Read The Last Days Online

Authors: Scott Westerfeld

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Performing Arts, #Music

The Last Days (8 page)

BOOK: The Last Days
6.88Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
“Yeah, well, imagine if she did have drums. Listen to how much sound she’s getting out of those paint cans!”
“Those are actually paint
buckets
, Zahler.”
“What’s the diff?”
I sighed. Painting had been one of my shorter-lived jobs, because they just gave you the colors to use, instead of letting you decide. “Paint cans are the metal containers that paint comes in. Paint buckets are the plastic tubs you mix it up in. Neither of them are drums.”
“But
listen
, Moz. Her sound is huge!”
My brain was already listening—my mouth was just giving Zahler a hard time out of habit and general annoyance—and the woman really did have a monster sound. Around her was arrayed every size of paint bucket you could buy, some stacked, some upside down, a few on their sides, making a sort of giant plastic xylophone.
It took me a minute to figure out how a bunch of paint buckets could have so much power. She’d set up on a subway grate, suspending herself over a vast concrete echo chamber. Her tempo matched the timing of the echoes rumbling up from below, as if a ghost drummer were down there following her, exactly one beat behind. As my head tilted, I heard other ghosts: quicker echoes from the walls around us and from the concrete awning overhead.
It was like an invisible drum chorus, led effortlessly from its center, her sticks flashing gracefully across battered white plastic, long black dreadlocks flying, eyes shut tight.
“She’s pretty fool, Zahler,” I admitted.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Especially if we could rebuild this chunk of Times Square every place we played.”
He let out an exasperated sigh. “What, the echoes? You never heard of digital delay?”
I shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the same. Wouldn’t be as big.”
“Doesn’t have to be as big, Moz. We don’t want her playing a gigantic drum solo like this; we want her smaller, fitting in with the rest of the band. Didn’t you learn
anything
yesterday?”
I glared at him, the anger spilling out from the place I thought I’d had it tucked away, rippling through me again. “Yeah, I did: that you’re a total sucker for every chick who comes along with an instrument. Even if it’s a bunch of
paint buckets
!”
His jaw dropped. “Dude! That is totally unfool! You just said she was great. And you know Pearl’s fexcellent too. Now you’re going to get all boys-only on me?”
I turned away, thoughts echoing in my brain, like my skull was suddenly empty and lined with concrete. Between the Stratocaster that wasn’t mine, the other guitars I couldn’t afford, Pearl’s demolition of the Big Riff, and now the thought of
paint buckets
, it’d been too many adjustments to make in forty-eight hours.
I almost wished it was just Zahler and me again. We’d been like a team that was a hundred points behind—we weren’t going to win anything, so we could just play and have fun. But Pearl had changed that. Everything was up in the air, and how it all came down
mattered
now.
Part of me hated her for that and hated Zahler for going along so easily.
He kept quiet, wrangling the dogs while I calmed myself down.
“All right,” I finally said. “Let’s talk to her. What have we got to lose?”
 
We waited till she was packing up, stacking the buckets into one big tower. Her muscles glowed with sweat, and a few splinters from a stick she’d broken rolled in the breeze from a subway passing underneath.
She glanced at us and our seven dogs.
“You’re pretty good,” I said.
She jutted her chin toward a paint bucket that was right side up and half full of change and singles, then went back to stacking.
“Actually, we were wondering if you wanted to play with us sometime.”
She shook her head, one of her eyes blinking rapidly. “This corner is mine. Had it for a year.”
“Hey, we’re not moving in on you,” Zahler spoke up, waving his free hand. “We’re talking about you playing in our band. Rehearsing and recording and stuff. Getting famous.”
I cringed. “Getting famous” had to be the lamest reason for doing anything.
She shrugged, just a twitch of her shoulders. “How much?”
“How much . . . what?” Zahler said.
But it was obvious to me. The same thing that had been obvious all day.
“Money,” I answered. “She wants money to play with us.”
His eyes bugged. “You want
cash
?”
She took a step forward and pulled a photo ID card from her pocket, waved it in Zahler’s face. “See that? That’s from the MTA. Says I can play down in the subway, legal and registered. Had to sit in front of a review panel to get that.” As she put the card away, a little shiver went through her body. “Except I don’t go down there anymore.”
She kicked the upturned paint bucket, the pile of loose change clanking like a metallic cough. “Seventy, eighty bucks in there. Why would I play for free?”
“Whoa, sorry.” Zahler started to pull his dogs away, giving me a look like she’d asked for our blood.
I didn’t move, though, staring at the bucket, at the bills fluttering on top. There were
fives
in there—it probably totaled a hundred easy. She had every right to ask for money. The world was all
about
money; only a lame-ass bunch of kids wouldn’t know that.
“Okay,” I said. “Seventy-five a rehearsal.”
Zahler froze, his eyes popping again.
“How much for a gig?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. One-fifty?”
“Two hundred.”
I sighed. The words
I don’t know
had just cost me fifty bucks. That’s how it worked with money: you had to know, or at least act like you did. “Okay. Two hundred.”
I held out my hand to shake, but she just passed me her business card.
 
