We Sold Our Souls

by Grady Hendrix

  DAVE THE METAL GUY: …and Insect Narthex is a radical departure. You’re more in the mold of Marilyn Manson, or Trent Reznor at this point in your career.

  TERRY HUNT: I’ve got more showmanship than Reznor, and I’m more intense than Manson, but really I’m about transcending genres. My fans are some of the most intelligent listeners alive. They listen to Metallica, they listen to Tool, they listen to Wagner. They listen with what I call “honest ears.”

  DAVE THE METAL GUY: So you don’t think Koffin is a heavy metal band?

  TERRY HUNT: Koffin sings about real things, about social change, about actual emotions, about 9/11. Metal is an act. Koffin is real.

  —90.7 WVUA, “The Combat Zone”

  July 8, 2004

  old still, you little bitch, and let me shoot you,” Greg said. A shotgun went off and he giggled. “Suck my left one!”

  Melanie had come to his place after work, hands sticky with spilled margarita, and found her boyfriend where he normally was, in the center of the couch, headset over his ears, an Xbox controller in his hand. She used to sit next to him while he gamed. The places he took his avatar were sometimes eye-searingly beautiful and there were nights when she wanted to live in those fantasy forests with their golden motes floating in beams of sunlight so bad her heart hurt. But now, more and more, he bounced around the same desert ruins, trapped inside a chain-link fence, murdering other players he referred to as “whores” and “little bitches.” It sounded too much like real life to her.

  “Hey,” she said, putting down her bag. “We need to talk.”

  Greg muted his headset. “Are you breaking up with me?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, surprised.

  “Okay, hold on,” he said, and unmuted.

  Twenty minutes later he took the headset off and said, “What’s going on, babe?”

  She came over and sat down next to him on the couch, trying not to wrinkle her nose when it puffed out a blast of dirty socks, Cheetos, and Axe body spray. He shared this townhouse with three other guys. The stuff she kept here was in a plastic bin so their boy stink didn’t seep into her clothes.

  “Look,” she said. “You know things are really hard right now.”

  “The fucking Boomers,” he said. “I just read today that the debt-to-GDP ratio is 103 percent. You know what it was for the Boomers? Thirty-five percent. They sucked everything dry.”

  “Okay, yeah,” Melanie said. The two of them had met at an Occupy protest, and the longer Greg went without a steady job, the more horrible facts he learned about the Boomers. “But geography is destiny, right? If we want to change our lives, and get out of this rut, we need to move. You know Koffin?”

  Greg laughed and spun invisible DJ turntables.

  “Wicky-wicky-wicky,” he said. “Black latex! White girls! Around your neck! Drip my pearls!”

  Then he did the robot while making terrible industrial music noises.

  “That was a really bad song,” Melanie agreed. It was off 2010’s 9 Circles and was maybe one of the worst songs ever written. She mostly ignored it. “But they mean a lot to me. And they got me inspired with this idea. They’re playing Vegas in June, that’s six weeks away. I can get tickets. Let’s drive out there for the show.”

  “White lady! Smoke curls,” he kept going. “Black, black latex! For my white, white girls!”

  Melanie persisted. “Then when we get out there, we don’t come back.”

  That shut Greg up. He blinked at her for a moment.

  “We kill ourselves?” he asked.

  “We keep driving,” she said. “To LA. I can wait tables there just as well as here. We’ll live way out in the Valley—”

  “The Valley’s expensive,” Greg said.

  “We’ll live in Pasadena.”

  “That’s worse.”

  “We’ll live in Covina,” she said. “Wherever. But it’s not here. We go and start fresh. Are you in?”

  He slouched against the back of the couch and picked at his cargo shorts.

  “We need money,” he said. “Even just for gas. And how’re you going to pay off your loans?”

  “We have to try something,” she said. “Remember Sheila Bartell? She was homecoming queen my senior year? She just overdosed. That’s the thirteenth person from my graduating class. My dad said a guy OD’d in the Walmart today and knocked over a laptop display. They’re going to make him pay for the laptops.”

