Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You

by Scotto Moore

  The appendage smashed through the side of the venue, ripping one entire wall down, and I watched human bodies fly through the air under the pallid streetlights, screaming as they flew. I heard myself bawling and babbling but I couldn’t understand what I was saying and I didn’t feel connected to my body—even more so than usual.

  And then, with no ceremony and no warning, the portal suddenly disappeared—thankfully—severing the appendage from its unlucky owner. The appendage flopped down hard from its great height and smashed half a city block’s worth of buildings. It was sheer fate that caused it to flop facing the other direction from where the van was parked; we would’ve easily been crushed to death before I could’ve gotten the van moving in my state.

  A brief silence followed, and then wails and shrieks rose up from the debris field where the venue once stood. And inexplicably, in the midst of the dawning horror of the night’s events, Airee began laughing. She strolled around and climbed in the passenger seat of the van. Sierra and the twins quietly climbed in back.

  “That was so close!” she shouted, cackling. “You guys, that was so close!”

  “Close to what?” I asked.

  “Close to opening a portal to my home dimension!” she said, as though she was shouting the most obvious fact in the history of shouting facts. “I missed the target and wound up opening a portal to who - knows - what - the - fuck dimension, which yes, that was a problem, because apparently giant tentacled beasts live there. And now they know about your planet, although who knows if they can find their way here. But the point is, we were so close! I swear we’ll get it right tomorrow night!”

  “Drive the van,” Sierra ordered.

  Many things go through your mind when you realize the entire world is very obviously doomed. This prevented me from driving the van.

  “What happened to Imogen?” I asked.

  “That’s what you care about?” Airee replied, incredulous. “After what you just saw?”

  “She’s not coming,” Sierra said quietly. “You should drive the van.”

  I heard the sirens of emergency vehicles in the distance, and for some reason, the very realistic threat of the Lawrence police department was able to motivate me to get moving. Brain could comprehend “going to jail” in ways it couldn’t comprehend “end of the world by giant sky claw.”

  I fired up the van and kicked it into gear. As I pulled onto the road and began to accelerate, I realized too late that a large man was standing in the road directly in front of me. I was going to hit him before I’d ever get the chance to apply the brakes. It didn’t matter. He threw an incredible punch that smashed the front of the van into a crumpled mess and stopped our forward momentum completely. We weren’t going fast, obviously, but I still hit the steering wheel hard with my head, and Airee flew forward against the dashboard. When I stopped seeing stars, I realized that the man standing in the glow of the one remaining headlight was the man from the show in Austin, the big guy who had elbowed me to the ground.

  He looked a lot angrier than the last time I’d seen him.

  Airee looked up to get her bearings, pure fury on her face, as the man strode around to her side of the van and began to pull the passenger door off completely. She timed it perfectly to kick him hard in the face once the door was gone, and he staggered backward onto the shoulder of the road. The twins popped out of the side door of the van and savagely attacked him, knocking him onto his back before he could get his balance after Airee’s kick. As they proceeded to pound him into submission, Airee climbed on top of the van, where she could survey the entire scene: the wreckage of the venue, the enormous tentacle that lay splattered down the center of the neighborhood, the struggling man who was currently subdued by the twins but was rapidly regaining his wits. I saw Sierra put her earplugs in, and I rapidly followed suit.

  The man tried to shout something at Airee. It came out as a muffled, hoarse bleating sound, like cattle being mutilated, but slowed to half speed.

  “Is that all you got, open mic night?” Airee said with a laugh. “Let me show you what a real singer can do.”

  She sang a melody I thought I recognized, which quickly and suddenly transformed into a horrifying sonic wave of pure antipathy. The man’s head briefly swelled, then exploded, showering the twins with gore.

  I passed out.

  * * *

  When I awoke, the world was very different.

  I was alone in the back of the road crew van. Music was playing. It wasn’t coming out of the car stereo though. It was outside, playing at a significant volume. I’d never heard it, but I recognized its signature immediately. This was Beautiful Remorse. Or the Augmented 4th—whatever you wanted to call them. I suspected I was hearing the new track, somehow recorded at the show before it was rudely interrupted by a massive death strike from another dimension. I recognized Imogen’s bass line, the one and only time she’d perform it for an audience. It was an achingly beautiful song, and it filled me with energy, like I was a video game character who’d reached a health station and was topping off.

  I climbed out of the van. Dawn was coming on fast. Airee Macpherson owned Lawrence, Kansas.

  * * *

  I staggered through the streets. Somehow, the music was sufficiently amplified so that you could hear it all throughout the city. I could hear it vibrating inside my own skull, contributing to the effect. It was exactly like Sierra had said at the hospital in Austin: my brain was a battery in the energetic network that Airee controlled and used for sustenance. They were playing the entire album in order up through track seven, waking these people up to Airee’s music and capturing them in its web.

  The streets were filled with people staggering about in varying degrees of shock. Every time track six came up, a few people here and there would suddenly die and collapse, or violently kill themselves with whatever implement was handy, and you got very immune to seeing it over time.

