The Last Days

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 running into my eyes, heart pounding like something in a cage. But it wasn't stage fright; it was the beast gone wild in me. I'd been anxious all day, too nervous to eat, and now the hunger had caught up with me all at once.



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.



She played with them, drawing the microphone close, then pushing it away, grinning behind dark glasses. The Big Riff could hypnotize you, I knew all too well - Zahler and I sometimes played it for hours at a stretch. When Minerva let it flow through her body, she was as spell-binding as a swaying cobra.



Then she pulled off her glasses, braving the spotlights to peer into the audience, to fix them with her gaze. I saw their faces ignite with the light reflected from her, as if somehow she'd made eye contact with everyone.



That was when she started to sing, and when I started to feel really funny.



The words that Minerva had scrawled down in her basement tumbled out of her, as lunatic as the first time she'd played with us - incomprehensible, ancient, and wild. They dredged up weird pictures in my mind, the skulls and centipedes carved into the iron lock on her bedroom door.



The ground began to rumble.



Maybe it was just my stomach, the gnawing hunger changing into something sharper. It felt as if all the raw hamburger I'd consumed over the last few weeks had gotten to me at last, my iron gut finally succumbing to food poisoning.



The sight of Minerva with her glasses off made my head spin, the spotlights flashing from her face like crystal. I felt the garlic leaving my body in a hot sweat, as if giant hands were squeezing me, wringing out every protection I had against the beast inside.



Disgust was leaking into me, a loathing for everything that had put me on this stage: Minerva, this band, the Stratocaster in my hands. The whole insane idea of fame and adulation and even music itself...



I wanted to throw it all away, to run from all these pointless complications and let the beast inside take over. To hide in some distant, shadowy place and gnaw on nothing but flesh and bones - perfectly sated, an animal.



But my fingers kept playing. The music held me there, balanced between love and hatred.



I stared down at the stage, not looking at Minerva, but I couldn't keep her song out of my ears. It kept pouring from the amplifiers, echoing back and forth across the club, building like feedback in my head.



The cables at my feet were moving, shivering like dizzying snakes across the floor. I tore my eyes from them, glaring out into the darkness of the nightclub.



I saw it start out there.



A shape moved through the crowd, a swell of hands thrown up into the air, like a stadium wave carrying itself along, traveling toward us from the back of the club. It broke against the stage, shattering into wild cries of surprise.



The ground rumbled under my feet.



Then the swell appeared again, moving from right to left this time, carrying screams along with it. That's when I realized this wasn't something innocent, like upraised arms at a baseball game... Reality was bending before my eyes.



The floor itself was surging up, the bulge moving like a rat scurrying under a rug. More violent this time - the people in its path were thrown into the air, tossed up to fall into the outstretched arms of the crowd, like stage-jumpers.



My sharp ears caught a thin scream behind me, and I glanced back to see Alana Ray crying out, "No, no, no...," unheard in the booming beat of the Big Riff. But she kept playing: the music had also captured her, locking her hands into their fluttering patterns.



The moving surge of floor turned again, growing stronger. As I watched, the ground began to split, the earth opening like a huge zipper, vomiting up black water and cracked pieces of concrete. A choking smell filled my nostrils.



It was headed toward the stage, but none of us stopped playing.



A few people began to scramble away from its path, trying to run through the crowd, but most were staring raptly up at us, too mesmerized by Minerva to move.



It was the enemy, of course, the same beast I'd seen down in the subway. She had finally called it up.



The Stratocaster burned my fingers, my whole body rejecting the music we were making, but still I couldn't stop.



Screams filled the nightclub now. More of the crowd fought to scramble over one another for safety, trying to avoid the snapping maws of the beast. It grew closer and closer to us.



And then angels starting falling.



They dropped from the ceiling on thin filaments, cables that sparkled in the spotlights, descending toward the creature and onto the stage. One angel swung to the top of each set of amplifiers, swords flashing in their hands. They rappelled down the stacks, stabbing each speaker right in its center, every thrust bringing forth a high-pitched shriek from the equipment - a squealing counterpoint to the Big Riff.



Dozens of them dropped onto the beast and into the crowd, pushing people away. They brought the creature to a halt, hacking with swords and stabbing with long, telescoping spears. Its cries of pain joined the squawking of the amplifiers, until the music finally began to stumble...



