Demon Beat



  Demon Beat

  By William Reid

  Copyright 2013 By William Reid Schmadeka

  For a human, Rick’s rage that his lead singer Dieter was fucking his girlfriend would have made sense. For a demon of Wrath, rage was an understatement.

  His lead singer. He still considered it his band, Dämonschlag, not the mass-appeal Demon Beat travesty Dieter built from its ashes. He still considered Dieter an outsider. And he hated Dieter’s black-dyed soul for ruining everything he had built. Cassidy was just the latest slight, but it was the one that seared the hottest.

  “You should lay off that shit,” Dwayne mumbled around the cigarette that hung from the corner of his mouth. He pointed with his chin at the ragged arcane symbols carved into Rick’s forearm.

  Rick glanced down at the cuts. His blood, purple in the dim light under the stage, pattered onto the matching symbols etched on his Kevlar drum heads. The drum kit rattled in time with the twenty thousand fans pounding the rafters above him. Their raw emotions rippled the smoke that hung thick in the air.

  “This is what Dämonschlag is about, Dwayne,” Rick said.

  Dwayne shrugged and returned his attention to the bass in his hands. “Shit, not since college. Listen to them. They’re chanting Demon Beat.”

  Rick’s temples throbbed. Dwayne was the only other original member of Dämonschlag left. Of all people, he should understand.

  “We’re big time now,” the bassist continued. He slapped a few chords to test his tuning. “Teens with our posters up and shit. Parents get pissed enough at our lyrics. We act that way too, bite heads off bats and fuck knows what else, it’s all over.”

  “Maybe it should be. The fans of Dämonschlag felt our music. They knew we were genuine.”

  Dwayne snorted. Smoke streamed pale out his nostrils. “Yeah, they also knew the shit that went down at our gigs.”

  “Lightning struck the place in Oakmont. A gas station blew up next to Metal Inferno. That wasn’t our fault.”

  “Ain’t what I’m talking about.”

  “That tour was epic! Lightning storms every night. Car crashes. Brawls. Ambulances and police cars stacked in the parking lots. We were legends!”

  “Phone stopped ringing all the same.”

  Rick growled, a low rumble boiling from the depths of his throat. So he lost control of his aura during performances. He couldn’t avoid it with so much raw emotion around him. The tales of the band brought droves of fans even as venues stopped wanting them. His offerings of Wrath to the Infernal Host grew with the crowds.

  But then Dieter had come.

  Rick looked above him at the doors in the ceiling. They would open at Dieter’s cue, and the band would rise like demons from Hell onto the stage, in front of the biggest crowd Rick had ever performed for.

  “I wish Lance was here to see this,” he said.

  “If your brother were here, be fuckall for him to see.”

  Rick stared at Dwayne. A curtain of greasy black hair hid the bassist’s face.

  “That’s as good as saying all our success came from Dieter.”

  Dwayne glanced up toward the unseen crowd, then gave Rick a look. “Lance was too wasted to remember his lyrics or play a chord. We were shit before Dieter.”

  Rick grimaced. It had taken his aura of rage and destruction just to cover for his all-too-human brother. But as hard as kicking Lance out had been, Rick could have remade Dämonschlag once they were free of him. They found a new lead guitarist in Franc. When no one liked Rick’s attempts to sing lead – Wrath demons weren’t known for their vocals – Franc suggested they look to his friend, the antichrist himself, fucking Dieter.

  Dieter could sing. He’d cut his chops on manufactured Euro techno pop bands. After dyeing his hair black and trading his Abercrombie for Hot Topic, he slipped right in to the lead singer role.

  Which included Rick’s girlfriend.

  “We are ready to rock the house?” A thick Swedish accent roared.

  Dieter strode in. The black nail polish and mascara looked garish against his pale skin. His hair spilled like ink over his head. But under the macabre dress and makeup he possessed an animal attraction that made the crowd, Cassidy, everyone, love him.

  The sight of him stoked Rick’s fury even hotter. He dropped his arm to hide his carved and bleeding flesh, but Dieter didn’t even look in his direction.

  Rick should have seen the true Dieter the second they met. Demons masked their auras by nature to avoid notice. But a Lust demon exploded when put on stage, a supernova of passion, hunger, need.

