“You’re an ignorant person,” Rob said. “Terry is trying to save the world.”
The idea was so ridiculous that Kris laughed out loud. She couldn’t help it.
“I know, everything’s a big joke to you,” Rob said. “But Black Iron Mountain is metastasizing. Every year it grows faster. It always wants more souls. Its greed knows no bounds. So Terry made a deal. He offered Black Iron Mountain something new. They’ve been signing people up all weekend, getting them with unlimited data plans, petitions for gay rights and against fracking, registering them to vote. And tonight, the Special Ones will come creeping out of their corners and feast on almost half a million souls.”
Kris saw the desert moon slip behind scraps of cloud, and in the darkness she saw kids falling unconscious, passing out on the sand, going into their tents, lying down on their sleeping bags. And then the cold, white faces came crawling out of the dark, hundreds of them, thousands, hundreds of thousands, creeping up from a hole in the center of the world, picking their way over warm bodies, turning open mouths into slop bowls, lapping up the best part of them.
She wondered if Melanie was out there.
“I tried to warn Terry,” Rob said. “When this is over, they’re going to be just as hungry as before. But Terry doesn’t listen. He really thinks he can appease them this time. He actually believes they’re not lying. His hunger clouds his reason, but nothing is ever enough. Not for him, not for Black Iron Mountain. I think tonight will be a tipping point. After this, they’ll eat the world.”
The only sounds were the refrigerator motors humming, the neon buzzing, the wisk-wisk of the maid spraying disinfectant on the bar.
Kris thought about the kid holding out her hand at the gas station, saying, “Melanie Gutiérrez. I’m heading to Las Vegas.” She heard her singing along to Dolly. She thought about her out there in the desert, alone with those soulless boys, the Special Ones creeping through the crowd, she thought about Melanie unconscious in the sand, black foam gushing from her mouth.
Kris’s heart gave a low, slow flip. Blood drained from her head, her legs were hollow straws, and her voice was weak and far away when she said, “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to do what they say.”
Rob blinked and for a flash his face looked his actual age. He gave Kris a rueful smile.
“About thirty years ago, I was in a band,” he said, his voice genuine and quiet. “I thought we were going to change the world. But my dad woke me up one morning and took me out on the beach and made me take a hard look at my life. He told me the story of the sparrow and the mountain. You ever heard it?”
“Jesus, you people like the sound of your own voices,” Kris said.
“I just want you to know I’m not a monster,” Rob said. “See, Black Iron Mountain is, well, a mountain. And you’re a sparrow. So you want to destroy it and you fly over and you pick up a pebble in one of your talons and you’re all angry and arrrrgh arrrgh arrgh, and you carry it away, and you drop it in the ocean. It takes all day. Then you fly back to the mountain and take another pebble. Arrrrgh arrrgh arrgh. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
“Yeah, the sparrow kicks the mountain’s ass,” Kris said.
“No.” Rob shook his head, taken aback. “The mountain’s enormous, the sparrow can only carry one pebble at a time, and it has to fly to the ocean, which is hours away. Hundreds of sparrows will die and the mountain never changes. For all intents and purposes, the mountain is eternal. It’s a really depressing story. And that morning, my father asked me: do you want to be the sparrow or the mountain? Do you want to die in a flash, and no one will even notice, or be part of something bigger than yourself that will live forever?”
“I’ll get a million sparrows,” Kris said, but even to her it sounded empty. “We’ll take a million pebbles at a time. Your fucking mountain is toast.”
Rob shook his head, and got up off his stool, and if he’d left then, Kris would have been stuck. Rob could have just walked out of the room and left Kris to Black Iron Mountain and then nothing else that happened that night would have needed to happen. But Rob was a man, and men never know when to shut up.
“It must be nice to be you,” Rob said. “Everything must seem so simple.”
