Taking his phone back, he said, “Thanks so much, man! And good luck with the show!” And then he disappeared through the curtain, offering me another preview of the waiting crowd. All those faces blended into one enormous, featureless thing, and my stomach clenched with fear all over again.
We weren’t opening for anyone tonight. Everyone was there for us, and that scared the shit out of me. Not to mention The Last Call was a much bigger venue than the churches and pavilions we had played in the past.
“All right,” Ruby said, “I’ll let you get to it. The fans sound like they’re getting anxious.”
But I was already way past that point.
We call ourselves The Dinks.
Well, we called ourselves The Dinks. The band’s current status is a bit up in the air after, you know, the end of the world and all, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
Tommy and I were the only members of the band. He played the drums, and although I could play most every instrument, I held my own when it came to the guitar and the ukulele. Yes, the ukulele, that old Hawaiian staple. Believe it or not, our most played songs on YouTube and Spotify were the ones that featured me on the ol’ uke. Both of us sang. I never thought I was any good, but people seemed to like my voice. So I couldn’t complain.
We started the band in Tommy’s parents’ basement in middle school, and then got kicked out into the garage when we hit high school. We didn’t get serious about it until our last year of college, playing small gigs at state fairs, birthday parties, and weddings. At first it was just a way to make a little money on the side, but then we were getting bookings every weekend—Fridays, Saturdays, and sometimes Sundays. The extra money was starting to overtake the money I made from my normal job, which was working the night shift at a twenty-four hour gas station.
The Dinks took a break when my daughter was born, got back into it when Julia left me a year later, and then saw it as a possible full-time career after Tommy had the bright idea to post our music on the internet. Without my blessing, of course. Sharing the songs was something that had floated in the back of my mind since we recorded our first EP. I was just worried about the mean comments we’d get about our sound, our name, and all that stuff. Besides a few, which weren’t too nasty, most of the feedback was positive. Overwhelmingly positive.
Calling ourselves The Dinks was kind of like painting a target on our backs, wasn’t it? But the name had meaning. It was a big fuck you to anyone who doubted us. I can’t take full credit for it, but it was me who brought the idea up when we were in between monikers.
We were originally The Sunflowers. Then we were Pyramid after our hiatus, just Pyramid. Neither of those felt right, and by this time we were starting to get booked weeks in advance. So Tommy and I decided the new name had to do two things: it had to have a ring to it, and it had to look good on a T-shirt.
We floated about a thousand ideas between us. Billy Goat Rock, T-Rex and Stretch, and even Smith & Westman, are a few of my favorites. With that last one we were going for a Simon & Garfunkel vibe, on account of our sound being similar to theirs, but vetoed it when we realized how closely it sounded to Smith & Wesson. We were selling music, not guns, so we thought it was best to go a different route.
One day, when Tommy, his mom, and me were having lunch at Olive Garden, one of the jocks who used to pick on us in high school, Charlie Hurley, walked past our table. He stopped, did a double-take, and, eyes widening at Tommy, he said, “No shit. Dink, is that you?”
And that was when it hit me. Not Charlie Hurley’s right fist, although Tommy and me were well acquainted with it, especially during our freshman year.
See, Tommy is about five and a half feet tall. Close to average height for an American dude. Only, in high school, he was barely five foot, having not hit a growth spurt until after his senior year. I can’t tell you who coined the nickname “Dink,” but I’d put money on it that whoever they were played football and was fond of stuffing Tommy in his locker.
After Charlie left, I looked at Tommy and said, “Dink.”
And Tommy said, “Fuck off, Carter.” Before apologizing to his mom for swearing.
“No, dummy,” I said. “That’s the name! The Dinks.”
Tommy cocked his head, confused for a moment, and then a big old smile stretched across his face. “The Dinks…holy sh—crap—I love it.”
So thus began the era of The Dinks.
We didn’t really have a genre, and we sang a lot about getting our hearts broken and being depressed and about the nightmares we had—but for some reason, people loved it. I’m not complaining, trust me. I just couldn’t believe anybody could enjoy something I created enough to want to pay me for it.
Our first big hit—in our eyes, at least—was called “Stuffed Heads,” and no, it’s not as gruesome as it sounds. It’s not about someone’s collection of skulls or anything like that. It’s about having too much on your mind. I guess a lot of people related to it, because the last time I checked, the song had almost half a million plays on YouTube and around the same on all the streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. Nothing crazy, but enough for us to get recognition.
Right around when that song was taking off, I remember Tommy telling me that all we needed was a hundred true fans, and if we got them, the rest would fall into place.
“We just gotta go for it, man,” he said. “What’s the worst that could happen? We fail? We get laughed at?”
Both of which sounded pretty shitty to me, but I kept my mouth shut and nodded.
“Luckily for us, we’re pretty experienced in both the failure and getting laughed at departments,” he said. “A little more can’t hurt us, right?”
And yep, Tommy was right.
We went for it. We wrote about a thousand songs in the span of two years—some of them good, some of them outright terrible—and we learned from our mistakes, and we improved. A hundred true fans turned into five hundred, a thousand, and so on.
