The degrading membrane of the legendary bass guitar essence I’d stolen from the Drix dork had stabilized while it was temporarily seeded inside the soul of Lady Gates. But now that Mina had splattered the tri-centenarian witch’s brains all over the floor I only had a little under two minutes to find some other schmuck to stuff it into.

Mina collapsed like a puppet with no hand up its butt, right there in the puddle of still-warm gore.

“Go,” Handsome Alex said to me with eyes flaring wildly.

He’d turned off Mina’s brain, I realized, same as he’d done before. Probably a smart move; she was still going to need that guitar later if I somehow managed to find us a new bassist and I doubted the neck would hold up if she kept hammering away with it like she’d been doing. And she’d shown no sign of stopping, despite having already smashed Lady Gates’s face flat.

I figured it was because she was so old. Normally, a head wouldn’t just flatten all the way out like a balloon filled with pancake batter and ketchup.

I zapped the essence into my pocket abyss and hit the door running. The hallways were eerily empty. All the other bands were in their cabins making last-minute adjustments. I sort of blacked out, I think. I just remember running and running. And then I stopped.

“This is seriously fucked,” I told the barman. There was no one in here, either, except for me and him. I downed my shot. “Anyway, I better get moving.”

[Handsome Alex]: Kirby, return at once. Lady Gates has not perished from her injuries after all.

[Kirbdawg]: Hope I can make it back in time, Bud. I’ve gone a long way looking for a suitable candidate here.

[Handsome Alex]: Do please try.

I breathed a sigh of relief and turned to the barman. “Alright. I’ll have one more.”

When I got back to the cabin Mina was still in a trance, laying on the floor in the mess she’d made of Lady Gates. The blood and brain bits were seeping into the folds of her black-leather costume-thing; the girl was so fucking rock & roll, even when she was comatose.

Lady Gates, meanwhile, was standing over by the window with her arms crossed. She looked super-pissed despite having no head. Down on the floor, her face stared up at the ceiling like an empty Halloween mask leaking smashed hotdogs out the eye-holes.

I looked at Handsome Alex where he hovered nearby. “Can she hear us? Like, her ears are on the floor there in that puddle, right?”

“You are correct, she cannot hear without her ears.”

“Great look for you, Cherry-lynne.” I strolled right up to her headless body like we were back in the bar where we first met.

The upper-portion of her esophagus had flopped out of her raggedly torn throat-opening and was dangling down her chest. It looked like a gray, tubular tongue and something was pushing out of it; old food mixed with bile or something. Dead bodies did weird shit and Lady Grace was a dead body now if I’d ever seen one.

“Smells awful but – you’re gonna save a fortune on wigs.

“Kirby. Please.”

I nodded my agreement. “So what’s going on here? How’s she still kicking after all that? This should be way beyond anything witchcraft can accomplish, right?”

“While it is impossible to know with complete certainty, I do have a theory.”

“Okay, and?”

“I will explain, but first you should re-implant her essence. Time is fleeting.”

“Oh shit, you’re right.” I zapped it out of my pocket abyss and the membrane was down to eight seconds before it would disintegrate entirely.

Fortunately, Lady Gates had already given me permission to diddle her soul and she was in no condition right then to rescind her consent. However, her third-eye was squished all over the floor.

So I had to slam the vortex into her throat-opening, and it went churning its way down into her heart chakra, which was another point-of-access for the soul but a lot sloppier. The smell emanating from the crater atop Lady Gates’s shoulders was suddenly even worse.

I gagged and covered my mouth and nose with my sleeve. “Alright, not my cleanest work but I guess it’ll have to do. We’re seriously going to go onstage with her like that, though?”

“I suppose you have a better idea?” Handsome Alex crossed all four of his arms. An amused spark shone in the depths of his eye sockets.

I thought for a moment. “We could carve a pumpkin and stick it on her shoulders.” I smacked myself in the forehead. “Shit, that’s stupid. There ain’t no pumpkins in the jungle. Dumb dumb dumb.”

Just then something rapped at the door to our cabin. I tilted my head at Handsome Alex and he tilted his right back at me. “Who could that be?”

I didn’t see anyone through the window so I marched over and slid the door open. A raven was standing there at my feet looking up at me like some sort of solicitor.

Then the goddamn thing flew into the cabin and started flapping like crazy. Look I know they aren’t really dangerous but I’ve got this thing about birds, alright, and being stuck in a confined space while the fucking thing flapped around like a catastrophe had me cradling my head to protect it and maybe doing a little bit of shrieking for it to stay the fuck away from me you shitty little bird!

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Anyway the raven finally landed right on Lady Gates’s throat-opening and started wiggling its little bird-butt in like it was settling into a nest. It used the sharp point of its black beak to scissor out wads of flesh until the hole was just the perfect size to get comfy in.

Then its eyes flashed that spooky shade of Halloween-green and it cawed loud as shit. Then it began to cough like a human for like a minute straight.

And then Lady Gates began to speak through its beak.

“Kirby,” she croaked. Her voice had become a cross of the raven she was now and the woman she had been. “Be a hon and light me a smoke.”

