Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger

by Goforth, Jim

  Then, through it all, coursing right over all this mayhem and crescendo resonated another sound. A chilling sound. One scorched into Seth’s auditory senses, engrained on his brain despite only having heard it once, and maybe subconsciously twice, in his life before.

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR-THE ZOMBIE TRIGGER

  Seth hauled himself upright, and instead of taking this ascent cautiously, as the previous actions should have taught him, he was up in double the speed. This time though, he was a fraction smarter, bracing himself firmly against the solid form of the stage as he did so. His face throbbed, he tasted blood welling around in his mouth, and his abused chest and ribs screamed a violent protest at him, all of which he ignored.

  The only imperative thing was that utterly terrifying, and nauseating screech of high pitched white noise, an all too familiar sound violating his eardrums, driving him to scrabble on feet that felt like alien clumps of meat along the wall of the stage, aiming up where he’d last seen Scarlett.

  There was no sign of her, he must have passed the place he’d last seen her, curled in a tangle on the ground with Roxana stooping down alongside her.

  He knew he needed to be up higher, off the ground, not just to give him a better altitude from which to look for where Scarlett might have absconded, or been assisted to, but to see if what he was fearing so greatly was actually true, or whether the landslide of blows rained on him from Biblebasher’s cohorts somehow screwed his hearing up a little.

  Could that be the case? He dared hope so, but the clawing clutch of nausea and panic swirling insanely in his stomach suggested otherwise. Unless the advent of various agonies slicing through his body were helping out with that sickness, but again, it wasn’t just a mere queasiness lurking like something disagreeable he’d eaten in his guts, it was that whole sensation of his entire being, his entire essence, being violated by the grotesque sound.

  Barely acknowledging the slumped shape that was Ralph, propped haphazardly against the foot of the stage where Tempest let him drop, Seth carried on past, oblivious to warring factions around him, tufts of grassy soil thumping against the stage, shattering glass spiking his flesh with tiny slivers of flying projectile, drops of blood from wounded battlers.

  Then he was hauling himself up onto the stage, lifting free of the violent congestion below. Scrambling up amidst what he expected to be more of a melee.

  What he encountered was a host of the Biblebasher members and associates sprawled out on the stage, his friends being attended to by those who’d rushed up there to aid them and a handful, including those bikers and fans who’d also joined the fray, in various states of distress.

  While Tempest was over to the rear of the stage, where Mark was lying amidst a tangle of drum wreckage, Black was tending to Miranda and possibly Dax; Seth couldn’t immediately see the blonde Plaguewielder bassist, the cluster of bikers up here were mostly crouching on their haunches, some in the throes of vomiting.

  A giant bulk of a man with close cropped black hair and a bushy beard enveloping much of his lower face, dressed in black leathers with multiple patches embellishing his jacket, was nearest to where Seth appeared. He was on his knees, big meaty hands clasped to his ears. He spewed stringy trails of bile out onto the deck, his eyes rolling in a helpless cycle. Strands of the material he was being physically forced to expel were clinging to his forest of beard and with those great meathooks clutched to his ears, attempting vainly to prevent the horrid sound from invading his soul, he couldn’t do much about that.

  Behind him, others were in the same position, or even lying prone on the deck, convulsing in nauseous paroxysms.

  Seth turned to his right and looked out over the sea of carnage and brawling, and saw his worst nightmares realised.

  In the centre of Blackwater Park, a platform was rising up, by what means, Seth wasn’t entirely sure, but that seemed inconsequential. What snatched and held his horrified attention in thrall was what, or rather who, occupied that ascending stage and created that same horrific portentous sound he and his friends had inflicted upon them way back in the Quo Vadis Bar. The feral five piece, the unholy zombie makers themselves, kings of the apocalypse. Undead Fleshcrave.

  SamEdi. The Deadwalker. SkinCarver. GatlingGrinder. FaceGnawer. Spanning out along the length of the modest stage as it climbed higher, bathed in the sickly green illumination that made them look like they were charged with a particularly virulent toxicity, their instruments melding into the twisted union of sound that heralded the arrival of the Zombie Trigger.

