Destroy All Monsters Read online

  There’s a commotion by the side of the stage. A muscle-bound security guard manhandles a teenager with a nest of brown hair, levering his left arm behind his back. Florian recognizes the skinny boy who twists and flails as he’s frog-marched out of the auditorium. The boy tumbles to the floor and before he can stand up, the guard kicks him in the stomach.

  Florian breaks through the ring of stunned onlookers and steps in front of his friend to shield him from further blows.

  —You okay, Eddie? he asks.

  Eddie tries to nod, but can’t stop coughing.

  Florian faces the security guard, a giant whose bottom lip twitches spasmodically.

  —Out of my way, the guard says. I’m tossing him out of here.

  —He’s not going anywhere, Florian says. You fucking assaulted him. Everybody saw it.

  The guard stares at him with blank fury.

  —You going to assault me, too? Florian says. Come on. I’m right here.

  The audience members encircling them mumble taunting threats. The ring of people thickens as fresh faces push forward, straining for a better view.

  The guard curses and backs away into the crowd, which closes around him. Florian lets loose a long breath, then helps Eddie off the ground.

  —Damn, Eddie says. That guy could’ve killed us both.

  —What the hell happened?

  Eddie stares at his shoes. I didn’t have a ticket, so I snuck in through the back, he says. I walked through the backstage without anybody noticing. I was so close, then that goon grabbed me.

  His conservative cardigan sweater and pressed jeans are impressively out of place here.

  —It’s my folks’ fault, Eddie continues. You know how they are. I thought I hid my ticket pretty well, but they found it and ripped it up. There’s no way I could miss this show.

  Florian remembers Eddie’s controlling parents, their unpredictable alcoholic rages, their violent suspicion of music. They scared him as a kid.

  —Come on, Florian says. Let’s stake out a better spot.

  Eddie coughs violently into his hands and discovers bright red spots. He stares at his speckled palms. That’s hardly any blood, he says, so softly it sounds like a regret.

  * * *

  The lights cut out. Every face in the darkened theater turns toward the stage. As the footlights slowly brighten, the five members of the Carmelite Rifles step into view, marching single file, each of them wearing a white ski mask. Armed with their instruments, they confront the crowd: The boy with the zigzag scar pressed against the lip of the stage. Randy tapping out a syncopated beat on his chest. Eddie perched on his tiptoes to get a better view. Florian studying the posture of the lead singer. Shaun ruminating on the significance of the sinister masks. Xenie widening her eyes and holding her breath. The auditorium is hushed, performers and audience suspended together in this still moment.

  * * *

  In the years to come, this concert will be recounted by the entire community as the apex of the Arcadia music scene. The boy with the zigzag scar will focus on the reckless intensity of the band’s performance. Randy will rave about the abandon of the crowd who treated the songs as if they were their own. Eddie will remember the violence of the singer smashing his guitar and slapping his own face. Florian will recall the audience clambering onstage during the encore, the mass of bodies engulfing the band. Shaun will marvel over the set lists he found taped to the monitors afterward, and how none of them matched the show.

  * * *

  When Xenie will think back on the concert, she’ll always replay the band’s entrance, the audience stunned into silence, the atmosphere saturated with expectation. She’ll wish she could remain in this moment of wild possibility, her senses dilated, forever on the cusp of the distorted ripple of the first note.

  part one

  THE EPIDEMIC

  Anybody can shoot anybody.

  —LYNETTE “SQUEAKY” FROMME

  It was as if I knew it was going to happen. A dull feeling of dread had been gathering. The signs were getting harder to ignore. At the end of my street, I discovered a drum kit at the bottom of an overgrown ravine. Piece by piece, somebody had hurled it down the steep precipice and abandoned it there. A bass drum, snare, and cymbals were scattered in the shallow streambed, surrounded by tangled vines, rocks, and fallen branches, subtly rerouting the flow of the rippling water. My first thought wasn’t to marvel at the strange sight, but to wonder why the rest of the band’s equipment was missing.