“Are you crazy, Moz? Pearl’s going to freak when she finds out she has to pay for a drummer.”
“She’s not paying anyone, Zahler. I am.”
“Yeah, right. And where are you going to get seventy-five bucks?”
I looked down at the dogs. They were staring in all directions at the maelstrom of Times Square, gawking like a bunch of tourists from Jersey. I tried to imagine rounding up customers, going door-to-door like Zahler had, putting up signs, making schedules. No way.
My plan was much better.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got an idea.”
“Yeah, sure you do. But what about the Strat? You can’t save up for a guitar if you’re paying out seventy-five bucks two or three times a week.”
“I’ll figure that out when its owner shows up again. If she shows up.”
Zahler let out his breath, not sure what to make of this.
I looked down at the card:
Alana Ray, Drummer
. No address, just a cell-phone number, but if she could make a hundred bucks a day in cash, somehow I doubted she was homeless.
It had been so simple hiring her, a million times simpler than I’d imagined. No arguing about influences, getting famous, or who was in charge. Just a few numbers back and forth.
Money had made it easy.
“Moz, you’re freaking me out. You’re, like, the tightest guy I know. You never bought your own amplifier, and I’ve only seen you change your strings about twice in the last six years.”
I nodded. I’d always waited until they rusted out from under my fingers.
“And now you’re going to pay out hundreds of dollars?” Zahler said. “Why don’t we find another drummer? One who’s got real drums and doesn’t cost money.”
“One who’s that good?”
“Maybe not. But Pearl said she knew a few.”
“We don’t have to run to her. We said that we’d handle this. So I’ll pay.” I turned to him. “And don’t tell Pearl about the money, okay?”
Zahler groaned. “Whoa, now I get it. You want to pay this girl so she owes you, right? You want her to be
your
drummer, not Pearl’s.” He shook his head. “That is some dumb-ass logic at work, Moz. We’re supposed to be a band.”
“Pearl’s already paying for rehearsal space.”
“Which is no big deal for her. You’re getting into a spending contest with a girl who lives in an apartment that has
stairs
. Whole other
floors
!”
I looked down at my tattered shoes. “It’s not a contest, Zahler. It’s just business.”
“Business?” He laughed. “You don’t know jack about business.”
I looked up at him, expecting to feel the death stare, but he was just confused. I didn’t understand myself, not completely, but I knew I had to get some part of this band under control. If I let Pearl decide everything and pay for everything, Zahler and I would wind up just a couple of sidekicks along for the ride. “Just don’t tell her about the money, okay?”
He blinked, his dogs winding around his feet in disarray. I saw him wondering if I’d gone insane, wondering if I was going to screw this whole thing up, and knew I was right on the edge of losing him.
Which was fine, if he really thought I was that hopeless. Maybe it was better to walk away now than later.
But finally, he exhaled. “Okay. Whatever. I won’t tell Pearl you’re paying. I guess I can pitch in some of my dog money too.”
I shook my head. “I’ve got it covered.”
“But maybe we should warn Pearl . . . before we all show up for rehearsal.”
I frowned. “Warn her about what?”
“Um, that our new drummer drums on paint buckets . . .”
9. FEAR
-PEARL-
I took the subway to Brooklyn, so Mom wouldn’t find out from Elvis.
Skittering sounds wafted up from the tracks as I waited for a train, the shuffling of tiny feet among discarded coffee cups and newspapers. The platform was empty except for me, the tunnels murmuring with echoes. The subways sounded wrong these days, almost alive, like there was something big down here. Something breathing.
I hated facing the subway on Sunday mornings, with no rush-hour crowds to protect me, but we didn’t have much choice about when to rehearse. Minerva said that church was the only thing that kept Luz away till after noon.
This would all be much easier when we didn’t have to sneak Minerva out of her room, but she needed to join the band
now
. Lying around in bed all day was never going to cure her. She had to get out of that dark room, meet some new people, and, most of all, sing her brains out.
Moz, Zahler, and I had rehearsed together four times now—we had a B section for the Big Riff and two more half-formed songs. We were better every time we played, but we needed structure: verses and choruses, a drummer too. We didn’t have time to wait for Min to get completely well. The world was in too much of a hurry around us.
Except for the F train, of course. Ten minutes later, it still hadn’t come, and I hoped it wasn’t broken down again. The subways were having some kind of weird trouble this summer. Minor earthquakes, they said on TV—Manhattan’s bedrock settling.
That was also the official explanation for the black water infecting the pipes. They said it wasn’t dangerous, even if they didn’t know exactly
what
it was—it evaporated too quickly for anyone to find out. Most people were drinking bottled water, of course. Mom was bathing in Evian. I wasn’t sure I believed any of it, but in any case, I didn’t have time for earthquakes today. The rehearsal space was reserved in my name, on my credit card—the others couldn’t get in without me. If I was late getting up to Sixteenth Street, everything would fall apart.
I fished out my cell phone. It searched for a signal, until a tremulous
7:58 A.M.
appeared. One hour to get to Brooklyn and back.
Still hovering on the screen was the last number I’d called the night before—Moz’s—to remind him again about this morning.
Lonely and nervous on the empty platform, I pressed send.
“Yeah?” a croaky voice answered.
“Moz?”
“Mmm,” came his annoyed grumble. “Pearl? Crap! Am I late?”
“No, it’s only eight.”
“Oh.” He scratched his head so hard I could hear it over the cell-phone crackle. “So what’s up?”
“I’m on my way out to Brooklyn to pick up Minerva. I was wondering if . . . you wanted to come.”
“To
Brooklyn
?”
That’s how he said it:
Brooklyn?
Like I wanted to drag him to Bombay.
I should have given up. For two weeks now I’d been trying to connect with Moz, but he always kept his distance. If only I hadn’t messed up that first rehearsal, the one where I’d pulled the Big Riff apart. I should have gone slowly, respecting what had been conjured between us when the Strat had fallen from the sky. But instead I’d decided to dazzle him with nine kinds of brilliance.
Clever, Pearl.
BOOK: The Last Days
6.88Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Wish List by Jane Costello
Best Kept Secrets by Sandra Brown
The Right to Arm Bears by Gordon R. Dickson
Doctor Raoul's Romance by Penelope Butler
Wild Hyacinthe (Crimson Romance) by Sarina, Nola, Faith, Emily
The Border Lord's Bride by Bertrice Small
Day of War by Cliff Graham