  “Fucking Boomers,” Greg muttered.

  “If we don’t get out of here now, we’ll never get out of here,” Melanie said. “This town is a hole sucking everyone down. We’re going to wind up dead inside.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m totally supportive of whatever. You know I’m feminist, and I love it when you go all kickass, but we have to be practical.”

  “Fuck practical,” she said. “We are going to die if we stay here. Either we will OD, or get run over by some fucker who ODs in his truck, or our hearts and brains will fucking die because this is the worst place in America and we’ll become zombies. Do you want to turn thirty and never have taken a single chance?”

  “All right, all right,” he said. “Take a pill. How’re you going to pull off this grand plan?”

  She told him. She’d work nonstop—with a goal in mind, she could work doubles two or three times a week, maybe more. They’d cancel their Netflix. They’d get cheaper phone plans. They’d sell a bunch of her clothes. If they were smart, and worked hard, and focused on being positive, they could do this.

  “Yeah, totally,” he said. “I’m down.”

  He leaned forward, holding her hand, and then grabbed her left breast. She jumped backward. He cupped it again.

  “You get all fiery and your eyes flash,” he said. “Like Selena Gomez.”

  She knew she should let him, just to keep the peace, so she kissed his mouth that tasted like Cool Ranch Doritos, and put one hand around his neck. There was a tag on the back of his shirt, and she tried to fold it back down inside his collar.

  “Ow!” he said.

  It wasn’t a tag—it was stuck to his skin. He yanked away, but Melanie grabbed his shoulder and looked. There was a white gauze pad taped to the back of his neck.

  “You didn’t,” she said. “Show me.”

  He peeled it down. On the red, shaved skin at the back of his neck, shiny with antibacterial ointment, were the letters FML in Gothic script.

  “You’re never going to get a job with ‘fuck my life’ tattooed above your collar,” she said. “And we’re supposed to be saving money.”

  “No Boomer knows what this means,” Greg said, his face mottled red. “And it’s my money, too.”

  The fight was ugly and ended when they both stormed off in opposite directions. She went to his bedroom, which she paid part of the rent for, so it was technically her bedroom, too. He headed out the front door. Probably to Farmer Don’s to smoke weed.

  Melanie’s phone dinged, and she saw a Kik message from Hunter.

  HEY BEAUTIFUL ——> BEEN THINKNG ABOUT U U THINK ABOUT WHAT WE TALKED ABOUT?

  Then there was Hunter. She hadn’t told Greg about him, because nothing was going on, and he didn’t need to know because he’d just freak out over nothing. They weren’t having an affair, even though she sent him the occasional sexy picture, but everyone did that. She’d met him on Tinder when she was mad at Greg. His profile pic showed him shirtless and tanned on the prow of a motorboat holding up an enormous fish.

  I FEEL SORRY FOR THE FISH, she’d typed.

  THREW HIM BACK, Hunter had typed. HE WAS AN EGOMANIAC AND LOVED THE CAMERA TOO MUCH.

  She actually laughed through her sniffles, and they talked all night. And the next day. He lived in Las Vegas where he was into CrossFit, was a professional gambler, and had his real estate license.

  32, he’d typed. F
IRST MILLION BY 35.

  26, she’d typed. FIRST THOUSAND BY NEVER.

  THAT’S ON YOU, he’d typed.

  Then he’d told her that geography was destiny. If she wanted to know the maximum salary she could ever make, she should take the average salary of her five closest friends. Her result was barely even a number. Hunter was smart, and he had ambition, and they weren’t cheating because she wasn’t leaving Greg. Hunter was more of a friend lifting her up to a higher level, which was why it was okay to keep talking to him on Kik.

  He’d offered to sell her tickets to the Koffin show in Vegas. He’d bought two extra ones as an investment, he told her, and she was tempted. Go out there, stay with Hunter, feel like she was going somewhere. Now she typed:

  I WANT THOSE TIX

  Hunter sent:

  FOR ME AND MY BOY, she typed.

