We Sold Our Souls

by Grady Hendrix

  “Can anyone really say what’s good or what’s bad?” Rob asked. “A band is a business, and you have to think like businessmen. Nu metal moves units.”

  “If I wanted to go into business I would have gotten a job,” Kris said.

  “For once in your life, stop being so goddamn stubborn,” Terry said. “You’re fucking it up for everyone else.”

  “Fuck nu metal,” Scottie enunciated. “If I’m going to play metal I don’t want that whiny baby crap. I want fucking dragons and shit.”

  “You know where Slipknot is right now?” Rob asked. “They’re in Malibu, recording their first major label release.”

  Scottie ran at his chair and tried to tear it out of the wall to throw at Rob again. Tuck wrestled him back.

  “I can’t believe that asshole’s talking to us about Slipknot!” Scottie shouted, struggling in Tuck’s arms.

  “That ‘asshole’ is going to make us rich,” Terry said. “And don’t knock fucking Slipknot. They got a half-million-dollar advance from Warners.”

  “And they wear Halloween masks,” Kris said.

  “Because it’s their look,” Terry said.

  “Because they’re ashamed of their playing,” Kris said.

  “They’re the future of metal,” Terry said. “They have a point of view.”

  “Troglodyte is a point of view,” Kris said. “You want to turn us into Korn.”

  “Don’t be a snob,” Terry snapped. “Follow the Leader debuted at number one. Korn flies around the country in a chartered fucking jet. I don’t want to be eating fries and sleeping in the fucking band van for the rest of my life.”

  “Fuck nu metal,” Scottie said, and stormed into the kitchen. They heard him kick the cooler, then grunt, pick it up, and a mountain of ice crashed to the floor. They heard the bottles roll across the linoleum.

  Tuck sat down heavily on the sofa, a sad, silent Buddha, rolling a cigarette.

  “We need a new approach,” Terry said. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re going nowhere fast. It’s been ten years. Ten years! Just saying that pisses me off. We’re lucky someone the caliber of Rob is even giving us the time of day.”

  “I’m just grateful for the opportunity to channel your talent,” Rob said.

  “Someone shut him the fuck up!” Scottie shouted from the kitchen.

  “Man, I’ll sign this shit just to get some peace and quiet,” Tuck said.

  Rob held out his hands. “What do you say, everyone? Terry’s worked hard on this. I mean, you should have seen him with those lawyers. He fought like a lion to make sure each and every one of you was taken care of. He reminded me that you can have a Porsche, or a Lamborghini, or even one of those luxury Hummers, but friendship comes first. Why not support your friend?”

  “Because he’s ripping us off!” Kris shouted.

  She shoved past Rob, stalked into the kitchen and almost busted her ass on the ice. She grabbed two bottles of champagne and stormed out of the house. She’d be fucked if she was going to sit there and take this. She walked into the dark, dripping woods, knocking back champagne even though she knew it was going to give her a headache in the morning. Where were their lawyers? This wasn’t right. When did Terry become the owner of everything?

  She wandered for hours, getting drunker and angrier. After that, things were patchy, but she remembered throwing the empty bottles against a tree and being disappointed they didn’t break. She remembered how cold she was, even with her Bones on. She remembered going back to the Witch House. No way were they signing tonight. If the deal was legit, showing it to a lawyer wouldn’t hurt. Her little brother was an entertainment lawyer, he’d know somebody. Or she’d find someone to look at it in Allentown. Or Philly.

  The house was quiet. No one was in the living room. All the contracts were lined up on the coffee table, all of them signed, except hers. She went into the front hall and saw that the blue door leading to the basement was open. She went down the stairs.

  Everyone was in the basement except Rob and Terry. There was a gap in her memory here, maybe caused by the champagne, but she remembered panic suddenly buzzing in her veins, knowing she had to get them out of there right that minute. Tuck was passed out on a damp sofa, Bill lay sprawled across a half-filled beanbag, and Scottie lay on a deflating plaid air mattress by the wall. For reasons she couldn’t understand, Kris thought they were dead. She ran around the room, slapping them awake. She had to get them out.

