by Z. Rider
“Hey,” Carey said as Dan started away.
He turned.
“It was really a bat that hit you?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Oh, but don’t come stumbling in here in the middle of the night after getting smacked by something around the corner, ’cause the desk clerks disappear like roaches when a light comes on.”
“Great.” Another road-worn sigh.
Dan spun back and headed for the exit.
On the bus again, he slumped on a couch in the front lounge, his chin tipped up toward the TV mounted on the ceiling. Ray had it on a news channel again, but if anyone was getting attacked by bat-like creatures, it wasn’t getting national coverage. Trust them to run into the one fucked up bat in the country.
“Where’s next?” Dan asked, watching without taking in the B-roll footage of the astronauts returning from their international cooperative space mission. He wondered if it had been the vastness of space that had gotten to the astronaut who’d killed her kids—what had she seen up there? Maybe it’d been being cooped up in a tin can for months on end. That he could relate to.
“Somewhere north of here,” Ray said without looking away from the TV.
“Someplace without bats, I hope.” With Jamie safe on board and the pull of gravity as the bus started away from the hotel, his thoughts turned back to the night before. What he wouldn’t give to shut off that instant replay. The quick flap of wings rushed his ears. He could taste the acid of his stomach all over again.
Ray flashed him a quick smile.
Dan massaged the back of his neck.
“How are you doing?” Ray asked.
“Fine.” His voice was flat. He shifted to get more comfortable on a couch that’d had all its comfortable spots worn out of it months ago. He tried to focus on the television.
What he did instead was rub his neck, remembering how that thing’s body had felt when he’d tried to grab hold: writhing and rubbery and slick. Like a pulsing, thick-skinned organ outside of its host body. A shudder jerked down his spine.
The television wasn’t doing anything for him. His gaze dropped to Ray’s upturned profile, his nose and chin like an outcropping of rock in the face of a cliff. If he had to be attacked in a dark alley with anyone, he guessed Ray was about as reliable as they came. He hated to think if it had been Jamie.
“Hey,” he said.
Ray looked over.
“Thanks. For last night.”
“No problem.” He tilted his chin back toward the TV.
The bathroom door shuddered open, sticking in its tracks. Josh called it colorful names under his breath it as he tried to close it back up.
When this tour was over, one thing Dan wasn’t going to miss was this bus. “How many more shows?” he asked Ray.
“Three. No, hold up. Four.”
Four. The shows didn’t exhaust him, but all the hours in between… He scrubbed his face.
“Day off today, though,” Ray said.
Shit. He’d take shows over downtime any fucking day.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was a day off only if you counted sitting on a bus for seven hours a “day off.”
Because they had all afternoon and evening to travel, they could afford to stop for a sit-down meal at least. After some discussion about the road signs on the highway and what everyone was in the mood for—everyone except Jamie, who was crashed in his bunk—they rumbled off the interstate.
Jamie managed to haul his ass out of the bunk to join them, sulking in a half-stupefied state until he was on his third drink.
After two weeks on the road, you ran out of things to talk about. Got irritable. Pulled into yourself. By the time you got up close to two years, you were like a big family crammed in a three-room trailer—and sometimes there was still nothing to talk about. You ate to the sounds of forks, ice cubes against glass, an occasional fart. Maybe a story from Stick about the chick he banged the night before…because he could pick ’em.
As they made their way through lunch, Jamie, bristling against the quiet, began dropping silverware for the hell of it. He’d call the waitress over to get another replacement—and another drink, thanks. Drumming his spoon against his water glass while he waited. Laughing to himself: sudden short hiccoughs over nothing.
It was a spike hammering into Dan’s forehead. The anger that had ebbed since the night before came scrabbling back on claws. Jesus fucking Christ. Had it always been like this, this much of a pain in the fucking ass? Jamie’d been worse, a lot worse—there was the time he’d gone missing for three days in the middle of laying drum tracks, running up the bill on the studio for no fucking reason. Or when he’d moved himself into their rehearsal space, a twenty-by-twenty room with no windows, and they had no idea he was living there until the building owner to let them know they were violating the rental agreement.