  Hunter sent:

  CHANGING MY LIFE, MOVING OUT THERE, A NEW PAGE, she typed. CLOSER TO YOU.

  SEND ME A SEXY PIC, Hunter typed. TO MAKE UP FOR HURTING MY FEELINGS.

  She smiled, and lifted her shirt. It was the least she could do. He was going to help her and Greg see Koffin and escape from this trap their life had become.

  DEMARCOS: A tragic shooting left four victims dead in Allentown late this afternoon, and authorities with more questions than answers. Local resident Scott Borzek allegedly shot his wife and two children, ages fifteen and seventeen, before turning the weapon on himself. Police say that Borzek, a onetime member of the defunct local band Dürt Würk, had a history of drug and alcohol abuse and had recently been seeking treatment. A UPS driver discovered the scene while attempting to deliver a package. Police are seeking an as-yet-unidentified witness who may be able to fill in key details. In Allentown, I’m Rick Demarcos, Newsradio 790.

  —790 AM WAEB, “Top of the Hour News and Weather”

  May 11, 2019

  nger had driven Kris to Scottie’s house, but fear sent her driving in circles for hours after. If Scottie was right, Terry could see her phone. He was in her email. He was tracking her car. The second she pulled over, UPS trucks would surround her, and their drivers would gun her down.

  Her phone buzzed with incoming calls, then texts, from Little Charles. She turned it off and locked it in the glove compartment—another way for them to find her. She didn’t know what to do or where to go until she turned on the radio and heard how they were shaping the story. Terry could turn a murder into a suicide, he could turn an assassination attempt into a domestic dispute, he could steal her music and turn it into millions. She needed to warn the band.

  Twenty minutes in a public library outside King of Prussia, a little bit of Google stalking, and Kris was driving up and down suburban streets outside Philly looking for the entrance to Eaglecrest, a planned community that paid to keep itself off Google Maps, because privacy was the new status symbol. It was where Tuck lived, and he seemed like the best place to start.

  Eaglecrest was a spotless, micromanaged walking community full of gracious green lawns, public spaces, clearly marked bike paths, and sustainable, eco-friendly McMansions. By the time she pulled up in front of Tuck’s impossibly perfect house with its impossibly green yard, beneath cotton-candy-pink sunset skies, Kris felt like an intruder, a leper clad in black, bringing bad news no one wanted to hear. She got out of her car and almost hit one of Eaglecrest’s perfect citizens power-walking past in a herd, burning off their calories at the end of the day. She planned to take a few minutes and get her head together before ringing Tuck’s doorbell, but when she looked up, he was watching her.

  He stood in his open garage, a white cooler in one hand, two yellow life vests in the other. A streak of white slashed his goatee in half. His electric-blue polo shirt was big enough to make ten shirts for Kris. His faded olive cargo shorts hung to just above his ankles, which were thick as tree trunks.

  Kris wanted to get back in her car and drive away, but it was too late. She had come here on a mission, and she couldn’t back down now. She kept her eyes on Tuck’s Chuck Taylors as she closed the distance between them. As she approached, he put down his cooler and the vests. She stopped walking when he loomed over her, inches away. He hadn’t done anything yet, and she took that for a good sign. She stepped forward, arms open for a hug.

  Tuck jumped backward.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said. “You can’t come in here. After all this time? After what you did? Looking for a hug? Are you out of your mind?”

  She tried to say something, but only a small noise came out.

  “I don’t dwell on the past,” Tuck said. “I don’t dream about the future. I focus on the present. And in the present, I don’t want you in my driveway.”

  “You’re not still—” she began.

  “I am,” he said, picking up his cooler. “But it’s been a lot of years, and I have found the forgiveness in my heart. But Lily is home and she is not as evolved on the subject as me. She hears you out here, and she will slit your throat and stuff you in a ditch, and I can’t stop her.”

  Kris remembered going to visit Tuck in the hospital and his father not allowing her in the room. She remembered taking the elevator back to the first floor and walking toward the parking lot, hearing quick, fast footsteps behind her, and turning as Lily, just his girlfriend back then, all bones and tendons and teeth, threw a cold cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in her face.

