The Last Days

by WESTERFELD, SCOTT

  And she wonders why I don’t dress up more.

  Finally, though, I weaseled out of her orbit with the lame excuse of wanting to look at, you know, the art. Her fingers trailed on my shoulder as I slipped away, reminding everyone one more time that I was her daughter.

  I made my way straight to a table full of champagne, rows and columns of it bubbling furiously, and smiled. The open bar: where else would a record company rep hang out at an art opening?

  I snagged a glass and hovered near the table, keeping an eagle eye (just one) out for the face I’d downloaded that morning. My trap was finally set—I was ready. All my lines were memorized; I was dressed ravishingly and standing in the perfect spot. There was nothing more I could do but wait.

  So I waited. . . .

  Twenty minutes later, my enthusiasm had faded.

  No record company talent scout had materialized, the glass was empty, and my feet were unhappy in their new shoes. The party buzzed around me, ignoring my little black dress and borrowed bling, like I was some kind of nonentity. Bubbles rattled unpleasantly in my head.

  All my life I’d wondered how my mother’s sole life purpose could be going to parties, even while the world was crumbling around her. Finally Google had shown me the answer: her reason for existence was to get me into this party. Astor Michaels, Red Rat Records’ most fawesome talent scout, was also the biggest collector of this photographer’s work. He’d discovered the New Sound, signing both Zombie Phoenix and Morgan’s Army—not huge, commercial bands, but gutsy bands like us.

  It was a perfect match, like when Moz and I had been brought together. Surely this was fate playing with my mother’s social calendar.

  But as I picked up my second glass and wandered through the crowd, squinting at two hundred half-blurry faces and recognizing none of them, I started to consider an awful possibility: could fate be messing with me?

  What if Astor Michaels was out of town? Or busy scouting bands at some undiscovered club instead of here? What if Google had lied to me? All my efforts tonight would be wasted—in fact, my mother’s whole life would be wasted. . . .

  I stood there, dizzy on my feet, staring at a half-empty glass and realizing something equally dismaying: the champagne gene was another one my mom hadn’t passed on. Maybe it was my half-blurry vision or the buzz of the uncaring crowd around me, but I felt like reality was in a blender.

  I had to get control.

  I took a deep breath and pulled myself out of the crowd, wandering to the party’s edge to look at the pictures. They were gigantic photos of the sanitation crisis: glimmering mountains of plastic bags, garbage guys on strike, lots of rats. All were dramatic and weirdly beautiful, almost life-size, as if you could walk straight into them. Which begged the question: Why would you want this stuff on your wall when it was all happening right outside?

  The crowd seemed to agree. People were crowded into the middle of the room, shrinking from the images of decomposition. Only a few of us hovered at the fringes of the party, sullen and extraneous, like sophomore guys at the senior prom.

  Poor art lovers, I thought, and then, in a fit of champagne-stoked genius, I realized where Astor Michaels had been hiding.

  He wasn’t here for the prom; he was here for the art. He was one of the sophomores.

  I started to circle the room, ignoring the crowd in the middle this time, the ones who looked well connected and happy and cool. I looked for the lonely guys, the losers.

  Halfway around, I spotted him out of the corner of my eye—my good eye, luckily. He was ogling a vast photo of a shrine built by sanitation workers out in the Bronx: praying hands and crosses and skulls (again!) all jumbled up to provide protection on their route.

  I took a deep drink of champagne to steady myself, my lines beginning to tumble through my head.

  “What am I listening to? Oh, just this lateral new band.”

  My fingers fumbled with the sticky clasp of my new handbag, scrambling around inside until they found my music player at the very bottom. Its earphones were non-helpfully tangled with makeup and hair goo and a million other things I never normally carried. After long seconds of unwinding, I managed to drag the player out and get the phones into my ears. But where was my neck strap? I peered down into the bottomless handbag in horror, realizing I hadn’t brought it.

  I flashed back to my hours spent at the Apple store looking for just the right strap: sleek black leather with a shiny steel USB connector. I could see it in my mind’s eye, still in its packaging, sitting on my bed with all the other crap.

  And of course this stupid cocktail dress, like all stupid cocktail dresses, had no pockets. It would look way too obvious just carrying the music player in my hand, and a pair of earphones snaking out from my handbag wasn’t going to make me look like the hip young trendsetter I was supposed to be. The kind who says things like . . .

  “No, they’re not signed. Everyone just knows about them.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to think.

  There was only one place to put it.

  I took a gulp of champagne, switched the music player on, and dropped it down my cleavage. It fit perfectly and was kind of warm down there. Really warm—I looked down and realized that while scrabbling in my handbag I’d locked the screen backlight on.

  Framed by the black velvet of my dress, my breasts glowed softly blue.

  In my champagne haze, it was kind of cool looking. Carrying your music this way might not be the Taj Mahal of class, but it was definitely going to get the guy’s attention.

  I moved closer.

