Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger

by Goforth, Jim

  Stupid, Mark, he admonished himself silently. That’s just about the stupidest fucking thing you have ever thought of. And fuck knows you’ve thought of plenty of stupid shit in the past.

  It was possible that Dax had just lost the plot. Flipped his wig. Battered one too many homeless bums to death with his spiked arm bands. Seen too many death metal fans transmute into rabid human-devouring freaks. Witnessed too much death and horrendous bloodshed for his mind to cope, and he’d snapped. Brain switched to complete nutcase mode. Which, Mark supposed, was another reason he maintained his position, walking cautiously alongside the guy, the pair of them aiming for the last place on earth Mark wanted to be.

  With that knife in hand like he was some form of black metal Rambo, who was to say, if Dax had indeed gone a little twisted in the brain, that he wouldn’t decide Mark should be a receptacle for it.

  Pushing the issue that this was an incredibly bad idea didn’t seem like the best way to avoid getting a blade embedded in him…

  All the same, wandering into a moshpit of death metal zombie mutants was hardly the pinnacle of good sense.

  “Do you really…?” He started to speak, but Dax hissed a curt command to remain quiet.

  That didn’t elevate Mark’s spirits a whole bunch. He ruminated on how Seth was faring back there. Hoped the girls were fine. Shit, he should have stayed with Seth instead of letting himself be dragged along with the unhinged Dax like a puppet.

  Miranda was back there somewhere, at least she was the last he’d seen of her. Granted, she was apparently away from the core of where this screaming and hideous undulation that comprised the Zombie Trigger was, but that meant little.

  In Armada, the spread of the mutant meatseekers had been far and wide, and it happened rapidly.

  Noumena was nowhere near the size of their home city, it was a small coastal populace that would be entirely overrun and become the domain of the undead by sunbreak.

  Fuck this. This is the worst idea in the history of worst ideas.

  “Down there!” Dax suddenly said, again gesturing with a prod in the air of his knife blade.

  Mark looked where he indicated, and saw, way down the expanse of the beach, a large flatbed truck spanned out across the sand.

  This was the platform for Undead Fleshcrave’s virulent, life changing death metal performance in Noumena. The five piece who constituted the band were all present atop the flatbed, ripping and bashing at their musical instruments as if they were attacking them, tearing out grotesque reams of sound, and the closer Mark and Dax got, the more ill Mark began to feel.

  He wasn’t wholly sure how they were managing to produce the sound of their electric guitars, he supposed there were some sort of generators and such all the amplifiers and microphones were hooked and rigged up to, but perhaps that was all irrelevant.

  Already knowing the terrible power the quintet possessed to transform death heads into undead heads with a collective of brain-warping sounds and a litany of mindfucking vocal utterances, Mark would hardly have been surprised if they were merely able to play their deafening non-music on a whim, regardless of amplification or electricity being present.

  With that thought in mind, he supposed he probably wasn’t so stupid after all, thinking that maybe the sinister spirit of any one of the Subversion crew could enter and possess Dax.

  The presence of the band themselves was pretty much irrelevant; Mark already knew they were going to be down there somewhere. From the first strains of that atrociously vile composition which became audible through the glass pane of the door, he’d known they would be present in some capacity. Playing their zombiemaking tune like some abysmal Pied Pipers of the Undead.

  The scenes spread all over the beach before the truck, behind the truck, and all the way up to the main street that marched along the beachfront were the worst.

  The sand was dark with what Mark knew was blood, masses and masses of blood, spread as far as the eye could see, in splashes, splatters, in bucketloads. So much of it that it didn’t immediately soak into the sand to stain it, but merely sat in great coagulating pools.

  There were body segments, dismembered and gnawed upon limbs, severed heads, unidentifiable pieces of meat scattered just as widely, offal and entrails glinting in the shine of the moon and the reflection cast off the ocean waters.

  There were still people, running and screaming in panic, obviously casual metal fans not susceptible to the Zombie Trigger, but caught in the deadly crossfire nonetheless.

