Armageddon Rag

by George R. R. Martin

  Kansas City was fifty thousand people under the stars, and music that lasted half the night, encore after encore after encore. The Nazgûl opened with “Wednesday’s Child”—Faxon still hoped—and later, when they were really hot, they did “Goin’ to the Junkyard” just for the hell of it, and the crowd was so moist and ready and hopped-up that they almost bought both of them, despite Richmond, but that night especially it was Patrick Henry Hobbins from start to finish, almost, dominating the stage, dominating the crowd, making them howl and clap and stomp their feet, driving the music even higher and louder. Out in that sea of people were all six members of American Taco, Jamie Lynch’s other world-class band, disbanded since 1975, but Hobbins spotted them and called them up on stage, and for almost an hour the two bands battled each other as they had warred in days of old, and even the egregious Todd Oliver of the Tacos, dressed in a paisley shirt and silver-gray stovepipe hat instead of the silver lamé jumpsuit he wore with Glisten, seemed to rise to the occasion and remember what rock and roll was all about. The battle of the bands ended with Oliver and Hobbins strutting across the stage and singing an insane duet while Maggio traded hot licks with the Tacos’ lead guitarist. Then the others left, and the Nazgûl shut it down with a rousing, chaotic, thunderous version of “Prelude to Madness.”

  But Kansas City was also Larry Richmond going crazy in his room back at their hotel. Sandy was padding down the corridor in search of a Pepsi when he heard a noise. The door was ajar; he hesitated a moment and opened it. Richmond stood against the window with balled fists, his white face reddened by hysterical tears. A lamp had been knocked over; it lay on the carpet, the base shattered and the shade torn, but the bulb still alight, giving the room an unnatural bleak cast. There were too many shadows in all the wrong places, and a glare of light from below. Peter Faxon stood a few feet from Richmond, talking him down in a calm, reasoned voice. “Take it easy, Larry,” he was saying. “It’s OK. Too many pills, that’s all.”

  “I don’t do pills,” Richmond said shrilly. His eyes, pale with fear, found Sandy. “I don’t!” he insisted.

  “You took a whole handful in the middle of the first set,” Faxon said. “That’s why you’re so crazy now.” He raised his hands, palms out, in a gesture that said calm, calm, calm.

  “No,” Richmond said, petulant as a child. “No, no, no, no, no. I didn’t! I don’t do… don’t…”

  “You tell him,” Faxon said to Sandy.

  Sandy nodded slowly. “Uppers, I think.”

  Larry Richmond screamed and kicked the fallen lamp as hard as he could. It spun around, and the shadows shifted sickeningly. Then Richmond collapsed on the sofa, sobbing. “I don’t remember,” he said loudly. “I don’t remember it, I don’t remember anything. What’s happening to me, what’s happening?”

  “Give me a hand,” Faxon said. He and Sandy laid the kid out on the couch, covered him with a blanket, tried to calm him down. “It’s strain,” Faxon said in the even tones of one who knows. “You’ve been under a lot of strain. The travel, the shows. You’re not used to it. Hell, none of us ever get used to it. Look what’s happening to Rick and John. John’s eating too much, drinking too much. Rick’s freaking out on drugs. And both of them are old hands at this. You’re having a breakdown, maybe. A nervous breakdown. Big fucking deal. You’ll get through it. Only two more shows to do, and then we’ve all got a long rest coming. We’ll cut a new album after West Mesa and go home and sleep for a year. Don’t worry about it. You hear? Don’t worry.” He forced a smile. “And you’re singing better every damn night, too.”

  Faxon’s words seemed to take the edge off Richmond’s fear, and at the last comment, the kid actually smiled a bit. “I am?” he said. “No shit?”

  “No shit,” Faxon said.

  But a minute later, when they closed the door behind them and stood together in the hall, Faxon turned to Sandy and said, in a tone vastly less cheerful, “Do you really believe the bill of goods I just sold him in there?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t,” Faxon said. “Come with me. I want to talk.”

  They went back to Faxon’s room, and Faxon got a couple of beers out of his refrigerator, opened them, and sat down with a grim, hard look on his face. “You know why he went crazy?”

