He almost missed his cue. The disco beat became nearly a slippery-slidey rap, echoed back to him as if the mountain itself had a voice:
“Bedlam A-Go-Go!
Two wrongs, they make a right.
Peacekeepers, they want to fight.”
The song had been their first video. The Five had danced down a Soul Train of demons and angels. A UT computer graphics major had digitized James Brown dancing down the line, followed by, among other public figures, George W. Bush, Bill Gates, Saddam Hussein, Mother Teresa, Oprah Winfrey, a black-and-white leering Satan from an old movie called ‘Dante’s Inferno’, Godzilla and John Barrymore’s hunchbacked Mr. Hyde from the silent film. The video had been up for two days on YouTube before the plug was pulled, in a big way.
“Vampires, they sleep at night.
My straitjacket, it’s way too tight!
Bedlam A-Go-Go!
Mad mister murder he came to play,
Brought a butcher knife and he carved away.
The homeless sit on barren fields
While the bankers sit on their golden steals.
President says to embrace that fear,
But he’s on the first plane out of here.
Bedlam A-Go-Go-Go!”
At the end of the song, sweaty and energized, Nomad stood at the edge of the stage as he took in the response, so far so good, and he shouted into his mike a statement for that other Gogo, the Felix, over in Dallas or Fort Worth or Temple or Waco or wherever he was today, selling his cars and grinning his grins: “Fuck your role!”
Which got, really, a stronger response than the song had.
By the end of the third song, the Terry-penned ‘Don’t Bleed On My Paisley Shirt’, Ariel was dropping chords and lagging behind the beat. Her concentration was out of the groove and it wasn’t just because of the speed and intensity. Those she could handle; it was the feeling here that was eating at her. It was the atmosphere of Stone Church itself, a hard steely dark sense of…what was it? Hatred? Contempt? She was out of her element here, she felt vulnerable and threatened. She felt, quite simply, like an easy target. She’d realized, as well, that the stage’s backdrop and wings were painted to look like mortar lines and red stones.
Everybody else was going full-throttle. Occasionally she would get a questioning glance from John or Terry, a lift of the eyebrows to urge her to tighten up, but her nerves were betraying her talent. As the show went on and the hot wind blew around the folds of the black canopy above their heads and more and more bodies came through those turnstiles and ran to join the slam-dancing, bone-smashing tribe, Ariel felt herself falling away from her friends.
It had bothered her so much, since that visit to George in the ICU. Day or night, bright or dark, she couldn’t shake it.
It was up there, George had said. Folded up. Sharp edges. The wings of a crow.
< >
Waiting for him to die, he’d told them.
And then…the appearance of that girl.
I believe in you, George.
I thought she was the angel of death, he’d said.
But now I think she was the angel of life.
Ariel dropped another chord and stumbled over a trill in the first chorus of ‘Your Body Not Your Soul’, which really earned her a puzzled look from John Charles. She had a solo coming up at the bridge of this song, she had to focus, but…why had George seen that girl from the well in his hospital room? Of all people he might have dreamed of seeing? Of all the people he had ever met?
Why her?
And that thing about driving back and finding out if the place would still be there…why wouldn’t it be there? It was there, they saw it, why wouldn’t it be there?
Don’t you want my part? George had asked.
The song.
She thought about Mike, writing the first word: Welcome.
Again, drawn from that girl at the well.
And George’s part: I wish you safe travel…courage when you need it.
The song.
Her solo was upon her.
She was a half-step late, but she swung her Tempest up and stepped toward the edge of the stage, and she was shredding metal and flailing it out in thick dripping incandescent blue-white coils above the heads of the Stone Church crowd when some of the people on the left side started sliding over the chainlink fence.
She faltered in her playing, mangled a hot handful of notes and stepped back, but then she picked it up again because she was a professional. Nomad, Terry and Berke had also seen the tattooed bodies coming over the fence. Garth Brickenfield’s security men were trying to push them back but now on the right hand side they started coming across, and over there the security men were shoving back and shouting but Ariel could only hear the voice of her guitar through her stage monitor. There was a human crush against the fence, a straining of flesh against chainlink, and suddenly the fence collapsed. It just went down and disappeared under the boiling wall. The bodies rushed forward, swarming around the security guards who were caught up in small battles of their own. The camera crews struggled to get out of the way, but there was no way to get out of the way; they were caught in a floodtide and shoved hard against the stage, and when there was no more empty space before the stage the real party, the hard-core crash of tattooed, sunburned and red-eyed music fiends, could begin.
< >
“Prime, this is Shelter.”
“Go ahead, Clark.”
“We’ve got a vehicle coming up the road behind us. Black Range Rover. We’ll get a visual on the tag in just a few seconds. Yeah…okay, it’s an Arizona tag. Driver’s stopping at the gate. Doors opening. Looks like…three males and a female. Two males, two females. Not quite sure there.”
Join the club, True thought. He’d been walking around the lot, checking things out with his Walkie-Talkie ready, strolling in between the trucks, vans and trailers, and so far he’d seen plenty of unidentifiables. True stopped alongside a small U-Haul truck and faced in a southeasterly direction, where the Shelter team was located. The gate Clark mentioned was the one festooned with chains and barbed wire. “What’re they doing?”
“Um…well…it looks like they’re wanting to climb the gate. One’s trying it. No go, he’s backing off.”