I sat in the green room of The Rusty Nail, tuning my guitar. I was still playing my guitar, not one of Charlie’s, but ever since I changed its strings after breaking one I could barely tell the difference.
It had been two weeks since Charlie returned to the “mortal realm” and we won the Battle of the Bands, and there had been no sign of any “enforcement department” coming back for Charlie. That hadn’t stopped him from preparing, however. Every day we showed up to his house for rehearsal, he’d be practicing manipulating his instruments to use them as weapons, and he’d continue once we left.
Once Travis asked Charlie if he and I should have been learning to use the holy weapons as well, since we’d be targeted as his “power source.” Charlie’s answer was “The best way you can learn to use these is by playing them. As long as you stay brutal I’ll be able to take care of the rest.”
Well, I didn’t need to be playing a holy weapon to stay brutal. Besides, I brought an extra one of Charlie’s guitars with me on the off chance the enforcement department came for Charlie during the show. With Charlie’s drum set, Travis’s bass, my effect pedal, our various cables and amps, and my spare guitar, Charlie should have had more than enough.
I started to run through a few scales to warm up when someone opened the door to the green room.
“Oh, sorry! I thought I’d find Travis in here.”
It was the blonde girl I saw Travis talking to at the Battle of the Bands. I only got a brief glance at her then, two weeks prior, but I recognized her immediately. I guess she was somewhat attractive.
“No, just me,” I said, putting my guitar down to stand up, “But I’m Eric, the frontman of the band, so if you want photos or autographs to show your friends when we’re famous I’m probably the better…”
“No, that’s okay,” the girl cut me off, “I was just going to wish Travis good luck before his set.”
“Well, it’s my set, too,” I replied, “So you can wish me l-”
“Sure, good luck, Eric,” she said, not even looking at me as she began to close the door.
“Hey, I didn’t catch your name,” I shouted after her.
“Izzy,” she replied hastily.
Izzy, why did that name sound familiar? Was that the “Isabelle” Travis had been texting back and forth with? Every time he lent me his phone to call my parents I accidentally hit the wrong button and I guess I must have noticed that name a few times.
“Nice to m-”
She slammed the door shut before I could finish my sentence. Ugly little wench had an attitude. It figured that was the best Travis could do. I even felt a little sorry for him.
–
A decent number of people showed up in time for our set. Fewer than the Battle of the Bands when it was most crowded, but more than when we played our set. There were substantially fewer metalhead ghosts in attendance than when we played Battle of the Bands, however. Now that they were free of the few responsibilities they actually cared about in life, they had the freedom to be at any concert in the world.
Our mortal audience members weren’t all paying attention to us when we took the stage, but that was to be expected. We were the local opener. It was our job to make them pay attention.
I fiddled with Charlie’s effects pedal to get my amp to feed back a little before playing the intro riff of “Infernal Escape.” This was a new song we hadn’t played at the Battle of the Bands. You can probably guess the story that inspired it from the title.
“What’s up, Sturlusson!” I shouted into the mic, “We are Chernobog from Felmore! Come closer and bang your head! Let’s go!”
As we launched into the main riff, the audience started to do what I asked. The people who had snickered when they saw how young we were weren’t laughing anymore. The people who had been hanging out outside the venue to smoke a cigarette were coming back inside. By the time I started to growl some of the vocals, we had a solid mob of people in front of the stage banging their heads and cheering.
The Rusty Nail’s stage was not very big. Since there were two other drum sets behind Charlie’s for the bands after us, Travis and I stood on either side of him, allowing me to gauge his expression out of the corner of my eye. He looked more than happy with how our set sounded and the audience’s reaction to it, until we got to the bridge preceding a skull-shatteringly brutal breakdown.
When we reached that point in the song, time seemed to slow down. And it wasn’t just because we were slowing down the pace of the song to lead up to the breakdown. A purple fog started to appear throughout the venue. At first I thought Rick was using a fog machine to make us look cool, but the fog wasn’t coming from any machine. In fact, I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. It simply appeared. And it was getting thicker, enveloping more of the atmosphere. I knew I wasn’t the only one seeing it as the audience began to glance uneasily at it.
I could somehow hear over the sound of the music to catch Charlie saying “Ah, crap. Not now!”
As we reached the breakdown of the song, the purple fog began to take shapes, if you could call them that. The shapes became what I could only imagine had to be the enforcement department.