  “I can guess,” Sandy said.

  “Someone mentioned American Taco, how great the whole thing had been. Richmond didn’t remember. Not a bit of it. He didn’t even know the Tacos had been in the crowd tonight, much less that we’d jammed with them. He remembers less with each goddamned show, but up to now he’s been lying to himself. He remembers less, but he sounds better. Why is that, I wonder?”

  “Why are you asking me?” Sandy said.

  Faxon’s green eyes were bright and piercing. “Because I think you know a hell of a lot more than you let on. Don’t bullshit me, Sandy. We’re both too smart to play those games. You’re a part of this. I don’t know how or why, but you are. For me, it all started when we went up in the Flying Eye together, and you dug up a hell of a lot of memories and feelings that I’d buried a long time back. So don’t play the innocent with me. Tell me what the fuck is going on here.”

  “You wouldn’t believe it if I did.”

  Peter Faxon laughed. “Try me. Right now I’d believe anything. You don’t get up on that stage night after night. I do. I can feel it, see it, hear it. Sometimes—” He hesitated, took a swig from his beer bottle, and frowned. “I swear, I get the weirdest feelings up there. Back in St. Louis, I was playing, wrapped up in the music, not paying much attention to the crowd, and then I looked up…it was in the middle of ‘Prelude to Madness,’ I think… and the whole fucking hall was full of candles. Thousands of candles out there in the dark. It was like I’d been transported back in time fifteen years. Then I blinked, and they were gone.” He shook his head. “I get a horrible cold feeling sometimes, too. It’s all I can do to keep my teeth from chattering. Mostly I get it when I look over and see Pat there, singing. Pat! Not Richmond. Yeah, they look alike, but I knew Pat Hobbins better’n his mother did, and believe me, I can tell the difference.” He hesitated, drank some more beer. “It is Pat, isn’t it?” he asked, with a shrewd tilt of his head.

  “You ought to know,” Sandy replied. “You wrote the music.”

  “The music?”

  “Music to Wake the Dead,” Sandy said.

  “Crazy,” Faxon muttered. “It can’t be happening.”

  “It is,” Sandy said. “Don’t lie to yourself. You believe it as much as I do. Larry Richmond doesn’t remember the concerts because, for the most part, he isn’t there.”

  “Pat,” Faxon whispered. “I knew it. I could feel it.”

  Sandy said nothing.

  “It’s got to be…I don’t know… psychological, right? Split personality. I’ve heard of things like that. An actor who does the same role so often he wigs out and starts thinking he is the character he’s playing. That’s got to be it. There are two people inside Richmond’s body—the kid, and this pseudo-Hobbins. Up on stage, the kid can’t do it, so Hobbins takes over.”

  “Plausible,” Sandy said. “Believe that if you want to. You and I both know it isn’t so.”

  “So what’s the alternative?” Faxon snapped. “Possession? Possession from beyond the grave?”

  Sandy suddenly felt very tired. The beer tasted sour in his mouth. He nodded wearily.

  “Impossible,” Faxon said. “I don’t believe it.”

  “You can’t believe it,” Sandy said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re a decent man, Peter, and if you believed it, you’d have to stop it, wouldn’t you? You said it in Chicago, backstage, the first time it happened—you don’t want it to stop. Do you?”

  Peter Faxon looked away, frowning.

  “Do you?” Sandy insisted.

  Faxon’s head snapped around. “No,” he said, his mouth tight. “No.” He grimaced. “Jesus. What am I saying?”

  “The tru
th,” Sandy said. “Which is more than you gave to Richmond, isn’t it? Why lie to him? Why the false reassurances? Unless you wanted it to go on.”

  Faxon was staring at the floor now. His eyes had taken on a haunted, frightened cast. “It’s not just the sound, Sandy, not just the music. It’s Pat. He was…he was my brother, my best friend, another side of myself…I hated him at times, but I loved him, too. When I see him up there, just a few feet away, it rips me apart. I want to go to him, hug him, talk to him again. I want him back. Yes. But he fades. Every damned time, when the show is over, he fades, and it’s Richmond again.” He looked up, looked Sandy in the eye. “But not after West Mesa, right? That’s what we are all heading for. Morse, you, me. West Mesa and…and…”

  “‘The Armageddon Rag,’” Sandy said quietly.