  I told my boyfriend Shaun about it, but he didn’t see any deeper significance.

  —Xenie, he said. It’s probably some angry kid who didn’t like his birthday present.

  —It looked expensive, I said. Like a set a pro might play.

  Something about this image made Shaun laugh.

  —Xenie, he said. Drummers are practically feral. The best ones aren’t even housebroken. Maybe that’s just the guy’s new practice space.

  I tried to shake it off, but I kept thinking about how much had changed in Arcadia since I’d met Shaun. Over the past three years, the economy tanked and the wheelchair factory shut down. The Carmelite Rifles moved away to cash in on their success, and it wasn’t long before several of the city’s best musicians followed their lead, betting their fortunes lay elsewhere. The scene’s heyday faded like a dull mirage. Nobody was surprised when Arcadia’s only record store closed its doors. Outside the Broken Ear, the owner left piles of records, cassettes, and compact discs free for the taking. Weeks after the locks were changed and the windows covered with construction permits, the stacks remained untouched, blackening in the weather.

  The clubs were still doing business, but there wasn’t much excitement now around the shows. Even longtime landmarks like Echo Echo lost some of their allure. The theater downtown rarely booked homegrown acts, and it was easy to understand why. Most local musicians had little ambition, low standards, less taste. The bands that used to stun audiences and rampage across the stage—Taconic Parkway, Jerusalem Crickets, the 40 Thieves—had all broken up. Their members branched off in dozens of musical directions, forming projects that felt increasingly detached from their origins, part of a family tree of mediocrity. Nobody in the scene played for any stakes. People still came together in the night to get drunk and share gossip and hook up, but the music mattered less and less.

  Whenever we went to see shows, Shaun always did his best to cheer me up. The more boring the band, the more he got turned on. His fingers would begin the set massaging my shoulders. If the music got worse, they’d steadily work their way down my body. Sometimes we spent most of the night making out in shadowy corners of the club, working the buttons on each other’s jeans. If the band was really dire, we’d sneak off to a secluded bathroom stall and create our own competing soundtrack.

  I was collecting more music than ever on my computer, but I rarely listened to it. I realized I was getting more pleasure from amassing the files than actually playing them. I’d spend hours obsessively accumulating an artist’s entire discography, then promptly forget about it for months. Whenever I managed to spin my newly acquired songs, they rarely came across as more than modest diversions. It was hard to make myself believe any of it mattered. More troubling, even my favorite music was barely able to hold me in its sway, its pleasures easily eroded by the world around it.

  One afternoon, I carried my hard drive full of songs through the street to the ravine. I let the plastic device drop and watched it careen down the weed-choked embankment and crash into the creek below. The battered black rectangle rested at the bottom of the stream, surrounded by the rusted drum kit whose punctured snare drum was now a nest for a family of sparrows. Several open red throats peeked from the spiral of dried grass and bent twigs, waiting to be fed.

  That night, I dreamed about a group of boys emerging out of the darkness, following a path through the woods, one after the other. The boy with the shaved skull. The boy with the scraggly beard. The boy with the black overcoat. The
y each held an instrument—bone flute, rattling gourd, stick strung with a single metallic wire. There was a strange determination to their lurching steps as if they were in a trance. As they came closer, it became clear that they were covered in mud. Their clothes and faces caked in the stuff. Or rather, it was blood. A wet redness that refused to shimmer in the dim light. It obscured everything except the boys’ lidless stares. Their eyes were white orbs, the exact shape of the absent moon.

  DAY ONE

  Nobody paid much attention to the account on the news of the first killing, but it made me feverish with anticipation and dread. I felt dizzy as I listened to the report of what had happened hundreds of miles away. My forehead was dotted with droplets of sweat. Shaun couldn’t help noticing how distracted I’d become. As we sat there together on the couch, I stared at the television screen long after he turned it off.

