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* * * * *

If the aliens who helped the Egyptians build the pyramids returned to Earth and opened a Casino, it would look like the Luxor Las Vegas. The thing was a massive, gleaming black glass pyramid with a line of white lights that pulsed up its four corners.

We had just pulled into the Luxor parking lot and were watching two cop cars and a tow truck messing with Justin’s abandoned beer hauler, which had been carelessly run up onto the curb. The cops and tow guy all looked a little confused by the scene.

I said, “Let’s go.”

We filed out of the SUV and strode toward the front entrance, giving the cops a wide berth. Jennifer looked up at it and whispered to me, “I don’t like this place.”

“You already said that.”

“It looks like—like the end of the world. Somehow. Like those huge, scary future buildings in Blade Runner, black with the fire coming out the tops and all that.”

Big Jim said, “Yeah, yeah, and those gigantic big screens with huge Asian women on them. I watched that movie when I was a kid and I started cryin’.” Big Jim adjusted his cape.

The entrance was ahead, opened wide like a maw, the guts inside showing gleaming solid gold.

“You know what else scared me?” Jen said, reaching up to scratch where a bundle of black feathers was tickling her neck. “Independence Day. That alien invasion movie. The first part, where the aliens come and they look up between the buildings and the sky is gone and, like, all they see is metal. Just as far as you can see, that steel ship looming up there. I remember thinking that’s what the end of the world will look like. It won’t be wars and tanks or a meteor. It’ll be something we never could have thought of...“

Awe choked off her voice. We all had entered the lobby and stopped in our tracks. The cavernous inner chamber of the Luxor was gold upon gold, gold floors, gold walls, gold ceiling. The place was a temple, and there was no question who God was.

The lobby was a pulsing crowd of people and we were pushed ahead by the current. Everyone stared at us as they passed, eyes flicking from me to Jen to John’s naked ass. I nervously adjusted the guitar strap around my neck. John said, “Over there.”

He had found the entrance to something called the Egyptian Ballroom, outside of which was two huge stand-up posters with a smiling 50-something man who must have been Dr. Marconi, since his name was boldly displayed under the picture. A lady sat at a table with a laptop PC in front of her next to stacks of programs and brochures. There were two guys in suits with thin cell phone headsets on, guarding the door.

My mouth went dry. This is as far as we had planned. I had sort of hoped that by the time we got here we would be met with a panicked mass and we could ride in and take charge. Instead we were the intruders, left to try to slip past security like little kids at an R-rated movie.

I had left $4,000 from my envelope with a pony-tailed roadie who gave us fifteen minutes alone with the concert truck while he went off to smoke. That left two thousand in my pocket, but I had no idea how I would broach the subject of bribery with these three. Six eyes widened in confused amusement with our approach.

The guitar slung over my back was made entirely of a crystal-clear glass or polymer. I was wearing a white leather overcoat trimmed in long, luxuriant green fur and an enormous white sombrero edged in a pattern of fiber optic lights.

Jennifer had donned a tailed white tuxedo/ringmaster coat over her T-shirt and shorts, the coat long enough to leave only bare legs emerging from the hem. A black feather boa gave her an outfit that sort of looked intentional. Big Jim was wearing an incredibly tight roadie jumpsuit with a flashy Elton John logo on the back. He had a huge Casio keyboard under his arm and pulled a dolly behind him loaded down with two black boxes the size of foot lockers.

John wore a black jockstrap, a pair of white chaps and a small purple Robin Hood cap that covered his groin. He was naked from the waist up save for a tight leather vest and a bundle of gold chains. We all wore sunglasses.

We stopped at the Ballroom entrance and I glanced into the one partially-opened door to see if anything odd was happening in there, such as, well, Satan or whatever. No sign of Justin, and it all looked fairly normal. Every seat was taken and just about every member of the audience had their eyes closed. The far-away, amplified voice of Dr. Marconi drifted out into the lobby.

