The Last Days Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART I - INFLUENCES

  1. THE FALL - -MOZ-

  2. TAJ MAHAL - -PEARL-

  3. POISONBLACK - -MOZ-

  4. NEW ORDER - -ZAHLER-

  5. GARBAGE - -PEARL-

  6. MADNESS - -MINERVA-

  PART II - AUDITIONS

  7. STRAY CATS - -ZAHLER-

  8.CASH MONEY CREW - -MOZ-

  9. FEAR - -PEARL-

  10. THE MUSIC - -MINERVA-

  11. SOUND DIMENSION - -ALANA RAY-

  12. THE TEMPTATIONS - -MOZ-

  PART III - REHEARSALS

  13. MISSING PERSONS - -PEARL-

  14. REPLACEMENTS - -ZAHLER-

  15. THE NEED - -MOZ-

  16. LOVE BITES - -MINERVA-

  17. FOREIGN OBJECTS - -PEARL-

  PART IV - THE DEAL

  18. ANONYMOUS 4 - -ZAHLER-

  19. THE IMPRESSIONS - -ALANA RAY-

  20. GRIEVOUS ANGELS - -MOZ-

  21. THE RUNAWAYS - -MINERVA-

  22. CROWDED HOUSE - -PEARL-

  PART V - THE GIG

  23. MORAL HAZARD - -ALANA RAY-

  24. 10,000 MANIACS - -ZAHLER-

  25. MASSIVE ATTACK - -MOZ-

  PART VI - THE TOUR

  26 HUNTERS AND COLLECTORS - -MINERVA-

  27 FAITHLESS - -PEARL-

  28. DOCTOR - -ZAHLER-

  29. THE KILLS - -ALANA RAY-

  EPILOGUE: THE CURE - -MOZ-

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Also by Scott Westerfeld

  So Yesterday

  Peeps

  The Last Days

  RAZORBILL

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group

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  Copyright 2006 © Scott Westerfeld

  All rights reserved

  eISBN : 978-1-440-67789-2

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  To Jazza

  first reader and best friend

  PART I

  INFLUENCES

  Ever hear this charming little rhyme?

  Ring-around-the-rosy.

  A pocket full of posies.

  Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

  Some people say that this poem is about the Black Death, the fourteenth-century plague that killed 100 million people. Here’s the theory: “Ring-around-the-rosy” was an early symptom of plague: a circular rash of red skin. In medieval times, people carried flowers, like posies, with them for protection against disease. The words “ashes to ashes” appear in the funeral mass, and sometimes plague victims’ houses were burned.

  And “we all fall down”?

  Well, you can figure that one out for yourself.

  Sadly, though, most experts think this is nonsense. A red rash isn’t really a plague symptom, they say, and “ashes” was originally some other word. Most important, the rhyme is too new. It didn’t appear in print until 1881.

  Trust me, though: it’s about the plague. The words have changed a little from the original, but so have any words carried on the lips of children for seven hundred years. It’s a little reminder that the Black Death will come again.

  How can I be so sure about this rhyme, when all the experts disagree?

  Because I ate the kid who made it up.

  NIGHT MAYOR TAPES:

  102-130

  1. THE FALL

  -MOZ-

  I think New York was leaking.

  It was past midnight and still a hundred degrees. Some kind of city sweat was oozing up through the sidewalk cracks, shimmering with oily rainbows in the streetlights. The garbage piled up outside the restaurants on Indian Row was seeping, leftover curry turning into slurry. The glistening plastic bags would smell jaw-droppingly foul the next morning, but as I walked past that night, they still gave off the perfumes of saffron and freshly thrown-out rice.

  The people were sweating too—shiny-faced and frizzy-haired, like everyone had just stepped out of a shower. Eyes were glassy, and cell phones dangled limply on wrist straps, softly glowing, spitting occasional fragments of bubblegum songs.

  I was on my way home from practicing with Zahler. It was way too hot to write anything new, so we’d riffed, plowing through the same four chords a thousand times. After an hour the riff had faded from my ears, like it does when you say the same word over and over till it turns meaningless. Finally, all I could hear was the squeak of Zahler’s sweaty fingers on his strings and his amp hissing like a steam-pipe, another music squeezing up through ours.

  We pretended we were a band warming up onstage, slowly revving the crowd into a frenzy before the lead singer jumps into the spotlights: the World’s Longest Intro. But we didn’t have a lead singer, so the riff just petered out into rivulets of sweat.

