The Last Days

by WESTERFELD, SCOTT

  “And why do you suppose that is?”

  “Uh, I don’t know. Drugs?”

  He shook his head. “That’s what we usually tell the press. But it’s rarely true.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You mean, you cover up the truth by saying it was drugs? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?”

  “Generally. But certain things are worse than drugs.” He shivered. “Late last night, Toxoplasma had something of a meltdown. Right after their very first gig too. Those boys never really got along, you know.”

  I saw a line of sweat roll down his forehead. It was the first time I’d ever seen Astor Michaels looking discomposed.

  “What happened?”

  “Who knows, exactly? It was all very stressful. And expensive to clean up.” He looked down at his free hand, picking under the fingernails with his thumb. “And messy.”

  “They broke up?”

  “Not exactly.” He didn’t smile. “As you say, that’s always been the problem with the New Sound. Toxoplasma had heart, but they only lasted a single gig. One gig!” He let out a long sigh. “Morgan’s Army may last forever, but of course they’re not the real thing.”

  “Hey, maybe they weren’t perfect last night, but I thought they played a great set. What do you mean, ‘not real’?”

  Astor Michaels glanced up and down the empty hall. “I’ll tell you inside.”

  He turned and walked away, and as I followed, my stomach started to roil again. My knees felt shaky, as if someone was adjusting the exact height of the floor beneath me. What were we doing here?

  Reaching an apartment door, he rapped on it twice sharply, then waited a moment. “Don’t want to disturb the tenants, but I think they’re out.”

  “Whose place is this?”

  He pulled out a key, opened the door.

  Zombie was waiting just inside.

  “I could always see them,” Astor Michaels began. “Even before it happened to me.”

  I was staring at the couch, where half of Min’s clothes were draped: black dresses and shawls and stockings strewn across the room. Two open suitcases lay on the floor.

  My stomach twisted again. Minerva lived here now. Astor Michaels had installed her here, his special girl.

  “They were coming to the clubs, leaking sex out of their eyeballs, only a few of them at first. But once they got onstage . . .” He shook his head. “They’re natural stars, charismatic as hell. Except for that one little problem.”

  “They’re bug-ass crazy?” I said harshly, looking at the dresser—the old pink jewelry box I’d bought Min when she was twelve was splayed open, full of shiny things.

  “Crazy? I work for a record company, Pearl. Crazy I could deal with.” He leaned forward. “But they’re bloody cannibals.”

  I looked up into his eyes. Had he just said cannibals?

  But then I remembered how Min had hospitalized one of her doctors in the days before Luz. I thought of all the raw meat she ate, the way her teeth grew sharper every day.

  Almost as sharp as Astor Michaels’s.

  There in the darkened apartment, something cold crawled down my spine. “Why did you bring me here?”

  He looked puzzled for a moment, then let out a snort. “Please, I never even tried it, not once. I’m different than the rest of them.” His eyes twitched; he still looked nervous. “Sane. And I wouldn’t hurt you for the world, my dear little Pearl. You’ve done me such a huge favor.”

  “A favor?”

  “For the last two years, I’ve been looking for someone like me—someone who’s infected but immune to the hunger. A singer who can get onstage and take the New Sound to the world without . . .” He looked down at his fingernails again, then shrugged. “Quite so much cannibalism.”

  I wondered again what exactly had happened with Toxoplasma the night before. Probably nothing a rehab clinic could fix.

  “That’s why I was so thrilled when you brought me Minerva,” Astor Michaels said. “She’s real, don’t you see? Not a mimic, like Abril Johnson. But not like those lost boys in Toxoplasma either.” Zombie jumped onto his lap, and he stroked the cat’s head. “She’s immune to the hunger.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, looking at the clothes strewn around the room. “She had it pretty bad there for a while.”

  “Then somehow you’ve kept her together, Pearl.”

  “But it wasn’t me. Her parents hired this . . . esoterica. Someone who knew what to do for her.” I looked around the apartment, wondering how Min was going to get what she needed now. How long would she last without Luz’s medicines?

  “Well, if someone’s figured out how to cure this thing, we really do need to move fast. Won’t be long before they bottle it and everyone’s a rock star.” He shivered. “What a disaster.”

  I looked at his hands, with their long, sharp, manicured nails. “And it never made you . . .”

  “Crazy? A cannibal?” He shook his head. “Just hungry for raw meat sometimes. And horny, always.”

  “Horny?” My skin was crawling now.

  “Of course.” He giggled. “That’s how it spreads, you know. It’s nothing but a disease, Pearl. Just some new bug in the water. And as far as I can tell, it’s sexually transmitted. It makes you want to spread it.”

  I closed my eyes. So Luz had been right about boys. What else was she right about? I wondered where her angels were, now that I needed them. . . .

