Hard Rock Roots Box Set (27 page)

“Get onstage with me. Music heals, Dax. Even the ugliest fucking souls can take it in and heal a little. Play her songs, keep her alive.” I swallow deep and lean on the drugs for support.
Naomi.
I can't even fucking think past her name. It's just there in my head on a continuous loop. Her voice plays over and over again in my head, and I swear, when the wind blows, I can feel her body against mine. I squeeze my eyes shut and look down. I'm not usually this optimistic. But I've always been this stubborn.

“Fuck the fans,” Dax says, and I glance back up at him. He looks hysterical now, but I can't blame him for that, so I just stand there and let him rant. My muscles clench and anger rides over and through me, demanding respect, begging me to put him down. But I can't. I can't bring anybody else down because I'm at the lowest point there is. There's nowhere else to go. “This isn't a circus. We're not here to satisfy their morbid curiosity. Lives were lost and destroyed, Turner. There are a thousand vultures swarming outside this bus, wanting to cut so deep into us that we bleed to death.” Dax slaps his chest hard for emphasis, squeezing his fingers in their skeleton gloves so tight that his skin turns red. “And you want us to go onstage and play? Why? So every note can poison us a little more? So every strum of your fingers on her guitar can remind us that she's gone, and our life is gone, and the music,” Dax laughs, but there's no joy there. Just fucking pain and agony, enough to drown an army. “The music is dead, Turner.”

I look up, into Dax's gray eyes, past the wave of dark hair he uses to hide behind like a security blanket, and I give him God's honest fucking truth best as I know it.

“Music never dies, Dax. It revives and it soothes the soul. If you let this fall away, you let Naomi down, but the music will live on. The music will always live on.”

The atmosphere backstage is the most cloying, depressing shit I have ever had to sit through. Even Travis' funeral didn't feel like this. There's this sense of hopelessness that poisons the air and drags its dirty fingers through your soul. Nobody wants to be here, yet they have nowhere else to go.

The crowd is extra fucking insane today, screaming and shouting and clawing their way towards the stage, belting out questions that nobody knows the answer to.
Where is Hayden? Who killed Naomi? What will happen to Amatory Riot?
I keep the guitar slung over my shoulders and wait for Terre Haute to finish their set and get off the fucking stage. Once I get up there, this game is over. I will not allow the disrespect to continue. Those assholes will step up and shut up. They will show their support with open ears and desperate cries. They will listen and they will damn well appreciate Naomi's work, or I'll fucking destroy them onstage with her guitar. I will cut them up with this black and white axe, slice them to pieces and throw them to the wolves.

I finish my cigarette and toss it on the floor. I don't care if it burns the whole place to the ground. All that matters now is letting Naomi's voice be heard, using the music like I use the drugs, as a crutch to get through the day, a stepping stone to move across the black abyss of the horror filled week.

Nobody mentions that I'm wearing the same clothes I had on a few days ago or that I stink like shit. Not even Milo. I'm not even sure I'm the only one. Dax's outfit looks pretty fucking familiar.

“You don't have to do this,” Trey says to me, but I ignore him. He's really starting to piss me off. I used to think he knew me better than anyone, but this shit is starting to get old. If he can't see that I
have
to do this, then we've obviously grown further apart than I ever could've imagined.

“Trey, fuck off,” I tell him, and he just sighs.

“Fine, what the fuck do I know? I only watched Ronnie fall into a lifelong depression that he's never getting out of. Screw me sideways for trying to keep you from doing the same.”

“I'll be fine. Soon as I find Naomi.” Even if she's dead, I have to know for sure. Until then, in my head, she's still just missing. Although missing is better than bloodless and beat up, that's for fuck's sure.

“Oh, Jesus Christ, Turner. She's fucking
dead.
” He hisses this last part out, lowering his voice so nobody else can hear. The subject of Naomi Knox is friggin' taboo back here. They're all more than willing to entertain the scenario that she's lying cold in the morgue, but too chicken shit to say it aloud. Screw them. Screw them all.

“Do you hear the crowd?” Dax asks, moving up beside me. Trey throws him a nasty look though I'm not sure why. It's not like he's at fault for all this. God help the fucker who is. If I find him, I won't be thinking straight. There'll be his pain and his end, and I'll make it my own personal mission to see that he finds both. “This is ridiculous. We can't go out there. They're not even here to listen to the fucking music. Sorry to say this, but I think we're jumping ship.”

I spin to glare at him and get up in his face, pressing the toes of my boots to his. He doesn't expect it, so he doesn't step back, just stands there and let's me get in close.

“We will demand their respect, and we'll have it. They'll either give it or they'll leave. I won't accept anything else. If you bow out now, you give in. You might be prepared to do that, but I'm not.”

Rook drops the microphone from his mouth and pauses like he isn't sure what to do. The people in here have lost their Goddamn minds. Music isn't what they came here for; drama is. I don't do fucking drama.

Without waiting for a response from Dax, I storm across the stage in blood crusted boots, pausing in the center, waiting in the spotlight like I was fucking born for this. Rook gives up the mic without a fight.