  She remembered slapping Tuck’s fat cheeks, rocking Scottie’s shoulder with her Doc Martens, yelling “Hey, Bill!” Panic fizzed in her blood. She had to get them away from the Witch House. She improvised as she yelled at them, frustrated they weren’t waking up fast enough.

  “Terry’s taken the contracts!” she lied, grasping at anything. “We have to get to the airport before he takes off with Rob.”

  They were groggy, they were drunk, they were stoned, but she infected them with her panic. They did what she said because she was loud, and she yanked, and she pushed, and she pulled them upstairs and out of the Witch House.

  “Hey,” Scottie said. “Rob’s Porsche is still here.”

  Kris ignored him, grabbed his wrist, and pulled him into the band van. It was raining hard when she slammed the back doors. As she grabbed the handle of the driver’s side door, rain pattering loud on the leaves overhead, she realized how drunk she was, and a smart part of her thought, “This is not a good idea.”

  Then she yanked the door open, almost clipping herself in the nose. The rest came in flashes and slashes, like seeing a show through flickering strobe lights. Twisting the ignition, flooding the engine, the band complaining in the cold darkness around her. The van lurching up the track, rear end fishtailing in the mud, bouncing through the woods, Kris terrified she was going to veer into a tree before remembering to turn her headlights on, clinging to the steering wheel, knuckles cold and aching. How good it felt to finally hit the hardtop, press the accelerator down, and Tuck next to her, all stoned, saying, “Whoa,” and looking over to see him brace himself against the dashboard. Looking back through the windshield, into the headlights of that UPS truck.

  CALLER: …oceans are past the point of no return, there is no water in thirty percent of the populated countries, DNA-mapping services have fifty-one percent of our population’s genetic sequences coded, FEMA just purchased 30,000 body bags, the CIA just got seven billion dollars added to their black-ops budget, we’ve had false flag active shooter situations every week for months. This is the tipping point. Something’s coming.

  RUTH MOORE: What’s coming, caller? Caller? Are you still on the line?

  —1030 AM “Braintronics Newswire”

  May 13, 2019

  ris jerked awake, her head leaning against the passenger window of Tuck’s white Chevy Equinox. It was dark outside.

  “Nightmare?” Tuck asked from the driver’s seat.

  Kris nodded.

  “Good,” Tuck said.

  Kris watched the Koffin billboards go by. There was a new one after every exit because no driver escaped the Blind King’s commercial solicitations. It was exhausting seeing Terry’s face again and again proclaiming that shows were sold out, that there would be pay-per-view packages available, that Atlantis would be streaming it live to select theaters. Around them flowed an endless stream of cars and trucks with Gothic K decals on their back windows.

  A drone flashed by, 200 feet above the highway. Kris stared at it until its lights turned into a speck and it disappeared in the blackness.

  “Traffic drone,” Tuck commented.

  There were so many ways for Terry to follow them. GPS, Waze, Google Maps, traffic helicopters, tollbooths, dashboard cams. It didn’t matter anymore. Terry might know where they were going, but it was too late to stop them. As anxious as she was about seeing Bill, by seven o’clock in the morning the surviving memb
ers of Dürt Würk would be together again.

  West Virginia was a haunted house. Grocery stores sat dark, empty diners stared out from blank windows, farmhouses collapsed beside the highway like rotten teeth. Billboards featured opioid addiction hotlines, debt consolidation services, and car loans for anyone with a guaranteed monthly income from the government. The cars got rustier, the men wore more camo, and the road began to dip and wind as it threaded through the hills.

  Finally, Kris couldn’t keep it inside any longer. “What do you think Bill will say when he sees me?” she asked.

  Tuck eased back in his seat and spoke diplomatically. “I’m sure Bill has come to terms with what happened on contract night,” he said. “Same as the rest of us.”

  “If it even really happened,” Kris said. “Scottie said we can’t trust our memories.”

