cafes, tattooing businesses. They were everywhere where fresh flesh was assembled. They followed no special rhyme or reason, they merely sought the meat and blood of the living and they took it where they discovered it, ripping with clawed hands and gnashing teeth, overrunning everything they encountered and breeding more of their kind.

  They met some resistance in a handful of these places, several desperate and ingenious folk who attempted to fight back with whatever they could get their hands on, people who refused to go down without a mighty struggle, though in some cases it was a terribly futile endeavour.

  Many of the besieged folk soon made the horrifying discovery that having their friends or those in their party escape from an attack after being bitten was no true escape at all. It was merely an illusion that threw the threat like a cruel grenade right into the midst of their terrified circle and watched it explode and engulf them all.

  The undead rolled through the city centre in a teeming wave of terror or splintered off in groups and packs, even in small knots of only two, three or four.

  They were a rotting, pallid plague of blood-dripping maws, hooked hands, insanely blank eyes and a brutal capacity for sheer violence all in the pursuit of flesh; hideously hungry appetites that couldn’t be quenched.

  Cars were stormed over, drowned under crawling bodies, occupants torn out and ripped asunder or the vehicles themselves smashed into, where teeth sawed through flesh and blood splashed gory paint against cracked windshields. Even moving vehicles were not guaranteed safe passage. Trying to ram through thick clots of zombies bogged them or brought them to a standstill as effectively as if they'd become mired in quicksand. Then the gruesome slaughter would inevitably begin.

  For every one or two people who were so thoroughly torn to pieces, wrenched so forcibly apart that they were just fleshless bones and a scattered meat smorgasbord there were ten, twenty, thirty who weren't. These latter were just bitten, or hooked by feral fingernails, and thus infected or in one way or the other delivered the contagion that would morph them into zombie fiends themselves.

  The drafting of members into the ever-growing zombie army was a far wider-reaching and rapidly moving activity than the actions of the police and all the backup they were mustering even as they were calling for reinforcements in the most urgent way possible. It seemed almost inconceivable, indeed impossible, how swiftly the change impacted the bitten bodies of victims; the change wasn’t instantaneous metamorphosis, but it frequently happened with alarming speed.

  Yet not every soul was infected so quickly, in fact, each individual was different. Completely separate and bizarre reactions happened in variables, making the outcomes of each stricken person dangerous and unpredictable. Ultimately, the end result was the same; if anyone was bitten by the zombie fiends, or injured in some way that brought them into contact with bodily fluids with the undead hellcreatures, they too were cursed to rise as part of the ghastly squadron of death.

  The plague was everywhere across the city as the undead spread their insidious contagion, that the toxic malady took hold; bars, strip clubs, brothels, massage parlours, pizza joints, Chinese takeaway places, fancy restaurants and al fresco dining areas. As before as the bestial flood of undead poured down city streets and through businesses, a seething sea of devastation, they met some forms of opposition, particularly in some of the more notorious nefarious businesses they swarmed.

  The strip clubs, bars, brothels and the like boasted a variety of weapons on the premises for obvious, and not so obvious reasons, and many inside took up these firearms and other lethal implements when the zombie plagues plundered through their doors.

  Moderate success and even escape came to some, but they were few. Only those with enough ingenuity or will to survive managed to avoid disaster; they either hid in such places nobody could find them (let alone mindless creatures with only a hunger for human flesh and no other thoughts), or they ran for their lives, seeking transport or routes that would speed them to some form of safety without becoming bogged down in the logjam trap of traffic that had befallen many.

  Many businesses had multiple ways in and out, which was a double-edged sword; it enabled people to escape in some instances, in others it meant the occupants were besieged from several different angles. For those establishments having only one entry/exit point there was dire trouble once the invasion started.

  Other places of business or entertainment were all you can eat banquets just ripe to be stormed and their unwitting human residents were plucked like fruit and torn asunder. Some of the occupants inside these particular spots never saw the impending disaster coming.

  Such a place was the Archeon Cinema on Consolation Avenue. Packed out on Friday evening, this was a full house of delectable meat, trapped like animals in an abattoir just waiting to be eradicated.

  In a bizarre and ironic twist of fate, at the gold lounge theatre one of the cinemas was screening a marathon featuring George A. Romero's first three classic films of his Dead series and it was halfway through Dawn of the Dead when the place was invaded by bloodthirsty flesh-hungry zombies.