  Peter Faxon nodded. “Get out of here, Blair,” he said. “I need to be alone with myself for a while. Get the hell out of here.”

  Sandy stood up and moved toward the door, understanding full well what Faxon was going through. But when his hand was on the doorknob, Faxon stopped him. “One more question.”

  “Yeah?” Sandy said.

  “I know why I don’t stop it. I want Pat back. Maybe I damn myself by saying so, but I value Pat more than a dozen Larry Richmonds. But what about you, Blair? Why are you going along?”

  That was a hard question to answer this late at night, so close to the closing number. “You’re not the only one who loves a ghost,” Sandy said.

  Peter Faxon nodded and looked away, and Sandy made his exit. But out in the hall, when the door snicked shut behind him, his parting words seemed to echo hollowly above the nearby hum of icemaker and Pepsi machine. Wrong, Sandy thought dully, wrong, wrong, wrong. For after all, his ghosts were not dead, only changed, and maybe that only made it hurt the more, yet somehow it made a difference.

  Back in his room, he woke Ananda from her sleep, and she looked at him and smiled and kissed him and they made a swift and violent sort of love, and from her body Sandy took his reassurance, and in her arms he found his comfort.

  On the road Ananda was always close to him, and her closeness made it all right.

  On the road there is no room for doubt.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Heard the singers playin’, how we cheered for more!/

  The crowd then rushed together, tryin’ to keep warm

  Long before the Nazgûl reached Denver, the crowds had arrived. The concert had been sold out a month before, but that did not deter them. They came in campers and trailers, in brand-new Porsches and weathered old Beetles, in pick-up trucks and panel trucks and chartreuse school buses. They came by the hundreds and the thousands and they poured into Red Rocks Park in the foothills west of the city, hard up against the mountains. They camped in the mountains, in the hills, in the amphitheater itself, slept in their vehicles, in sleeping bags, in yurts and tents and teepees, all erected illegally. They gathered around illegal fires and played guitars and passed illegal joints and sang old songs, ignoring park rangers and police and concert security equally.

  A week before the show, the newspapers brimmed with furor and agitation. There was talk of sending in an army of cops to clear out the squatters, there were calls for the National Guard; serious consideration was given to canceling the concert, banning it, moving it. The amphitheater was a gorgeous place, a bowl of pale crimson stone, tier after tier of ascending seats carved from the mountain, walled on three sides by weathered cliffs and tall columns of rock, but low in the east so that, beyond the stage, the lights of Denver shone in the distance… yet, though it was capable of seating nine thousand, it was far too small for the hordes who had trekked to Denver to hear the resurgent Nazgûl. Red Rocks would be destroyed, claimed those who wanted the show stopped; a major riot was predicted.

  Edan Morse worked to defuse the situation, with the help of cooler heads among the local authorities, those who recalled the example of Houston. He asked permission to erect sound towers all through the surrounding parkland so that those outside could hear the show. Permission was granted. He doubled the size of his security, doubled it again, finally increased it to almost a thousand. The authorities went along; Morse assembled a small personal army. He signed a binding pledge making the Nazgûl responsible for all damages, and agreeing to pay the massive cleanup bill afterward.

  Sandy himself released the final announcement to the press. The West Mesa concert, Morse swore, would be completely free. Only ten days off, it promised plenty of room for everyone, good sound, an easy view of the band. Go to Albuquerque, Morse told them, and thousands took him up on the suggestion. The others remained. On the day of the concert, the police estimated that there were thirty thousand of them.

  Sandy and Ananda left for the show four hours early and still had their problems getting there. The roads were jammed with traffic, all of it crawling in the same direction. The shoulders were lined with cars, either stalled or parked. They had to abandon Daydream three miles from the site, when the snarled road became totally impassable. Sandy found room to pull her off, and they walked the rest of the way, the two of them part of a river of humanity streaming up the road. The chaos was infused with a curious light-headedness, a sense of joy, of holiday. Everyone seemed friendly. Six-packs were cracked freely, cans given over to anyone who looked thirsty. Strangers talked to one another happily, shared joints, turned into friends in no time at all. Frisbees went sailing through the late afternoon air.