You know how a centaur is a horse with the body of a man from the waist up where the horse’s head should be? These were like that, except swap out a horse for a beetle. Or a roach. Or a hornet. Some kind of bug with lots of spiky, gross parts. Each one was a little different. Some had wings like flies, others more resembled those of moths. I couldn’t tell if the hard, black material covering their bodies was body armor or exoskeletons, similar to what real insects have, but either way they seemed to have their own insulation systems, pulsating almost as if they were breathing.
The “man” part of these “centaurs” also didn’t always replace the head of the insectoid body they were on top of, either. Some of them came from the thorax of the insect, some from the abdomen. The ones with the humanoid upper bodies in front usually had arms that functioned as their front pairs of legs. Some of the humanoid upper bodies had wings on their backs, either as their only set or an additional set to the wings on the insectoid body. Some of them had wings in place of their humanoid arms. All of their humanoid bodies were covered in the same body armor/exoskeleton material that covered the insectoid bodies, complete with spikes and spines. They wore goggles and balaclavas to cover their faces, like real SWAT team officers, except the goggles resembled a bug’s compound eyes, and the balaclavas had these giant mandibles sticking out of them…or maybe those were their actual faces.
Despite the enforcement department infesting the entire venue, either hovering above the crowd or crawling through it, we continued to play, and the audience continued to jam. The enforcer that appeared to be the leader, hovering the highest and rocking the spikiest, scariest armor with red accents, moved his compound mouth as if he were saying something. If he was, I didn’t hear him. The leader slapped one of his pawns on the back and pointed at us. The pawn moved closer to us and tried repeating what his boss said, but I distorted my riffage with my effects pedal to drown him out as well. I didn’t care who these guys, if you could call them that, thought they were. If they thought they were going to interrupt my set opening for Lamashtu, they had another thing coming.
Except I forgot one thing: the song we were playing ended after the breakdown. The pawn realized his opportunity before we had the chance to play the next song, saying “Chernobog, you are under arrest. It would be in everyone’s best interest if you came quietly like you did last time.”
Charlie coolly looked back at the pawn, reached behind his back, pulled an extra pair of drumsticks out of his shirt, and replied, “Last time I didn’t have these.” Looking at Travis and me, he said, “Boys, just worry about playing our set. I’ll handle this,” before leaping head-first at the pawn, plunging a drumstick into each of his compound eyes.
“GEEEEEAAAAAUUUGGGGHHHH!” the pawn screamed as it vanished in a burst of purple fog.
“Holy weapons! He’s got holy weapons!” one of the enforcers shouted out in terror.
“Where the heaven did he get those?!” another shrieked.
He didn’t get an answer, as Charlie promptly severed his human head with one drumstick, and his insect head with the other before his entire body also disappeared in a puff of purple fog.
“Play the next song!” Charlie shouted at us as he started to mow down more enforcers.
Travis shouted back, “How are we supposed to play when you’re over th-”
He didn’t finish that question, as we both saw the pair of drumsticks Charlie had left on the stage levitate before tapping together to count us off. With the entire venue infested with bug demon cops, I guess Charlie figured the time for subtlety was over.
As we launched into our second song, “Enlightenment Through Punishment,” the leader, gesticulating wildly, ordered the enforcers to take Charlie. Reluctant as they appeared, they obeyed. Their armor shifted, creating small openings where glowing, rusty chains with fish hooks on the ends shot out at Charlie with an unnerving clang-a-lang! He knocked most of them aside with his drumsticks, forcing the enforcers to come closer. One of them eventually wrapped a chain around one of Charlie’s drumsticks, but instead of yanking it out of his hand, Charlie instead used it to pull the enforcer to him, stabbing the other drumstick through its insectoid mouth and out the top of its head.
Charlie’s holy weapons weren’t the only thing preventing his arrest. The effect of our brutality on the concert goers, combined with the enforcers shoving them out of the way to get a clear shot at Charlie, created the perfect storm for a mosh pit.
“Commander!” one of the pawns yelled as a six foot, three hundred pound metalhead slammed into him, “The mortals are attacking us! Permission to engage?”
“Permission denied, idiot!” the commander shot back, “I will not have another Cincinnati incident! They’re not attacking you personally, they’re attacking anything that moves! These are metalheads we’re dealing with. Now apprehend the suspect!”
Seeing the opportunity to help Charlie, I egged on the crowd to get rowdier every break between lyrics. Despite the obvious danger the enforcers should have presented, more concert goers continued to enter the venue and join the pit. The bouncers tried to intervene, but they were just as helpless to stop it as the enforcers.
