Death Metal

by Mark All

  He got out and approached the back doors. A quick search revealed no obviously stashed key; he wouldn’t be so lucky twice. He got the tire iron from the car’s trunk and brought it to bear as a crowbar, jamming it between the doorframe and the jamb. It occurred to him that the house might have security, but he hadn’t seen a “Protected By…” sign out front. It didn’t matter. He had to destroy the music from Hell, and out here in the sticks, he should have enough time to do that before the police arrived, even if he did set off an alarm. His life as he knew it was over anyway. He was responsible for Charlene’s death and who knew how many more by now. All he could do was try to make amends, to make it right, to redeem himself.

  He pressed his weight against the bar and the door’s lock broke with a loud metallic snap, sending the glass panel shooting across its track and opening the house to him. His heart beating madly, he leaned against the jamb to catch his breath, then stepped inside.

  In the darkness, he tripped over what he took to be a pile of instrument or microphone cables. “Shit,” he mumbled. He fumbled for a light switch and eventually located it on the wall beside the door. The overhead fixture illuminated a mostly empty room, which was apparently a staging area for loading out equipment. Open and empty road cases and discarded equipment racks sat in stacks against one wall. The other wall featured a door to a hallway.

  Still hefting the tire iron, Ben stepped into the hall, which extended to his left and right. The opposite side of the hall featured two doors. He went to the left hand door, opened it, and stepped inside onto a rubber floor. A sound studio. Silence swallowed him, not the comforting quiet of all the studios he’d been in, but the claustrophobic stillness of a cave deep underground, or a coffin. The light from the outer room behind him glinted off a large plate glass window to his right. That would be the control room. He made his way toward it and found another door beside the window.

  It opened easily into the control room. A glittering forest of red, green, and blue lights twinkled in racks and on the banks of preamplifiers, compressors, limiters, and other professional audio equipment. Fairburn apparently had invested a small fortune in this place. Yet somehow Ben was sure the guy hadn’t done anything with it for a year until he’d found the keyboard player’s discs in the safety deposit box.

  Ben flipped on the lights and looked around for the computer, which he found under the mixing console, a Mac Pro. Scanning around, he located one other computer and three external hard drives, likely holding audio of drum banks and synthesizer samples, but also no doubt backups of work files and finished projects.

  He set the tire iron down and leaned over the keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Clicking the mouse to clear the screen savers on the two large monitors above the old analog console, he breathed a deep sigh of relief when the desktop appeared on one, and Pro Tools’ main window appeared on the other. Fairburn hadn’t password protected his screen saver. Thank God.

  Now to look for a backup program to see if it was only storing locally, or also to an online service. Then he would check the file-sharing site Fairburn had used to transfer “Fire It Up” to Jessica.

  He was mousing along the menu bar, looking for a commercial backup service, when metal clanked against metal behind him.

  He whirled around and involuntarily uttered a cry.

  A tall man stood before him, his face a mask of cold fury, holding an axe.

  Stammering and stuttering, Ben staggered back and stumbled over the tire iron on the floor. His eyes went from the man to the tool and back to the man. He’d never be able to pick the tire iron up in time.

  “You shouldn’t have fucked with me,” the dark figure said. It raised the axe.

  Ben screamed in terror, then in agony as the heavy blade cut through his neck and collarbone. He lived for a few Hellish seconds as his life flowed out of him, then he was gone.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Saturday night

  The deafening music on the sound system stopped mid-song, the house lights went dark, and the jam-packed crowd in the Athens Theater erupted in cheers and whoops.

  David loved this moment of inevitability above all, the anticipation as reality slowed to a crawl, poised and pregnant with infinite potential. In these agonizingly long seconds before the band started playing, the feeling that anything could happen took him. The tension built, as thick and heavy as the fog being pumped onto the stage, which was lit by five red spotlights. He slipped through the darkness between the lights to his workstation, stage right. His mic stand’s boom jutted over the broad pedalboard in front of him, and to his right sat a rack case with the computer and its interface. He looked out over the crowd, his hands fondling the Goldtop Les Paul, not the best guitar for shredding, but with the most beautiful, soulful tone of any instrument he’d ever possessed.

  For now, he could see the rapt, jostling faces. They would soon disappear in the glare of the spotlights aimed at him. There was always a heady energy in the room in the seconds before a concert began, but this time it was palpable, and David felt so much stronger and more powerful than ever before in his life, it was scary.

  He glanced over at Alan and back at Mike to see if they were in place, grinned, then hit the spacebar on the laptop.

  A synthesizer note so low it was more of a rumbling sensation than audio ominously swelled, then white noise, flanged and phased, washed through it like waves of change, and they both intensified in a swift crescendo. The band, partly live and partly recorded, came in, first with a brief drum intro, then cascading layers of arpeggios from the synths and organ, punctuated by a series of quick staccato stabs of guitar, bass, and drums, synchronized with precise blasts of lighting. The hits multiplied in number and frequency, then, impelled by a massive fill that spanned the entire drum kit, “Fire It Up” commenced in earnest. Heavy metal pounded in the groove, while a flood of white lights bathed the stage, as blindingly brilliant as if they were playing on the surface of the sun. With the bass and kick drum pounding his abdomen, David had never felt so alive. He sensed that not only the band, but everyone in the house did as well. The crowd surged toward the stage, packing tight in a dense sea of headbangers fused together into a single entity, fists pumping the air.