Or the time he pawned his drum kit because a dealer he owed money to was going to “kill” him. He still owed them for buying it back for him.
Dan wondered if he was getting too old for this. He was barely thirty. They’d been doing this ten years, the three of them. At some point it had to get better, right?
He wrenched the spoon from Jamie’s hand.
Jamie said, “What?”
Ray wiped his hands on a napkin, dropped it on his plate, came out of his chair without a word. He ambled toward the doors, pulling a cigarette pack from his shirt pocket.
Dan was wary of thinking Ray felt the same as he did. Whenever he assumed something like that, it usually came back to slap him in the face.
Ray had infinite patience—and a little panic at the edges of his eyes at the mention of replacing their drummer. Maybe it was superstition more than patience. They’d gotten where they were because of the configuration they had, each of them an important piece of the talisman. Change something in that and maybe it was like spilling salt, breaking a mirror, going to a black cat convention.
That, and Ray just didn’t give up on people. Not after what happened with his mother.
Jamie beat a rhythm against the floor with his sneakers.
Without looking up from the baked potato he was working his way through, Carey said, “Knock it off for a few, huh?”
Which got an edge of a laugh from Jamie, who crumpled his napkin and headed for the bathroom.
The time it took to suck down a butt passed, and Ray didn’t return. The bill came. It got paid. Jamie’d made a detour at the bar instead of coming back. He was leaning on it, chatting up the cute bartender when it was time to leave. Trying to get a free drink, knowing him. Chances were he didn’t have the cash in his wallet to pony up for one himself.
Dan corralled him with an arm around his shoulder, pulling him close as he walked him out the doors. “Just a few more days, huh?”
“Fucking finally.”
They stopped to let a car pass. The bus was at the far end of the lot, because that’s where you parked buses, far away. “Think you’ll be able to hold it together for that long?” Dan asked.
“What? Yeah?” He seemed surprised.
“Looking forward to getting back home for a while?”
“Uh, yeah. As soon as I figure out where that is.”
Dan held back a sigh, stifling also the urge to say, Well, you know, if you need to… Nope. No way. He had an apartment all to himself, and after two years of not spending more than two weeks at a stretch in it, he was going to enjoy the fuck out of the space and solitude. Without Jamie’s bullshit tromping in and out day and night.
“You could always check into rehab,” he said. “You know, get a breath of fresh air for a bit? If nothing else, it gives you someplace to stay for a month or two.”
“Uh. Yeah. Sounds like a blast.” Jamie dug in his jacket for a cigarette, using it as an excuse to pull free of Dan’s arm, and for a second it felt like the past pulling free. It wasn’t always this shitty, the Jamie thing. They used to have fun.
Ray and Moss waited outside the bus, watchin
g traffic pass in companionable silence, Ray with a cigarette dangling between his fingers. Moss, who didn’t have a tobacco habit but could drink all of them under the table and still wake up ready to go at the crack of dawn, had his hands in his jacket pockets, no doubt enjoying the leg stretch.
Jamie, lit up by now, leaned his shoulder against the bus. He smiled, to himself it seemed like, and blew smoke into the air.
Dan had the irritable beginnings of a headache, a holdover from Jamie’s silverware concert. He hauled himself up the bus steps, mourning the fact that fresh air hadn’t made its way inside while they were eating. Someone had brought boxed leftovers in. Garlic pasta mixed with the stale funk of their tin can home. He got a water from the fridge and headed to his bunk with the morning’s USA Today, compliments of last night’s hotel stay.
It was more of the same—everything he’d learned from CNN Headline News, only in print. He folded it up and tossed it by his feet. With lunch heavy in his stomach and his skull feeling like a vise was cranking closed on it, he couldn’t summon the motivation to even pull off his boots. Closing his eyes, he hoped for a little sleep.
A while later, the bus downshifted, then downshifted again. He rubbed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, trying to work up some spit. He pushed himself up, then dropped again. Sleep had been thin and sweaty, and now he had that same unsteady feeling he’d woken up with in Ray’s room. He fumbled for his warm bottle of water, that hyper-real sensation coming over him again: he was foggy and indistinct while everything else was overly real.