  I sometimes feel it right before something big happens—when I’m about to break a guitar string, or get caught sneaking in, or when my parents are this close to having a monster fight.

  So just before the TV fell, I looked up.

  The woman was twenty-something, with fire-engine red hair and raccoon eyes, black makeup streaming down her cheeks. She pushed a television through her third-floor window, an old boxy one, its power cord flailing as it tumbled toward the sidewalk. The TV clipped a fire escape, the deep ringing sound swallowed seconds later by the crash on the pavement twenty feet ahead of me.

  A spray of shattered glass skittered around my feet, glittering and sharp, tinkling like colliding chandeliers as shards rolled and skidded to a halt. Fragments of street-light and sky reflected up from them, as if the television had split into a thousand tiny screens, all still working. My own eye stared back at me from a Manhattan-shaped sliver. Wide and awestruck, it blinked.

  The next thing I did was look straight up. You know, in case everyone was throwing out TVs that night, and I should roll under a parked car. But it was just her—she was letting out long, wordless screams now and throwing out more stuff:

  Pillows with tasseled e
dges. Dolls and desk lamps. Books fluttering like crash-landing birds. A jar full of pens and pencils. Two cheap wooden chairs, smashed first against the window frame so they’d fit through. A computer keyboard that sent up a splash of keys and tiny springs. Silverware glittering as it tumbled, ringing on the pavement like a triangle when dinner’s ready . . . a whole apartment squeezed out one window. Somebody’s life laid bare.

  And all the while she was shrieking like a beast above us.

  I looked around at the gathering crowd, most of them getting out late from Indian Row, addled by curry. The rapt expressions on their upturned faces made me jealous. The whole time Zahler and I had jammed, I’d been imagining an audience like this one: flabbergasted and electrified, yanked out of the everyday by their ears and eyeballs. And now this crazy woman, with her rock-star hair and makeup, had them mesmerized. Why bother with riffs and solos and lyrics when all the crowd wanted was an avalanche of screams and smashed Ikea furniture?

  But once the shock wore off, their rapture faded into something uglier. Soon enough, people were laughing and pointing, a gang of boys shouting, “Jump, jump, jump!” in rhythm. A camera flash popped, catching a satanic flicker in the woman’s eyes. A couple of faces glowed with blue cell-phone light—calling the police, or nearby friends to come and join in? I wondered.

  One of the spectators slipped into the impact zone, running half-crouched to snatch a black dress from under a rain of computer cables and extension cords. She backed away, holding it up to her body as if she’d pulled it off a rack. Another ducked in to snag an armload of magazines.

  “Hey!” I yelled. I was about to point out that this wasn’t exactly Dumpster diving—the woman might want her stuff back after this psychotic meltdown was over—but then the CDs started flying. Glittering projectiles spattered on the street like plastic hail, each one impelled from the window by a shriek.

  The looters retreated—the woman was aiming now, and the CDs were deadly. I mean, compact discs don’t hurt much, but these were still in their cases, giving them extra weight and corners.

  Then I saw it: the neck of an electric guitar emerging from the window, then the whole instrument—a mid-seventies Fender Stratocaster with gold pickups and whammy bar, a creamy yellow body with a white pick-guard.

  I took a step forward, holding one hand up. “Wait!”

  The madwoman glared down at me, mascara smeared across her face like black blood, clutching the Stratocaster to her chest. Her hands found the strings, as if she was about to play, and then she let out one last terrible howl.

  “No!” I shouted.

  She let the guitar drop.

  It spun in the air, delicate tuning hardware glittering in the streetlights. I was already running, tripping on smashed plastic and tangled clothes, thinking that there were four hundred bones in my two hands, wondering how many of them that lacquered hardwood would break after a thirty-foot fall.

  But I couldn’t just let it smash. . . .

  Then the miracle: the guitar snapped to a halt in midair. Its strap was caught on a corner of the fire escape, where it hung, spinning perilously.

  I skidded to a halt, looking straight up.

  “Over here!” someone shouted.

  I glanced down for a split second: a girl my age, with short black hair and red-framed glasses, yanking something big and flat from under the clutter, sending silverware scattering in all directions.

  “Watch out,” I said, pointing up toward where the Strat was untangling itself. “It’s about to fall.”