  Many didn't even initially realise that the marauding hordes were a genuine threat, instead believing that it was some kind of gimmick specifically set up to coincide with the screening of the classic zombie films, with actors hired to rampage into the cinema to throw the frighteners into the patrons.

  Soon enough they came to the terrible conclusion that this was no hoax, gimmick, or staged event. By then they
were meat for the insatiable undead, falling beneath the teeth and nails of a plague that rained downpours of genuine blood, matching the celluloid carnage unfolding on the giant theatre’s screen.

  By the time a riot squad of any significant force had been assembled it was a case of shutting the gate after the horse had bolted. The first police on the scene of the Quo Vadis Bar massacre had been overwhelmed right away. Too few of them escaped as it was, though many managed to get their panicked reports for help in. All the same, the irregular spread of the contagion refused to be contained, some bitten souls having the curse strike them insanely fast, others left for dead and rising much later.

  As a result the newly arriving reinforcements weren't aware of these strange developments. Bodies strewn all over the streets or in desecrated businesses, slumped in cars, were presumed dead or injured. As ambulances struggled to get through the gruesome congestions and paramedics attempted to get to those they assumed were urgently requiring medical attention, they were in for worlds of shock. Very fleeting worlds that would be over as they knew them in seconds.

  Some of the mangled, chewed, gnawed-on corpses remained in the postures of grisly death, their processes of morphing into members of the living dead brigade far slower than others, but some rose at times most inopportune for the medical services, the recently arrived police and the paramedics.

  Eventually, hosts of uniformed undead clad in the various identifiable clothing of their occupations walked, ran, or shambled among those they'd come to kill or save, launching their own fleshlusts upon those their living personas would have seen rescued.

  Armada's apocalypse wouldn't happen immediately, it may be days or more until the city truly collapsed and fell into undead anarchy, but it would inevitably die and become an infestation of zombies in plague proportions, and there was really no way of preventing that now.

  By the time something like the National Guard, army, any sort of military action, was deployed it would be too late. In all reality, it was already too late.

  This was stage one of Global Death.

  ***

  The zombie epidemic wasn't so prevalent yet as to have completely and utterly saturated the besieged city of Armada, though with the dissemination rapidly escalating it wouldn't take a great deal of time. With each passing minute, the outbreak grew, and with no evacuation procedure yet in place and authorities still coming to terms with the nature of the disaster, ‘threat’ was rapidly becoming ‘calamity’.

  That didn't mean each and every soul dwelling in the city were vulnerable, or about to throw in the towel.

  As emergency reports overtook the television programming, monopolised radio stations and multiple other forms of media to get the urgent news out, desperately seeking to bring military support in as soon as possible, people from currently unaffected areas began to make plans.

  There were those who got their own evacuation procedures in place as reporters, on the advice of authorities, cobbled together their own suggestions for what residents should do; there were those who refused to leave their homes on the basis of some freak incidents happening in parts of town separate to where they lived; and, then again, there were the renegade souls who were filled with a foolish bravado or thoughts of waging their own war against this apparent living dead uprising, the zombie apocalypse few ever imagined would actually ever take place.

  There were even pockets of people who’d somehow managed to evade death and undead metamorphosis right in the very place the pandemic had been kick-started. As inconceivable as it was that anybody from inside the Quo Vadis bar, either upstairs in the band room or even downstairs in the remainder of the drinking areas, including the ambushed beer garden, hadn't been killed and ripped apart, or turned into one of the undead, it was a fact that there were some survivors.

  A small knot of those patrons of the upstairs concert, unbelievably avoided being chomped and turned, or masticated to bloody slop by climbing in desperate panic as high as they could get, managing somehow to escape out onto the venue roof and then head to the front.

  Originally, their party numbered seventeen, but in their endeavours to completely break free from the core of chaos there were casualties. A lot of them. Almost half their members were decimated with the first fatality coming before they’d even made it down to the street level again. A miscalculated judgement in the descent from the Quo Vadis bar roof down to the ground meant one of them slipped to a sudden shocking death on the unforgiving pavement, splitting their head open like an overripe melon.

