Moz took a step back, his hands quivering. "Yeah, and what if no worm ever shows up?"
"Boys," Minerva said straight into the microphone, her words echoing through the park, "I don't think we have a choice."
A few of the peeps had begun to advance, teeth glittering in the moonlight, hands flexing into claws.
"Min's right," Pearl murmured.
"'Piece Two'?" Zahler said, and started before anyone could answer.
We all jumped in, playing hard.
Even terrified, I wondered how we sounded to the peeps, whether they really liked the music or whether certain kinds of sound waves calmed them down, like plants and Mozart. They weren't exactly dancing or moshing or singing along. Why were they listening instead of eating us?
I started pushing the tempo, coaxing the others along, almost as fast as a Toxoplasma song - music for insects.
Then Minerva came in, howling her nonsense syllables, setting my vision shimmering, like the glitter of weeping-willow fireworks fading in the air.
Something rippled through the crowd, a sudden wave of motion, and for a terrible moment I wondered if our spell was breaking. But the ragged army didn't rush to attack us; instead the whole mass of them turned together, like a vast flock of birds wheeling as one.
For a second, I thought the peeps were dancing... but it was something much better. Or worse, depending on what happened next. The ground had finally begun to shudder.
They were getting ready. They smelled something: the hated worm rising up toward the surface. Sane or not, the parasite inside them knew the scent of its natural enemy.
The rumbling grew, and I pushed the tempo still faster.
The worm broke through just as we hit the first chorus, scattering dirt and black water, tossing a handful of bodies into the air. But these were peeps, not clueless kids in some nightclub, and the crowd didn't panic or run. They came at the beast from every angle, setting upon it with flashing claws, tearing into its pulsing sides with their razor teeth.
The angels didn't stand back and watch. They shot out of the trees, dropping from the amphitheater roof, swords drawn. Jumping into the throng, they fought side by side with the peeps, the great worm screaming and twisting in its trench.
We played and kept playing. When we ran out of verses, we started over without pausing a single beat, the air warping around me. Minerva's voice had a new shape now, shimmering lines of strength that bound peeps and angels into a single force. Zahler's low thumping notes were tendrils reaching down, squeezing the earth shut below the enemy, trapping it here on the surface. I could feel the battle in my muscles, my sticks flashing like the swords below.
Some endless time later the song finally stumbled to a halt, all five of us exhausted, the engine of our music out of steam at last.
I looked down into the park.
The peeps had torn the worm to pieces. Fragments of its huge carcass were spread out across the broken concrete, still twitching as if trying to burrow back into the earth.
A few of the peeps were scrabbling over the remains, eating them...
"What now?" Zahler said as the last echoes faded. The army of peeps had grown bigger than the crowd at our first gig - more than a thousand of them summoned by our music and the death cries of the worm.
Most of them still looked hungry.
The handful of angels stood out in the audience, covered with blood and black water. They glanced nervously at the peeps around them, their bloodlust fading.
"Dudes!" Lace yelled up at us. "Keep going!"
So we did.
Altogether we killed five worms that night, playing until dawn began to break at last.
Light filtered across the sky, pink clouds brightening to orange, and finally our grisly audience began to disperse. They faded into the trees, driven back into the dark alleys of the city, sated by the fight.
Up onstage, we collapsed one by one. Zahler's fingers were bleeding, and Minerva had practically croaked her way through our last song. Even the angels looked unsteady on their feet. Covered with black water, blood, and chunks of gelatinous flesh, they cleaned their swords with shaking hands.
I curled up on the concrete stage, shivering in the predawn chill. My hands ached, my body thrummed with echoes, and shimmering hallucinations colored everything I saw.
But I was smiling. About halfway through the concert, my moral hazard had slunk into the darkness.
And this felt very real.
EPILOGUE: THE CURE
- MOZ-
Being on tour wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
There were too many long bus trips, we were in a new town almost every night, and I hated living out of suitcases and trailers for months on end. Most hotels didn't have much staff anymore - most didn't have sheets. Room service was a thing of the ancient past.
But we did it for the fans.
At every new town they'd give us a heroes' welcome, having hiked in from miles away or squandered their last few gallons of gasoline to drive from farther. They brought their homemade weapons and homemade liquor, ready to fight the enemy and party, to sing along, basically to have a good time. Local angels and regular people, even a few wild peeps wandered in most nights - everyone wanted to see us perform.
We'd become famous after all, even though the old ways of manufacturing fame - television, magazines, movie sound tracks - hardly existed anymore. There was still a lot of radio around, ten thousand backyard stations juiced with solar power, so everyone knew our songs.
They knew our name too, thanks to Pearl, who'd finally come up with the three perfect words to describe us. Even if it is a stupid plural. I mean, it doesn't really make sense without the s at the end.
The Last Day? Come on. That's as bad as the Desk.
So you probably know how the rest of the story goes:
We toured like crazy, hitting the big cities all over the world, playing one show after another until the local population of the enemy had been destroyed. Then we did our famous Heartland Tour, playing every small town that had ever spotted a worm-sign in the distance and a few that hadn't.
We were just as popular overseas. One good thing about singing in a language that's been dead for seven centuries: nobody feels left out.
Especially not the worms.
Everywhere we and our two dozen superhuman bodyguards went, the enemy came, called up from the bowels of the earth by their ancient hunger, unable to resist a thousand tasty humans swaying to Minerva's songs, as tempting as the smell of bacon sizzling in the morning.