And he gave her one of his patronizing smiles. The same one he gave her when he explained the contract with Black Iron Mountain in the Witch House that night. The same one he gave her when he showed up at the hospital while Tuck and Bill were still in the emergency room. The same one he gave her from the other side of her coffee table as she took his pen to sign the contract, pretending to read clauses she didn’t understand in a desperate attempt to delay the inevitable. The same smile men had been giving Kris her entire life.
Every promoter who’d shorted her on the door because she “didn’t understand how clubs work.” Every house tech who’d explained to her where her monitor really needed to be, how her guitar should be tuned, what songs she actually should play.
Everyone who told her to calm down, who told her no, who told her to wait, who told her to be good, act nice, do what they say, sign a contract, play this kind of music—all of them gave her that same patronizing smile when they explained things to her and here it was again, on the last night of her life, right there on Rob Anthony’s face.
Kris couldn’t help herself. She punched him. As hard as she could.
Her fist clipped him on the chin, and it hurt like hell, but Kris didn’t care because it was so satisfying to see the shock on Rob’s face as he stumbled back, as his legs went out from under him, as he went down like a sack of cement, whacking his head on the edge of one of the tables. As he lay motionless on the floor.
The maid stared at her, frozen, cleaning rag in one hand, spray bottle in the other.
“Will you trade clothes with me?” Kris asked, pulling her shirt over her head. “I won’t tell anyone.”
The maid only hesitated for a second.
“They aren’t paying me enough for this,” she said. “I’d rather be home with my kids.”
Five minutes later, Kris walked past the two bouncers outside the Sporting House, clanged down the metal stairs, and melted into the crowd. They didn’t say a thing. After all, who ever notices the maid?
DONALD PUPINO: It would be hard to describe the chaos. Just after 9 p.m., the first fire broke out by the Pepsi Peace and Love Arena during a performance by the band Woods of Ypres. It was extinguished shortly thereafter, but not before thirty festivalgoers were injured in a stampede. Over the next two hours, attendees looted merchandise booths and set multiple fires throughout the campground. Nevada State Police are undermanned, and we are witnessing sheer anarchy. We’ve been told by authorities to retreat to the highway for our own safety.
—89.9, KNPR, “Nevada Impact News”
September 7, 2019
he crowd was trying to murder Melanie. All day long the enormous mass of people had basked in the heat, slow and torpid, like a snake. But after the sun went down and a full yellow moon came up, the crowd became a grinding, crushing, whirlpool of bodies sucking Melanie down.
Hunter, Jones, Chisolm, Spencer, and Slowen formed a protective pocket around her as they pushed their way into the dense, hot crush of people jammed motionless in front of the Bud Light Stage, 440,000 strong, a big dumb animal whose microsurges caught Melanie in its undertow and crushed her beneath its waves. But the boys repelled intruders, pushed back against freaks having freak-outs, picked her up when she went down.
As Cannibal Corpse took the stage, cans of Budweiser got passed around, bottles of Pacífico, burning joints, the occasional edible. Melanie tried to do all things in moderation until Slowen passed her a blunt and shouted over the guttural sounds of George Fisher destroying his vocal cords, “What’re you saving yourself for? Marriage?”
Melanie realized he was right. This was Hellstock ’19. When was she going to
rock out harder than this? So as Cannibal Corpse and Kamelot gave way to Pig Destroyer and Abbath, things got funky.
By the time Slipknot wrapped up their set, Melanie could feel the beat coming through the earth, up through her feet. She closed her eyes as the crowd surged forward and crushed her into Chisolm’s and Spencer’s backs, everyone excited for Slayer, Jones reciting trivia about how Terry Hunt got thrown off a Slayer tour because he was too much of a badass. Melanie imagined that the beat through her feet was fists buried deep underground, corpses banging on their coffin lids.
She felt a sharp, invasive scratching, and realized someone had put their fingers up the back of her shorts. It took her a second to register it through the stoner haze, and she whirled to find Slowen grinning at her. He pulled his fingers out and sniffed them. Melanie tried to tell Hunter, but Slowen pushed around her fast, grabbed Hunter by the shoulders and whispered in his ear. Melanie grabbed his other shoulder, staying away from Slowen’s hand, but Hunter ignored her, then turned and shouted, “Let’s move up!”
