Read The Last Days Online

Authors: Scott Westerfeld

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

The Last Days (19 page)

BOOK: The Last Days
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“How did Morgan’s Army get their name?” I asked. “Did Astor Michaels give it to them?”
“No.” Pearl shrugged. “They’re named after somebody called Morgan.”
“Their singer?”
She shook her head. “No. Her name’s Abril Johnson. There are a lot of rumors about who Morgan is, but nobody knows for sure.”
I sighed. Maybe Zahler was right, and bands should just have numbers.
Toxoplasma was four brothers covered with tattoos. I liked the singer’s voice—velvet and lazy, smoothing the words out like a hand across a bedspread. But the other three were brutally efficient, like people cooking on TV, chopping things apart in a hurry. They wore dark glasses and scattered the music into little pieces. I wondered how one brother could be so different from the others.
When their first song was done, I felt myself shiver—Astor Michaels was hovering behind us in the crowd. Pearl saw me glance back at him and turned and smiled. He handed her a glass of champagne.
That was illegal, but I didn’t worry. Here in the flashing lights, the law felt less real.
“So what do you think of Toxoplasma?” he asked.
“Too thrashy for me,” Pearl said.
I nodded. “I think three insects is too many for one band.”
Astor Michaels laughed and his hand touched my shoulder. “Or maybe too few.”
I pulled away a little as the second song began; I don’t like people touching me. That makes it hard to go to clubs sometimes, but it’s always important to see what new music people are inventing.
“Just think,” he said. “In a week you’ll be playing in front of a crowd as big as this one. Bigger.”
Pearl’s smile widened, and I could tell she was feeling realer by the minute. I turned to watch the audience. It wasn’t like when I played in Times Square, where people could come and go as they pleased, some watching intently, some throwing money, others just passing by. Everyone here was focused on the band, judging them, waiting to be impressed, demanding to be energized. These weren’t a bunch of tourists already wide-eyed just from being in New York.
Toxoplasma was making an impression. Rivulets of people were streaming forward, pressing toward the stage, dancing with the same chopping fervor as the three insect brothers. They hadn’t looked much different from the rest of the crowd until now, but suddenly they all moved like skinheads, a wiry strength playing over the surface of their bodies.
They were insects too, and my heart started beating faster, my fingers drumming. I’d never seen so many together before.
I already understood that there were different kinds of insects—Astor Michaels was very different from Minerva, after all, and I had seen many other kinds back when I’d played down in the subway—but the ones in front of the stage made me nervous in a new way.
They seemed dangerous, ready to explode.
My vision was starting to shimmer, which almost never happened with music I didn’t like. But the air was rippling around Toxoplasma, like heat rising from a subway grate in winter. In front of the band they’d started moshing, which is why I always stay away from the stage. Shock waves seemed to travel from their slamming bodies outward through the crowd, their twitches spreading like a fever across the club.
“Mmm. Smell that,” Astor Michaels said, tipping back his head with closed eyes. “I should have called
these
guys the Panic.” He giggled, still amused by his little joke on us.
I shivered, blinked my eyes three times. “I don’t like this band. They’re
against
normal, not beside it.”
“They won’t last long anyway,” he said. “Maybe a couple of weeks. But they serve their purpose.”
“Which is what?” Pearl asked.
He smiled, wide enough to show the Minerva-like sharpness of his teeth. “They shake things up.”
I could see what he meant. The tremors spreading from the insectoid moshers were changing things inside the club, making everyone edgy. It felt like when news of some strange new attack broke once while I was playing Times Square, and the crowd seemed to turn all at once to read the words crawling by on the giant news tickers. Most of the audience didn’t like Toxoplasma’s music any more than Pearl and I, but it tuned their nervous systems to a higher setting. I could see it in their eyes and in the quick, anxious motions of their heads.
And I realized that Astor Michaels was good at manipulating crowds. Maybe that was what made
him
feel more real.
“The audience expects something big to happen now,” I said.
“Morgan’s Army,” Astor Michaels answered, letting his teeth slip out again.
 