  No preamble. No big build up. No regaling of the myriad death metal fanatics here with any preliminary songs to whet their appetite and cajole or bludgeon them into the mood. There was no need for any of those fancy magic tricks or cunning methods to draw the crowds in, they had the hordes in vast numbers already gift-wrapped by the very presence of the festival itself. As for warming those thronging masses up, why would they consider that a necessity at all? All the other death metal bands on the bill had been doing that all day, meaning the likes of Monstrous Calamity, Biblebasher, even Plaguewielder themselves inadvertently acted as agents for Undead Fleshcrave.

  Creating the perfect diversion, the prime opportunity, an iron so hot that striking at it now was a mind-numbingly simple task. If Monstrous Calamity were indeed roped in by Undead themselves, an obnoxious creation intentionally placed to aggravate, annoy, time-waste and ultimately bring about unrest before Biblebasher and Plaguewielder’s unexpected collision course culminated in violent brawling, then the role was played to perfection. All security from that sector immobilised by those matters, and then all attention focusing on the ensuing explosion of fighting, meant the Undead supergroup could rise and detonate their most lethal of weapons upon unsuspecting hundreds.

  It was inconceivable to think that Undead Fleshcrave could have foreseen the Biblebasher stage invasion, but again, it didn’t matter. It was a cruel twist of fate ensuring they could emerge in the midst of chaos, and now, those who’d come to Blackwater Park to prevent them doing exactly this, were powerless to cease their vile efforts.

  Staring in hopeless, horrified fascination, Seth saw SamEdi, in the centre of the stage throttling his microphone to death in that same savage manner he’d witnessed before, and then a cavernous bellowed “Now…turn!” rumbled through the atmosphere like a peal of thunder. On its heels came the terrifying wall of sound, the inexorable mass of discordant gut churning maniacal noise that constituted the composition of the Zombie Trigger, the marriage of all the instruments into the chaotic blend of human destruction patented by Global Death.

  The gates of any hell, real or imagined, didn’t just creak and crack open, they burst at the seams and exploded wide, simultaneous with the subterranean phrase, a command, not a lyric. A curse. A death sentence.

  There were still some bands plying their trade on other stages, much further back than the monstrosity emerging in the centre of the Park, or at least they’d been in the midst of doing so when the deathly sound that very few would have known was the dawning of the Zombie Trigger resonated.

  Now those same band members were hurling themselves at one another in freakish paroxysms of violent hyperactivity, attacking each other with their instruments and then, morphing, changing. Flesh peeled from them in grey flakes, lips swelled up and blackened, pustules and hideous growths emerged on exposed skin. As their human brains died in the welter of cranial destroying sound engulfing them through the Zombie Trigger, these mutated figures lurched to the front of their stages, and in true metal fashion, stage-dived into the milling mass of panicked crowds.

  These stagediving, moshing, pit plunging antics were not done in the spirit of over enthusiastic fans trying to bring energetic risk and high flying fun to the gig, these were any last vestiges of the undead band members personalities aiding them in finding a quick easy access to the meat below.

  These crowds, all over the entire spread of Blackwater Park, were packed with true death heads as well, whether
they were members of other bands or the death metal armies there in prolific numbers to watch the musical performances, and the virulent locust plague of the Zombie Trigger’s infernal intro pierced into their auditory canals, stabbed into their heads and brainfucked them beyond belief. To death. Essentially reanimating that tiny pocket of brain with SamEdi’s mantra, bursting toxins of undead venom throughout.

  Not all of those affected by the hideous Zombie Trigger—and with the massive proliferation of susceptible down there, meant there were hundreds of them―reacted or morphed in the same way.

  As Seth watched, stricken with terror, many of the death heads collapsed in writhing heaps, or dropped and remained still. Pus and foul discharge erupted from parts of their bodies, predominantly facial areas, though not limited to the general head region. Skin peeled and flaked off as if it were in the course of a hyperspeed desiccating process, flesh appearing to rot or suppurate in a similar manner and blood was everywhere, either leaking out of wounds and fissures, or spouting in crimson torrents.

