My Favorite Band Does Not Exist

by Robert T. Jeschonek

"Maysville, Pennsyltucky," said Sundra. "Because there's no guarantee the Tuned magazine people will get you to the show on time once they're done with you. You don't think I'm going to let anyone risk ruining the official world debut concert of Youforia, do you?"

  "What can I do to help?"

  "The only thing that'll get them to risk losing fifteen thousand dollars by untying you," said Sundra. "Tell them the truth about Youforia and offer to play a private show for them."

  "Oh," said Reacher. "Is that all?"

  JOHNNY Without was meeting with his war council, trying to decide how he could cross the border of Fireskull's Unrepentant Kingdom without being killed outright. That was when he first learned of the unexpected attack.

  A messenger girl burst into the council chamber without knocking, wide-eyed, sweating, and gasping for breath. "Invasion! The Burning ... Legion!"

  The mood in the room immediately darkened. Johnny shot to his feet, as did everyone else around the council table.

  "Fireskull is invading?" Johnny hurried to the girl and helped her into a chair. "What of our troops?"

  The messenger shook her head. "Not ... good. Heavy ... losses. General Fairforce requests reinforcements ... immediately."

  "But the border was already secure," said General Knell. "The line was three men deep from end to end."

  "It was," gasped the messenger. "It ... was."

  Everyone in the room took a deep breath at once.

  Johnny broke the mood by bringing his fist down hard on the table. "Again he tests us! We men and women of war must fight once more!"

  All eyes locked on Johnny. He pounded the table a second time, ignoring the way his fist liquefied when it hit.

  "I was told that we would have to ally with Fireskull to save this kingdom." Johnny's shifting voice made every syllable sound like it was spoken by a different person. "In my soul, I knew all along that he could not be trusted. Sure enough, while we planned to offer peace, he attacked us like the night snake that he is.

  "But he will not find us lacking!" Johnny hammered the table once more, and his fist shattered like glass. "As often as he has struck at us in the past, we have pushed him away. This time, let us go forth with one common goal. Let us see this as an opportunity to achieve that which we have ever dreamed of!"

  Johnny jumped onto a chair and then stepped up onto the council table. "To hell with the prophecies!" He drew his sword from the scabbard at his side and shook it skyward. Orange light streamed in from the windows, surrounding him with a dramatic aura. "Let this be the day we crush Fireskull for good and all!"

  IT was a beautiful blue-sky day, not that Idea noticed. He was too busy keeping his nose stuck in Fireskull's Revenant.

  "What's going on in there?" asked Eunice, looking over from the driver's seat. "It must be pretty juicy, because you haven't said a word for the past hour."

  "A major battle," Idea said without looking up from the book. "All-out war between archenemies."

  "Just like you," said Eunice. "You're heading for a fight with the Youforia impostors."

  "Not a fight, unless they make it one."

  Eunice swung the Beetle into the passing lane to get around a tractor-trailer. "You do realize you don't have a leg to stand on, right?"

  "What are you talking about?" said Idea.

  "With the impostors." She zipped past the truck and back into the right-hand lane. "You don't own any rights to Youforia, do you? Anyone can use the band's name if they want."

  Idea looked up from Fireskull's Revenant. He thought about what she'd said, and realized she was right. Youforia had been a eighteen completely imaginary creation intended as a hoax, so Idea had never considered trying to copyright anything.

  "How can you even prove you're the one who made up the band?" Eunice continued. "Anybody could say that."

  Since leaving Chicago, Idea's anger at having Youforia stolen from him had propelled him toward Kentucky. Now, on the interstate between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, Ohio, about three hours from Maysville, Eunice was making him realize he hadn't thought his plans through. He had no real strategy for what he was going to do when he reached his destination, other than a vague notion of finding the Youforia impostors and shutting them down.

  "You know, you're right," he said. "So how do you think I should handle this?"

  Eunice laughed. "What makes you think I have any better ideas than you do?"

  "Because you have the digihoroscope. It predicts events on an hour-by-hour basis, remember?"