  * * *

  I would have expected some kind of coordinated police response, maybe? Something big to put a stop to all this chaos—the National Guard maybe? Something with enough firepower to hold off the next giant death tentacle from the sky? Then I wondered what was happening across the country if track seven had gotten out. My phone was dead so I couldn’t check. But let’s imagine track seven was out. The track itself couldn’t be the trigger that opened up the portal, or we’d have a portal every forty-five minutes right here in Lawrence.

  Track seven plus a sacrifice, however . . .

  What if this was happening all over the country?

  * * *

  I saw my first runner a few hours later. Someone who was completely unaffected by the music, who wasn’t existentially destroyed by track six, someone who was terrified and caught in the middle of a strange and sudden hell on earth. She was running from two quick pursuers, who rapidly caught her and slammed her to the ground. I recognized the pursuers: it was the twins.

  Except they looked very different. Enhanced somehow—bigger, more muscular, meaner, more ferocious. They smiled at me and I realized they were both demons of some kind. I don’t think they started off as demons, but they were definitely past the point of no return at this point.

  “There you are,” they said in creepy unison, because of course they did. Their prey scampered off while their attention was on me. “Airee’s been looking all over for you.”

  * * *

  They led me back to the epicenter of the destruction, where a small crew of individuals was erecting a makeshift stage—setting up generators, loudspeakers, instruments, the works. Airee was planning another show tonight. They still had three tracks to release before the album was complete.

  If they were looking for me, maybe that meant she hadn’t released track seven yet. Maybe she still expected her Herald to do that.

  Sierra was waiting for me at a park bench near the new stage.

  “Snagged this from the band van,” she said, handing me my backpack. “Thought you might want that.”

>   I studied her very, very closely, looking for any signs that Sierra had transformed like the twins. Then, almost as an afterthought, I took a close look again at the twins. They looked just like they always had. Normal, cute, bored. My head was pounding with pain, from when I hit the steering wheel. Or maybe from the aggressively loud music that was constantly playing throughout the city. Some percentage of what I was feeling was imaginary bullshit and the rest of it was abject terror. I sat down on the bench and opened my backpack, to find my laptop secure inside.

  “Thank you for finding him,” Sierra said. The twins nodded but loitered nearby.

  We sat together silently for a while, observing our surroundings. I felt like I was seeing the aftermath of a hurricane even though all but a few of the buildings in town were still standing.

  “Where’s Airee?” I said.

  “Recruiting a new bass player,” she told me.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I said, starting to rise. Behind me, the twins forcibly shoved me back onto the bench. Got it—so it’s like that.

  “She wants you to post track eight,” she said, handing me yet another deadly thumb drive.

  “What about track seven?”

  “We posted it last night while you were passed out.”

  “When did you record track eight?”

  “We haven’t. This is Airee’s demo. She was hoping to record it last night as well, but the show got a little interrupted.”

  “Obviously you guys can post it without my help,” I said.

  “She likes it better when you do it. She says having a Herald is classy.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake—”

  “This is the wrong time to get mouthy. Just shut up and listen. You need to post the new track immediately. Spread the word about what happened here. Tell the truth, who gives a fuck what you say. Then you’re going to figure out how to operate a sound board, because Elsie got herself accidentally killed last night.”

  “As opposed to the people who got killed on purpose last night?”

  “Yes. Exactly. As opposed to the people who might still get killed on purpose, in fact.”

  I imagined I could hear the twins snickering behind us, but I was clearly delusional about most things by this point.

  I pulled out my laptop and fired it up. My hotspot still worked. Out of instinct, I dared to check my email before doing anything else. There was a message from Sierra Nelson waiting for me with the subject line: “What happens next.”

  They killed Imogen during the show last night. Airee and the twins. Airee’s music is a psychic virus unleashed on the world, but blood sacrifice onstage is what’s making Airee herself stronger, and she’s not done yet. I’m pretty sure they’re going to kill me during the show tonight. If the world is still standing after that, I’m pretty sure they’re going to kill you during the show tomorrow night. No one is coming to rescue us. No one knows how she summoned that thing from the sky but she has them convinced she can do it again whenever and wherever she wants. We need to get out of Lawrence fast. I guess that’s probably obvious. I’m open to suggestions. First you should post the new track. We’ll never survive the rest of the day if she doesn’t see that track go live on Much Preferred Customers soon.

  “What’s track eight called?” I asked her.

  “It’s called ‘Destroy All Unbelievers,’” she said.

  Track 09

  Posting a new track was a five-minute process, top to bottom, from booting the machine to pushing the publish button. I decided to make some pleasant small talk to pass the time.

  “Who the fuck was that guy whose head exploded?” I asked.

  “Airee won’t tell us,” Sierra said. “She admits someone’s been stalking her but she won’t say who and she won’t say why.”

  “Yeah but . . . she made that guy’s head explode!”

  “I know. But to be fair, he punched out our van!”

  “His head exploded! That is not fair!”

  “I am not the boss of Airee Macpherson!”

  We were shouting a lot. We both still had our earplugs in. I suspected we would never take them out again as long as we lived. Which wasn’t super likely to be that much longer anyway.