  Closer to the amphitheater, the throngs grew denser and more testy. The road narrowed, the rocks rose around them as redly as promised, the pilgrims were pushed closer together, and tempers began to fray. Still they streamed on, pressed up against one another until the flow had a life of its own. Sandy could not have turned back then even if he’d wanted to. Up near the entrance to the theater itself, the crowd was a solid hard-packed mass churning with frustration, disappointment, and more than a little claustrophobia. Those who had tickets swore as they tried to push to the front; others pushed back.

  Sandy glimpsed one of Morse’s security force, a big blond woman wearing a crimson armband with a black Nazgûl insignia emblazoned upon it. “Tickets,” she was shouting, “tickets. Tickets come with me.” She was carrying what looked like a sawed-off baseball bat, and using it adroitly to clear a path through the press. Three or four sweaty, grinning ticketholders trailed in her wake.

  “Here,” Ananda shouted when the woman came close. They traded nods of recognition, and she and Sandy shoved through to the woman’s side and were given an escort up to the gate.

  They were in sight of the barrier when a tall, fat black man in a dashiki called out to Ananda. “Hey, babes,” he yelled in a slurred, drunken voice. “Hey, mama, help me out. Get me inside, sister.” Ananda ignored him; they tried to shoulder past, but the going was slow. The man pushed up next to her. “Hey, tits,” he said, “I’ll do ya better’n that white boy.” Sandy, boxed in, was helpless to intervene as the man put a big meaty arm around Ananda and squeezed a breast roughly. “Hey, mama, be nice to me. I’m gonna—”

  He never finished. Ananda moved, moved fast, a deft half-turn that freed her from his grasp, an elbow that took away his breath, and then a hard sharp slam upward, her arm a piston, her palm open. She mashed his nose with the heel of her hand and a thin line of blood ran down from one nostril. Then he collapsed, or began to… the crowd pressed so close on all sides that he barely had room enough to sag, but his blood-smeared face and suddenly vacant eyes sent his neighbors pushing away, and inch by inch the heavy body in green-and-black vanished, sinking to the hard dusty ground.

  The security line was manned by at least twenty of Morse’s people, in the bright crimson armbands. Mirrors was in charge, twin suns shining off his silvered sunglasses. Ananda jerked a thumb back at the man she had felled. “Get him out of there,” she said.

  “We’ll take care of it,” Mirrors said.

  They passed beyond the line to the lip of the amphitheater. It was
crowded even there, but at least there was room to breathe. “Jesus,” Sandy said, glancing back, “what’d you do to him, ’Nanda?”

  “Broke his fucking pig nose for him,” she said.

  “His nose,” Sandy echoed, stunned. He remembered the glimpse he’d had of the swift, sure blow. The flat palm. The crunch at impact. The trickle of blood. “The way he went down,” Sandy said. “I mean, he didn’t even make a sound…”

  “Mirrors will take care of it.”

  “You could kill someone with that kind of blow,” Sandy said.

  Ananda regarded him innocently. “Oh? Well, he started it, right? No one grabs me unless I want to be grabbed.” She smiled and took Sandy’s hand. “And you’re the only one I want grabbing me these days. End of discussion. Come on.”

  Red Rocks was crammed solid with human flesh. Even the aisles were full, and people were sitting and climbing all over the tall encircling rocks. Down in front, a small section had been roped off, and another knot of security men were keeping it clear. Sandy saw Gort among them, his sunburned shaven head looming above all the rest. They climbed down, trying not to step on anyone. Gort grunted at them and lifted Ananda over the rope. “Fucking zoo, ain’t it?” he said.

  “Wait till West Mesa,” Sandy told him.

  Maggio was there, pacing, talking in an excited babble. When he saw Sandy, he came over. “Hey, man, this is wild. Whattaya think? We didn’t get no draw like this even in ’71. Fuck, no. This is gonna be one hell of a show, I guaran-fucking-tee it.” He laughed.