Armageddon Rag

by George R. R. Martin

  He passed a line of porta-sans, with hundreds waiting patiently for the use of each facility. The band was playing “Proud Mary” hard and hot. To the west, the sun was fading fast. The clouds filled the horizon, a wall of sullen purple. He passed a hot-air balloon, tethered to the ground below, its envelope a bright yellow smiley face. Three women in the gondola waved to friends below, while a man studied the distance through a telescope. The band played “Summer in the City,” but the heat was beginning to dissipate now with the setting of the sun, and in a few hours the high desert would actually be cold. He passed a white hot-dog truck, shut tightly, a big sign on its side that read SOLD OUT. Spray-painted, disapproving comments overlay the lettering. PROFITEER! had been written in red and CARNIVORES! even larger in green. A different band played “Riders on the Storm.” Faces grew indistinct in the twilight. His feet hurt.

  Far ahead, across a surging plain of humanity, Sandy saw the stage, awash in shifting colored light. Nearby stood a slim black man with a Fu Manchu mustache and binoculars around his neck. Sandy borrowed the binoculars and took a closer look. He studied the instruments, the musicians, the crowd that eddied and danced around the stage, the security force pushing off those who tried to climb up. The platform stood ten feet off the ground; behind it loomed a metal gridwork thirty feet tall, supporting banks of amps and lighting tracks. Two huge hardwood beams braced the whole structure, crossing in a great X behind the performers.

  Sandy tried to return the binoculars, but the man who had lent them to him had vanished. He kept them and moved on. The last two sound towers stood about two thousand feet from the stage, one on each side, angled outward. He made his way toward the closest, the one to the right of the crowd.

  It was slow going. Darkness was settling fast now and the ground underfoot was uneven and rocky. People were everywhere, pushing him first this way, then that. He had to fight through them, clutching tight to the duffle bag, sometimes carrying it before him, chest high, like a baby. Once a woman pressed up against him, a slender, pretty redhead with vacant eyes. Her blouse was tied around her waist, and her small breasts touched his chest. “Want to ball?” she asked. Wordless, he moved away from her. Later he collided with a hairy man in denim colors ornamented with swastikas and peace signs, and the man glowered and said, “Who the fuck you pushing, man? You want to get cut? I’ll cut you, asshole.” Then he was gone too, swept away by the crosscurrents of swaying flesh.

  When Sandy was a hundred yards from the tower, the stage lights went off, and the world grew silent.

  You could feel the silence spread through the crowd. The music stopped and the dancing died and conversations ceased, out and out in ever-widening ripples. “Yes,” he heard a woman near him whisper in a low, hoarse voice. “Yes,” the way she might urge a lover who was riding her to climax. “Yes, yes, yes.”

  He glimpsed motion on the darkened stage. The sound system made a sibilant hiss and spoke.

  “THIS IS THE HOUR,” it said.

  “THE HOUR!” the audience screamed back, half a million voices rending the silence. Miles away, Captain Mondragon and his men must have heard the sound, like some vast tidal wave breaking against the mountains. Sandy lifted the binoculars just as the smoky red light came on, all blood and fire, and there was Gopher John Slozewski scowling on his throne among those black-and-crimson drums.

  “THIS IS THE DAY,” the amps roared.

  “THE DAY!” answered the crowd, and a second light came up, a sickly green light, alive with decay, and there stood Rick Maggio sneering, fingers poised over the strings of his guitar.

  “THIS IS THE YEAR.”

  “THE YEAR!” they shrieked, and a deep violet spot came up and outlined Peter Faxon and his Rickenbacker, making him a dim, bruised, expressionless shadow. He was wearing a familiar jacket, a white leather jacket with long trailing fringe, and in the violet light the old bloodstains looked almost black.

  “OF…”

  “THE NAZGUUUUUUUUUUL!!!” the multitudes screamed and all the lights came up at once, sweeping back and forth across the stage, shifting, dancing, flashing on and off in a wild hypnotic strobelike rhythm, a rhythm that caught every small motion and froze it and magnified it and etched it clear to see. And Patrick Henry Hobbins came walking out on stage in a black denim suit with an American flag sewn on the crotch, the Eye of Mordor where the stars should have been, and he put on his Gibson and laughed the largest laugh in the world, said, “Yeah! All right, you fuckers, get set. We’re gonna rock you till your ears bleed!” and they screamed even more, frenzied in their welcome, and Hobbins pounded on his guitar and the music surged out of the amplifiers, fiercer and more terribly alive than any sound in the world, and Hobbins’ voice rang out across the miles.

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

  Fireworks arched overhead, spreading sheets of phantom flame, while the Nazgûl sang “Napalm Love” and the audience clapped and cheered below. Sandy lowered the binoculars. He could feel the impact of the music. It was coursing through his bloodstream, touching him, shaking him. He wanted to join in, to let go of his rifle and slap his hands together and melt into the mass around him, to let it all happen. But he couldn’t, he couldn’t. He bit his lip and pushed on, toward the tower.