“Hey.” One word from me shuts the whole place up, just the way it should be. I've always been in charge, ever since I left home. My life didn't give me any other options. It was either take control or be controlled. Not much of a fucking choice. And this is
my
tour, and it's my friggin' heart that's bleeding and my love that's lost at sea. The crowd gapes up at me with open mouths and cell phones flashing, taking pictures, recording video. Good for them. I want them to write this shit down in the history books, mark this moment as a landmark in life. If I get my way, they will remember this shit forever. Whether it's my dirty, sweaty clothes, or my sunken cheeks or my trembling hands, I don't know, but I get no backlash, just stunned silence when I speak my next words. “Shut the fuck up. We're not here to entertain you. We're here to destroy your souls and put you back together. We're here to make you remember why it's so damn good to be alive. We're here to remind you that all of the drama and the bullshit isn't worth it. So, you're gonna shut your mouths and you're going to listen, and if you don't like me saying that you can leave. And if you do stay, when you walk out that damn door later, you're going to stop gossiping and you're going to think real hard about what it is you want in life, and then you're going to take steps to fucking get it.” I pause and wet my lips while equipment is shifted around me, while the members of Amatory Riot sneak out from backstage, crawl across the dirty wood floor and stand with their heads down and their hearts pounding. “I fell in love with a girl last week. I didn't expect it, didn't even know what was happening to me until it was too late. Now that there's a chance I've lost her, I know I'd do anything to get her back.” My hand falls to the guitar, and my mind scrambles to remember her rhythm, her music, the rise and fall of her voice. It's been awhile since I've played, but I will be damned if I screw this up.

From behind me, Dax starts a beat on his drums while that skinny druggy dude sneaks in from my right and blindsides the shit out of me by taking control of the lead guitar position, leaving me to play rhythm. It only takes me a second to get into the music and once it's got control, that little demon fucker screws with me hardcore and doesn't let go, sinking its teeth into my hands and sliding its tongue down my throat.

The crowd swells and breaks up into pieces before crashing together into a new whole, eliminating the us and them, becoming a single entity, one shining face shouting its joy and pain to the world, knowing that it's safe to spill secrets, that they'll get caught up in the strands of our music. Tangled webs are weaved as we unravel those motherfuckers, unleashing our fury into them and watching it get smashed back tenfold.

At first, my voice is low and weak, like I'm coming out of a Goddamn coma or something. That isn't fucking me, has never been me. If I let love make me weak, then I wouldn't be Turner fucking Campbell.

“
Unwitting cruelty bathed in beauty sings to me, brings me down, and lifts me back up. Takes me high, soars above, and all the while I'm falling. I am falling. Falling. Falling so far that I move right through you, and you don't, you refuse, to see me.
”

I get somewhere inside that maybe Naomi was singing about me. I think a lot of her songs are about me, but maybe I'm just an arrogant little bitch. There's that, too. But I like to think they're about me. All of mine are about her, whether I knew that or not. I wish I could tell her. I wish I'd done a better job of breaking my feelings to her. Jesus, I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't this. It wasn't the blood or the ambulances or the unknown.
I miss the shit out of that girl.

“
When you tried to catch me, it was all a lie. When you tried to soothe me, you only made me cry. Because I'm falling. Falling. So far into you. And I'm bleeding. Bleeding. Because you cut me through. My heart is sore.
”

My eyes scan the crowd and catch on smiles, tears, frowns. I pass right over all of them, trying to remember what it was like to have her onstage next to me. It might've been only days ago, but the rift between then and now is so wide that it makes it seem like years. I feel my body responding to the thoughts, the memories, and I end up with the most inappropriate, raging, fucking hard-on. But I won't apologize for it. It's just my dick reacting to what my heart already knows.

The crowd loves the shit out of me for it.

“
And I can't go on.
”

And then as I'm scanning, as I'm pretending this call and response thing isn't happening between me and that chick with the dual colored hair, that it's Naomi that's answering me, I see the barefoot girl.

“
My life.
”

She's standing in the back, the only still person in the venue, the only one whose body isn't throbbing with the music. She hasn't lost herself in the crowd. She's still a single person, and she's looking right fucking at me. The Devil himself would cry if that girl stared at him the way she's staring at me. I almost choke on my next words. My fingers fumble a bit, but I pick it up. If anything, I'm a Goddamn perfectionist at heart. I can't fail at this. I won't.

“
It's all come undone. I can't get air.
”

I feel like the girl's trying to grab me with her gaze, trying to warn me with those crazy blue eyes that swim like the sea. I want to stop playing right then and there, call her out, have the crowd bring her to me, throw her at my feet, so I can shake the shit out of her. She knows things. What, I'm not sure, but Naomi told me about her,
warned
me actually. What if she's the one responsible?

“
And I no longer fly.
”

I keep playing, knowing that she'll be gone before I can get to her, and I try to learn everything I can from her face, from the way her hand clutches her stupid, plastic purse, the way her lips part and her face fills with fear. I see her mouthing words, and I think she's trying to tell me something. Then I realize, that's not it at all. She's singing the lyrics, the response bits, the ones Naomi would've done if she'd been onstage with that anorexic bitch, Haley or whatever the fuck her name is.

“
Because I'm falling. Falling. Falling into you.
”

When she saw the carnage on the bus, she said she was too late. That
he
got there first. Who the fuck is
he
? What the fuck is going on? The girl starts to move back, white dress dirty and torn, melding into the shadows, taking her answers with her. In my grief, I had forgotten about her and now, here she is, three hundred miles away from the last place I saw her.

I belt out the last lines of the song like a plea, like I'm praying for her to stay, to answer my questions, but if she hears me, she doesn't cut me any slack.

“
And then I know it's the end and even my descent is done.
”

The last thing I see before she goes are her lips, mouthing the words like a curse.

“
I hit the ground and I'm gone. I hit the ground and
we're done. Forever.
”

Chapter 4
Naomi Knox

For some reason, I think I hear an angel singing, strumming the beat of my fluttering pulse with words that are my own, penned in a dirty, spiral notebook, born of the pain that kissed my spirit a lifetime ago. I accept that this is my end and relax into the rhythmic cadence of his beautiful breath.