An oak, a rope, a song and a sacrifice. In the desert, not knowing the terrain, Frankie hadn’t had much luck finding an oak tree, much less one on the crossroads. The moonlight was pale, as far as he knew how to tell. The trucker that was giving him a lift snorted, and looked as if he was going to speak. Before Frankie could stop him, he did just that.
‘So, where’s you headed, kid, the city, yeah?’ the trucker said.
‘Yeah, yeah. Gotta make a stop someplace first though,’ Frankie said. Frankie was of average height, average build, but his face was handsome and non-threatening. The grey two piece suit with the white shirt helped him look respectable, or it would have had it not been worn and patched.
‘Whereabouts? Not sure I’ll be headed that way, you know,’ the trucker said.
‘Don’t worry about it, man. I’ll know it when I see it,’ Frankie said.
‘Come on, I might be able to help,’ the trucker said. Frankie considered for a moment. Then shrugged and said: ‘I need to find a crossroads with an oak tree on the right side. Gotta be before the moon gets to half. Decent hunting country would be best, no matter what kind of animal.’
‘Sounds kind of suspicious, when you put it that way,’ the trucker said, ‘why do you need that kind of a place anyhow?’
‘I’m gonna make a deal with the Devil, so he can teach me how to play the guitar real good,’ Frankie said.
The trucker got silent, and the next time they stopped for a leak, he drove away as soon as Frankie was out of sight. ‘Guess I’ll be damned,’ Frankie said to the open air and laughed.
He started walking, making sure to take every turn widdershins when he could. It was hours of wandering in the desert before he saw it. The tree was long dead, its bark fallen off and rotten away. It was the only thing that stood above the horizon for a hundred miles every direction, and even in the pale moonlight Frankie thought it strange that he hadn’t seen it before he got there. There was still time. His grandmother had explained the ritual to him, though he never did figure out why she would risk damning her favorite grandchild to eternal damnation. Not that he minded. He was going through with it after all. But there was still work to be done. It was not a simple thing, the Devil didn’t have time to hang around with every damnable mortal. First thing, he would have to find a sacrifice. He hadn’t the heart to buy a domesticated animal, even for this he didn’t reckon he could kill a puppy or a kitten or what have you. He’d figured it would be easier to end a raccoon or a coyote or whatever lived around these parts. Rattlesnakes and scorpions had been his experience. But Frankie figured he’d need something bigger, so Frankie took a bear trap and a ham sandwich out of his backpack. Very illegal, of course. The trap, not the sandwich. But he needed to make sure to catch something, and he needed to make sure it stayed caught. It was not like he would make the poor creature, whatever it ended up being, to suffer for long. So he laid the trap and put his back against the tree and he went to sleep. It was still dark when he was awoken by the sound of animal screams. He rushed to the trap. It was a possum caught in it, and Frankie was damned sure that there weren’t no possums living in the Mojave Desert. Not to look a gift possum in the mouth he held it by the scruff, opened the trap and carried it to the noose he had prepared earlier. He hung the possum by the neck and he sang a lullaby that his grandmother had taught him until the small creature stopped struggling. He waited for a minute then three. He shook his head, laughed, picked up his backpack and his guitar case and started back towards the highway.
‘I don’t get invitations polite as this much these days,’ A voice said. It was a deep baritone, less gravel and more sandpaper. Despite all his preparations and his faith, Frankie jumped when he heard the devil speak in his left ear.
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ Frankie said.
‘Maybe, who knows? What do you desire, Frankie?’ the Devil said.
‘So how does this work?’ Frankie said.
‘You knew how to do all that, but not how this all works? Frankie boy, your grandma should’ve taught you better,’ the devil said. The Devil, to not much surprise on Frankie’s part was a white guy. He was tall, 6’5 at the least, and he wore an expensive looking coat and a pair of round lensed spectacles, tinted pitch black. His brown hair was messy and he had a smirk on his face. He could be anywhere between twenty five and forty years old, but he was, of course, eternal.
‘Damn, I did not really- Man, I guess I didn’t really expect it to work,’ Frankie said.
