The Last Days

“It can mean two things,” Alana Ray said. “Electrified gas or blood.”

“Gee,” Pearl muttered. “Which one do you think he was going for?”

The teakettle suddenly spit out a crooked screech, the sound fading into a moan as Minerva unplugged it. She poured the boiling water into her cup of herbs, and the smell of compost heap filled the room. “Here you go, Mozzy.”

An explosion of sound came from the walls, a thudding from the floor beneath us.

“Crap!” I hissed. “It’s the first band. We’re the second band. That means we’re next!”

“That is correct,” Alana Ray said.

My stomach started roiling like that time when I was little and I swallowed part of my chemistry set. We were going to face a possibly homicidal crowd in… “Half an hour.”

“Plus changeover time,” Alana Ray said.

I shut my eyes and listened. The crowd wasn’t booing yet. Maybe they weren’t such a nasty bunch after all. But Plasmodium sounded tight, not like they’d been forced to switch instruments, say, in the last month or so…

“Listen to that,” I said. “Their bass player is way faster than me. Everyone’s going to think I suck.”

“You don’t suck, Zahler,” Moz said. “And he sounds too fast to me.”

“Be dead by tomorrow at that speed,” Pearl said, staring down at her fingernails.

“Dead?” I said. “What do you mean?” Did people ever die on stage? I wondered. Like from heart attacks? Or the audience killing them because they sucked?

“Relax, Zahler.” Moz was sipping his tea now, still trembling, Minerva mopping at the sheen of sweat across his face with a towel. “You’ve got half an hour to get yourself together.”

Great. I was being told to chill out by a guy who looked like he was dying of Ebola fever. Maybe Moz was about to collapse, and then we could do this whole Special Guest thing after he recovered—and I got some more practice in.

Alana Ray was still staring at her hands. She’d hardly moved the whole time, like some kind of kung-fu Zen master contemplating destiny. I was thinking how maybe I should have worn something Japanese—then I’d at least look fool. Well, actually, I already looked fool. In the usual sense of the word.

“Time is a strange thing, Zahler,” Alana Ray said. “If you focus your mind, thirty minutes can seem like five hours.”

But it didn’t. It seemed like five seconds.

Then Astor Michaels came in and said that it was showtime.

A thousand of them waited out there, all just looking at us.

Random shouts filtered up from the audience—they weren’t heckling us exactly, just bored and ready for another band to start. We didn’t have any fans yet—the few friends Moz and I had invited were too young to get in. The sight of the unfriendly crowd made me realize one big thing missing from my rock-star dreams:

In all my fantasies about being famous, I was already famous, so I never had to get famous. I never had to walk out in front of a crowd for the first time, unknown and defenseless. In my dreams, this awful night had already happened.

I looked over at Moz, but he was staring down at his feet and still trembling, like he was having a seizure. Behind her paint buckets, Alana Ray’s eyes were shut, and Pearl was peering down at her keyboards, flicking switches as fast as she could, like she was about to take off in a spaceship. Nobody looked back at me, like they were all suddenly embarrassed to be in the same band.

It’s not my fault! I wanted to shout. I never wanted to play the bass!

Minerva was the only one who looked happy to be onstage. She was already leaning over her mike stand, talking to a bunch of tattooed guys down in front, flirting with them, flicking at their grasping hands with spike-heeled black boots. Even through her dark glasses you could see that her eyes were scary-wide and glowing, sucking energy from the crowd before she’d sung a single note.

Pearl gave me a low E, and I took a deep breath and tuned up. The sound boomed out from my bass like a foghorn, rumbling through the club. A few howls from the audience answered the noise, as if I’d interrupted someone’s conversation and they were pissed.

The guys flirting with Minerva had big muscles and tattoos on their shaved heads. I’d read the night before about a big riot in Europe, a whole crowd at some soccer game going crazy all at once, attacking one another. Hundreds had died, and nobody knew why.

What if that happened here, right now? The whole crowd turning into deadly maniacs? I knew exactly who everyone would choose to kill first.

The half-assed bass player in the lame T-shirt. That’s who.

When we were all tuned up, the stage lights lowered. Total darkness, like I’d suddenly gone blind from freaking out. More impatient shouts filtered up from the crowd, and someone yelled, “You suck!” which people laughed at, because we hadn’t even started yet.

We were so dead.

I swallowed, waiting to begin…

“Zahler!” Pearl hissed.

Oh, right. We were doing the Big Riff first. I was supposed to start.

My fingers groped for the strings, and I heard the amps squeak with the sweat on my fingers. I tried to remember what to play.

And I couldn’t.

No, this wasn’t happening…

I’d been playing this riff for six years, and yet it had somehow disappeared from my brain, from my fingers, from my whole body.

I stood there in silence, waiting to die.

25. MASSIVE ATTACK

— MOZ-

Zahler had frozen up.

Perfect.

My head was burning, sweat ru

Garlic and mandrake tea wasn’t cutting it. I needed flesh and blood.

“Play, Zahler!” I heard Pearl hiss, trying to get him going.

The crowd was growing impatient, a restless hum building before us, but at least the delay gave me a few more seconds of darkness. My vision had been doing weird things all day: I hadn’t been able to look at Min, as if her face were made of sharp angles that cut into my eyes. Even the smell of her clothes and perfume was making my head spin, as if living together had somehow given me an overdose of her.

But here in the darkness I felt alone, almost under control.

Zahler still wasn’t starting the Big Riff, though, which left only me. I could play his old guitar part and wait for him to come in. But once the music began, the lights would pop back on, so bright, so sharp…

And then the hunger would take control again.

I could run offstage right now, slip out of the club and into some all-night store, wolf down a slab of raw meat. Probably a better idea than taking a chunk out of someone right here in front of a thousand witnesses.

But even with the beast ravenous inside me, I had to stay. I couldn’t let Zahler live forever with the shame of having blown it tonight.

I took a deep breath, and just as my fingers moved… Zahler finally began to play.

Six years of practice took over: the Big Riff grabbed me, coiled around my spine and out my fingers, my nervous system responding as automatically as breathing. Pearl followed, then Alana Ray came in, the echoes of her paint buckets making the space huge around us.

The lights came up, and the crowd was suddenly cheering.

Good move, Zahler, I thought. Making them wait for it.

Minerva kept them waiting too, left the Big Riff grinding for a solid minute before she brought the microphone anywhere near her lips. But you could tell she hadn’t frozen up—her whole body moved with the beat, drawing every eye in the crowd, gulping in their energy.