by Goforth, Jim
“So, what’s it going to be, Quinn?” Black spoke calmly, his blood-streaked arms crossed over his chest, his katana in its sheath on his back only a brief flicker of a hand away. “You and your vengeance crowd still fixing to kill us? That’s the reason you’re in Blackwater Park as well, isn’t it?”
“There is no more Buck Quinn,” Vengeance Priest replied gravely. “Buck Quinn and the others you knew died exactly where you thought they did. Back where you left them all for dead. Now there is just Vengeance Priest, there is Natassja, there’s Empress. And yes, you are correct. The whole plan was to hunt you all down and kill you wherever you’d travelled to. For the longest time, that was my chief motivation in doing everything I did, though to begin with it was only my master plan, shared with nobody else. It motivated me, it fuelled me, it drove me on, and made me more than I was. Lethal, dangerous, resilient, powerful. Able to strike down great numbers of the undead plague wherever we encountered them, becoming smarter, more cunning, clever. Able to take what we wanted or needed, and with cities just falling all up and down the coast, able to reign where we wanted. The police can’t stop this, hell, the army didn’t get a quick enough jump on it, they can’t hold back the tide either. One simple death metal concert, then a chain of others and the most ludicrous concept one might ever expect to become reality, an apocalypse of the undead, is here.
“And then it occurred to me, why the hell was I investing all my time and energies, all my hatred and resentment into chasing down those I thought wronged us? Because, after all, you didn’t, I’ll concede that now. At the time, sure, blaming you for us being left behind to escape that hell was what I did, but of course, what it really did was make us, shape us, create us. In hindsight, this was inevitable once that Trigger was switched on and kept getting switched on, and now this is the way the world is. The weak get swallowed up and the rest of us endure, persevere, and make what we will of the hand we’ve been dealt. And I’m not going to be someone who runs and hides and lays low, always looking to escape this epidemic. I’m going to rule like a king among it. So, rather than want to kill you now, I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to you for making us what we now are.”
Vengeance Priest ceased talking, and Black gazed back evenly at him, merely nodding once to acknowledge everything the man said.
“And I’ll return thanks for arriving here to throw a monkey wrench in the cogs of this final concert to switch on the Trigger, but I suspect you’ve been watching and waiting for some time to do so.”
“Indeed,” Vengeance Priest nodded back. “But one more thing. We might essentially be on the same side of sorts, but that doesn’t make us friends. Armada has fallen, it is in the embrace of undead chaos, but it is our chaos. It belongs to us. You and yours can have this metropolis, or whatever you see fit, but don’t ever return to Armada. There’s no place for you there anymore.”
“Wait!” Dax suddenly burst through, pushing past Seth, Scarlett, and Black to stand in front of them. “Wait a minute. Buck…I mean, Vengeance Priest…I’m coming with you. Let me join your group. I’ve no business with any of these people…”
“What’s more,” Black interjected harshly. “You aren’t welcome here anymore. You’re a loose cannon, you’re a liability, and you can’t be trusted. If they’ll take you, good luck to them, but you will never be welcome to ride with us again. There’s a lot more I could say, but I won’t. Go on and run along. I almost hope they don’t take you, and then you will see just how far you are going to make it in this fucking debacle, but that’s not my call.”
A scowl flitted across the face of Dax, but only momentarily. An earnest look, almost of desperation, supplanted it as he turned attention back to Vengeance Priest and his silent soldiers. They stared back, impassive, stoic, unreadable under their corpse paint for long moments, then Priest gestured with his hand, waving Dax over.
“Come on then. I see you’ve worn out your welcome here. Better hope you don’t do likewise here. We don’t suffer fools too lightly either and you’re going to have to be part of the machine, or you’ll be feeding the undead.”
Immediately, Dax was gone, scampering away to join the others without a backwards look at Seth or anyone. Seth expected to feel pangs of something, some regret, pain or sorrow jabbing twinges into him, but he didn’t. He only felt hollow and empty about the desertion of Dax, the friendship expired a long time ago, almost following a similar trajectory as his relationship with the long departed Julietta.