  Six more met gruesome fates at the hands and teeth of the undead predators on street level as they raced in a frenzy of hysteria and dread along the sidewalks, attempting to keep a step or ten ahead of the throngs of slavering zombie freaks.

  The majority of the group were in a blind panic, beside themselves with utter terror, barely comprehending what was going on. They were in shock from the various chain of horrible events beginning with the explosion of unbelievable violence inside the Bar and the escalation of horror from that point on, including, but not limited to, the various violent deaths of their companions and the ensuing morphing into zombies of some of those deceased members.

  Some of them, however, weren't so utterly overwhelmed that they fell to pieces; they rose to the challenge of contending with insurmountable odds in order to keep the remainder of the escapees from being snatched and taken down like their luckless comrades. One man in particular took charge of the group, took control, and kept the rest of them alive. Basing their chances of survival on how well they'd done so far, he surmised they’d be safer up high, on roofs as they’d been on the bar. Pointing out that the undead were swarming street level and attacking anything and everything there, even invading every business containing live souls, he was able to convince the party in its entirety that heading up was the way to stay alive.

  So they did. They clambered up scalable businesses and residences, avoiding the maelstrom of blood-soaked terror that swamped the city folk of Armada down on the streets and stayed up there, moving from roof to roof where they could. They waited, they watched, they travelled when they could. They saw the police fighting a losing battle, they witnessed the horrendous spread across town, and then the undead were everywhere. These zombie marauders, however, did not remain loitering around the one spot, or stay in an area that was thoroughly ravaged and stripped bare of flesh feasts. They moved on, continually in search of pockets where people were congested, following the trail of fleeing pedestrians or business patrons/owners/staff, always looking for more meat.

  Once groups of them laid waste to whatever they could, they continued their ruthless hunt, their appetites seemingly insatiable. In large packs, in twos and threes, even single zombies prowled, shambled or ran down their prey, their various pursuing methods bizarre, irregular and unpredictable.

  From rooftops, the bunch of survivors from the Undead Fleshcrave massacre watched everything that was visible to them, sometimes even moving with the flow of the main zombie pack to get up to date with what was occurring.

  A couple of them couldn't watch, and didn't want to―the scenes were catastrophically traumatic and the sanguinary mayhem was mind-scarring to them—but those who’d taken the leadership roles within the group were doing so for a very specific reason.

  They were watching certain stores, making plans from their vantage points, brainstorming ideas and coming to agreements on actions they were going to take.

  The main man of this, the protagonist of the escape, had very clear motives, definitive things he wanted to achieve and observing what was going on down below was of great assistance to him.

  Though he had a name, this man had forgone it. He’d bestowed another moniker upon himself and he suggested the members of his party do likewise. They did.

  He called himself Vengeance Priest. He made the decision that he was not going to attempt in some vain futile effort to leave town like so many were trying and failing to do, though no doubt many would have been a
ble to successfully escape the city limits and find freedom from the disaster.

  He made his intentions abundantly clear: he wanted to strike back at these zombie mutants who were going to bring the city to its knees, he wanted to kill and destroy a whole slew of them, he wanted to cut a swathe through their ranks. He wasn't alone in that burning desire. Members of his group who’d elected to take names like Apollyon, Natassja, Empress, Attila, and Demonaz were in strong agreement. They also stood firm with him on his other lofty ambitions.

  Vengeance Priest suspected that in this debacle and this unforeseen threat that was going to prove immensely devastating to Armada. Things were going to change immeasurably and there would be a weakening of all sorts of power, a decline in authority, a rise of anarchy.

  It was early days yet, this was pretty presumptuous of him to assume that police and the many reinforcements that would sometime be arriving to battle the peril wouldn't be able to wrestle control back, but already he and his minions had grand ambitions of somehow seizing some part of the city as their own.

  In the very back of his mind, a secret design was brewing and festering like some suppurating sore―a deep, burning desire for vengeance. A bloody revenge against those the man who called himself Vengeance Priest resolutely believed had wronged him in the worst possible way.

  That little section of the grand blueprint he kept to himself for the moment to keep his legions focused wholly on the things that most urgently required their full focus. And right now he required their attention to be concentrated on specific things, shops and various places where the undead already rampaged through. Because once they moved on from those places he had designs on the refugee group going down to ransack these places for different reasons than zombies.