“Okay, everyone. Settle down. I know this is frightening for some of you but what we’re dealing with is real, real as the person sitting next to you. But I need all of you, I need all of your concentration, all of that power, that openness of the mind for this to work. Now we’ve just heard from Betty, who says her husband disappeared under mysterious circumstances last year. His name is Harold Alexander. Let’s all concentrate on Harold Alexander. Now, clear your minds. Each of you picture, in your head, an apple-”

The guards and check-in lady were staring at us now. We all stared back. No one spoke. The lady at the table, trying to suppress a smile, finally said, “Uh, do you have tickets?”

John said, “No. We’re Elton John.”

“I’m sorry we’re late,” I interjected, quickly. “We’re the band. We were told to, uh, use the other entrance, but it was already locked because we didn’t get here until it had already started.” This sounded good because I figured there would be some other kind of service entrance somewhere for speakers and performers to get through and, indeed, the show had started.

The table lady glanced at one of the security guards, who pulled a cell phone off his belt that was connected to his head phones and tapped in a number. The lady looked at us, smiled and said, “We’re just gonna check with Randy. We didn’t have anything about a-“

“-Look,” John said, impatiently. “Do you know who I am?”

“Sir, it will only take a moment to-“

“-I’m Lazarus McDeathsinger. I am not gonna stand here and be treated like some, you know. Whatever. We’re goin’ around to the band entrance. You have Randy let us in, we gotta get set up in there. Where is it? The band door?”

“It’s—there’s a service entrance down that hall, around the bend and on your left, but you can’t get in without-“

John stormed off, and we followed.

I heard tense muttering from the door crew behind us and I knew one of the security guards had been sent to follow. I glanced back and saw him, a broad-shouldered guy with a greasy, over-gelled crew cut and an earring. He was still messing with his cell phone.

I slowed down to get alongside him, put my hand over his phone and said, “Look, I wanna show you somethin’.”

I reached out, pulled up the sleeve to reveal the nasty burns on my forearm - the cut in my cheek was now covered by a glittery sticker in the shape of a star. “We got in a car accident on the way here, we shoulda been here an hour ago. Now, no, don’t do that. Don’t call Randy. Randy might be a nice guy to you-“

The guy scoffed involuntarily. I had hit a weak spot. Most people with jobs like “Randy’s” are required to be assholes. I continued, “but Randy has always hated us, he treated us like shit on the phone. Us bein’ late, it’s all he needs. And we need this gig. Look, just let us in the door. If Randy wants to kick us out, fine, but get us in that service entrance. You do that, use your keycard on the door, and I’ll give you whatever you want. Name your price.”

We reached the door, we all stopped. The guard looked around, smiled, said, “I can’t. It could be my job.”

“How about a thousand dollars? I’ve got it, right here.”

He smiled and looked at the ceiling, shaking his head. “Look, I-“

“Two thousand. Cash.”

No answer.

I dug into the front pocket of my overcoat, pulled out the wad of cash, held it up. He sighed.

* * * * *

“-not talking about mysticism or superstition,” said the voice of Dr. Marconi over the loudspeaker. We were moving through a back room stacked with sealed cardboard boxes that seemed to be filled with copies of the doctor’s hardback book. “I’m simply talking about something science does not yet understand. Lightning was a mystical, wondrous thing until we understood what it was. You see, the true scientist never scoffs, never dismisses. He only observes. That’s all it is, folks. Who else do we have? Anyone want to try to make contact?”

I heard faint barking from the hallway behind us, a commotion like five people trying to catch a loose dog in a fancy hotel. We didn’t turn back. We stepped through the last door, emerged on the right side of a stage. The ballroom was huge, a floor like half a football field. In the center was an enormous ice sculpture that had to have been 15 feet high. It was an angel with its wings spread, hands upstretched to the ceiling. It must have had water pumping up through it because a rain of liquid rolled off its crystalline wings like a waterfall, splashing into a pool at its feet. A stunning effect.

I heard a harsh whisper from my right and saw a heavy man in a gray suit stomping toward me. Randy? We were seconds away from a confrontation when suddenly a voice emerged from the audience. A young man stood up and said to Marconi, “Yo, I gots an old homey I’d like you to contact for me, fool.”