  It spilled from gaping mouths, it burst from ruptured eye sockets, perforated eardrums, it even jetted out of other orifices, shooting from nether regions in terrible fountains of gore. Some of this was a result of their human vessels being overthrown by the insidious invasion of Global Death’s patented undead creation, some of it was due to many of the death heads still maintaining some semblance of their own personalities, enough to make them want to inflict violence upon others, and they did just that with shocking results.

  As they did, their brutality was soundtracked by the ugly musical carnage of the Zombie Trigger, the grotesque instrumentations and cavernous vocal filth vomiting from SamEdi’s throat, beating every true death head present in Blackwater Park into an undead state where only feral hunger remained in their minds.

  Even those who fell to the floor to thrash madly around in convulsions and stricken seizures, and become trampled by multitudes of insane boots, being violently morphed into meatseekers, didn’t stay down. Once the Trigger completely took hold they rose again; zombified, freakishly vacant-eyed, blood drooling grotesque mockeries of death metal fans, meatseeking beasts clad in band T-shirts and other garments befitting the scene.

  When they did, they joined the thick knotted tangles of those who didn’t sprawl haphazardly along the ground, but remained upright, morphing from ordinary metal souls into mutated undead entities, brains mushed by the Trigger into devices filled only with the insane urge to feed. And continue feeding. Incessantly. Eternally.

  So much visceral horror unfolded before Seth’s eyes as he stood transfixed on Stage Four that it felt as though it had been playing out a splatter movie of epic proportions for an eternity, when it was only mere minutes since he’d hauled his aching, battered body to his feet down on the grass and battled his way up here.

  “Play!” A harsh voice barked abrasively in his right ear, and he almost jumped with a start, swivelling slightly to see Black was beside him.

  “What?”

  “Plug Mother North back in and play,” Black declared, his face as resolute and impassive as always. “Just play. Black metal. Our music. Not theirs.”

  “Why?” Seth couldn’t find the logic in doing that anywhere. Scarlett was somewhere down in a zone about to become a zombie infested hell on earth, so too were the other absent members of their congregation, and Black was suggesting he plug this undead slaying machine back into an amplifier and use it as an instrument instead of a weapon?

  “Just do it,” Another abrasive voice chimed in. Tempest was there too, his tone dark and malevolent, seething with barely restrained fury at the whole situation. Hearing it made Seth wonder whether Biblebasher Ralph was dead by Tempest’s hand down there. Then he realised all the Biblebashers were probably about to be undead any tick of the clock now and the rest of the thronged death heads, fans and bands alike, including, one would imagine, the majority of those down there where Scarlett, Roxana, Blizzard, Lizette, and Heather seemed to have been swallowed up. Including the members of Monstrous Calamity, escorted away by force at the hands of the security entourage. Including the members of Biblebasher and their cohorts on this very stage. With he and his friends.

  “Scarlett…” Seth managed to choke out, his eyes darting around the prone bodies of the handful of death metallers who’d rushed the stage. None yet appeared to be in any other state than perhaps unconsciousness, but if they were, by Undead Fleshcrave definition ‘true death heads’, that wouldn’t remain the case for long.

  “Leave that to us,” Tempest said brusquely. “We’ll get our people. You just play like your life depended on it. Well, actually, it does. Can you play? As in, not too beat up to do so?”

  “I can play,” Seth said resolutely, largely ignoring the aches and pains in his body screaming rebuttal about that affirmation. “But what about these guys?”

  He released the hand gripping Mother North’s headstock and waved it around, encompassing the sprawled Biblebasher affiliates.

  “If they turn, then kill them,” Black said, and this time he wasn’t just speaking to Seth, he was also addressing the cluster of bikers on the stage. The big fellow with the shaggy black beard nodded stoically, his face still a mask of white, but gradually shaking off the nausea. Behind him, his trio of companions responded in kind with taciturn resolute nods of agreement.

