The Last Days

"Hey, Pearl. How's it going?"



I tried to answer, but my gut was writhing now, squeezing the taste of stomach-ripe champagne up into the back of my throat. Minerva moved a step closer to Moz, five pale fingers wrapping protectively around his arm.



He was hers now. Completely.



With the three of them here together, I could finally see the changes in Moz, all the clues I'd managed to blind myself to: the luster of his skin, the beautiful, inhuman angles of his face. Just like Min back in spring - when the hunger was first welling up - he'd grown a heart-twisting shade more fetching.



Even slitted against the dim candlelight, his eyes glowed, full of pity for me. He must have known what I'd wanted.



But she'd taken it instead.



Suddenly the desolate feeling in my stomach was swept away by fury: Minerva had done it again, hooked up with someone in the band - in my band. Even after what had happened with Mark and the System, after everything Luz had told her, Min had done this to me again. I clenched my fists. Of course she would throw it in my face now, when we were this close, the contracts near enough to touch, ready to be signed.



I felt Astor Michaels's gaze, willing me to keep it together. For the good of the band. For the good of the New Sound... the music of monsters.



He snapped open the locks on his briefcase, pulled out his pen.



I swallowed my screams whole. They went down my throat as sharp-cornered and cold as ice cubes.



"Hi, guys," I said. "Nice place."



PART V



THE GIG



Study the Black Death, and you'll understand one truth: when things start to go wrong, human beings always find ways to make them worse.



The year the Death came to Europe, a city called Caffa on the doorstep of Asia was under siege. When the attackers found themselves coming down with a strange new disease, they wisely decided to run. But first they catapulted plague-ridden corpses over the walls of the city - so both sides would get the disease. Brilliant move.



When the Black Death was at its worst, the church decided to look for someone to blame and began to persecute heretics, Muslims, and Jews. As people fled these attacks, the disease fled with them. Nice work.



England and France had gone to war one year before the Black Death struck, but instead of making peace while the pandemic raged, they kept on fighting. In fact, they kept on fighting for 116 years, keeping their people poor, malnourished, susceptible to disease. Now that's commitment.



The Black Death was helped along by war, by panic, even by the weather, but it had no greater ally than human stupidity. Sometimes, you wonder how our species has made it this far.



Not without a lot of help, I assure you.



NIGHT MAYOR TAPES:



411¨C421



23. MORAL HAZARD



-  ALANA RAY-



I still hadn't made a decision, but my hands were steady.



I'd been here at the nightclub more than three hours and hadn't needed to drum my fingers or touch my forehead even once. Like being suspended in that moment before playing, the cadence of the universe around me needed no adjustments.



The club was at one end of a long alleyway in the meatpacking district, one free of garbage, the walls painted with giant murals and tagged with graffiti. I'd come in through a huge loading dock, trucks full of equipment rumbling in a tight line, waiting to disgorge.



Inside, the space was more than three hundred feet from stage to back wall, the echoes returning lazily, almost a whole second late - two beats at 120 beats per minute. Useless for playing, but that was fine with me. I liked my fake echoes with this band, just to be in control of something. My visions, my emotions, even the patterns I played all seemed to spring unbidden from the air, but at least my echo boxes obeyed me.



Astor Michaels had asked me to come early for sound check, so that the engineers could get used to my paint buckets. I'd brought thirty-six to arrange in eight stacks (S8 = 36), along with my special buckets: unusual sizes and thicknesses, even the broken ones that gave off the buzz of cracked plastic.



Unlike Pearl, the engineers here thanked me when I ran only two channels from my board to theirs. They had four bands to worry about tonight - each with its own array of treble, bass, effects, and volume settings - and wanted things as simple as possible. They let me hang out for the whole sound check, watching as they plastered the club's huge mixing board with notes scribbled on masking tape. Its backside sprouted a tangle of cables, four bands' worth of musical specificities sculpted in color-coded spaghetti.



I was still watching them work when I felt Astor Michaels behind me.



"Miss Jones," he said, a sheaf of papers in his hand.



"I prefer Alana Ray."



He smiled. "Sorry to be formal, but we have business to conduct." The papers rustled, making the air ripple. "You're the only one who hasn't signed yet. Not embarrassed about your penmanship, are you?"



"Top of my class," I said, then shrugged. "The competition was less than average."



"Ah. Didn't mean it that way." He pulled out a thick fountain pen. "I'm sure your signature's more legible than Zahler's - or his mother's, for that matter."



The drummer on stage started a long fill, rolling across his whole set, the sound phasing and twisting as engineers played with their settings. For a few moments, we couldn't speak.



When the drumroll stuttered to a halt, Astor Michaels spread the contracts out on the mixing board. "Shall we?"



I stared down at them, all those carefully chosen, hair-splitting words. When I'd read the contract, it had made a tangle in my mind, the numbered and cross-referenced paragraphs twisted around one another like the theme of a fugue.



"What's wrong?"



"I'm concerned about... the ethics of signing."



"Ethics?" He laughed. "Good God, Alana Ray. This band has four minors, two of whom are bat-shit crazy. Minerva had to forward-date her contract to next week. We've got a simpleton and a control freak as well. The ethics of you signing? You're practically the only one of sound mind!"



I didn't like how he was talking about the others, but first I had to explain: "I'm not concerned about my own competence. I am worried about tonight."



"Stage fright?" His voice softened. "Is it tough with your condition?"



I shook my head. "This is not about me. What if signing this contract risks harm to others? In the law, that is called a moral hazard."



"I don't follow you."