I looked through a crack in the curtains. It seemed like there were a million people out there, all huddled together, staring at the hidden stage.
“Deep breaths,” I told myself. I grabbed my ukulele and strummed a few easy, muted chords. My fingers slipped down the frets, and not on purpose.
A moment or two later, Tommy came out of the shadows behind me. He had a half-full beer in hand. “You ready, Westman?”
“Nope.”
“Too bad.” He tilted his head back, downed the rest of his beer, and wiped the foam from his mouth with the back of his hand. “The show must go on. Now let’s do this.”
Before the show could go on, it had to begin first.
And that time had come.
At eight p.m. on the dot, Ruby’s voice sounded from the PA system.
“Without further ado, the moment you’ve all been waiting for has arrived. Here is Northeast Ohio’s very own dynamic duo, The Dinks!”
The place dimmed and a spotlight was trained on the stage. The audience erupted in cheers and whistles, somehow roaring louder than the blood in my ears.
We walked forward. Tommy flipped his drumsticks one by one, catching them and repeating the motion flawlessly. I put my ukulele strap over my head and cracked my knuckles.
And then the curtains parted.
2
The concert was an out-of-body experience. That’s the thing with performing. When I’m up there and it’s just the music and me, everything else melts away.
I don’t see the crowd, I don’t see anything. It’s just The Dinks, a spotlight, and the songs we’re playing.
The show went on for little over an hour, and when the curtains closed and the lights flickered back on, the crowd chanted for an encore.
Tommy looked at me, grinning. “You know we gotta do it.”
“Yeah, I know.”
We took the stage again, picking up right where we left off.
After the encore, we mingled with the fans, taking pictures and signing t-shirts and CDs. The merch w
e brought—all stuff that Tommy’s cousin had designed—sold out fast. Then to the dwindling group of people around us, we called it quits for the night and split to pack up our gear.
It was going on midnight, and the adrenaline that had surged through me throughout our set was waning. I still felt pretty damn fine, though, because up to that point everything had gone perfectly.
Things started going downhill when we were walking to my SUV, and it wasn’t an easy decline either. Shit plummeted fast.
Tommy and me were about fifty feet from the parking lot half a block away, laughing and whooping, excited out of our minds, because we felt like we had finally made it. We passed the dark windows of businesses closed for the night. An antique shop with a bunch of junk cluttered in its display windows, a women’s boutique, its outer walls all pink and purple, a hookah shop that weirdly smelled like pot and blueberry, and a used book store.
Far as I could see, we were the only ones out around here, but I couldn’t see too far, to tell you the truth. A few of the streetlights were dead or flickering, giving the whole road a horror movie vibe I didn’t like. Then, adding to that vibe, a woman shouted, “Get off of her, you creep!”
The voice came from an alley ahead of us. I reacted fast, darting toward the sound, but I only got a few steps before Tommy snagged the back of my shirt.
“Whoa, dude! Are you crazy?”
“What?”
“You wanna get your teeth kicked in…or worse?” he said. “Let’s just call the cops. Life’s too good right now. I don’t really wanna get shanked by some crackhead.”
I wrenched out of his grip.
“Carter, you dumbass!” he yelled after me.
He wasn’t in the wrong for calling me that, and there was a big possibility I was the one who would get hurt for sticking my nose somewhere it didn’t belong, but I wasn’t thinking about that in the moment. Still, I heard Tommy’s footsteps following behind me. He was definitely scared, but he wasn’t about to let his best friend get shanked by himself.
That was just the type of guy he was—by my side no matter what.
I rounded the corner of the alley and I saw two women, both looked to be in their twenties, one blonde and one with black hair. Between them was a man in a ratty overcoat and a baseball cap. He had one hand clamped on the blonde’s arm, yanking her so hard I thought he was going to rip it off. The black-haired woman held on to the blonde’s other arm and swatted at the man with her purse. Each blow struck him on the side of the head, but he barely flinched.
The bit of streetlight that made it into the alley was enough to see how dirty the man’s face and outfit was; it was also enough to see the insane look in his eyes. I pegged him as homeless. Last Call was located on the outskirts of town, near a bunch of railroad tracks, so a lot of less fortunate folk who hopped the trains drifted through the area. They were never a problem. They asked for a dollar or some spare change here and there, collected empty cans from the garbage and recycle bins, and then got back in their boxcars to go wherever it was they were going. Mostly, though, they kept to themselves.
So my first thought was this guy was on drugs—and if that was the case, the situation’s danger level wrenched up a few notches. Crazy is bad enough, but you definitely don’t fuck with crazy and high. That is a surefire way to end up in the hospital…or the morgue.
I took my chances anyway.
“Let her go! Let her go!” the dark-haired woman yelled. “Help! Someone help!”
“I am trying to help you!” the man shouted back. “Just listen to me!”
That was all I heard of the exchange before I barreled into the guy. I mean, I just went for it. I drove my shoulder into him like a pro wrestler. He was completely blindsided, having no choice but to let go of the woman, stumble back, and land in a heap of trash.
