Scott Westerfeld - The Last Days

After his little joke, Astor Michaels had said it didn’t matter what we called ourselves, that our real audience would find us by smell, but that sounded unlikely to me. I hoped we would come up with our own name soon. I didn’t want one tacked onto us, like “Jones” had been to me.

“How did Morgan’s Army get their name?” I asked. “Did Astor Michaels give it to them?”

“No.” Pearl shrugged. “They’re named after somebody called Morgan.”

“Their singer?”

She shook her head. “No. Her name’s Abril Johnson. There are a lot of rumors about who Morgan is, but nobody knows for sure.”

I sighed. Maybe Zahler was right, and bands should just have numbers.

Toxoplasma was four brothers covered with tattoos. I liked the singer’s voice—velvet and lazy, smoothing the words out like a hand across a bedspread. But the other three were brutally efficient, like people cooking on TV, chopping things apart in a hurry. They wore dark glasses and scattered the music into little pieces. I wondered how one brother could be so different from the others.

When their first song was done, I felt myself shiver—Astor Michaels was hovering behind us in the crowd. Pearl saw me glance back at him and turned and smiled. He handed her a glass of champagne.

That was illegal, but I didn’t worry. Here in the flashing lights, the law felt less real.

“So what do you think of Toxoplasma?” he asked.

“Too thrashy for me,” Pearl said.

I nodded. “I think three insects is too many for one band.”

Astor Michaels laughed and his hand touched my shoulder. “Or maybe too few.”

I pulled away a little as the second song began; I don’t like people touching me. That makes it hard to go to clubs sometimes, but it’s always important to see what new music people are inventing.

“Just think,” he said. “In a week you’ll be playing in front of a crowd as big as this one. Bigger.”

Pearl’s smile widened, and I could tell she was feeling realer by the minute. I turned to watch the audience. It wasn’t like when I played in Times Square, where people could come and go as they pleased, some watching intently, some throwing money, others just passing by. Everyone here was focused on the band, judging them, waiting to be impressed, demanding to be energized. These weren’t a bunch of tourists already wide-eyed just from being in New York.

Toxoplasma was making an impression. Rivulets of people were streaming forward, pressing toward the stage, dancing with the same chopping fervor as the three insect brothers. They hadn’t looked much different from the rest of the crowd until now, but suddenly they all moved like skinheads, a wiry strength playing over the surface of their bodies.

They were insects too, and my heart started beating faster, my fingers drumming. I’d never seen so many together before.

I already understood that there were different kinds of insects—Astor Michaels was very different from Minerva, after all, and I had seen many other kinds back when I’d played down in the subway—but the ones in front of the stage made me nervous in a new way.

They seemed dangerous, ready to explode.

My vision was starting to shimmer, which almost never happened with music I didn’t like. But the air was rippling around Toxoplasma, like heat rising from a subway grate in winter. In front of the band they’d started moshing, which is why I always stay away from the stage. Shock waves seemed to travel from their slamming bodies outward through the crowd, their twitches spreading like a fever across the club.

“Mmm. Smell that,” Astor Michaels said, tipping back his head with closed eyes. “I should have called these guys the Panic.” He giggled, still amused by his little joke on us.

I shivered, blinked my eyes three times. “I don’t like this band. They’re against normal, not beside it.”

“They won’t last long anyway,” he said. “Maybe a couple of weeks. But they serve their purpose.”

“Which is what?” Pearl asked.

He smiled, wide enough to show the Minerva-like sharpness of his teeth. “They shake things up.”

I could see what he meant. The tremors spreading from the insectoid moshers were changing things inside the club, making everyone edgy. It felt like when news of some strange new attack broke once while I was playing Times Square, and the crowd seemed to turn all at once to read the words crawling by on the giant news tickers. Most of the audience didn’t like Toxoplasma’s music any more than Pearl and I, but it tuned their nervous systems to a higher setting. I could see it in their eyes and in the quick, anxious motions of their heads.

And I realized that Astor Michaels was good at manipulating crowds. Maybe that was what made him feel more real.

“The audience expects something big to happen now,” I said.

“Morgan’s Army,” Astor Michaels answered, letting his teeth slip out again.

It worked: Morgan’s Army shook things up more.

Abril Johnson held an old-fashioned microphone, clutching it in two hands like a lounge singer from long ago. Her silver evening dress glittered in the three spotlights that followed her, covering the walls and ceiling of the club with swirling pinpricks. As the band slid into their first song, she didn’t make a sound. She waited for a solid minute, barely moving, like a praying mantis creeping closer in slow motion before it pounces.

Bass rumbled through us from the big Marshall stacks, setting the floor trembling. Glasses hanging over the bar began to shudder against one another—my vision already shimmering, the sound looked like snow in the air.

Then Abril Johnson started singing, low and slow. The words were barely recognizable; she was stretching and mangling them in her mouth, as if trying to twist them into something inscrutable. I closed my eyes and listened hard, trying to pick out the half-familiar, half-alien words entwined in the song.

After a moment I realized where I’d heard them before: the strange words were shaped from the same nonsense syllables that Minerva always sang. But Abril Johnson had hidden them in her drawl, interweaving them with plain English.

I shook my head. I’d always thought that Minerva’s lyrics were random, made-up, just leftover ravings from her crazy days. But if she shared them with someone else… were they another language?

My eyes opened, and I forced myself to look at the floor. Minerva’s beast was moving underneath us. Its Loch Ness loops rose and fell among the feet of the unseeing crowd—but much, much bigger than in our little practice room, as thick as the giant cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. It had been made huge by the stacks of amps and the focus of the spellbound throng, and I could see details in the creature now. There were segments along its length, like a sinuous earthworm testing the air.

“How’s that for intense?” Pearl murmured, her empty champagne glass clutched tightly in both hands, echoing the singer’s grip on the microphone.

“Very.” Astor Michaels cocked his head. “But not as intense as you’ll be, my dears. Not as authentic.”

I shuddered a little, knowing what he meant. Minerva’s songs were purer, unadulterated by English. Our spell would be stronger.

The beast coiled faster, and the floor of the nightclub rumbled under my feet, as if some droning bass note had found the resonant frequency of the room. I thought of how wineglasses could shatter from just the right pitch and wondered if a whole building might disintegrate when filled by some low and perfectly chosen note.

Pearl suddenly looked up, her eyes wide. “It’s them!”

I followed her gaze and saw a pair of dark figures on the catwalks high above us, climbing gracefully among the rigging of stage lights and exhaust fans.