  "It is about time we checked the digihoroscope," said Eunice. "Thanks for reminding me."

  "Let's see what this thing has to say. Not that I believe in horoscopes, computerized or otherwise."

  "Prepare to have your mind changed," said Eunice. "Or should I say blown?"

  Sitting in a booth at a truck stop, Idea watched as Eunice typed on her strange striped phone. Her fingernails with their black and white yin-yang symbols danced in the little cloud of glitter swirling over the screen.

  She brushed her blond hair from her eyes and tucked it behind her ears, which Idea thought made her look prettier. "Okay." She reached for her chocolate milk shake and took a sip. "All the data has been updated. What question do you want to ask the digihoroscope?"

  "What should I do when I meet the phony Youforia in Kentucky?" said Idea.

  Eunice typed the question into the phone. Then, she held it up with the screen facing Idea.

  A single word was displayed there for him to read. " 'Unite.' That's it?"

  "'Unite' is the keyword. There should be more." Eunice turned the phone around and tapped the screen. "Here it is. 'To succeed, you must unite with your enemies. You must not face the coming threat alone.' "

  Idea frowned. "What threat?"

  She tapped the screen a few more times and shook her head. "That's all it's giving us."

  "It's kind of general, isn't it?"

  "Maybe," said Eunice. "But doesn't it seem like a huge coincidence that it fits your situation perfectly?"

  "Horoscopes are designed to make as many people as possible think they apply specifically to them."

  "The digihoroscope's different," Eunice insisted. "It applies a statistical algorithm to a set of real-world data to generate accurate predictions. Think about it. Seems to me the Youforia impostors qualify as 'enemies.' "

  Idea rubbed the three moles on his left cheek. His stomach twisted, and a familiar chill rushed through him.

  "Maybe we're on to something here," she continued. "What if you team up with the impostors and make them the official 'real' Youforia? This could be exactly what you need to take your make-believe band to the next level."

  Idea was glad he was sitting down, because his head started to spin. As a wave of nausea rolled over him, he realized why Deity Syndrome was rearing up at that moment.

  "You could bring Youforia to life, have a voice in what they do, and share in the profits," said Eunice. "You wouldn't have to sit back and watch someone else exploit the buzz you've whipped up while you get nothing."

  Idea shivered. Her words were dovetailing with the book he'd been reading.

  Eunice had advised Idea to join forces with his enemy. In Fireskull's Revenant, Scrier Inevitas, the witch, had given Johnny Without and Lord Fireskull the same advice.

  Once again Idea was confronted with what seemed like incontrovertible proof that he was a character in a novel. It seemed like a plot device: the book he was reading was paralleling the book in which he was living. It was just the kind of thing that made Idea feel like he could see behind the curtain of his world, straight through to another where his fate was being devised by a malevolent mind of questionable imagination.

  "Are you all right?" Eunice stared at him with a concerned expression.

  He pushed his milk shake aside, nearly knocking it over, and put his head down on the table. "I know you're out there," he said under his breath. "Nobody else seems to know, but I do."

  "What did you say?" Eunice asked.r />
  "I'll be okay in a minute." As the dizziness, chills, and nausea continued to rage, Idea's thoughts swirled around Fireskull's Revenant. Certain events in the book were coming too close to his reality. What if the pages he had yet to read foretold his future?

  And what if that future had already been foreshadowed in his life? For example, the number 64 kept popping up. "Chapter 64" was the title of the Youforia song he'd downloaded from the girl in the coffee shop. Bud System had ordered Youforia tickets from P.O. Box 64.

  Since coming down with Deity Syndrome, Idea had suspected he was trapped in a book and would someday be killed off in its pages. What if the number 64 was foreshadowing his greatest fear? Maybe it was going to play a role in his death in the novel.

  Maybe the song title said it all. Maybe he was doomed to die in Chapter 64, and the same chapter in Fireskull's Revenant would tell the tale.

  Did he dare skip ahead to that part of the book to find out? No way.

  Not yet.

