Scott Westerfeld - The Last Days

The rumbling grew, and I pushed the tempo still faster.

The worm broke through just as we hit the first chorus, scattering dirt and black water, tossing a handful of bodies into the air. But these were peeps, not clueless kids in some nightclub, and the crowd didn’t panic or run. They came at the beast from every angle, setting upon it with flashing claws, tearing into its pulsing sides with their razor teeth.

The angels didn’t stand back and watch. They shot out of the trees, dropping from the amphitheater roof, swords drawn. Jumping into the throng, they fought side by side with the peeps, the great worm screaming and twisting in its trench.

We played and kept playing. When we ran out of verses, we started over without pausing a single beat, the air warping around me. Minerva’s voice had a new shape now, shimmering lines of strength that bound peeps and angels into a single force. Zahler’s low thumping notes were tendrils reaching down, squeezing the earth shut below the enemy, trapping it here on the surface. I could feel the battle in my muscles, my sticks flashing like the swords below.

Some endless time later the song finally stumbled to a halt, all five of us exhausted, the engine of our music out of steam at last.

I looked down into the park.

The peeps had torn the worm to pieces. Fragments of its huge carcass were spread out across the broken concrete, still twitching as if trying to burrow back into the earth.

A few of the peeps were scrabbling over the remains, eating them…

“What now?” Zahler said as the last echoes faded. The army of peeps had grown bigger than the crowd at our first gig—more than a thousand of them summoned by our music and the death cries of the worm.

Most of them still looked hungry.

The handful of angels stood out in the audience, covered with blood and black water. They glanced nervously at the peeps around them, their bloodlust fading.

“Dudes!” Lace yelled up at us. “Keep going!”

So we did.

Altogether we killed five worms that night, playing until dawn began to break at last.

Light filtered across the sky, pink clouds brightening to orange, and finally our grisly audience began to disperse. They faded into the trees, driven back into the dark alleys of the city, sated by the fight.

Up onstage, we collapsed one by one. Zahler’s fingers were bleeding, and Minerva had practically croaked her way through our last song. Even the angels looked unsteady on their feet. Covered with black water, blood, and chunks of gelatinous flesh, they cleaned their swords with shaking hands.

I curled up on the concrete stage, shivering in the predawn chill. My hands ached, my body thrummed with echoes, and shimmering hallucinations colored everything I saw.

But I was smiling. About halfway through the concert, my moral hazard had slunk into the darkness.

And this felt very real.

Being on tour wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

There were too many long bus trips, we were in a new town almost every night, and I hated living out of suitcases and trailers for months on end. Most hotels didn’t have much staff anymore—most didn’t have sheets . Room service was a thing of the ancient past.

But we did it for the fans.

At every new town they’d give us a heroes’ welcome, having hiked in from miles away or squandered their last few gallons of gasoline to drive from farther. They brought their homemade weapons and homemade liquor, ready to fight the enemy and party, to sing along, basically to have a good time. Local angels and regular people, even a few wild peeps wandered in most nights—everyone wanted to see us perform.

We’d become famous after all, even though the old ways of manufacturing fame—television, magazines, movie sound tracks—hardly existed anymore. There was still a lot of radio around, ten thousand backyard stations juiced with solar power, so everyone knew our songs.

They knew our name too, thanks to Pearl, who’d finally come up with the three perfect words to describe us. Even if it is a stupid plural. I mean, it doesn’t really make sense without the s at the end.

The Last Day ? Come on. That’s as bad as the Desk.

So you probably know how the rest of the story goes:

We toured like crazy, hitting the big cities all over the world, playing one show after another until the local population of the enemy had been destroyed. Then we did our famous Heartland Tour, playing every small town that had ever spotted a worm-sign in the distance and a few that hadn’t.

We were just as popular overseas. One good thing about singing in a language that’s been dead for seven centuries: nobody feels left out.

Especially not the worms.

Everywhere we and our two dozen superhuman bodyguards went, the enemy came, called up from the bowels of the earth by their ancient hunger, unable to resist a thousand tasty humans swaying to Minerva’s songs, as tempting as the smell of bacon sizzling in the morning.

Our fans and the angels kept slaying them, until the last few survivors got canny enough to slither back into the depths. The crisis slowly began to subside, the deep-dwelling rats retreating into their unlit warrens, taking the spores of the parasite with them. Thanks, guys, till next time.

Of course, things took a while to get back to normal.

There were cities and societies that had to be rebuilt, and the Night Watch still had to mop up the last few untreated peeps. They scoured the wilderness for those that the anathema had pushed into lonely existences, healing the vampires one by one until they became creatures of legend again. And then the Watch itself disappeared back into the shadows.

The earth was cured—or at least we humans thought so.

No one knew what the worms thought, or if they thought anything at all. We’d killed practically all of them… except for the most intelligent ones, Cal always pointed out. The ones who somehow figured out that our music was deadly. So the next time the worms rise up, they’ll all be descendants of those clever enough to escape. They probably get smarter with every invasion of the surface: wormy evolution in action.

Fexcellent.

But the next crisis won’t happen for at least a few hundred years, and I’ll be too old to tour by then.

Angels don’t live forever, after all.

Along the way, Min and I broke up and got back together about fifteen times, and that’s if you don’t count the breakups that lasted less than two hours. Zahler became a fawesome bass player, and Alana Ray stayed exactly the way she was: ethical, logical, collected. And Pearl is, as you know, running for Mayor of New York again, but that’s a whole other story.

By now, we’ve all been interviewed a million times about the tour. One of Cal Thompson’s books covers it the best; he was there watching our backs the whole way. Most of what he says is true, as far as I can remember.

The only really new thing I can add to all those stories is this:

It happened in a small town outside Tulsa, about halfway through the Heartland Tour. That night’s gig had been fawesome, us thrashing through a twenty-minute version of “Piece Two” while the crowd killed the local enemy, a giant bull worm whose death throes tore up that Sears parking lot like a rabid dog does a newspaper.

At the after-party, one of the local angels came up to me. She had short hair, wild makeup, and intense eyes. Her broadsword was strapped across her back like a guitar.

She stood there for a second, eyes flashing in the light of the bonfire. The comforting smell of burning worm-flesh filled the air.

“Hey, good work tonight,” I said, raising my hand. “You guys in the Oklahoma Watch are great !”