  “What language is she singing in? I don’t think it is one, really.”

  The player was set to shuffle our four best songs— long, intense rants of Minerva’s peppered with Moz’s cleanest, simplest lines, Alana Ray shattering it all into a thousand glittering shapes, Zahler finally playing a proper bass underneath. As I drew nearer, the music began to synchronize with the bubbles in my bloodstream, my footsteps falling with the beat. I was cool and connected, seventeen and covered with bling, a record company’s dream demographic in the flesh.

  The world began to shift around me, just like when we played, my fingers twitching with the keyboard parts. Huge photographs rolled past my shoulder, a galaxy of rats’ and cats’ eyes flickering on my blurry side.

  “What’s their name? I don’t think they have a name yet, actually. . . .”

  By the time I walked up beside Astor Michaels, swirling one last smidgen of champagne in the bottom of my glass, I was cool and predatory and confident, the embodiment of our music.

  He turned and looked at me, his eyes following the white cords from my ears down into my glowing cleavage. His gaze flashed a little, reflecting the soft blue light.

  Then Astor Michaels smiled at me, and his teeth were pointy, a hundred times sharper than Minerva’s. . . .

  All my lines flew from my head, and I pulled my earphones out, pushing them toward him with quivering hands.

  “You’ve got to listen, man,” I said. “This shit is paranormal.”

  PART IV

  THE DEAL

  About seven hundred years ago, the disease that finished the Roman Empire returned.

  Humanity was already in a bad way. China had just suffered a brutal civil war, Europe had endured a destructive famine, and the Little Ice Age was descending. Across the world, temperatures dropped, crops failed, and whole countries fell into poverty. Wars were sparked by what little wealth remained.

  Then a relentless and deadly plague appeared in Asia. In some parts of China, nineteen out of every twenty people perished. The disease was carried to Europe and the Middle East, where it killed a third of the population. The most intense part of the outbreak lasted only five years, but worldwide it left 100 million dead.

  Historians once assumed that the Black Death was bubonic plague, a bacterium spread by rats. But that never quite added up: too many people died too quickly. According to some, it might have been a new form of anthrax t
ransmitted from animals to humans. Others believe that an Ebola-like virus suddenly evolved to become airborne, spreading across the world via handshakes and coughs, then disappeared.

  But what was the Black Death really, and how did it come and go so quickly?

  Keep your ears open, and you’ll find out.

  NIGHT MAYOR TAPES:

  313-314

  18. ANONYMOUS 4

  -ZAHLER-

  The offices of Red Rat Records were fawesome.

  Maybe they weren’t the biggest label in the world—Red Rat was only an independent—but they had an old town house in the East Twenties all to themselves. Astor Michaels took us inside, saying that the richest family in New York City had once lived there. The ground floor was still fitted out like a money-counting room: antique brass bars guarding the receptionist’s desk, the doors solid oak, thick as dictionaries.

  There were a bunch of kids waiting in line to deliver CDs and press packets by hand, most of them in full stage dress: black eye-liner and fingernails, ripped clothes and Mohawks. All of them were trying to look fool, but they stared wide-eyed as the five of us were ushered past the brass bars and inside. I got a weird jolt, thinking, We’re rock stars, and they’re not.

  I’d always known Pearl would take us places, but I hadn’t thought it would be this fast. I didn’t feel ready for it, especially since I’d only been playing my new instrument a week.

  But Pearl was unstoppable. She’d even managed some kind of deal with Minerva’s parents, getting her into Manhattan on a workday. The two of them were supposedly out buying Minerva new clothes, something about her birthday coming up.

  We tromped downstairs to the basement, where Astor Michaels’s personal office occupied the steel cube of an old walk-in safe, lit only by the flickering glow of a computer screen. It was as big as a one-car garage, the walls lined with rows of safe-deposit boxes. The foot-thick metal door looked too heavy to move—I hoped it was anyway. If anyone shut it, I would’ve started screaming.

  Huge photographs hung from the walls, artsy pictures of garbage-strewn alleys, gushing black water, and rats.

  Yes: rats. And that wasn’t the weirdest thing about Astor Michaels.

  Our new rep licked his lips a lot, and when he smiled, his teeth never showed. He kept his sunglasses on until we got down into the darkness, and once he took them off, I wished he’d put them back on again. His eyes were way too wide and spent a lot of time lingering on the three girls, especially Minerva.

  It was creepy, but I guess when you’re a record company rep, you get to ogle all the girls you want. And anyway, it didn’t matter whether I liked the guy or not. We were signed.

  Well, almost. Pearl said her lawyer was still going over the contract. That’s right—she said “my lawyer,” the way she’d say “my gardener” or “my driver” or “my house in Connecticut.” Like a lawyer was something you kept in a drawer along with the double-A batteries and spare apartment keys.

  “In a few minutes, we’ll all go upstairs,” Astor Michaels said. “Marketing is dying to meet you. They love the music, of course, but they want to make sure you really have it.”

