The Last Days

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?”

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.

He stabbed at the papers with one long fingernail. “What you have right here is real, and your visions aren’t. You know that.”

I was suddenly angry. “How can you be certain? This is in my head, not yours. No one else can see the things I do.”

His stare held me coolly. “But you’re the most logical person I’ve ever met, Alana Ray. And you wouldn’t have come here for a sound check if you weren’t going to play tonight, and you wouldn’t play tonight if you weren’t going to sign. So you don’t really believe in monsters, do you?”

I swallowed, looking down at my hands—perfectly still, ready to play. I had dreamed of drumming all last night, of being under the spotlights. “But you say Minerva is going to change things. What if she makes the beast real?”

“I’ve watch this epidemic roll across New York City for two years, and I’ve never seen anything like what you describe.”

I stared at him, wanting to believe. Astor Michaels had discovered the New Sound, after all. Maybe he knew what he was talking about.

“Don’t you trust me?” he said, the pen flickering in his hand. “Don’t you think I’ll do right by you?”

“I think it was right, what you did for Minerva.”

He let out a snort. “Finally somebody thanks me.”

“Yes. Thank you,” I said. Minerva’s freedom had frightened Pearl, but I’d watched too many schoolmates graduate into mental institutions, into group homes and jails, and I knew that locking people up was paranormal—against normal, not beside it. Locks didn’t cure; they strangled.

“Well, then.” He held out the pen, eyes glinting. “I don’t think you’re afraid of me or afraid of monsters. I think you’re just afraid of your own success.”

I shook my head. Astor Michaels was very wrong about that. That morning, I’d thrown my change bucket away. Moral hazard or not, I wanted to be more real than someone begging on the streets.

So I signed, as he’d always known I would.

24. 10,000 MANIACS — ZAHLER-

The crowd was filling the main room now—a thousand people, Astor Michaels said, but it sounded like millions. Here in the backstage dressing room the noise was smoothed to a hum, like a hive of bees just waiting for someone to poke it with a stick.

The more I listened, the more they sounded like they were ready to boo somebody off the stage. Especially some lame bassist who’d only been playing for about four weeks…

I swallowed. Nobody had ever been this nervous before.

This was real. This was actual. This was happening right now.

Under the dressing room fluorescent lights was the worst place to practice, but I sat there in my chair slapping at the strings. Maybe I would get a little bit better, maybe just enough to save myself from humiliation.

Sometimes, playing my new instrument, my fingers moved more gracefully than they ever had across a guitar. Lately I’d been dreaming of the whole world expanding from guitar-size to bass-size, everything suddenly scaled just right for me and my big, fat, clumsy hands. But right now, the strings of Pearl’s bass felt an inch thick, dragging at my fingers like quicksand in a nightmare.

Moz didn’t look much happier. He was standing in one corner of the dressing room, wearing dark glasses and trembling. A sheen of sweat covered his face and bare arms.

“You look like you got the flu, Moz,” I said.

He shook his head. “Just need my cup of tea.”

“Almost ready, Mozzy.” A teapot was plugged into the wall next to where Minerva sat doing her makeup. She had some weird herbs waiting to be brewed.

“Your cup of tea?” I shook my head. Living with a girl had turned Moz totally lame. And it was all my fault, because I’d told him to call Minerva, because I’d been so mad at him for wanting me to switch instruments…

It was all the stupid bass’s fault!

Alana Ray stood right in the center of the room, staring at her own outstretched hands. Their rock-steadiness made her look incomplete, as if Moz had stolen all her twitchiness.

She’d traded her usual army jacket for this fawesome Japanese kimono over jeans. No one had told me we were supposed to dress up. I looked down at my same old unfool T-shirt. Would the crowd boo me for wearing it? They sounded really impatient now. The whole thing was starting an hour late, which Astor Michaels kept saying would make everything really intense…

But what if it just pissed them off?

Pearl was in the opposite corner from Moz, in the same dress she’d worn to Red Rat Records. She looked fawesome, I could tell, even if my brain was melting.

But she didn’t look happy. She kept swearing under her breath: “Special Guests? More like Special Retards. I can’t believe we’re going out as ‘Special Guests.’ Why don’t we just call ourselves Special Education?”