I looked up from the mass of words spread out across the mixing board, finally meeting Astor Michaels's eyes. "I think that something dangerous may happen here tonight, because of us. Because of what Minerva is."



"Oh." He blinked. "So you've... seen something?"



"Only what I always see when she sings."



"Your little Loch Ness hallucination?" He smiled.



"I also saw it at the Morgan's Army gig, but stronger." The drummer hit his snare, its echo bouncing across the vast club. There would be a thousand people here tonight. Huge stacks of amplifiers waited on either side of the stage, buzzing in the silence, crinkling the air. "More people makes the beast bigger; more sound makes it bigger."



"I hope so, Alana Ray, but that doesn't make it real." Astor Michaels frowned. "You know that, don't you?"



"Do I?"



He stared at me for a moment, genuinely puzzled. Then he shook his head. "We've both seen strange things in our lives, I'll grant you that. We've both had... conditions to deal with. But both of us made something from them. That's why we're sitting here across this contract, you and me."



I looked at his teeth, remembering what Pearl had told me on the phone last night. How Astor Michaels had made a career out of making more insects.



He stabbed at the papers with one long fingernail. "What you have right here is real, and your visions aren't. You know that."



I was suddenly angry. "How can you be certain? This is in my head, not yours. No one else can see the things I do."



His stare held me coolly. "But you're the most logical person I've ever met, Alana Ray. And you wouldn't have come here for a sound check if you weren't going to play tonight, and you wouldn't play tonight if you weren't going to sign. So you don't really believe in monsters, do you?"



I swallowed, looking down at my hands - perfectly still, ready to play. I had dreamed of drumming all last night, of being under the spotlights. "But you say Minerva is going to change things. What if she makes the beast real?"



"I've watch this epidemic roll across New York City for two years, and I've never seen anything like what you describe."



I stared at him, wanting to believe. Astor Michaels had discovered the New Sound, after all. Maybe he knew what he was talking about.



"Don't you trust me?" he said, the pen flickering in his hand. "Don't you think I'll do right by you?"



"I think it was right, what you did for Minerva."



He let out a snort. "Finally somebody thanks me."



"Yes. Thank you," I said. Minerva's freedom had frightened Pearl, but I'd watched too many schoolmates graduate into mental institutions, into group homes and jails, and I knew that locking people up was paranormal - against normal, not beside it. Locks didn't cure; they strangled.



"Well, then." He held out the pen, eyes glinting. "I don't think you're afraid of me or afraid of monsters. I think you're just afraid of your own success."



I shook my head. Astor Michaels was very wrong about that. That morning, I'd thrown my change bucket away. Moral hazard or not, I wanted to be more real than someone begging on the streets.



So I signed, as he'd always known I would.



24. 10,000 MANIACS



-  ZAHLER-



The crowd was filling the main room now - a thousand people, Astor Michaels said, but it sounded like millions. Here in the backstage dressing room the noise was smoothed to a hum, like a hive of bees just waiting for someone to poke it with a stick.



The more I listened, the more they sounded like they were ready to boo somebody off the stage. Especially some lame bassist who'd only been playing for about four weeks...



I swallowed. Nobody had ever been this nervous before.



This was real. This was actual. This was happening right now.



Under the dressing room fluorescent lights was the worst place to practice, but I sat there in my chair slapping at the strings. Maybe I would get a little bit better, maybe just enough to save myself from humiliation.



Sometimes, playing my new instrument, my fingers moved more gracefully than they ever had across a guitar. Lately I'd been dreaming of the whole world expanding from guitar-size to bass-size, everything suddenly scaled just right for me and my big, fat, clumsy hands. But right now, the strings of Pearl's bass felt an inch thick, dragging at my fingers like quicksand in a nightmare.



Moz didn't look much happier. He was standing in one corner of the dressing room, wearing dark glasses and trembling. A sheen of sweat covered his face and bare arms.



"You look like you got the flu, Moz," I said.



He shook his head. "Just need my cup of tea."



"Almost ready, Mozzy." A teapot was plugged into the wall next to where Minerva sat doing her makeup. She had some weird herbs waiting to be brewed.



"Your cup of tea?" I shook my head. Living with a girl had turned Moz totally lame. And it was all my fault, because I'd told him to call Minerva, because I'd been so mad at him for wanting me to switch instruments...



It was all the stupid bass's fault!



Alana Ray stood right in the center of the room, staring at her own outstretched hands. Their rock-steadiness made her look incomplete, as if Moz had stolen all her twitchiness.



She'd traded her usual army jacket for this fawesome Japanese kimono over jeans. No one had told me we were supposed to dress up. I looked down at my same old unfool T-shirt. Would the crowd boo me for wearing it? They sounded really impatient now. The whole thing was starting an hour late, which Astor Michaels kept saying would make everything really intense...



But what if it just pissed them off?



Pearl was in the opposite corner from Moz, in the same dress she'd worn to Red Rat Records. She looked fawesome, I could tell, even if my brain was melting.



But she didn't look happy. She kept swearing under her breath: "Special Guests? More like Special Retards. I can't believe we're going out as 'Special Guests.' Why don't we just call ourselves Special Education?"



"The band going on first is called Plasmodium," Moz said. "How much does that name suck?"



Pearl looked at him, gave Minerva a two-second glare, then said quietly, "Sounds a lot like Toxoplasma."



"We should pick a real name soon," Minerva said, staring at her reflection in the mirror, applying makeup with steady hands. She was wearing a long evening gown, lots of jewelry, and didn't look nervous at all. She didn't notice the looks Pearl had been giving her. "If we let Astor Michaels choose one, it'll have the word plasma in it."



"What does plasma even mean?" Moz asked.



"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.