The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  At the pastor's direction, the sinful pile was killed with ballbats and axes. By the time this was coordinated, the audience was inside the Arena. The cops directed the pastor's group to clean up their mess and watched, bored, while they complied. It was less than momentous.

  The entire abortive moment had been set up on the local news by a Tucson minister the night before. Lucas had caught the guy's act on TV in his room at the Holiday Inn.

  "I was in Haiti and Jamaica," intoned the stern elder, all brilliant white hair and glittering, point-making specs. "This rock music puts youngsters into the same uncontrolled frenzy of voodoo worship I witnessed in those places. Give them a beat, and Satan can slip into their souls with his message of doom. Youngsters set up these heavy metal rock and roll musicians as role models, like Ozzy Osbourne. Young people perish at Ozzy Osbourne shows; it's been proven. I have seen a record album by this group playing tomorrow night. There was no sticker or other warning on the record. The name of this group, which is in itself odious, and the names of their dark songs, all promote illicit sex, sadomasochism, pain, and death. A publicity gimmick is nothing less than an open doorway for Satan! People seem surprised that this singer was killed in San Francisco. He was blown up by the fires of Hell, and others have died violent deaths. Violence begets violence, and those singers sing with Satan now. We offer young people an alternative to damnation. Our interest is not to appear as fanatics destroying other people's property, but to save souls by any means! Jesus Christ is the king-not Elvis, not the Beatles, not this Bruce Springstein or any heavy metal group." He set his jaw for the camera, determined, as immovable as the Rock.

  As it turned out, the record bashing pulled no coverage at all. Record store owners, FM deejays, and even reverends from other local churches were all given equal time. All condemned this particular minister's fascistic tactics to one degree or another. Lucas could not recall the man's name.

  The gyrating performance below had blurred before his eyes. Had he started all that fuss with his simple, spray-painted diversion? Bunch of damned nuts. Yet here he was, squatting in the rafters, making ready to do God's work.

  Or somebody's.

  He centered Jackal Reichmann in his crosshairs again. This deed was not on behalf of any god, any intangible spirit born of superstitious fear. This was for Kristen, born of his loins, whom he had loved… and whom the capering buck in the white leather panties had helped, in however tiny a measure, to erase from this world. His index finger teased the trigger. This time he would pull the trigger without blinking.

  Quickly, he sighted Fozzetto again. He would hit the bassist first, since Reichmann was installed behind his drums and was not as mobile. In the scope, tinted red, he could see the smoke hoses leaking wisps of white fog, the dry-ice cloud cover that would flood the stage and transform it into a primordial tarn under cover of the darkness supplied by Pepper Hartz's big solo spot.

  It was almost time. When the lights snapped out, Lucas would have three minutes not to screw everything up.

  Hartz exhorted the crowd with the usual battle cries: "You wanna ROCK'N'ROLL SOME MORE? We're gonna PARTY HARDY tonight! Lemme hear ya say YEAH!" He windmilled his arm and struck a hard, harsh note. Whaannnng!! He stroked the crowd and made them chant "YEAH!" with each salvo. Fists rose, made devil horns, and again Lucas thought of the Nazis. YEAH! Faster, faster, YEAH! American audiences were nothing if not syncopated-YEAH! The next song needed their participation, and Lucas knew it would be "Rip Me Ofl (Blow Me Down),'' one of the rowdier songs from Throw Down Your Arms. The stage moves for-this one were recorded indelibly in his mind. This was the lead-in song to Hartz's big solo.

  Yeah.

  To Lucas' metabolism, his plugged-up ears and throbbing eyes, the music became a towering, unstoppable migraine headache. The shifting masses of air, pushed around by heavy amplification; redefined the reality in which he moved. The grubs below could never suspect the motivations of the being above, the man no one could see. Wasn't that the image that the nameless TV minister had painted of his god? A will-'o-the-wisp who guided everyone's destiny… comes and goes like Santa Claus… his handiwork plain for all to see, the presence itself unseen?

  In the nightmare, he feels weight in his hands and looks down. I'm packed, he thinks. Thirty slugs should take the bastards down all right.

  But the nightmare had not bothered him since his final days at Olive Grove. He'd killed it, too, and handily.