  As soon as my laptop connected, I fired up Maxnet. The main channel was a ghost town. I DM’d William but got no response. For kicks, I DM’d Maxstacy as well, and also got no response. My feeds were showing me the national news reporting about some kind of natural disaster in Lawrence—and also in Austin, Chicago, Mexico City, Sydney, Vancouver, and Bristol. People were calling it a “natural disaster” despite dozens of iPhone videos of giant sky tentacles smashing buses and churches and any goddamn thing they felt like smashing.

  Was Airee the epicenter of this apocalypse, or just one of the spokes?

  Did Airee actually have any control, or was she just making sacrifices to the unknowable out of blind stupid devotion? Or worse, because she just wanted to see what the fuck might happen?

  Her blog post had said that some schlub at a music conference had delivered a demo recording to her in a bar. Who the fuck was that schlub, how much did he fucking know, and where the fuck was he now?

  I considered what kinds of trouble I could get into by uploading an old Neil Diamond track and claiming it was the new Beautiful Remorse track. The twins were watching closely as I composed the post. I finished uploading the new track. Normally I would add some cryptic but pithy commentary, something intriguing to entice listeners, but I no longer needed any such pretense whatsoever. Instead I simply wrote: “Here is the new Beautiful Remorse track. It’s called ‘Destroy All Unbelievers.’ I’m not in any way encouraging anyone to do any actual destroying. You probably know and love a few unbelievers yourself and I suspect they would prefer it if you did not destroy them.” I was terrified of what mayhem I had just unleashed. I swore that this would be my last act as Airee’s Herald, even if she killed me for it. I realized I wouldn’t have the guts to disobey her if she were standing here in front of me though. I was despondent.

  The twins saw the post go live from over my shoulder. Satisfied, they wandered off in search of a new diversion. They shouted back to Sierra, “Don’t miss sound check!”

  Suddenly Maxstacy responded to my DM.

  “Holy shit you’re alive!” he said.

  “So are you!” I said.

  “Yeah but I’m not the one on tour with a homicidal alien-summoning cult leader!”

  “It sounds so quaint when you put it like that.”

  “I can’t believe you released a new track.”

  “If you were here, you’d believe anything.”

  “That’s my point—you must know by now what that music is doing to people!”

  “Yes. Obviously. Wait, are you immune?”

  “I haven’t listened to any of it. I have no idea if I’m immune and I don’t plan to find out. Are you still in Lawrence?”

  “For now.”

  “Are you in danger?”

  “Of course I’m in danger.”

  “Imminent danger?”

  “Yes, if I stay here, I am going to die here.”

  Maxstacy fell silent, one of those “Maxstacy is typing . . .” moments where he probably just went to the bathroom. I looked over at Sierra, who was not at all attempting to hide that she was reading the entire conversation on my screen. Impatiently I flipped over to news feeds for a moment, and found myself distraught to learn that roving bands of murderers were out in the streets of major cities around the world with boom boxes blasting Beautiful Remorse. Converting the masses, exterminating the immune. Sierra finally made eye contact with me. When this tour started, Sierra was all in, and now she was racked with guilt. Like me. For all the good it could do.

  “I think you should get out of Lawrence,” Maxstacy finally said, “and come here. Do you have wheels?”

  Sierra said, “Charlie’s got the key to the crew van.”

  My mind reeled. I’d seen too many TV shows, or not enough. Airee could s
ummon space tentacles by killing bass players. Could she command the state patrol to chase down her crew van? Fuck it, who cared.

  “Yeah, we have wheels,” I told him. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Madison.”

  Madison, Wisconsin, where Sierra and I went to school together without knowing each other, where Sierra’s band Surrealist Sound System first captured my imagination and set me on the righteous path toward music blogging, where Airee Macpherson attended the music conference that changed her life. I wanted desperately to believe this was a coincidence.

  “What a coincidence,” I said.

  * * *

  We had to trick Charlie into giving us the key to the crew van. And by trick I mean punch. We left her tied up in somebody’s garage and took off. No one stopped us. Not sure anyone even noticed us. It’s not like this was martial law. It’s not like cameras were everywhere. It’s not like some secret police force was out hunting for us. It was simply that at any given moment giant alien tentacle beasts might descend from the sky and slaughter us.

  Even that assumption was starting to wear off. The more distance I got from Airee, the more I realized that the portal in the sky and the subsequent giant alien tentacle beast were summoned as part of a ritual—one that likely involved spilling blood, and one that definitely involved performing Airee’s music. By stealing Sierra—tonight’s drummer and probable sacrifice—I was dealing Airee quite a setback to any immediate plans she might have to summon a giant alien tentacle beast. Shit, even if her new bass player was ready to go on tonight, it seemed increasingly unlikely that a new drummer could go on too.

  Normally my favorite part of posting a track was watching all the responses pile up: the plays and likes and reblogs. Today the cycle was massively accelerated. I’d never seen a post go so disturbingly viral. Probably because people were discovering that the track “Destroy All Unbelievers” sounded exactly like the Monkees track “I’m a Believer.” Don’t ask me why I have Monkees tracks on my laptop. The point is the twins were too stupid to spot me switching out the track in my post.