“As for your other friends, what’s left of them are still inside. There aren’t too many of them, but then again there’s a fair few of us missing too. But that’s been how it’s gone from the start, we lose numbers, we gain numbers. That’s the way this world is going to operate now, the smart and the strong will prevail, and the rest will fall by the wayside. Since I’m assuming you’ve done what you came to do, and Undead Fleshcrave are but resemblances to the pieces of scattered meat they grunt about in their songs, then our time here is done.”
“As is ours,” Black replied simply, choosing not to elaborate on that remark any further.
With that, Vengeance Priest marshalled his remaining Black Metal troops, including the latest recruit Dax, and continued on down the hallway, some nodding solemn acknowledgement of sorts to Black and his companions, others merely staring straight ahead and ignoring them. Seth saw the woman who he’d known as Callie, but now went by the moniker Empress glance ever so briefly at them, perhaps taking in the absence of some faces she might have expected to see there, then away again. After all, Vengeance Priest stated the way things had run with them, quite obviously it was something which had impacted on Seth and his crew too.
Then they were gone, treading off down the primarily dark hallway, swallowed up in shadows.
Where they were intending to exit, or how they were planning to contend with the swarming throngs of undead, Seth hadn’t a clue, but it wasn’t his concern nor did he want to make it his concern. His interest remained only in seeing whether Mark and Miranda were among the survivors inside, and then, how all of them were planning on escaping Kathaarian.
Amidst a staggering sprawl of bodies, broken, bloodied, segmented, and in a blood flooded floor almost an inch deep in places, Mark and Miranda were among the survivors as were Renee, Lilith and Gavin. But no others.
Everybody else, including a host of the Black Metal Warriors and all of the Renegade Masters who hadn’t escaped the room before the war ensued were dead. Almost every single corpse riddling this ghastly performance room of pain and sheer brutality bore death wounds to their heads in some way, the proof that they’d all been destroyed as undead or killed prior to morphing into zombies.
Seth could imagine what horrors unfolded in this room to leave it in a state of utter bloodshed and sprawled corpses spread from every corner, some still in the cells or half hanging out doorways, the air alive with a pungent mixture of foul smells, but he didn’t delve too deep into trying to recreate it all in his mind. There was little enough room left for such hideous scenes in his head as it was, those many terrible scenes already witnessed pushing happier pleasant things into a tiny corner of it.
He didn’t know whether the survivors here were ordered to wait inside this horrible death laden area by Vengeance Priest, or if they’d done so of their own accord, frozen in the shock of still being among the living, but they gradually begin moving once they recognised those who’d returned.
While Black and Tempest prowled throughout, searching bodies, looking to see if there was anything the vultures hadn’t already appropriated, Seth, Scarlett, and Heather went to the others.
“Dax?” Mark queried.
“Gone,” Seth told him. “But of his own free will. He left to…join them.”
“Them?”
“Vengeance Priest and his gang.”
“Oh…right. Listen, Seth, I wasn’t seeing things was I…Vengeance Priest was actually Buck wasn’t he?”
“Was being the operative wor
d. He isn’t Buck anymore. Not the Buck we knew. There’s nothing of the guy who was our friend left, and he both blamed us and then thanked us for the opportunity to become something other than what he was. And as for Dax, he’s long since revoked his friendship with us. There’s no getting any of that back.”
“No big loss,” Mark muttered quietly, though his voice indicated he hardly meant that. It was a loss, they’d been losing things and people ever since the first hideous purpose of Undead Fleshcrave’s musical performances became clear.
Just behind him, and seemingly in no hurry to move from her uncomfortable position splayed on the floor in a rough seated stance, Miranda said nothing. She just looked blank and distant, as if she was hardly still there behind her eyes.
“Unsurprisingly, they’ve taken all the guns,” Black announced as he and Tempest wandered back, managing to locate a handful of discarded bladed weapons from around the death room, but nothing in the way of firearms. “Which we should have expected. I guess it was charitable enough of them to return the majority of our other weaponry. In any case, we have what we need to get out of here and get to the Truck.”
“The Truck?” Mark echoed. “We’re not staying here?”