He unscrewed the cap, marveling at its ridges, and propped himself up enough to take down a few gulps.
Warm or not, it was what he needed.
The bus lurched, turned, and slowed yet more. The brakes hissed.
He rolled out of the bunk and made for the bathroom as the others gathered their shit—laptops, phones, Ray with his cigarettes and a beat-up paperback folded around his thumb.
When Dan dropped to the ground from the bus’s steps, they were closing up the luggage area in the bus’s belly. His bag sat on the pavement. Yawning and shrugging off another few layers of sleep, he grabbed it and headed for the hotel behind everyone except Ray, who’d stopped to light a cigarette.
A lot of times on the road there was nothing to say, and he appreciated that, for the most part, the guys they traveled with didn’t need to fill up the silences. As he and Ray stepped in behind the rest of the crew, waiting for Carey to get their room keys from the desk, Ray lifted an eyebrow to ask how Dan was doing, and Dan answered with a half-hearted shrug. He could use some real sleep, for one thing.
“I’m gonna stretch my legs,” Ray said after dumping his stuff in front of his bed. “Might get something to eat, too. You want me to give you a call if I find someplace decent?”
“Nah. I’m good.”
Two nights in a row in an actual bed was a luxury. It was after ten by the time he’d unpacked and hung the Do Not Disturb sign. His nap had left him wide-awake but scattered. He touched the window before pulling the thick drapes closed, ran his hand over the upholstery of the chair in the corner, grasped the edge of the dresser, feeling its hyper-real solidity, wondering when that weird effect was going to wear off.
He worked his laptop out of his bag, plugged it in, and set it up. While it booted, he lay back and massaged his temples. The thin shell of a headache hadn’t cracked away yet. He found a travel bottle of ibuprofen in his bag. After washing two down, he sat cross-legged in front of the computer.
An image search for “black bat” returned a shitload of clip art and comic book character Cassandra Cain. His headache said, Fuck it man, give up. Have a drink. Get some sleep. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment before scrolling down the page—row after row of cartoon bats, the Black Bat, the Batmobile. He growled under his breath and deleted the word “black.”
Bats.
He cupped the back of his neck as he looked at a bat cocooned in its own wings. He opened an image of one in flight. Watched videos of them flying.
No way was what had gotten him a bat. What he’d felt under his fingers had been rubbery, clammy, but something else too, something that made his gut go loose every time he thought about it. He rubbed his eyes, drank more water, and tried searching on the city they’d just left for “bat-like things.” Nothing. He tried “attacked.” A car hijacking, an elderly woman mauled by a neighbor’s dog, a man robbing a 7-Eleven with a crowbar. He expanded his search beyond the city. Even with tweaking, the best he could do on “humans attacked by animals” was monkeys in Thailand stealing food out of tourists’ hands. He dropped back on the bed, his brain skittering from one thing he didn’t want to think about—Jamie—to another—bats—to another and another. Eventually he gave up and sat against the headboard, staring at the TV. Everything was in the middle of itself. Click—a movie he’d already seen. Click—news. Click—an SUV commercial. He dropped the remote, leaving the commercial and whatever would come on after it to play out. He rubbed circles into his temples.
M*A*S*H came on after the break, late into the plot. After that came Hogan’s Heroes. F Troop. All of it shit. He’d hoped the TV would shut down his thoughts, but no: bats, Jamie, what the fuck had attacked him?
Halfway through F Troop he took a piss, got out of his clothes, turned everything off.
He pulled the blankets up and closed his eyes.
He thought for sure he was going to lie awake all night, but after a few ticks of silence, he was gone.
Something squirmed in the back of his neck. Some things. He had no idea where the band had gone, the crew. He tried to flip the hood of his sweatshirt up to cover his neck, but he remembered he’d left it in the alley. He clamped his hand over it, the skin there stretched tight, about to split like a tomato in the sun. Things wriggled underneath, hot and alive.
He woke in the dark, unsure whether this was real or the dream was, and he rubbed the back of his neck, feeling the ghost of tiny insect legs creeping over it, but nothing was there.