Minerva's voice faltered, and the spell was shattered.



I broke free, pulling the Stratocaster's strap from my shoulder and grabbing the guitar by its neck, despising it with every fiber of my being. I raised it over my head and swung it down against the stage, smashing it again and again, its strings snapping, its broken neck twisting like a dying chicken's. The guitar buzzed and squeaked out a last few tuneless notes, its death cries leaking from the surviving amps.



Around me, the others had ground to a halt. In tears, Alana Ray threw her sticks aside, kicking wildly at her paint buckets. Zahler just stood there openmouthed, staring at the battle on the nightclub floor. I couldn't look at Minerva anymore.



Stepping back from the broken guitar, my hands bent into claws, I started to stomp at it with my boots. It peeped and squawked.



Then an angel landed on the stage in front of me, dressed in commando black, trailing a thin cable from her waist. She held a small object in one hand.



I recognized her: Lace.



I turned to run, to escape her and everything else: this band, this music, the monstrous thing we'd called up. But after a few steps, before I'd even reached the edge of the stage, she'd caught up with me, grabbing my arm and spinning me around, her needle flashing in the spotlights.



I felt a pinprick at my neck, then her arms supporting me.



"Say good night, Moz," Lace said.



The sound of my own name almost made me vomit, and then nausea and pain melted into darkness.



PART VI



THE TOUR



There has never been a better time for a pandemic.



Airplanes can carry people across the globe in a single day, and half a billion people fly every year. Cities are far larger and more crowded than at any point in history.



The last great disease was Spanish flu, which appeared at the end of World War I. (Pandemics love wars.) It spread across the planet faster than any previous disease. Within one year, one billion people were infected, a third of the world's population. Its spread was so frighteningly quick that one U.S. town outlawed shaking hands.



And all this was before airplanes could fly across oceans, before most people owned a car. These days, any pandemic would travel much, much faster. We've got it all these days: dense cities, instant transportation, and all the wars you could want. For the worms, that's motive, means, and opportunity.



When the last days come, they will come quickly.



NIGHT MAYOR TAPES



END HERE.



26. HUNTERS AND COLLECTORS



-  MINERVA-



The smelly angels took us all away.



I tried to explain to them that I was fine - had been for weeks - and that Zahler, Pearl, and Alana Ray weren't even infected. But one look at sweaty, frothing, guitar-smashing Mozzy convinced them we were all insane.



That was the angels' big problem: they thought they knew everything.



I could have run. I was as fast and strong as them now - I could shatter bedroom doors with a single blow, after all. With the angels busy protecting a thousand bystanders and catching Astor Michaels and killing the giant worm that I'd called up (okay... oops), disappearing would have been a cinch.



But that would have meant leaving Moz and the others behind, and we really were a band now; I couldn't let them be kidnapped without me. So I let the angels stick me with their stupid needles...



And woke up all the way across the river in New Jersey. They'd put me in a locked room, a cross between a cheap hotel and a mental hospital. Nothing to do but watch the world fall apart on TV.



Smelly angels.



"We're very interested in you, Minerva."



"Really, Cal?" I batted my eyelashes. He was kind of handsome - in a boring, clean-cut way - and had a cute southern accent. Not as yummy as Mozzy, of course, but I liked how Cal turned pink when you flirted with him. "Then why don't you let me out of here? It's not like I'm dangerous, after all."



His eyes narrowed. Cal never wore sunglasses, like the other angels did. They were all infected, of course, and only sane because they took their meds. The angels had a big pill factory out here. No skulls or crucifixes on the walls, though - they were very scientific.



But Cal was different. He didn't need pills and smelled a little bit like Astor Michaels. Fellow freaks of nature.



"We can't let you go because we don't know what you are," Cal's girlfriend said.



I glared at her. Her name was Lace-short-for-Lacey, and she'd stuck Mozzy with her needle.



"But I'm cured. You can see that." They'd tried to give me their smelly angel medicine, but I was refusing it. Fresh garlic was enough for me now.



Cal scratched his head. "Yeah, you told us about your esoterica already. We're checking her out."



"You be nice to Luz," I warned. "She knows things."



"We know things too," he said.



Lace got all bossy then, hands on hips and voice too loud. "We've been around for centuries, cured a lot more peeps than Luz ever will. Your friend might know a few folk remedies, but the Watch has this stuff down to a science."



