The Last Days p-2

by Scott Westerfeld

  Moz nodded. “Yeah, the Beatles had a pretty stupid name, if you think about it. Didn’t hurt them much.”

  “Dude!” My jaw dropped open. “They did not have a stupid name! It’s a classic!”

  “It’s lame,” Minerva said. “Beatles, like the insect, except spelled like beat, because it’s music?”

  Pearl cleared her throat. “Had to do with Buddy Holly and the Crickets, actually.”

  “Whatever,” Minerva said. “It’s a really pathetic pun. And it’s plural.” She smiled at Moz.

  “Whoa… really?” I blinked. But they were right: beetle didn’t have an a in it. They’d spelled it wrong.

  Moz and Minerva were laughing at me, and he said, “You never noticed that?”

  I shrugged. “I just figured they spelled it that way in England. I mean, I read this English book once, and all kinds of stuff was spelled wrong.”

  Now everyone was laughing at me, but I was thinking maybe Minerva was right. Maybe it didn’t matter what we called ourselves: the Paranormals, the F-Sharps, or even the Desk. Maybe the music would grow around the name, whatever it was.

  But we kept arguing, of course.

  When Astor Michaels came back expecting an answer, Pearl pulled out her phone. “It’s only been forty minutes! You said an hour.”

  He snorted. “I’ve got work to do. So what do we call this band?”

  We all froze. We’d come up with about ten thousand ideas, but nobody could agree on a single one. Suddenly I couldn’t remember any of them.

  “Come on!” Astor Michaels snapped his fingers. “It’s do-or-die time. Are we in business or not?”

  Naturally, everyone looked at Pearl.

  “Um…” The silence stretched out. “The, uh, Panics?”

  “The Panic,” Moz corrected. “Singular.”

  Astor Michaels considered this for a moment, then burst out laughing. “You’d be amazed how many people come up with that.”

  “With what?” Pearl said.

  “Panic. Whenever I give bands the Name Ultimatum, they always wind up calling themselves something like the Panic, the Freakout, or even How the Hell Should We Know?” He laughed again, his teeth flashing in the semi-darkness.

  “So… you don’t like it?” Pearl asked softly.

  “It’s crap,” he chuckled. “Sound like a bunch of eighties wannabes.”

  No one else was asking, so I did: “Does this mean we’re dumped?”

  He snorted. “Don’t be silly. Just trying to motivate you and have a little fun. Lighten up, guys.”

  Minerva was giggling, but the rest of us were ready to kill him.

  Astor Michaels sat down behind his desk, his smile finally showing all his teeth, a row of white razors in the darkness. “Special Guests it is!”

  19. THE IMPRESSIONS

  — ALANA RAY-

  When the doorman heard our names, he didn’t bother to check the list or use his headset. He didn’t even meet our eyes, just waved us in.

  Pearl and I walked straight past the line of people waiting to have their IDs checked, to be patted down and metal-detected, to pay forty dollars (a thousand dollars for every twenty-five people) to get in. It had all happened just as Astor Michaels had promised. We were underdressed, unpaying, and in Pearl’s case underage, but we were getting in to see Morgan’s Army.

  “Our names,” I said. “They worked.”

  “Why shouldn’t they?” Pearl grinned as we followed the long, half-lit entry hall toward the lights and noise of the dance floor. “We’re Red Rat talent.”

  “Almost Red Rat talent,” I said. The “almost” part was making me twitchy. Pearl’s lawyer was still arguing about details in the recording contract. She said that we would thank her for this diligence in a few years, when we were famous. I knew that details were important in legal documents, but right now the delay made the world tremble, like going out the door without a bottle of pills in my pocket.

  “Whatever,” Pearl said. “Our band is nine kinds of real now, Alana Ray—and real musicians don’t pay to see one another play.”

  “We were already real,” I said as we crossed the dance floor, the warm-up DJ’s music making my fingers want to drum. “But you’re right. Things do feel different now.”

  I looked at one twitching hand in front of me, mottled with the pulsing lights of the dance floor. Flashing lights usually made me feel disassociated from my own body, but tonight everything seemed very solid, very real.

  Was it because I’d (almost) signed a record deal? My teachers at school always said that money, recognition, success—all the things normal people had that we didn’t—weren’t so important, that no one should ever use them to make us feel less than real. But it wasn’t exactly true. Getting my own apartment had made me feel more real, and making money did too. The night I’d gotten my first business cards, I’d taken them out of the box one by one, reading my name again and again, even though they were all exactly the same…

  And now my name had gotten me to the front of a long line of people with more-expensive clothes and better haircuts, people who hadn’t gone to special-needs schools. People with real last names.

  I couldn’t help but feel that was important.

  Pearl was beaming in the dance-floor lights, as if she was feeling more real too. It was illegal for her to be here, and I’d expected the doorman to know she was only seventeen, even if Astor Michaels had said it wouldn’t be a problem.

  That thought made me nervous for a moment. At my school they’d taught us to obey the law. Our lives would be complicated enough without criminal records, they liked to point out. Of course, saying that people like us couldn’t afford to break the law suggested that other people could. Maybe Pearl and I were more like those other people now.

  My fingers started to itch and pulse, but not because of the flashing lights: I wanted to sign that record deal soon. I wanted to grab this realness and put it on paper.

  As we waited for the first band to start, I looked around for Astor Michaels. He made me shiver sometimes, even though he seemed to like me, always asking my opinions about music. He also asked about my visions, which didn’t upset him the way they did Minerva. Of course, I never saw Astor Michaels upset by anything. He didn’t care that his smile made people nervous, and he only laughed when I told him that he moved like an insect.

  I found him easier to talk to than most people, just not to look at.

  “Too bad Moz couldn’t make it,” Pearl said. “What did he say he was doing tonight?”

  “He didn’t,” I answered, though I had guesses in my head.

  Moz was different now. In the last month he’d started borrowing things from the rest of us—Astor Michaels’s smile, my twitchiness, Minerva’s dark glasses—as if he wanted to start over.

  He and Minerva whispered when Pearl wasn’t looking, and the two sent messages to each other while we played. When my visions were strong enough, I could see their connection: luminous filaments reaching up from Minerva’s song to Moz’s fluttering notes, pulling them down toward the seething shapes beneath the floor.

  I tried not to watch. Moz still paid me and said he would keep paying until Red Rat Records had actually given us money. He had never broken his promises to me, so I didn’t want to tell my guesses to Pearl.

  And I didn’t want to make her sad tonight, because it was nice of her to have asked me along to see her favorite band.

  The opening act had just been signed by Astor Michaels—like us, except for our “almost.” But they already had a name. Toxoplasma was stenciled on their amps.

  “What does that word mean?” I asked Pearl.

  “Don’t know.” She shrugged. “Don’t quite get it.”

  Neither did I, but I also didn’t understand why Zahler never used his first name, or why Moz had started saying “Min” instead of “Minerva,” or why no one ever called Astor Michaels anything but “Astor Michaels.” Names could be tricky.

  After his little joke, Astor Mi
chaels had said it didn’t matter what we called ourselves, that our real audience would find us by smell, but that sounded unlikely to me. I hoped we would come up with our own name soon. I didn’t want one tacked onto us, like “Jones” had been to me.

  “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.