“Why would we stay here? Our business here is done, we move on. Somewhere else, where at least for now, the undead haven’t spread. And make preparations for when they do.”
Few others had any desire or inclination to question Black. The whole notion of escaping another zombie besieged city was the principal motivation for them all, fatigued, bloodied, injured, mentally and physically drained. They left the charnel house, a subdued knot of folk on the heels of Black with Tempest now falling into rear-guard. No mention was made of retrieving the bodies of any of their friends here, as much as at least three of these number might have wanted to take that of Blizzard. From this point on they knew there was going to be zero chance of burials, anything of the sort. The matter of fact words spoken by Vengeance Priest were cold hard truths, it was the way of the word now. Those who couldn’t adapt or acclimatise or contend with what this new world of Undead Fleshcrave’s creation would be left behind, and they would be dead.
They made it outside, trailing in apprehension into the car park where the Truck remained silent in its corner parking spot, left there for what felt like an eternity ago. It was remarkably bereft of undead lurkers out here, at least visible ones, but then again it was completely devoid of human presence as well. Their presence exiting Kathaarian might be enough to draw some attention from the zombie packs roaming the streets outside the front of the place, but for now, it was quiet.
“Really should burn this fucking place to the ground,” Tempest growled, though it was more of a wish than a suggestion. The less time spent here the better, they’d all lost far too much than to want to tarry around any longer.
A strange low ululation of sound carried from behind Seth, where he and Scarlett tailed Black, and he snapped his head around in instinctive alarm. Back there traipsed Mark, Miranda, Renee, Lilith, and Gavin, with Tempest and Heather back behind them.
The eerie noise travelled from Miranda, and Seth realised she was clutching at her left arm, fingers clasping around it. Blood was seeping between her fingers and dripping steadily as she walked, her face gradually growing paler, the vacant expression in her eyes more unnerving than the acknowledgement she was shielding the fact that she’d been bitten.
“Mark!” He abruptly screamed, as the ashen face of Miranda began to alter dramatically before his eyes, not quite as rapid as some of the many transformations he’d witnessed, but enough to understand the deadly peril, the fact that the infection in her had slowly but surely overwhelmed her. “Get away from her!”
“What?” Mark looked stunned, bewildered, then aghast as he realised who Seth referred to, the conflicting array of expressions chasing one another across his visage, stunting his ability to do anything.
Simultaneously, Tempest and Seth both ran. Too late. Miranda’s trudging gait shifted into a brief flurry of explosive action as her hand left the gory wound on her arm and both sets of fingers clawed into Mark, followed swiftly and brutally by a gaping mouth that sank teeth into the side of his face.
Mark’s horrified screams of realisation and finality rang out in a duet with Seth’s horror stricken howl of total desolation before Tempest brought the lethal blades of his Moons around in arcs that came from each side, severing the heads of both the doomed almost simultaneously.
Seth didn’t want to watch as the bodies of the decapitated lovers collapsed together, entangled in a hideous embrace of death, but he was paralysed, hypnotised in morbid fascination. From beyond the grave Undead Fleshcrave had one final cruel laugh, one final terrible fatal throw of the dice, and with his ears full of his own screams, Seth saw the two detached heads bounce away in different directions, one with the blank cold stare of the undead, the other trapped eternally in a horrible acknowledgement of their demise.
***
Some vehicles might have found it a difficult proposition getting out of the zombie choked streets of Blackwater Park, but not the Subversion truck. Driven with furious dedication and desire to see the tiny collective of survivors leave this behind without dropping another body, Black powered through undead obstacles like a harvester tearing through corn, and those members riding in the tray hacked with blades at any ghoulish limbs striving to reach as the vehicle, utilised like a battering ram, bashed them all free of the threat, free of the city, and back out onto the endless black ribbon of the highway.
They all knew any space put between them and the inevitable march and pandemic spread of the undead was but a temporary thing.
Black stated it best when at last they were ensconced in the Truck, answering a question from Renee.
“Is that it? Is it over?”
“No. Not at all. This is just the beginning. This is the start of Global Death’s new world. Welcome to Hell.”