‘No shame in that, Frankie, not a lot of people know me these days. Not a lot of fiddlers trying to strike gold, not a lot of third sons of farmers stumbling upon me by accident either. So, what do you want? We can work out the details later,’ the Devil said.
Well, Frankie figured, he’d dug this far down, so he might as well go all the way.
‘I want to play the guitar real good. Damned good. Better than anyone alive,’ Frankie said.
‘Is that all?’ the Devil said.
‘Yeah, isn’t that kind of traditional?’ Frankie said.
‘I have done a few of those, yes. I also get the credit for many others I did not. It is a simple enough thing, I suppose, let us talk payment,’ the Devil said.
‘Yeah. What’s in a soul anyways, am I right?’ Frankie said.
‘Frankie boy, my vault is so packed with souls of the damned that I don’t rightly know where to put them all. I’m afraid there has been quite the inflation in that regard. It’s going to have to be something else I’m afraid,’ the Devil said.
‘Well damn, D, what do you want that’s not a soul?’ Frankie said.
‘How about this, Frankie? The first one’s on the house, provided you are okay with me tagging along with you for a while,’ the Devil said.
‘Why the hell would you wanna do that?’ Frankie said.
‘I’ve been out of the game too long. And someone willing to sell their soul just to be real good at playing the guitar isn’t someone that comes by just any day. Shall we get going then, Frankie?’ the Devil said.
‘Well, hell, man. The road’s damnably quiet when I walk alone. Sure thing, if you can keep up your end of the deal,’ Frankie said. To this the Devil grinned full with teeth. ‘Frankie, one way or another, I always do. Next time you try to play you will see the difference.’
After this was done the Devil fell silent. Not one to start conversation on his own initiative, Frankie was content to walk in silence with his new companion, though the guitar felt heavier on his back now. Like it was more solidly made, like it was more real. More like it was made of gold.
It took much of the night for Frankie and the Devil to find any sort of civilization, but neither of them felt tired. There ain’t no rest for the Devil, of course, and Frankie was running on adrenaline and the music in his head. The music had always been with him, though try as he might he never could tease it out of any instrument the way that it sounded in his head. He could play, he had a knack for it, but it was never that music of dreams that he dreamed of. If luck was on his side, maybe the next time he found an audience he could play it properly. It was three in the morning when the Devil and the guitar player reached a highway, and by chance a roadside bar. Seven old and battered American made motorcycles were leaned against its front wall, and the faded letters on top of the entrance claimed that they had found ‘The Weeping Possum’.
‘I swear that there weren’t supposed to be any possums in the Mojave,’ Frankie said.
‘Guess it’s just my own luck,’ said the Devil.
They walked inside the bar. The only reason they knew it was not abandoned were the bikes on the outside, and being honest, those might have been there for a decade for all Frankie knew. But as they got closer to the door they heard muted music, rock n’ roll, hard and fast. So Frankie swung open the door and entered. Eyes turned to him, but he had gotten used to it travelling the States, going places no one had seen a stranger for a good long while. Frankie knew he shouldn’t make trouble. But the same time, the fingers of his right hand were itching to strum. He knew that he could turn heads and change minds, and he knew that he could play music, real music, the way that no one else in the world could. But first, he walked up to the bar, and asked for a beer. The devil asked for a bottle of Sazerac bourbon which the decrepit place had for no discernible reason. He uncorked it and chugged down a good third of the bottle before wiping his mouth with his sleeve and exhaling with pleasure.
‘Don’t want no strangers getting drunk and disorderly around these parts,’ the bartender- a big butch white woman in a band t-shirt and jeans- said.
‘I can hold my liquor, beautiful, don’t you worry about a thing,’ the Devil said.
‘Yeah. Right. What the hell are you doing here then?’ she said.
‘Just passing through,’ Frankie said.
‘Didn’t hear no wheels. You walking through?’ she said.
‘I hitchhike, most times, had to walk from the last intersection,’ Frankie said.
‘Uh-uh. Gonna want to see the cash up front,’ the woman at the bar said.
‘Not a problem, but I was thinking about maybe making a different arrangement,’ Frankie said.
‘Not interested. I’m married, and even if I weren’t I wouldn’t be,’ the woman said.
