Rock On (47 page)

That was everybody, thought Nicky.

Lyz Ah and Archie and Double-Ought ganged up for their infamous three-way ax-massacre pose. The crowd was not only ready for it, they expected it.

They used it as an excuse to get crazier.

The audience could easily outlast the band, Nicky knew. No lie, but no strain either. He scooted half a step to observe Rocky, a headphoned tech sitting at the console. Red and green LEDs shot full-board in time. Their power consumption was awesome. There were three crew people for each member of the band, guys ’n’ gals who earned their scratch by burning and bleeding through every show. Nicky had picked them all—roadbones who might consume Camels by the carton and bimbos by the six-pack, but whose true OD was adrenaline, endorphins, the electricity of the metabolism.

Nicky blew out a breath. It was nearly force-fed back down his throat by the sheer hurricane of sound. He moved to his cue position.

Jambone and Nicky had sign language worked out for all occasions. Periodically the singer would glance stage left to see if Nicky had a request.

The arena manager glared at Nicky through blue fog and the atmospheric swim of music. When he thought he had Nicky’s attention, he tapped his wristwatch.

Nicky’s glands upshifted to hate. Pure, ungilt. Not for Gasm, but for the audience of vampires, for that little turd-weasel in the Sears three-piece, squinting at Nicky like a high school principal, his lips pressed whitely together. Two worms fucking, thought Nicky.

Nicky nodded exaggeratedly at the minion of authority.

In that moment, Jambone turned.

Without averting his gaze from the manager, Nicky clenched his right fist, holding it up for Jambone to see. Then he braced his wrist with his left hand.

Jambone got what he wanted.

Jambone spun high on one toe, shooting his own fist up, then down, and the entire band pivoted in midbridge to another of their big ’uns, “Never Give In.” It was a precision switch guaranteed to leave change from a dime, and the audience was so stunned by the relay that there was almost no reaction through the first bars.

Then they cheered. They knew the words.

You want nihilism, anarchy? Nicky thought. You got it. He grinned.

Crescendo time for the cannibals. The bouncers felt the crush from behind the plywood barricades, sliding to defensive crouches as Double-Ought fireballed through a lunatic improv. Lyz Ah and Hi Fi went on the attack; the crowd wanted them the way a leather Harley saddle wants a warm crotch. Archie rode the lip of the stage, beckoning physical contact from the pit.

The arena manager was trying to consult a munchkin underling. He could not be heard. He was going at least as berserk as the band.

Nicky caught Rocky’s eye and jerked both thumbs up. The tech acknowledged, invoked his personal grapevine, and everyone who mattered had the massage in seconds.

Play it loud. Pop fuses. Break laws. Fry brains.

Flaming money, undergarments, spikes, programs, change, cherry bombs, everything not bolted to the concrete floor rained stageward. Jambone unsocketed his skull-and-crossbones codpiece, lent it a hefty sniff, and spun it into the teeming throng. A Morrison-style bust was about the only option left.

Nicky saw a whirlpool form where the codpiece landed. A piranha feeding frenzy. The morsel was won amid eye gouging and tribal slaughter.

The concert reached for critical mass, gauged in contusions and fractures and perhaps even the ultimate inconvenience. Nicky no longer cared. The unbridled power of his decision was narcotic; the rush flooded his system.
Let cochleas explode. Let the blood flow.

Let history be made, but
now.

JFDI: Just Fucking Do It.

Jambone was the first to be hit by the echoes of Lyz Ah’s just-concocted solo, bouncing back from the far end of the arena bowl. The sound returned hollow and unnatural. He gawked. The mike slithered from his grasp to
clunk
on the stage. There was no superamplified clunk to follow.

Nazi Kurt slipped and fell on his ass in astonishment.

The sudden, total silence whooshed in like a shroud to compress the eardrums. The drop-off was vertiginous; Nicky felt as if he were fighting to respirate in a vacuum.

Hi Fi and Archie were still hammering away, grimacing, posing, busting strings, until they discovered they were putting out zero sound. It took exactly two heartbeats.

Slurpee stopped drumming. The sight was so lame it was nearly comic. Double-Ought, ditto.