“The band going on first is called Plasmodium,” Moz said. “How much does that name suck?”

Pearl looked at him, gave Minerva a two-second glare, then said quietly, “Sounds a lot like Toxoplasma.”

“We should pick a real name soon,” Minerva said, staring at her reflection in the mirror, applying makeup with steady hands. She was wearing a long evening gown, lots of jewelry, and didn’t look nervous at all. She didn’t notice the looks Pearl had been giving her. “If we let Astor Michaels choose one, it’ll have the word plasma in it.”

“What does plasma even mean?” Moz asked.

“It can mean two things,” Alana Ray said. “Electrified gas or blood.”

“Gee,” Pearl muttered. “Which one do you think he was going for?”

The teakettle suddenly spit out a crooked screech, the sound fading into a moan as Minerva unplugged it. She poured the boiling water into her cup of herbs, and the smell of compost heap filled the room. “Here you go, Mozzy.”

An explosion of sound came from the walls, a thudding from the floor beneath us.

“Crap!” I hissed. “It’s the first band. We’re the second band. That means we’re next!”

“That is correct,” Alana Ray said.

My stomach started roiling like that time when I was little and I swallowed part of my chemistry set. We were going to face a possibly homicidal crowd in… “Half an hour.”

“Plus changeover time,” Alana Ray said.

I shut my eyes and listened. The crowd wasn’t booing yet. Maybe they weren’t such a nasty bunch after all. But Plasmodium sounded tight, not like they’d been forced to switch instruments, say, in the last month or so…

“Listen to that,” I said. “Their bass player is way faster than me. Everyone’s going to think I suck.”

“You don’t suck, Zahler,” Moz said. “And he sounds too fast to me.”

“Be dead by tomorrow at that speed,” Pearl said, staring down at her fingernails.

“Dead?” I said. “What do you mean?” Did people ever die on stage? I wondered. Like from heart attacks? Or the audience killing them because they sucked?

“Relax, Zahler.” Moz was sipping his tea now, still trembling, Minerva mopping at the sheen of sweat across his face with a towel. “You’ve got half an hour to get yourself together.”

Great. I was being told to chill out by a guy who looked like he was dying of Ebola fever. Maybe Moz was about to collapse, and then we could do this whole Special Guest thing after he recovered—and I got some more practice in.

Alana Ray was still staring at her hands. She’d hardly moved the whole time, like some kind of kung-fu Zen master contemplating destiny. I was thinking how maybe I should have worn something Japanese—then I’d at least look fool. Well, actually, I already looked fool. In the usual sense of the word.

“Time is a strange thing, Zahler,” Alana Ray said. “If you focus your mind, thirty minutes can seem like five hours.”

But it didn’t. It seemed like five seconds.

Then Astor Michaels came in and said that it was showtime.

A thousand of them waited out there, all just looking at us.

Random shouts filtered up from the audience—they weren’t heckling us exactly, just bored and ready for another band to start. We didn’t have any fans yet—the few friends Moz and I had invited were too young to get in. The sight of the unfriendly crowd made me realize one big thing missing from my rock-star dreams:

In all my fantasies about being famous, I was already famous, so I never had to get famous. I never had to walk out in front of a crowd for the first time, unknown and defenseless. In my dreams, this awful night had already happened.

I looked over at Moz, but he was staring down at his feet and still trembling, like he was having a seizure. Behind her paint buckets, Alana Ray’s eyes were shut, and Pearl was peering down at her keyboards, flicking switches as fast as she could, like she was about to take off in a spaceship. Nobody looked back at me, like they were all suddenly embarrassed to be in the same band.

It’s not my fault! I wanted to shout. I never wanted to play the bass!

Minerva was the only one who looked happy to be onstage. She was already leaning over her mike stand, talking to a bunch of tattooed guys down in front, flirting with them, flicking at their grasping hands with spike-heeled black boots. Even through her dark glasses you could see that her eyes were scary-wide and glowing, sucking energy from the crowd before she’d sung a single note.

Pearl gave me a low E, and I took a deep breath and tuned up. The sound boomed out from my bass like a foghorn, rumbling through the club. A few howls from the audience answered the noise, as if I’d interrupted someone’s conversation and they were pissed.

