My dog and I we liked to fly
High above the wasted earth,
High above the dirty surf.
We saw a city burning red.
We heard some voices
And what they said,
Come join us it’s party time,
Come join us the party’s fine.
Come on down we never close,
Come on down enjoy the show.
We live it, we love it
But we never can rise above it.
Bedlam A-Go-Go.
We live here, we love it.
The kings and queens of nowhere scenes,
In Bedlam, Bedlam A-Go-Go.”
Nomad looked out across the audience as Terry launched into a short instrumental strut—a demonic boogaloo—between the choruses. He saw the oval shape of the natural amphitheater, which was about the size of two football fields. A control tower stood at its center, topped with a glassed-in booth and bristling with multicolored parcans, follow spots, strobes and other special effects lights. Back and to the left were the turnstiles of the entrance area, and beyond it the ‘Midway’, where vendors from all over the southwest and California had come to display their artistry.
Business was booming among this demographic. He saw blue, red and purple flames tattooed on bald heads. He saw faces transformed into Escher artwork. He saw the calligraphy of a hundred hues written across shoulders and chests and breasts and stomachs, each man and woman their own Book of Life. Here, dancing and capering, was a bearded figure whose original color of birthflesh had disappeared beneath the new skin of blue ink and black proclamations; there whirling ’round and ’round was a topless female with red pigtails and an intricate painting of a multicolored dragon clinging to her back, its arms extending down across her shoulders and the black nails of its claws circling her nipples. Technicolor serpents coiled around throats, arms, thighs and calves. Flowers grew from navels and foreheads were crowned by shooting stars and pentagrams. Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, Alice Cooper and Hitler pushed their faces forth from sweat-glistening meat. And there in the crowd…and there…and over there…stood in this blur of constant motion the few motionless figures who stood staring at the performers on the stage with eyes in a visage no longer recognizable as being earthly; they were creations from another realm, a strange and frightening beauty of human matter carved upon and recolored by needles both insane and awesome. There was the face made of layered scales like the gray hide of a desert lizard; there was the face created from a dozen interlocking other faces like a grotesque human jigsaw puzzle; and there was the face that was none at all, but rather a pair of eyes, nostrils and a mouth suspended against a bruise-colored, crackled parchment of indecipherable markings. It seemed to Nomad to be a document of rage.
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.”
“Kids who ought to know better,” said True, though he could remember climbing over plenty of barbed wire and locked gates when he was one of those who ought to know better. He started walking again, his black wingtips stirring up puffs of red dust. “They moving on?”
“Still in place, sir. Looks like…checking with the glasses…looks like they’re smoking some pot now.”
“Prime, this is Signet,” another voice came in. “Fly on the wall. Do you copy?”
True felt his face tighten. All joviality at pot-smoking unidentifiables vanished in the fraction of an instant. “Copy that,” True said. “Got a distance?” He was already turning toward the northwest. The music was thundering from that direction. The fly was coming up from the opposite side of the mountain, and would seek a clear shot at the stage.
“Three hundred and twenty-seven yards.”
That distance, calculated by a range-finder, would put the fly more than five hundred yards off the stage. Still climbing up, unable to get a shot yet until he reached Signet team’s height. True said, “Give me some details.”
“Definitely carrying a rifle,” said the Signet leader.
True wasted only the time to swallow. “Go get him. You know what I want. Logic, you’re on standby. Copy?”
“Copy that,” said the Logic leader.
True kept walking. After a few minutes he realized he was going in circles. He checked his wristwatch. He checked the sun. He walked past a nearly-naked guy with long brown hair and a topless, scrawny girl sprawled together in the water of a small blue inflatable baby pool. He brought the Walkie-Talkie to his mouth.
“Signet, you copy?”
No answer. They might be a little busy right now.
“Signet, this is Prime. Copy, please.”
He heard a sound from the amphitheater. The sound of wailing guitars, the driving drums, the fiery keyboard and the raw voice of John Charles, yes, but something else too. It was a sound like the wings of a thousand birds. When True looked up he saw only a sky of white fire.
John Charles abruptly stopped singing. There was an explosive boom and feedback shrieked. Something made a horrendous crash and twang.
True heard the next two noises and knew exactly what they were.
Crack. Crack.
Gunshots.
He ran for the stage.
Ariel had seen the goose-steppers. There were six of them, bald-headed and pale, wearing white T-shirts, black jeans and shiny black boots. They were going back and forth through the crowd at full-speed, doing their Nazi salutes as they jammed into other people and fought through the crowd like battering-rams. No one was listening anymore; no one in her range of sight was actually paying them any attention, but they were hearing the music like escaping prisoners hear the sirens at their backs, and all they wanted to do was smash through every obstacle in front of them.
She was playing rhythm guitar to ‘Desperate Ain’t Pretty’ and trying to keep up with Berke’s frenetic beat. Terry sounded like he was playing the Hammond with his fists, and even John had started to miss notes. He had his mouth right up on the microphone, he was bellowing it out like a hundred-year old field hand scarred by a Georgia bullwhip.
“Some fine woman you made yourself out to be,
If you had your evil way they could hang me from a tree.