The arena manager peeked out from behind the wing curtains. He stuffed his fist into his face, dropping his clipboard to the floor. It landed with a solid, flat whack that almost startled Archie into a power dump.

Every single preamp, power amp, power booster, contour amp, and PA speaker had overloaded, arcing across protective fuses to crisp the circuitry. The speaker elements and conduits were puddles of chrome plasma. Three of the techs were still writhing from severe electrical hotfoots. The tapes, running at 15 IPS, had flash-melted into useless Frisbees of plastic as the recording hookups had cooked down to slag.

Slurpee put his sticks down gingerly. Gently, quietly. In his time he had seen sound frequencies blast glass to smithereens, crack rubber, induce coma, roast lab animals. He cleared the sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand.

The arena was littered with fallen garments. Pimp boots, trashy lingerie, metalzoid jewelry, fatigues, jeans, punk shirts, yee-hah hats, dirty undies, halters, tubes, belts, lace, thongs. The empty cavern of space resembled a sloppy flea market . . . or Nicky’s bedroom, he thought, as administered by his first wife.

Mixed liberally into the piles and wads of unoccupied garb were clinking pints of booze, smuggled dope, fake IDs, smuggled weapons, scratch cash, and several thousand ticket stubs. Somewhere in front was Jambone’s pirate codpiece, nestled in the clothing of the person who had battled for it.

But no people.

Jambone cursed loudly and it bounced back to meet him. He gave a disgusted shrug and stomped offstage, past Nicky, lending him only a venomous glance that said, “We have another gig one day and four hundred miles from here and what the ratfuck are we gonna do about
this
baby-rapin’ mess?”

Nobody spoke. Not even the arena manager.

They had all been cowed silent, afraid to make any sound, lest they vanish, pop, the end.

Nicky walked slowly out to center stage and sat down, right on the edge. His feet dangled where the bouncers in their yellow shirts—

Had been.

Okay. Item #1: You want fame, you just got it.

Item #2: Their gear had completely filled two forty-five-foot longbed trucks. Now it was all useless and ruined. Slowly, Nicky’s head dipped to rest in his hands.

Item #3: Their audience had completely filled the arena . . .

The arena manager had left the premises. Presumably to locate a telephone that was not melted into gooey junk.

Nicky had coveted the covers of
Rip
and
Rolling Stone,
not
Time
and
Newsweek.
He stayed as he was, sitting on the edge of the stage, until men at last came for him.

How long? Time had stopped. Who cared?

Ladies and gentlemen, Gasm has left the arena.

“Excuse us.”

Nicky looked up and saw three men in suits. The arena manager was standing out of range behind them. Tattlers always stand back when the poop is about to hit the propeller. FBI? CIA? Secret police? Death squad? Exactly how did you punish someone for something like this?

“You
are
Nicky Powers? You manage the band Gasm?”

Nicky prepared himself mentally for the cuffs. He did not answer. The lead guy seemed anxious to get the particulars correct. He spoke hesitantly.

Nicky returned the man’s frank gaze. He did not read threat. He read nervous excitement.

“These gentlemen and I represent the Defense Department of the United States.”

Call it intuition, but Nicky knew in a flash that Gasm would make its next concert date, no sweat. Not drop one. He smiled his very best dealmaker’s smile and stood up.

The
Oxford English Dictionary credits
David J. Schow
for coining the term splatterpunk,
a type of horror fiction critic S.T. Joshi noted as “utilizing elements from popular culture (especially
rock-and-roll
music and slasher films) to underscore the violence and sterility of modern life.”
Rock musicians pop up in several of his short stories and
the band Gasm from “Odeed” also makes an appearance in Schow’s debut novel
The Kill Riff
(1988), a story of vengeance and madness in the world of rock and roll. A Bram Stoker Award-winner and recipient of the World Fantasy Award, his short fiction has been gathered into six collections. Some of his nonfiction was compiled for the International Horror Guild Award-winning
Wild Hairs.
In addition to
The Kill Riff,
he has authored five other novels, the most recent of which is
Internecine
(2010). Film-writing credits include
The Crow,
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning,
and
The Hills Run Red.