  “Now go!” Tempest shoved Seth, with Mother North in his mitts, towards an amplifier. “Play the blackest of metal you can muster up. If your buddy Dax is with it enough, hook him up to the Blizzard Beast. Leave Scarlett and the rest to us.”

  Then he and Black, both simultaneously stage-dived from the front of Stage Four, launching themselves right out over the mass of teeming humanity—and unhumanity―swarming around below, the pair of them crowd-surfing across the whole congregation, to Seth’s stunned disbelief. To the best of his knowledge, neither of them were in any way armed; he was certain every member of the group relinquished their weapons and placed them inside the Subversion instrument cases to smuggle inside with the band.

  Almost mesmerised by their reckless actions to the point where he remained rooted to the spot, Seth nonetheless came to his senses and scurried back to the amplifier he’d been using before. The lead, wrenched out of both the amp and Mother North as he toppled over the edge of the stage, was curled on the deck in erratic twists, and snatching it up, he plugged it back into the lethal beauty.

  The bikers weren’t sitting around wasting any time. Instead of simply hanging there waiting for the prone Biblebashers to ‘turn’ as the towering man with long black hair, tattooed face and neck and eerie eyes made reference to them potentially doing so, they hauled the death metal assailants to the edge of Stage Four and tipped them over with solidly prodding boots or shoving meaty hands. The splayed, presumably unconscious, hunks of Biblebasher crony meat, thumped awkwardly on the earthen floor below, though Seth only caught glimpses from the corner of his eye. Most of his attention was captivated in visual horror by the hellish inferno and orgy of blood, death, violence, and undead metamorphosis swamping Blackwater Park everywhere.

  Undead Fleshcrave played on, pounding their gruesome tune, which, of course, wasn’t really anything resembling a tune at all, just a call to arms for zombie squadrons to rise from the brainfucked hordes here to worship death metal. A disastrous dinner bell heralding a fleshy feast of gargantuan proportions.

  As pallid-faced, bloody-mouthed, lank-haired, and shaven-headed freaks swelled in congested knots throughout the vast sprawl of the open air venue, screams of total terror now rent the night air in a horrible melange with the ugly music. Pandemonium reigned supreme. Those who weren’t susceptible to being rendered technically brain-dead by the high pitched buzzing screech of the Trigger intro and the ensuing blitzkrieg of instrumentation and guttural vocal mantra from the Fleshcravers, now found themselves in an absolutely fucked up world of bedlam they wouldn’t have ever dreamed possible, regardless of the brutal savagery of the lyrics
and imagery they saturated themselves in here, witnessing these bands. For the casual music fan, just there to observe some live heavy music, or the random wanderer in off the street, it must have been akin to being propelled right into the epicentre of some kind of hell. A living, bleeding, screaming, zombie horror flick wrenched forcibly off the screen and dropped right down into their midst.

  Seth wanted to look behind him, back where he knew his friends must be. He desperately wanted to see that they were all still there, alive and breathing, though he guessed Black and Tempest might have told him otherwise. At least the bikers—The Revenge Masters was the name Seth recalled seeing on a backpatch―hadn’t elected to roll them off the stage as well, so he figured they were aware of which side they were on. In any case, it was those down in the pits of a materialising hell who were most important right now, Mark, Dax, and Miranda were safe, at least temporarily.

  What was more, it was nigh on impossible to yank his gaze away from so much suppurating, violent, visual horror below and spanning out over the whole spread of Blackwater Park, try as he might. Anywhere his gaze travelled out there landed his horrified eyes on things dredged up from nightmares, even the realities of seeing this undead epidemic form back in Armada paled in comparison.

  He shaped a chord on Mother North’s long, shapely fretboard and then her power dragged him seductively back in, and he was playing. He almost recoiled from the weapon as he acknowledged what song he’d almost instinctively started to play, the feral filthy blast of Carpathian Forest’s ‘Doomed to Walk the Earth as Slaves to the Living Dead.’

  A more appropriate song he couldn’t have picked, but the connotations of the title disturbed him, even more so with the painful knowledge in the back of his mind that Carpathian Forest were the favourite band of his dead—and undead—love Julietta.