Scott Westerfeld - The Last Days

“Maybe it’s worth a controlled experiment, Cal,” Lace said. “A little science, a little art.”

Cal looked at them one by one, then sighed. “You’re the boss, Doctor. Once their guitarist gets well, I’ll set it up.”

“Hang on!” I said. “You’re not saying that we’re actually going to play those songs again ?”

Minerva let out a giggle. “Let’s put on a show!”

We set up in an old amphitheater in the East River Park.

Surrounded by the crumbling and graffiti-covered concrete, thick grass reaching up through the cracks, it felt as if the world had ended long ago. This place had been abandoned by the city early in the sanitation crisis, but it showed how all of Manhattan would look in a few years: nothing but a ruin in the weeds.

Along one edge of the park the FDR Drive sat empty, the whole city strangely silent behind it. I saw only faint movements in the windows that faced us, the barest pulses of life.

The Night Watch angels set to work, bringing us everything we’d asked for, looting equipment and instruments from the music stores in Midtown. They brought me a brand-new set of Ludwig drums and Zildjian cymbals, but Cal wanted a controlled experiment, as few differences as possible from our first gig. So Lace and three other angels and I made our way to an East Village hardware store, hurrying to make it before the sun started to go down.

The windows were all smashed in, and the angels stepped through without hesitation. My sneakers skidded on shattered glass; I was blind in the darkness inside. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that the shelves were almost empty, every tool looted, every can of spray paint gone.

I listened for anyone, or anything, hiding in the wreckage.

As the angels searched, I stood in the broken window, terrified to step in from the sunlight but not wanting to stand out in the street alone. I drummed my fingers against my thighs, watching the way the fragmented glass reflected sunlight on the ceiling.

Finally Lace shouted that she’d found what we needed. Luckily, no one had bothered to steal the paint buckets.

As we emerged, a pair of young boys called to us from a window overhead. They needed food, they said, and more flashlights to drive the peeps away from their doors and windows at night. Their parents had gone out and hadn’t come back.

The angels climbed up and gave them the few remaining batteries they’d found in the store. Then other people started yelling at us from other windows, asking for help. My hands opened, as if they were offering something. But we had nothing else to give.

I felt helpless, the world shimmering with guilt. I’d signed Astor Michaels’s contract, had written my name into that tangle of words and consequences. And the monster I’d seen had really come; people had died that night, scores of them. Maybe hundreds.

And I was accountable.

The moral hazard was still following me, slithering underfoot like Minerva’s beast, half visible in the corner of my eye. It stirred the grass out in New Jersey and rattled in the drain when I took showers. But it was growing bigger here in the city, drinking in the energy of shattered glass and empty streets. It never left my side.

I knew it was just a hallucination, a trick of my mind as I began to ration my last bottle of pills. But standing there, the blank expanse of First Avenue stretching in both directions as far as I could see, my moral hazard felt more real than I did.

Moz wasn’t completely recovered yet, but he could hear his own name without wincing and could look at Minerva, even touch her. The two of them waited in the shadow of the amphitheater’s shell, Moz limbering his fingers up on a new guitar.

“As good as your Strat?” I asked, knowing the answer.

He winced at the memory and shook his head.

We did a short sound check as the shadows lengthened, pulling electricity from one of the Night Watch’s military vehicles. It had a powerful engine, enough to run the instruments, the mixing board, and the thirsty stacks of amplifiers.

The angels had constructed a tower for stage lights on either side of the amphitheater. Once night had fallen in darkened Manhattan, our lights would be visible for miles, a beacon of safety. We were hoping to lure a crowd from among the millions of survivors left in the city.

An audience was necessary, I was certain: it focused Minerva’s music, made it more human, and that was what the enemy hungered for.

Once the angels were ready, we gathered onstage and waited for the sun to go down. The worms would never rise up in broad daylight, not long enough for us to kill them.

The park began to come alive. Cats moved among the broken concrete, and the scurrying of smaller creatures stirred the weeds. Lace told Pearl, Zahler, and me to sit on top of one of the Night Watch vehicles, so that we wouldn’t be bitten by an infected rat. That seemed wise. Bands with too many insects, like Toxoplasma, could only play fast and twitchy music.

And I didn’t want to become a peep. I didn’t want to hate my drums and my friends, my own reflection. Lace said that peeps who’d been devout Christians even feared the sight of the cross. Would I be terrified of my own pills? Of paint buckets? Of the sight of music?

The sky changed from pale pink to black, and I saw human forms moving in the near distance, parasite-positives out hunting, looking for the uninfected. They shied away from the bright band shell for now, but I wondered if a few spotlights and a dozen angels could really protect us from an entire city full of cannibals.

I drummed on my thighs and tried to remember that the worms were the real enemy: incomprehensible, inhuman. They came from some unlit place we’d never even imagined existed.

But peeps were still people.

Moz and Minerva were my friends and were human enough to be in love. The infection had made Moz sweaty and sick and violent at first, but I’d seen normal love do that. He was already playing his guitar again; maybe soon he would become like the angels, powerful and sure.

I remembered Astor Michaels talking happily about all the bands he’d signed. He thought of the peeps as more than human, as gods, as rock stars. He’d even tried to give them a new kind of music.

Of course, if Pearl was right, the New Sound wasn’t new at all. Despite our keyboards and amps and echo boxes, the songs shimmering nervously through my head might be like the struggle itself: very, very old.

I’d never seen Manhattan pitch-black before. Normally the pink glow of mercury-vapor streetlights filled the sky, the rivers sparkled with lights from the other side, the windows of buildings shone all night. But the grid was failing now, and outside the band shell’s radiance, the only light trickled down from the strange profusion of stars.

Lace joined us up on the truck. “I can think of one problem with this whole idea.”

“Only one?” Zahler asked.

“Well, one big one.” Lace pointed across the highway toward the darkened city. “These people have seen their whole world fall apart, and they’ve only survived this long by being very careful. So why would they leave their barricaded apartments for something as random as a free concert?”

I looked up at the lightless rows of windows. “Before we had a name, Astor Michaels said that our real audience would find us by smell.”

“Smell?” She sniffed the air. “The parasite improves your senses, you know. But aren’t we talking about people who aren’t infected?”

I frowned. Astor Michaels had been ethically broken, a tangled maze of moral hazards, but he knew brilliantly how crowds worked. Even if the people hiding in the city were terrified, they still needed some kind of hope to cling to.