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.

PART VI

THE TOUR

There has never been a better time for a pandemic.

Airplanes can carry people across the globe in a single day, and half a billion people fly every year. Cities are far larger and more crowded than at any point in history.

The last great disease was Spanish flu, which appeared at the end of World War I. (Pandemics love wars.) It spread across the planet faster than any previous disease. Within one year, one billion people were infected, a third of the world’s population. Its spread was so frighteningly quick that one U.S. town outlawed shaking hands.

And all this was before airplanes could fly across oceans, before most people owned a car. These days, any pandemic would travel much, much faster. We’ve got it all these days: dense cities, instant transportation, and all the wars you could want. For the worms, that’s motive, means, and opportunity.

When the last days come, they will come quickly.

NIGHT MAYOR TAPES

END HERE.