  They were all just meat for the Fleshcravers, and if they weren’t torn to bloody chunks of raw steak, any bites they happened to endure would assure they’d rise again as part of the escalating undead battalion.

  A fence of sorts spanned along the top of this slope Mark and Dax were navigating, all the way along the beachfront, broken up in spots by gaps where stairs descended down to the sands.

  On the street side of the fence, Mark didn’t feel any safer than he would have right out there on the bloodsoaked sands, but it was some small semblance of a barrier, the illusion that he and Dax were separated from the absolute carnage.

  “This is damn impossible, Dax,” Mark moaned. “What we oughta be doing is hightailing it back to the motel and raising Black and co. That is, if they aren’t already a part of…that…”

  With this he waved a hand limply to specify he was referring to the slaughter beach. “We’ve got zero hope of getting anywhere near that truck.”

  “Maybe so,” Dax conceded, finally halting his stalking motion to stop beside the fence.

  A breeze blustered against them, whipped in off the sea, and it should have felt chilly and refreshing. Instead it felt hot and sickly, blasting the stench of blood and death into their faces.

  “What we really need to do is get Seth and the girls and take a car…any car…and drive. Just drive and drive and drive the fuck out of here!”

  “That won’t solve anything. Or achieve anything. That will just mean we have to keep running. Didn’t you hear a single word Black said? If these Undead Fuckcraves aren’t stopped, this keeps happening. Over and over. And over. The Apocalypse, Mark. The world’s end. Complete zombie fuckery.” Dax wasn’t even looking at him as he spoke, his eyes were fixed on the horror below, but his words were still harsh and direct. “Town by town, this happens until everyfuckingwhere is totally and utterly zombified. Get the picture?”

  Mark got the picture. He got it loud and clear. Black was already pretty explicit in his portrayal of how shit would go down if Undead Fleshcrave weren’t eradicated. What he didn’t get was how it came to be that Dax appointed himself the heir to the throne of the king executioner of the zombie makers.

  He was just assuming Black and his companions were either still in their motel room, or perhaps they’d already been ripped asunder down there.

  Maybe the Subversion trio and their sexy femme fatale associates were among the feral undead, sinking teeth and clawed fingers into the screaming running hordes.

  In which case, they were all fucked. Dax and his delusions of grandeur, of nullifying the lethal threat with one solitary knife―two, if Mark’s weapon was to be counted, three if Seth managed to re-join them—weren’t about to prove to be the stopping power that would quell the Fleshcravers.

  ‘Shit!” Mark suddenly recalled they’d left behind the collection of knives they’d taken from the Subversion instrument cases for the women. Shit! If Seth brought them back to this hellish feast unarmed…

  Maybe Seth would have enough nous about him to remember and arm the girls first.

  Mark sure hoped so. Not that he wanted Miranda anywhere near here. He didn’t want to be anywhere near here.

  He stared at the truck down on the beach, taking notice of a couple of things almost simultaneously. He’d been wondering how the hell they’d managed to get the truck down there in the first place, and then he saw way up the beach, an access road that apparently stemmed from the main street, a car park off in the distance beyond
it.

  The other thing he observed was though the symphony of horror, courtesy of screams, ripping tearing sounds, breaking bones, hideous grunts and growls persisted, the hellish music had ceased.

  No longer were the band abusing their instruments and piercing the ears of the susceptible souls, they weren’t playing at all.

  His face drenched in streaky blood, SamEdi stood on the flatbed, purveying the scene. It was too far for Mark to actually see any expression on his visage, but he was willing to bet it was one of malevolent triumph, savage glee at taking another town, unleashing more Global Death.

  Then shit went chaotic.

  A big black vehicle came hurtling down the access road towards the beach, traversing the same path the truck would have taken to reach its place on the sands for the diabolical concert.

  Though it was even further away than the violent mayhem, the truck of death metal zombie makers and all below, Mark immediately knew it was the Truck. The Subversion Truck.