  The audience surged against the barricade, yelling out the refrain lines to "Rip Me Off." The bouncers perked up and held steady, grinning grimly. They were a cadre of body builders who bulged mightily from their canary-yellow T-shirts, and they grimaced at each other to let the Tucson audience know they were not going to take any shit. You could put their guard-dog dedication in the bank.

  Now Lucas tilted the Dragunov and used the dim-red, incremented circle of night-sight to scan the audience itself. Now he could see them as individuals- aggregate neurons powered by the electrical jolts of music. Now he saw them as a tentload of Bible Beltists, swaying in unison, waving their arms in the air, born again as Hartz molded his song toward its thunderous and utterly predictable conclusion.

  Perhaps lambasting the music as predictable was unfair. Predictability was part of the music's attraction. The very sloganism of heavy metal was its mainstay strength. Lucas was reminded of the social codes of the Hell's Angels, the permutated chivalry to which righteous bikers adhered. Their rules were absolute, and a lot of normal citizens couldn't handle a system in which there were no flexible ethics, no creative reinterpretation of peculiar and unwritten laws. Disputes were settled in terms of a one-to-one stand, whether it was between two hog jockeys contesting rights to the same old lady or two clubs claiming the same turf. The price for breaking the rules was ostracism… sometimes known as getting your skull kicked in and your corpse dumped in a wheat field. There was black and there was white. The basics were dictated by simplicity and expediency, and that was what 'Gasm's music held in common with the biker credo. The kids below Lucas had not showed up to be surprised. These were the people who watched MTV day in, day out. Instead, they had come to give trained reactions to stimuli they already knew by heart. They had come not because Pepper "Mad Max" Hartz's gimmicks were anything new, but because Hartz was nicknamed after a movie they had all seen, and they wanted to see him survive a fake pillar of fire one more time. They wanted to pretend to be shocked by Jackal Reichmann's blanks. They didn't give a damn about the music's originality, they gave a damn about how easy it was to duplicate. They all wanted to live the rockstar fantasy, and if Pepper Hartz stood up and proved to them that what he did with his hands was simple, they would all envy him and perpetuate his existence. 'Gasm took their money. In return, the audience expected to orgasm according to conditioning received via various media -manipulative selling campaigns like those Lucas had dreamed up to make a living.

  (During his first visit to the local cathouse, the country hick forks over five bucks and gets so excited when the lady of the evening takes his hand to lead him upstairs that he ejaculates in his pants. "Now what do I do?" he says, aghast. The painted lady, her mission prematurely accomplished, says, "Now you find yourself a ride home, lover. Y'all come again real soon.")

  Here, below Lucas, as in that ancient joke, the conditions of an unspoken contract were being fulfilled. 'Gasm did not have to be innovative, not by a mote. So what?

  So had that meant that Kristen had known exactly what she was getting into that black night? Was she as responsible for her death as Whip Hand?

  Rolling fog, pink in the glow of the sniperscope, began to congest the stage as "Rip Me Off" wound up. The cobalt-blue spotlight perked on and singled out Hartz, who lashed into his solo with an earsplitting feedback whine that brought another breaker of wild applause.

  Lucas was still scanning the audience, stunned, thinking, Impossible!

  He shifted up hurriedly through the total darkness in the auditorium. Too hurriedl
y. It made him sloppy. He zeroed in on Fozzetto.

  Where are you, you bastard… there. There, gotcha.

  He was positive he'd seen Kristen in the crowd below. The nightmare and the reality had fused, blurring into each other. Long blond hair, Cory's nose and eyes, his own square, definite jawline, crystal beads, silk shirt, looking adoringly up at Hartz in his deep blue circlet of light. Goddamned little slut would spread her legs for anyone, anyone, and she had to be watched constantly…

  No, impossible. The girl was not Kristen. From this distance, under these conditions, Winston fucking Churchill would look like Kristen. There must be at least two thousand clear-skinned heartbreakers here tonight who looked vaguely like Kristen. Yet the sight-the imagined sight-had shaken him.

  Five seconds gone.

