7:00pm Soundcheck

The train pulled into this village full of thatch-roofed huts at about half past six. Middle of the fucking jungle. I kid you not, a gang of these sheisty little bearded monkey bastards accosted us as soon as we stepped onto the platform. One of them stole Mina’s lucky pic. Lady Gates laughed until she split her latex bodysuit all the way down the back, revealing that underneath she wore naught but liver spots.

“Aww,” she whined. “Kirby, be a dear and walk behind me, would you? The paparazzo would kill for this shot.”

To reach the actual venue we had to hike even deeper into the jungle, about a mile from the village center, which was nothing but a ring of stamped-down dirt, anyway. That fact juxtaposed weirder than shit with the venue itself, which was a futuristic concert hall stuck out in the trees, like the Sydney Opera House but made of volcanic glass.

Anyway, they had zero business putting a train station out here; I don’t even think the place had a name. But this was the first stop on Emperor Hawijimi’s Sonic Gauntlet for the Reward of Great Fortune and the Infinite Adoration of the Glorious People of Hawijimi and Her Colonies.

“Probably loses something in translation, am I right?”

I was joking around with the venue’s sound guy. He wasn’t laughing. This stone-faced dude had a bone through the bridge of his nose and his balls were just hanging out from under a grass mini-skirt, like everyone else in the village.

You couldn’t find this place on a map, but the people here belonged to Hawijimi. That meant they all had their shit together like you wouldn’t believe. The kind of brutal efficiency enjoyed exclusively in the empires of mad reality mages.

This sound dude—his name was Three Quick Clicks of the Tongue, as far as I could tell—was better at his job than most of the bozos you’d find back in the States. Part of it was that the soundboard and the stage were some of the most powerful magical machines on Earth. But mostly he was just dedicated to his craft; you could see it in the way he’d get real focused on his work and start absent-mindedly twiddling with the bone piercing his nose.

The soundboard ol’ Three Clicks was manipulating was set in the center of the audience seating. It looked like a submarine had barfed out its cockpit. There weren’t the usual mixers and equalizers and whatever else like you’d find in a non-combat oriented concert hall. His job was to make sure that when certain sonic combinations were achieved they caused the proper balance of psychic and physical damage to the opposing band.

“So hey, Bud,” I leaned into his battlestation and said in my most conspiratorial tone. “Imagine for a second that you were to find a bag on the floor all by itself with, shit I don’t know, say fifty-million American dollars inside—”

[Handsome Alex]: I sincerely hope it is only out of a misguided dedication to comedy that you are engaging in this lame attempt to bribe an official representative of Emperor Hawijimi’s Sonic Gauntlet for the Reward of Great Fortune and the Infinite Adoration of the Glorious People of Hawijimi and Her Colonies, Kirby.

[Kirbdawg]: I know you’ve refused ‘The Cacophony’ as reductive but we have got to come up with like a palindrome or something for that name ASAP if you’re going to insist on using the whole damn thing every time. Shit’s ridic, Bud.

[Handsome Alex]: Perhaps you mean a portmanteau? A palindrome would in no way un-complicate the title of Emperor Hawijimi’s Sonic Gauntlet—

I muted the chat.

“Anyway,” I said to my pal Three-Clicks. “We all set here? Do I just like, go up there and sing something now?”

He nodded and that was it, he went back to his equipment. I resisted the urge to say something snarky about how I thought we had something special blah blah blah and instead I headed to join the rest of Motley Skew up on stage:

On lead guitar, we had Mina Diamond, former member of the anime-soundtrack supergroup Hypermagickal Girlz. She had painted her face completely white including her eyelashes and was otherwise dressed head-to-toe in a loose-fitting black leather suit.

Playing bass, for one night only, was Lady Gates, among the richest women in the entire world. We had slapped on a long piece of duct tape to cover up the split on her latex bodysuit so no one would peep her upper-buttcrack. She had also recently become part interdimensional-alien, which I should probably explain:

You see when I saw that the membrane belonging to the legendary essence I had yeeted out of that Drix dork was about to degrade to nothing, I knew I only had one choice: I had to get Cherry-lynne to let me stuff the essence in her soul-hole to stabilize it and then she’d have to go on stage with us.

In under thirty seconds I struck up a bargain with her, offering to vouch with Handsome Alex so he’d help her get a younger body. She called me a saint and opened up her soul to me without any need for one of his stories. I was fully aware my messiah-like presence might have had something to do with it, but like the saying goes: any soul-hole in a storm. Don’t look a gift horse in the soul-hole?

Whatever; moving on. Since I hadn’t dissected the essence I was going to implant in Lady Gates, the artifacts remained in there along with the compounds which comprised the legendary trait, and would provide her enough bass guitar basics to limp through the first show, when every band only had to play one song, anyway.

Alright, so resuming the band introductions, behind the biggest drum kit you’ve ever seen sat Handsome Alex. I’m telling you Neil Peart would’ve been like, it’s too much. It’s too much.

My boy Alex had come out of his bone chrysalis looking fucking terrifying. He now had four arms, two of which extended from his shoulder-blades and had too many joints and bones like a pair of profaned angel wings. Each of his four arms was wielding a drumstick. He had not grown legs but rather his spinal column had thickened into a snake-like tail which he could use to operate the pedal for his bass drum. He was surrounded by a swirling, purple mist as he casually levitated behind his kit.

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His eyes flared as I stepped up onto the stage. “It is time to work now, Kirby. Please take this seriously.”

I snorted and rolled my eyes like I was too cool.