The teenager was wearing an ill-fitting suit jacket, jeans and a cowboy hat that we knew covered a lumpy head wound.

Dr. Marconi’s smile faltered at the sight of Shitload striding toward the stage, the thing limping with joints seemingly bent at odd angles, his body puffy and stretched like it was ready to burst. The jacket didn’t completely conceal the grouping of gaping shotgun wounds in his midsection. The Justinmonster said, “His name is Korrok the Slavemaster from the eighth plane, also known in some realms as Baa’aaa’aaathn’l and in others as The Lord of Zanthk A’ll-Bzzki’l Shadd’uuul’l the Ptttuffft.”

Shitload pushed his way onto the stage. Randy spun, forgetting us for a moment. I stepped up and ran my hand along my side, felt the long, rigid shotgun hidden behind my overcoat. I moved my other hand into the coat and found the handle. I saw security guys off stage move forward nervously, half watching us and half watching Shitload. Dr. Marconi, however, was unfazed.

“Well,” he said, smiling pleasantly. “What is your name, friend? Do you honestly have any lost loved ones or do you just have a vivid- AGGGHHH!! MY BALLS!!!”

Dr. Marconi fell to the floor, grabbing his punched groin.

A wave of suddenly-standing people rippled through the room. John and Jim and Jen and I flew into action. I whipped out the shotgun and leveled it at Shitload. A lady screamed at the sight of it.

“FREEZE!” I screamed, for some reason. Shitload turned his back to me and leaned forward. Suddenly a split formed in his pants. A fleshy, puckering protrusion formed and pushed its way through the slit, looking like the end of a flesh trumpet. I wanted to pull the trigger, but in a way was eager to see what he would do next.

FOONT!!

With a bassy thump and a smell like burnt sulfur, Shitload farted himself far into the air.

The crowd went wild, chairs clanging down all around us. I tracked Shitload the Justinmonster with the barrel of the shotgun as he climbed a hazy contrail of shimmery methane. He came down in an arc atop the giant ice angel. Shitload crouched on one wing, raised his arms in a “touchdown” motion and said something at the top of his voice that was probably very profound and ominous but was drowned out by the absolute bedlam in the crowd below.

I fired a shot up at Shitload that probably missed by a mile but looked successful because he chose that exact moment to explode into an eruption of blood and hamburger, staining the top of the angel red and pink. I felt a momentary euphoria of victory, felt ready to be carried off on shoulders.

I should have known better. What poured out of the meaty hive that had been Justin White was not the white buzzing rod things this time, but rather a shower of black specks that could have been coffee beans but that I suspected was something else. They bounced and flecked off the wings and shoulders of the angel and plinked into the water below.

I stood there, frozen, then edged forward. I had the shotgun trained down on the pool, got close enough to see dark shapes writhing in there now like malformed eels. They grew and twitched and gained shape. Dozens of dark lumpy masses, maybe even a hundred.

Oh, shit.

A soft hand landed on my shoulder and I turned to see the sharp, brown eyes of Albert Marconi.

“Son, I think we need to get the people out of here.”

I looked back at the fountain, then at the doctor again. I caught a glimpse of Big Jim hustling this direction, still toting the keyboard. I wondered what he thought he was going to do with it. Marconi said, patiently, “Don’t you think? We haven’t much time.”

I turned, ran, fired the shotgun into the air and shouted, “BOMB!!! THERE’S A BOMB IN THE FOUNTAIN!! EVERYBODY RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! PLEASE DON’T NOT PANIC!!”

The words were completely lost in the stampede caused by my shotgun blast and the crowd flew off in random directions, some actually heading for a door, thank God. I met John in the crowd.

“Where’s the bomb?”

“There’s no bomb. We’re trying to get the people out before-“

“GUYS!!!!”

That was Jennifer. We turned to where her and Big Jim were standing next to the fountain, both looking terrified. She screeched, “THERE’S SOMETHING GROWING IN HERE!”

One of the seven-legged wigmonsters flung itself out in a spray of water.

