by Goforth, Jim
Dax.
Nor was Dax finished yet. He lunged off the stunned figure of Seth and launched another charge at SkinCarver, hitting him hard in the abdomen with a crash tackle similar to the one he’d performed on Seth, nothing held back in either one. SkinCarver’s grip on Mother North was flimsy at best to begin with, after just chopping his bandmate’s throat open, and the power of Dax’s unbridled assault was sufficient to make him unhand it. Seth pulled in his feet quickly before the falling weapon sheared off a handful of toes, regardless of him wearing steel caps or not, and then watched as Dax squeezed hands around SkinCarver’s throat.
Tighter and tighter, he sought to apply pressure, also using the grip embedded in the guitarist’s skin to raise the man’s head and bash it against the floor. It may have been carpeted, but with the force Dax used while digging clawed fingers deep into the neck and strangling as well, the blows would be enough to stupefy SkinCarver. At length, when the flailing legs of the axeman began ceasing the violence of their actions and a protruding tongue emerged beneath a pair of eyes which filled red with busting blood vessels, Dax released his hold, panting heavily.
Then he promptly straightened, took hold of the abandoned Mother North and methodically hacked SkinCarver into sections of raw meat, spilling a deluge of blood into the carpet.
Seth didn’t stick around to watch the entire dismemberment, the complete dismantling of SkinCarver, which would render his hacked up pieces unable to regenerate in any undead way; he was already crawling around the bloody mess to Scarlett.
She was breathing after all, pulling herself up in a seated position against the wall, gingerly feeling around her head and face for knots and lumps, eyes on the spectacle of Dax playing delicatessen on not just SkinCarver, but now the throat-slit FaceGnawer.
When at last he was done, he stalked over to them, breathing hard, his face almost unrecognisable beneath a sheen of blood, hair that should have been blonde now so drenched and thick with the gore that it looked like blood ropes hanging around his head and shoulders.
He thrust the principal blade of the guitarweapon straight into the floor, driving it through the carpet to stand in the wooden boards below, though he kept both blood dripping hands on the neck of it.
“Jesus, Dax...” Seth started to speak, but Dax cut him off curtly.
“Save it. You’re not cut out for this, Seth. You’re no leader, you’re not going to last this apocalypse without somebody else pulling your ass out of the fire. And that’s the last time I do it. After this ends, I have plans on what I’ll be doing, but it doesn’t involve you. So, I’ll be borrowing this deathwhore right here and putting her to good use in the way only I can. You sit tight here and let the real men of the apocalypse handle business.”
Then he yanked Mother North back up out of the floorboard, leaving a spreading puddle of blood to soak into the carpet, and swiftly strode off, aiming not into the kitchen area, but further up the hall, vanishing once the dark beyond the illumination from the open door swallowed him up.
An eddying mixture of things swam within Seth in a whirlpool, a humiliated burn jostling around relief, frustrated anger, and emasculated fury, and he didn’t know which one to settle on. In reality he almost felt reassured by the brusque, demeaning dismissal by a man he realised no longer called him a friend, and were Scarlett not present, he might have taken that as his cue to abscond for good, seeking safety and some form of passage away from the undead hellhole he knew Blackwater Park would now be outside.
But she was. And she wasn’t going to acquiesce to Dax’s command, his self-appointment, once again, as the man who could finish this.
“You taking anything that lunatic says to heart?” Scarlett asked abruptly and Seth realised she was giving him an out too. If he suggested he was, then she was probably planning to tell him to run along and seek cover somewhere else. Which he was no longer prepared to do.
“Fuck no. Aside from the thinly veiled implication that we are no longer friends in any capacity.”
He stood, his whole body feeling like he’d come out of a brutal death metal pit full of insane moshers dressed in full body armour, and hauled her up with him. Despite them both looking like refugees from a Slayer composition, Scarlett pulled his body against hers and kissed him.
