I am the baddest, most brutal, most metal guy in this entire town. My death growl sounds like it comes from the depths of hell. I can shred with the best of them. No one in this town is more metal than me.
But there’s not much competition for that title in Felmore.
My name is Eric, I’m a 13 year-old student at Felmore Middle School, a suburban public school that is nearly identical to every other suburban public school in America. I’m five foot four, weigh 120 pounds, my skin is blindingly pale, and I have red hair that I’m trying to grow out. I have lived in Felmore my entire life, and if it weren’t for Travis, I would have absolutely nothing to do.
Travis has been my best friend since kindergarten. He’s the only other person in this town who is metal (not as metal as me, though). Travis and I discovered metal music two years ago when a movie we watched played “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath. We don’t even remember the movie, but the music captured us, and we wanted more. We journeyed down the metal rabbit hole, progressing from the classics, to thrash, to death metal, black metal, and beyond. I started learning to play guitar and Travis took up bass. The two of us are pooling our allowances to buy a drum machine software, since we can’t find any other metalheads in Felmore.
At least that’s what we thought until today.
It started when I was stuck in Mrs. McClean’s pre-algebra class, my last class of the day. As usual, I was bored out of my skull. My only objectives were to avoid accidentally touching the old gum under my desk and ignore Jeff Hennessy, who was getting snickers out of his dumb friends by flicking balled-up sticky notes at my head.
After what seemed like forever, class finally ended. I rushed out of the classroom, got my stuff from my locker, and booked it to one of the school’s back doors. I was so glad to be free for the day, I somehow didn’t notice the Herculean figure trying to mop the floor until I careened face-first into one of his bowling ball-sized shoulders, knocking me onto my butt.
I looked up in terror at the hulking frame in front of me. He must have been at least six foot five, was incredibly muscular, and his neck was almost as wide as his head. He had long, black hair tied into a ponytail, a long, thick beard, a tattoo sleeve on his right arm, and I could see part of some kind of symbol tattooed on his left arm. He didn’t seem injured, only unamused.
I muttered an awkward “sorry” as I took off again, ignoring the human slab of granite as he shouted “Wait! Come back here!” in a thick foreign accent. I figured a janitor wouldn’t care enough to bother reporting a kid he didn’t know for running in the hallway.
I finally made it to the football field, where Travis was waiting for me in the space below the bleachers. Travis and I have been meeting up with each other every day after classes let out since we began middle school. Our only problem is all the good hangout spots are already taken, and we only get about two weeks with the open ones before a larger group of kids kick us out. We’ve been hangout nomads for about four months now, and it’s only a matter of time before someone kicks us out from under the bleachers.
“About time. What took you so long?” Travis asked. Travis is thirteen years old like me, not that puberty makes it obvious. He’s probably about five foot seven at this point, but given how out of sync his different body parts are growing it’s hard to tell for sure. He’s about 135 pounds by the look of him, although his top-of-the-line, industrial strength braces probably add an extra pound or two. His skin is covered in pimples, some of which he is able to cover with a dirt stache. His hair is also black, although it’s almost to his shoulders since he got a head start on growing it out (my dad wouldn’t let me at first).
“My bad, I had to uh, take care of a few things first.” Travis is my best friend, but there was no way I was going to tell him how much of an awkward clutz I had just been.
“You’re not going to believe what I just found out today,” Travis said, “Lamashtu is playing at The Rusty Nail in three months.”
“Shut up,” I said, “Lamashtu would never come within a thousand miles of here.” The Rusty Nail is a sketchy dive bar in downtown Sturluson, the only “city” near Felmore.
Lamashtu is one of the most evil, blasphemous, blackened death metal bands to hit the scene in over a decade. They’re more of an underground act, only releasing demo tapes that are near impossible to find. However, they just announced that they’ll be releasing their first full-length album on Lycanthropy Records next month.
“See for yourself,” Travis replied, holding out a piece of paper. I took a look, then rubbed my eyes and looked again to make sure I read it right. Sure enough, it was a flyer for Lamashtu’s upcoming tour, which had a date at The Rusty Nail. After staring at the flyer with my mouth agape for what seemed like minutes, Travis broke the silence. “We are there!” he exclaimed.
“Oh, we are so there!” I shouted as I snapped out of my stupor.