  What’s “it”? I almost asked. But I figured that if you did have it, you probably didn’t need to ask what it was, which meant I didn’t, so I should just shut up.

  “Should we have dressed up for this?” Pearl asked, which didn’t make any sense because she looked fexcellent in her tight black dress, a thin choker of diamonds around her neck. The only bad thing was that her glasses were missing, which made her look less smart and in charge.

  Still, she looked amazing.

  Astor Michaels waved a hand. “Just be yourselves.”

  What if myself happens to be a big sweaty ball of nerves today? I wanted to ask, but that also didn’t sound like a very “it” thing to say.

  We went upstairs, where a bunch of people with six-hundred-dollar haircuts sat around a conference table shaped like a long, curvy swimming pool. Pearl took charge, of course. She talked about our “influences,” naming a bunch of bands I’d never heard of except for seeing their CDs on Pearl’s bed.

  Minerva sat at the head of the table, shimmering, sucking up all the compliments that came her way. She obviously had it—even I could see that now, reflected in the marketing people’s gazes. Ever since Minerva and Moz had secretly hooked up, her junkie vibe was slowly changing into something else—whether less creepy or more, I couldn’t tell.

  But the haircuts ate it up.

  Moz also seemed to make an impression on them, like he had it too. As if Minerva had given it to him. He was much more intense these days, his eyes radiating confidence and a new kind of hungriness that I couldn’t understand.

  That was the weird thing: as Minerva got less junkie-like, she seemed to push Moz in the opposite direction, so we were really only breaking even.

  Me and Alana Ray stayed quiet, like a rhythm section should. I was a bass player now, after all, and we don’t say too much.

  After a while we headed back down to the safe, leaving the haircuts upstairs to talk about us. Astor Michaels said we’d done a good job, then gave us some fexcellent news.

  “We want you to play a showcase. Four Red Rat bands in a little club we’re renting.” He licked his lips. “In two weeks . . . I hope that’s not too soon.”

  “Soon is good,” Pearl said, which was probably the smart thing to say, but a wave of panic was rolling through me. Two more Sunday rehearsals with my new instrument didn’t seem like enough. I practiced hours every day, of course, but that was nothing like playing with the whole band. Those big bass strings still felt clumsy under my fingers, like playing with gloves on.

  “There’s one issue, though,” Astor Michaels was saying. “We’re printing the posters tomorrow. Taking out ads as well.”

  “Oh, crap.” Pearl cleared her throat. “And we don’t have a name yet.”

  “We’ve been meaning to come up with one,” I blurted. “But there hasn’t been time.”

  “Can’t agree on anything,” Moz growled.

  Pearl shifted uncomfortably next to me on Astor Michaels’s big leather couch. “Can’t we just be ‘Special Guests’ or something?”

  He shook his head, lips parting, a little glimpse of teeth slipping into view. “Posters and ads cost money, Pearl. That money’s wasted if your name is missing.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” She looked around at us.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” Astor Michaels said. “I’ll leave you five to discuss this while I go and have lunch. When I come back in an hour, you give me a name you all agree on. Not a list, not suggestions or ideas: one name. Either it’ll be perfect or it won’t be.”

  Pearl swallowed. “So what if it’s not?”

  He shrugged. “Then the deal’s off.”

  “What?” Pearl said, eyes widening. “No showcase?”

  “No nothing.” Astor Michaels stood and headed out. “If you five can’t agree on a name, then how are you supposed to tour together? How are you supposed to make records? How can Red Rat commit to you for five years if you can’t commit to one simple name?” He stood in the doorway, slipping sunglasses over his laughing, too-wide eyes. “So unless you agree on something perfect, the whole deal’s off.”

  “But . . . not really,” Pearl said. “Really?”

  “Really. You have an hour.” Astor Michaels looked at his watch. “How’s that for motivation?”

  We sat there in silence for a moment, the blown-up photos of rats staring down at us. The room was full of guilt, like we’d all committed some terrible crime together.

  “Was that meant ironically?” Alana Ray asked.

  “Um . . . I don’t think so,” Pearl said.

  “Crap,” Moz said. “What are we going to do?”

  Pearl turned to me and Moz, suddenly angry. “I knew we should have figured this out when it was just us three, in that first rehearsal. Now it’s all complicated!”

  “Hey, man,” I said, hold
ing up my hands. “That’s the day I said we should call ourselves the B-Sections. Why don’t we go with that?”

  Moz and Pearl just stared at me.

  “What?” I said. “Don’t you remember? B-Sections?”

  Pearl glanced at Moz, then turned to me. “Yeah, I remember. But I didn’t want to be the one to explain that band names based on musical terms—the F-Sharps, the Overtones, the Tapeloops—are in fact the lamest. Thing. Ever.”

  Moz shrugged. “I just thought you were kidding, Zahler. I mean, for one thing, being plural is stupid.”

  I frowned. “Being what?”