Armageddon Rag

by George R. R. Martin

  “Is that so?” Sandy said. His mind was on other things. On the big man, falling silently, the bright colors of the dashiki lost in the human sea. On the blood from his shattered nose. On Ananda’s hand in his; the long, strong fingers, the nails cut to the quick, the familiar ridge of callus along the edge of little finger and palm. He felt disquieted.

  “Fuck yes,” Maggio was saying. “Reynard’s gonna do some freaky stuff with the lights, man. Fireworks and shit, out over there.” He jabbed a finger at Denver. “And the music, man. Gonna be all solid tonight. No weak spots, baby, I guaran-fucking-tee it.”

  That got Sandy’s attention. “What? What do you mean?”

  Maggio grinned. “Ain’t you heard, man? Leader-man finally got the shit outta his ears and listened to me. No more of that new junk.”

  “And that’s not all,” Edan Morse said. “Tonight the Nagzûl are going to perform the Rag. Right, Rick?”

  “You got it.” He held out his palm. “Gimme some skin, man.”

  “I…no,” Morse said. He held up his hands. Both of them were bandaged.

  “Fuck it,” Maggio said. He spied Francie, turned, and left them.

  Sandy was staring at Morse. He had spoken to Morse on the phone frequently in the past two weeks, but this was the first time he’d seen him since Chicago. But for the voice, he might never have recognized him. Morse looked ravaged. The eyes were all glitter and obsession, sunk in deep pits in a face that was nothing but skin pulled tightly over jutting bones. He wore a pale cotton gauze shirt that did nothing to conceal the cadaverous condition of his body. His beard had gone wild and scraggly, but his hair seemed to be falling out. Around his neck were a dozen heavy pendants and chains, and their weight seemed almost too much for him. Morse leaned over and kissed Ananda, smiled crookedly, and took a seat next to her.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Sandy blurted.

  “Nothing,” Morse said. “It’s under control. It’s all under control.”

  “You look like you ought to be in a hospital. Why are you here, anyway? You’ve never bothered to come to a concert before.”

  “Tonight’s going to be different,” Morse said.

  “Why?” Sandy demanded. “What is…”

  “You’ll see,” Morse said, his voice strained. He leaned over to Ananda and began to talk to her in low, private tones.

  Dismissed, Sandy found himself gazing at the empty stage, the waiting instruments, and Denver beyond. Slum was down there somewhere, he thought, locked in a house that had become a prison, locked in the cage of his own despair. He found himself fantasizing. He saw himself ascend the stage, deliver a long harangue into the open mike, and they all came together to follow him, all thirty thousand of them, cheering and whistling and singing, marching behind him down the city streets to Fort Byrne, overwhelming Butcher and his guns and his dogs. Slum came out to join them, and with each step he took he changed. His face filled out, his hair grew, his clothes melted and reshaped themselves and flowered in a hundred bright colors, and when he embraced Sandy, he was whole again, and young, and strong.

  Sandy put the dream aside, pressed the button on his watch for the time. An hour till showtime, the readout told him.

  An hour and a half later, the shadows of late afternoon had begun to lengthen appreciably, and the amphitheater was full to bursting, and restless. Someone began clapping. “We want the show,” he called. Others took up the chant. “We want, the SHOW, we, want, the SHOW, we, want, the SHOW.” Clap clap clap-CLAP. “We, want, the SHOW!” They clapped and chanted for ten minutes, the volume of the sound growing until Sandy realized that the call had been taken up even beyond the tiers of seats, that they were chanting it out in the park as well, and all along the road.

  The surrounding stone was a vivid, livid red with the light of sunset, and the impatient, chanting faces were red as well. The lights of Denver were starting to come on, and the far eastern horizon was a band of blue-black darkness. “We, want, the SHOW. We, want, the SHOW. We, want, the SHOW. We, want, the SHOW.” The mountain itself seemed to vibrate in time to the claps.

  They let it go on and on, let it continue for another twenty minutes at least, building and building until it seemed impossible for it to build any more. By then Denver was a grid of lights to the east, a vast field of stars caught and tamed and ordered and set against the encroaching blackness. The mountains to the west were towering black teeth, their tips outlined blood-red and suffused with the glow of sunset. Clouds were massing to the west above the mountains, an ominous wall of churning black and scarlet; Sandy didn’t like the looks of that.