  “Scottie also went crazy and killed his family,” Tuck said, and Kris had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from starting an argument. “If you have any doubts that contract night really happened, I’ll show you my scars.”

  Kris looked out the window while she talked because the SUV suddenly felt closed up and tight. “I used to do jigsaw puzzles sometimes with my mom,” she said. “I never thought that’s what I’d wind up doing on my Friday nights, but she liked them. You ever do those?”

  “I’m familiar with the concept,” Tuck said.

  “There’s always that moment when you know that this piece has to go into that hole,” Kris said. “It’s the only one that’ll fit, but it won’t go. So you turn it, and you twist it, and you force it, and you think, well, maybe it got cut wrong in the factory, maybe it’s defective. So you work on other parts of the puzzle, but you can’t stop obsessing about that one piece that won’t fit. That’s contract night. I can’t make it fit.”

  “We were in a band, Kris, not the Super Friends,” Tuck said. “We smoked some grass, drank some wine, played some shows. Then it ended, and not in a good way. But we all moved on. Everyone except you.”

  “If Terry moved on, then why is Scottie dead?” Kris asked.

  “Terry is done with Dürt Würk,” Tuck said, pulling himself forward on the wheel, shifting his weight. “And now he’s richer than Jesus. What does he care what we’re up to? We all cashed out and went our separate ways. It ended.”

  “Troglodyte would have put us over,” Kris said. “All we had to do was hold on. We were so close. Why’d he stop us?”

  “You have a timetable I didn’t have access to?” Tuck asked. “When were we scheduled to break big? Wait one more day, one more day, one more day, suddenly you’re pushing fifty, and what do you have to show for it? Nothing.”

  Kris changed the subject.

  “What happened after I left the house?” she asked. “On contract night?”

  “I’m not sure this is a productive conversation,” Tuck said.

  “Do you honestly not care?” Kris asked. “Can you honestly say nothing about that night feels like unfinished business? Nothing about it bothers you?”

  They drove silently for a while. Kris sensed Tuck was thinking, so she didn’t say anything. She didn’t even move. After two miles, Tuck shifted his weight, and said:

  “We did what any band would do that just signed a major deal. We partied.” He licked his lips. “You missed some fine champagne. The next thing I know, we’re in the basement and you’re slapping me in the face, saying we got to go.”

  Kris watched another Koffin billboard roll by outside Star City and remembered the most vivid ninety seconds of her life. The blinding UPS headlights. The hollow metal boom. A violence done to her body she’d never felt before or since. She remembered every revolution as the van rolled off the road, two full turns and one half turn before they hit the tree, her stomach flipping into her feet, vomit spraying out her nostrils. The top of her head smashing into the roof of the van again and again. The wet meat sounds of everyone in the back bouncing off the walls. The van landing on its roof and the windshield shattering into her eyes, and then that moment of perfect silence before Bill started screaming in the dark, high-pitched and unvarying, like a dying animal.

  “I still don’t know why you all came with me,” she said.

  Their voices were lower now, more honest and straightforward. Neither one trying to impress the other.

  “We all felt a little guilty for signing without you,” Tuck said. “Everyone respected your talent back then, even Terry. I mean, every single song on Troglodyte was your idea. So you’re yelling at us and saying ‘Pack up, pack up,’ and I guess none of us had the heart to argue. I wish we had.”

  Unconsciously, he pulled the seatbelt strap away from his chest, fiddling with it. In the silence, Kris gave voice to what had been circling around inside her head ever since she’d woken up.

  “What time do you think that was?” she asked.

  Tuck rolled his bottom lip between thumb and forefinger. “Beats me,” he said. “You took off into the woods around seven? Eight? We partied until midnight, passed out early. You came back, woke us up, we got in the car.”

  “I found a copy of the accident report,” Kris said. “In all the insurance stuff. It says the ambulance was dispatched at 4:14 a.m.”

  “Sounds about right,” Tuck said.

  Kris took a deep breath, careful not to look at him. “Let’s say I really did walk around in the woods with two bottles of champagne for four hours,” she said. “Let’s say I woke you guys up at midnight, even 1 a.m. It took us three hours to drive a quarter of a mile?”

