by Goforth, Jim
So therefore, if the undead existed, one couldn’t rule out the possibility of ghosts, vampires, werewolves, or anything else from being a reality.
Blank expressions existed on the faces of some, sheer terror on others, and a complete lack of any understanding on still others.
“They aren’t ghosts,” Nate said brusquely. “Told ya, Blackwater ain’t like any other town. I know where they’ve gone. Any of you Park folk should know too.”
“Of course!” Renee snapped her fingers, nodding in accompaniment with the other biker’s also moving heads in assent and comprehension.
Seth and his friends were none the wiser, as were plenty of others in the congregation. Clearly not all the survivors here were born and bred in Blackwater Park, they must have travelled to attend this festival. It was only locals like the Masters, Renee, and any others, who had any inkling what the bearded giant was referring to.
“Notice the thinning of the Blackwater residents?” Nate pressed on, directing his query to anybody who might be in the dark―which was a lot of them.
While the likes of Blizzard, Scarlett, and Roxana were listening, they were also keeping watchful eyes on the lurking undead. Right now, the zombie freaks nearest to where they stood, over by the stage, were largely preoccupied by feasting on fallen flesh, but that wouldn’t be the case forever and there were plenty more of the humanivores in the park grounds, no doubt spilling out of them too.
The rest paid close attention to Nate, waiting for him to reveal what he knew.
“Blackwater Park is built to deal with shit like this, and all kinds of catastrophes. One of the few cities leading the charge when it comes to being prepared for tragedies, or natural disasters, or well…fucking zombie apocalypses.” Nate stated simply. “Tunnels.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TUNNELS
“Tunnels?” Dax echoed predictably.
“They must have an in with somebody in this town,” Nate continued. “Someone who has given them the inside dope, but trust me, boys and girls, that’s where your fucking death metal ghosts are. Fleeing like punk bitches in the Blackwater Park tunnels.”
“Tunnels.” Dax repeated, though this time he said it as a statement rather than an echo, as if he was trying to wrap his head around it.
The Subversion trio exchanged glances, nods of understanding and acceptance of that little nugget of possibility slithering over their respective visages.
“Where are these tunnels? How do we get into them?” Roxana asked, a question all of those who formed the nucleus of the mission to destroy Undead Fleshcrave wanted to know. The others possibly had no interest to know, if it meant continuing the madness of chasing the elusive death metal outfit, though as an escape route that meant they didn’t have to slug their way through the minefield of flesh-eating monsters must have come as a heaven sent option.
Seth felt his heart leap up into his throat as Nate relayed the information; a sudden surge of jubilation rivalling that he’d felt seeing Scarlett hadn’t been mauled and rent asunder by zombie freaks.
At the same time, apprehension and nervous anxiety crept in too, the differing sides of the coin playing havoc with his thoughts.
If this were indeed the case, perhaps the Undead Fleshcravers were not fleeing, but going down into these alleged tunnels somewhere, possibly with any surviving Sentinels, in order to lay another ambush, set another trap to put paid to their pursuers for once and for all.
Then again, maybe not. If Undead were aware that these Hunters on their tail were the same who’d pursued them all the way from the instigation of this apocalyptic horror back in Armada, then they might assume their chasers were unaware of the so-called tunnels existing under Blackwater Park.
“My guess,” Tempest spoke up roughly. “Is there is some entrance to these tunnels somewhere very near to where we are right now. Which would explain why they chose to have their stage here, and also why they’ve vanished so quickly. Furthermore, that would be where the Sentinels were hiding in wait, ready to open fire on anybody who came to fuck with the Trigger achieving its desired effect.”
“The stage!” Mark exclaimed.
“Bet you’re right,” Dax nodded, a strange grin creeping across his face. “Those motherfuckers lowered their stage right on top of an entry point and now they’re running like fucking sewer rats, trying to escape, thinking we’re none the wiser. Well, fuck that, let’s do this!”
“There’s a whole bunch of entrances here in the Park alone,” Drill said, then amended the statement. “Well, there’s a few anyway. And yeah, one of them is bound to be around here close by.”
“Let’s fucking find it then,” Dax snapped impatiently, obviously keen to make up for lost time, rack up the body count he’d been cheated out of by losing his weapons and becoming cut off from involvement in the Sentinel dogfight.
“Hang on,” Seth voiced his concerns. “What if they’re down there setting another trap? I’m assuming that’s pretty much what…happened here…”
He studiously avoided catching Scarlett’s gaze, not wanting to see any hurt reflected in her eyes, as he danced around mentioning any names of those who hadn’t made it so far.
“They’ll be running,” Nate was confident. “They won’t think any of you know jacksquat about the tunnels, that’s obviously been an ace they’ve held up their sleeves the whole time. Get in, play that fucking brain killing zombifying fucking music and then, on the advice of whoever in town is feeding them the goods, slip away like fucking thieves in the night.”