‘No, I mean, I play the guitar see. I’m real good, might help liven up the place,’ Frankie said.
A man, shaved bald, and to Frankie’s annoyance with a tattoo of Thor’s hammer on his neck, walked over to the bar. ‘You getting a bit too friendly with my wife, boy,’ the man said.
‘Not at all, sir, in fact I was hoping to talk business,’ Frankie said.
‘I ain’t doing business with you. Pay up and leave,’ the man said. The Devil laughed at that.
‘What’s so funny, bitch boy?’ the man said. At that, the Devil had to answer between gasps of raucous laughter. It didn’t sound joyous.
‘If you ain’t doin’ no business,’ the Devil paused for another fit of giggles, ‘Then he shouldn’t be paying you,’ he paused again, took a deep breath and calmed himself down, ‘bitch boy.’
The large man took a swing at the Devil and he missed by a foot, slipped and fell flat on his face, to much amusement from the Lord of Darkness. His six buddies stood up and walked over, menacingly, and though Frankie looked worried, the Devil merely took another swig of his expensive bourbon. ‘You wanna dance or you wanna sing?’ the Devil said. ‘What the fuck are you talking abouuuuu-,’ one of the thugs, a shorter, red-haired man said as the Devil slammed the bottle of bourbon right in his junk.
‘Singing it is,’ the Devil said and all hell broke loose. Somebody got Frankie with a right hook right to the cheek, and he fell off his stool, laid supine on the ground. The Devil tripped the man responsible, so that he was laid down right next to Frankie. Frankie was not one for violence, but he wasn’t particularly interested in pacifism either, so he scrambled to straddle the man, but others started kicking at him. The Devil sprayed a slosh of the whiskey into the eyes of a couple of attackers and went into his pocket for a matchstick, but was tackled from behind by the very first man, who was now back up. Frankie scurried for a chair, ignoring the boots of his attackers, held on to a chair to stand up and swung it in a wide arc behind him, breaking the back support off the stool and likely some bones of both of the men behind.
It was a valorous effort, truly, but it did not take all too long for the numbers of the locals to outweigh the viciousness of the Devil and the scrambled panic of Frankie’s. They were bleeding from their busted noses and cut eyebrows by the time they were thrown out of the Possum. ‘And stay the hell out of my property!’ the bald man shouted behind them.
Frankie half crawled half walked up to the brown-painted wooden boarded wall of the bar and he fell down to sitting, leaning against the wall. The Devil walked up over to him and dropped down next to him, took out a cigarette, lit it and even in the darkness Frankie could feel him smiling.
‘Well that was damned fun,’ the Devil said.
‘Might want to readjust what you find fun if you’re going to be sticking around,’ Frankie said.
‘I’ll be sticking around regardless. And come on now, Frankie, it got the blood going,’ the Devil said.
‘Going right outta my mouth,’ Frankie said, spat and sighed, ‘the fuck are we supposed to do now?’
‘Oh, I’ve got some ideas, but are you sure you want to be asking me?’ the Devil said.
‘Does sound pretty dumb,’
‘Don’t it?’
So having nothing better to do, audience or not, Frankie unslung the guitar from behind his back. He opened the case and he ran his fingers down his instrument. It was an old thing, the lacquer and the polish giving in to splinters and harsh wood underneath in places. The strings were metal and their ends were jutting out of the head of the guitar at strange angles. He picked it up and looked at it in the starlight. It looked downright at home here in the hands of a beat up man in the middle of the desert.
Frankie sat up straight. He made a show of tuning the guitar, but he knew it would be perfect. Still, he made sure to pull each string a few times. The pangs of the instrument broke the silence of the desert and even in simple tests seemed as bright as the smell of rain. He played two notes in order. It made a sigh. And then Frankie began playing his guitar on the porch outside the Weeping Possum and the world had an awakening. He played slowly at first, the crystalline notes carrying perfect grace and clarity. He sped up, and the tune took on a joyful sound, as even the Devil himself was tapping his foot along with it. He sped up more yet. The notes merged together in a mad rush towards violence. Faster and faster the frantic but perfect sequences rushed through the night air. And then something more. This last component is not one that can be conveyed in simple words. It was magic, both in the literal sense and the metaphoric. The music elated the player to a place of a master, beyond that, to something approaching divinity, and none that heard the sound could deny it. And it was fast and mad and violent and perfect and clear and graceful still. None but the Devil knew that the sounds of shouting and drunkenness and music, if you could call what the jukebox was playing music, had stopped inside the bar. Indeed, not even the patrons noticed that they had stopped their talking.