  “That’s what time the ambulance was dispatched,” Tuck said. “We might have sat there for a while.”

  “The UPS driver radioed it in,” Kris said. “Right after it happened.”

  “Your point being?” Tuck said.

  “The pieces don’t fit,” Kris said. “I walk in the woods for five hours? Then we drive four hours but only make it just up the road? I leave the house at seven and come back at midnight, why is the truck we hit calling the EMS at four?”

  “We were drunk and stoned,” Tuck said. “You forgotten that part?”

  “Not that drunk,” she said. “Not that stoned. There’s missing time in there, Tuck. Didn’t you read Scottie’s note?”

  “I wish I hadn’t,” Tuck said.

  “What happened to us that night?” Kris asked, talking faster. “What happened in those four or five hours? Terry did something to us. He did something to our memories.”

  It was getting light outside. More cars appeared, passing in the other direction.

  “You planning on talking this kind of conspiracy craziness to Bill?” Tuck asked. “After what you did to him? I beg you, Kris, hold off on the UFO abduction theories until he has some time to process this thing about Scott.”

  “Scottie didn’t kill his family.” Kris leaned forward, the shoulder strap of her seat belt cutting across her chest. “And we’re missing hours of our lives. Don’t you want to know what happened?”

  “We were stoned, stupid kids who shouldn’t have been operating a motor vehicle,” Tuck snapped. “That’s what happened.” He leaned away from her, his shoulder resting against his window, shaking his head. “I knew you were crazy, but this is really crazy.”

  They traded around Huntington so Tuck could sleep while Kris drove, and then they were in Kentucky, the morning sun coming up over the hills. They were lost. So many lanes closed, so many trees cut down, so many of their old landmarks erased. They made U-turns, took the wrong exits, pulled over twice to consult Tuck’s phone.

  Finally, they came around the curve of the road and saw a familiar stand of pine trees on the crest of a hill. Kris rolled off the two-lane highway onto a dirt road. They bounced down it, taking the same old familiar turns, then she eased the brakes and they rolled to a stop before a massive, white wooden gate flanked by a pair of stone pillars.

 
“What happens now?” she asked, her stomach starting to crawl all over itself again.

  The gate performed a smooth, professional swing inward to reveal a gleaming white gravel road winding through the trees.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” Kris said, a panic monkey gibbering in her chest.

  Tuck’s SUV crunched down the drive. The dark, dripping forest Kris remembered had gotten plastic surgery. What had been wild and dank was now manicured and rustic. Meditation gardens set back in the trees flashed by, carved wooden “Horse Crossing” signs appeared alongside the road. Finally, the white gravel lane terminated in a perfect circle that flowed around an abstract V-shaped sculpture made out of two jagged, lightning-struck tree trunks. Kris pulled around the circle and stopped, shoved the transmission into park, and there, in front of them, stood the Witch House.

  It was bright and glossy, its wood gleaming and oiled. No longer sagging, it stood up straight, its cracked cinder-block chimney replaced by a rustic British fairy-tale chimney made of hand-baked bricks. Where it had previously raised blank walls of slimy wood, now it was bisected with glass cubes and rectangles at dramatic angles, forming sunporches, skylights, and solariums. A wooden ramp flowed from its front door, spread across the grass, and terminated in a raised dock next them.

  Sitting at the end of the dock in his wheelchair, waiting for them to arrive, was Bill.

  RUSS STARLIN: …and I say, Jeremiah, 13:17, “the Lord’s flock is carried away captive.” They destroy your individuality, they destroy your free will, they destroy your personality and replace it with one of their own. I’ve got JD here on the line.

  CALLER: Russ, I want you to think about this. They say you have to be “healthy,” they say you have to be “sober,” then they put you in programs that are secret brainwashing camps. Alcoholics Anonymous. Narcotics Anonymous. The only Anonymous are the globalist elites using these camps to manufacture MKUltra mind-controlled assassins.