We Sold Our Souls

by Grady Hendrix

  It took them ninety minutes to get from their car to the campsite, where they found Jones sitting in the middle of their three blue dome tents, clearly baked.

  “Dudes,” he said. “I just joined the army.”

  Everyone serviced Hellstock ’19. You could sign up for the army, you could sign up to consolidate your student loans, you could sign up for an American Express card with 0% APR for the first year, you could sign up to win a free iPhone, you could sign up for Rise Up, for We the People, for Earth First, for Amnesty International, for Change.org. People put their signatures on everything.

  Most of the support staff had walked off the job on Friday night and hadn’t come back. Garbage curdled and stewed in the cans. Every weak breeze carried the barnyard tang of shit.

  “Yeah,” Jones said, giggling. “They tipped the porta-potties. They’re calling them the Shit Pits now. But some dudes rigged up their own chemical toilets and it’s one dollar to piss, five dollars to shit. Chicks are lucky, they can just flash their tits and pee for free.”

  All this disorganization scared Melanie. The boys took off their shirts to reveal gym-cut abs and chiseled pecs. They shared a vape, they had food in their coolers, and when some Jehovah’s Witnesses tried to give Melanie a tract about how this was the end of the world, they closed ranks and drove the Witnesses away. The boys wanted her to feel safe, but she’d glance up sometimes and catch them breaking off a look that seemed to communicate some secret. Something about the way they talked to her felt like they all shared an inside joke and she was its punch line.

  As people shot fireworks at the drones zipping back and forth overhead, they decided to head over to the Pepsi Peace and Love Arena to see Gwar. They were shouldering their backpacks when a drone fell out of the sky, turning from a speck, to a dot, to a humming spider dangling in front of their faces.

  “Hello?” a tinny voice said from its tiny speaker. “Can you hear me?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Chisolm said, laughing.

  “Which of you is Melanie?” it asked.

  “Me?” she said, raising her hand timidly.

  The drone rotated to face her.

  “Terry Hunt is grateful for what you did,” it said. “He’s grateful that you’re keeping this event safe and fun for your fellow fans. He’d like to invite all of you to a private backstage tour of the Crypt and a brief one-on-one so he can thank you in person. If you make your way to the Bud Light stage and tell security your name they’ll take care of you.”

  Then it rose into the air and turned into a busy, darting speck again.

  “No! Way!” Spencer said, and the guys all high-fived each other.

  Hunter pulled Melanie aside.

  “Look,” he said. “I know you don’t know us, and you must feel out of place, but I’m watching out for you, okay? If anything feels weird, just tell me.”

  She wanted to feel relieved.

  “Package,” the UPS driver said.

  His fingers dug into Kris’s jaw joint. Her lips cracked open.

  “Sign here,” the UPS driver said.

  She swallowed. He tipped some water into her mouth to help loosen the bitter clot of pills dissolving in her throat. Kris swallowed the lump. It was better than suffocating.

  The UPS driver came out of the bathroom and nodded to the one giving her the pills. Then they turned all their attention on Kris and that’s when she knew she was going to die. Another pathetic rock-and-roll suicide in a dingy hotel room with holes in the sheets, cigarette burns in the carpet, and the TV nailed to the wall.

  “Please,” she said.

  * * *

  – – –

  “Package,” the UPS driver said.

  They were giving her an overdose, then they would hang her from the electrical cord in the shower, probably pulling down on her feet to make sure the cord crushed her throat, blood building up in her skull, pounding hot in her temples.

  She bet they even had a note. Something in her handwriting about a last-minute wave of remorse, or how she couldn’t bring herself to hurt Terry. And no one would ever hear Troglodyte again. Dürt Würk would be forgotten. Her entire life led to this dark hotel room in Las Vegas in the middle of the afternoon.

  “Sign here.”

  “Package.”

  “Sign here.”

  “Let me talk to Terry,” Kris said.

  “Package.” This time he really dug his fingers in.

  “I need to speak to Terry,” she said. “Can you call him? Just call him? For two seconds.”

  “Sign here.”

  “Please,” she said. “I have something to tell him.”

  “Package.”

  “You have to tell Terry I brought him something.”

  The pills were starting to dissolve into her bloodstream, she could feel them slowing her down, making her face numb.

  “Sign here.”

  “I wrote a sequel to Troglodyte.” It just popped out. She didn’t know what part of her brain decided to try that, but she ran with it. “It’s a sequel and it’s the same as the first album. Tell him, it does the same thing. And there’s a song about tonight, there’s a song about this show.”

  “Package.”

  “You have to let him know,” she said, and began to weep. Tears dripped onto the back of the UPS driver’s hand.

  “Sign here.”

  “It’s not going to go like he think it will tonight,” she said. “I’ll play it for him. The riffs, the words, they’re all in my head. It’s six songs, a full album about what’s going to happen.”

  “Package,” the UPS driver said.

  “Sign here.”

  At some silent signal, the UPS drivers stopped feeding her pills and lifted her up, fingers digging into her armpits, and carried her toward the bathroom. Kris lost it.

