12. Last Days

A/N: final chapter's here! It's been pretty exhausting trying to finish this, but I've done it! After 2 long years. The sense of completion isn't that satisfying. But I hope that I'd help motivate others to keep writing for this genre. I've promised myself I'll stop writing such dreary & depressive stories, and try to move onto something realistic. Enlisting for the Police in 12 April, so I've got a damn lot of time to be real. ENJOY:

When the short season of Christmas wanes into the usual days again, I have this wronged hope that everything will return to normal. And I hold onto the thought so insanely even as everything else disputes with me.

The air is heavy with the afterglow of misery. Rain, frosty and hostile, cuts open the mornings and fills the evenings with a pall of wet blackness, as if the entire Solbrecht was the procession of a lonely funeral. From my window, the tombstone buildings that scatter beyond the square are wasted grey with rain and wind, now a mauling choke blasting down narrow streets and licking the ashen remains of late night fires against their charred corners. The sun is but a smudge of confused red-yellow amongst the grey. The city is rotten with shadows.

I keep the windows closed now. On Mother's orders. Her faint fear of mobs hurling stones and slurs through inviting windows and doors is a remedy to by disrespect, a sharp wound to my rushing out to help Iain on two occasions where I was meant only to help with my eyes. I question her: won't stones through glass be worse? She has no answer. She tells me to stop asking. She yells at me to obey.

But which mob would even take the trouble to wreck our houses anyway? The magistrate has stationed sentries on both ends of the street, where the square meets the road and at the edge of the street that precedes our. No human is to leave this area, he orders. He says our safety is at risk if we do. And since then, no one has ventured into the street – and neither has anyone walked out of it. I feel the house has become a cell. The street a dungeon. The city a cemetery.

I pluck at my guitar. The wire, not leashed in a plug, lashes across my knee as I lean back onto the bed to pluck from this sourness something even more miserable. I try not to think of Iain and his brother, battered and thrashed, under Aunt Cheng's care in their home. I try not to think – but it eclipses my music. I force my fingers onto the bass string, its metal wire rasps the skin under my fingernails; I wish I could have been there with Iain. When they hit him. So I could have a reason to feel vengeful.

The sound of a lifeless bass and a swollen despair make me want to play.

Instead to delay the impulse I know will come, I flip my guitar on its side, giving the meek light a moment to skim the black surface now artistic with scratches. My reflection is drained, without texture. I could smear myself with more self-strangling; I let the guitar down, pausing, in the valley of my stomach.

I can tell that this house will not protect me for long. Neither will the calm of the new Solbrecht year. Not even the guitar reclining defiantly, its strings unmoved with the excitement of the rage of its former songs. There is a sense of loss. That is all that I can feel right now – a feeling of completion – but to what end? It feels like one of the guitar solos I play: it will end, it must end, but where, when, how?

I cannot answer. I clasp the guitar by its neck and rush to see Iain.

I suspect that Aunt Cheng disapproves of my presence with Iain as he recovers – while being with a pack of youngsters up to no good – and carrying weapons – and making a lot of noise – and… Not that I think she is grumbles too much, but I know she will not stop me. She lacks Mother's choking discipline and, after living with drifters for years, I know she subtly – even though all her upbringing yells against it – understands.

"Iris, ah, remember not to provoke anyone now, okay? These are difficult times, you know," she fires the words at us. But they are stale phrases with blanks for warnings.

"Yes, auntie," I say, with a voice waxed to sound filial.

Vanessa has yet to come with all the drums yet, so Iain and I tune in her absence. Iain surprises me. Really. Twelve hours after getting hits by city officials and he still can sit up straight. He is such a totem of ridiculous theatricality sometimes. His left arm is still limp as if wrung like a sheet of wet laundry, but he rests the neck of his bass on his shoulder, and tunes with one hand plodding through the purring sounds of bass. Tamar and Spike, our supportive audience, watch us with cat-like eyes, catching our every move.

When Vanessa arrives we move to the stone garden at the back of Iain's house. It had been a garden before, but the previous owners had heard that humans were moving in, so they filled the plot with cement so Iain and his brothers and his Father could not grow food to feed themselves. The pavement, old and screened with cracks, is a flooring of dead grass pushing themselves through the cracks in the cement. The garden ends where a dead crumbling wall separates this neighbourhood from the next. The ground there is littered with stones the mob beyond the wall hurls over in hate or fun or both.

