Read The Last Days Online

Authors: Scott Westerfeld

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Performing Arts, #Music

The Last Days (16 page)

BOOK: The Last Days
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The beast inside me had been created to fight it.
“We have to be careful. It’s close.”
He sucked in deep breaths through his nose. “I’ve heard this, Min, at practice. It’s in your music.”
“Clever Mozzy.”
He shook his head. “But how come it has a . . .
smell
?”
I shrugged. “Because it has a body. It’s real and dangerous. And I don’t think we want to meet it just yet, so shush.” I dragged him farther into the tunnel, toward the trail that the old enemy had left behind—the perfect place to quicken the beast inside me.
As we grew nearer, I felt the rest of Luz’s restraints stripped away, the lures and tangles and spores of the beast spilling through my system. Finally I understood how it worked. Down here, the beast inside me didn’t want to eat Mozzy, it wanted to spread itself.
The old enemy somehow made it . . .
horny
.
Here was the hole, chewed and broken earth, like a wound in the side of the man-made tunnel, stained with the black stuff the enemy used to melt the earth. The ancient enemy was huge, I realized now, big enough to make its own tunnels, though it loved the subway’s free ride.
I dragged Moz into the gashed stone of its trail, pushed him against the crumbling edge, easily holding his shoulders in a grip he couldn’t break.
His pupils were as big as starless skies. “Min . . .”
“Shhh.” I put one ear against the tunnel wall and listened. . . . The enemy was drifting away, my bad hunger growing as its influence faded. My teeth wanted to pull Moz to pieces, to sate my hunger in a way no chicken blood could touch. . . .
“I need to give it to you
now
,” I said.
“But what—”
“Mozzy . . .” I put my hand over his mouth. “Here’s the thing: if we stand here talking, I think I’ll eat you.”
His eyes wide, he nodded.
Pulling away my hand, I leaned forward, my mouth covering his, and the beast exploded. It struggled to filter through my skin, trying to wring itself out every pore, squeezing itself into my sweat and spit and blood, saturating every drop of me.
Infecting Moz, injecting him.
The kiss took long seconds, and when it was over I was dripping.
I pushed myself back from Moz and stared into his glittering eyes. He was panting, beautiful, infected. Relief swept through me, and I kissed him softer this time, finally certain that he was safe. Just this once, sane had beaten crazy.
After that first kiss, the hungry beast inside me didn’t want to consume this new warrior in the struggle. It was satisfied.
But me . . . I was only getting started.
17. FOREIGN OBJECTS
-PEARL-
I’d bought a new dress just for this, and nine kinds of makeup. My hair had been redone that afternoon, cut and blown and sculpted with goo. I was dripping borrowed bling and staring at my bathroom mirror, a contact lens balanced on the tip of my finger.
Color my mother ecstatic.
“You can do it, Pearl.” She was hovering behind me, similarly glammed.
“That’s not the question.” I stared at the contact lens, which shimmered like a tiny bowl of light. A dreadful, painful glow. “The question is whether I
want
to.”
“Don’t be silly, darling. You said you wanted to look your best tonight.”
“Mmm.” Foolish words that had sent Mom into a spending rampage.
Back a million years ago when she was seventeen, she’d actually had a coming-out party, like a real old-fashioned debutante. She still had the pictures. And we’d stayed in New York City no matter how high the garbage got, no matter how dangerous the streets—because this was where the parties were. So she probably hoped this was the beginning of a new era of Pretty Pearl, no more blue jeans or glasses or bands.
“I could just go there blind.”
“Nonsense. To be truly lovely, one must make eye contact. And I don’t want you stumbling all over the art.”
“She’s a photographer, Mom. Photos are traditionally hung on the wall; you can’t stumble on them.” Typical. It was my mother who always got invited to these things, but she never bothered to Google the artist. Which was lucky, I guess. A glance would have revealed who else was on the guest list tonight, giving away the real reason I wanted to go.
“Quit stalling, Pearl. I know you can do this.”
“And how do you know that, Mom?”
“Because I wear contact lenses and so did your father. You’ve got the genes for it!”
“Great,” I said. “Thanks for passing on those sticking-a-finger-in-your-eye genes to me. Not to mention the crappy-eyesight genes.” I stared at the little lens gradually drying to razor-sharpness on my fingertip, imagining all my totally lateral caveman ancestors jamming rocks and sticks into their eyeballs, none of them realizing the whole thing would pay off a thousand generations later when I had to look good at an art gallery opening.
“Okay, guys, this is for you,” I said, taking a breath and prying my left eye open wide. As my finger approached, the little transparent disk grew until it blotted out everything, dissolving into a fit of blinking.
“Is it in?” my mother asked.
“How the hell should I know?” I opened one eye, then the other, squinting at myself in the mirror.
Blurry Pearl, clear Pearl, blurry Pearl, clear Pearl . . .
“Hey, I think it’s in.”
“See?” my mother said. “That was easy as pie.”
“Pi squared, maybe. Let’s get going.” I scooped new makeup into my brand-new handbag, its silver chain glittering softly in my blurry eye.
My mother frowned. “What about the other one?”
I alternated eyes again—blurry mother, clear mother—and shrugged. “Sorry, Mom. I don’t think I’ve got the genes for it.”
As long as I could recognize faces, the demimonde was good enough for me.
 