  It was the same set as Denver. Red Rocks had been the dry run; West Mesa was for real. He could feel the excitement in the crowd around him, could feel the change begin, all those thousands and hundreds of thousands flowing into one another, becoming as one, one vast beast with half a million pairs of eyes and a single voice, a single heart, beating faster now, beating faster and harder and stronger. He glanced up, and the stars looked back at him with a billion yellow eyes. He could not see them twinkling. They were hard and icy and oh-so-steady, looking down.

  With every step the sound pulsed louder, the crowd went wilder. Sandy found that he was fighting the music almost as if it were a living thing, a tenacious dark creature that wrestled against him every inch of the way. Song after song, he shoved his way through, forcing people aside, moving into the teeth of the music. The sound grew louder as he neared the tower, louder and still louder. It roared at him, it hissed and snarled, it buffeted him like some ancient preternatural wind sweeping out of nowhere, out of unimaginable blackness. It took him endless effort to make a yard of progress. He pressed on, through “Elf Rock” and “Cold Black Water” and “Crazy Cara,” struggling against the foot-stomping beat of “Jackhammer Blues,” against the bodies that swayed to “Poison Henry” and boogied to “Schuylkill River.” He heard the screams when Maggio took off his shirt and tossed it out into the crowd, saw the colored smoke billowing off the stage when the Nazgûl plunged full-force into “Makin’ War.” As they did, a small gap opened in the wall of bodies in front of Sandy. He saw it and plunged through, up against the base of the sound tower. Movement in the crowd threatened to tear him away from it; he grabbed hold of the great metal leg and held on for dear life. “Makin’ war, makin’ war, makin’ war, war, WAR!” the crowd was singing, over and over again as Maggio and Hobbins jammed.

  “Get the fuck off there!” he heard a familiar voice shout, close at hand.

  A few feet away, a girl had climbed up on the scaffolding. The shout was directed at her, from above. “Get the fuck off the tower!” the voice said, and a burly man leaned over from the girder on which he balanced, swung a nunchaku hard against the girl’s fingers. She screeched, let go, and fell down onto the others below.

  On the stage, red and yellow and white lights flashed in blinding explosive sequence. The reflections shone off the silver-mirror sunglasses on the man above. “Makin’ war, makin’ war, makin’ war, war, WAR!” Gopher John lit into a long drum solo. Everyone was screaming, whistling, writhing. Sandy, silent, stared up at Mirrors. There was no help for it.

  He waited until Mirrors had glanced away, then pulled himself up onto the tower, and began to climb. The thing had been put together with bare sharp metal. It dug into his palms painfully w
hen he pulled. Under his arm, the duffle bag was awkward and heavy, and it kept slipping. Again and again he had to stop, adjust it, start over. He was scarcely ten feet up, on the same level as the guard, when Mirrors turned and saw him.

  Sandy tried to flinch away, to conceal himself in the shadow of the tower’s leg, but it was no good; he had been seen. Mirrors came toward him, walking along a girder as sure-footed as a cat, his nunchaku in hand. No retreat, Sandy thought. He braced himself against the leg, prepared to use the rifle as a club.

  Then Mirrors stopped. “You,” he said. He nodded. “Didn’t recognize you. Go on up.” He smiled and turned his back.

  For an instant Sandy stood in disbelief, his body stiff with tension. Then he grabbed the rifle awkwardly again and resumed his climb.

  He was not in good shape. He had to stop three or four times to catch his breath. The duffle bag with the rifle was impossible, and twice he almost dropped it. Finally he stopped, stripped off his sweater, and used it to tie the duffle bag to his back in a crude sling. That was better, but even so, he was only sixty feet up when the Nazgûl took their break, to cacophonous applause, whistling, shouting. The steady, rhythmic clapping from hundreds of thousands of hands was so loud that it sent tremors through the sound tower, and there was an awful moment when Sandy was certain that the resonance was about to bring down the entire structure. But then the Nazgûl came back out, in answer to the summons. Sandy hung on the side of the tower and watched. Hobbins took a swig from a flask, and Maggio took a pill, and then the sound started again as they opened the second and final set with “Blood on the Sheets.” He was only twenty feet from the top then, and the shrill whistle from the amps so close at hand was an ear-shattering knife of sound that hurt his teeth and almost pried him loose from his precarious perch. He hung on, wincing, swaying, his teeth gritting together. Then, almost desperate, he scrambled up the final twenty feet, and pulled himself onto the platform where the amplifiers were mounted. They shook with the volume of the music. The sound level was deafening. Sandy pulled Kleenex out of his pockets, wet them in his mouth, stuffed them in his ears. That helped, a little, but there was no escaping the music. It was all around him. He rolled over on his back, gasping from the climb. His hands were raw and bloody. For long moments, he just wanted to lie there.

  They did a long, driven version of “Blood on the Sheets,” and they did “Ash Man” too, and still Sandy could not find the strength to move. Then he heard Rick Maggio’s slashing, rumbling, pissed-off voice screaming out from the huge amps, right through the makeshift earplugs he had rigged. “The fuckers tried to keep us from playing here tonight,” Maggio was saying. “What do you say to that?”

