The Last Days

Pearl joined Minerva, her fingers spreading across her keyboards to hold down long, lush chords. Then Moz came in on top, quick notes flirting with Minerva's hummed melody, pushing her toward words.

I began to play, rolling the sticks softly across my paint buckets, breaking into a slow beat. Finally Zahler reluctantly joined us, his bass rumbling through the darkness.

The peeps remained motionless, staring at us, unblinking.

We played the whole song, trying to forget our ghastly audience, but we wound up going faster toward the finish, our fear finally showing in the music. We ended with a brutal thrashing of the same chord again and again, finally rattling into silence.

I looked out into the dark.

There were five times as many of them now.

"Spot the problem," Zahler said.

A ripple went through the ragged army before us. One of them let out a low, hungry moan. A drop of sweat crawled down my back, as cold as the night air.

"We can't stop playing!" I said.

"What?" Zahler hissed. "You want more of them to come?"

Moz took a step back, his hands quivering. "Yeah, and what if no worm ever shows up?"

"Boys," Minerva said straight into the microphone, her words echoing through the park, "I don't think we have a choice."

A few of the peeps had begun to advance, teeth glittering in the moonlight, hands flexing into claws.

"Min's right," Pearl murmured.

"'Piece Two'?" Zahler said, and started before anyone could answer.

We all jumped in, playing hard.

Even terrified, I wondered how we sounded to the peeps, whether they really liked the music or whether certain kinds of sound waves calmed them down, like plants and Mozart. They weren't exactly dancing or moshing or singing along. Why were they listening instead of eating us?

I started pushing the tempo, coaxing the others along, almost as fast as a Toxoplasma song - music for insects.

Then Minerva came in, howling her nonsense syllables, setting my vision shimmering, like the glitter of weeping-willow fireworks fading in the air.

Something rippled through the crowd, a sudden wave of motion, and for a terrible moment I wondered if our spell was breaking. But the ragged army didn't rush to attack us; instead the whole mass of them turned together, like a vast flock of birds wheeling as one.

For a second, I thought the peeps were dancing... but it was something much better. Or worse, depending on what happened next. The ground had finally begun to shudder.

They were getting ready. They smelled something: the hated worm rising up toward the surface. Sane or not, the parasite inside them knew the scent of its natural enemy.

The rumbling grew, and I pushed the tempo still faster.

The worm broke through just as we hit the first chorus, scattering dirt and black water, tossing a handful of bodies into the air. But these were peeps, not clueless kids in some nightclub, and the crowd didn't panic or run. They came at the beast from every angle, setting upon it with flashing claws, tearing into its pulsing sides with their razor teeth.

The angels didn't stand back and watch. They shot out of the trees, dropping from the amphitheater roof, swords drawn. Jumping into the throng, they fought side by side with the peeps, the great worm screaming and twisting in its trench.

We played and kept playing. When we ran out of verses, we started over without pausing a single beat, the air warping around me. Minerva's voice had a new shape now, shimmering lines of strength that bound peeps and angels into a single force. Zahler's low thumping notes were tendrils reaching down, squeezing the earth shut below the enemy, trapping it here on the surface. I could feel the battle in my muscles, my sticks flashing like the swords below.

Some endless time later the song finally stumbled to a halt, all five of us exhausted, the engine of our music out of steam at last.

I looked down into the park.

The peeps had torn the worm to pieces. Fragments of its huge carcass were spread out across the broken concrete, still twitching as if trying to burrow back into the earth.

A few of the peeps were scrabbling over the remains, eating them...

"What now?" Zahler said as the last echoes faded. The army of peeps had grown bigger than the crowd at our first gig - more than a thousand of them summoned by our music and the death cries of the worm.

Most of them still looked hungry.

The handful of angels stood out in the audience, covered with blood and black water. They glanced nervously at the peeps around them, their bloodlust fading.

"Dudes!" Lace yelled up at us. "Keep going!"

So we did.

Altogether we killed five worms that night, playing until dawn began to break at last.

Light filtered across the sky, pink clouds brightening to orange, and finally our grisly audience began to disperse. They faded into the trees, driven back into the dark alleys of the city, sated by the fight.

Up onstage, we collapsed one by one. Zahler's fingers were bleeding, and Minerva had practically croaked her way through our last song. Even the angels looked unsteady on their feet. Covered with black water, blood, and chunks of gelatinous flesh, they cleaned their swords with shaking hands.

I curled up on the concrete stage, shivering in the predawn chill. My hands ached, my body thrummed with echoes, and shimmering hallucinations colored everything I saw.

But I was smiling. About halfway through the concert, my moral hazard had slunk into the darkness.

And this felt very real.

EPILOGUE: THE CURE

-  MOZ-

Being on tour wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

There were too many long bus trips, we were in a new town almost every night, and I hated living out of suitcases and trailers for months on end. Most hotels didn't have much staff anymore - most didn't have sheets. Room service was a thing of the ancient past.

But we did it for the fans.

At every new town they'd give us a heroes' welcome, having hiked in from miles away or squandered their last few gallons of gasoline to drive from farther. They brought their homemade weapons and homemade liquor, ready to fight the enemy and party, to sing along, basically to have a good time. Local angels and regular people, even a few wild peeps wandered in most nights - everyone wanted to see us perform.

We'd become famous after all, even though the old ways of manufacturing fame - television, magazines, movie sound tracks - hardly existed anymore. There was still a lot of radio around, ten thousand backyard stations juiced with solar power, so everyone knew our songs.

They knew our name too, thanks to Pearl, who'd finally come up with the three perfect words to describe us. Even if it is a stupid plural. I mean, it doesn't really make sense without the s at the end.

The Last Day? Come on. That's as bad as the Desk.

So you probably know how the rest of the story goes:

We toured like crazy, hitting the big cities all over the world, playing one show after another until the local population of the enemy had been destroyed. Then we did our famous Heartland Tour, playing every small town that had ever spotted a worm-sign in the distance and a few that hadn't.

We were just as popular overseas. One good thing about singing in a language that's been dead for seven centuries: nobody feels left out.

Especially not the worms.

Everywhere we and our two dozen superhuman bodyguards went, the enemy came, called up from the bowels of the earth by their ancient hunger, unable to resist a thousand tasty humans swaying to Minerva's songs, as tempting as the smell of bacon sizzling in the morning.

Our fans and the angels kept slaying them, until the last few survivors got canny enough to slither back into the depths. The crisis slowly began to subside, the deep-dwelling rats retreating into their unlit warrens, taking the spores of the parasite with them. Thanks, guys, till next time.

Of course, things took a while to get back to normal.

There were cities and societies that had to be rebuilt, and the Night Watch still had to mop up the last few untreated peeps. They scoured the wilderness for those that the anathema had pushed into lonely existences, healing the vampires one by one until they became creatures of legend again. And then the Watch itself disappeared back into the shadows.

The earth was cured - or at least we humans thought so.

No one knew what the worms thought, or if they thought anything at all. We'd killed practically all of them... except for the most intelligent ones, Cal always pointed out. The ones who somehow figured out that our music was deadly. So the next time the worms rise up, they'll all be descendants of those clever enough to escape. They probably get smarter with every invasion of the surface: wormy evolution in action.

Fexcellent.

But the next crisis won't happen for at least a few hundred years, and I'll be too old to tour by then.

Angels don't live forever, after all.

Along the way, Min and I broke up and got back together about fifteen times, and that's if you don't count the breakups that lasted less than two hours. Zahler became a fawesome bass player, and Alana Ray stayed exactly the way she was: ethical, logical, collected. And Pearl is, as you know, running for Mayor of New York again, but that's a whole other story.

By now, we've all been interviewed a million times about the tour. One of Cal Thompson's books covers it the best; he was there watching our backs the whole way. Most of what he says is true, as far as I can remember.

The only really new thing I can add to all those stories is this:

It happened in a small town outside Tulsa, about halfway through the Heartland Tour. That night's gig had been fawesome, us thrashing through a twenty-minute version of "Piece Two" while the crowd killed the local enemy, a giant bull worm whose death throes tore up that Sears parking lot like a rabid dog does a newspaper.

At the after-party, one of the local angels came up to me. She had short hair, wild makeup, and intense eyes. Her broadsword was strapped across her back like a guitar.

