“Besides,” the doctor had said, “I thought you rock musicians weren’t about perfection. Isn’t it all about soul?”
Soul. Yeah, Jen could’ve used some soul in her playing.
“So, you figure this ‘war’ belongs to you?” she asked Jacks.
He licked his lips, not like a perv but like somebody’s uncle trying to figure out a nice way to say a kid wasn’t ready for football tryouts. “You didn’t sign up for this. It’s the worst case I’ve ever seen. Three hundred dollars is a lousy payday for what comes next.”
“Then why are you going back in there?”
He ran a hand through greasy graying hair. “I’m old, kid. If I go down fighting, well, I wasn’t going to live that long anyway. I don’t try? Then what’s the point of living?”
Lucy and Levon squeezed past her in the hallway and headed into the kid’s bedroom.
“What about them?” Jen asked. “Why are they going back?”
“No idea,” he replied. There was a subtle break in his voice, and his eyes were wet. “Until five seconds ago, I figured they were going to leave.” He patted her on the shoulder and headed towards the bedroom. “It was good playing with you, kid. Couple of times in that second set I heard a lion clawing at the doors of her cage getting ready to bust out. Don’t ever listen to anyone who says you’re second rate, Jen Farmer.”
He left her standing there. A lion clawing at the doors of her cage. Twenty years of playing guitar and that was the only time anyone had described her playing in a way that made sense. Of course, given what a manipulative prick Jacks was, there was a decent chance he’d said it just to see if he could make her stick around.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“Hey, old man,” she called.
Jacks poked his head out of the bedroom. “Yeah?”
She pushed him out of the way and entered the bedroom.
The air was thick with a kind of green-black haze that stank of every kind of death and decay. Lucy and Levon were barely on their feet, coughing from the stench and trying not to look at the eight-year-old boy who floated, cross-legged, two feet above his mattress. Particles of puke, shit, and urine floated around him like Saturn’s rings.
When she walked in, Kyle said, “You’re the one I’m going to rip apart first, Jennifer.”
She plugged the amp cable into her guitar, not even bothering to tune the Strat, but instead turning the gain all the way up.
“The name’s Axe Girl, you little shit.”
“No more covers,” Jacks said. “No more playing it safe.”
Levon started up a heavy, nasty beat on the drums. Lucy plucked a steady rhythm of straight eighths on the second fret of the bottom string of her bass, but Jen knew the key wasn’t going to stay in F-sharp; this was going to be E all the way—open strings wherever possible, the strongest vibrations with a standard tuning.
Jen turned the Strat towards her amp, not touching anything but the whammy bar, letting the feedback build up. It was such a cheesy, guy-liner-and-black-leather-pants thing to do. But fuck it: fighting a demon called for a little showing off.
“Well, all right, motherfuckers,” Jacks declared, the last syllable swooping up from a low baritone note all the way to a high tenor range that shook the bedroom windows. “Show me what you got!”
Jen blasted into an E-9 chord with an almost funk rhythm that ran counter to what the others were playing but would’ve made Prince proud. The effect was both dissonant and yet somehow sweet; the wrong move that sounded right.
In other words, rock ’n’ roll.
The room shook, though whether from their performance or from Kyle she couldn’t tell. The boy’s parents stood together in the doorway watching with impotent desperation.
“Help me, Daddy,” Kyle whimpered.
His plea would have been more convincing if his various secretions weren’t twisting and turning in the air, buzzing around the room like a swarm of wasps—and if he wasn’t giggling quite so much.
Jacks sang with a passion and furor that would have captivated an entire football stadium. So much so that it took a minute before Jen realized he wasn’t singing in English. She wasn’t entirely sure it was any kind of language.
But Levon’s drumbeats faltered. His upper body lilted back and forth as he struggled to keep up the beat. When he looked up, she could only see the whites of his eyes.
“What’s happening to him?” Jen asked Lucy.
“He’s losing it.” She slapped the drummer across the face. It didn’t do any good. “Come on, Levon, stay with me, brother.”
The rhythm from the drums started to drift then faded completely. The last trace of Levon disappeared.
“Hey, ladies,” he grinned at them, tongue lolling from one side of his mouth like a dog’s as foamy drool slid down his chin.
“Fuck!” Lucy cried stumbling away. She tripped over her own patch cable and fell, the bass giving a cacophonous crash that crushed the music, breaking it apart like stale bread.
“Ain’t givin’ it up,” Johnny Jacks continued to sing. “Ain’t givin’ it up to you.” What had been a gravelly, bluesy voice before had become ragged.
Jen slammed a power chord on the guitar then reached to help Lucy up. The bass player took her hand but started to drag her down to the floor. Like Levon, her eyes showed only the whites, and her grin was anything but human.
“Come play with me, Jenny,” she cooed.
Jen yanked away, lost her pick but managed to hit the strings with her fingernails to give Johnny something to sing over. He fell to his knees, the way a crooner would during the big emotional moment of the song, but his performance was lifeless, barely audible above Jen’s guitar and the hiss that had risen to take the place of the rest of the music.
That hiss…
She’d thought it was the usual noise that came through guitar and bass amps when you weren’t playing, but this was different. Feral. Gleeful. Like an ocean wave, it crested higher and higher before crashing down on them, drowning everything in its path.
“Come on, Jenny, give it up, girl,” Lucy said with someone else’s voice.
“On your best day you couldn’t play worth a damn, baby,” Levon crooned.
A creak from the bed made her turn. Kyle was crawling forward on his mattress, eyes milky white except for pulsing strands of red like blood vessels bursting one after another. A rabid rat preparing to pounce on a dying cat.
Kyle’s parents entered the room, no longer crying, but instead humming with the stilted, painful buzz of wasps. They ran their hands along Kyle’s back, the gesture not loving but obedient. Sensuous. Perverse.
They continued past the bed and kneeled in front of Johnny Jacks, opening their mouths wide—wider than their jaws were meant to—and Jen heard something first click then crack wetly. Their lower jaws hung loose and wagged as they took turns breathing on Johnny, a sick, urine-stenched haze that wafted over him, making him choke.
Johnny, still on his knees, turned to her. He’d stopped singing, but his lips formed a single word.
“Run.”
The urge to flee was overwhelming. Jen was alone in a room of human bodies driven by something not at all human. They looked at her and grinned, reaching out with sickly white limbs, the skin riddled with veins gone black and green as if the blood itself had been replaced with bile.
Johnny Jacks flailed, trying to shove away the mother and father. They dodged his feeble blows effortlessly.
“Don’t go givin’ it up,” he said—no, sang. It was weak and pathetic, not in any real key, but still it made the parents snarl at him. Their upper lips curled even as their broken jaws shuddered.