‘Gasm let their end note ring, and ring, and ring, building audience applause like the airwash blast of an approaching jet fighter. The crowd had been caressed into a valley, and now it was time to peak them out. Hartz sprang into the air, legs pinwheeling. Lucas thought of Wile E. Coyote, making his getaway in a Roadrunner cartoon. Hartz landed on the boards on one knee, punching a raw chord out of his white Stratocaster. Reichmann woke up and began to bludgeon his hi-hat cymbal, thankful he could resume his endless four-four “Indian Giver” beat. This pounding, chording, and tribal prep gobbled up eight full bars before the band turned the song around a corner and bent it into “Doncha Want To.”
Lucas seated the PSO sight against his eye and focused on Tim Fozzetto’s bobbing white mane. As fast as he could, he tracked and targeted the four other band members in succession.
Flame pot explosions punctuated the refrain of the song, blowing columns of flash powder and orange fire twenty feet into the air on both sides of the drum riser. Then Hartz threw out both arms in a crucifixion pose, his Strat hanging free, still humming. A hidden pot positioned directly in front of Hartz’s mike stand went off, obliterating him in a sheet of blinding white fire—foom! Lucas thought of Jackson Knox, eating chunks of his own guitar. When all eyes in the house recovered from the blitz, Hartz stood there victorious. The silver mike stand and the face of the Strat had both been painted with smoke paste before the show, and now they were blackened and steaming.
The audience berserked. Some were caught off guard. All approved, loudly, longly. Hartz was invincible.
Neat trick, thought Lucas. It was one that had not been on the videotape. Hartz must have gotten his eyebrows singed a time or two on this tour.
They wrapped up “Doncha Want To”—always a crowd pleaser—and bright red scoop lighting flooded the entire stage. Jackal Reichmann, laughing like a maniac, stood spread-legged atop his kit and hoisted his drum-fed machine gun. He held the trigger down and crisscrossed the front ranks of the audience, the ones crammed like lemmings against the orchestra pit barricade. The squibs, planted in triple rows along the footlight trench of the stage and salted around on the monitors and P.A. equipment, were detonated electronically. Reichmann’s sham bullets blew glitter and paper shrapnel into the air. The front-huggers ducked and shrieked, and when the shooting stopped, Hartz was already filling the airspace with a freeform intro to “Loose Rivets” from Primal Scream. Reichmann kicked out and dropped back into place in the manner of an old-time cinema cowboy vaulting onto his trusty horse. The machine gun was still smoking as he began to pump and pound.
Lucas cradled the Dragunov against one thigh and waited, crouching, high above and in front of the band. From his vantage point he could see roadies snaking corrugated hoses for the smoke machines into place behind the P.A. system.
The crowd’s initial hostility had been overwhelmed by ’Gasm’s pyrotechnics. For at least two more songs, Hartz and company would have the audience palmed and wrapped.
The latent aggression Lucas had felt seething up toward him from the Arena floor earlier had had an additional source. At four in the afternoon, a lath and tag board booth had been erected in the middle of the Community Center’s broad stone patio. It was the sort of booth one sees at county fairs or during election weeks. Slathered across the top of the booth in stark red tempera letters was the admonition JESUS IS THE KING, Not Elvis Presley.
What Elvis had to do with ’Gasm, Lucas wasn’t sure. An advance guard of sweet, primly dressed, terribly earnest young women did their best to foist folded tracts onto the kids milling about the patio, killing time before the lines formed. At about six, when people began arriving in force, an enormous ghetto blaster appeared in the booth. It was the size of a large suitcase, all black and silver with twin speakers like begrilled insect eyes. A slickly groomed pastor was dropped curbside by a wheezing Chevy Nova. He made his way to the booth, tuned the huge radio to an empty AM band, and pulled a Mister Microphone from inside his coat. Though it was suffocatingly hot, he did not ever shed the coat.