“To carry on and potentially hit another town, or a whole spate of them,” Tempest finished. “So maybe Blackwater isn’t their coup de grace, the big finale, or anything of the sort, just a very big notch on the belt of Global Death. Set up to be a grand finale if they somehow got sprung and stopped, yet manipulated enough so if they slipped the noose once again, there’s still hope to infect more towns. You’re right, big man, these fuckers don’t have a clue we’ve got the inside scoop on the tunnels now too. They won’t be expecting us to keep coming. Dax, you’re right too. Let’s find this entrance pronto.”
As the various main players in the conversation were speaking, after posting his concern about the possibility of a trap, Seth had been in the process of edging around the fringes of the group. He’d kept a nervous, watchful eye on the assorted scattered knots of feeding humanivores, all of whom still seemed more engrossed in the available meat they had, than chasing down new flesh, and none yet threatened to make any moves towards the cluster of bloodied folk beside the stage.
His motivation for moving from his original position was simple. Scarlett. Never again did he want to be separated from her in that fashion, having her so far ahead in another group he couldn’t even see her and not know what might be happening to her. The terrible expanse of space between losing sight of her and eventually being able to clap eyes on her once more had been devastating, nerve-wracking, and horrendous, not knowing whether she was a bloody pile of flesh and bone being mauled between the teeth of the hideous undead fiends.
Losing her was not an option, not after he’d lost Julietta, not just once, but twice, and then, ultimately, in a twist of fate, at the very hands of Scarlett herself.
He wasn’t putting himself in the position to be away from her again.
Though her attention was mostly fixated upon Tempest and Black as they reined everybody into a close-knit formation, again keeping the more adept at weaponry and zombie slaughter on the outside where possible, her eyes flickered over to him as he drifted up alongside her. Now she allowed a smile to turn up the corners of her gorgeous lips and she stretched out her free hand to him. He dropped Mother North back to a one handed grip, ignoring the searing burn of pain as all her weight shifted to that single limb.
The frantic swinging, chopping, hacking, and dismembering of undead beasts sure did a number on every muscle from his shoulders right down to his hands, and he was feeling it even more now, but the feel of her skin against his went a lo
ng way towards alleviating that, at least inside his head.
The whole tunnels notion brought to light by Nate had him drenched in relief that he wouldn’t essentially have to immediately start swinging with Mother North again, provided they made it down underground without issue. On the other hand, if his suggestion that Undead Fleshcrave and whatever remaining Sentinels that were with them were lying in wait to spring an ambush was true, then he’d hardly get the respite his limbs were badly screaming for.
Scarlett pulled him into her with that one-handed tight grip, pressing the length of her divine body against his and kissed him passionately, her tongue slithering in between his lips, hers clasping on them. Though both of them were festooned in a mixture of blood, perspiration, and assorted other muck picked up along the way, none of that was any concern to Seth; his only interest right now was her shape against his, her kiss sparking his being with an adrenalin surge of delight, a power charge to counteract his dwindling batteries.
“I thought you were…” His voice, already a hushed murmur, trailed off into nothingness, as if even uttering the words would in some bizarre way jinx the fact that she was still alive. She placed a finger over his lips, further ensuring he kept those words unsaid. Though she’d evidently been of a similar mindset, and thinking the same of him once the two factions inadvertently split, she elected not to voice that either.
“I’m not. And nor am I going to be,” she whispered back. “Don’t worry about that.”
He knew she was saying words he wanted to hear, the same sort of sentiments he wanted to communicate to her, even though neither one of them could guarantee it in the slightest. Saying it with some measure of confidence was one thing, having it actually pan out that way was entirely another, and Seth was all too painfully aware of that.
A mere couple of weeks ago it would be completely inconceivable to imagine that he and those members of his clique of black metal friends still in the land of the living would be surrounded by the land of the undead, miles and miles from their home city, his girlfriend to become first his ex, then a zombie, then killed by a woman who would take her place romantically, while multiple other close friends were gone forever. Now, death was not only a constant threat from roaming rampant packs of once-ordinary death metal fans turned ravening fleshcravers, but from gun toting bodyguards, to the very band who’d instigated what was essentially the zombie apocalypse, and he and his pocket of associates were consigned to be the agents to prevent the unbelievable menace from spreading even further than it already had, an epidemic which was proving to be nigh on impossible to contain.
He could scarcely recall what it was like before this nightmare, and his surviving friends bore little resemblance to what they’d been prior to that fateful concert in Armada.
Good time clownish practical joker Dax had morphed into a gung-ho borderline lunatic who thought he had what it took to match it with the dangerous leaders of this whole insane death mission, and Seth’s best friend, usually a staunch and fiercely loyal soul, had gone the other direction, driven into a fearful existence where all he wanted was to be far away from it all with Miranda, wanting no part of the enforced violence and brutal survival tactics they had to engage in.
Seth shuddered to think of how the outcome would be unfolding if it was only Dax, Mark, and Miranda he had to rely on to keep them all alive.
Dax would be so rash and militantly exuberant to launch into attacks that his careless negligence would have them all slaughtered and feasted upon, while the reticence of Mark would have them killed equally fast.