  Fozzetto was unstringing himself from his bass guitar, dipping from under the Fender's broad, tooled strap and poising it on a nickel-plated stand next to the drum riser. As soon as the stage lights changed to favor Hartz, Fozzetto was apparently bound for the wings. Maybe he had to take a quick leak. Lucas would have to tag him before he crossed behind Rick Hicks. He felt like swearing, but that would have bollixed his aim, and he would only have this one chance.

  Lucas squeezed off, and the Dragunov bucked against the hollow of his shoulder. The flat crack of the expelled bullet was lost in the ear-pegging keen of Hartz's gorilla axe-handling. Fozzetto's hair flew apart on the far side of his head, and he stumbled into the drum riser as though shoved. One hand thumped the bass drum. Lucas put a second slug into him before he could collapse. No sound. The bass player's white mop of hair began to darken as soon as he hit the stage floor.

  Nine seconds gone.

  Jackal Reichmann's face was like the fifty-point hole of a bull's eye. It would be fast and easy to plant a slug right into his mouth, which was now hanging open in a black oval that sat at ground zero in the tinted crosshairs. He was the only band member who had seen Fozzetto's head come apart, who had watched him crumple to the boards. Lucas gave him one extra second of life, to react. He might decide to stand up and provide a bigger target. Manufactured smoke billowed up behind him, and he was framed in the red light of the scope. During his bit with the gangster-style machine gun, red spotlights were used. This time the red light belonged to Lucas, and the shells were not blanks.

  Eleven seconds. Lucas' finger pulled back on the steel tongue of the trigger.

  Write a wet-dream love ditty about this, ratfuck. Hope you enjoy hell.

  Before he could shoot, he saw something astonishing through the scope. A stuttering line of black dots punctured the double bass, then corrected trajectory and quilted upward into Reichmann. Five dark holes blossomed in a diagonal across his bare chest as he rose to take a look at his unmoving comrade on the stage below. His face scrunched up, and he did a backward tumble off the drum riser, dragging the long rack of brass gongs with him as his white-booted feet flashed in the air and he disappeared out of sight behind the platform. The gongs made a hell of a racket going down.

  Rick Hicks had half-turned to see what in blazes was going on when a fan of hot slugs tore through both him and his guitar, impelling him into a clumsy pirouette.

  Fourteen seconds gone.

  Pepper Hartz's solo hitched and died. He had just turned his attention to Reichmann's fall when a fireline of bullets stitched toward him, blowing plastic and canvas splinters out of the prefab stage floor. There was zero time to react. He caught the burst in both legs and folded up, screaming. The blue spotlight was still on him, and in its light the fresh blood looked like chocolate syrup. Hartz's Strat thudded endwise on the floor and sent a thrumming bass tone careening through the Arena.

  Lucas broke through the panic freeze of his total surprise and turned his head to fix on the bright flashes of light.

  Somebody was standing on the stage-left catwalk, less than sixty feet across from him, cutting the band apart with an M-16 on rapid fire. Lucas remembered what he and every other soldier had called the rapid-fire setting in Vietnam.

  Rock and roll.

  17

  THE URGE TO SPEND SOME time near the ocean struck Cass as she was picking her way down from the outhouse. Going to the bathroom in the woods was never less than an adventure, and however cleanly maintained, the outhouse nevertheless hosted a scary variety of curious life forms.

  The clothes she had hand-washed in the kitchen basin hung, dry now, from tree limbs behind the cabin. She pulled them down and sniffed. Ahh.

  There was ham and swiss cheese and tuna salad in the fridge, and she constructed a pair of thick sandwiches on seven-grain bread and folded them into a bindle made from one of Lucas' large kerchiefs, which she had also washed. She used the sandwiches to cushion two clinking bottles of cold Dos Equis beer and added a spiral notebook she had discovered in the kitchen drawer. Under the gun.

  Finding the gun had sent a tiny lance of surprise spearing into her heart. It was some kind of huge pistol, wrapped up in a holster with a lot of nylon webbing. Her hands had absolutely refused to even touch it; she hated guns. She'd slid the notebook out from under it as though the pistol were radioactive. It had dropped back into place with a heavy thud-even the sound had been dark, weighty, ominous. She'd slammed the drawer shut and refused to look inside again.

  Guy has a cabin in the mountains. Has a gun. Almost logical, for out here. Frontier security. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean lots of normal people don't have them. I certainly don't have to touch the icky thing. Case closed.