  “We want, the SHOW. We, want, the SHOW. We, want, the SHOW. We, want, the… oohhhhhh!”

  The whistle of a skyrocket knifed through the tumult; it exploded off to the east, and a pinwheel of red and orange spun against the night, turning the chant to a sigh of appreciation and awe. More skyrockets followed, one, two, three, four; booms shattered the rhythm of the clapping, broke it, scattered it. Fireworks lit the night. All eyes turned upward. Among the fading showers of trailing fire, a phoenix suddenly sprang into view, a burning yellow phoenix with wings greater than the city beneath, and eyes like hot red coals.

  “THIS IS THE HOUR,” the PA boomed.

  They had taken the stage while the crowd was staring upward; now they stood silent and still as shadows, holding their instruments, indistinct in the dimness.

  “THIS IS THE DAY,” the PA said.

  A few lights came on; low red lights that illuminated them from below, that made the stage a murky scarlet pool.

  “THIS IS THE YEAR,” the PA promised.

  Another skyrocket shrieked up, closer and louder than the others, and it burst overhead and spread a brilliant white umbrella over all of them, flaring so bright for a second that it washed away the darkness entirely. From the west came a low rumble from the gathering storm.

  “OF THE NAZGÛL!” screamed the PA, and a thousand people screamed along with it, and then five thousand, and then more and more as the excitement rippled outward and flowed over the rim of the amphitheater and washed through the darkened park beyond. And the stage lights all came up at once, a blinding flare of illumination in a dozen different colors, and drums and bass and guitar all sounded together, a great hammer blow of music that smashed out at crowd and mountains and storm. White hair shining, black denim suit drinking in light, Patrick Henry Hobbins sang:

  Hey baby, what’s that in the skyyyy?!

  And there was something up there, a silver shape that knifed through the darkness, glittering; behind it spread a rippling sheet of fire, a flaming aurora that curtained off Denver. A handful of people flinched away from its fury, but the rest screamed, whistled, went crazy. Maggio was growling back at Hobbins now, voice hoarse and lascivious.

  It’s looooooove!

  And the music came burning off the stage, faint martial airs magnified and twisted and distorted into new shapes, the lead guitar as hot as the jellied gasoline it invoked, the bass alive with the rumble of approaching bombers, the sound gone to smoke and fire, delivered against the crackling backdrop of the wounded red sky. Hobbins’ voice was pure hot, sweaty sex, and when he hit the chorus the crowd sang with him:

  Oooooh, napalm! Oooooh my napalm love!

  And then he stood alone again, but his voice echoed for miles.

  Yeah, it’s hot because I love ya!

  Oh, it burns because we love ya!

  Filled with an emotion for which he had no words, an emotion that went beyond the music, Sandy leaned over toward Ananda. “It’s Hobbins!” he shouted in her ear, yelling to make himself heard. She nodded at him absently. She didn’t understand, he thought: “Napalm Love” was off Napalm, not Music to Wake the Dead. It should have been Larry Richmond. But it wasn’t. Tonight it was Hobbins from the first.

  From the first, and until the last.

  When the song was over, Hobbins smiled and asked, “Are your ears bleeding yet?”

  “Fuck N
OOOOOO!” thousands of voices screamed back.

  “Just have to play louder then,” Hobbins said, and he led them into “This Black Week.” The fireworks veiled and slashed the sky behind him, blue, then green, then red, a different color for each verse of the song, and the stage lights shifted with the pyrotechnics above, and the music changed, too. When he hit Black Sunday, the amphitheater was singing along, swaying from side to side, clapping its uncounted hands. Edan Morse, eyes closed, beat a soft time against his knee with one bandaged hand. Even Gort, standing and scowling at the foot of the stage, moved slightly to the music.