  They realized their natures when they first performance together. Their auras warred over the crowd as the band played. Some fans waited for the lightning, the explosions, the brawling pandemonium that were the legacy of Dämonschlag. None of it came. But the fans swooned over Dieter. Those that wanted to see a death metal sex god from a stage on high, feasted their fill. Near orgies replaced the fights, and Dieter’s power consumed the group, and their legacy.

  Rick couldn’t compete with Dieter onstage, where Dieter was in his element. So Dieter took control of the band. But that didn’t stop him from humiliating Rick off-stage as well. Sex with a Lust demon was so mind-blowing it drove Cassidy mid-fucking-coitus to call Rick and break things off. Rick still remembered the sounds in the background as Cassidy told him they were over, barely able to speak between her squeals of ecstasy.

  Rick’s wrath knew no bounds. Lightning blistered the sky for a week. He nearly quit the band. He knew Dieter wanted him to. But in his fury he realized how he could hurt Dieter worse than Dieter had ever hurt him. He just needed to wait for the right moment to wrest everything back.

  Franc came in behind Dieter. The guitarist’s miasma of body odor trampled all other smells in the lift. Franc had spoken perhaps ten words since Rick met him, most of them in connection with the worst decision Dämonschlag had ever made. Despite his moist, doughy skin and barrel-shaped body, Franc never wore a shirt when they performed. Their new fans didn’t seem to care. They gave Dieter all their attention.

  Dieter rotated his head in a few quick circles, his spine cracking like tinder. Then he stepped behind the keyboard at the front of the band. Synthesized tones shrieked through the lift.

  “We start with ‘Pulse of Death,’ yes?” Dieter stabbed a few last notes, then started doing knee bends while holding his arms straight out from his sides.

  “Fucking Dieter,” Rick muttered, and slipped in his ear buds. Finally the band had the money to afford such luxuries. Even with amps pointed straight at him, crowd chants used to throw his beat off. Now with the ear buds, he heard only the band. He heard only his drumming.

  “Diabolus tribuo mihi vox,” he whispered, and gripped his red steel drum sticks. The one in his right hand was matted and sticky.

  “Let’s do this!” Dieter pounded the lift control. The stage trapdoors swung open. Cold stars flickered in a clear sky above them. The invisible crowd screamed.

  The platform shuddered and began to rise. Rick’s heart thundered.

  The darkness exploded. Gouts of flame blossomed in red-orange streams around the lift. A wave of heat enveloped Rick, clutched him. The shouts, the cheers, the emotion of the crowd slammed in to him from all sides. The blood streaming down his arm coated the drum heads with a rippling sheen. He could feel the power infused in them, channeling the rhythm of the crowd, amplifying it.

  The pyrotechnics died as quickly as they had come. For the first time he saw the immense sea of humanity before them, filling the rows of the amphitheater, jumping, gyrating, howling. A sea of blue and green lights rippled like a carpet of stars over them.

  Cell phones.

  Goddamn cell phones! Rick searched the crowd for the flicker of a real honest-to-Christ f
ucking lighter. Lava pulsed through his veins.

  “Are you ready, Oakland?” Dieter shouted. His voice slashed through Rick’s ear buds over the crowd noise. It was too much to hope he got the city wrong, like Lance often did.

  The crowd’s shouts took form. Chants of Dieter’s name washed over the stage.

  Hatred clawed up Rick’s spine and broiled his soul.

  “Are you ready to feel the Pulse?” Dieter cried.

  The crowd roared. Dieter’s first keyboard notes screamed straight into Rick’s skull.

  Rick fell into rhythm as Franc and Dwayne kicked in. The darkness beyond the stage became empty to him. Soundless. Dead. Only the music remained. His anger focused, took form with the music. Blood ran down his drumstick as he pounded. He felt the waves of sound slam out into the crowd from the power infused in the drums.

  And he felt the crowd respond with each beat. Their emotions engulfed the stadium. He played faster, harder. Their emotions fueled him. The drumming filled his ears, drowning out the guitars, drowning out Dieter’s singing.

  Stark white flashes lit the sky above them. The stage beneath his feet quivered with the low, steady rumble of thunder. Lightning sizzled between gathering clouds in the sky. The scent of ozone tinged the air. Dieter didn’t pause in his singing, but shot a baleful glare at Rick over his shoulder.

