Free Undead Fleshcrave: The Zombie Trigger by Jim Goforth Page A

violent onslaught on the now downed figure. He also bellowed a frantic alarm and eventually the combination of voices broke through the haze surrounding Dax's auditory senses and the spiked armband wielder ceased his battering, stepping back from the carnage, breathing hard.          
    His face was splattered with a gory spray-paint of blood and his spikes were streaked and dripping red rivulets.          
    That crimson bespattered visage went abruptly ashen beneath its blood smears as Dax eyeballed his handiwork, and even in the paltry light of the alley he, as well as those who already knew, could see that it was no undead entity laying prone in pooling blood at his feet. Instead, in a tangle of splayed, feebly moving limbs inside a thick grey overcoat was a person, evidently a hobo, a street-dwelling transient who must have been loitering in the alley.          
    He may have been stumbling from the dark patches of shadow to accost them for money or a cigarette, but most likely he hadn't been intent on eating the flesh from their bones or delving inside their bodies for innards.           Now his bearded face was a raw mush, unrecognisable as a human countenance and the dirty off-colour of his clothes was stained with a spread of red.          
    His grimy fingers spasmed as his hands weakly clutched at air, unable to even reach towards his ruined face.          
    Seth was thankful the illumination here was sparse; he had no desire to see this battered individual in technicolour gore.          
    "Oh, Christ...” Dax choked out a moan as a drop of blood gathered momentum and ran down his nose, dripping off the tip of it to splash onto the front of his equally bloodied shirt. "I...what the...fuck..."          
    By now the black-clad women had wrangled in the errant duo of Mark and Miranda, returning them to the fold, accompanied by Subversion.          
    Black merely gazed down with an unreadable expression at the human wreckage sprawled across the alley.          
    Seth wasn't certain, but he thought a malicious glimmer of amusement slithered across the hard visage of the menacing man, though if it had done, it swiftly disappeared into the standard impassive expression.          
    "What happened here?" Tempest queried with a short jab of his finger down at the bloody wretch.         
    "I...I thought it was...one of them. A zombie..." Dax murmured in a hoarse shocked whisper. "I thought...it-he-was coming at me."         
    Miranda looked as though she’d screamed herself ragged; she didn't appear capable of mustering up any more sounds of terror to regale the abused eardrums of her companions. She just stared in transfixed horror at Dax's lethal error, unable to wrench her eyes from it. Mark too was hypnotised by the gruesome scene, but at least he was able to drag his eyes up to meet those of Dax, optical orbs that were wide with the utter shock of what he’d just done.         
    "Oh, man," Mark moaned. "Dax...ah, Jesus."         
    "I've killed him," Dax whispered, though Seth wasn't entirely sure the vagabond with the pulped-in face was quite deceased yet.         
    Not far off it, but not there yet, his crooked fingers still twitched and a barely discernible moaning ululation trickled up from the ground where his mutilated form lay.         
    "You look like someone who would be handy to keep around," Black said in an even voice to Dax, and an undercurrent of impressed malevolence floated in there.         
    Julietta may have maintained her composure remarkably well upstairs while the brutal zombie transformation overwhelmed the entire room and through the consequential violence that erupted from it, but here and now, witnessing Dax physically attack and beat an innocent bystander in a mistaken fit of panic, destroyed all of that.         
    She