  “We need to talk about Scottie,” Kris said.

  “I heard on the news,” Tuck said, picking his way through his cluttered garage. “I was going to call you after I hosed down the life jackets. Phone is okay. You being here is not. Goodbye.”

  He hit the door-close button on the wall and the big garage door began to rumble down. Kris stepped into the doorway and it detected her, its gears ground, and it rolled back up. Tuck jabbed the button again but nothing happened.

  “It’s not going to close on me,” Kris said. “I’m standing in the electric eye.”

  “Goddammit,” Tuck said. “Go away.”

  She followed him into the dim garage.

  “Scottie thought we might all be in danger,” Kris said. “He thought that Terry might try to hurt us. He thinks Terry is spying on us.”

  “That sounds exactly like what someone who shot his family would say,” Tuck said.

  “You need to read this,” Kris said, and she held out Scottie’s note. “It’s the last thing he wrote.”

  “Where’d you get that?” Tuck asked.

  “From Scottie,” Kris said.

  Realization dawned in Tuck’s eyes.

  “You’re the unidentified witness,” he said. “They’re all looking for you.”

  Kris threw all her cards on the table at once. “He shot himself,” she said. “Someone called him, someone from Terry, and he was living in his basement, and I was down there with him and he shot himself, but he didn’t kill his family.”

  “Aw, Kris,” Tuck said. “You cannot do this to me.”

  “I was there!” Kris said. “Your family is not safe.”

  “The man was on drugs.”

  “Scottie’s been sober since rehab.”

  “Maybe that’s what he told you—” Tuck began.

  “Fine,” Kris said. “You keep hosing out your cooler and I’ll read it to you.”

  For the first time, Tuck’s mask slipped, and terror showed in his eyes. He snatched at the note. Kris took a big step back, yanking it out of reach. Tuck came toward her, forcing her to back up.

  “Kris,” she read, backing into a dog carrier, going fast. “I’m sorry for whatever it is they made me do—”

  “Please,” Tuck said, and stopped. “Don’t. Just…just let me get my readers on.”

  Tuck put on his reading glasses and stood by the open garage door, reading in daylight’s last pink wash. Kris had memorized the note by now and it played along i
n her head as Tuck read it to himself.

  Kris,

  I’m sorry for whatever it is they made me do. I’m not strong enough to stay myself, but you are and that’s why I wrote this. I am tired all the time. I thought I was taking allergy medication and also Paxator for my panic disorder but that is not what they are. I stopped taking them 2.5 months ago but it is too late for me.

  Terry put something inside my head in case you ever contacted me again. He watches everything we do through our televisions and our phones. He must make sure we do not wake up.

  Something is wrong with me. I look up and I’m in places I do not remember going. I think I have something dark living inside of me. But I do not think it is just me. I think it is all of us.

  Do I sound crazy? That is their goal. But ask yourself: why can’t we remember contract night? Ask Tuck and Bill. I bet they do not remember it either. Do you? Nothing has been the same since then. What happened to us? What did the Blind King do?

  Find the answers in TROGLODYTE. They are there. I don’t want to write what they are because I cannot be sure my thoughts are my own. But Black Iron Mountain is the conspiracy behind the conspiracy. They watch us through Terry’s eyes. They run us in circles. They make us hurt each other.

  Trust TROGLODYTE. We are all targeted individuals. Black Iron Mountain will try to stop you. But metal never dies. Metal does not retreat. It does not surrender. Metal tells the truth about the world.

  You never let me down, Kris. You never disappointed me. There is no one else left. Carry the fire.

  I love you.

  Scottie Rocket

  Tuck lowered the note and took off his glasses. Still holding them in his hand, he pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes closed.

  “I had no idea things were this bad,” he finally said, scrubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Did you?”

  “I hadn’t seen him since he went into rehab,” Kris said, “but I was at his house today and I saw what happened, and we need to go warn Bill before it happens again.”