Кейт Форсит - Relics, Wrecks and Ruins - Anthology of Speculative Fiction Short Works

“Whatever,” she said and went back into the room.

Creep.

For the next half hour she followed Jacks’s instructions to the letter, plugging in her amp, checking her strings, tuning both the acoustic and the Strat, all the while ignoring the kid.

“How long have you been playing?” he asked. When that got no response he said, “It’s my birthday, you know.”

“Yeah? How old—” she stopped herself. Fucking Jacks and his stupid rules.

“I’m going to be nine. The doctors said I’d never live past five, but they were wrong.”

She looked at the pale skin stretched over bony features. He may have beaten the doctor’s predictions, but he wasn’t likely to see ten.

Jen set down the tuned acoustic and then yanked the patch cable out, plugging it into the Ricky. It only took a couple of seconds to tune—that guitar almost never lost its tuning. She flipped on the standby switch on the amp and was going to do a couple of test chords, but Jacks appeared at the door again.

“Leave it.”

“I need to set my amp sounds,” she said.

“Do it with the acoustic and the Strat. Don’t play the Rickenbacker until I tell you. You’ll play the acoustic and then the Strat. If and when I tell you to, you’ll bring forth the Rickenbacker.”

“Bring forth?” Who talks like that? She set the Ricky back in its case and plugged the acoustic back in, strumming a few chords from “With a Little Help from My Friends.” She glanced at the kid to see if he liked it. He stuck his tongue out at her.

I’m surrounded by heathens, she thought.

“Meet me downstairs when you’re done,” Jacks told her.

“For what?”

“Band meeting, of course.”

Great. A speech about who was boss mixed with some pontification on his personal philosophy of live performance.

This was going to be the gig from hell.

“The first rule,” Jacks said, staring at each of them in turn, “is that once I start the song, you don’t stop playing until I give you the signal.” His gaze swept the other two. “What’s the rule?”

Levon scuffed a toe on the kitchen’s linoleum floor and Lucy Bottom slumped against a cabinet, but they dutifully repeated his words: “Don’t stop playing until Johnny gives the signal.”

“What is this?” Jen asked, suddenly irritated past the point of caution. “Some kind of fucking cult? You don’t think we know how to play in a goddamned cover band?”

Jacks, far from being angered by her rebellion, seemed heartened. “Cool. Okay, so what’s rule number two?”

“Oh, for fuck’s—” Shut up, Jen , she thought. So what if he’s a weirdo? They’re all weirdos, and you need the money.

Levon seemed eager to please, or at least to get that over with. “Don’t pay attention to the audience.”

“And why don’t we pay attention to the audience?” Jacks asked, with all the patronizing smugness of a primary school teacher.

“Because the audience is the enemy,” Lucy replied.

“Good,” Jacks said, wrapping his arms around Levon’s and Lucy’s shoulders.

Jen no longer had any trouble understanding how Johnny Jacks had descended into playing private parties for sick kids.

“Oh,” she said. “What about requests?”

“No requests,” the skinny singer replied. “That ain’t how the game is played.” He locked eyes with her. “We clear on that, Axe Girl?”

“Please don’t call me that.”

His stare remained. “Clear?”

“Fine. Whatever.”

“Good.” He removed his arms from the bass player and drummer and stuck his hand out, middle and ring fingers pressed into his palm, index and pinky straight out like devil horns. “Join with me, brother and sisters.” Lucy and Levon complied, and then all three had their hands out making the idiotic gesture that Jen hadn’t seen anyone over high school age do since… well, high school. “Axe Girl,” he said.

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“Just do it,” Levon urged.

“No.” She was all set to launch into a tirade because at this point sleeping in her car seemed better than playing with these psychos, but then Johnny Jacks reached his free hand into the back pocket of his skinny black jeans and pulled out a wad of bills.

“Three hundred, like we agreed,” he said, thrusting the money at her. “You decide to walk from here on out, you keep the cash.”

She reached for the wad, but he pulled his hand up. “But first…”

Jen stared at the money, then at her fellow musicians with their devil-horn salute, then back at the money. “You’re really going to make me do this?”

“Please, Jen,” Lucy chimed in. “It’s important.”

Ugh. I’m going to hate myself in the morning. She stuck out her hand and made the gesture, shaking her arm for emphasis.

Jacks grinned like the self-satisfied eight-year-old he was. “All right, my babies, time to rock this shit all the way to the gates of hell!”

“It’s MY birthday, and I don’t want any stupid music,” the kid declared as Jen, Lucy, and Levon got their instruments ready. Jacks stood by the bedroom window facing away from them as if he were a superstar meditating before leaping onto an arena stage to sing for fifty thousand fans.

“It’s okay, Kyle,” the kid’s mother said from the doorway. “Just try it and see what you think.”

“No! They’re shit. I can already tell.” He pointed at Jen. “Just look at her. Bet she can’t solo worth a damn.”

Little prick.

“Don’t be like that, kiddo,” the father said. He stepped past his wife into the room and instantly Jacks turned, eyes blazing.

“Get the fuck out. You know the deal.”

Jen fully expected the guy to take three strides into the room and punch Jacks in the face, but instead he bowed his head and backed out. “Sorry. Sorry, I just—”

“And close the door.”

Jen looked at Levon, waiting for some explanation of this insanity, but the drummer just shrugged with a “Hey, takes all kinds” sort of look. The kid—Kyle—apparently found it all hilariously funny.

“Did you see that?” He looked at Jen. “Daddy’s got no balls. Mom says it all the time to her friends.”

The level of disfunction in this household was terrifying in its ordinariness. Jen blocked it out by focusing on retuning on her acoustic and waiting for Jacks to tell her what the first song would be.

The singer paced the length of each wall of the room like a panther looking for gaps in his cage. When he got to the kid’s bed, he looked down at Kyle. The boy shrank under his blankets, which was a perfectly natural thing to do when faced with an emaciated, corpse-like old man in skinny jeans, with long gray hair hanging wild, and eyes looking like something from an old Iron Maiden album cover.

“Don’t,” the boy said.

“Shut up, motherfucker,” was Johnny’s reply.

“Hey man, come on,” Jen said. “Don’t.”

He turned his head and shot her a look that made her slightly more afraid for herself than the kid. “Did I tell you to talk?”

The wad of cash in her pocket was telling her to pack up her guitar and walk, but Lucy put a hand on her arm.

“It’s okay, just go with it.”

Five minutes , she told herself. One song. Then if this shit didn’t get real normal real quick, she was out of here.

Jacks left the kid’s bedside and came to stand with the rest of the band. “ Grave Digger ,” he said. “The Joe Cocker version.”

Not actually the worst choice in the world, Jen thought, waiting for Levon to count in with his drum sticks. Cocker’s version of Procol Harum’s barely known B-side love song was slow and soulful, a little on the raspy side, but that would probably suit Jacks’s voice. She got her fingers into place to play the opening riff, but Johnny started without waiting for the count or for her to play.