by Goforth, Jim
Loitering around at the head of the bunched group of folk with little to no idea what they were getting into, Seth started moving off as well, and under the terse harshly spoken commands of Black, all the others did also, albeit extremely reluctantly in several cases.
To his dismay, Seth noticed that he was at the front left hand side and Blizzard at the right. Scarlett was on the opposite side as him, a little ways back from Blizzard. Now, not only was she not in the perceived safety of the shepherded bunch, surrounded by the more able members, but she wasn’t even close enough for Seth to reach out and touch. It seemed like she was miles away, though it was probably only a span of ten or so metres.
The other two bikers had automatically split as well, with the fellow referred to as Rusty circling around to the right and Nate remaining on Seth’s side. That appeased Seth’s nerves a fraction, since it helped even up the odds a little. With Lizette and the shotgun formerly wielded by Tempest in her hands also on the opposite to him, Seth was beginning to feel like the side he was on was the most vulnerable of the lot. He had Mark and Roxana over here as well, and Dax loitered somewhere back behind them, obviously appointing himself some kind of rear-guard along with Black.
Seth figured he could take that one of two ways. Either the vicious killing instinct Dax was trying to cultivate ever since he’d overcome that shock slaughter of the hobo in Armada, was finally blown away, had the starch knocked out of it by the Biblebasher ambush, and Dax wanted to be near to Black for ultimate protection when the shit really went down, or it was merely strengthened by the death metallers attack, and now he was attempting to prove he had what it took to rear-guard the entire congregation from any undead assaults from behind.
Thompson and Thomson, the security guards, sure looked as though they’d had any wind taken out of their sails, and Seth supposed he couldn’t blame them. They hadn’t signed on for this calamity, no way in hell. They might have been expecting some violence in the form of brawling metalheads; they wouldn’t in a million years have foreseen that it would come in flesh-chomping zombie form.
Then it didn’t matter who didn’t want to be out there, because they were out there. Out from behind the sanctuary of Stage Four, regardless how minimal that might have been. Out in view of whatever terrors rampaged in the wide open spread of Blackwater Park. Out where the true death heads who’d attended the festival in massive proliferation were twisted and morphed into fleshcraving mutant undead freaks seeking to feast upon the flesh of the living.
Out in a group, which despite being bordered by weapons toting folk with the ability to use them and no qualms about doing so, also hosted a whole bunch of clueless folk with no idea what nightmare they were about to be engulfed in.
Out into Undead Fleshcrave’s domain.
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN-DOWN AMONG THE HUMANIVORES
Seth cursed the decision, or rather, the flow of circumstance, which resulted in him being on the left hand side of the pack of panicked people and Scarlett being way over on the other. Mainly, because he knew the first cluster of undeaders that were going to come at them would be those formerly on Stage Four or thronging around the bottom of it. The Biblebashers and their associates. Any remnants of their sadistic memories were going to launch them straight at anybody their disintegrated brains might happen to recall. Seth knew that Scarlett’s distinctive persona was going to rate high on their list.
They may not have had the chance to eat her in the way they’d have preferred to while they remained alive, but now as undead monsters, they would be able to eat her quite literally, ripping all the succulent flesh from her bones.
Seth knew Blizzard and Black were over that way, but regardless of how protective of her they were, there was every chance that one single mistake, one tiny error in judgement, one miniscule distraction and anything could happen.
His heart thumped its consistent painful beat, and then there was no time to dwell on thoughts of anything but action.
He was right about that cluster of meat masticating, patron pulverizing, zombie beasts being the first to notice a flood of new human beef emerging into their al fresco dining area, but it wasn’t just them detecting it.
Horrible grunts, growls, and hungry slavering snarls swirled in a hideous soundtrack of dinner preparations, swamping them as they entered the arena, and before Seth could contemplate how he was going to deal with things if Scarlett fell beneath the feral jaws of undead Tre, Ralph, and their ogre cronies, a knot of zombie folk were taking interest from the left side.