  Alan began the soaring, majestic melody, nailing every note and wringing each for all it was worth. He’d never sung with more conviction or control, and Mike was tight and powerful and in the pocket. After the first B section came a brief transition dominated by the lead guitar and synth blending in harmony, then David was one with the music.

  Although lost in the performance, he was dimly aware that the atmosphere in the large room was changing, thickening more than could be accounted for by the dry ice fog and humidity. Before and below him, the crowd that had been swaying in time with the backbeat began to writhe like worms being burned with matches, like tormented souls in the deepest pit of Hell.

  They arrived at the guitar solo and David seared the fretboard with more power and precision than he’d ever achieved, the runs fierce and crisp, the held notes flowing like water, his vibrato fluid.

  It was at the climax of his solo that the violence began in earnest, signaled by what sounded like a gunshot, audible even over the band, which was reaching over a hundred decibels, approaching the sound levels of a 747. Knots formed and broke apart in the crowd, which churned in constant erratic motion. People shoved, elbowed, kicked, and choked each other. Tables and tall chairs were overturned and crashed to the floor, audience members sprawling over them. Through the blinding lights David saw a man pound another in the face, his fist coming away red and the other man’s nose a fountain of blood as he was knocked back. The victim could not fall, supported and held in position by the packed bodies surrounding him. The attacker hit him again.

  David screamed as he tore his gaze away, sickened, yet even more energized. His mind recoiled in disgust, but he could not stop playing.

  Penumbra had started a riot. The music was causing it and his stomach sank as
the realization came to him that he’d known it would come to this all along. The dreadful knowledge had existed deep in his subconscious, had tried to surface, but he’d suppressed it. Whether of his own volition, or the music itself had exercised this mind control on him, he had no idea, but in that moment he knew the utmost guilt.

  Sick with horror, shame, and remorse, he turned to see Alan banging his head, playing air guitar, his eyes closed, oblivious to the full-scale riot, and Mike staring glassy-eyed into the void that had subsumed them all. They had lost their souls and minds.

  NO!

  He whirled to face the crowd again; he had to stop this madness, had to do something. Yet he could not stop his fingers. It was as if someone else was running his autonomic nervous system.

  As the song drove forward into its demonic-sounding development section, the keyboard parts shrieking like the screams of the damned, a flash came from David’s left, brighter than all the stage lights, reddish-yellow. He turned to see a fountain of fire blossom at the center of the stage, two stories high like all the band’s flash pots put together in a single explosion, so bright he had to close his eyes, though he did not stop playing. When he opened them again, Vince Buckley stood there with the flames collapsing around him.

  Vince stormed over to him, his visage one of sadistic, lustful, Satanic triumph, and David staggered back, banging his hip painfully on his rack, nearly sending it tumbling. Now, finally, his hands fell from the guitar. Vince stepped up to him, his face in David’s, laughing. He disengaged the guitar’s strap locks and tore David’s Les Paul from him. Then he was gone, heading back to the middle of the stage, as the rest of the band played on, oblivious or simply unable to stop.

  Vince held the guitar high and shouted at the crowd, a few of whom had stopped their fighting to behold him in his awe and majesty. His voice, though unamplified, boomed like thunder, louder than the band. It was the sound of a great and terrible being.

  “I am the God of Hell Fire!”

  He held the Les Paul by the neck, then swung it like an axe down onto the stage. As it hit, sending splinters of wood and recoiling strings flying, it exploded into another pillar of flame that reached the ceiling far above and sent fire streaming along the rails of the balconies of the second and third levels of the theater and splashing across the stage in a rolling cloud of black smoke.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Saturday night

  Jessica fought her way through an endless wave of screaming people rushing out the doors of the theater into the street, took an elbow in the ribs, but made it inside. She moved quickly out of the doorway, and from beneath the overhang of the first wide balcony, looked onto a scene of madness.

  She was too late, and the sheer horror of it all overwhelmed her. Tears streaked her cheeks; sobs hacked in her throat and nearly doubled her over.

  The crowd's cries were as loud as the band, and the dance floor was a vicious mob, an orgy of violence. People littered the floor under moving gang fights, some trying to crawl as they were trampled, some lying still.

  Dominating the flaming stage and the room, overseeing it all, was Vince Buckley.

  “You will listen now!” he screamed, the floor rumbling with his preternaturally loud voice, impossibly audible above the cacophony from the floor and the music from the PA system. “I bring eternal life through eternal death. I orchestrate the end of the world!”

  David and the others stood stunned as the computer continued to play the backing tracks of Oblivion excruciatingly loudly and furiously through the sound system, the very soundtrack of Hell itself. The music had locked into a headbanging groove, the bass pumping low D eighth notes and Mike pounding four on the floor and slamming the snare on the backbeats, while two dueling synths played like ferocious demons battling for a damned soul.