  The first set was one hit after another, all the old songs off the old albums, the first four albums. They did “Elf Rock” and “Cold Black Water” from Hot Wind Out of Mordor, “Crazy Cara” off Nazgûl, and “Jackhammer Blues” and “Poison Henry” and “Schuylkill River” off the Black Album and wound up with the long, long version of “Makin’ War!” off Napalm. Maggio caught fire and went up into the seats, his Telecaster shrieking, while the audience echoed the band. “Makin’ war!” they sang, “Makin’ war, makin’ war, makin’ war, war, WAR!” but it was a kind of love they were making, it was all passion, and when Maggio finally broke off the endless jam, he was drenched in sweat. Faxon’s Ricky and Hobbins’ Gibson led him back to the stage and the closing verse, and Gopher John closed it off with some riffs that made it seem he was out to flay his drums, and Red Rocks came to its feet screaming, and the applause was a long rolling thunder.

  But when it died, as all thunders do, another deeper rumble came behind it. Sandy craned around and saw the storm, closer now, black and threatening. Lightning flashed in the distance, against the mountains. The horizon was a vast wall of inky blackness about to fall on them. As Sandy watched, the clouds lit from within.

  People were on their feet, stretching, moving around during the short break. Sandy got to his feet as Gort approached. “Faxon wants to cut short the second set,” he reported.

  Morse looked startled. “What? Why?”

  The big man jerked a huge thumb toward the west. “He’s scared of the thunderstorm.”

  “No,” Morse said, agitated. “No, absolutely not. They have to finish the show. They have…they have…” He reeled, and his face went pale. “Dizzy,” he muttered. “I got to sit down.” He almost collapsed back into his seat.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Ananda said crisply. She followed Gort through the milling crowd. Sandy came after them, quickly, but not quickly enough. The argument was already in progress when he got there.

  “NO!” Faxon was shouting. “Absolutely not! Are you crazy, or what?” He pointed. “That storm’s going to be on us any minute now.”

  “What’s a little rain?” Ananda said. “They played in the rain at Woodstock, right?”

  “Rain? Are you kidding? Look at that! I’ve been staring at it all show, and it’s not going to be any drizzle, ’Nanda. That’s a major-league thunderstorm out there. Lightning and electrical instruments don’t mix.”

  “Scared, leader-man?” Maggio put in from the side. “Not me. I’m playing.”

  Faxon looked harassed and outnumbered, but he wasn’t about to give up the argument. Then Hobbins came pushing through a bunch of roadies. “We’re going on,” he said. “You hear me, Peter? We’re playing.”

  “No,” Faxon said, but weakly. He was pale and edgy.

  “Yes,” Hobbins snapped. “Who the fuck’s the star here, anyway?” They were all staring at him now. His tone had been light, bantering, but behind the joke was steely self-confidence, iron certainty. He would have his way, the tone said; he always did. It was Hobbins talking, not Richmond.

  “Pat,” Faxon said. “It is you.”

  “Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ,” blurted Maggio, his mouth sagging open.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Hobbins said. “I see you guessed my name.”

  Peter Faxon put himself back together with a visible effort. “If we’re going to play, let’s get on with it,” he said. “Before the storm front gets here and we all get electrocuted.”

  “Fine,” Hobbins said. “I’m ready. We do the new album in order.”

  “You got it,” Faxon said. They started to break up, but as the others walked away, Sandy took a few steps forward and caught Hobbins by the shoulder. “What?” the singer snapped.

  “The others don’t understand,” Sandy said. “Not even Faxon. They’re only tools of…of Morse, or whoever’s behind this. But you, you understand. Don’t you?”

  The eyes glittered scarlet; the thin mouth twisted into a mocking sardonic smile. “What if I do?”

  “Armageddon,” Sandy said. “The final battle. The ultimate confrontation between good and evil. That’s what armageddon is supposed to be. Right?”

  Hobbins lifted a pale white eyebrow, said nothing.

  “Which side are we?” Sandy demanded. “Which side are we?”

  “That’s one you got to work out yourself, friend. This ain’t like in Tolkien, is it?” He started to move away.

  “Wait,” Sandy called out after him.

  Hobbins turned back, shook his head. “Sorry, Charlie. Got me some music to play.” He made a thumbs-up gesture. “Listen to the tune, bro’, just listen to the tune.”

  Ananda and Gort had listened to the whole exchange. When Sandy turned back, he thought he saw a strange, wary light in Ananda’s dark eyes, but she reached out and took his hand anyway. “Come on,” she said. They went back to their seats.