  After she wiped off the surface of the notebook (what, me, compulsive?), she put the gun out of her mind. She did not feel much like reading, though Lucas had socked in plenty of paperbacks. Today she wanted to ruminate on the pad or just doodle by the sea, which held a degree of bohemian attraction for her. A pity Jack Kerouac was stuck with the squalors of suburbia and skid row for inspiration.

  Thus provisioned, she checked the padlock on the door of the cabin's auxiliary room before leaving. She could not pinpoint the reason why she did this, other than her desire to be responsible on Lucas's behalf. It was secure. When she let it go it clunked against the plank door and shined at her. It was new, recently bought, as was the hasp on the door. The other hardware and cabin fixings were all worn or broken in with age.

  It was none of her business.

  If there was a single fact she had learned about men-whose weird body chemistry made them the closest thing to alien beings on earth-it was that men were addicted to the cultivation of their private little caches of secrets. The thing that had put the whole country in such a balls-up was the machismo hormone. That was why the backbone of politics was the mud-slinging smear campaign, why there were so bloody many nuclear bombs buried all over the map, why

  Tanya's biker boyfriend T-Bone and Cass' own Reese had apocalypse written in their eyes. The machismo hormone. Lucas seemed immune, so far. At least he had not been demonstrably male in the Teutonic, patience-abrading fashion that kicks the female's automatic alarm system on like a fire klaxon. He seemed to live his life in balance, to know what he wanted. He seemed in control of his circumstances, and for that Cass envied him. At least he hadn't gotten himself puddled by a homicidal screwball like Reese.

  She had taken stock of herself that morning and thought she was mending with fair speed. The left side of her face no longer stung abominably when she spoke or rolled onto it in sleep. Her crushed hand had freed up, and her grip was back to about three-quarter strength. Her shiner had deflated. The discoloration in the socket of her eye now resembled an inept makeup job. If she glanced at her face in the mirror tile above the sink fast enough, she looked normal. The progress pleased her. You'll be back on the cover of Vogue in no time, kiddo.

  She used a flexible wire brush on a wide wooden paddle to brush her auburn hair straight back, then braided it into a single, thick, twisting rope that she secured with a rubber band at the bottom. It looked rather like the bell pulls used by the filthy rich to summon butler
s and handmaidens in the mostly awful 1940s films that ran in the predawn on Channel Five or Thirteen, back in the city. It no longer hurt to comb her hair. She did not yelp with pain in the course of washing or drying it. Just a few days before, it had felt as though she was yanking blood vessels right out through her scalp.

  She laced up her hiking boots and cuffed the slightly large coverall legs to fit. Then she hit the trail.

  Near the cabin you could make out natural depressions in the ground that meant walk here, others do. But the footpath vanished almost immediately, giving way to a forty-degree slope of limestone bluff littered with rock chips a foot deep in some places, which led down to the timberline. She speculated that a huge chunk of limestone stratum had pushed its way to the surface and made a big scab where trees could not root. Only stubborn scrub plants poked up through infrequent cracks. It killed traction. Sometimes it allowed deceptively easy climbing. Right when you thought you'd gotten the swing of dancing downward, high-stepping, it would slip your foot and dump you on your ass. No wonder Lucas needed a tank like the Bronco to scrabble all the way to his stoop. From a postcard distance, it was picturesque. Up close, it was just a bitch of a hill.

  She watched a squirrel watching her.

  "Yeah, laugh all you want, buckaroo. I need the exercise, and nobody invited you to watch. Whoops!"

  Cass slid feet first down five feet or so of the rock surface. Pathetic miniature avalanches of chalky rock trickled around her. Fifteen feet away, another squirrel joined the first on the branch of a crooked, dead tree. The soil could not nourish the tree here. But the squirrels could gather there to make bad squirrel jokes and watch the human burlesque.

  "Fine. Wonderful." Her butt was sore, and her calf muscles were already twanging. She felt like throwing a rock until she remembered this wasn't her neighborhood.

  Doggedly she continued downhill, bobbing and weaving and sliding only occasionally. She thought triumphantly, At least I'm not falling around as comically as those two city slickers on their way up…