Tommy rushed to the blonde’s side—he always did, it seemed—who had fallen over in the scuffle. They were talking frantically behind me, but their voices faded as he pulled them out of the alley. Besides, even if they had been shouting in my ear, I wouldn’t have registered any of it, because the homeless man started screaming my way.
Laid out on his ass, the intensity in his eyes remained. It was like he was looking through my soul. I didn’t like it.
“They’re coming! Do you hear me? I saw them myself. In the sewers! Nightmare creatures! Demons from the basement of Hell! You gotta run, man! You gotta go!”
I stood in front of the guy, my hands balled into fists. I was breathing hard. My heart pounded the inside of my chest like a jackhammer.
What the hell was this dude talking about? I knew it was probably just the ramblings of a drug-addled mind, but for some reason his words sparked a strong sense of déjà vu in my head.
I reached deep into my memory for a few seconds as the man continued rambling and finally figured out why.
Over the last few months, I’ve suffered from bad nightmares. Terrible dreams where I woke up screaming or paralyzed, an inhuman shriek rattling around in my head. I never remembered them in their entirety—just fragments, images.
A week earlier I had had one of these dreams. I remembered a black hole opening in the ground, I remembered falling, I remembered the sky rippling with blood-red lightning. And then a tall figure, its face featureless, began to stalk me. Every time I tried to turn and look at it, my vision got all hazy, like I was navigating through smoke. I wasn’t a stranger to nightmares. I had had plenty throughout my childhood, but none of those felt as real as these more recent ones.
“They will kill you! They will kill you all!” the man barked, scrambling to his feet, spit spraying from his mouth. “Just listen for them, because you can hear their whispers! Don’t you hear their whispers?”
Then his voice softened and he looked at me, the intensity fading from his eyes. Maybe he was coming down off of whatever high he’d been on. God, I hoped so.
Standing, he leaned against the brick wall. His gut hung over the belt of his dirty, patched jeans, and the face beneath his wild beard looked puffy. I suddenly thought he might not actually be homeless. He might just be…crazy. Did he break out of the insane asylum? Were insane asylums still around?
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. It’s just…no one listens to me. No one ever listens to me.”
Tears filled his bloodshot eyes, and man, I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t starting to feel bad for him.
I’ve known a few addicts in my lifetime—my family isn’t exactly from the right side of the train tracks, if you catch my drift—and I’ve seen firsthand what addiction can do to not only the person addicted, but the ones who love said person.
My cousin Beth overdosed back in 2012. She was such a cool person, kindhearted, smart, loving and loved, but she got hooked on heroin. In the end, I came to the conclusion that she didn’t consume it. It had consumed her.
I remember one time, not long after she completed a stint in rehab, she called me up for a ride, and when I got to her apartment she walked to my car looking a lot like this dude did. It was ninety degrees out that day and she had come out wearing a heavy sweater. I knew why, of course. It was to cover the track marks on her arms. I called her out on it. Mostly because I was angry. She had come so far, all for what?
And you know what she told me?
She said, “Carter, I don’t wanna be like this. I just am.”
That hit hard. It summed up addiction for me. Most or maybe all of the people stuck on these nasty, life-ruining drugs don’t want to be—this guy included.
“Can I—can I have some money, man?” he asked. “I need to take the bus to see my mother. She’s sick. I don’t think she’s gonna make it much longer. I gotta see her before they get here. I gotta tell her I’m sorry and that I love her.”
The tears spilled down his puffy cheeks.
All I had on me was three bucks in cash, and I handed it over to him without thinking. I just wanted him to go away. I didn’t like what he was
saying. I didn’t like how much conviction was in his voice.
All I could think about was the nightmares I’d had. The tall figure following me, and the coldness that seemed to follow it.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the man kept saying as he took my money, but I don’t think he was saying it to anyone in particular.
When I go back to this moment, I think he was trying to talk to God, like he was apologizing for the wrongs he’d done in the past. This was a man who knew with absolute certainty that death was coming for him.
“Carter? What the hell are you doing? C’mon!” Tommy called from the mouth of the alley.
I couldn’t have been there for more than a minute or two, but somehow it had felt like hours. Time was distorting the way it does in dreams. With that realization, fresh chills broke out over my skin.
I turned, my throat dry, my voice hoarse, and I said, “I’m coming.” Then I spared one last glance at the crying man. He was staring at the bills in the palm of his hand with wide, sad eyes.
When I got to the others, Tommy said, “You okay? You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“I-I—” I began, but no words came. I just shook my head and took a deep breath. We walked away from the alley. The more distance I put between that guy and myself, the better I felt.
I was able to talk maybe thirty seconds later. I looked at the women and asked, “Are you two okay?”
The dark-haired one nodded and said, “I think so, but Stephanie’s a little shaken up.”
Stephanie, the blonde, was looking down at the ground. Her hands were trembling. “We were just heading to Bovine’s to get a bite to eat and the guy jumped us. H-he was screaming about people in the sewers!” She wrapped her arms across her chest, hugged herself.
“Well, you’re safe now,” Tommy said.
But I wasn’t sure if they were—hell, if any of us were.
The Whispers: A Supernatural Apocalypse Novel Page 2