  Reynard sent up another rocket, a whistler that pierced the night with a high, shrill scream, singing counterpoint to the rumble of the approaching storm. Gopher John laid down the backbeat, the guitars sent their sharp notes skirling, cutting, and Hobbins hit it:

  Baby, you cut my heart out!

  Baby, you made me bleeeed!

  The first rains came just as “Blood on the Sheets” was winding down, tiny drops of coldness that wet the skin and chilled the soul. It came down harder and faster during “Ash Man,” but it failed to dampen the enthusiasm of the crowd. One of the skyrockets fizzled, but the spirit in Red Rocks continued to mount. The dark passed overhead, swallowing up the stars, churning above them like the sea of chaos.

  Rick Maggio stepped forward. He was sneering; his old, familiar, contemptuous sneer. He was soaking wet. “Fuck it,” he roared into the microphone. He stripped off his sodden tee shirt, balled it up, tossed it into the crowd. Women screamed and fought for it. Maggio’s ribs were outlined clearly; his body looked sallow and sick, and everywhere his skin was crawling with acne. It glistened wetly in the downpour. “I’m wet,” he said into the mike, and he touched his strings and stepped on his Wah-Wah pedal to underline the point. “When I get wet, I get fuckin’ MAAAD!” he said.

  “How mad are you?” the crowd shrieked.

  “Why, I’m absolutely positively RAGIN’!” Maggio shouted, and just as he did, a sheet of lightning crackled overhead, the clap of thunder coming right on top of it, the wash of purple-blue light turning night to day. Maggio blinked up, and grinned. “Holy shit,” he said. “Looks like I’m not the only one who’s pissed.”

  The crowd roared with laughter, Maggio hit his guitar, and music slammed into them.

  Ain’t gonna take it easy

  Won’t go along no more

  Francie climbed up on the stage, started dancing to the music, her eyes closed, swaying back and forth in front of the band. She was drenched too, like all of them. Her long thin hair was plastered to her face, and her wide, dark nipples showed clearly through the wet tee shirt. The audience followed her lead, climbing, dancing, clapping their hands.

  ’Cause I’m ragin’!

  Maggio sang it, and thousands echoed him.

  RAGIN’!

  they cried. More lightning splintered overhead. A web of light flickered over the mountains behind them, touching down once, twice, three times. Thunder came rolling, and the sound system crackled with static for an instant, drowning out the music. Then the song came fl
ooding back, louder than ever.

  Hobbins took over again and delivered a soft, poignant rendition of “Survivor,” then grinned at them all savagely, flipped his mass of white hair back—water ran down it freely, and it looked to be almighty heavy now— and spread his arms and looked up and sang:

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  And the Nazgûl whispered He’s coming! loud as midnight.

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer

  sang Hobbins, and Sandy heard the skyrocket go off, saw it struggling against the pouring rain, saw the fire trailing and hissing behind it, saw it climb into the jet-dark clouds… and then the lightning caught it, a great jagged blue-white bolt that burned the eyes, and then another, and another, and another, until for an instant it seemed as though four spidery electric arms held the rocket still against the darkness. It exploded. For an eyeblink a falcon shape wheeled against the sky, but it was shattered, distorted into something hideous and grim, and then it was gone entirely.

  He’s coming!

  Faxon looked as white-faced as Hobbins, but his bass had never sounded better. The electrical storm was crackling and snarling all around them, sending unpredictable static into the sound system, but somehow Maggio was using it all, playing around it, weaving it into the song. Time and time again the thunderclaps came booming down just as Gopher John struck his bass drum with his foot stick.

  The best lack all conviction

  sang Hobbins, and he looked at Sandy, his red eyes burning deep into the soul.

  while the worst,

  OH! They’re full of passion, and intensity!

  His gaze shifted, just a little, and who was he staring at now, at Morse? at Gort? at Ananda?

  Lightning smashed against a high outcropping of rock. A woman seated a few feet away screamed shrilly, her voice, unamplified, small and weak in the night. The rest of the crowd laughed, clapped, pointed. Hobbins waved a fist at the storm. Thirty thousand voices shouted “HE’S COMING!” as one. “Yeah!” sang Hobbins. Faxon was blank-faced, concentrating, Maggio was sneering, Gopher John wore his fiercest scowl, and hit, and hit, and hit.