I drag the amp to the garden, and deftly, I stuff the plug into it. The batteries flare, and the hum of defiance starts to freeze the surroundings with an echo eager for expansion. We do this on purpose. We know those beyond will be able to hear us. Just beyond the sheet of wall I can almost hear the pulses of the tenements, faded, but as alive in its dead routine as ever. For once, I do not seem afraid of practicing out in the open air; we've done it once. We are doing it again. It may be our last.

Iain finishes with the mike. It rests, head down, like an injured prisoner tugging on the wire that runs a maze round to the cells. Our last cells. Vanessa steadies the bulk of the bass drum, lands it the right side up against her full set of cymbals and snares. Whenever Spike's around she doesn't seem to mind the trouble of all that mass.

I pick the first note. My guitar, for once, is tuned and eager at its beginning note. Waiting, I flip through the scrapbooks of songs, the soul of souls and the symbols of survival. The chords look familiar; it isn't as if I've had time to practice.

"Why don't you try this one?" I tell Iain and Vanessa.

"Ahhh… something new," Iain mutters, "but it's got all those funny chords in it. Are you sure you can manage?"

The arrogant sucker! I say nothing and pick out a soft intro.

Vanessa's eyebrows nearly touch the sky, and Iain, like he did in Zechaat, puts on one of his most ornately insane grins. I don't know what he's waiting for. His part's supposed to kick in after mine. I play the intro again. But still his eyes are stuck to my fingers, now getting redder with restraint, and he will not play.

Then, I jam my fingers onto the strings, and the intro comes out five times louder than it's supposed to. I see Spike and Tamar flinch. Half enraged but half swayed, I play. Iain's crooked smile turns into a metaphor for approval. "Now that's it."

Now the intro gets into motion. And I pound my raging fingers down for the first chords that give into the strumming. Vanessa joins in. Iain motivates the music with an undertone of bass edgy and tense but so, so fast and irresponsible. I catch a glimpse of Spike and Tamar, clapping and yelling in a vacuum. No sound dares to penetrate our song. The amps relay the message, and with the downbeat that Iain is the master of provision for – and his voice personified of poetry – the creak of sound wallows into the music.

What's happened to you? I have heard this song before and have never known who's the guy being addressed. Now that Iain's singing it, stanza by slinky stanza, I think it's me. Something deep inside you is probably to blame. It could be Vanessa though, but as she plays, I hear the screams of the snares ride all the way up to Iain's voice and slam them into the bass that the two of them conjure.

Why am I jealous?

Iain's voice is waiting on the chorus. I nod down, my eyes feeding the ground with a patient vision, and do not desire to upward glance ever again. I can feel the music groping me down my neck, and melting into my head, blitzing a kind of teardrop from the cellars of my eyes. My hands drain the strings, and rasp as the chorus falls into my conscience as blood on the ground. It's never the same on the way down. I understand, yeah, I truly do. How does it feel when your feet finally hit the ground? Iain lifts that strain for a second longer, and I find myself bent over in seeking myself. You again? I thought you're dead and gone. Depart from me. Your identity is screwed. Yeah I said… and the sandcastles you built are falling down…

I turn to Iain. Finding my eyes on his flexed feet. He didn't give me any time to think. I press my fingers clean into the wire of strings, and in confusion, blast my head back, shaking it to the bass that creeps up my still correct chords coughing comfortable with self-strangulation. Vanessa forces the snare and a sliver of cymbals into a second union that shall never be parted, as my trembling treble slams on the wall that bass and solo dominate. Got you fingers burned by burning candles at both ends. I smear my face with sweat of my moment, myself insane, blood full of disregard, clutching the souls of myself that are frothy with music, worshipped in self-vengeance.

Here it comes again. Without impulse or control, I blurt out with Iain's voice in a duet. It's never the same on the way down. I struggle to keep up with his rich defiance, but find mine helplessly drowning in it. I realise that I am still myself. Yet the music propels myself back into the surface of the atmosphere stalking with music. When all of your bridges are burned down. I'm treading on it, and as it screams beneath my feet I fumble and stare at the ground again. And the sandcastles you built are falling down…

As Iain reels to take in a breath, he speeds towards the bridge with a lower note in his singing. So now I question what you're gonna do. I match Vanessa's bass, and two on the snare with a pass down, thumb straight as a leftover on the twitching strings close to numbing. Now that everything's gone up with you.