As metalheads continued to enter, so did enforcers. For every enforcer Charlie struck down, two or three appeared. Charlie must have realized his drumsticks alone weren’t going to cut it, because just before I started to rip a solo I saw Charlie’s collection of guitars and instruments hovering above our heads.
“Melt some faces, Eric,” Charlie commanded.
I gladly obeyed, giving Charlie enough juice to launch a multi-faceted assault on the enforcers, slashing them every which way to a chorus of pained howls. Unfortunately, many of the concert goers got caught in the crossfire, although it only concussed them at worst.
But even every instrument in Charlie’s arsenal only temporarily abated the onslaught of enforcers closing in on him. His only other line of defense was the tenacious audience, who despite the increasing danger, continued to join in on the brawl. In fact, their numbers were growing almost as fast as those of the enforcers, only adding to Charlie’s strength as they disregarded their personal safety for a sick mosh pit.
As the concert goers continued to impede the enforcers’ objective, I heard one of them again request permission from their commander to “engage.” Increasingly flustered, the commander replied “Granted! Get these chumps out of the way and get a clear line of fire on the target!” He then gave Charlie a smug look and said “It’s not like these souls are claimed by anyone, anyway.”
I watched as the enforcers grew new antennae. Or were they new pairs of legs? Wings? They grew some kind of appendages from various parts of their bodies that looked different from the ones already there. They were even spikier, spinier, and sharper. I didn’t need to wonder what their purpose was for very long, as the enforcers started to mow down metalheads with them.
“Noooo!” Travis screamed, stopping his playing. Dismayed as I was, I only stopped because Travis had, causing me to lose my place in the song.
“Keep playing, you morons!” Charlie shouted, “Or that’ll be you!”
But this night was full of surprises. Travis and I were still stumbling to figure out where we had left off, and the venue was now down a few tens of brutal souls, both of which should have been a hit to Charlie’s power. However, Charlie was still keeping the enforcers at a distance, although he was no longer on the offensive.
Just before Travis and I found our place and started playing again, I heard a voice say “Killer! I’m still at the Lamashtu show! Wait, is that my body on the ground? Where’s the other half? Eh, whatever. Hey, opening band! What are you standing around for?! Keep playing!”
Several other figures in the crowd echoed this sentiment, seemingly unfazed by the sight of their own, horribly dismembered bodies littering the floor. Even the metalheads who were still alive must have picked up on their dead counterparts’ heckling, as they started shouting at us as well.
“Quit standin’ around!”
“We wanna mosh!”
Travis and I stood in stunned silence for a few more seconds before another, familiar voice shouted at us, “Could they make it any clearer, boys?” Charlie barked, “Keep playing!”
We obeyed, and as if nothing happened, the ghost metalheads and living metalheads alike began moshing again. The concert goers were now actively attacking the enforcers. They hadn’t been before, as they were indiscriminately pushing everyone and everything in the pit, true to metal concert etiquette. But once the enforcers had taken things too personally and lashed out, etiquette dictated that the concert goers were well in their rights to gang up on them and put them in their place. The ghosts themselves, not wanting to be left out of the fun, distracted and confused the enforcers, who could seldom tell the difference between them and their living counterparts. At least until a living metalhead cracked them in one of their faces.
“Imbeciles!” the commander shouted, hovering out of reach of the ghosts, who had yet to realize gravity no longer applied to them, “If killing them’s not enough, just use your spectral chains! They work just as well on ghosts as they do on insiders!”
“Well, they’re not working on these ghosts, commander!” a beleaguered enforcer cried, unsuccessfully trying to swat the ghosts off with the chains shooting out from his armor.
“Starting to regret decapitating me?” one laughed.
“Oh, almost got me that time! Try again!” another taunted.
As the ghosts leaped in and out of the enforcer’s sight, he failed to notice a few living metalheads tip over a trash can in front of him, spilling countless half-full draft beers onto the floor. After several failed attempts to restrain the ghosts, the enforcer eventually lost his patience and sprinted through the ghosts, attempting to rush Charlie. Slipping on the spilled beer, he struggled to right himself, his six feet sliding around before they all slid away from each other, causing the underside of his body to slam on the floor.
Charlie approached the collapsed enforcer with a sinister laugh. “Still think no one claimed these souls, Incurso?” he said, looking up at the commander, “You must not have gotten a good look at any of their left shoulders. Who do you think was the last band I recruited before this one?”
I looked around at the bodies piled on the floor. They were so badly mangled it was hard to identify individual body parts, and when I could they were usually covered with blood and guts. However, once I saw the first tattoo I started recognizing it on every left shoulder I could identify.