"Science, huh?" I ran one finger down the side of my neck, making Cal all squirmy. "So what am I, then?"



Lace frowned. "What you are is freaky."



"We've been watching Astor Michaels for a while now," Cal said. "We knew he was spreading the parasite, but this whole singing thing... It kind of caught us by surprise."



I didn't say how the worm had caught me by surprise too. I'd always felt it rumbling when we played, but I'd never thought it would come visit.



Even humming made me nervous now. Smelly underground monsters.



I shrugged. "Why don't you ask Astor Michaels about it, then?"



"He doesn't know any more than we do," Lace said. "He's just some record producer, trying to find the Next Big Thing. He's immune to the parasite's worst effects, but that's more common than you'd think."



"I'm a carrier myself." Cal smiled, all proud of himself. He'd already come by my room to explain how he was naturally immune and how he'd been a badass vampire-hunter even before the crisis. Now he worked for something called the Night Watch, which was run by someone called the Night Mayor. Oooh! Spooky.



I batted my eyes again. "Did you get up to tricks like Astor Michaels did, Cal? Were you bad?"



"No." He swallowed, then Lace gave him a look. "Well, not on that scale. And never on purpose..."



"Did you infect her?" I asked, pointing at Lace-short-for-Lacey. I'd seen them being all kissy through the bars of my window.



"No," he said in a tiny voice. "My cat did."



"Your cat?" I blinked. "Kitties can do that?"



"Felines are the major vector," Cal said. "The parasite hid in the deep-dwelling rat population for centuries, until the worms drove them up to the surface..."



As Cal went on with his parasite-geek lecture, which he loved to do, I remembered back to before I got sick. As the sanitation crisis had settled over our street, Zombie started spending a lot of time outside. And every night he'd come home and sleep on my chest, breathing his cat-food breath into my face.



That was how I'd gotten sick? From Zombie?



That meant that Mark wasn't such a dirty dog after all. He hadn't given the nasty to me; I'd given it to him...



"Oops," I said softly.



I wondered where Zombie was now. I always left the apartment window open so he could visit his little friends, but Manhattan looked pretty bad on TV. The whole island had been sealed off by Homeland Security, like that was going to keep the parasite from spreading.



Cal had explained to me how clever the parasite was: it turned infected people horny, hungry, bitey - anything to pass on its spores - and made them despise everything they'd loved before. That's why I'd thrown away Mark and my dolls and my music, why Moz had smashed his Stratocaster to bits. The anathema, as Cal called it, pushed infected people to run away from home and head to the next town over, and the next town after that...



It wouldn't be long before the whole world had it.



There were full-scale riots in most big cities now, blood-thirsty maniacs running around doing vile things - and not all of them were infected, you could totally tell. Schools were shutting down, the roads were choked with refugees, and the president kept making speeches telling everyone to pray.



No shit.



But the news never mentioned cat food supplies, not that I ever saw. So what was Zombie eating now? He didn't mind birds and mousies, but he always puked them up.



"Anyway," Lace said, noticing I wasn't listening. "We don't really care how you got the disease or how your voodoo friend cured you. This is about your songs."



I smiled. "They make the ground rumble. Want me to sing one for you?"



"Um, not really," Cal said, then he frowned. "That worm was probably just a coincidence anyway. But certain people around here are interested. They've been listening to recordings from that night, and they want to know where you got those lyrics."



"You need my help? But I thought you had this stuff down to a science."



Lace took a slow breath. "Maybe what happened that night wasn't strictly science."



Cal turned to her. "What do you mean by that?"



"Dude! You saw what happened! That shit was..." Her voice faded.



"Paranormal?" I looked down at my fingernails, which needed a manicure. They were still growing faster every day, even though I was cured. "Okay. I'll tell you everything I know... if you let me see Mozzy and the others. I want us to be together. We're a band, you know."



"But the other three tested parasite-negative," Cal said.



"I told you they would."



He frowned. "Yeah, I guess you did. But if we let you see them, you can't do anything that would compromise their health."



"Eww! I wouldn't kiss any of them."



"Kissing's not the only vector."



I tried not to roll my eyes. Anything to get out of this smelly room. "Okay, I promise not to share my ice cream."



"Cal," Lace said. "If she really wanted to infect them, she could have already." She turned to me. "But Moz is still dangerous."