I pause for the smallest frame of a second; my fingers are close to the point of being overwhelmed by myself as Iain illustrates the bridge with Vanessa tapping hypocrite solemn. You believe the shit you say is true. I am waiting for revenge. I am waiting for my guitar solo – But everybody's on to you – I crease my fingers into strumming – my other hand a blur as it tries to hang onto the ledges of the lofty chords that I generate with myself – I take no consideration for Iain's voice that shrouds my guitar, for I myself sway the music, and the chords mingle into the final chorus –

And as it comes – I rip the strings into plucking, desperate to turn myself into the song – within the bounds of my solo I make sure Iain cannot breach my retort – but Iain voices out his groans of finality, a voice knowing that he has to stop – but I am entrenched in my own adrenaline – unsure when all of your bridges are burned down – I lift my guitar to crown the collapse of the song – and the sandcastles you built are falling down… - Vanessa rakes an intersection of bass and snare – but I have the final show, and my fingers blunder through their final torture of wire before the flare of the guitar on a hangover from an overdose overrides everything else –

When I look up, I think I am resting my eyes upon a mirage. No stones. But there's a din that sounds like applause, breaking up from all around us and hitting the walls and overtaking the stretched out wake of our finished guitars. Spike and Tamar are there; their faces shine the way every good audience does when they hear us. There's a pack of kids behind them. One of them I know is Tamar's youngest brother. They have their eyebrows straddling the highest crest of her eyes in a gesture I could have mistaken for awe. But they are clapping.

I look to Iain. The bass guitar poised at a treacherous angle of repose down his neck and shoulders, he gives them a half-bow, the grin on his face streamlined like a guitar string with furnished pride. Vanessa and I follow. The applause, now sounding to me less of compliment and more of gratitude, joins from its scattering to a firm chorus again.

There must be some symbolic feature with those kids turning up to watch us. I just cannot make it out.

But I guess it's something good.

The aftermath of the short jam ebbs in my head as the days number themselves with another round of sore weather. The street is deserted. Several humans trying to leave were told to return to their homes. Later officials picked all of them up. The sentries now have rifles, stashed to their belts with lighter protocol; they haunt the intersections on both ends, even through the sore-throated wind and the rheumy rain.

But what I cannot see from my locked window are the bounds of a greater shadow. There are more riots in Zechaat. I hear they have spread, like the spreading scabs of woe, to distant D'armara. The doors are closing, and the days will soon come, the wind tells me, when they will recognise humans no more. And just beyond the walls that keep me human, Doug's cigarette flames up in the midst of the wounded night. It is a light. But one so noxious and flickering that it cannot be seen as a hope.

I can tell the days are falling down on us.

The day after, the sickened rains subside, and the crude hammering on the door drawls away at my conscious mind. Aliens, all Father's business partners, rail in their loud voices, demanding their pledges for money they have borrowed from Father be returned to them at once – without payment. They quarrel. I crush my teeth together, enamel on my persistent gums, and prepare myself for a fight as I lie on my bed trying to ignore the threats. All day they come. Some want to close their accounts; others want to buy out Father's exchange.

When finally I press through my teeth enough courage to venture downstairs, the scene is banal with a deep seizure of bathos. The door open, the aliens come in and go as they please, trespassing into the house smugly, smirking, retrieving their pledges from Father's locked cupboard. The lock has not been forced open. Father dwarfs the anticlimax by the sidelines. An official from the city council dominates the door.

I look to Father. He cannot look me in the face.

Finally as I had expected it, they come for us.

But they are stubborn in taking everyone in the street along with us. The warning knocks on the door arrived first. Then they forced their way in. I had been upstairs at the time; from my position half-curled over tuning my guitar I heard the crescent wave of echo as the front door swung at full into the wall. An unfinished dirge of smashing glass. Mother's hyperbolic scream. Another shout from down in the street. And more breaking glass.

I see him coming up the stairs. A towering, skull-capped creature, having tentacles in the place of muscular arms. I know Michelle and Liwei are downstairs, so then they must have come for me. Calmly, as if all the time in the world had been reserved for this climax, he nudges his head to screen the rooms. When he notices my door ajar, he bounds towards it. And as I get up, he flashes the muzzle of the rifle at me.

"Pack your things now!" he orders tactlessly. "And get downstairs."

