The Last Days

Once the angels were ready, we gathered onstage and waited for the sun to go down. The worms would never rise up in broad daylight, not long enough for us to kill them.

The park began to come alive. Cats moved among the broken concrete, and the scurrying of smaller creatures stirred the weeds. Lace told Pearl, Zahler, and me to sit on top of one of the Night Watch vehicles, so that we wouldn’t be bitten by an infected rat. That seemed wise. Bands with too many insects, like Toxoplasma, could only play fast and twitchy music.

And I didn’t want to become a peep. I didn’t want to hate my drums and my friends, my own reflection. Lace said that peeps who’d been devout Christians even feared the sight of the cross. Would I be terrified of my own pills? Of paint buckets? Of the sight of music?

The sky changed from pale pink to black, and I saw human forms moving in the near distance, parasite-positives out hunting, looking for the uninfected. They shied away from the bright band shell for now, but I wondered if a few spotlights and a dozen angels could really protect us from an entire city full of ca

I drummed on my thighs and tried to remember that the worms were the real enemy: incomprehensible, inhuman. They came from some unlit place we’d never even imagined existed.

But peeps were still people.

Moz and Minerva were my friends and were human enough to be in love. The infection had made Moz sweaty and sick and violent at first, but I’d seen normal love do that. He was already playing his guitar again; maybe soon he would become like the angels, powerful and sure.

I remembered Astor Michaels talking happily about all the bands he’d signed. He thought of the peeps as more than human, as gods, as rock stars. He’d even tried to give them a new kind of music.

Of course, if Pearl was right, the New Sound wasn’t new at all. Despite our keyboards and amps and echo boxes, the songs shimmering nervously through my head might be like the struggle itself: very, very old.

I’d never seen Manhattan pitch-black before. Normally the pink glow of mercury-vapor streetlights filled the sky, the rivers sparkled with lights from the other side, the windows of buildings shone all night. But the grid was failing now, and outside the band shell’s radiance, the only light trickled down from the strange profusion of stars.

Lace joined us up on the truck. “I can think of one problem with this whole idea.”

“Only one?” Zahler asked.

“Well, one big one.” Lace pointed across the highway toward the darkened city. “These people have seen their whole world fall apart, and they’ve only survived this long by being very careful. So why would they leave their barricaded apartments for something as random as a free concert?”

I looked up at the lightless rows of windows. “Before we had a name, Astor Michaels said that our real audience would find us by smell.”

“Smell?” She sniffed the air. “The parasite improves your senses, you know. But aren’t we talking about people who aren’t infected?”

I frowned. Astor Michaels had been ethically broken, a tangled maze of moral hazards, but he knew brilliantly how crowds worked. Even if the people hiding in the city were terrified, they still needed some kind of hope to cling to.

“Don’t worry,” I said, tapping my forehead. “They’ll come.”

By ten P.M. the wind had grown stronger, cutting slices of cold salt air from the East River.

The angels had disappeared, hidden among the trees and up in the light towers, perched across the arched top of the amphitheater—watching over us, just like at the nightclub. Ready to descend.

And hopefully to protect us, if this all went horribly wrong.

Pearl switched on her mixing board, and the columns of speakers began to buzz. She gave Zahler a low E and he tuned his bass, the stage rumbling beneath me. Moz and Minerva came out of the shadows to take their places, trembling in the cold.

We waited for a moment, looking at one another. Pearl had finally come up with the perfect name for us, but there was no one to a

So we just started playing.

This time Zahler didn’t freeze. He began the Big Riff, the bass notes thundering out across the park, bouncing lazily back from the wall of housing projects along Manhattan’s edge. The rest of the lights came up, bright white instead of the colored gels we were used to, as harsh as a movie set. We were blinded now to anything out there in the darkness, terrifyingly exposed. We had only our angels to trust in.

It was Moz who froze this time, his body shuddering for a long moment as he fought the anathema of his own music. But finally his fingers danced into motion on the strings, years of practice beating aside the parasite inside him.

I started drumming, muscles falling into familiar patterns, but the motion of my hands didn’t calm me. It wasn’t the blank and empty darkness before me, or the thousands of deadly, infected maniacs all around us. It wasn’t even the thought of those huge, human-eating creatures we were trying to summon.

What scared me was being drawn again into the engine of our music. I remembered playing, unable to stop, while the worm had rampaged through the crowd, cutting them down while they watched us, mesmerized. My moral hazard still lurked in the corners of my vision, watching me and waiting.

If the world wasn’t cured soon, that vision would become too real. I was ru

I was one of those people who needed civilization simply to survive.

Minerva began to sing, her voice searching the darkness, keening through the empty and weed-choked park around us. Calling.

The air began to glisten, and soon I could see the music: Moz’s notes hovering in the air, Pearl’s piercing melody like a thin spotlight moving among them, making them sparkle. Minerva’s song wound through it all, stretching out into the darkness, and Zahler and I played with a fierce determination, as tight as fingers locked together, like sentries afraid to turn their heads.

We played the whole piece through, hoping someone would hear.

When we reached the end, no cheers or applause answered us, not even a lonely shout of encouragement. No one had come.

Then the lights faded around us, and I looked out at where the audience should have been.

A galaxy of eyes reflected back at me. Night-seeing eyes.

Peeps.

They stared at us, transfixed, undead. Not like the angels or Minerva or even trembling Moz, not sane or reasonable or human. These had been fully taken by the disease. They wore filthy and tattered clothes, logos ripped from them as the anathema had taken hold. Many were barely covered, shivering in ragged pajamas and sweat-pants—the sort of clothes you’d wear to bed when you felt feverish and half-crazy, coming down hard with the flu. Their fingernails were long and shone black, as if they’d glued the husks of dead beetles to their fingers. A hundred of them stood there. Motionless.

The survivors hadn’t gathered to hear us. The vampires had.

Astor Michaels had been all too right. Our real audience had found us by smell.

“Oh, crap,” Zahler said next to me.

A stir moved through them, forms shifting in the silence, the spell of the song fading. Glimmers of hunger flashed in their eyes.

“We have to keep playing,” I said.

“We have to run,” Zahler hissed. He started to back away.

The crowd stirred again. One of them was shambling toward the stage, squinting his eyes against the light.

“Zahler, stop,” Moz said. “It’s like your dogs. Don’t show them you’re afraid.”