The pocket of boys plunged forward into the wall of backs, Melanie caught in the middle, unable to escape their flying wedge. Women in bikinis were passed hand over hand through the crowd. Tossed two feet, five feet, ten feet, high over the crowd, going down into the sea of hands and emerging with their tops off, breasts flapping free. The boys shuffled forward, getting shoulders and elbows in their chests and faces, pushing deeper into the airless mass as Slayer took the stage.
Melanie couldn’t breathe. A woman got passed over her head and she held her hands up to help, saw the strong male hands all around her dipping into the girl’s shorts, up her shirt, pulling her hair. Then the girl was gone, sucked away into the crowd, and the boys stopped moving. Melanie was too short to see the stage. She had a few inches of sand to stand on. Next to her loomed the metal struts of the sound tower where the mixing engineer sat twenty feet in the air. She looked over her shoulder and saw a solid wall of faces piled up behind her. Bodies pressed in on every side. There was no way out. Slayer started to play “Altar of Sacrifice.”
* * *
– – –
As Kris melted into the crowd flowing through the backstage hallways, she felt it. A heavy, oppressive weight in the air. The walkway air conditioners had broken down and now they just blew hot desert grit. Techs passed by with filter masks pulled up over their faces. The warm air was thick with the smell of scorched plastic and burning weed.
Slayer boomed from backstage monitors, filling the air over the tents, winding down their set, and the traffic in the walkways thickened as everyone prepared for the main event.
Kris emerged into a courtyard formed by a ring of RV dressing rooms parked around a massive square of bright-green Astroturf. Tables with umbrellas were scattered across it, crowded with wives, and girlfriends, and agents, and visitors from other bands. There were three Koffin pinball machines at one end. Waiters took orders for coffee and cocktails, serving them from an open-air bar. Someone’s girlfriend danced topless on one of the tables, and everyone ignored her because nothing was less cool than paying attention to another band’s groupies. Kris climbed the stairs attached to the nearest RV, pushed the flimsy door, and stepped into the clean, well-lit interior.
It was a white plastic shell that smelled like disinfectant. A dressing table ran down one side with a long mirror screwed into the wall, and a rolling wardrobe rack jammed with clothes stood against the opposite wall. On top of the rolling rack were a series of foam heads with different wigs: curly, blonde, long brunette. Hanging from the ceiling in the corner was a flat-screen monitor showing a live feed from the stage.
The monitor went dark and a counter started running in the upper right-hand corner, displaying the seconds and minutes until Koffin went onstage. Kris went through the clothes on the rack and found a pair of black jeans about her size, took off the maid’s uniform, and slipped them on. She found a white tank top and slipped it over her head. She took a glance at herself in the mirror. She looked like hell. Her hair was patchy and cropped, her face yellow and tight with exhaustion.
She did a quick wipe with some Wet Ones and found a lipstick and some eyeliner in the countertop debris. She used a little of the lipstick to make blush. She considered the results. Not very good, but it’d do for stage work.
On the monitor, Terry came onstage and the trailer shook with thunder from half a million throats. She grabbed a yellow windbreaker and pulled it on over her shirt.
Behind her, the door opened. She turned and stood breast to belly with Tuck.
“What the hell—?” he started.
“Close the door,” Kris said, ducking under his arm, pulling it shut behind him.
He took an automatic step into the room to avoid getting hit by the door.
“What the hell, Kris?” he asked again.
She stepped out of his reach, just in case.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I was invited,” he said. “And I know you weren’t.”
“You’re in stage makeup,” she said. His skin was even. He had on foundation and eyeliner. It wasn’t conspicuous, just enough to make him camera ready.
“Terry invited the old band to join him onstage,” he said. “Well, me, anyways.”
“For Troglodyte?” Kris asked.
“Hell, no,” Tuck said. “For ‘Chinagirl.’ You’re not supposed to be anywhere near this place.”