Our celebration was short-lived as we heard the sound of someone banging his lacrosse stick against one of the support beams of the bleachers. We knew what that meant.
“What do you freaks think you’re doing here? This is our turf,” Jeff Hennessy sneered as he and his pack of minions approached. Jeff is not a particularly intimidating figure himself. He’s a little taller than me and outweighs both of us, but that’s because he’s kind of fat. He’s no looker, either. He has acne like Travis, but Travis’s acne exists on an otherwise normal face. Jeff’s acne is only the finishing touch on a masterpiece of ugly.
But what Jeff lacks in athleticism or good looks he makes up in charisma. Well, let me add a few qualifiers to that: he is no charmer with teachers, friends’ parents, popular kids, jocks, or smart kids, but he has a remarkable knack for attracting the absolute scum of Felmore Middle School. Jeff’s lackeys are all somehow even dumber, uglier, and more rotten than him. I could never remember any of their names or even tell them apart, but they were all ready to follow Jeff off a cliff if needed. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man rules, I guess. And at that moment this kingdom of the blind was about to expand its territory to the underside of the bleachers and forcibly evict the local inhabitants.
We had two options in this scenario: concede defeat and leave the bleachers with our faces intact, or stand up for ourselves against this gang of hoods, get absolutely annihilated, then limp away. After facing this situation several other times with Jeff’s gang, not to mention all the other “warring factions” that competed for territory in this dump, Travis and I usually opted for the former.
But today I wasn’t having it. I don’t know if it was my unwillingness to accept defeat after the good news of the concert, or the adrenaline from colliding into a silverback gorilla, but I decided I was not leaving for these scumbags.
“No,” I replied, “this isn’t your turf. This is our spot. You’ll have to go somewhere else.” Jeff’s already hideous features twisted into something resembling a combination of surprise at my refusal, anger at my defiance, and sadistic satisfaction at the excuse to sic his thugs on me. Travis looked at me like I had just shot his dog.
“What did you just say to me?” Jeff interrogated. Travis tried in vain to apologize on my behalf and diffuse the situation, but I cut him off before he could:
“I said get lost. We’re not going anywhere.” I decided at that moment that if we were going to throw down, I better land the first punch, because it might be the only punch I’d have a chance to land. I awkwardly threw my right fist in the general direction of Jeff’s distorted mug, with absolutely no idea of what I was doing. Jeff’s gang of bodyguards already had us circled. I can’t even remember how many there were; three? four? five? It made no difference, they were going to pummel us regardless. The knuckles on my right hand barely grazed Jeff’s pimple-encrusted face before one of his goons grabbed me by my left arm and yanked me toward him, putting my face on a collision course with his fist. Great job, Eric, you managed to avoid one beating today just to walk yourself into another, and you managed to drag Travis into it too.
As I watched my life flash before my eyes, a hand the size of my head came out of nowhere and blocked the punch before it turned my face into a crater. I looked up, and who did I see standing behind Jeff’s thug but the mammoth janitor whom I had just run into. “Let go of his arm,” bellowed the behemoth in what sounded like an Eastern European accent. Jeff’s thug graciously complied. “Get off him,” the titan demanded of another thug who had wrestled Travis to the ground and had proceeded to clobber him. The thug stood up. “Get out. Now.” Jeff and his stooges booked it out of there so fast they left a dust cloud where they were standing.
The giant pulled Travis up, then looked at me, whose jaw was on the floor in disbelief. “You didn’t wait when I called you in the hallway,” he said. He reached one of his catcher’s mitt-sized hands into his pocket and pulled out a square cardboard container. “You dropped your guitar strings.”
I continued to stare dumbfounded for a few seconds before my brain eventually processed what had happened and I meekly took the strings from him and stammered out a timid “th-th-th-thanks?”
The colossus’ eyes wandered to the ground, and lit up when they detected the Lamashtu concert flyer that had fallen in the scuffle. “You going?”
What?! Neither Travis or I could register what gigantor had just asked us. He picked up the flyer and pointed to it and asked again, “Lamashtu, are you going to their concert?”
So we had heard him correctly. Travis was able to sputter out a “yes, we were thinking about it.”
“Cool. Guess I’ll see you there.”
Both of our jaws dropped back onto the ground as the mountainous entity walked away.
Did we just find the third most metal person in Felmore?