There were four of them in this initial group, two women and two men, or at least Seth assumed that much. The Zombie Trigger appeared to have rendered them sexless, making them instead, nothing more than pallid faced freaks with wide open jaws streaked with blood, their eyes in sunken sockets vacant, and yet horrifyingly malevolent at the same time. Clad in the standard death metal uniform of brutal band shirts and jeans, all liberally saturated in gore, with various chains and jewellery items swinging, they came towards the perceived herd of newly appearing human cattle.
Unlike some of those Seth witnessed in the past, moving at ridiculous speeds which warped his preconceived notions of how zombies should and would move, this quartet moved with the shambling motions horror movies instilled in him growing up, so there was time to remove that cover from Mother North’s blades, revealing her true sinister purpose beneath.
Over on the other side of the topless Miranda, SternBitch wasn’t so overcome with terror that she hadn’t seen that unveiling of Black’s beauty, and she gaped in open-mouthed astonishment, eyes boggling as she saw what Mother North really was.
Not waiting for the four shamblers to get near enough to the group to present any threat, Seth made the executive decision to meet them halfway, and did so, bringing Mother North up in a huge scything motion. He recalled the bellowed command from Black as they all vacated the paltry space of refuge behind Stage Four, something regarding conserving ammo where needs be and to take out the heads of the undead, aim for the heads.
With that in mind, Seth launched an attack with Mother North that stupefied him with the results. The myriad blades of the lethal instrument weapon all cleaved through three of the approaching zombies, punching wicked steel through one after the other. First, the main cutting edge sheared one of the male meatseeker’s heads right from his shoulders in a gory shower of blood, jetting the crimson liquid sky-high, and then it carried right through the next zombie in line, a female, slightly shorter. Due to the height difference, and the fact that Seth’s swing was somewhat arcing down from the first point of impact, the deadly blade sliced right through the female undead’s head, just under the top of her ears and sloping on an angled chop that ripped through a grey blood-dripping nose, and then obliterated a cheek, tipping the severed section of skull like the top of a sugar bowl, exposing a mangled mush of grey brain slop before the carved off piece of cranium fell, an upended bone basin vanishing behind the bodies of the meatseekers.
The third recipient of Mother North’s fury was the other male undead, the tallest of the whole bunch, so the blade, still angling further downwards, hit him underneath his reaching arms, pile-driving with the velocity of Seth’s swing into ribs, ripping into rotting meat flesh, separating that cage of bones inside the zombie’s torso and cleaving apart more internal organs.
If Seth thought this was where the bestial beauty might get tripped up, he was pleasantly surprised. Mother North blasted her way right through the midriff and exited out the other side of the zombie’s ribcage in a geyser of blood and mangled innards, splattering little gobbets of shiny, slippery meat against the last of the quartet.
All three of the mutilated freaks went down like undead dominos in a collapse of hacked up body segments, the two headless ones not moving from their tangle of sanguinary spill, while the halved one continued to wave it’s tattooed arms, silver rings glinting incongruously on clawing fingers.
Seth was under no impression that he was one of the st
rongest guys in the world; he knew without any doubt that the strength of Black would far exceed his, so he imagined just how lethal Mother North would be in the hands of the Subversion leader. Shit, he could be hacking down whole armies of undead swinging this deadly lady if Seth himself could take out three with one swipe.
Big Nate accounted for the last of the undead group converging on the left hand side of them. Witnessing how Seth dismembered three of them, not concerned with the fact that one was female, the big biker bashed with the butt of his pistol right on the top of the final zombie’s skull, then battered down with a knife he’d lifted from the Subversion armoury. The blade bit in and sliced through brain matter like butter, again proving Seth’s assumption correct, that the skulls of those affected by the Trigger seemed to become weakened by the toxins leeching out of the brains.
The hooked fingers of the still active halved zombie swiped at Nate’s legs as he yanked his knife from the mutilated skull of the beast he’d despatched, and the big fellow avoided the grasps with ease, stepping back and then punting the creatures head with a steel capped boot right under the chin.