One by one they sat in a half circle around Frankie, emotion in their eyes. They were not changed men, they were the same redneck asshats that they had been their whole lives, but there was neither man nor woman in this world that could have done anything else that night. Unless, perhaps, they were born deaf to begin with. Frankie looked up at his audience and smiled at them with a split lip and bloodied teeth. He played for five minutes longer. Then he stopped without warning.
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‘So, how ‘bout it? Some guitar playin’ for booze and board?’ Frankie said. For a moment it seemed that the crowd might grow violent for being denied their music. But then the spell was shaken and all they felt was the yearning for more, no matter what they’d have to do to get it. Giving this man all he could drink and a bed to sleep was nothing. They only feared what would happen when he decided to leave.
‘It’s a deal. Uh, what can we call you, mister?’ said the same bald man that had promised to do no business with Frankie.
‘Call me Franklin. Let me get cleaned up and get a beer in me, and I’ll get to playing right away,’ Frankie said.
‘Oh, of course, sir. Right this way,’ the bald man said.
Only then did Frankie relax properly. ‘Holy fuck that was close,’ he said to the Devil. ‘Not particularly,’ the Devil said, ‘I’d worry more about how you’re going to get away from them once you’re ready to move one. ‘That won’t be no thing, D,’ Frankie said.
Frankie laughed, he drank beers and he played music until it started getting light outside. His enthralled audience was hanging onto his every note and word, in effect unable to break themselves away from the performance even had they wanted to. But they didn’t and, as the consent paradigms of our modern society are not very well compatible with Faustian bargains, who can say whether or not their enjoyment of the music was just. But the night dragged on and even Frankie’s fingers grew tired eventually. He stopped playing and the skinheads and their friends dropped on their knees in front of Frankie and they begged for him to keep playing.
‘Sorry, folks, I’m gonna have to take a bit of a nap. It’s been a long day, as you all well know,’ Frankie said. His face hurt too, and though his nose was not broken the guitar had several clear drops of brown dried blood on it from the breaks and bruises his new groupies had left on him before they found the love in their hearts. So he did not feel all too guilty to ignore the pleas of his worshippers and to take the bed in the back room away from the married couple that owned the Possum.
He awoke to eight people looking down on him with hungry eyes. ‘What the-‘ escaped his mouth, though it went largely unnoticed by the attendees of his bedroom. ‘Mister Franklin, could you please play for us some more?’ the red haired younger man said. He was missing a tooth and still seemed to have a somewhat strained posture, but he was at Frankie’s bed in supplication. If Frankie asked them to kneel down and beg, he knew that they would. It felt… Freaky as hell. ‘Damn,’ Frankie said. The Devil was leaning against the door frame, and he lit a cigarette. He was still grinning, the bastard.
‘Uh, what time is it?’ Frankie said.
‘Right around noon, sir,’ the bald man with the white power tattoos said. That meant that Frankie had had around six hours of sleep. He’d gotten by on less before. ‘Well, I can’t play right on an empty stomach,’ he said, ‘and my head hurts a bit from the night before, so if you wouldn’t mind mixing me up some vodka and tomato juice.’
‘Of course, sir- Rosie, get mister Franklin a Bloody Mary and some toast and bacon or what have you,’ the bald man said.
‘And I’m going to need some wheels, I have got to get to Vegas,’ Frankie said.
‘But, I don’t understand,’ a particularly dumb looking one said.
‘What do you not understand,’ Frankie said.
‘You- You want to be leaving?’ he said.
‘Look, what’s your name?’ Frankie said, ‘It’s JB,’ JB said.
Frankie stopped, as if lost in thought, then said:
‘Well, you know I am planning to go on drinking for the time being, drinking and playing the guitar. This means that I should not be driving,’ Frankie said.