Incurso stuttered “But…but, how could they still be here if you’re rogue? Upper management revoked your security clearance! They repurposed your sub-realm! They…” he paused, realizing he was about to answer his own question.
“…cut off the gateway that sent my recruits there,” Charlie finished the commander’s sentence, “Now they’ve got nowhere to go. Unfortunately for you and your squad here.”
Charlie beckoned an ESP M-10 guitar to his hand before running the head and neck through the collapsed enforcer’s humanoid torso. The enforcer let out a tormented scream. Charlie didn’t even wait for his victim to evaporate before yanking the guitar out of him and hurling it at Incurso like a javelin. Incurso deflected it with one of his chains before summoning more enforcers to attack Charlie.
The concert goers, both dead and alive, did their best to help Charlie as well. The former helped by distracting the enforcers, who usually couldn’t tell that they had already killed them, and the latter by old-fashioned assault. However, as our set progressed, this proved to be an unsustainable strategy; the ghosts, unable to manipulate tangible matter, could not physically fight the enforcers themselves. And distracting the enforcers only worked insofar as there were still living metalheads to hit them. The more concert goers the enforcers killed, the fewer obstacles stood in the way of their target. The killing also didn’t do Travis’s playing ability any favors.
Eventually, hardly any concert goers stood between us and the enforcers. One of the enforcers made a lunge for the stage, hollering “If that freak is powered by brutal souls, why not take out those musici-guilck!”
The enforcer made a stomach-churning croak as the head of a guitar shot out of his humanoid mouth before he could finish the thought. His body fell to the side before it could evaporate, revealing Charlie beneath it, yanking a Gibson Flying V from its underbelly.
Charlie addressed the remaining enforcers with a smug, hateful grin, “Your buddy had the right idea. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to realize ‘this freak’ had been training these boys with these for centuries,” he said as he held up the Flying V for them to see, “So if you want to try to take out my band while they’re shredding, you be my guests.”
My face dropped in horror for a second before I caught myself and returned to my grim, brooding stage presence. Not only could I not show fear while facing the enemy, I didn’t even have the luxury to feel it if I wanted Charlie to feed off of my brutality. However, a quick sideways glance at Travis’s face revealed he had realized the same thing I had: I wasn’t holding a holy weapon. I had no means of defending myself against the enforcers without Charlie. Not even death. I was no longer one of Charlie’s recruits. I wouldn’t become a ghost or even go to the Other Place if an enforcer killed me. I would die. That’s it.
The irony infuriated me. I had switched to my own guitar because I didn’t want to become reliant on Charlie’s arsenal of supernatural bullcrap. That arsenal could have been my last resort to keep me alive. I talked Charlie out of keeping me as a recruit. Being Charlie’s recruit could have been my last resort if I had died. And I wouldn’t have even been in this situation at all if I had listened to Charlie in the first place and gone to Missouri or whatever to recruit more rogue demons. But no, I had to be a headstrong moron! I had to have it my way!
Not that I had much confidence in Charlie, either. The dude had practically just given an evil villain’s monologue to the enforcers, revealing his grand plan to defeat them. Unfortunately, even that grand plan was mostly bullcrap. He may have been training Travis and me with his holy weapons “for centuries” by Other Place standards, but it was only a month here. And he said nothing about them being holy weapons until two weeks ago!
My rage fueled me to play harder. To play heavier. I realized that’s what I needed to do if I was going to make it through this. Like an optimist sees the good in everything, I needed to see the brutality in everything. I growled and screamed like a rabid animal. Like an arcane beast that made these enforcer chumps look like pansies. Because I was. I didn’t care how many concert goers died, they still fueled Charlie all the same. I didn’t care how many enforcers tried to take Charlie. He’d make mincemeat of them thanks to me. It’s not like he could have depended on Travis, the way he was playing.
By the time we finished our penultimate song, the onslaught of enforcers had slowed to a trickle, before they stopped appearing altogether. Only two remained, standing in the back of the venue at the ready, as well as Incurso, still hovering above us.
“Now you’re starting to piss me off, Chernobog,” he said, regaining his cool after his stuttering episode moments ago, “Those so-called ‘brutal souls’ might fuel you the same, alive or dead, but their bodies aren’t much good to you after we break them.”
He had a point. Although their numbers were now slim, the enforcers had also turned nearly the entire audience into ghosts at this point. Anyone they hadn’t killed must have wisened up and fled. As much as I tried to keep it from affecting me, knowing our defenses were growing slim had me nervous.