The rest of the group were still moving, ushered rapidly on by Dax and Black, and with the way somewhat cleared, Seth could see that the right hand side had more undead threats to contend with.
The Biblebashers were there, after all. His face hardly recognisable under a mire of blood and gore, the chrome-domed freak that formerly was Ralph came hurtling out of a pack of undead crouching on the ground around multiple fallen bodies, evidently fans and casual bystanders who, while not susceptible to the Trigger, were certainly susceptible to the gnashing teeth of meatseekers.
There were clusters and knots of undead like this all over the region, swarming around corpses, and even still living, screaming people, who’d been taken down to the ground and were being torn apart by hooked fingernails and chomping teeth, like hyenas or packs of lions, ferocious undead jackals feasting at will. For the most part, plenty of these undead fiends weren’t even disturbed from their hideous feeding endeavours by Seth’s group moving through the area; some didn’t even notice, but for all those that didn’t shift from their current meals, others did.
UndeadRalph was one of these, so too some more of his Biblebasher mates. Five or six of them came in a pack, just as they’d done in assailing Stage Four. Too far back to be of any benefit, assisting Nate finish off the foursome of zombie death heads, Seth felt his chest tighten with fearful panic as he saw them moving, not in slow shambolic fashion, but open ungainly runs.
Then he saw Blizzard and the demonic Blizzard Beast slicing and dicing through the midst of them, saw Rusty, one of the other Renegade Masters in the fray too, his long auburn hair flying in tangled knots behind him. A shotgun boomed, most likely the one in the grip of Lizette, and a shredded undead form went earthwards in a blood mist.
As for Ralph, his paws stretched out for Scarlett to no avail; she took hasty, but sure aim with her pistol and sent a bullet singing through his rotted meathead brain, tearing fragmented skull bits out the back of his head.
Black might have said for them all to try and conserve their ammunition, but Seth doubted he was about to begrudge Scarlett that one shot and ensuing aerating of UndeadRalph’s cranium.
“Keep moving!” Black boomed, his voice loud but barely audible among the hellish carnage of sound buffeting all around them, and Seth and Nate ran in long strides to catch up to the main body of the group.
Most of the feeders on the ground continued to do so, ripping and tearing at bodies, hauling out long stringy ropes of intestines and entrails, fingers clawing into head cavities for brains, teeth seeking out succulent portions of meat, leaving the grass comprehensively bloodied. Soon enough though, the massing numbers of undead would outweigh the fallen corpses on the ground and the feeding packs would begin to search elsewhere for food.
As the tailing two raced to draw level with the others, Nate cast a stare in Seth’s direction, issuing a long, low whistle as he did so.
“Goddamn, boy, looks like I have to revise that earlier assessment about you slinging a mean six string. You swing a mean…well, whatever the fuck that damn thing is. Jee-sus Christ, man. Who the hell are you guys?” An expression beyond impressed was emblazoned on the big bearded man’s visage as his eyes lingered on the blood-dripping blades of Mother North.
“I’m…just a guy who got caught up in all this shit when it first started. Back in Armada. This…well, it belongs to Black.”
“Uh-huh,” Nate grunted, nodding in approval as they moved into the slipstream of the main group.
Seth could see, or was under the impression, that this foolhardy pursuit was somehow destined to fail. In its initial format, or running with their original cast of characters they might have been able to pull this off, even at this terribly late stage with Undead Fleshcrave already successfully managing to hurl open the gates of zombie hell in Blackwater Park, but now, it seemed to be an impossible venture.
Their group was now an overbloated one, swollen with members who didn’t understand the gravity, had no concept of the situation, and were ill-equipped to deal with it. People were going to die and there was no way of avoiding that. Seth just hoped that he, and Scarlett, weren’t among those unlucky enough to be in that final body count.
The clique of Biblebashers and associates, wrenched from their grounded feasts didn’t create too much of a stir once Scarlett skullfucked Ralph’s head with a bullet, and the shotgun in Lizette’s hands boomed, along with the violent slashery meted out by the Blizzard Beast, but the gunfire attracted more undead horrors. Most of them were some distance away, swarming around regions where various crowds assembled to watch active bands, or wait in lines for drinks, food, merch and the like, but their hungry interests were piqued by the sounds and reports of loud noises, the presence of a group of human livestock moving through their realms.