  THE three men and two women sang and danced around a campfire in North Tenneginia, acting not at all like kidnappers. Their captive, Reacher, who was no longer bound, gagged, or zipped up in a garment bag, sat on a picnic table in a wooded campsite, surrounded by lush pink trees and a carpet of thick pink grass. He sang and played an acoustic guitar that one of his abductors had just happened to have in the van.

  Sundra had been right about what it would take to get her partners to let Reacher out of his bonds. He'd barely finished offering to play a private concert for the Youfers before they'd freed him and thrust the guitar into his hands.

  But Sundra hadn't been quite so clear about how she would get him away from the others. "Wait for my signal," she'd told him. "You'll know what to do."

  Reacher wondered what the signal would be and if in fact Sundra had any plan at all beyond getting him to perform.

  The fact that he was playing a concert at all without being in disguise was a minor miracle. He was nervous, as he always was when performing for an audience. But it helped that there were nineteen only five of them, and he didn't really have a choice in the matter. It was the only way to escape being turned in to Tuned magazine.

  The lack of options forced him to focus and calmed his nerves. So did the fact that the kidnappers were blowing his mind.

  He was stunned when he launched into "Coming to Life" from Singularity City and all the kidnappers sang along. He'd never performed the song in public, had never released a recording of it, and had never posted the lyrics on the Internet ... yet the Youfers knew every single word by heart.

  "Come to life," he sang. "Come to life and eat the sun. D-don't you know that two-two heads are better, much better than one?"

  Reacher played a version of the big screaming guitar solo that came next. It didn't quite sound the same on the acoustic.

  "Step right up," he sang after the solo. "Tell me what to do. There's a man at the center of everything laughing ... but I know a way out and I'll take you."

  Everyone continued to sing along, matching him word for word. The whole thing was completely unnerving, which was what gave him the idea to try an experiment.

  "Upside downside," he sang. "My side your side."

  Then instead of the lyrics that should have come next, he improvised. Instead of singing "Come to life, your life will come," he sang, "Come to see, don't criticize me."

  And the Youfers sang along. Though Reacher had made up the new words on the spot, the Youfers sang them exactly as he did. Their mouths moved in perfect time with his own; they were anticipating him, not mimicking him.

  He tried it again. Instead of singing "I'll put you on, but I'll follow through," he sang, "Never again will I dream of you."

  Just like before, the Youfers sang the improvised lyrics as if they were old favorites they knew by heart.

  Even as Reacher continued to play and sing, he wondered how they did it. The only explanation he could think of, which seemed pretty far-fetched, was that they could read his mind. If that was the case, though, why hadn't they tied him back up yet? If the Youfers could read his mind, they would surely notice his thoughts of escape.

  Although Reacher hadn't been mistreated, apart from being bound and gagged and zipped into a garment bag, he'd had enough of being a captive. Breaking away from the others with Sundra would give him his best shot at winning his freedom. But she just kept singing and dancing around the campfire.

  Realizing that she might go back on her promise to help him, Reacher decided he would take action alone if he had to. If Sundra didn't initiate an escape attempt before long, he would try one himself. Although he was outnumbered five to one, he was a great sprinter and would try to make the most of the element of surprise.

  Two songs after "Coming to Life," as he started into "Magic Feeling," he lost sight of her. She'd been dancing with everyone else around the fire, but when he looked up from the guitar after playing the intro, she was gone.

  She showed up again midway through the song, although Reacher couldn't get a good look at her because she was behind him. He heard her voice in his ear and felt her arm sling over his shoulder and chest.

  And he felt the flat edge of a knife blade touch his throat, cool and solid against his skin.

  Later, with the hunting knife stowed in a sheath strapped to her thigh, Sundra raced the Tucker van across the border into Pennsyltucky, driving like a maniac. Reacher sat in the passenger seat beside her, watching the nighttime scenery flash by in the bright beams of the triple headlights. His right foot kept stepping on an imaginary brake pedal, as if that could keep them from crashing.