  Vince pumped his fists in the air, as if encouraging the flames spreading through the building. “Give in to your secret desires and needs! I leave you to your true nature now, I go to spread the seeds of destruction, to enact my vengeance!”

  He disappeared in an explosion of fire that set the drum kit and hulking racks of PA speakers ablaze.

  Jessica wailed as she saw the band members abandoning the stage, each one appearing lost and dazed. She had to get to David. Vince Buckley’s fearsome performance told her that the unleashed power of Oblivion had strengthened him beyond comprehension, and she feared that Ben had failed. The music must be destroyed, if there was still time, and she couldn’t count on anyone else to do it.

  She waded into the mob.

  * * * *

  Wesley Lambert came late to the party, but hadn’t missed it: he could hear the music still blasting from inside the Athens Theater and quickened his pace, eager to join it with his own blasting. It galled him to think that his followers had arrived before he did, that just wasn’t right, but he was here now. Around sundown, traffic between Atlanta and Athens had picked up. Some of it must have been others heading to the heavy metal show. Now to make up for lost time. Starting with these fucking assholes blocking his way into the club.

  As he approached the doorway, a steady stream of people issued from it. They separated into two rivers flowing around him when they saw his Glock.

  “Get back in there, you cowards!” he yelled.

  No one listened to him, so he shot the first man coming at him in the face.

  * * * *

  Hearing gunshots behind her, Jessica threw herself forward with even more determination. She made her way toward the right side of the room and along the bar, where a space had cleared as people joined the clot of fighters in the middle of the room. She was jostled into a muscular man with a shaved head and he rounded on her and took her by the arms. Screaming, she brought her knee up into his groin, her leg driven by the strength of panic. He cried out and bent at the waist and she shoved him out of her way, only to run into two women hugging and clawing each other, one holding a bloody clump of hair. The other snarled “Bitch!” at Jessica and slapped at her. Jessica dodged sideways, toward the bar on her right, stumbled over something, and fell to her knees.

  She was kneeling beside a woman whose over-sprayed blond hair was thick with blood that ran down onto her blouse, darkening and sticking it to her body.

  “Oh, my God,” Jessica cried. “Sharon!”

  Sharon Stevens, the club manager, moaned something incoherent and nearly inaudible.

  Jessica bent closer and got her arms under the woman. “I can’t hear you!”

  The manager blinked, wiped blood from her left eye. “Got your message. I should’ve listened, should’ve stopped it.” She batted her eye again, blood and tears and mascara and eyeliner running. “How could I have known?”

  Sharon closed her eyes and went limp in Jessica’s arms. “Sharon? Sharon! I’ve got to get you up, get you out of here.”

  Someone kicked Jessica and she huddled closer to the base of the bar, holding Sharon to her. She couldn’t haul the woman out of the club in this chaos, but had to get her to some semblance of safety, and decided behind the bar would have to do. She backed toward the rear wall and the end of the bar, struggling to drag the club manager, but people kept tripping over her. By the time Jessica got her to the back wall, she realized Sharon wasn’t breathing.

  “Sharon!” No response came. As she pushed the woman into the opening that led behind the bar, gunfire cracked again, twice, and from just over her head came a loud noise. Splinters of wood rained down on her, some penetrating her arm, but she hardly noticed.

  Some lunatic was shooting at her.

  * * * *

  Everyone’s behavior was far too unruly for Anna Simonoff. She couldn’t process any complicated train of thought, because her iPod still rocked her brain through her earbuds, the sounds of “Fire It Up” bizarrely blending with the music playing in the room and the banging and shouting. She’d known she would find people misbehaving here, and that she would have work to do. Presumptuous bastards, trying to take Her Song from her
. Who the hell did these little pissants think they were?

  Slipping the chef’s blade from her purse, she headed for a particularly snotty-looking man in a suit. A college kid bumped into her, knocking her arm, nearly dislodging the knife from her grip. She wheeled on him.

  “You little shit!” Anna raised the blade and slashed it across his face, raking it across an eye and his nose, snagging it briefly in his mouth before tearing it raggedly through his lip.

  Spattered with blood, she spit and shouted, “Who else wants some of this? I’ll cut your little peckers off! It’s my song!”

  * * * *

  Bob Finster, natty in his banker’s uniform of an Italian suit and silk tie, grinned, relishing his role in all this creative destruction. Goddamn, there were a lot of hot chicks here tonight. Showing a little leg and side boob while they were fighting, too. He’d have to tap some of that stuff, but first, he had to show what kind of man he was. He had to earn himself a girl.

  He couldn’t hear his phone, but felt the vibrations of the music it played in his inside suit jacket, which he found reassuring. He made his way through the frenetic crowd, catching a glimpse of David Fairburn helping some skinny blond chick down the stairs at the back of the stage.

  “Dave!” He waved, smiling. “Good show! Woo-hoo, rock ’n’ fuckin’ roll!” David didn’t see him, which he found disappointing, but that was okay, Bob had his own part to play. He bent and drew the hunting knife from its sheath against his calf, got bumped and tottered for a moment before steadying himself and straightening, then scanned the crowd. Time to go to work.