You take my money and then you spit in my face,
Somebody ought to take you from this human race.
Won’t be me, not today, not me,
’Cause I want you to live to see me go free,
Want you to live to see your pretty face fall,
Want you to cry before that mirror in the hall.
’Cause desperate ain’t pretty, baby, you’re gonna know that’s true,
Desperate ain’t pretty, baby, ugly’s gonna show on you.”
Nomad stepped back from the microphone while Terry went into his organ solo. The hard, heavy vibrato was full of glittering golden pain. Nomad looked out at the audience, at the figures who slammed into each other and, snarling, twisted away again. He saw at the very edge of the stage a few people who had ceased their warfare for the moment and were staring at him with glazed eyes. When they saw him looking, they reached out to him their tattooed hands and arms, and the inked figures and shapes moved on their necks and shoulders and shifted on their naked chests as if a multitude of souls were confined in each body and trying to climb out by using him as their ladder. He saw a big burly dude with close-cropped black hair staggering around, clipping people left and right with dangerous elbows. His red T-shirt read Nug Nug Nug. Another formidable guy with a goatee and Celtic tattoos blackening his throat ran head-on into one of the Nazi freaks and knocked the goose-stepper on his ass. Nomad thought of something his mother used to say: It’s all fun until somebody starts to cry. In this case, starts swinging fists.
As Terry ended his solo and Ariel picked up her rhythm part again, Nomad stepped up to his mike. He caught sight of a slim kid with neatly-trimmed blonde hair pushing through the crowd to the front of the stage, moving slowly but avoiding elbows, knees and skulls with the grace of a dancer. The guy was wearing jeans and a loose-fitting gray T-shirt with a color travel picture screened on the front and the green legend Vietnam Golf Vacations.com. He had his eyes fixed on Nomad, who got his mouth right on the mike once more.
“This part you’ve been playin’, you know it has to end,
Nothing worse in the world than the murder of a friend.
Could’ve been so much to you, been the steady one,
But what I have to say to you won’t be spoken from a—”
Gun.
The sun sparked off metal.
The wind rustled through the black canopy overhead. Nomad stopped singing.
He saw it in the blonde kid’s hand. It was a small pistol. It had come up from underneath the T-shirt. The barrel’s eye looked at him.
Then the kid blinked, his eyelids maybe freighted with drugs, and he turned the pistol toward Ariel.
Nomad had no time to think; he just jumped.
He knocked the mike stand over and carried with him the guitar on its strap around his shoulder. There was a hollow reverberating boom as the mike slammed down, followed by a squeal of feedback. An effects box or something crashed to the stage and made a noise through the speakers like a Strat in its death agony.
His guitar hit the kid first, and then Nomad. From the pistol in the outstretched hand came two shots, but the shooter was already going down to the dirt. Nomad was on top of him and fighting for control of the dude’s arm, which snaked this way and that and then suddenly the kid’s head came up and slammed against Nomad’s right eye. Sizzling lights and pain zigzagged through his head; he thought his skull had been fractured, but he had to get that fucking gun. He just started beating the kid, started whamming at him with both fists, every damned thing he had.
Somebody grabbed him under the arms and pulled him up and someb
ody fell on the shooter like a blanket. The blanket was wearing a red T-shirt, and as he pinned the kid’s gunhand to the ground with one knee, he looked up at Nomad and the guy holding him and said tersely, “Get him on the stage! Now!” His T-shirt read Nug Nug Nug. Another figure knelt down and started twisting the kid’s white fingers off the pistol’s grip. He had a spiderweb tattooed—painted?—on one side of his face and hexagonal steel gauges—definitely real—in his ears.
“Back! Everybody get back!” shouted the dude who was helping Nomad climb up over the edge of the stage. Ariel was there, her face drained of blood; she reached down and grasped his hand, and Terry leaned forward to grab hold of his shirt.
Nomad scrambled up onto the stage and then fell to his knees. The socket of his right eye was throbbing. Maybe it was already swelling shut. God, that was going to get black! Fucking took a shot! He felt like he was going to puke, the smell of gunpowder was still in his nose. He saw that the guy who’d helped him had a headful of spiky brown hair, a brown beard and on his bare chest a—fake?—tattoo of a horned red devil sitting astride a Harley. The bearded devilish Harley fan was holding out an open wallet and showing a badge to the crowd.
Berke knelt down beside Nomad and said something. It was all gibberish, he couldn’t make it out. “I think I’m going to puke,” he told her, or thought he did because he could hardly hear himself either. He began to try to fight free from his guitar, but it wouldn’t let him go.
Ariel was trembling. She backed away from the crowd. She could feel what was coming just about to break; she saw it in their faces, in their clenched fists, in their rage at having been born between the wasted earth and dirty surf. As the young man who’d tried to shoot her was being pulled to his feet, his gun now in the possession of Agent Nug, one of the Nazi Six stormed in and kicked the kid in the ribs with a black boot.
Maybe their anger was spilling over because he’d screwed up the show. Maybe they just wanted to beat somebody to death. Whichever it was, they started coming in at him and in another moment the FBI agents were fighting for the life of their prisoner.