  “FUCK ’EM!” the crowd screamed back.

  “They said this gathering was il-legal, wouldja believe it?” Maggio snarled. “They said to stay home. They said to break it up.”

  “FUCK ’EM!” shouted a half million hoarse voices.

  Maggio laughed. “Damn right! They’re out there now, you know. The fuckers still want to stop us. They got tanks and they got guns and they got fucking napalm, but they ain’t gonna stop us, not this time, I guaranfucking-tee it! Are they?”

  “HELL NO!”

  “But maybe they’re gonna try. And if they do, I don’t give a damn. Know why? ’Cause I’m mad!”

  “How mad are you?”

  A stab of sound from the Fender Telecaster, amplified thousands of times; a single, jolting, searing, blazing, screeching chord that shuddered through the night. “Why,” said Maggio, “I’m positively ragin’!” The Nazgûl exploded into sound, the beat came hammering down and Maggio sang his fury.

  Ain’t gonna take it easy

  Won’t go along no more

  Tired of gettin’ stepped on

  When I’m down here on the floor

  Sandy rolled over, crawled to the edge of the platform, unzipped the duffle bag and drew out the rifle. He kicked the duffle bag off the platform and watched it fall into the crowd that raged and seethed below. Sandy braced the rifle, sighted down on Maggio. He was closer now, and the telescopic sight had greater magnification than the binoculars. He could see everything clearly. Maggio was sweating profusely. The sores on his ravaged face had been covered with makeup, but the sweat had made the pancake run and now they looked open and ugly and painful. Rivulets of moisture ran down Maggio’s chest under the lights. Sandy could count the ribs. Maggio was putting everything he had left into his song, pouring vitriol over all the injustice of the world, sneering down at his guitar as he bled it dry. The song roared from the sound system like a demon wind, but it was only one man’s hurt and pain, all the bitterness and insecurity and fear that lived inside of Rick Maggio, coming back with a vengeance.

  “How I’m ragin’,” sang Maggio.

  “RAGIN’!” they answered, taking his pain.

  The music was hot enough to raise blisters.

  Maggio was square in the crosshairs. Sandy slid his finger around the trigger. He could end it now. Maggio was the worst of them, he thought. A weak man, a bitter man, a man who didn’t know how to love, only to hurt. He wouldn’t be missed. Take Maggio instead of Hobbins, he thought, and the world will be better off.

  “RAGIN’!” they screamed.

  In the scope, Maggio’s perspiration looked almost like tears. Sandy took his finger off the trigger. Not Maggio. No. Maggio, vile as he might be, was an innocent. He couldn’t kill him, no matter what the price. The Nazgûl were pawns in this, all of them but one. All of them but Patrick Henry Hobbins. It would be different with Hobbins, Sandy thought. That would not be murder. After all, Hobbins was already dead.

  As Maggio sang, Francie appeared on stage, dancing around, hands clapping above her head, eyes closed. The sight of her, moving to the music in front of that vast X, gave Sandy a cold feeling.

  When the song ended and the applause finally wound down, Hobbins moved up front again. The lights narrowed in, shining on his face alone, on that pale white mask and those blazing red eyes. “Are your ears bleeding yet?” he asked with a grin.

  “FUCK NOOOOOO!” they roared back.

  “Well, well,” Hobbins said. “Guess we got to play louder, then!” The opening bars of “Survivor” surged up around him.

  Well, he came back from the war zone all intact

  And they told him just how lucky he had been

  It was the slowest song on the album; Hobbins stood stationary as he sang. Sandy sighted down on him. The crosshairs framed the pale forehead, covered with wisps of white hair. Now? he thought. He hesitated, then lowered the rifle. Not now. It wasn’t… wasn’t right, somehow. It had to be later, during a different song.

  He looked up. The stars still shone overhead, but the clouds were moving in quickly now, eating them up one by one. Still, there would be no thunderstorm tonight, no wild lightning strikes scoring the blackness. These were a different sort of cloud, darker, quiet, sliding across the night sky like ink. With them came a coldness, and a stillness, and a silence that threatened to engulf even the music of the Nazgûl.

  Sandy found himself listening to that music now, really listening to it for a little while, putting aside all thought of the thing he must do in a minute or two or ten. The song was as sad as heartbreak, and as inevitable. The music had a power to it. Whatever else they might be, the Nazgûl were still a hell of a rock band. They touched him now as they had first touched him many years ago, when he was a teenager listening to their first album on his first record player. His parents never understood. They could never hear the joy in rock, the life in it, the beauty. “Noise,” his father called it. His mother, who went to too many PTA meetings and church services, was worse. “The devil’s music,” she would snap. He had to hide his Doors albums from her.

  Sandy thought of Jamie Lynch, screaming his anguish in the night, tied to his desk, bleeding his life away on a concert poster. He thought of the teenagers burning in the Gopher Hole, pounding at locked doors until the metal grew red hot and
the smoke rose around them. He thought of Balrog, gutted in an alley, and of the blood in Edan’s eyes, and the sound Gort’s neck had made when it snapped. Maybe she had been right, he thought.