  —Xenie, he said. Are you okay?

  I tried to nod my head, but my body wouldn’t respond.

  —You’re so pale, he said. What’s the matter?

  Shaun was genuinely concerned. He rubbed my cold hands, trying to stimulate some circulation.

  I wanted to tell him, but I was overwhelmed by the multiplying images of violence rattling through my mind. The teenage boy walking into the local battle of the bands in the rented veterans hall and pulling out a handgun. He aims his shots squarely at the group onstage. The drummer tumbles backward off his stool. There’s blood on the wall. Another bullet brings the lead singer to his knees. There’s a hole in his chest, but he reaches toward the scattering crowd, arms extended, as if he’s trying to say something.

  I needed to be alone. I went upstairs and locked myself in the bathroom. I sat on the floor and waited for the unsettling visions to subside, then I turned on the shower. Usually I loved to sing while I washed. I’d belt out tunes, lyrics half remembered, the sound of my voice obscured by the rush of water and the echo off the ceramic tiles.

  But this time, I remained under the pelting stream until it ran ice cold, until my fingerprints vanished in folds of puckering skin. I only opened my mouth to let it fill with water, letting it overflow, until it felt like I was about to choke.

  The boy with long hair wakes with a shout, knowing something is wrong. His hand thrashes around, probably searching for a lamp, but the bedside table is empty. He sits upright and clenches the sheets in his fists. He remains motionless while his breath slows and his eyes adjust to the darkness. He’s having trouble remembering something. He combs his brown hair out of his face. He’s fully dressed in strategically ripped jeans and a vintage cowboy shirt. Even his high-top sneakers are laced.

  He takes several wobbly steps toward the window. He stretches the kinks out of his trim frame, then slides open the curtains, but no light streams into the room. It’s pitch black outside. Down below, the shadowy expanse of grass, the stand of overgrown boxwoods, and the outline of a concrete pathway creep into focus. His chin drops to his chest. Memory comes flooding back. Oh shit, he’s late.

  The boy with long hair turns on his cell phone, winces at the glowing display of the time, and makes a call. Nobody answers. He hangs up without leaving a message. For several moments, he stares into the corner of the room, as if expecting some shape to materialize from the shadows.

  He spots a note at the foot of the bed. He cautiously uncreases the paper. The handwriting looks like it was executed underwater. The dissolving letters form a name and street address. Some sort of reminder to himself. At the bottom, he’s inscribed a set of circles, one inside the other, that resembles a target. He seems hypnotized by this increasingly tight series of spirals …

  DAY NINE

  Bands were being shot in the middle of their performances all across the country. The noise duo at the loft party in the Pacific Northwest. The garage rockers at the tavern in the New England suburbs. The jam band at the auditorium on the edge of the midwestern prairie. The bluegrass revivalists at the coffeehouse in the Deep South. There was never any fanfare. The killers simply walked into the clubs, took out their weapons, and started firing.

  Everybody was slow to call it an epidemic. They didn’t want to believe these deaths were connected. I tried to discuss it with my coworkers at the diner, but they reacted with raised eyebrows and sideways stares, treating me like the customer who only ordered glasses of chocolate milk and claimed that birds were trying to communicate with him. They keep following me, he said. They never shut their filthy fucking mouths.

  I kept my ideas to myself, even though it was clear that the killers weren’t acting in isolation. It was as if they’d all been infected by the same idea. They seemed to be obeying the same subconscious marching orders.

  Somehow I knew each act of violence was a prelude to another. The night before each new shooting, I’d find myself closing the curtains throughout the house and pacing figure eights in the bedroom carpet without understanding why. These events seemed like something plucked from my most disturbing daydreams. Whenever I thought about the bodies of the dead musicians, my mind went blank.

  Was there some kind of message?