‘So you won’t be leaving then?’ JB said, hopeful.
‘Well, I don’t know, I really do got to get to Las Vegas. If only someone could take me there I wouldn’t have to worry about that,’ he said and waited for a few sets of particularly rusted sets of gears to start moving. It did not take all that long before every man in the room- and Rosie too- were clamoring and begging to be Frankie’s ride.
‘Well, just figure it out amongst yourselves,’ Frankie said, ‘I’m going to get some breakfast.’
As Frankie left the small backroom of simple folks to argue about who’d get the honor of giving him a ride on their bike, the Devil fell into step next to Frankie. ‘Damn me, people don’t usually get that cold that fast. You sure you’re not some kind of a sociopath, Frankie?’
‘I kind of really don’t like them. They can kinda suck my dick,’ Frankie said.
‘Don’t let them hear you say it,’ the Devil said, ‘though some of them might actually have an aneurysm if you did.’
‘What do you mean?’ Frankie said.
‘Don't worry about it, Frankie. Just be careful when you're throwing requests around is all I'm saying.’
‘Anyways, what the hell, D, I didn’t ask for magical mind control powers. I just wanted to play the guitar real good,’ Frankie said.
‘That’s the beauty of it. That’s all I gave you. The ability to play music so good that anybody would do anything just to get to hear a little more of it. Well, not anybody, of course. There are people with strong wills and there are people with magical protections and there are people that aren’t too fond of the kind of music you play. But overall you catch my drift,’ the Devil said.
‘You fucking with me? Cause you know that they are in the next room arguing about who gets the honor of getting black all over their bikes,’ Frankie said.
‘I guess that’s fair enough if you gotta put it that way. Anyhow, I heard there was bacon for breakfast,’ the Devil said.
‘Yeah, and I won’t be the one who’ll mind taking it,’ Frankie said. The two of them went to the kitchen, and while Rosie was still back in the room arguing with her husband’s friends, the kitchen was prepped for cooking, and with a surprisingly good selection of breakfast foods in it. Well, if a bunch of bikers stayed in his place every night, he might get into the habit of making some greasy cook-ups for the morning as well. He fried up some eggs and bacon, made coffee, toasted toast, and took a beer out of the fridge. He drank, ate and said:
‘You know what, in a real fucked up way, this is real fucking good.’
‘You haven’t seen the half of it, Frankie’ the Devil said.
The sun shone on the counter through a broken window, and the coffee smelled fine and the cold beer was just the thing for the acrid heat outside. Frankie took a cigarette out of one of the jackets of one of the bikers- a taller one, it seemed- and sat out on the porch to play and smoke. The music came just as easily as last night, but with a languid lethargic calm. The few notes that Frankie played left all who would listen, all who could hear him yearning for the next one through torturous seconds between some of the chords. Frankie smiled. The kinda sorta mind-control thing he seemed to have going on was a nice bonus, but the true value of this deal that he had made was friendship. Nah, I’m just fucking with you, the true value, in Frankie’s mind was, without a doubt, that the music inside him could finally find a way outside of his mind and into the world and thus was made real.
By the time he had finished playing, he was surrounded by artisanaly inbred redneck bikers, and two of them had tears in their eyes, the rest smiling with their mouths open. This time there was no near riot when Frankie stopped playing, nor even pleading for more. The song had been a complete story. It had had a beginning, a middle and a definite end, and those who heard it had no choice but to stop and think about what they had just heard.
It took a few minutes before anyone could speak.
‘I’ll stay behind,’ said the small, red-haired man, ‘Your friend can take my bike, you can take Rosie’s and she’ll ride with your friend.’
‘Sounds good to me, buddy. Thanks,’ Frankie said.
‘Anything for you, Frankie,’ the red-haired man said.
Certainly, this domestic and insignificant conversation would have gone on for several more minutes, and then there would be the usual preparations for a relatively long trip, but it was interrupted by the sound of dozens of motorbikes approaching the biker bar. Soon, Frankie and the others saw the incoming band. The seven bikers groaned. They knew they would have to check in with whoever was coming over the horizon, to serve them and to talk about bikes and machismo.