I delay. He arms the gun and blasts a round clear through the window. The streak of pulse yells like an animal with no teeth, and wondrously leaps through the glass, crumbling into flakes that jingle and rasp all around me. The smell that roams in place of the sound fires through the insides of my nose with resentment. I hurry. I stuff the guitar into its bag and at gunpoint lead my entourage downstairs. He tries to push me with his other outstretched arm but I duck underneath it. He growls.

Downstairs everyone is huddled under two more of those armed sentries. Probably they're mercenaries. From the open door I can see them herding people away, and beyond that someone talking back, before receiving a crack with that nasty rifle which comes across as a tread on the path.

"Get out, now!" the one who brought me down orders us. "Out the door! And follow the other humans!"

I step out the door first. The first thing I see isn't another sentry, or a captive human lending me lead. But a splash of earth, metal and alien blood – a Juniraxian reels over, parted by a slice down to his shoulder. The door, Doug Whiteman's, had been rigged. The sentries see the blood; they open fire at the door, at the windows, at any opening into the house. The street is laced with pulses and non-animal yells clattering into stone and glass.

I hurry down the street – guitar over my head – accidentally knock someone over – get in the way of a sentry rushing to join the action; there's another blast, this time right in the centre of the street – this sentry wasn't as bulky as a Juniraxian – and all I catch is a flashing, a wild scramble of eyes before the blast sweeps him into the air and away into the clouds. I fall back. There's blood on the pavement – I'm not sure whose.

But by the time I'm on my feet, the sentries have stormed the house. More shots, a tumble of shouts, then screams – a wild, shrieking of a gutted animal, inhuman, twisted – the crowd of neighbours huddles behind me – the pulses continue – deeply-resonating, ending in a high-pitched din. Climax – a lower boom of return fire – finally a harsh, screwed squeal – sounds like a hog prised open and cleaned. Shouts of surrender. The sentries' threats.

The rebellion is over, just like that. Doug's house, the balcony where he once watched sentinel-like with his cigarettes, has become a slaughterhouse. The sentries haul a carcass out from the door, it is a mass of moulted meat, clotted with strings of deep blood fibre. I can't even recognise who it is. Two sentries appear, one wounded, but not badly. They order out the animals who were cornered. I see Vanessa.

"What the hell?"

Her eyes contract. The sentry threatens me not to move towards her – I don't see any wound, any cut, but she is swabbed in a humid blood shower. Not hers.

The sentries lead the rebels another way, up the street.

I worry for her now.

"What're you humans staring at?" one of them blasts us with orders. "Follow the head! Down the street now!"

I try to delay, with the weight of the guitar stroking my weaker hand. I don't see Iain or Tamar or Spike anywhere. Father goes ahead, and Michelle, shaken, almost in a trance, follows. I bring up the rear, as the sentries bay us pass eager crowds and curious natives to a container by the river.

Speckled lamps, like clumps of dying fireflies, set the dark belly of the container alight as they shut the door and lock us in.

"Maybe one of the officials will come to free us," we muse in the dark.

"Maybe the magistrate's secretary will…"

"Maybe the magistrate himself…"

"Maybe even the chancellor…"

Hopes and rumours get bolder and more boisterous by the hour – or has it been a day? I can't tell. Within the iron atmosphere of this former hold time is forbidden to penetrate or speak to us of our fate. The rusted whorls of ventilators, pounded into the ceiling, radiate a dull drone, a simple hum, lost in the dimness. There is plenty of space. But the place is starting to feel stuffy.

I start to fear for Vanessa.

But Iain stands out among everyone. He is not worried, neither is he resigned to everything. I can almost feel his mood beating through his open, clasped hand which gropes for mine in the dark. Without turning to him, I can read his mind. An unstable but excited hopelessness.

I gently pluck my noiseless guitar. Music won't do any good now, not when I don't have any amps or mikes or even a tuner. Instead, I wonder why the first thing I seized was this guitar. Now, why? Michelle has the skateboard I got back for her from Zechaat. I think of Gail. But I pick the thinnest steel string on my guitar, and unknowingly rest my other hand on a chord. A-minor.

Now I'm wishing I could play.

Iain didn't bring anything. He didn't even get ordered out. Once he saw the humans being herded down the street, he calmly went out to join them. Then we met just before going into this place. In the place of his lack of hope is his unconditional silence. He hasn't spoken a word since we came in.

"What're you thinking about?" I ask.

He turns his face over to me. A dry smile. "What about a song?"

"With no music?"