I did like she asked while her raven-head kicked into another coughing fit. I don’t know what I was thinking but I tried to insert the cigarette into its beak and Lady Gates reached up with her hand and snatched it away from me. But then she went ahead and stuck it in the bird’s mouth like I’d been trying to do anyway and took a deep drag.

“Uh, yeah,” I said, backing away. “Welcome back and stuff, Cherry-lynne.”

“Save it.” She pointed at Mina using the cigarette. “Before anything else, I want to renegotiate the specifics of our arrangement.”

I turned to see what Handsome Alex thought. I know I probably looked sort of concerned, but his lack of a jaw just kept him looking like he’d seen something very unexpected. I couldn’t help but laugh.

*****

Backstage, I looked at the performance schedule which had been hung on the wall of our greenroom.

“We’re going on as part of the third grouping,” I told the others, “and we’re matched up with Superbus, like we expected.”

The way this worked for the preliminary round was pretty simple. The venue held three stages, placed in a precisely equilateral triangle anchored on the outskirts of the audience seating area. There were something like three hundred skews onboard, and we were all going to faceoff in groups of three. We’d each take a stage, whoever they came up with to be Three-Click’s replacement would fire a starter’s pistol, and then it was fucking Monster Jam time.

You just had to keep playing. If you stopped for any reason – instant DQ. This first show was the only time we’d be facing more than a single band at once. If we all three finished our songs then the decision on which of us to eliminate would go to a panel of judges, all of them Hawijimi’s people, which meant they’d be completely unbribable.

And that in turn meant that 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 was known colloquially as the Gang Bang. Nothing crude, I swear.

But it earned the name because what inevitably occurred when three skews were forced to face one another at once was the strongest two would team up to annihilate the third before they could finish their song. It was simply a safer practice than allowing the decision to be made by unbuyable judges.

“It’ll be us, Superbus, and a skew I’ve heard nothing about called Long John and the Donut Holes,” I explained to the others. “Now it’s possible the ‘perbs are going to have a real hard-on for me after I killed like, every Drix in their skew, but they’d be smart to team up with us to shitstomp this third team of nobodies, and I expect that’ll be their play.”

We were waiting in a tricked-out greenroom; even had our own shitter with a door and everything. Hawijimi spared no expense. Anyway it was almost showtime and the first grouping would be going on any minute.

Handsome Alex had brought Mina out of her trance and she was all messed up when she saw that Lady Grace had become some kind of bird-headed chimera. Not that she felt guilty, but it was like Alex was always telling me: there were limits. Limits to what the subject of a Compelling Narrative would accept outside that narrative, and a woman with a bird in place of a head had evidently violated those limits rather thoroughly.

Speaking of, Lady Grace’s cigarette was now a pillar of ash dangling from the raven’s black beak. Every now and then it would stand up on its little stick legs and crap right down her back. The duct tape we’d used to cover the split she’d splut in her latex bodysuit was all spackled with the bird’s white booty-crumbs.

And the Lady did not give a fuck. It was like she was the bird now, and her body was just something the bird was driving. I mean I get it better than most; a vessel isn’t actually your body and sometimes you can’t help but treat it like shit. But I say this as an immortal seed of evil wearing the skin of a man I never even met before I murdered him: this was all getting a little weird.

The first grouping came off-stage to a round of applause we could suddenly hear through the wall. We never heard any of the actual performance – the venue was built with togglable soundproofing, which was a big deal when some of the sounds could potentially kill people a mile away. The audience wore special headphones that protected them from any magical effects.

Or at least the earmuff-style headphones were supposed to protect them. Hadn’t done much good for poor Three-Clicks when I’d done my soundcheck.

Handsome Alex levitated beside Mina in his awesome nebula of purple gases. She looked like a crackhead if I’m being real here; all twitchy like one of the monkeys we’d been mugged by when we got off the train; eyes bulging and unblinking.

[Handsome Alex] When the performance is over I will require your assistance. I believe it will still be possible to implant a new narrative, but it will be vital we keep these two isolated from one another during the process.

[Kirbdawg]: Alright, one thing at a time though, Bud. Let’s just make it through the show first before we worry about what comes after.

[Handsome Alex]: A surprisingly mature perspective for one aged a mere millenia-and-a-half.

[Kirbdawg]: Oh eat shit, man. I’m actually being a pro for once and you’re gonna twist my nips?

Another round of applause echoed in our greenroom. The second grouping had ended almost as quickly as it had begun.

I horked my face up into my best Jim Carrey and went, “It’s shoooowtime!”

The others just stared at me.

“What was that?” Lady Grace cawed.

“It’s uh, Jim Carrey, you know? The Mask.”

“Does he actually say that in the movie? Caw! I don’t think I remember that line.”

“I believe perhaps you meant to say, somebody stop me!’” Alex’s eyes hummed with inner-laughter.

“Or smokin’!” Mina chimed in. It was the first thing she’d said since Alex had brought her out of her trance.

“Seriously? You too?” I jerked open the door which led out of our greenroom and headed for the stage. “I’m surrounded by amateurs.”