  Then I remembered that Mark had cracked up too. Had he given it to her? Or vice versa? One of them had to have been cheating. . . .

  Zombie jumped up onto my lap, and I opened my eyes.

  Astor Michaels was still talking. “I’ve been shagging wannabe singers for two years now, trying to find someone who could keep it together after the charisma set in, and every single one went nuts. Fifteen bands, Pearl. And finally you bring me a rock star already made!” He leaned back, rubbing his palms across Min’s dresses and sighing. “After all my labors.”

  I sat there, stroking Zombie, trying not to scream as what he’d just said sank in. Astor Michaels had intentionally spread this disease; he’d been making more casualties like Minerva, broken people stuck in attics by their families, or lying huddled on the street, on subway platforms. . . .

  We were in business with a monster. The New Sound was the music of monsters.

  I took a deep breath, reminding myself about the contracts. This didn’t have to change anything. Artists had been bat-shit crazy before; it was what you did with your insanity that mattered. We were still a good band, a great band even, even if our whole style of music was based on . . . a disease.

  As long as we were the Taj Mahal of cannibal bands, maybe it wasn’t so bad.

  “Okay,” I said.

  It wasn’t really, but sometimes saying that word helps.

  Astor Michaels smiled. “So we’re in this together, right, Pearl? We have to keep Min healthy, so that all our hard work—yours and mine—finally pays off. Even if she does something that makes you really, really angry. Okay?”

  I looked at him through narrowed eyes. “Like what?”

  “You know, something she’s not necessarily . . . in control of.” He shrugged. “The disease makes people crazy, violent, and especially horny. Sometimes even I can’t control myself.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you’ve been trying that hard.”

  He smiled, revealing his razor teeth to the gums. “A small price to pay for art.”

  Zombie’s ear perked up, and he jumped from my lap and ran to the door. A second later came the jingling of keys outside.

  “Ah. They’re home,” Astor Michaels said, eyes twitching. “Just remember, we all want this band to be a success. So don’t get mad at poor Min. I’ve seen the change happen with my own eyes, and she’s been through more than you can imagine. So be nice, all right?”

  I nodded, but my head was spinning again.

  They’re home, he’d said.

  They.

  The door ope
ned, and Minerva breezed in. Moz followed behind, carrying a threadbare duffel bag.

  “Mozzy! Look who’s here!” Min cried, beaming all the wattage of her fawesome beauty at me, her cannibal-rock-star charisma. Moz just stood there staring, looking a little surprised, a lot guilty.

  With a twist in my stomach, I remembered his mother’s anxious voice on the phone that morning.

  He took a slow breath, then shrugged the duffel bag from his shoulder. It thumped to the floor like a dead body—stuffed full.

  He was moving in.

  “Hey, Pearl. How’s it going?”

  I tried to answer, but my gut was writhing now, squeezing the taste of stomach-ripe champagne up into the back of my throat. Minerva moved a step closer to Moz, five pale fingers wrapping protectively around his arm.

  He was hers now. Completely.

  With the three of them here together, I could finally see the changes in Moz, all the clues I’d managed to blind myself to: the luster of his skin, the beautiful, inhuman angles of his face. Just like Min back in spring—when the hunger was first welling up—he’d grown a heart-twisting shade more fetching.

  Even slitted against the dim candlelight, his eyes glowed, full of pity for me. He must have known what I’d wanted.

  But she’d taken it instead.

  Suddenly the desolate feeling in my stomach was swept away by fury: Minerva had done it again, hooked up with someone in the band—in my band. Even after what had happened with Mark and the System, after everything Luz had told her, Min had done this to me again. I clenched my fists. Of course she would throw it in my face now, when we were this close, the contracts near enough to touch, ready to be signed.

  I felt Astor Michaels’s gaze, willing me to keep it together. For the good of the band. For the good of the New Sound . . . the music of monsters.

  He snapped open the locks on his briefcase, pulled out his pen.

  I swallowed my screams whole. They went down my throat as sharp-cornered and cold as ice cubes.

  “Hi, guys,” I said. “Nice place.”

  PART V

  THE GIG

  Study the Black Death, and you’ll understand one truth: when things start to go wrong, human beings always find ways to make them worse.

  The year the Death came to Europe, a city called Caffa on the doorstep of Asia was under siege. When the attackers found themselves coming down with a strange new disease, they wisely decided to run. But first they catapulted plague-ridden corpses over the walls of the city—so both sides would get the disease. Brilliant move.

  When the Black Death was at its worst, the church decided to look for someone to blame and began to persecute heretics, Muslims, and Jews. As people fled these attacks, the disease fled with them. Nice work.

  England and France had gone to war one year before the Black Death struck, but instead of making peace while the pandemic raged, they kept on fighting. In fact, they kept on fighting for 116 years, keeping their people poor, malnourished, susceptible to disease. Now that’s commitment.