The bikers approached, long steel and feather frames behind each of them, and large, ornamented biking helmets on their heads, they were mustachioed and angry looking, and rode with the confidence of armed men. There was a strange shimmering to the air as they approached, more than one would expect from the Desert, and more, Frankie thought, than there should be in nature. He was a Northern boy, sure, but he’d seen the movies, he knew what desert heat shimmer should look like. As they approached, the sound of their approach mixed in with the sound of whistling and howling from their feathered wing-like frames and the Devil tapped Frankie on the shoulder.
‘We should go,’ the Devil said.
‘Why?’ Frankie said, ‘I see no reason not to make friends with our new arrivals.’
‘These folks ain’t much interested in making friends with me. Not since Constantinople,’ the Devil said.
‘Thought it was Istanbul now,’ Frankie said.
‘Yeah, they ain’t been much interested in making friends with me for a while,’ the Devil said.
‘Why do you care? They’re only human,’ Frankie said.
‘Yeah, I suppose I could summon up some plague or some locusts and kill them all in one fell swoop,’ the Devil said.
‘What? No,’ Frankie said.
‘Yeah, not a fan of that idea myself, Frankie,’ the Devil said, ‘So let’s scoot.’
The winged riders must have seen the Devil, for the howling of their engines and their wings was joined by the howling of the men atop their bikes, and their shouts were in no language that Frankie could recognize.
‘I sure hope this is just a coincidence. Would be a shame if old enemies had noticed me coming back to walk among you. Kind of fun, but a bit of a shame,’ the Devil said.
‘Fun? You’re out of your mind,’ Frankie said.
‘Ain’t got time for much conversation, let’s get riding,’ the Devil said.
‘Fuck,’ Frankie said, and turned to his groupies, ‘You heard what he said, let’s get gone.’
The seven people and the Devil all got on their allotted bikes, and though Frankie had only ridden a scooter once before, he was the first to torque up and rush down the dirt road leading to the highway, neither looking back, nor slowing. The six other bikes behind him fell in line and soon were up to speed with Frankie. But despite their significant lead it soon became obvious that the winged riders would catch up to them over time, as the imposing figures struck larger and larger forms in Frankie’s rear-view mirrors.
He chanced going even faster, and only Devil’s own luck could have saved him from a terrible crash, as he slid into a turn onto pavement from dirt, finally reaching the highway. The road was empty- another fortuitous coincidence- and so the seven riders could really let their beasts go. The fifty or so winged riders chasing after them, either through sheer statistical likelihood or dark magicks, were not so fortunate. Stragglers and those going too fast in order to be the first both had difficulty controlling their rides, and a full dozen or so of them slid out of control and crashed in several gruesome, but mostly non-lethal, ways.
Undeterred the winged riders picked up speed and drew their weapons. ‘What the fuck,’ Frankie said, seeing that their weapons included, among a few smaller side-arms, full length, spear tipped lances. As the riders lowered their lances and sped up to truly nonsensical speeds, Frankie knew that he would have to do something. The specifics of this something were harder to pin down, as the winged riders closed in. ‘Hey, D, I really need some way to shake ‘em,’ Frankie said. ‘Now that is just the kind of thing that I do not want to give away freely,’ the Devil said.
‘What do you want?’ Frankie said.
‘I wonder,’ the Devil said, paused, and then one of the winged riders sped up to a speed that broke the speed limit twice over. He lowered his lance, and the last man in Frankie’s column- a fat bald man- got hit. He was unseated, fell off the bike going a hundred and sixty miles an hour, and that was all she wrote for Bill Grossman. There was a flash of a scream, a nasty scraping sound, blood on asphalt and then it was out of sight. The sound of an explosion reverberated.
‘Damn you, what do you want?’ Frankie said.
‘Hmm mmm mmm,’ the Devil said, ‘I’ve got enemies, Frankie, not all of them as violent as these, but serious damned enemies. I’m going to ask you to deal with three of them, Hell, I’ll even help a little.’
‘You want me to kill people?’ Frankie said.