“For the record,” she said quietly. “He’s wrong. Somebody is always going to be looking out for you and vice versa. He’s the one who isn’t going to last the apocalypse. When you reach the point where you think you are above having your ass pulled out of the fire by your friends and those stuck in nightmare situations as well, where you think you’re going to be able to take on everything thrown at you without some support, regardless of who it is from, then that’s where you’re lost. And that’s where Dax is right now. He thinks he has somehow ascended everybody else around him, and while that arrogance and belief in what he thinks he’s capable of might keep him going for a while, in the end he’ll come undone. Unless he wises up, real quick. The reality is that the undead apocalypse is already here. We didn’t get around to nullifying Undead Fleshcrave soon enough. They always had an answer, a backup plan, some other nasty little surprise lying in wait. So no matter if we get the rest of them or not, Global Death’s plans are already coming to fruition. There’s lots more Dax is going to have to contend with. And if he doesn’t think he needs his friends, it’s going to be a painful reality for him to wake up to.”
Not sure if it was a pep up talk, a reassurance, or just a grim portrayal of the reality that would unfold, no matter what the outcome was of this possible final clash, Seth merely nodded, trying to will the assortment of pains riddling his body into some semblance of numbness. He smarted at the blunt attitude of Dax, the brazen arrogance displayed in just appropriating Mother North as his own. Mother North was Black’s of course…
No, she’s mine. She wants to be with me…
But then again, Black wasn’t around to stamp his authority on the fact. Who knew where Black was? He’d vanished on the tail of the Undeaders along with Tempest, he hadn’t been seen since. Maybe some ambush had been pulled on those two, a more successful one than FaceGnawer and SkinCarver’s attempt on Scarlett and Seth.
Before Seth could start descending into his usual quandaries, Scarlett was recovering the weapons she’d spilled on the carpet. Then they raided the kitchen as well. In there, Seth obtained a cleaver, a nine inch bladed beast with a black moulded plastic handle, its weight impressive and comforting in his hands. He took a couple of knives as well, fashioning a sheath of sorts to carry them on his belt, though the cleaver he kept in his hand. It might have been a poor substitute for the awesome might of the majestic Mother North, but it was probably better than the carving knives SkinCarver thought he would bring to the party.
Then they got moving.
As they travelled through Kathaarian, they discovered that the lights weren’t out everywhere, but for the most part, the establishment was cloaked in darkness, as if the power in most sections had been largely disabled somehow. Consequently, they were moving largely in darkness, having to rely on a couple of flashlights also garnered from the kitchen until they came across areas where the subdued illumination provided more ability to see.
That wasn’t the only thing they discovered. Nor was it the most unnerving. What they found, as they searched the great sprawling entity, which was part lodgings, part nightclub/bar, part other entertainment areas, which Seth suspected meant strip club, was that all the residents or patrons of the place were undead.
Either the Blackwater Park metal gig debacle finally managed to permeate this far into the centre of town, or those fans wrangled in for the final show, turned by the Trigger, had escaped the black metal battle led by the curious Vengeance Priest and his armoured foot soldiers in sufficient quantities to infect each and every person housed within Kathaarian. It now made an uneasy cautious search for the surviving members of Undead Fleshcrave, or their Subversion associates, a deadly mission fraught with more p
eril than they anticipated.
The mass amount of shadows stretching out through the expanse of rooms, hallways, and locations, created unseen threats where none might exist before.
It was in the bar, the place where Seth and Scarlett first planned to wile some time away together before the emergence of Tre and Ralph, where they first encountered undead, a small knot of them feasting on the ruined guts and brains of some unfortunate guests, right inside the entrance after an unnerving trek down that hallway. Seth found the weighty cleaver a handy item, its exceedingly heavy steel blade driving through brittle zombie skulls and mushing brains into stew, while Scarlett hacked with her machete and finished the job with a thrust from a knife also obtained from the kitchen. The gun, she kept mostly holstered, saving whatever ammunition she had left in it for desperation stakes.
While the entire population inside Kathaarian may have been infected and turned, the place wasn’t packed out like it was the night prior, and undead encounters were pretty sparse. However, the fact that they roamed the halls at all was enough to keep Seth in a constant sweat, fearing each dark shape glimpsed out of the corner of his eye was one or more humanivores looking for Seth sirloin and Scarlett steak.