  “No,” she screamed. “Nooooo!”

  She thrashed her body from side to side, but that only made them press her ankles tighter together and clamp down on her wrists. They took her to the tub. The white electrical cord hung from the showerhead in a perfect noose.

  “Please,” she said. “Just tell Terry. Tell him I’ll play it for him. Tell Terry.”

  They raised her up, and looped the electrical cord around her neck.

  In the other room, the phone rang. A soft electronic trill. The UPS drivers stopped. They looked at each other. It trilled again. Kris’s heart leapt, but she knew it was probably only the front desk calling to make sure she knew checkout was at eleven.

  One UPS driver went into the other room and picked up the phone mid-ring. Kris saw him in the mirror, pressing it to his ear. He listened for a minute, then hung up. The other three UPS drivers watched him.

  “That package is out for delivery,” he said.

  They put Kris on her feet, wiped the vomit out of her hair with a wet towel and, still controlling her arms, marched her out of the hotel and put her in the back of their truck. Then they pulled out, headed for Hellstock ’19.

  * * *

  – – –

  Behind the Bud Light stage sprawled a tent city of trailers, air-conditioned walkways, chain-link fences, fabric walls to block paparazzi shots, a helipad, honey wagons, makeup trailers, generators, catering services, three full bars, an ice cream fountain carved out of a single massive block of ice, a Starbucks, two gyms, a Pilates studio, a day spa, and an above-ground pool. Everything needed to entertain fifty visiting acts, conjured out of the desert by the power of money. At the far end, close to where sixty-three eighteen-wheelers sat in long rows, waiting for Sunday’s strike, was Terry’s private compound, open only to invited guests. In the middle of the compound stood the two trailers housing the Crypt.

  A mobile museum highlighting major landmarks in Koffin’s career, the Crypt was accessible to two hundred “super-fans” who purchased the $1,200 “Koffin Exp
erience” tickets. Inside, industrial-strength air conditioners pumped ice-cold air into the dark rooms where pinpoint spotlights picked out a golden microphone presented by Osama bin Laden’s brother after Terry did a show for his son’s thirteenth birthday, the hand-drawn designs for the corsets sold by Shroud, his fashion collection, and a twisted leg of metal from the sound tower fans tipped over on the Insect Narthex tour. There was absolutely no mention of Dürt Würk except for one photo, next to a picture of a fourteen-year-old Terry standing with his parents at a track meet.

  “That’s her,” Hunter breathed, and Melanie crowded up close to the glass.

  Kris stood onstage at Robot House in Philly, feet planted wide, head down over her guitar as Terry stood in front, shirtless and thin, blood crown on, fake blood oozing down his face and dripping onto his shoulders as he screamed into the mic.

  “She looks so young,” Melanie said.

  Melanie longed to be that intense woman onstage in the picture, the one so focused on what she was doing that she shut out the world. She hoped Kris was okay, wherever she was.

  “Even psychos started small,” Hunter said.

  They regarded with appropriate awe Terry’s guitar (which he never played), three books from his occult library (which he’d never read), and a pair of his skinny leather jeans from the Witch Slave tour (which he’d never worn because they were too small). The last stop was the meet-and-greet room where an assistant named Stephen told them to wait.

  A woman with a headset scanned the room and left, then two security guards came in and took up stations on either side of the door and stood there for so long that the group forgot about them, taking pictures of themselves on the American Airlines–branded step-and-repeat, until suddenly, in a whirl of entourage, Terry was there.

  The guys crowded around him, all wanting photos and autographs, but Melanie hung back. He was smaller than she thought, a perfectly formed miniature man with skin made out of the same substance as the beautifully moisturized handbags she could never afford. He looked like an elf, barely older than she was, even though she knew he was almost fifty. He was lineless and smooth, his hair fine and golden, illuminated by some inner light like a digital effect in a movie. He looked more real than she did. He didn’t smile, just stared at them from behind his enormous mirrored shades.

  Finally, he said, “Who made the call?”

  The guys parted like the Red Sea to reveal Melanie as she mumbled, “Me,” and Terry stepped forward and shook her hand. It was cool and dry and she didn’t know how he did that in this weather. Even with the air-conditioning blasting she was wet beneath her arms.

  “Never doubt that you did the right thing,” Terry said, taking off his sunglasses. His almond eyes and high cheekbones stared into her soul.

  Melanie mumbled something and then Terry was pulling away and she tightened her grip at the last minute. He turned back, caught in the act of putting his sunglasses back on.

  “Don’t,” Melanie said, and she wasn’t sure why she felt the need to say this, “Don’t do anything to her. She was nice to me.”

  Terry regarded her through two perfect reflections of her face, then said, “Kris has to learn that her decisions have consequences.”

  Then a brisk smile whisked across his face and he turned to the boys.

  “You guys need to save your energy for tonight,” he told them.

  Melanie saw them all pause, that lull in a conversation she’d seen all day out of the corner of her eye, and something secret passed between them and Terry. Then Spencer tried to take one more photo and Terry turned his back, and he was a rock star again, his entourage swirled, and he was gone and they were being propelled, gently, toward the exit.