Out on the street, Elvis made a big deal about my new look, acting like he didn’t recognize me, trying to get me to blush. The older I got, the more he thought his job was to make me feel ten years old. Lately, he was tragically good at it.
The weird thing was, though, by the time we arrived at the gallery, I felt twenty-five. There weren’t any cameras popping as Elvis swung the limousine door open for me, but there was a guy with a clipboard and headset, other blinged-up art lovers sweeping into the entrance, their bodyguards piling up out in the street, the clink and chatter coming from the crowd inside. . . . It was almost like going onstage.
Even with everything going on, New York still had
gallery openings
. Civilization was still kicking ass, and here I was, in costume and in character. Ready to charm.
Once inside the gallery, the first trick was extricating myself from Mom. She kept showing me off to friends, all of them dutifully not recognizing me and dropping their jaws, reading from the same script as Elvis. Soon Mom was striking up conversations with strangers, dropping “my daughter” comments and clearly craving “Not your sister?” in response.
And she wonders why I don’t dress up more.
Finally, though, I weaseled out of her orbit with the lame excuse of wanting to look at, you know, the
art
. Her fingers trailed on my shoulder as I slipped away, reminding everyone one more time that I was her daughter.
I made my way straight to a table full of champagne, rows and columns of it bubbling furiously, and smiled. The open bar: where else would a record company rep hang out at an art opening?
I snagged a glass and hovered near the table, keeping an eagle eye (just one) out for the face I’d downloaded that morning. My trap was finally set—I was ready. All my lines were memorized; I was dressed ravishingly and standing in the perfect spot. There was nothing more I could do but wait.
So I waited. . . .
Twenty minutes later, my enthusiasm had faded.
No record company talent scout had materialized, the glass was empty, and my feet were unhappy in their new shoes. The party buzzed around me, ignoring my little black dress and borrowed bling, like I was some kind of nonentity. Bubbles rattled unpleasantly in my head.
All my life I’d wondered how my mother’s sole life purpose could be going to parties, even while the world was crumbling around her. Finally Google had shown me the answer: her reason for existence was to get
me
into
this
party. Astor Michaels, Red Rat Records’ most fawesome talent scout, was also the biggest collector of this photographer’s work. He’d discovered the New Sound, signing both Zombie Phoenix and Morgan’s Army—not huge, commercial bands, but gutsy bands like us.
It was a perfect match, like when Moz and I had been brought together. Surely this was fate playing with my mother’s social calendar.
But as I picked up my second glass and wandered through the crowd, squinting at two hundred half-blurry faces and recognizing none of them, I started to consider an awful possibility: could fate be
messing with me
?
What if Astor Michaels was out of town? Or busy scouting bands at some undiscovered club instead of here? What if Google had lied to me? All my efforts tonight would be wasted—in fact, my mother’s whole
life
would be wasted. . . .
I stood there, dizzy on my feet, staring at a half-empty glass and realizing something equally dismaying: the champagne gene was another one my mom hadn’t passed on. Maybe it was my half-blurry vision or the buzz of the uncaring crowd around me, but I felt like reality was in a blender.
I had to get control.
I took a deep breath and pulled myself out of the crowd, wandering to the party’s edge to look at the pictures. They were gigantic photos of the sanitation crisis: glimmering mountains of plastic bags, garbage guys on strike, lots of rats. All were dramatic and weirdly beautiful, almost life-size, as if you could walk straight into them. Which begged the question: Why would you want this stuff on your wall when it was all happening right outside?
The crowd seemed to agree. People were crowded into the middle of the room, shrinking from the images of decomposition. Only a few of us hovered at the fringes of the party, sullen and extraneous, like sophomore guys at the senior prom.
Poor art lovers
, I thought, and then, in a fit of champagne-stoked genius, I realized where Astor Michaels had been hiding.
He wasn’t here for the prom; he was here for the art. He was one of the sophomores.
I started to circle the room, ignoring the crowd in the middle this time, the ones who looked well connected and happy and cool. I looked for the lonely guys, the losers.
Halfway around, I spotted him out of the corner of my eye—my good eye, luckily. He was ogling a vast photo of a shrine built by sanitation workers out in the Bronx: praying hands and crosses and skulls (
again!
) all jumbled up to provide protection on their route.
I took a deep drink of champagne to steady myself, my lines beginning to tumble through my head.
“What am I listening to? Oh, just this lateral new band.”
My fingers fumbled with the sticky clasp of my new handbag, scrambling around inside until they found my music player at the very bottom. Its earphones were non-helpfully tangled with makeup and hair goo and a million other things I never normally carried. After long seconds of unwinding, I managed to drag the player out and get the phones into my ears. But where was my neck strap? I peered down into the bottomless handbag in horror, realizing I hadn’t brought it.
I flashed back to my hours spent at the Apple store looking for just the right strap: sleek black leather with a shiny steel USB connector. I could see it in my mind’s eye, still in its packaging, sitting on my bed with all the other
crap
.
And of course this stupid cocktail dress, like all stupid cocktail dresses, had no pockets. It would look way too obvious just carrying the music player in my hand, and a pair of earphones snaking out from my handbag wasn’t going to make me look like the hip young trendsetter I was supposed to be. The kind who says things like . . .
“No, they’re not signed. Everyone just
knows
about them.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to think.
There was only one place to put it.
I took a gulp of champagne, switched the music player on, and dropped it down my cleavage. It fit perfectly and was kind of warm down there.
Really
warm—I looked down and realized that while scrabbling in my handbag I’d locked the screen backlight on.
Framed by the black velvet of my dress, my breasts glowed softly blue.
In my champagne haze, it was kind of cool looking. Carrying your music this way might not be the Taj Mahal of class, but it was definitely going to get the guy’s attention.
I moved closer.
BOOK: The Last Days
6.7Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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