The Last Days

“Excellent point, Zahler,” Cal said. “Come on, Dr. Prolix, this is just wishful thinking. Even if the Watch used to know how to call worms back in the old days, the information’s lost, burned at the stake. Why would it be sitting around waiting for some kid in a basement, especially here in the New World?”

“I don’t know, Cal.”

He shook his head. “We only saw it happen once, and that was hardly a controlled experiment. More like a coincidence. The enemy loves to feed in big crowd situations, like that riot the other day in Prague.”

Dr. Prolix was silent for a moment, and I dared to relax a little. Maybe they were going to forget this whole Minerva thing and take us back to New Jersey. We’d only been here half an hour; the sun would still be bright outside…

“No,” Alana Ray spoke up. “It was not a coincidence.”

Everyone looked at her, and she shivered. Then she touched her own chest three times and pointed a quivering finger at Dr. Prolix.

“I can see things. I have a neurological condition that may cause compulsive behavior, loss of motor control, or hallucinations. But sometimes they are not hallucinations, I think, but the realness that comes from the patterns of things. I can see how music works, and I often saw something happening as we rehearsed, and when Morgan’s Army played…”

“Morgan’s Army?” Lace said. “Isn’t their guitarist infected?”

“By Morgan herself,” Cal said softly.

“But not their singer,” Alana Ray said, her head jerking toward Minerva. “That’s why we made it real, not them.”

Great, I thought. Ten thousand bands in New York City and I had to be in the monster-calling one.

“Alana Ray’s right.” Pearl stepped right up to the red line. “It’s not just Minerva. Everyone in the New Sound has stumbled on bits and pieces of this.” She turned to Cal. “You’re always saying how nature stores things: in our genes, in the diseases we carry, even in our pets. Everything we need to fight the worms is all around us. So maybe music’s a part of that.”

“Music?” Cal said. “Music isn’t biology.”

I nodded. “Yeah, Pearl. We’re not talking about some force of nature. We’re talking about us.”

She shook her head. “What I’m talking about is whenever a thousand people gather in one spot and move together, all focused on the same beat, mouthing the same words, riding the same twists and turns. I’m talking about the Taj Mahal of human rituals: a huge crowd hanging on the edge together, waiting for a single note to be played. It’s lateral and magic and irresistible, even if you happen to be a giant worm.”

“In other words, music is biology.” Minerva smiled. “Just ask Astor Michaels about that, Cal.”

He rolled his eyes. “And dead people wrote your lyrics?”

“I don’t know where Min’s words came from, okay?” Pearl said. “Maybe they’re passed on through the disease somehow, and Min just imagined them coming out of the walls. Or maybe they’re really nonsense, and it’s the melodies that count. But they work, don’t they?”

Alana Ray nodded. “They make the air shiver.”

“They’re something I thought we’d lost,” Dr. Prolix said softly. “We can’t fight what we can’t find, after all. But if we could call the worms to a place of our choosing, this war might be much shorter.”

“Maybe it’s worth a controlled experiment, Cal,” Lace said. “A little science, a little art.”

Cal looked at them one by one, then sighed. “You’re the boss, Doctor. Once their guitarist gets well, I’ll set it up.”

“Hang on!” I said. “You’re not saying that we’re actually going to play those songs again?”

Minerva let out a giggle. “Let’s put on a show!”

29. THE KILLS

— ALANA RAY-

We set up in an old amphitheater in the East River Park.

Surrounded by the crumbling and graffiti-covered concrete, thick grass reaching up through the cracks, it felt as if the world had ended long ago. This place had been abandoned by the city early in the sanitation crisis, but it showed how all of Manhattan would look in a few years: nothing but a ruin in the weeds.

Along one edge of the park the FDR Drive sat empty, the whole city strangely silent behind it. I saw only faint movements in the windows that faced us, the barest pulses of life.

The Night Watch angels set to work, bringing us everything we’d asked for, looting equipment and instruments from the music stores in Midtown. They brought me a brand-new set of Ludwig drums and Zildjian cymbals, but Cal wanted a controlled experiment, as few differences as possible from our first gig. So Lace and three other angels and I made our way to an East Village hardware store, hurrying to make it before the sun started to go down.

The windows were all smashed in, and the angels stepped through without hesitation. My sneakers skidded on shattered glass; I was blind in the darkness inside. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that the shelves were almost empty, every tool looted, every can of spray paint gone.

I listened for anyone, or anything, hiding in the wreckage.

As the angels searched, I stood in the broken window, terrified to step in from the sunlight but not wanting to stand out in the street alone. I drummed my fingers against my thighs, watching the way the fragmented glass reflected sunlight on the ceiling.

Finally Lace shouted that she’d found what we needed. Luckily, no one had bothered to steal the paint buckets.

As we emerged, a pair of young boys called to us from a window overhead. They needed food, they said, and more flashlights to drive the peeps away from their doors and windows at night. Their parents had gone out and hadn’t come back.

The angels climbed up and gave them the few remaining batteries they’d found in the store. Then other people started yelling at us from other windows, asking for help. My hands opened, as if they were offering something. But we had nothing else to give.

I felt helpless, the world shimmering with guilt. I’d signed Astor Michaels’s contract, had written my name into that tangle of words and consequences. And the monster I’d seen had really come; people had died that night, scores of them. Maybe hundreds.

And I was accountable.

The moral hazard was still following me, slithering underfoot like Minerva’s beast, half visible in the corner of my eye. It stirred the grass out in New Jersey and rattled in the drain when I took showers. But it was growing bigger here in the city, drinking in the energy of shattered glass and empty streets. It never left my side.

I knew it was just a hallucination, a trick of my mind as I began to ration my last bottle of pills. But standing there, the blank expanse of First Avenue stretching in both directions as far as I could see, my moral hazard felt more real than I did.

Moz wasn’t completely recovered yet, but he could hear his own name without wincing and could look at Minerva, even touch her. The two of them waited in the shadow of the amphitheater’s shell, Moz limbering his fingers up on a new guitar.

“As good as your Strat?” I asked, knowing the answer.

He winced at the memory and shook his head.

We did a short sound check as the shadows lengthened, pulling electricity from one of the Night Watch’s military vehicles. It had a powerful engine, enough to run the instruments, the mixing board, and the thirsty stacks of amplifiers.

The angels had constructed a tower for stage lights on either side of the amphitheater. Once night had fallen in darkened Manhattan, our lights would be visible for miles, a beacon of safety. We were hoping to lure a crowd from among the millions of survivors left in the city.

An audience was necessary, I was certain: it focused Minerva’s music, made it more human, and that was what the enemy hungered for.