But Travis was even worse. I had been trying to cover for him throughout our set, but he must have been even more disturbed by watching our audience get massacred than the audience themselves, and it showed in his playing. I guess the bass was the foundation of our sound, even if you couldn’t actually hear it half the time.
“Maybe, but their souls were good enough to help me take out twice as many of your guys than you have of mine!” Charlie retorted.
Had it been that many? I guess it was impossible to tell. The bodies of the enforcers Charlie had defeated weren’t in piles on the floor of the venue, which was more than I could say for our audience. I guess I found some solace in the fact that their ghosts were watching this exchange with excitement, as if they were watching an action movie.
“Again with that big ego of yours, Chernobog,” Incurso snickered, “Isn’t that what keeps getting you in these predicaments?”
Was this chump about to launch into his evil villain tirade now? I would have started playing and cut him off again, but given how absorbed Charlie was in this exchange, I doubted he would have started playing with me. One look at Travis told me the same was probably true for him.
“Like you said earlier, your insignia adorns each of your recruits’ left shoulders,” Incurso continued, “Most of your colleagues are content to put their insignias somewhere less conspicuous, but not you. You need to have yours somewhere the world can see it.”
Why wouldn’t Charlie ignore this clown so we could start shredding? I looked at Travis again, who was the last person I’d expect to pay attention to a speech like this, and even he was looking at Incurso, not even trying to hide his dread. I looked at Incurso as well, and realized he was looking back at me.
“You got that right!” Charlie shouted back, “It’s not like these metalheads have any shame about their appearance! Or their livelihoods in general! I’m the best thing to ever happen to them! Why shouldn’t it be loud and clear who owns them?”
The ghosts’ faces suddenly shifted from excitement to resentment. Then they began to murmur amongst themselves.
“What did he just say about us?”
“…don’t need to take that from him…”
“We’re dead…could be doing anything.”
Then they began to disperse. Most of them, despite knowing they were dead, still left via the door and even queued to exit once it became crowded. But a large minority walked through the walls and a handful even ascended through the roof.
“…Gonna go haunt my ex-wife…”
“…Now I can finally visit Norway…”
Incurso laughed sinisterly as the three of us watched in horror, “Gotta keep that ego in check, Chernobog. But at least the two most brutal ones stuck around. Speaking of which, of all the brutal souls who were here until now, why don’t these two have your mark?”
Crap. Crap crap crap. Charlie had mentioned those with his symbol trying to cover it, but I didn’t have his symbol and now I needed it. I tried to make the irony of this realization get my blood pumping and make me feel brutal, but before I could play the first chord of our last song Travis let out a blood-curdling shriek.
He must have seen the enforcer a split-second before I did, since he barely dodged it before it landed on him. It must have crawled across the walls during Incurso and Charlie’s back and forth. They had struggled so much with stupid metalheads, I hadn’t expected them to make a tactical move like this.
Charlie tried to attack the enforcer with his holy weapons, but could barely move a guitar pick. The brutality of our souls must have plummeted once we lost our audience and realized we were about to be bisected by a demon. Charlie shouted at Travis to use his bass against the enforcer instead.
Travis was screaming too loud to listen. Despite his head start, the enforcer simply struck him with two of its long appendages. One broke Travis’s bass strap, causing the bass to fall to the floor, the other grabbed Travis and pulled him back. Travis managed to wriggle free, but the enforcer quickly caught him again, like a cat playing with a mouse. After doing this a few more times, he lifted Travis by his neck and dangled him over his insectoid mouth, which opened to reveal multiple sets of spiked mandibles. Travis opened his mouth to scream again, but the enforcer must have been cutting off his windpipe because no sound came out.
“You’ve had your little metal concert, Chernobog, now it’s time to go home,” Incurso said as he shot out his spectral chains. Charlie, too weak to dodge, howled in anguish as the hooks punctured and sank into his flesh, before pulling him up toward Incurso. Time slowed again as Incurso surrounded himself in purple fog. Despite the chaos surrounding me, I somehow caught a familiar glimpse into the fog. It didn’t look exactly the same as the last time I saw it two weeks prior, but I knew what it had to be. The Other Place. Hell. And the only thing preventing Travis and me from gruesome dismemberment was about to be dragged there.