"It doesn't matter now, does it?" he leans forward, and for the first time since we got taken by the officials, I'm uncertain whether I've really read his mood. He flashes his arms, in a half-flex. His fingers creak with a stretch. "How about Higher?"

I try to flash a grin. "You never tire of that song, don't you?"

I turn my attention to my guitar. Without an amp, the music would be terribly sour and soft. I try my best to put together a quiet intro; disgusted by the softness of a loud song, but determined nonetheless, I strum out a tune on sapped steel strings.

Just listening to Iain's – half-eaten, half-smooth – is redemption in itself. I nearly miss a note trying to keep his voice in my head. It's so soft yet, Michelle who's just nearby, picks it up, and turns to listen. As he begins on the chorus, I stop short – usually this is where the bass comes in with Vanessa's drums, but we don't have them now. Only when Iain's voice subsides do I know my cue for the rasping solo stunt. But it comes out all crooked and weak. Iain smiles.

I just complete the next stanza and ready myself for the second chorus, when the entire container shakes, and the doors finally pull themselves open, to reveal a warp of the brightest light I've ever see. But my eyes slowly adjust. I see the same sentries, with their weapons; they gesture us outside hurriedly. As we delay several step in, slamming their weapons on the container walls in a clash of metal, a striking noise that echoes the container.

"GET OUT! GET OUT!" they order. "And hurry up!"

I delay again. But the guard has his meatloaf hands on me, pulling me to my feet, brushing my sides with the harshness of a warden's brutality. Iain and I are the last, yet I'm still clutching the guitar. As if it'll be of any use now. The door with its supreme heavenly light, blasting away all the darkness in my eyes, looms.

I step out.

I believe I've stepped out into a fair, like those in Zechaat, with the din of merchandise and the clutter of a hundred things going on at once – the barter of our lives with slave traders – "that's a pretty thing isn't she?" – "you fool, she wouldn't last a day in the mines" – the wail of the scoffers – laughs and sneers – the eyes of the traders of blood over the belongings that we carry. But over and above it all, is the music – the carnival of noise – the magistrate himself – mouthing a petition, the proclamation of our crimes and offences to the noble citizens of the city of Zyjushem, state and planet Solbrecht, under law number whatsoever. No one pays attention. Except me and Iain, our eyes fingering the joyous atmosphere to rest upon the magistrate and the curved sword we gave him.

"Screw you!" Iain yells. "And your bloody petition!"

We are the rear of the procession, as the dancing and the clowns surround us. I feel like I'm back in Zechaat, and in the eyes of each alien, I believe Gail will appear any moment now to me. The crowd pelts us with gifts, showers of their blessings, and the guard, who is completely indifferent to the scramble of scrapbook colour bursting before his eyes, forces us on.

We enter into where the crowd encircles us. Here it is. It has to be. The essence, the very spirit of the carnival! The climax of the performance and the resolution of all this clowning around and acting. I catch a glimpse of a hundred fragmented vignettes of motion going on at once. I see Alvin – he's slumped across the ground – he's not smiling although his admirers festoon him with Solbrecht flowers and alien spices – his head – I remember it closer than it was to his body – and his shoulders not at such a crazy angle. I see Tamar – the colour of her lips extends all over her face – a pale blood-red seeping out from her lips – the guard pushes her to the ground – now her face is the colour of mud – then the volley of shots leaves her face with no colour at all – the crowd applauds in appreciation of the drama she provides.

Then black.

Then colour again. A brutal pain in the back of my head. Where's my guitar – it's still in my hands. Then I realise who I'm seeing. Vanessa! I was so worried…

I see Vanessa now – the frozen word on the frozen face now frozen in suspension – she's been waxed dry – her skin is smooth and it radiates – I touch the flat bloodiness of her chest – the roughness is peculiar – even where the blade entered – then down to the white of her thighs and legs – white stripped of skin and blood and flesh – pale death white -

The crowd's wild now. They're waiting for the glorious finale, the final stand of the performing humans and their last act. This is my cue. This is it. I force myself to my feet just as someone seizes my hair. Iain is on his feet too, and on his cue – no it's my turn to start, my fingers plug the chords for the chorus of Higher. One last time, Iain. Let's give them one they won't forget. I slam my fingers down on the chords as Iain seems to bounce to the music, flung into ecstasy by all the guards opening fire at once. But I continue playing – a knob disturbs my temple – I motion to the final chord – then blackness.

I'm taken into the music.