The tirade that blatted forth from the radio had been energetic and incomprehensible, forming a surreal soundtrack for Lucas’s waiting time. The pastor shoved forth the testimony that a member of the rock metal group you are paying to see has admitted to consuming human flesh! He did not waste time citing references. It was gospel. His young ladies and young men joggled their heads gravely at each apocalyptic pronunciamento. The pastor fireballed onward with that trapped but defiant look Sam Houston must have gotten when he saw his buddies dropping like mosquitoes at the Alamo. Lucas wondered whether this dude had ever wasted pulpit time on a consideration of the act of communion as symbolic cannibalism.
Just as the waiting concertgoers began shouting epithets and making threatening motions, the police dropped by to say howdy. A contingent of Tucson Metro officers hung close enough to the booth to discourage any spontaneous trashing of the wild-eyed pastor and his zomboid charges.
Ten minutes before the Arena doors sprang wide to admit the over seven thousand people waiting to see ’Gasm, a battered Ford pickup truck chugged and clunked into the loading zone near the booth. It had obviously come off the same lot for senile vehicles as the Chevy Nova and was loaded down with more of the pastor’s minions. Each of these clear-eyed soldiers of the Lord toted a cardboard box filled with books, posters, records, and other items any fool could recognize as sinful. The pastor continued babbling, his Mister Microphone in hand… but now a propane torch was in his other hand, and he waved it around for special emphasis. The icons of vice and corruption were dumped at his feet—’Gasm albums, EPs by the Nuclear War Babies, old Beatles discs, records by the Stones, the Who, Rude Boy, Patti Page, AC/DC, Merle Haggard and the Strangers, Jules and the Polar Bears, Jim Nabors, Leonard Bernstein, Street Pajama, even Alvin and the Chipmunks. Even an ancient copy of Harmonica Harmonies, amid a smattering of other records all picked up for 49 a shot at K-Mart to bulk out the haul. ’Gasm albums, after all, cost retail. Among the books spilling onto the heap were works by Robert Ludlum, John D. MacDonald, and Isaac Asimov. Newspaper accounts would later report that the pile also included copies of the Destroyer novels, several violence pulps by Stephen Grave, The Guitar Fake Book, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Fahrenheit 451, Jane Fonda’s Workout Book, Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, and several dictionaries, including Bierce’s … all of which had nothing whatsoever to do with the demon of heavy metal, but which helped make the potential pyre much more impressive, especially for the TV news cameras.
Rock ‘n’ roll wasn’t the only thing that could distract the impressionable from America’s old gods.
The police intervened. One officer fought to remain civil as he addressed people he thought of as Nazis in religious drag. He informed the crazy pastor—civilly —that burning records inside the city limits violated ordinances against combustibles emitting noxious fumes, and polyvinyl chloride certainly classified. The pastor stowed his torch in a huff. Both the cop and the pastor had to shout at each other over the catcalls provided by the line of concertgoers.
At the pastor’s direction, the sinful pile was killed with balibats and axes. By the time this was coordinated, the audience was inside the Arena. The cops directed the pastor’s group to clean up their mess and watched, bored, while they complied. It was less than momentous.
The entire abortive moment had been set up on the local news by a Tucson minister the night before. Lucas had caught the guy’s act on TV in his room at the Holiday Inn.
“I was in Haiti and Jamaica,” intoned the stern elder, all brilliant white hair and glittering, point-making specs. “This rock music puts youngsters into the same uncontrolled frenzy of voodoo worship I witnessed in those places. Give them a beat, and Satan can slip into their souls with his message of doom. Youngsters set up these heavy metal rock and roll musicians as role models, like Ozzy Osbourne. Young people perish at Ozzy Osbourne shows; it’s been proven. I have seen a record album by this gr
oup playing tomorrow night. There was no sticker or other warning on the record. The name of this group, which is in itself odious, and the names of their dark songs, all promote illicit sex, sadomasochism, pain, and death. A publicity gimmick is nothing less than an open doorway for Satan! People seem surprised that this singer was killed in San Francisco. He was blown up by the fires of Hell, and others have died violent deaths. Violence begets violence, and those singers sing with Satan now. We offer young people an alternative to damnation. Our interest is not to appear as fanatics destroying other people’s property, but to save souls by any means! Jesus Christ is the king—not Elvis, not the Beatles, not this Bruce Springstein or any heavy metal group.” He set his jaw for the camera, determined, as immovable as the Rock.