However, as both Nate the Renegade Master, and Jazmyn the proprietor of Kathaarian pointed out; the townsfolk of Blackwater Park weren’t all running and screaming in blind panic. Some were, of course, along with the metal fans, not of the true death head persuasion, but a whole lot of them weren’t.
With weapons they’d either already been toting around, or weapons and makeshift implements of violence appropriated from ingenious locations around the Park, they were holding their own, standing their ground, fighting back.
Many must have realised what was happening, it was a fair bet that news of the aberrant happenings from other populaces way down the coast had carried here, so it wasn’t as though they were all completely taken by surprise. Consequently, some didn’t think twice about reacting with savage violence and killing these undead monsters, sweeping away any suggestion that they were still in some way people far out of the realms of possibility. They accepted that these flesh devouring fiends were exactly that, hungry ghouls devoid of humanity, and acted accordingly.
This was the reason for the gunshots heard from Stage Four by Seth and his cronies, but as evidenced now by the approach of more zombies, the sound didn’t distract them or in any way scare them off, it merely attracted more.
As Black and Dax steered the now beyond terrified bunch of survivors plucked from the pit of peril in front of the ex-Plaguewielder performance platform, Tempest and his two bikie backups continued to lead the way, the Subversion drummer with a Funeral Moon in one fist, a Freezing Moon in the other, the remainder slung in their case across his broad muscled back. Blood splashed in gory crimson streams from the lethal cymbals as he slashed and hacked anything that came within the radius of the group frontrunners and his pair of Renegade Master compatriots were quick to assist in clearing a path. They snapped shots off, but did so with restraint and calculated precision, picking when they would best be required to do so.
Seth was amazed by how well the bunch of bikers slotted easily into the mix; he imagined anyone else given a gun and sent off to head up the party would have been blasting with alarming freque
ncy and hitting jackshit, but not these guys.
As for the rest of the group, they were a shambles, a stumbling, panicked, terrified mass of hopeless humanity fearful of getting massacred and eaten by the humanivores. Even Mark and Miranda looked as though they belonged in the centre with the rest. Heather appeared to be holding her own, or at least maintaining composure for now, faced with the horrific blood-soaked scene spanning all across the entire grounds of Blackwater Park. Maybe she was in some type of shock, or she’d witnessed enough horror—including those perpetrated by humans themselves―over the days since her rescue from the Quo Vadis parking lot to be steeled enough against these sickening sights.
The security guards, basically rent-a-cops, certainly hadn’t adapted as well as the bunch of bikers. They were as terrified as the women and the other metal fans in the centre of the bunch, driven in a screaming, panicked horde, and probably couldn’t be relied on to do anything that would assist if the whole lot of them were suddenly overrun by a pack of undead mutants they couldn’t contain.
Seth was trying to look everywhere, and yet not look everywhere, at once. He needed to know exactly where the next threat might be coming from, but by the same token, there was so much abhorrent nightmarish activity swirling around the massive sprawl of Blackwater Park that seeing all of it splattering against his eyeballs wasn’t something he wanted scorching hideous images into his brain for eternity. Though, at this rate, his eternity possibly wasn’t destined to be a very long one.
Down here on the ground, the night was cruelly alive with an almost perpetual track of screams and terrified, shouted confusion, these sounds mingling with the grotesque utterances of the undead myriads, having long since replaced any of the death metal music formerly regaling the arena. Even those members of bands who’d been morphed by the Trigger mid-performance and had briefly remained on their stages in the throes of riffing or blasting on their drum kits while the dwindling remnants of their brain capacity told them that’s what they were supposed to be doing, now succumbed to the overwhelming desire to rip and tear flesh with their teeth, and bury their horrid faces in warm human blood, and then launched themselves into the crowds to do just that.