The guys flirting with Minerva had big muscles and tattoos on their shaved heads. I’d read the night before about a big riot in Europe, a whole crowd at some soccer game going crazy all at once, attacking one another. Hundreds had died, and nobody knew why.

What if that happened here, right now? The whole crowd turning into deadly maniacs? I knew exactly who everyone would choose to kill first.

The half-assed bass player in the lame T-shirt. That’s who.

When we were all tuned up, the stage lights lowered. Total darkness, like I’d suddenly gone blind from freaking out. More impatient shouts filtered up from the crowd, and someone yelled, “You suck!” which people laughed at, because we hadn’t even started yet.

We were so dead.

I swallowed, waiting to begin…

“Zahler!” Pearl hissed.

Oh, right. We were doing the Big Riff first. I was supposed to start.

My fingers groped for the strings, and I heard the amps squeak with the sweat on my fingers. I tried to remember what to play.

And I couldn’t.

No, this wasn’t happening…

I’d been playing this riff for six years, and yet it had somehow disappeared from my brain, from my fingers, from my whole body.

I stood there in silence, waiting to die.

25. MASSIVE ATTACK — MOZ-

Zahler had frozen up.

Perfect.

My head was burning, sweat running into my eyes, heart pounding like something in a cage. But it wasn’t stage fright; it was the beast gone wild in me. I’d been anxious all day, too nervous to eat, and now the hunger had caught up with me all at once.

Garlic and mandrake tea wasn’t cutting it. I needed flesh and blood.

“Play, Zahler!” I heard Pearl hiss, trying to get him going.

The crowd was growing impatient, a restless hum building before us, but at least the delay gave me a few more seconds of darkness. My vision had been doing weird things all day: I hadn’t been able to look at Min, as if her face were made of sharp angles that cut into my eyes. Even the smell of her clothes and perfume was making my head spin, as if living together had somehow given me an overdose of her.

But here in the darkness I felt alone, almost under control.

Zahler still wasn’t starting the Big Riff, though, which left only me. I could play his old guitar part and wait for him to come in. But once the music began, the lights would pop back on, so bright, so sharp…

And then the hunger would take control again.

I could run offstage right now, slip out of the club and into some all-night store, wolf down a slab of raw meat. Probably a better idea than taking a chunk out of someone right here in front of a thousand witnesses.

But even with the beast ravenous inside me, I had to stay. I couldn’t let Zahler live forever with the shame of having blown it tonight.

I took a deep breath, and just as my fingers moved… Zahler finally began to play.

Six years of practice took over: the Big Riff grabbed me, coiled around my spine and out my fingers, my nervous system responding as automatically as breathing. Pearl followed, then Alana Ray came in, the echoes of her paint buckets making the space huge around us.

The lights came up, and the crowd was suddenly cheering.

Good move, Zahler, I thought. Making them wait for it.

Minerva kept them waiting too, left the Big Riff grinding for a solid minute before she brought the microphone anywhere near her lips. But you could tell she hadn’t frozen up—her whole body moved with the beat, drawing every eye in the crowd, gulping in their energy.

She played with them, drawing the microphone close, then pushing it away, grinning behind dark glasses. The Big Riff could hypnotize you, I knew all too well—Zahler and I sometimes played it for hours at a stretch. When Minerva let it flow through her body, she was as spell-binding as a swaying cobra.

Then she pulled off her glasses, braving the spotlights to peer into the audience, to fix them with her gaze. I saw their faces ignite with the light reflected from her, as if somehow she’d made eye contact with everyone.

That was when she started to sing, and when I started to feel really funny.

The words that Minerva had scrawled down in her basement tumbled out of her, as lunatic as the first time she’d played with us—incomprehensible, ancient, and wild. They dredged up weird pictures in my mind, the skulls and centipedes carved into the iron lock on her bedroom door.

The ground began to rumble.

Maybe it was just my stomach, the gnawing hunger changing into something sharper. It felt as if all the raw hamburger I’d consumed over the last few weeks had gotten to me at last, my iron gut finally succumbing to food poisoning.

The sight of Minerva with her glasses off made my head spin, the spotlights flashing from her face like crystal. I felt the garlic leaving my body in a hot sweat, as if giant hands were squeezing me, wringing out every protection I had against the beast inside.