As it turned out, the record bashing pulled no coverage at all. Record store owners, FM deejays, and even reverends from other local churches were all given equal time. All condemned this particular minister’s fascistic tactics to one degree or another. Lucas could not recall the man’s name.
The gyrating performance below had blurred before his eyes. Had he started all that fuss with his simple, spray-painted diversion? Bunch of damned nuts. Yet here he was, squatting in the rafters, making ready to do God’s work.
Or somebody’s.
He centered Jackal Reichmann in his crosshairs again. This deed was not on behalf of any god, any intangible spirit born of superstitious fear. This was for Kristen, born of his loins, whom he had loved… and whom the capering buck in the white leather panties had helped, in however tiny a measure, to erase from this world. His index finger teased the trigger. This time he would pull the trigger without blinking.
Quickly, he sighted Fozzetto again. He would hit the bassist first, since Reichmann was installed behind his drums and was not as mobile. In the scope, tinted red, he could see the smoke hoses leaking wisps of white fog, the dry-ice cloud cover that would flood the stage and transform it into a primordial tarn under cover of the darkness supplied by Pepper Hartz’s big solo spot.
It was almost time. When the lights snapped out, Lucas would have three minutes not to screw everything up.
Hartz exhorted the crowd with the usual battle cries: “You wanna ROCK ‘N’ ROLL SOME MORE? We’re gonna PARTY HARDY tonight! Lemme hear ya say YEAH!” He windmilled his arm and struck a hard, harsh note. Whaannnng!! He stroked the crowd and made them chant “YEAH!” with each salvo. Fists rose, made devil horns, and again Lucas thought of the Nazis. YEAH! Faster, faster, YEAH! American audiences were nothing if not syncopated—YEAH! The next song needed their participation, and Lucas knew it would be “Rip Me Off (Blow Me Down),” one of the rowdier songs from Throw Down Your Arms. The stage moves for this one were recorded indelibly in his mind. This was the lead-in song to Hartz’s big solo.
Yeah.
To Lucas’ metabolism, his plugged-up ears and throbbing eyes, the music became a towering, unstoppable migraine headache. The shifting masses of air, pushed around by heavy amplification, redefined the reality in which he moved. The grubs below could never suspect the motivations of the being above, the man no one could see. Wasn’t that the image that the nameless TV minister had painted of his god? A will-’o-the-wisp who guided everyone’s destiny… comes and goes like Santa Claus… his handiwork plain for all to see, the presence itself unseen?
In the nightmare, he feels weight in his hands and looks down. I’m packed, he thinks. Thirty slugs should take the bastards down all right.
But the nightmare had not bothered him since his final days at Olive Grove. He’d killed it, too, and handily.
The audience surged against the barricade, yelling out the refrain lines to “Rip Me Off.” The bouncers perked up and held steady, grinning grimly. They were a cadre of body builders who bulged mightily from their canary-yellow T-shirts, and they grimaced at each other to let the Tucson audience know they were not going to take any shit. You could put their guard-dog dedication in the bank.
Now Lucas tilted the Dragunov and used the dim-red, incremented circle of night-sight to scan the audience itself. Now he could see them as individuals—aggregate neurons powered by the electrical jolts of music. Now he saw them as a tentload of Bible Beltists, swaying in unison, waving their arms in the air, born again as Hartz molded his song toward its thunderous and utterly predictable conclusion.