Even with the guys of Subversion and their sexy women associates—whose numbers were dropping alarmingly―and the stalwart biker newcomers, plus all the others swept up in the current, Seth wasn’t certain that somebody wasn’t about to get them all killed.
And even though it might mean being able to avoid the undead explosion above ground, he sure as hell wasn’t ruling out that possibility of brutal, bloody death happening once the party descended down into these alleged tunnels running beneath the populace of Blackwater Park.
***
For some reason, Seth was expecting a sheer rabbit warren of tunnels, a maze network where it would be almost impossible to guess in which direction the Undead Fleshcravers might have fled, with so many crisscrossing passages and intersecting shafts that the hiding places or options to go would be infinite.
He was wrong.
They discovered the entrance, as correctly suggested by Mark, underneath the stage. It was essentially a mostly hollow creation, where obviously the Sentinels were lurking prior to looming out in ambush formation. Once inside, they found ladder structures led down from the entrance into the bowels of the Park.
One by one, led by Tempest and Blizzard, prepared for any instance of an underground attack being launched by Fleshcravers and Sentinels lurking in wait, they climbed down the ladders to drop to a relatively narrow stone floor.
The tunnel they all emerged in was a long, straight entity with no signs of intersecting passageways or random deviations, nor places where an entire band could secrete themselves or any bulky bodyguards.
It was roughly circular in shape, around ten feet or so in height from the floor to the curving roof, composed entirely of big cinder block bricks, lined by a handrail all the way down the left-hand side, with ladders leading to other entry/exit points appearing intermittently along the entire span of it.
It wasn’t, as Seth was also expecting it to be, as dark as fuck down there either.
There were lights set into the roof, though not all of them were in operation. Those casting some semblance of illumination were sporadically placed along the line of the tunnel’s top, though not by design, more because some of them had expired, or possibly been deliberately destroyed by vandals.
Consequently, there was lighting, but it was erratic, with long sections of dark shadow loitering between patches underneath the illumination, where the curving walls, the handrails, and ladders were clearly visible. It was an unnerving experience being there, but at least there weren’t yet any masses of flesh hungry undead to contend with. Any of those Blackwater Park denizens who’d’ been transformed into meatseekers apparently hadn’t retained any thoughts or memories in their mutilated brains of the tunnels that stretched below their city, or if they had, they hadn’t yet considered climbing down there, not with the abundance of running, screaming, panicking human beef available up at ground level.
Had any of them been cluey enough, or able to use rational thought, or in any way been able to make use of thought patterns that might still be present, they would have discovered meals served up to them, human spam in a can.
Because as Seth himself finally joined some of the others who’d already descended into the bowels of Blackwater Park, he discovered why it appeared as though uninfected residents were simply vanishing from the Park.
They too were taking to the tunnels as a means to escape. If Black and co. were of the mindset of hitting the tunnels and making haste after the departing death metal villains, they were sadly mistaken.
These tunnels below the Park were choked with terrified souls looking to flee to other parts of the city and hopeful sanctuary.
Tempest, the first down into the unknown quality of the passageways spanning along underneath Blackwater Park, managed to refrain immediately from venting his frustration at discovering this serious impediment to them swiftly catching up to the Undead Fleshcrave contingent, since any furious yell of displeasure would have alarmed and panicked those waiting outside, the lot of them already bundles of frayed nerves and knots of terror.
What was more, in terms of avoiding the undead population swarming all over the park and extending out into the city now, these tunnels were everyone’s best bet of achieving that. It wasn’t just the mission of tracking down the death metal zombie makers that was paramount, they all needed to steer clear of the roaming rampant humanivores as well, and this was really the only option to give them a fighti
ng chance of doing so.
Regardless of how many other terrified residents of the city were cramming themselves down into the tunnels in a bid to follow them to areas of the metropolis not yet infected with zombie hordes, Tempest and the rest had to be down here too.
However, once they were all safely at the bottom of the ladders, the number in the group required them to span out along the length of the tunnel, since in reality it was quite narrow, possibly only able to fit a maximum of three people across at any given time, Tempest let his pent up frustration be well known with a savage snarl of profanity littered statements as they witnessed the amount of folk who’d also taken to the tunnels to escape.
Evidently there were quite a few entrances to this underground construction, for there were innumerable ladders stretching as far as the eye could see, at least where the illumination from the erratic overhead lights shone and allowed visibility. Some of these still had people scampering down them to join the crush.
“What the hell are we going to do now?” Dax voiced the damn obvious, gesturing at lines of people, some not even moving, just sort of huddled where they’d landed on the stone floor as if catatonic with the shock from what was happening above.
Plenty of them were moving, attempting to make haste, but it was slow going with only three able to make any forward progress, and once they ran into clusters where folk weren’t in motion, this space narrowed even further for those trying to get past.
“And how do we know which way they’ve gone?” Another voice piped up, Seth wasn’t even sure who said that, the voice trilled from behind him in a quavering voice that seemed to suggest whatever way the Fleshcravers had gone, they would prefer to head off in the opposite direction.