But deep-down, where my heart used to be, I was shitting bricks. I wasn’t a singer. I wasn’t any kind of performer at all.

I was a manager. What did I know about art?

“Alright, so we’re good?” I said, too far from the mic for Three-Clicks to hear me. I stepped closer so that my lips were nearly touching it. “Now I just sing something?”

He nodded once from behind his militarized soundboard. Then he put on a pair of ear-muff style headphones and concentrated on his equipment.

“Here goes nothing.”

The others had already done their checks and everything went off without a hitch. I went up there planning to belt out the first verse of War Pigs. That old Sabbath-era Ozzie felt like my vibe. I looked toward Handsome Alex one last time. His eyes had that eager glow. I really wanted to nail this for him.

I inhaled, and then I sang the first line:

Generals gathered in their masses….

As soon as I started ramping up to hit the high note at the end of masses, shit hit the fan.

The stage lights overhead exploded in a flourish of sparks. Lady Gates shrieked and ran off-stage taking quick little tippy-toe steps in her stilettos. My voice was suddenly not my own. It was hardly what you’d call a voice, at all. And yet it was also familiar, somehow. It reminded me of the sound stars make while being crushed into black holes. It was a chorus of annihilation.

It felt like a fist was punching up out through my throat and out of my mouth. The vessel wouldn’t survive much more of this. But I couldn’t close my mouth and the roar of cosmic vomit kept coming. In the end I had to uppercut myself four times in the jaw before it finally shut.

Which proved too late for poor Three-Clicks. My eyes were full of water but I could see him slumped over the soundboard. It looked like he’d dug into the top of his head using only his fingers. Spongy brain matter was all mixed in with shards of skull and tangles of his dark, blood-soaked hair.

It had all taken all of what? Four, maybe five seconds?

I turned to look at Handsome Alex and his lack of a jaw made him look very surprised indeed. I felt that.

Villagers started pouring into the hall. The whole place filled up with angry clicks and the sound of their grass skirts swishing. All of a sudden Mina was beside me, wiping something wet from my cheeks.

“Fucking metal.” She held up her fingers to show me the blood which had seeped out of my eyes. “You good, Uncle Kirb?”

I panned my gaze over the hall. A group had congregated around Three-Clicks and were probing the crater he’d dug in his own skull. “We better get out of here.”

After soundcheck all the bands piled back onto the train. There were no accommodations on this stop.

Historically, the hour or two between soundcheck and showtime were some of the most dangerous for performers, both in terms of overdoses as well as being murdered by the competition.

But not for us; we bee-lined it for our cabin. When we got there, Lady Grace had already changed into a pink and purple bathrobe. She was standing in the doorway, signing off on a delivery with one hand and wielding a martini glass in the other. It was all-but-empty except for the toothpick-speared olive.

How the fuck this delivery dude found her way out here, I have no idea. I guess when you’ve got billions of dollars people just bend over backwards to make you happy.

“Hey, gang,” she chirped as we arrived. Then she turned to me. “Kirby, dearest, be a pal and bring those boxes inside, won’t you?”

We filed into the cabin and I carried in the two boxes like she’d asked. They were lighter than they looked. Handsome Alex hadn’t said anything since my soundcheck and it was making me nervous enough to say dorky things like, “So, should we rehearse or something?”

Lady Grace ignored me.

“Don’t worry about paying me back,” she said, and started opening up one of the boxes. She held up a t-shirt with Motley Skue written across the top. Handsome Alex sat behind a drum kit with yellow fireballs in place of his eyes. Notably, this Alex on the t-shirt had his jawbone back and was sporting a huge stupid grin.

He was going to hate it. I tried to get Lady Gates to just put the damn thing away by shaking my head in rapid little twists almost like I was shivering but she was already shitfaced and didn’t pick up what I was trying to lay down.

“How great are these?” She pulled the shirt on right over her robe. It made her look all lumpy like she was about to get caught shoplifting a shitload of potatoes or something.

“Isn’t it skew?” Mina asked. I found myself now shaking my head at her instead of Lady Gates, and while she recognized I wanted her to shut up, she only smiled at me, instead. “Like s-k-e-w?”

Lady Gates narrowed her eyes. “Sweetie, what year were you born?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Mina stood from where she’d been sitting on one of the benches.

It legit looked like they might come to blows, so I figured it was as good a time as any to have the talk me and Handsome Alex were both avoiding. He hadn’t even looked at the shirts and was just hovering by the window, gazing out with his back turned to the rest of us. I took a seat on the bench near him while our bandmates’ voices continued to rise in pitch and volume.

“I’m sorry, Bud.”

“You have done nothing to apologize for.” He paused. “Which is remarkable in its own right.”

“There isn’t time to find a different singer before showtime. We’ve got like an hour before they want us backstage, right?”

“That is correct.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Like, nothing, nothing? Like you don’t want to go on stage? Just call the whole thing off, nothing?”

Handsome Alex laughed and it brought a welcome chill to my heart. “Oh dear, sweet, Ossick Meldrath. You don’t see, do you? What you’ve set in motion; what now cannot be undone.”

Outside the voidscape, I don’t think he’d called me Ossick in over a thousand years.

“Oh ho ho,” I chuffed, excitement swelling. “You must really have some good shit brewing to deadname me like that in front of mortals. Tell me everything. Right now.” I paused and held up a hand. “No, wait. Nevermind. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to ruin the surprise.”

Handsome Alex began to chuckle. We’re talking the real thing this time; the cackling of an immortal villain. It was among the most evil sounds in the galaxy.

And then Mina Diamond interrupted his mirth by cracking her Flying V over Lady Grace’s head.