“ ‘Chinagirl’ sucks,” Kris said. “I can’t believe that’s what he’s going to play.”
“That’s really not the immediate issue,” Tuck said.
“I need your help,” Kris said.
“No,” he replied.
Kris reached out and tapped a fingernail against the all-access ID on a lanyard around his neck. Tuck didn’t pull away.
“You owe me,” she said.
“No,” he repeated. “You’re not going to make a mess of Terry’s big moment. I’m not a huge fan of the guy, either, but we put you in Well in the Woods because you have a problem.”
“I’m not even mad at you about Well in the Woods anymore,” Kris said. “I just want your pass.”
“To do what?” Tuck asked.
“You know what I want,” Kris said. “Just once. I need to bring him home.”
“I cannot believe you’re asking me this,” Tuck said.
“You know something’s wrong,” Kris said. “Honestly, tell me anything feels right out here.”
“We can agree on that,” Tuck said. “This whole concert is dangerous, and kids are going to get hurt. The air smells evil, bad vibrations are everywhere, people are snarling at each other like they’ve got a hangover, and no one’s doing anything about it.”
“That’s the way Terry wants it,” Kris said. “This’ll help. I promise.”
“And now Terry again,” Tuck said. “You’re obsessed.”
“He seems normal to you?”
“Of course not,” Tuck said. “He’s on some kind of Satan trip. To be honest, I’m embarrassed about going out onstage with a man who’s bought into his own hype this hard.”
“Then help me,” Kris said. “Whatever you think of him, whatever you think of me, he shouldn’t have buried that album. It was my life. I just want to end it.”
Tuck really looked at her for the first time in years. Kris met his gaze.
“And then it’ll be over?” Tuck asked. “You’ll stop all this? You’ll go back?”
“Behind the bars, there’s a superstar, who never had a chance,” Kris said, reaching deep.
Tuck’s face was a confused blank as he tried to place the lyrics, then the first smile Kris had seen him make flickered across his lips as he recognized “Dead End Justice.” The atmosphere in the trailer changed, and the two of them were in Dürt Würk again.
“The problem is,” Tuck said, sitting
in one of the folding chairs, shaking his head, “this pass has a photo of a large and handsome black man on it. And you are not him.”
“OK,” Kris said. “What’s the plan?”
“You grab the guard, in the prison yard,” Tuck quoted. “Get his keys and gun. We’ll run.”
* * *
– – –
Terry put on a hell of a show, counting down his discography, starting with 9 Circles, then Insect Narthex, then Necrosex, and finally Sex Witch. Everyone roared as his trademarked IP appeared onstage at the appointed times: the thirty-foot-high locust, the forty-foot inflatable maggot with its twelve puppeteers, the twenty-foot Sex Witch operated by pallbearers in black.
The crowd surged and shoved and Melanie held on to the sound tower so she wouldn’t get sucked away. At one point she heard high-pitched female screams piercing the air over the crowd, electrifying because they were in the register of pure terror, then they were cut off. She tugged on Hunter’s arm, but he was chanting along with “Hellmouth.”
Koffin’s lighting was better than the other acts—the video screen got more use, the sound came through clearer. But Melanie was depressed by how empty the music felt. “Stand Strong” sounded commercial and clichéd, “Burn You Down” sounded like Greg yelling at her.
Hunter tried to get her to sing along to “InFANticide,” and she mumbled her way through it, but the song didn’t resonate with her the way it did in the hospital, waiting to get word on her dad. Everything that had sounded deep, and private, and meaningful back then now sounded ugly, and flashy, and cheap.
When Witch Slave started she cheered along with everyone else, but she felt alone, cut off in the crowd. The boys surged and crushed in around her, but this time they didn’t withdraw. The pressure compressed her lungs.
“I can’t breathe,” she squeaked.
She felt hands on her body, on her butt, worming their way down her shorts, on her breasts, her stomach, her sides. She tried to push them away, but her arms were trapped. Hands squeezed her breasts until they bruised.
We Sold Our Souls Page 23