‘Kill them? May come to that. It ain’t my plan A, if that’s what you’re asking,’ the Devil said. A column of ten winged riders lowered their lances and started accelerating towards Frankie and his group.
‘Fuck, fine, it’s not like I’ve got a choice,’ Frankie said.
‘So, it is a deal?’ the Devil said.
‘Deal!’ Frankie said.
‘Cool, get your guitar out and start playing. I’ll take care of the bike,’ the Devil said.
‘What the hell is playing the guitar going to do,’ Frankie said.
‘Inspire courage, competence, that kind of thing. Oh, and you might want to be standing up straight when you do it,’ the Devil said.
‘What?’
‘There’s no time. I’ll take care of wind resistance too,’
‘God damn it to hell,’ Frankie said, let go of the handlebars, froze for a moment, but realized that the bike was riding itself. Or rather, Devil had taken control of the vehicle. He unslung his guitar, took a breath and stood up. After a moment of terror, he felt that he could keep balance just fine.
‘Hell, a-one, a-two, a-one-two-three-four,’ he said, clapping his fingers and started playing a lightning-fast and rapturous melody, hard rock and Spanish Flamenco in one. And all who could see him could hear him, despite the wind howling and the motors roaring. The six riders with Frankie, all let out a whoop of jubilation, and just as Frankie could see the shape of the tip of the lance fast approaching his position, he heard gunfire too, and the first rider grasped at his chest, dropped his lance and fell. The other nine seemed to not be able to maintain speed in the face of Frankie’s Guitar and started slowly falling behind. Every bike on the road was now going faster than the laws of physics should have allowed, and none of them even noticed when they passed by a road patrol vehicle, but their sirens and shouts over loudspeaker joined the cacophony of wind roaring through the wings of the winged riders, their exclamations of battle, gunshots, and Frankie’s Guitar.
All of them flew down the highway, gathering patrol cars as they went along. The high speed highway chase now took up both lanes of the wide wide highway, and was was not slowing down or stopping either.
‘This isn’t helping, D,’ Frankie said, while still playing in the same absurd position.
‘Not in the way I’d hoped, Frankie, not in the way I’d hoped. Plan B?’ the Devil said.
‘What’s plan B?’ Frankie said.
‘Hold on to your-,’ the Devil said, ‘Eh, never mind.’
The earth opened up in front of Frankie’s bike, and he and the Devil both rode on into the Underworld. There was dirt, there were skeletons, both laying prone on the ground and dancing a macabre jig on the sidelines. The narrow pathway opened up more, and Frankie saw ghosts haunting the damned, swords, maces and torture devices from every age since the invention of steel. Strange creatures, real and illusory, such as no folklore Frankie knew had spoken about.
And he was rushing through this entire nightmare realm atop an old, black motorbike, standing up straight, if a bit bent in the knees and playing a melody that felt more natural here than it had up above. Nightmares flashed by Frankie and the Devil at over two hundred miles per hour, and though he had not time to see them properly in passing, he did nevertheless feel a chill go down his spine, through his arms and into his fingers playing the guitar.
‘Whatever you do, Frankie, don’t stop playing,’ the Devil said.
‘Frankie, Frankie where are we?’ Rosie said, still riding with the Devil.
The rest of the band had been left behind, only Frankie’s and Devil’s bike had gone down into the underworld.
‘Why shouldn’t I stop playing?’ Frankie said.
‘Not exactly the friendliest place, the Underworld. You have to distract… things, from trying to devour you, your mind, or break you in some other way,’ Frankie said.
‘D, if this is how you help, I sure as hell don’t want to see how you try to harm,’ Frankie said.
‘Well that’s just perfect, seeing as you are the one that is going to be doing the harming, Frankie,’ the Devil said.
‘Shit,’ Frankie said.
‘Deal’s a deal, Frankie. Now, it is just about time for us to get back topside. We should have traveled fifty miles or so by now,’ the Devil said.
The grave-dirt road shifted and shimmered. It started going upwards before Frankie’s eyes, and it quickly formed into a ramp. He saw light shining from above, and his focus on the guitar redoubled, as he played a hopeful melody. They rode out of the underworld into the light above. They saw a sign.
Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas.