The Last Days

Chapter 20

"Yeah, I guess. When I went there in my fevers, I could hear whispering from the cracks." Minerva shrugged. "So I started writing down what they said."
I swallowed. I'd never really thought about where her lyrics had come from, but then, Minerva had never mentioned that they'd bubbled up from underground. That seemed like the kind of thing you might mention.
"Perhaps I might hear a few words?" Dr. Prolix said.
"Um, is that a good idea?" Pearl asked softly.
"Don't sing, dear," the old woman said. "Just speak them."
Minerva paused a moment, then cleared her throat.
A few syllables came from her mouth, at first halting and tangled, like someone trying to imitate the sound of a sink gurgling. But then she started speaking in rhythm, and the weird sounds smoothed into words.
Then Minerva fell into the verses and choruses Pearl had built around the nonsense syllables, pitching her voice in a singsong way. I recognized a few phrases from Piece Two, and my fingers moved half-consciously, playing the bass line in the air, so I didn't notice when she started singing.
Maybe the floor trembled a little.
"Stop that!" Dr. Prolix snapped.
Minerva came to a halt, shaking her head as though she were snapping out of a daydream. Then she shrugged. "Sorry."
"I always wondered how that worked," Dr. Prolix said softly from behind her desk.
"How what worked?" Cal said. "What is that?"
"The last time the enemy came was seven hundred years ago, before I was born. But the Night Mayor was born toward the end of those times."
I blinked. Okay, this woman was talking about centuries - about being alive for centuries. I felt my brain trying to switch off, like when a crazy person is ranting on the subway and you totally don't want to hear it, but you can't stop listening.
Dr. Prolix spread her hand on her desk. "Have you ever considered, Cal, how the previous invasions were dealt with? Without seismographs? Without walkie-talkies and cell phones?"
"Um... I thought maybe they didn't deal so well?" he said. "Of course, they didn't have Homeland Security in the way, making it hard to move medicine into regions suffering outbreaks, and there weren't any subway tunnels for the enemy to slide around in. But it must have been hard. What did they lose last time? Two hundred million people?"
"And yet humanity survived." She folded her hands. "Legend has it that they didn't have to wait for the worms to come up. Certain peeps, called 'singers,' were able to bring them forth. So the Watch set traps and ambushes and killed the enemy at will."
Cal breathed out a little sigh. "And we believe this?"
Dr. Prolix nodded. "The Night Mayor saw it happen when he was a child. He saw a woman call up a worm." Her glowing eyes swept across the rest of us. "Along with fifteen drummers and bell-ringers and a man with a conch horn, with a great throng watching, waiting for the kill."
Conch horn? I thought. Oh, great. I was going to have to switch instruments again.
"Dude," Lace said, punching Cal in the shoulder. "How come you never told me about this?"
"First I've heard of it," he muttered.
"Some of the old ways were lost." Dr. Prolix looked down at her hands. "Many of us burned in the Inquisition."
"Those guys again," Cal said.
"But the knowledge was not completely lost, it seems." Dr. Prolix looked at Minerva. "Where do you live, child?"
"Um, Boerum Hill."
The doctor nodded. "Some of the old families are buried there."
"Buried?" Minerva said. "Eww."
My jaw dropped. "You mean, like, we were doing songs that dead people wrote?"
"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.
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 cannibals.
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 announce it.
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 running out of pills, the last bottle shaking half empty in my pocket, more depleted every day. I wasn't being heroic, risking my life here on the cold edge of Manhattan. I was being logical.
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."
"My dogs don't eat people!"
I heard more sounds in the darkness behind us. Of course, the peeps weren't just in the audience in front of us. They were all around us...
"Alana Ray's right. We need to keep playing," Minerva said. "We don't want to disappoint the fans." She pulled the microphone to her lips and began to hum.
The eerie melody crept from the amps, a nameless, shapeless tune that we'd made into our slowest song: "A Million Stimuli to Go."
The peeps began to settle down.