  The Black Death was helped along by war, by panic, even by the weather, but it had no greater ally than human stupidity. Sometimes, you wonder how our species has made it this far.

  Not without a lot of help, I assure you.

  NIGHT MAYOR TAPES:

  411-421

  23. MORAL HAZARD

  -ALANA RAY-

  I still hadn’t made a decision, but my hands were steady.

  I’d been here at the nightclub more than three hours and hadn’t needed to drum my fingers or touch my forehead even once. Like being suspended in that moment before playing, the cadence of the universe around me needed no adjustments.

  The club was at one end of a long alleyway in the meatpacking district, one free of garbage, the walls painted with giant murals and tagged with graffiti. I’d come in through a huge loading dock, trucks full of equipment rumbling in a tight line, waiting to disgorge.

  Inside, the space was more than three hundred feet from stage to back wall, the echoes returning lazily, almost a whole second late—two beats at 120 beats per minute. Useless for playing, but that was fine with me. I liked my fake echoes with this band, just to be in control of something. My visions, my emotions, even the patterns I played all seemed to spring unbidden from the air, but at least my echo boxes obeyed me.

  Astor Michaels had asked me to come early for sound check, so that the engineers could get used to my paint buckets. I’d brought thirty-six to arrange in eight stacks (S8 = 36), along with my special buckets: unusual sizes and thicknesses, even the broken ones that gave off the buzz of cracked plastic.

  Unlike Pearl, the engineers here thanked me when I ran only two channels from my board to theirs. They had four bands to worry about tonight—each with its own array of treble, bass, effects, and volume settings—and wanted things as simple as possible. They let me hang out for the whole sound check, watching as they plastered the club’s huge mixing board with notes scribbled on masking tape. Its backside sprouted a tangle of cables, four bands’ worth of musical specificities sculpted in color-coded spaghetti.

  I was still watching them work when I felt Astor Michaels behind me.

  “Miss Jones,” he said, a sheaf of papers in his hand.

  “I prefer Alana Ray.”

  He smiled. “Sorry to be formal, but we have business to conduct.” The papers rustled, making the air ripple. “You’re the only one who hasn’t signed yet. Not embarrassed about your penmanship, are you?”

  “Top of my class,” I said, then shrugged. “The competition was less than average.”

  “Ah. Didn’t mean it that way.” He pulled out a thick fountain pen. “I’m sure your signature’s more legible than Zahler’s—or his mother’s, for that matter.”

  The drummer on stage started a long fill, rolling across his whole set, the sound phasing and twisting as engineers played with their settings. For a few moments, we couldn’t speak.

  When the drumroll stuttered to a halt, Astor Michaels spread the contracts out on the mixing board. “Shall we?”

  I stared down at them, all those carefully chosen, hair-splitting words. When I’d read the contract, it had made a tangle in my mind, the numbered and cross-referenced paragraphs twisted around one another like the theme of a fugue.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m concerned about . . . the ethics of signing.”

  “Ethics?” He laughed. “Good God, Alana Ray. This band has four minors, two of whom are bat-shit crazy. Minerva had to forward-date her contract to next week. We’ve got a simpleton and a control freak as well. The ethics of you signing? You’re practically the only one of sound mind!”

  I didn’t like how he was talking about the others, but first I had to explain: “I’m not concerned about my own competence. I am worried about tonight.”

  “Stage fright?” His voice softened. “Is it tough with your condition?”

  I shook my head. “This is not about me. What if signing this contract risks harm to others? In the law, that is called a moral hazard.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  I looked up from the mass of words spread out across the mixing board, finally meeting Astor Michaels’s eyes. “I think that something dangerous may happen here tonight, because of us. Because of what Minerva is.”

  “Oh.” He blinked. “So you’ve . . . seen something?”

  “Only what I always see when she sings.”

  “Your little Loch Ness hallucination?” He smiled.

  “I also saw it at the Morgan’s Army gig, but stronger.” The drummer hit his snare, its echo bouncing across the vast club. There would be a thousand people here tonight. Huge stacks of amplifiers waited on either side of the stage, buzzing in the silence, crinkling the air. “More people makes the beast bigger; more sound makes it bigger.”

  “I hope so, Alana Ray, but that doesn’t make it real.” Astor Michaels frowned. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Do I?”
<
br />   He stared at me for a moment, genuinely puzzled. Then he shook his head. “We’ve both seen strange things in our lives, I’ll grant you that. We’ve both had . . . conditions to deal with. But both of us made something from them. That’s why we’re sitting here across this contract, you and me.”

  I looked at his teeth, remembering what Pearl had told me on the phone last night. How Astor Michaels had made a career out of making more insects.