He got out of bed, pissed, gulped down more water. Looked at the other bed, its covers untouched, Ray’s bag right where he’d left it. His shoulders felt like someone had stuck a key in his back and wound them tight. He rolled them to loosen them, then texted Ray, chewing a fingernail while he waited for a response. The tension in his muscles was giving him a killer headache. His phone lit up. He let out a breath of relief. The text said, “Hotel bar. Wanna come down?”
He passed on the offer, took some more ibuprofen, and stood under a spray of hot water for a while, trying not to think. North Carolina was four hundred and fifty miles behind them. They’d gotten away. The alley attack was just a bad dream.
He burrowed under the sheets. Sleep came in fits and starts. As it came over him one time, his body began to vibrate. He heard bees. He snapped his eyes open. A soft rustle of clothes came, a light step on the floor. The bathroom door closed. He slipped under again.
And felt more dragged down when he forced his eyes open in the morning than he had when he’d closed them.
† † †
Breakfast ended up being more like lunch, then they were back on the bus, heading to the club for soundcheck—which Jamie made it to, and which went off without a hitch, so thank you higher power for something going right. They jammed for a while at the end of it—their support hadn’t arrived yet, no one was breathing down their necks. Playing eased the headache he couldn’t completely shake.
After soundcheck, Carey herded him and Ray to a picnic table in a fenced-off smoking area, where a freelance journalist with hair the color of candy apples introduced herself as Prism.
He tried to focus on the interview, but his thoughts were muddled and muddied. He wanted to be back in the dimness of the club, his bass in his hands. Or in bed again, in the dark. Prism had Ray talking about how their songs evolved on the road, how they never really considered a song finished when they put it on an album.
“We’d do a live album for ever
y tour if we could,” Ray said. “But even then…you know, six, seven years after we put out a song, we pull it back out, and it’s all new again, it’s changing again. There’s always more to do with it.”
Sunlight glinted off the thin hook in Prism’s nose as she nodded.
“Nothing’s ever finished,” Ray said. “Not until you’re, you know, fucking dead.” He gave a wheezy laugh as he raised his cigarette to his mouth.
Dan cupped the nape of his neck. The mosquito bite had gone down, but it felt weird back there, under his skin, in his vertebrae. Tingly.
Prism laughed at whatever Ray’d just said, Ray saying now, “Well, you know.” And then the thank-yous went around, Prism stopping the recorder on her phone, gathering her stuff.
Dan rose, his hand out. “I hope you got what you needed.”
When she grasped his fingers, a sting pinched the back of his neck. He jerked away from her touch.
Her mouth opened.
“Sorry. Static shock.” A hive of bees swarmed hotly at the back of his neck, under his palm.
“I hate those,” she said. “I didn’t feel that one, though.”
“Sometimes they just getcha one way,” Ray said. When he offered his own hand, she said, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“I could probably use the jump,” Ray said. She laughed.
As she headed off, Ray raised an eyebrow at him.
“I don’t know what the fuck happened.” He rubbed his neck again, where the bees hummed distantly.
He grasped Dan’s shoulder. “You been feeling all right?”
The bees swarmed at the touch—a vibration crawling through the top of his spine. “Headachy,” he said.
“Need something for it?”
“I’ve got ibuprofen.”
Ray nodded and removed his hand to light his cigarette.
The hive of bees flew apart, and the headache pushed tighter against his temples. Between soundcheck and showtime, there weren’t many places to hang out—the bus or the back of the club, or the smoking area, which would be packed with fans soon. He retreated to the bus’s bathroom—the smell of disinfectant intensified by the fact that it didn’t get as much air conditioning as the rest of the tin can—and leaned a shoulder against the wall and let his mind wander, mostly through empty fields, which was what he was after. On the road, you had so much downtime you started to feel like you were stuck in your head. You got sick of yourself, sick to the roots of your teeth of your thoughts chasing after each other. Sometimes you could take off, walk around an unfamiliar city, crowd out your thoughts with sights and sounds and smells. Other times you were trapped, and you had to take that walk in your head. Empty fields. The woods after a warm rain. Scuttling over rocks at the top of Mount Chocorua in the bright morning sunshine.