  I blew the dust off my old tarot deck. I laid a black cloth on the kitchen table, cut the cards, and arranged them. Each arcanum was illustrated with lurid gothic lines. No matter how many times I shuffled them, I was always confronted by the catastrophic image of the Tower, lightning striking a stone structure, fire leaping from the windows, human figures tumbling through space. It felt like a spell had been cast, giving shape to something formless floating in the air. Part of me worried that somehow I had unleashed it, as if I had accidentally uttered an incantation in my sleep.

  The boy with long hair stumbles from the darkened bedroom into a narrow hallway. He lurches past the entrance to the bathroom and flicks a switch. A bare bulb illuminates the worn shag carpet, the old framed photograph, the faded red wallpaper. The walls seem sprayed with a disorienting pattern of violent splotches. Only on closer inspection do they reveal themselves as miniature roses, each interlocking petal intricately etched.

  He starts down the staircase and trips on the first steps. Catching himself on the banister, he slows and descends one tentative step at a time. The ground floor of the house is dark. The only sounds are the hum of a distant dishwasher and the squeak of his sneakers across the wooden floorboards. As he navigates the living room, he narrowly avoids banging into the exercise bicycle. He unlocks the front door and sets foot in the yard. The beat-up sedan at the curb beckons.

  The boy with long hair slides into the driver’s seat and slaps himself in the face. His eyes flare to life as his cheeks redden. He turns the ignition, revs the engine, and peels into the empty street. The floor is scattered with CDs, but he doesn’t put on any music. He rolls down the windows and lets himself be enveloped by the sounds of the night. As he coasts downhill, swerving through a succession of dimly lit side streets, he consults the note with the address.

  He arrives at a cul-de-sac lined with bungalows whose yards alternate between barren dirt patches and knee-high weeds. The car skids to a halt in front of a white stucco house. The front porch is bowed by a molting leather couch. Splintering planks are nailed across one of the windows. The porch light secretes a gauzy malarial glow. The boy sprints up the overgrown walkway and slams his fist against the front door, beating out an enigmatic rhythm …

  DAY 27

  The expressions of the national news commentators and expert consultants remained stubbornly blank as they speculated on the causes of the killings. What motivated the violence? Why were musicians the only targets? Why was it only happening in smaller venues?

  The black metal band ripped apart by an automatic rifle in the basement of a scuzzy rock club. The psychedelic band expertly picked off from the balcony of the renovated movie theater. The hip-hop collective shot at close range at the sweaty warehouse show. The female punk rockers massacred in the college town’s most celebrated venue. The Afrobeat ensemble murdered when a grenade was rolled onto the stage of
the international center. The indie rock show that turned into a blood-soaked melee in the cramped confines of a suburban house show.

  Few of the bands were familiar to me. They were mostly small-time acts, locked in their own communities, but their names briefly became national headlines with photographs of the crime scenes serving as their publicity shots. It was always gruesome. Immobile bodies contorted in unnatural poses, instruments spackled with gore, the stage covered in dark pools that resembled bottomless shadows.

  I warned Shaun about the killings, and he promised never to do anything reckless. He seemed to take it seriously, at least for my sake, and I wanted to believe him. But I could also tell he was more focused on his latest band, which was starting to make a name for itself in town. He and his bandmates sat in our living room for hours tweaking the mixes of their upcoming single and listening to demos of their latest tunes. They pored over maps as they plotted a tour itinerary, eager to take their music beyond the confines of Arcadia.

  His bandmates were even more cavalier about the danger. I guess Shaun liked to surround himself with people willing to say the things he never wanted to speak aloud—those guys thought they had it all figured out. They were smug in their easy theories:

  —The killers are just frustrated musicians.

  —The killers are just settling personal grudges.

  —The killers just got tired of post offices and schools and started shooting up rock clubs.

  Over the next few weeks, I tried to block out the violence and made a point of avoiding the news. The first killings were terrifying, but as they gained momentum my reaction started to change. I saw it. There was a pattern. An idea behind what the killers were doing. I could feel their thoughts buzzing. I could almost trace the shadow cast by their actions.