Disgust was leaking into me, a loathing for everything that had put me on this stage: Minerva, this band, the Stratocaster in my hands. The whole insane idea of fame and adulation and even music itself…

I wanted to throw it all away, to run from all these pointless complications and let the beast inside take over. To hide in some distant, shadowy place and gnaw on nothing but flesh and bones—perfectly sated, an animal.

But my fingers kept playing. The music held me there, balanced between love and hatred.

I stared down at the stage, not looking at Minerva, but I couldn’t keep her song out of my ears. It kept pouring from the amplifiers, echoing back and forth across the club, building like feedback in my head.

The cables at my feet were moving, shivering like dizzying snakes across the floor. I tore my eyes from them, glaring out into the darkness of the nightclub.

I saw it start out there.

A shape moved through the crowd, a swell of hands thrown up into the air, like a stadium wave carrying itself along, traveling toward us from the back of the club. It broke against the stage, shattering into wild cries of surprise.

The ground rumbled under my feet.

Then the swell appeared again, moving from right to left this time, carrying screams along with it. That’s when I realized this wasn’t something innocent, like upraised arms at a baseball game… Reality was bending before my eyes.

The floor itself was surging up, the bulge moving like a rat scurrying under a rug. More violent this time—the people in its path were thrown into the air, tossed up to fall into the outstretched arms of the crowd, like stage-jumpers.

My sharp ears caught a thin scream behind me, and I glanced back to see Alana Ray crying out, “No, no, no…,” unheard in the booming beat of the Big Riff. But she kept playing: the music had also captured her, locking her hands into their fluttering patterns.

The moving surge of floor turned again, growing stronger. As I watched, the ground began to split, the earth opening like a huge zipper, vomiting up black water and cracked pieces of concrete. A choking smell filled my nostrils.

It was headed toward the stage, but none of us stopped playing.

A few people began to scramble away from its path, trying to run through the crowd, but most were staring raptly up at us, too mesmerized by Minerva to move.

It was the enemy, of course, the same beast I’d seen down in the subway. She had finally called it up.

The Stratocaster burned my fingers, my whole body rejecting the music we were making, but still I couldn’t stop.

Screams filled the nightclub now. More of the crowd fought to scramble over one another for safety, trying to avoid the snapping maws of the beast. It grew closer and closer to us.

And then angels starting falling.

They dropped from the ceiling on thin filaments, cables that sparkled in the spotlights, descending toward the creature and onto the stage. One angel swung to the top of each set of amplifiers, swords flashing in their hands. They rappelled down the stacks, stabbing each speaker right in its center, every thrust bringing forth a high-pitched shriek from the equipment—a squealing counterpoint to the Big Riff.

Dozens of them dropped onto the beast and into the crowd, pushing people away. They brought the creature to a halt, hacking with swords and stabbing with long, telescoping spears. Its cries of pain joined the squawking of the amplifiers, until the music finally began to stumble…

Minerva’s voice faltered, and the spell was shattered.

I broke free, pulling the Stratocaster’s strap from my shoulder and grabbing the guitar by its neck, despising it with every fiber of my being. I raised it over my head and swung it down against the stage, smashing it again and again, its strings snapping, its broken neck twisting like a dying chicken’s. The guitar buzzed and squeaked out a last few tuneless notes, its death cries leaking from the surviving amps.

Around me, the others had ground to a halt. In tears, Alana Ray threw her sticks aside, kicking wildly at her paint buckets. Zahler just stood there openmouthed, staring at the battle on the nightclub floor. I couldn’t look at Minerva anymore.

Stepping back from the broken guitar, my hands bent into claws, I started to stomp at it with my boots. It peeped and squawked.

Then an angel landed on the stage in front of me, dressed in commando black, trailing a thin cable from her waist. She held a small object in one hand.

I recognized her: Lace.

I turned to run, to escape her and everything else: this band, this music, the monstrous thing we’d called up. But after a few steps, before I’d even reached the edge of the stage, she’d caught up with me, grabbing my arm and spinning me around, her needle flashing in the spotlights.

I felt a pinprick at my neck, then her arms supporting me.

“Say good night, Moz,” Lace said.

The sound of my own name almost made me vomit, and then nausea and pain melted into darkness.