Some were, but they came in ones and twos, not en masse. With his nerves and fearful anticipation, Seth was ready, so too was Scarlett. They laid low plenty of would-be diners on their flesh, in bloody piles and severed segments.
It was an erratic trail of blood and other slain zombie Kathaarian denizens which eventually led them to the roof of the building. Creeping up bloodslick stairs, where scant light shone, apprehensive of what might be sharing the darkened stairwell, the duo made it without incident to the top. The eerie quiescence of Kathaarian itself, which must have been soundproofed to the umpteenth degree, fell away as they emerged in the doorway, the door standing open and the frightful sounds of the night out in Blackwater Park rushed into their hearing.
CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT-BLEEDING AN EVISCERATED CORPSE
A terrible tableau of noise churned up from city streets below, a certain indication that the Park domain of the metropolis was no longer the sole confines of those undead monsters.
Sirens shrilled in their dozens, piercing in strident slices through a pastiche of screams, shouts, gunfire, bangs, all manner of calamitous noise that confirmed Blackwater Park was in the grip of the apocalypse, and like all those cities before it, fighting a losing battle to stem the tide of fleshcravers as more and more joined their eternally hungry cause.
However, all of that was inevitable and currently of no consequence to Seth. He already knew that once the Trigger was switched on at the Park, nothing could contain those afflicted by it from spreading their ghastly epidemic to the rest of the populace.
What was the issue now was the situation up on the roof of Kathaarian.
Before Seth could blunder out of the doorway and the fall of shadow out on the ground, which masked them where they stood, Scarlett stilled his motion, an arm flashing out across his midriff to prevent him betraying their presence.
The last three members of Undead Fleshcrave, still very much alive, were here and they weren’t alone. With them were the Renegade Masters Drill, Rusty, and Skin, and in the firm cruel grips of these three men were Heather and Roxana, both with the noses of guns jammed against their heads.
Seth couldn’t quite see Black or Tempest from this position, with an assortment of other constructions, ladders, water reservoirs, and large industrial fans obscuring his view, but he assumed from the tense stand-off that at least one of the duo was present, just out of view, bailed up by the threat to the two women.
“Down!” Scarlett whispered and promptly took her own advice, dropping into a crouch, hunching as low as possible to the concreted rooftop, and Seth followed suit, the bloody hatchet slippery in his grasp. She crawled and he did likewise, the pair of them shifting through shadowy patches from hiding spot to hiding spot, behind piles of piping, stands of lights, other entry points to the rooftop, table and chair settings.
There were abundant lights situated up here, but just like the remainder of the establishment, minimal were on and operating. That didn’t matter since there was profuse illumination from the besieged city’s lights below, but Seth wasn’t sure whether he’d rather the lights were all on or have the whole area swathed in pitch blackness.
Finally, they were able to see where Black and Tempest were, both of them present. Black maintained his grasp on the Blizzard Beast while Tempest held a Moon in each hand. They were still several long metres away from the crew, the short, bricked wall edging all around the perimeter of the roof, closer to the pair of them than they were to the Undeaders and their biker lackeys.
Dax was there too, Seth acknowledged belatedly, almost obscured in a patch of shadow cast by a water reservoir, Mother North clutched in his gore streaked hands. He wasn’t sure if the Fleshcravers and the Masters were aware of his presence, but they didn’t seem to be paying him any attention.
SamEdi stalked behind the trio of Masters with their bargaining chips, the other two members back behind him, indistinct in the shadows of the rest. One way or another, the three bikers were able to escape the bloodbath and either drag the women along with them, or waylay them somewhere in between. As a last stand, it didn’t make too much sense to Seth, where the death metal survivors and the Masters, obviously re-pledging their allegiance to the dollars of Global Death, intended on absconding to from here. All taking hostages did was keep the Subversion duo at bay, though the words of Black rang in Seth’s ears as he and Scarlett persisted with their furtive crawl and scamper through the dark shadows of the rooftop. The collateral damage didn’t account to anything, living or dying didn’t matter, provided the end result saw Undead Fleshcrave absolutely eradicated. He wasn’t sure SamEdi and his two cronies were aware of this, or maybe they wouldn’t have concerned themselves with holding the women at gunpoint.