  She followed the boys, quietly, slightly shocked that this moment she’d worked for all her life felt so small.

  LAURA TOWER: …here at Hellstock ’19?

  DENISE: To see Koffin!

  LAURA TOWER: Why?

  DENISE: Because they’re the greatest band in the history of music.

  LAURA TOWER: And why is Hellstock ’19 so important to you?

  DENISE: This is Woodstock for my generation! How could I respect myself and not go?

  —103.5 KIND-FM, “Tower-Trax”

  September 7, 2019

  t was already dark when security scanned the UPS driver’s pass and waved the truck through. They dragged Kris down endless tented walkways. The sound of the crowd rained down from the sky like a massive, crashing ocean in the desert. Finally, they stopped at the bottom of a set of flimsy metal steps bolted to the side of a trailer and protected by two matching bouncers, both bald and goateed.

  One knocked and immediately the door opened and Kris came face to face with the devil.

  There he stood, peaceful and handsome, totally untouched by all the misery and death done in his name. It seemed unfair that he still looked so young and unlined.

  “Terry,” Kris said.

  His sunglasses came off. His dimples came out. His perfect teeth flashed.

  “You just won’t quit.” Terry Hunt smiled.

  Kris’s blood throbbed in her neck. The air thickened. She was twenty-eight again, and Terry was thirty-one, and she stood at the base of the stairs and looked up at him as he held out his hand and said, “Come on.”

  And Kris reached out through the heavy air, across all those years, and put her big, calloused guitar-player’s hand in Terry’s small, soft, rock-star one, and went up the clanging metal stairs, through the door, and found herself back in Gurner.

  She stood, letting her eyes adjust, in the dim, cool cavern of the Sporting House on 191, just east of Hecktown Road. It smelled like old beer and sawdust, and the familiar Natty Boh clock behind the bar proclaimed, “Oh boy, what a beer!” The wall-mounted jukebox spun silver CDs in the golden gloom.

  Kris touched the white plastic door behind her to make sure they were still backstage in a trailer. It was there, the one out-of-place artifact, the only thing still connecting her to the desert. Terry stood in the middle of the floor before her, arms out, a ringmaster presenting his circus.

  “Isn’t this great?” he said.

  “But it burned down,” she said.

  “Nope,” Terry said, walking over to the bar with its sagging strings of Christmas tree lights and backlit liquor bottles. “I took it.”

  It took her brain a minute to put everything together and then the sheer audacity of what he’d done wiped out her voice. She clung to the door handle, keeping some contact with the real world.

  “Do you know how expensive it is to steal a building and make sure no one notices?” Terry asked, pulling two Rolling Rocks out of the reach-in behind the bar, ice sliding down their sides. “Rob thinks how much I spent is a sign that I’m unhealthy, but it’s not the money, right? It’s what you do with it.”

  He banged the caps off the Rolling Rocks and carried them around the bar, heading for the farthest of the three booths on the left-hand wall, still talking. “I want to hire some actors, get some customers in here, like the black midget. Remember him? Or the one-armed cowboy? That way anytime I come in there’s some folks hanging out, the way it used to be. It wouldn’t be hard. People are cheap.”

  He was in the booth now, arms stretched along the back of the seat, leaning back like he owned the place. He did own the place.

  “So lemme hear it,” he said, and waved his hand toward the far end of the room. “The new Troglodyte. Play whichever one you want.”

  On the tiny stage stood two guitars on stands: a Gibson Hummingbird acoustic, and a hideous Fender Telecaster customized to look like it was covered in black dragon scale.

  This was it. There wasn’t going to be any chitchat about the good old days. Kris had made a desperate claim and now she had to back it up. She took as deep a breath as she could without letting Terry notice, approached the booth and
sat down across from him. The red vinyl cushion sighed. The light from the bar painted one side of Terry’s face gold. He drummed his fingers on the scarred wooden tabletop.

  “You don’t actually expect me to play that thing?” Kris said, stalling. “That’s the ugliest guitar I’ve ever seen.”

  “You’ve always got to be a hardass,” Terry said. “Relax.”

  He slid one of the Rolling Rocks across the table and raised his, dripping ice, holding it out for a toast.

  “Cheers,” he said.

  Kris picked up her cold beer, raised it, then as Terry moved to clink necks, she turned hers upside down and let it glug out over the table. Beer ran off the lip onto Terry’s lap and he jumped up and danced out of the booth.

  “A lot of people are gone,” Kris said. “Scottie, JD, Scottie’s family. They didn’t die so we could hang out together in your backstage vanity bar.”

  “Memorial funds were started,” Terry said, brushing at his wet crotch. “Flowers were sent. But right now: do you have a second Troglodyte or not?”

  Kris had been lying about it for so many hours she’d almost convinced herself it existed.

  “I got screwed by you on a deal before,” she said, thinking fast. “That’s not happening this time. I’m not playing until we talk terms.”

  For one second, written plain across Terry’s face was a look of naked hunger. Then he sat down at one of the tables in the middle of the floor. He pushed out the chair opposite with his foot. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said.