  Then there were meatseekers coming at him and Dax, coming from fuck knows where, and they were abruptly on the street, behind them. Coming from the same side of the fence they were on.

  Mark screamed involuntarily, lending his startled addition to the ensemble of shrieks and death cries already echoing over the region, sweeping over the expanse of the ocean.

  There were five of them initially, two obviously those who’d been penetrated by the Zombie Trigger from the onset, a couple of thick set males wearing respectively, a long sleeved Mortician ‘Chainsaw Dismemberment’ top and a Possessed ‘Seven Churches’ shirt, both streaked with gore, and three others, evidently turned by savage bites from the pair they now accompanied in a hunting pack.

  They could have all been females for all Mark knew, they all had long hair but it was bedraggled and caked with an abundance of blood, and their hideous grey slack faces virtually rendered them sexless.

  The two undead death heads lumbered, slow and sluggishly, archetypal zombie stuff, but those they’d converted moved faster, though erratically. They came for Mark and Dax with horrible grunting utterances that froze Mark’s blood.

  Dax wasted little time, as he’d done with the hobo in the alley, he reacted frightfully quickly, and this time his attack wasn’t a blindly terrified one, striking randomly. He acted with purpose and intent, and the knife in his hands was a better weapon than his impromptu armband assault.

  The first of the grey-faced slackjaws he punched right in the face with his Jungle Primitive, burying the blade deep.

  Mark was expecting it to get caught in bone, but apparently this undead fiend possessed very pliant skull matter; the blade stabbed like a stake, smashing a hole in the freak’s head.

  Putrid matter that must have been brain slopped out of the ragged spiked edge cavity, as did a splash of blood and the turned meatseeker dropped to its knees on the hard surface of the road. Before it even toppled sideways to collect the blacktop, Dax was pouncing on another of the first three zombies, aiming for the skull again.

  “Look fucking lively, Mark!” Dax yelled to him, and he snapped out of his own fugue, fumbling his knife into a position to attack.

  The two bulky shamblers came for him.

  They lurched across the street, incongruous in cargo pants and black boots, chains swinging on their belts.

  Mark took a deep, desperate breath, hoping this wasn’t how Mark Frost was destined to go out, chomped to bloody ribbons by a pair of fat ass death metal zombie slobs and ran head on to meet them.

  He tried to emulate Dax’s vicious flourish and stab for the brain, hoping all these undead entities were cursed with the same soft skull affliction, or that the onset of zombification immediately rendered them as such, but he didn’t find out straight away. He missed his target with his first wild thrust and instead, sheared off Possessed’s left ear, taking a few hanks of long, greasy, bloodied hair with it.

  Losing an ear didn’t impact on the corpulent ghouls impetus whatsoever, he kept coming and got hands on Mark’s jacket.

  Mark tried again with his rubber handled Aura, twisting it inwards with the point of the blade aimed at the earless patch of gore on the side of Possessed’s chunky head. He thumped the blade in, ramming it into the gaping aperture left behind by the unplanned ear removal.

  There was more success to be had with that manoeuvre, and he repeated the blow, trying to ram the nauseous feeling down in his stomach as blood and unidentified goop sloshed out over his hand simultaneous with him ramming the knife into Possessed’s ear canal.

  The clawing hands spasmed on his jacket, almost bearing him down to the street as Possessed took a slow graceless tumble, but Mark was able to stay afloat, maintaining his footing.

  The demise of his zombie bud didn’t deter Mortician; his sallow, sunken-eyed face resplendent with muck and blood, with strings of flesh trailing from between lips that looked like wriggling earthworms, loomed in towards Mark.

  Fighting the urge not to violently expel the roiling contents of his stomach in the hideous face, Mark thudded his knife into it, right into the big shelf of forehead. He expected the blade of the Aura to buckle, to snap or to slice some layers of rotting skin and then skitter off the bone, but it ploughed right in, just like Dax with the sexless grey fiend.

  Mortician fell too, but the swinging chain on his belt got entangled in Mark’s open jacket, hauling him down as well, landing atop the hideous mass, his knife slipping from his grasp.