“Give it up, Hunters,” SamEdi advised. “This is it, the final hurrah. I know I keep saying that, but well, you slippery motherfuckers keep having the hands of fate prolong the inevitable for you. But know this, Global Death rolls on. And it doesn’t really matter what happens now, you can’t hope to achieve anything out of killing us. The gates of undead apocalypse have been flung open as they were always intended to be, and you can never hope to pull them shut again. Everything you do from this point on is just trying to play catch up in a game you’ve already lost. Failed. It’s time to usher in a new world, a world for the strong. A world of Global Death. Walk away now, and we’ll call it quits on this whole thing. You can’t undo what’s been done, all you can pray for is the ability to be counted among the strong once this cleansing period passes. That’s all. If you’re resilient enough, and I’m sure you are, there will be some room for you in the new world. But you achieve nothing by trying to kill us. Save your friends, let them take a chance at survival too.”
“We achieve what we set out to do,” Tempest said. “You’re right. We can’t shut the gates now, cheers and congratulations on achieving your goals. But that all means naught to us, since our agenda is to eliminate you now. We still have to contend with this ‘new world’ you’ve created whether you’re alive or dead, either way.”
Scarlett’s persistent crawl had her moving alongside the border of wall, and Seth, following, chose to look over that wall and down into the city below. He was immediately sorry he’d done so.
The streets were awash with swarming undead, the sidewalks choked with them, businesses being infiltrated with hordes. Blood ran thick in gutters, those not yet turned or devoured ran in blind terror, seeking refuge while police fought a losing battle. The townsfolk of Blackwater, armed with their guns and whatever other weapons they saw fit to tote, might have managed to cut down some of the number, but their expanding population was a wall too large to scale. It looked just like Armada all over again, Noumena, any of the smaller populaces desecrated and overrun between here and there. Folks in vehic
les had already made their escape, or were in the process of doing so. Attempting to. As the undead army swelled its ranks, the prospect of escape by motor vehicle from certain areas diminished.
Seth swiftly dropped back down below the level of the bricks, chasing away the idea of thinking too far ahead. With his attention back to where he and Scarlett were heading, he realised they’d come almost completely around, enough to be behind the Masters and the band. Not yet close enough to be within any sort of striking distance, and with nothing more to keep them cloaked in tenebrous cover.
“Come on, see some sense here, boys,” SamEdi continued, tracing a line with a thick finger down Heathers throat. “All of us can walk away from this alive. Then you’ve only got to worry about what’s going on down there. Looks like hell to most, looks like a damn fine party to me.”
“Those knuckleheads with you know how difficult it is going to be for them walking out of here?” Tempest asked. “They aware that you three can simply walk through that undead tide as though you’re going for a Sunday stroll without fear of being attacked?”
He turned his attention to Drill, Rusty, and Skin.
“Do you ignorant fucks realise that you aren’t in the same boat as these guys at all? Regardless of how big a pay check you’ve been promised, how much money you think you’re going to get from this? You don’t possess the ability to just walk downstairs and simply go about your business in the middle of an apocalypse, do you? Undead Fleshcrave do. They couldn’t care less how many zombies are out there because they’re impervious; they attract no attention at all. Do you think that’s going to be the case when the lot of you swan away thinking of a job well done? When they and you step outside, what the fuck do you think is going to happen? Do you think they have a helicopter ready to swoop down and soar away to some fantastic getaway place where you’ll be bathed in dollar bills? Better wake up and smell the rotting corpses, fuckers, because you are just disposable heroes. There’s nothing to come and sweep you away off this roof. The only way these guys are planning to leave is through that seething mass of undead fuckery, whether they walk out the front door, back door, side door, or down the fucking fire escape, and that’s just how it goes. You aren’t going to see that money.”