  Rick grinned wickedly. Yes, you Eurotrash piece of shit, I’m fighting back.

  Then he heard it again. Over the music, through the ear buds, through even the power of his drumming, he heard it again.

  The crowd chanted Dieter’s name in time with Rick’s beat.

  Rick’s fury exploded. He drummed faster. A black, glistening puddle of blood shivered on the drum head, flowing along the symbols on the Kevlar. Thick drops spun from his sticks into the darkness.

  Curtains of white-hot lightning leapt across the heavens. The crowd seethed in front of the stage, swallowed in a surging pit of violence. Sweating, bleeding bodies crashed together, bared teeth white and gleaming in the flashes. Dieter’s eyes, as violent as the sky, were now fixed on Rick.

  Rick’s hatred devoured him whole. Dieter might have seen this coming if he’d studied the symbols carved on Rick’s arms or drawn on his drums. Dieter hadn’t concerned himself with a cowed demon of Wrath.

  He hammered the drums in pure rage now. Power lashed with a quickening pulse into the darkness. He forced the crowd to its pace. Dieter was not what Dämonschlag was about. Rick would show everyone tonight.

  The guitar gave a high-pitched squeal and went silent. Franc’s whale-like bulk crashed to the floor. His body spasmed, eyes rolling upward in a flushed face. Foam dribbled from the corners of his lips. His hands clutched feebly at his sweat-slicked chest.

  Rick drummed faster.

  All sound but Rick’s drumming stopped. Dieter stared at his lead guitarist convulsing on the stage. Dwayne staggered from his position to Franc’s side, bass tumbling forgotten from his grasp. His mouth worked soundlessly in frantic gasps, and his eyes bulged from his skull.

  Rick drummed faster. He couldn’t hear the laughter erupting maniacally from his lips.

  Dwayne, moving in a daze, tried to press his palms against Franc’s chest. His entire body convulsed. He slipped on Franc’s naked skin and flopped forward onto the guitarist’s now still body. He didn’t even quiver in death like Franc had.

  Across the arena, cell phones winked out, tumbling to the ground as each wave of energy smashed out from the drums, faster and faster.

  “We are Dämonschlag!” Rick screamed.

  Dieter stumbled away from his keyboards, looking in a stupor over the blackness of the crowd. Slowly, drunkenly, he swung his head toward Rick.

  “What are you doing?” He slurred. His hand drug open-palmed across his chest as his eyes struggled to focus. The jugular in his neck swelled, surging in time with Rick’s frenzied tempo.

  Rick drummed as fast as he could.

  Dieter roared. His eyes went wide, crazed. He lurched toward Rick and collapsed on top of the drum kit. Rick’s blood splattered across Dieter’s reddening face. He made a desperate swipe at Rick’s bloody sticks.

  Rick stared at Dieter and kept drumming. “You want to take my girlfriend?”

  Dieter’s dilated eyes widened in surprise. “Not yours!” His fingers fumbled at the sticks.

  Rick cackled.

  “You want Demon Beat, Dieter?” He hissed. “You want to take my band?”

  “Not yours!” Dieter repeated, and surged over the kit.

  “Fucking Dieter!” Rick said.

  He stopped drumming.

  The storm in the sky died.

  Dieter’s body froze in mid-motion. He let out a guttural, choking sound. Crimson splattered from his painted lips. He collapsed forward. The drum kit caved around him. Dieter and the drums crashed together into a lifeless mass in front of Rick.

  Rick sat for several moments in silence and darkness, his arm aching, his breathing fast and shaking. Then he stood up, alone on the stage, and dropped his blood-coated drum sticks to the ground.

  Nothing. No reaction. No movement. He flicked the ear buds from his ears and stepped past the spotlights to the front edge of the stage.

  The arena was a tomb. Bodies slumped in heaps over the seats and sprawled in the aisles before him. They were dim, indistinct in the light of the emergency lamps and exit signs.

  Five formless shapes, emptiness punched out of the fabric of reality, stood along the upper ring of the amphitheater in silent appreciation of his vengeance. Rick had never seen the seething entities he served, let alone had them attend one of his concerts. He felt the eyes of the Host on him, eyes of hunger, galaxies of nothing devouring the Wrath he gave them.

  He closed his eyes and raised his hands to either side. The blood that dripped from his arm onto the stage sounded like explosions in the echoing silence.