  Miles behind the van, the other four kidnappers were stranded in the Tenneginia woods, their shot at a fifteen-thousand-dollar reward speeding away like a loose helium balloon spitting into the sky.

  Now that Reacher had escaped the rest of the kidnappers, he was glad Sundra had threatened to slice his throat, although he hadn't thought it was such a great idea at the time.

  In particular, he hadn't been a fan of the part where she'd actually cut him to prove how serious she was. When the other Youfers had expressed doubts that she would follow through with her threat, they'd closed in around her ... only to back off again when she nicked Reacher's left cheek with the knife.

  The sight of blood had seemed to convince everyone that she meant business, because they'd all cooperated perfectly from then until she'd driven off with her hostage. She'd told them to hand over all their cell phones and the keys to the van, and they'd done it. They'd said a lot of nasty things to her, but no one had made a single move to stop her.

  Reacher hoped the next phase of his getaway—escaping from Sundra—would go as smoothly.

  "I told you I'd rescue you." She smiled over at him from behind the wheel.

  "Thanks." Nervously, he rubbed the white stubble on top of his head. He wished she would keep her eyes on the road, given the van's high rate of speed—eighty-five the last time he'd checked. "Do you think the others will send the cops after us?"

  Sundra shook her head. "They kidnapped you, and I saved you. I don't think they'll be calling the cops. Plus which, they're out in the woods without phones or a car." Reaching over, she patted Reacher's knee. "Don't worry. You'll make it to Maysville for your show."

  The way she was driving, Reacher had his doubts about that, but he kept them to himself. "I think it'll be a good one. I had a great warm-up back at the campfire." He had no intention of performing in Maysville, but he thought it best to say what she wanted to hear.

  "That's wonderful." Sundra chuckled. "Hey, it just occurred to me ... maybe you'll write a song about all this."

  "Why not?" Reacher laughed along with her. "At the very least, I'll dedicate one to you at the show."

  Sundra gasped. "Really? You'd do that?"

  "Without you, there wouldn't be a show, would there?" said Reacher. "Of course, there is one problem yet."

  "What's that?"

  Reacher sighed. "I'm not sure if my band w
ill be there. They probably don't even know if I'm alive or not."

  "Whoops," said Sundra. "You're right."

  "The last thing they knew, I was going to the ice machine."

  Sundra reached into the console tray between the seats and drew out one of the four cell phones that she'd taken from the other Youfers. "Here. Call and let them know you're okay."

  Reacher took the phone and activated it with the press of a button. "No service," he read from the glowing green screen.

  Sundra stomped on the accelerator, and the Tucker sped up even more. "We need to get out of the boondocks. Get in range of some cell towers."

  Reacher tried not to watch the speedometer needle as it climbed past ninety. His heart pounded as the van hurtled through the night.

  Seconds later, his hands clenched the dashboard as the triple headlights of an oncoming vehicle flew around a bend in the road, rushing straight at them.

  EUNICE wrenched the steering wheel hard to the left, racing head-on toward the white van.

  "Watch out!" said Idea. "It's heading straight for you!"

  "No prob, Rob." At the last possible instant, she yanked the wheel hard right, veering away from the oncoming vehicle.

  Tires screaming, the van spun and stopped in the middle of the road. Eunice's car tumbled into a ditch. From her point of view on the screen of the video game, the world was canted at a cockeyed angle, seen through a rising cloud of smoke and steam.

  "GAME OVER" flashed red across the middle of the screen.

  "You tried to hit him," said Idea. "You tried to wreck."

  "I thought that was the object of the game." Eunice smiled.

  Idea blew out his breath in frustration. "They try to hit you. You try to keep from being hit."

  "Now, where's the fun in that?" Eunice abandoned the console and headed for a soda machine on the other side of the rest stop building. She carried a white plastic grocery bag full of clothes with her. She'd just changed in the bathroom, switching to a different two-sided outfit: a light green T-shirt with a white iwentY bull's-eye and faded blue jeans in front; a floral-print black and purple top with dark blue jeans in back.