  “I know! Take the other side!”

  I glanced back down at her, frowning. The girl was holding two corners of a blanket she’d rescued from the pile. She unfurled its plaid expanse toward me with a flick, as if we were making a bed. I grabbed for the other corners, finally understanding.

  We stepped back from each other, pulling the blanket taut, looking up again. Above us, the guitar spun faster and faster, like a kid unwinding on a swing set.

  “Be careful,” I said. “That’s a nineteen seventy-three . . . Um, what I mean is, it’s really valuable.”

  “With gold pickups?” she snorted. “Nineteen seventy-five, maybe.”

  I looked down at her.

  “Incoming!” she yelled.

  The guitar slipped free, still spinning, hardware glittering, strap flailing. It landed heavy as a dead body between us, almost jerking the blanket from my fists. Its momentum pulled us both forward a few skidding steps, suddenly face to face.

  But there was no awful thud; the Stratocaster hadn’t struck pavement.

  “We saved it!” Her brown eyes were glowing.

  I looked down at the guitar, safely swaddled in plaid. “Whoa. We did.”

  Then the fire escape rang out again. Both of us flinched as we looked up. But it wasn’t more stuff falling—it was a pair of human figures, six stories above, descending toward the crazy woman’s window. They weren’t climbing down the metal stairs, though—they were practically flying, swinging from handhold to handhold, graceful as headlight shadows slipping across a ceiling.

  I watched them, awestruck, until the girl next to me shouted two terrifying words:

  “Toaster oven!”

  It was tumbling out the window directly over our heads, glass door hanging open, scattering crumbs. . . .

  We bundled the Stratocaster into its blanket and ran.

  2. TAJ MAHAL

  -PEARL-

  “You know what the weird thing was?”

  The cute guy frowned, still wide-eyed and panting. “The weird thing? I can’t think of anything that wasn’t weird about that.”

  I smiled, holding out both palms, weighing the weirdness. It was all relative, these days. You had to take your normal where you found it. People went crazy all the time; it was how they went crazy that mattered.

  We’d taken the Strat and run around the corner—around a couple of corners, actually—until I’d led the guy to my street without saying so. My building was right across from us, but I wasn’t sure I wanted him knowing where I lived—even if he was the sort of boy to consider catching a Fender Stratocaster with his bare hands. And I certainly didn’t want my mom coming home late and finding me out on the front steps huddled with some random cute guy and a secondhand plaid bedspread. She might get the wrong idea. In fact, she would make a point of getting the wrong idea.

  The stoop we sat on was darkened by scaffolding, protected from the streetlights, invisible. The Strat lay between us, still wrapped in its bedspread, partly to protect it and partly because the guy looked guilty, like he thought someone was going to chase us down and make us give it back.

  Like who? Not that crazy woman: she was gone by now. I’d seen angels coming to collect her. That’s what happens when you lose it these days: real-life angels, just like Luz had told me about, though I hadn’t quite believed her until tonight.

  But I didn’t want to sound crazy myself, so I said, “Here’s what was weird. That was girl’s stuff she was tossing. The clothes coming out the window: dresses and skirts. Her stuff.”

  He frowned again. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Because there’s no story that way.” I paused and pushed my glasses up my nose, which makes people focus on my eyes, which are dark brown and, frankly, fabulous. “I could understand if she was throwing all her boyfriend’s crap out the window, because he cheated on her or something. That’s more or less nonweird: people do that on TV. But you wouldn’t throw your own stuff out like that, would you?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” He thought about it for a few seconds, frowning at someone laughing as she walked past, hands full of CDs in spiderweb-cracked cases. I thought he was about to tell me we should give back the guitar, but instead he said, “Girls have girlfriends too, you know. And roommates who don’t pay the rent.”

  “Hmm,” I said. I’d sort of thought the guy was thick, because he’d taken forever to understand my brilliant guitar-saving plan (the way firefighters used to save jumpers). Bu
t this answer demonstrated lateral thinking.

  Cute and lateral. And he knew a Strat when he saw one.

  “Maybe a girlfriend,” I admitted. “But your roommate’s stuff?” I’d never really had a roommate except my mom, which doesn’t count. “Wouldn’t you sell their crap on eBay?”

  He laughed, dark eyes sparkling in the shadows. Then he got all serious again. “Probably. But you’re right: I think it was hers. She was throwing her whole life away.”