  Choking and gagging, he yanked the knife out with a horrible sucking sound and flopped off the corpse, splaying next to it.

  Over by the fence, he witnessed Dax bashing the head of the final undead in the five piece welcoming party against the fence, until it mushed and literally exploded like a watermelon plugged with a shotgun.

  Hoisting himself up onto his hands and knees, Mark bent his head and puked his guts up on the strip of ground between the fence and the street.

  Only now could he manage to get his hands down to his jacket and try to wrench the zipper away from the dragging chain of Mortician, his eyes tearing, his throat burning with a horrible acidic taste.

  Fleetingly, he contemplated how beneficial it would be to have one or two of those chains on the outfits of the death head zombies in hand to use as weaponry, but vetoed the suggestion merely because it meant more time near them, indeed, touching them, having to place hands on their foul bloodied clothing to obtain those items and that was just about the last thing Mark wanted to do right now. Instead, he made do with extricating himself from the one formerly swinging on Mortician’s belt, now coiled on the ground between them, like some hideous metal cord that kept them connected.

  Then Dax was there, beside him, urging him to hurry up.

  “Come on, that ain’t going to be the end of it, there’s going to be more. A fuckload more. Looks like I was wrong about the Corpsepaint Cavalry, they are coming after all. A little late, but hey, at least they haven’t gone all zombie-ass on us.”

  Mark found his feet. Dax stood there with knife in hand, an insane gleam in his eye and something of a crooked grin on his face, as if he was relishing the desperate stakes, the savage violence he’d meted out.

  Weak from his exertions, first despatching Mortician and Possessed, then from his gut draining hurling efforts, Mark tried to make sense of why Dax would be looking so fervently pleased, so perversely overjoyed by the horrendous situation they were in. He had little doubt now that something had gone a fraction haywire inside Dax’s head, probably, as he’d thought, kicked off by that hobo-slaying accident, then blossomed to a kind of full-blown zombie killing obsession.

  Even with the welcome news that Black and the Subversion crew weren’t lost to the hordes of undead teeming on the bloodied sands of the beach, Dax hadn’t reverted back to good old wisecracking smartass Dax; he hadn’t switched out of this new gung-ho mercenary attitude clearly adopted from Black’s cohorts and the power of having a lethal weapon gripped in his mitts. He looked like there was not
hing better he would like to do than join the trio of black metal zombie-maker killers and hopefully get his sanguinary hands on some of the impressive weaponry they toted in the form of musical instruments.

  Down on the beach the mayhem persisted.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN-SEPARATED

  The room was empty. Where he’d expected to at least find two women, either slumbering in the pair of beds occupying the space or up and about, agitated and distressed by the terrible noise emanating from outside, Seth found nothing.

  In the back of his mind, alarm bells started clanging from the moment he discovered the door to Julietta and Miranda’s motel room was not locked, but still in a mist of shock from the necessary slaying of Madeleine outside he just went ahead and entered.

  Unlike many of the hotels and places of lodging in Armada, and possibly the more upmarket areas of Noumena, the flea-bitten Neptune Towers had no such thing as plastic sensor triggered swipe cards for guests to gain access to their rooms, they were still on an old fashioned physical key system, meaning responsibility for ensuring their rooms were locked belonged to the various visitants. It was easy enough for somebody too fatigued or distracted by certain events to become forgetful and not actually confirm their room doors were locked, so, in this case, an unlocked door wouldn’t essentially indicate that the room residents were not inside.

  However, when Seth entered the room that should have housed Julietta and Miranda, he found it did not.

  All he came across was a room literally identical to the one he’d been sharing with Mark and Dax, the same configuration of beds, the same Spartan spread of furniture, similar ratty curtains, mottled, stained carpets and discoloured wallpaper.

  The only thing suggesting the two women were actually present in the room at one stage was the fact that both beds were disturbed, bed sheets and blankets flung back, rumpled on the one covering the mattress. Other than that, the motel room was deserted.