Perhaps lambasting the music as predictable was unfair. Predictability was part of the music’s attraction. The very sloganism of heavy metal was its mainstay strength. Lucas was reminded of the social codes of the Hell’s Angels, the permutated chivalry to which righteous bikers adhered. Their rules were absolute, and a lot of normal citizens couldn’t handle a system in which there were no flexible ethics, no creative reinterpretation of peculiar and unwritten laws. Disputes were settled in terms of a one-to-one stand, whether it was between two hog jockeys contesting rights to the same old lady or two clubs claiming the same turf. The price for breaking the rules was ostracism … sometimes known as getting your skull kicked in and your corpse dumped in a wheat field. There was black and there was white. The basics were dictated by simplicity and expediency, and that was what ’Gasm’s music held in common with the biker credo. The kids below Lucas had not showed up to be surprised. These were the people who watched MTV day in, day out. Instead, they had come to give trained reactions to stimuli they already knew by heart. They had come not because Pepper “Mad Max” Hartz’s gimmicks were anything new, but because Hartz was nicknamed after a movie they had all seen, and they wanted to see him survive a fake pillar of fire one more time. They wanted to pretend to be shocked by Jackal Reichmann’s blanks. They didn’t give a damn about the music’s originality, they gave a damn about how easy it was to duplicate. They all wanted to live the rockstar fantasy, and if Pepper Hartz stood up and proved to them that what he did with his hands was simple, they would all envy him and perpetuate his existence. ’Gasm took their money. In return, the audience expected to orgasm according to conditioning received via various media —manipulative selling campaigns like those Lucas had dreamed up to make a living.
(During his first visit to the local cathouse, the country hick forks over five bucks and gets so excited when the lady of the evening takes his hand to lead him upstairs that he ejaculates in his pants. “Now what do I do?” he says, aghast. The painted lady, her mission prematurely accomplished, says, “Now you find yourself a ride home, lover. Y’all come again real soon.”)
Here, below Lucas, as in that ancient joke, the conditions of an unspoken contract were being fulfilled. ’Gasm did not have to be innovative, not by a mote. So what?
So had that meant that Kristen had known exactly what she was getting into that black night? Was she as responsible for her death as Whip Hand?
Rolling fog, pink in the glow of the sniperscope, began to congest the stage as “Rip Me Off” wound up. The cobalt-blue spotlight perked on and singled out Hartz, who lashed into his solo with an earsplitting feedback whine that brought another breaker of wild applause.
Lucas was still scanning the audience, stunned, thinking, Impossible!
He shifted up hurriedly through the total darkness in the auditorium. Too hurriedly. It made him sloppy. He zeroed in on Fozzetto.
Where are you, you bastard… there. There, gotcha.
He was positive he’d seen Kristen in the crowd below. The nightmare and the reality had fused, blurring into each other. Long blond hair, Cory’s nose and eyes, his own square, definite jawline, crystal beads, silk shirt, looking adoringly up at Hartz in his deep blue circlet of light. Goddamned little slut would spread her legs for anyone, anyone, and she had to be watched constantly….
No, impossible. The girl was not Kristen. From this distance, under these conditions, Winston fucking Churchill would look like Kristen. There must be at least two thousand clear-skinned heartbreakers here tonight who looked vaguely like Kristen. Yet the sight—the imagined sight—had shaken him.
Five seconds gone.
Fozzetto was unstringing himself from his bass guitar, dipping from under the Fender’s broad, tooled strap and poising it on a nickel-plated stand next to the drum riser. As soon as the stage lights changed to favor Hartz, Fozzetto was apparently bound for the wings. Maybe he had to take a quick leak. Lucas would have to tag him before he crossed behind Rick Hicks. He felt like swearing, but that would have bollixed his aim, and he would only have this one chance.
Lucas squeezed off, and the Dragunov bucked against the hollow of his shoulder. The flat crack of the expelled bullet was lost in the ear-pegging keen of Hartz’s gorilla axe-handling. Fozzetto’s hair flew apart on the far side of his head, and he stumbled into the drum riser as though shoved. One hand thumped the bass drum. Lucas put a second slug into him before he could collapse. No sound. The bass player’s white mop of hair began to darken as soon as he hit the stage floor.
Nine seconds gone.
Jackal Reichmann’s face was like the fifty-point hole of a bullseye. It would be fast and easy to plant a slug right into his mouth, which was now hanging open in a black oval that sat at ground zero in the tinted crosshairs. He was the only band member who had seen Fozzetto’s head come apart, who had watched him crumple to the boards. Lucas gave him one extra second of life, to react. He might decide to stand up and provide a bigger target. Manufactured smoke billowed up behind him, and he was framed in the red light of the scope. During his bit with the gangster-style machine gun, red spotlights were used. This time the red light belonged to Lucas, and the shells were not blanks.
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