She stood there for a second, eyes flashing in the light of the bonfire. The comforting smell of burning worm-flesh filled the air.

"Hey, good work tonight," I said, raising my hand. "You guys in the Oklahoma Watch are great!"

I was sort of expecting her to say, "No, you're great!" But she didn't answer, just stared at me.

After a moment, I said, "Tough old worm, though, huh?"

"You owe me a Strat," she said.

I blinked, finally recognizing her.

She was that crazy woman, the one who'd thrown her life out the window onto Sixth Street the night Pearl and I had met. We'd seen the angels taking her away, to New Jersey - or maybe even Montana, because it was that far back - so of course she'd been cured and had become one of them...

I wondered how she'd wound up way out here. Maybe she'd loved New York too much to go back home; the anathema hangs on real hard sometimes. I've seen angels cower at the sight of old friends or flinch when they hear the chorus of a favorite song. Hell, I still don't look in mirrors much.

"Wow," I said, starting to smile. "It's you."

Her dark eyes flashed. "You broke it, one of your bodyguards told me. Smashed it on the stage, like you're Jimi Hendrix or something?"

I shook my head. "It wasn't like that. I was going through the anathema."

"That was a nineteen seventy-five Strat with gold pickups and hardware," she said slowly. "Do you know how hard those are to find? Especially these days?"

I knew exactly. I'd been looking for another one since we'd started touring. The last few in existence were so valuable even I didn't have enough money for one. Here was me helping save the world, and I couldn't even afford a decent ax. How messed up was that?

But I'd had about enough of her attitude. "Hang on a second. Last thing I saw, you were throwing it out a window!"

"Yeah, well, I was nuts then!"

"So was I when I smashed it!"

"Um, Moz?" It was Pearl walking up, carrying two precious bottles of precrisis beer. She frowned. "Is there a problem here?"

The woman glared at me, then her hands unbent from claws and she shook her head. "No problem."

The acid scent of angels about to get into a fistfight faded from the air.

I let out a sigh, muttering, "She says I owe her a Stratocaster."

Pearl's eyes widened slowly. "Whoa... it's you." Her face broke into a smile. "Well, I guess you get Moz's beer, then."

The woman snorted, then took the offered bottle. Homemade liquor was common enough by then, but nobody ever turned down the civilized stuff.

I stood there and watched as Pearl told her how fawesome the local Watch had been tonight. Pearl asked if we could tell headquarters about anything they needed, already the politician, effortlessly charming - saving me once again.

Now that I thought about it, I'd always meant to find this woman, at least to say how much the Strat had meant to me, maybe to explain how it had met its end. But I'd never quite gotten around to it.

It was like Zahler said: Pearl was always fixing the things I'd smashed or dropped or just let slip into disrepair. She'd even helped me and Minerva patch things up more than a few times - anything for the good of the band.

Their conversation paused when another hunk of worm was thrown onto the pyre, making a rattling hiss like a radiator in a New York winter, a fresh scattering of sparks spitting forth and lifting into the sky, another round of drunken cheers.

"Thanks," I said to the woman.

"For what?"

"For dropping that guitar at exactly the right moment." I smiled at Pearl. "For bringing us together."

Pearl grinned back at me.

"Well, you've got a funny way of repaying me," the woman said.

"For what it's worth," Pearl said, "I was there, and he was bat-shit crazy at the time."

"You only break the things you love," I said.

The woman shook her head slowly. "But don't you get it, Moz? Anathema or not, it wasn't yours to fall in love with."

I swallowed, not knowing what to say, and Pearl came to my rescue again. "We don't always get to choose what we love."

The woman just scowled, sighing heavily as we turned together toward the blaze. It was growing hotter, its center turning blue as the beast's fat and muscle rendered, dripping down into the bonfire's sizzling core. Pearl's fingers wrapped gently around my arm and drew me closer.

The worm kept burning.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

In case you haven't noticed, all the chapter titles in The Last Days are band names. Some of them are great bands, some lame, and a few I've never actually heard play - I just needed their names for chapter titles, okay? But for your edification, and so that you can see that I didn't just make them up, here's the list of all chapter names, with a little info about each band.

Enjoy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Thanks to Morgan Butts and her pals for "fawesome."