Voodoo Child

Graham Masterton

I saw Jimi ducking into S.H. Patel’s, the news agent on the corner of Clarendon Road, and his face was ashy gray. I said to Dulcie, “Jesus, that’s Jimi,” and followed him inside, shop doorbell clanging. Mr. Patel was marking up stacks of
Evening Standard
s and said, “
New Musical Express
not in yet, Charlie,” but all I could do was to shake my head.

I walked cautiously along the shelves of magazines and children’s sweets and humorous birthday cards. I could hear Mrs. Patel’s television playing the theme tune from
Neighbours
somewhere in the back of the shop. There was a musty smell of manila envelopes and candy shrimps and fenugreek.

I came around the corner of the shelves and Jimi was standing by the freezer cabinet, looking at me wide-eyed; not sly and funny the way he always used to, but wounded almost, defensive. His hair was just the same, frizzy, and he was wearing the same sleeveless Afghan jacket and purple velvet flares—even the same Cherokee necklace. But his skin looked all white and dusty, and he really scared me.

“Jimi?” I whispered.

At first, he didn’t say anything, but there was a chilliness around him and it wasn’t just the freezer cabinet with its Bird’s Eye peas and Findus mixed carrots and original beef burgers.

“Jimi . . . I thought you were dead, man,” I told him. I hadn’t called anybody “man” for more than fifteen years. “I was really, totally convinced you were dead.”

He snuffed, and cleared his throat, his eyes still wounded-looking. “Hallo, Charlie,” he said. He sounded hoarse and remote and blocked-up, the same way he’d sounded that last night I saw him, September 17, 1970.

I was so scared I could scarcely speak, but at the same time Jimi was so much the same that I felt weirdly reassured—like it was still 1970 and the past twenty years just hadn’t happened. I could have believed that John Lennon was still alive and that Harold Wilson was still prime minister and that it was peace and love forever.

“I’ve been trying to get back to the flat, man,” Jimi told me.

“What? What flat?”

“Monika’s flat, man, in Lansdowne Crescent. I’ve been trying to get back.”

“What the hell do you want to go back there for? Monika doesn’t live there anymore. Well, not so far as I know.”

Jimi rubbed his face, and ash seemed to fall between his fingers. He looked distracted, frightened, as if he couldn’t think straight. But then I’d often seen him stoned out of his skull, talking weird gibberish, all about some planet or other where things were ideal, the godlike planet of Supreme Wisdom.

“Where the hell have you been?” I asked him. “Listen, Dulcie’s outside. You remember Dulcie? Let’s go and have a drink.”

“I’ve got to get into that flat, man,” Jimi insisted.

“What for?”

He stared at me as if I were crazy. “What for? Shit! What for, for fuck’s sake.”

I didn’t know what to do. Here was Jimi, three feet in front of me, real, talking, even though Jimi had been dead for twenty years. I never saw the actual corpse, and I never actually went to his funeral because I couldn’t afford the fare, but why would the press and his family have said that he was dead if he wasn’t?

Monika had found him lying on the bed, cold, his lips purple from suffocation. The doctors at St. Mary Abbot’s Hospital had confirmed that he was dead on arrival. He had suffocated from breathing vomit. He had to be dead. Yet here he was, just like the old psychedelic days, “Purple Haze” and “Voodoo Chile” and “Are You Experienced?”

The shop doorbell rang. It was Dulcie, looking for me. “Charlie?” she called. “Come on, Charlie, I’m dying for a drink.”

“Why don’t you come and have a drink with us?” I asked Jimi. “Maybe we can work out a way of getting you back in the flat. Maybe we can find out who the estate agent is, and talk to him. Courtney probably knows. Courtney knows everybody.”

“I can’t come with you, man, no way,” Jimi said evasively.

“Why not? We’re meeting Derek and all the rest of them down at the Bull’s Head. They’d really like to see you. Hey—did you read about Mitch selling your guitar?”

“Guitar?” he asked, as if he couldn’t understand me.

“Your Strat, the one you used at Woodstock. He got something like a hundred and eighty grand for it.”

Jimi gave a dry, hollow sniff. “Got to get into that flat, man, that’s all.”

“Well, come for a drink first.”

“No way, man, can’t be done. I’m not supposed to see nobody. Not even you.”