It worked: Morgan’s Army shook things up more.
Abril Johnson held an old-fashioned microphone, clutching it in two hands like a lounge singer from long ago. Her silver evening dress glittered in the three spotlights that followed her, covering the walls and ceiling of the club with swirling pinpricks. As the band slid into their first song, she didn’t make a sound. She waited for a solid minute, barely moving, like a praying mantis creeping closer in slow motion before it pounces.
Bass rumbled through us from the big Marshall stacks, setting the floor trembling. Glasses hanging over the bar began to shudder against one another—my vision already shimmering, the sound looked like snow in the air.
Then Abril Johnson started singing, low and slow. The words were barely recognizable; she was stretching and mangling them in her mouth, as if trying to twist them into something inscrutable. I closed my eyes and listened hard, trying to pick out the half-familiar, half-alien words entwined in the song.
After a moment I realized where I’d heard them before: the strange words were shaped from the same nonsense syllables that Minerva always sang. But Abril Johnson had hidden them in her drawl, interweaving them with plain English.
I shook my head. I’d always thought that Minerva’s lyrics were random, made-up, just leftover ravings from her crazy days. But if she shared them with someone else . . . were they another language?
My eyes opened, and I forced myself to look at the floor. Minerva’s beast was moving underneath us. Its Loch Ness loops rose and fell among the feet of the unseeing crowd—but much, much bigger than in our little practice room, as thick as the giant cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. It had been made huge by the stacks of amps and the focus of the spellbound throng, and I could see details in the creature now. There were segments along its length, like a sinuous earthworm testing the air.
“How’s that for intense?” Pearl murmured, her empty champagne glass clutched tightly in both hands, echoing the singer’s grip on the microphone.
“Very.” Astor Michaels cocked his head. “But not as intense as you’ll be, my dears. Not as authentic.”
I shuddered a little, knowing what he meant. Minerva’s songs were purer, unadulterated by English. Our spell would be stronger.
The beast coiled faster, and the floor of the nightclub rumbled under my feet, as if some droning bass note had found the resonant frequency of the room. I thought of how wineglasses could shatter from just the right pitch and wondered if a whole building might disintegrate when filled by some low and perfectly chosen note.
Pearl suddenly looked up, her eyes wide. “It’s them!”
I followed her gaze and saw a pair of dark figures on the catwalks high above us, climbing gracefully among the rigging of stage lights and exhaust fans.
“
Those
people.” Astor Michaels shook his head. “New fad: physical hacking, climbing around on roofs and air-shafts and down in the subways. Can’t keep them out of the clubs anymore. They especially like the New Sound.”
“Angels,” Pearl said.
“Assholes,” Astor Michaels corrected. “Takes away from the music.”
The song moved into its B section, and I dropped my gaze back to the floor, catching the last flicker of the worm disappearing. The hallucinations faded as the music grew faster, the air returning to stillness, the lyrics to ordinary English.
“She lost it,” I said.
“Yeah.” Pearl frowned. “Kind of blew the momentum there.”
Astor Michaels nodded. “The Army never gets that transition right, for some reason. It always feels like something is about to break through.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “But it never does.”
“Are you sure you want it to?” I asked. “What if it’s . . . ?”
Dangerous?
I thought of saying.
Monstrous?
“Not commercial?” Astor Michaels laughed. “Don’t worry. I’ve got a feeling that whatever it is, it’s going to be the Next Big Thing. That’s why I signed you guys.”
Pearl looked annoyed. “Because we sound like Morgan’s Army?”
He shook his head, pulling her empty champagne glass from her hands. “No, you sound like yourselves. But someone has to take the New Sound to the next level. And I’m pretty sure it will be you.”
He turned toward the bar to get her more champagne, and the band slowed into the A section again, as if trying to call back my visions. But they’d lost their grasp on the beast, and Abril Johnson’s lyrics were just normal words now. I saw that she wasn’t an insect at all; she was just imitating them, mimicking the madness she’d seen on the subway and in the streets.
I realized that Minerva was more real than her.
And I wondered: what if one day the beast under the floor turned real?
20. GRIEVOUS ANGELS
-MOZ-
The noise in my body never stopped. All night I lay awake, tissues struggling against one another, blood simmering. I could feel the beast fighting against everything I’d been, trying to remake me into something else, trying to replace me. Even my sweat raged, squeezing angrily from my pores, like a bar fight spilling out onto the street.
When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see my face. It wasn’t just that I was thinner, cheekbones twisting at new angles, eyes widening—it was something deeper, pushing up from beneath my skin, remote and contemptuous of me.
As if someone else’s bones were trying to emerge.
The crazy thing was, part of me was dying to know what I was changing into. Sometimes I just wanted to get it over with, to let go and slip across the edge. I’d almost said yes tonight when Pearl had asked me to the Morgan’s Army gig, wondering what hundreds of bodies pressed in close would do to my hunger, already halfway to uncontrollable. I imagined their scents filling the air, the crowd noise mingling with the roar inside me. . . .
But not yet—not without Min. In her arms, I still felt like myself. Besides, I had plenty more to learn down here, playing for quarters underground.
 
A woman was watching me, listening carefully, clutching her purse with both hands. She wasn’t sure yet whether to open it and reach in, risking that extra tendril of connection with the strange boy playing guitar in the subway. But she couldn’t pull herself away.
Union Square Station was almost empty at this hour, my music echoing around us. The red velvet of my guitar case was spattered with silver, and more coins lay on the concrete floor. All night, people had thrown their quarters from a distance and moved on. Even through dark glasses they could see the intensity leaking out of my eyes. They could smell my hunger.
But this woman stood there, spellbound.
I’d always wondered if charisma was something in your genes, like brown eyes or big feet. Or if you learned it from the sound of applause or cameras snapping. Or if famous people glowed because I’d seen so many airbrushed pictures of them, their beauty slammed into my brain, like advertising jingles with faces.
But it had turned out that charisma was a
disease
, an infection you got from kissing the right person, a beast that lived in your blood. Connecting with this woman, drawing her closer, I could feel how I’d been magnetized.
She took a step forward, fingers tensing on the purse clasp. It popped open.
I didn’t dare stare back into her spellbound eyes. There were no police down here anymore, not late at night. No one to stop me if I lost it.
Her fingers fumbled inside the purse, eyes never leaving me. She stepped closer, and a five-dollar bill fluttered down to lie among the coins. A glance at her pleading expression told me that she was paying for escape.
I stopped playing, reaching into a pocket for my plastic bag of garlic. The spell broken, the woman turned and headed for the stairs, the last strains of the Strat echoing into silence. She didn’t look back, her steps growing hurried as she climbed away.
Something twisted inside me, angry at me for letting her go. I could feel it wrapped around my spine, growing stronger every day. Its tendrils stretched into my mouth, changing the way things tasted, making my teeth itch. The urge to follow the woman was so strong. . . .
I put the plastic bag to my face and breathed in the scent of fresh garlic, burning away the noises in my head, smoothing the rushing of my blood.
BOOK: The Last Days
9.77Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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