I was so mesmerized by the sight of Charlie getting dragged to the Other Place, I didn’t even have the chance to dodge the other enforcer. All I could think to do before it landed on me was hold my guitar above me like some kind of shield from the impact. If it were one of Charlie’s holy weapons that probably would have been sufficient. Instead, the impact simply split the neck of my guitar from the body, leaving them only connected by strings. For some reason, maybe the sheer terror, I still clutched the broken pieces in a vice grip as the enforcer pulled me up by the neck to face him. Well, one of his faces, that is. I hung directly above the other face, which was waiting to devour me.
“What? All those holy weapons and Chernobog couldn’t even trust his lead guitarist with one?” the enforcer taunted.
“What!?” Charlie screamed despite the pain he must have been in, “Are you freaking kidding me, Eric?!”
Both enforcers simultaneously released their grips on Travis’s and my necks. Travis, getting one more chance to say something to me, his best friend, before both of our horrible dismemberments, shouted something so stupid only he could have made them his last words:
“Where did those guitar strings come from?”
They say your life flashes before your eyes right before you die. Well thanks to Travis’s idiotic question, only certain parts flashed before mine, and in reverse chronological order: me changing my guitar strings with a random pack lying around in my room, me breaking a string rehearsing in Charlie’s studio, Travis showing me Charlie’s arsenal of holy weapons turned into musical instruments, Travis asking me “where did those guitar strings come from?” the day after we met Charlie, Charlie handing me a pack of guitar strings the day Travis and I met him.
I knew exactly where those guitar strings came from.
I reached each piece of my broken guitar behind the enforcer’s humanoid head, the strings still connecting the two pieces. As I fell, the strings coiled around the back of the enforcer’s humanoid neck. The enforcer let out an agonized howl from its humanoid mouth as the strings buried themselves in its flesh, purple ooze spurting out from the wounds. Its other mouth bit down hard on my calves, the spiked mandibles sinking into my flesh. I let out a scream of my own, but I still kept my vice grip on the pieces of my shattered guitar, pulling them closer to me with all my might.
Then I suddenly yanked the pieces into my chest, the resistance I had been pulling against suddenly gone. The source of that resistance, the enforcer’s humanoid head, slammed into my face before bursting into purple fog. The insectoid mouth that had been biting into my legs must have done the same, since I fell onto the stage on my butt, my injured legs unable to hold my weight.
“Eric, that had to be the most brutal thing I’ve ever seen anyone do!”
I looked for the source of the voice and saw Travis lying on the other side of the stage. His enforcer must have also bitten his legs, judging by how much they were bleeding, but he was alive. However, unlike me he was surrounded by more than just one broken guitar. Not to mention basses, drums, symbols, amps, et cetera. Beheading that enforcer must have given Charlie all the brutality he needed to fling every other holy weapon at the other enforcer eating Travis.
The sound of dangling chains prompted us to turn around to where Charlie had been. The chains now held nothing, swinging freely. I followed the chains with my eyes to their source, Incurso, who despite his ugly bug-man face wore an unmistakable expression of terrified shock. The purple fog behind him housing the gateway to the Other Place dispersed to be replaced by a pitch black cloud.
As the cloud grew larger, I could hear the grinding of teeth, the gurgling of bowels, the breathing of lungs. Incurso tried to fly away from it, but there was nowhere to fly. Hands, teeth, and miscellaneous bones shot out from the cloud, holding it immobile.
“You’ve had your little metal concert, Incurso, now it’s time to go home,” an inhuman, yet unmistakable voice reverberated through the venue. It was the calmest I had ever heard Charlie speak.
“Chernobog, wait, I-mmmfff!” Incurso’s protests were cut short as a hand appeared from the fog to silence him.
“You know what I’m about to do won’t kill you, as much as I’d like that,” Charlie said, “So when you’re back in the Other Place you’ll be able to tell your boss what happened here. Then he can tell his boss. And he can tell his boss. I want your entire bureaucracy to know what happened, all the way up to your CEO!”
Charlie wasn’t so calm anymore.
“And when your CEO hears about this he will know I am coming for him! He will know I will return to my rightful place! He will know I am the Black God!”
Every single musical device on the stage shot upward. Every guitar, bass, drum, symbol, amp, cable, and pedal all converged to where Charlie held Incurso down. Even with the clatter of the holy weapons breaking against each other, none of it could drown out Incurso’s ear-splitting howl as the holy weapons broke him.
Just as Incurso turned into a blinding explosion of purple light with a deafening BOOM, the black cloud engulfed both of us, muffling the explosion, and muffling our screams. The last thing we heard was Charlie’s voice, saying “You’ve had your little metal concert, boys. Now we return to my plan. See you both in Kansas.”