Everybody scattered. The thing landed on the carpet on its little baby-like hands, looked around, meowed, then disappeared. In a blink it was clinging to the back of an elderly black woman, scorpion tail buried down into the base of her spine.

Another of the little black beasts emerged. Another. Then three more, splashing out at once. They crawled, leapt, clamped themselves to victims. I saw a fat guy go flailing past me with one of the things on his chest, I saw a bearded man trying to shake one off his leg.

That got the crowd moving, a crushing stampede toward the exits.

One of the wigmonsters ran and jumped at Jim. He swatted it like a baseball with his Elton John keyboard, then bashed the heavy Casio in half over its prone body in a spray of white and black keys. I looked hurriedly for Jen, found her on the other side of the fountain kicking one of the beasts to death and digging in her pocket for something. I raised the shotgun and blew another in half, worked the pump and realized I had no more shots. I flung the gun at one of the monsters, missed, hit an elderly man in a wheelchair instead, toppling him over.

I tried to look in every direction at once, kicking through the sea of abandoned blue chairs on the ballroom floor until I was near a wall. I saw at least two of the wigbeasts bearing down on me. One of them crouched and jumped onto the wall behind me, sticking to the vertical surface like a spider. It launched itself again and was thonked out of the air by a folding chair wielded by John.

He screamed “YEAH!” in a dead-on impersonation of pro wrestler “Macho Man” Randy Savage, grasping the folded chair by two legs, ready to swing again. He did, and flattened another of the beasts while screaming “Have a seat, bitch.”

The little creatures were all over the ballroom now, at least a hundred of them vanishing and appearing, crawling and jumping and popping into the air here and there like fuzzy black popcorn. Their victims lay all over the floor, dozens of them. Those who weren’t stung had cleared out of the room fast, but now the creatures were huddled around the exits in black clumps, sealing the escape routes.

I flinched at the sound of a sharp gunshot, spun to see a middle-aged lady holding a little chrome pistol she had pulled from her purse. She shot one of the things, killed it, took shots at another, missed. The beasts ganged up on her, three stinging her simultaneously. I heard a voice shout, “BECKY!!!” from behind me and I turned to see a tall guy with a heavy brown beard pushing toward the woman. “Becky!! Honeeeey!!”

He punted two of the creatures off his wife with several furious kicks, then John ran in and chaired the last one off, screamed, “You’ve been sentenced to get the chair, motherfucker!”

The woman, Becky, couldn’t stand under her own power but she was alive. I looked around and noticed the stung victims were mostly conscious, a couple even standing and trying to flee the room. I bent down to the woman, said, “Are you okay? Can you hear me?” She nodded. From behind me, John swung the chair once more and connected. I said, “Okay, we’re going to try to get you out of here. The venom, it might not hurt you but-“

The woman, nodding the whole time, reached over with her left arm and tore the right arm out of its socket. It made a slimy sucking sound, like tearing the leg off a Thanksgiving turkey. There was no blood. The wound was instantly sealed by a thin, black layer of the Soy Sauce.

This was unexpected. She calmly walked back toward the fountain, casually carrying her arm like an umbrella.

Then I saw another bite victim on the ground nearby, a young man writhing as if in a seizure. Eventually his legs kicked themselves free from the rest of his body. The limbs thumped along the floor on their own like two giant polyester snakes with shoes for heads. I saw a loose head stuck to a single arm, furiously biting and clawing the carpet nearby. I realized similar scenes were being repeated all around the room, my mind making only a passing attempt to take it all in.

I felt like we might not be in control of this situation any longer. A hand grabbed my arm and was pulling me away from the fountain area. It was Big Jim. He motioned and I looked back to see Dr. Marconi behind the stage, still a little too calm for the situation, pulling out the keys to the locked back room we had come in through.

I moved that direction, then heard a scream behind me that I had come to recognize as Jennifer’s.

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Copyright © 2008 David Wong and Jason Pargin - All rights reserved. No part of this book or website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the express written consent of the author and publisher. This online book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidence.