Completing a month of free fiction, here's one that appeared in Say ... Was That a Kiss, published by the lovely people at Fortress of Words.

When it first appeared, some people didn't see what my story had to do with the theme of kisses. So, I'm just gonna come right out in say it: KISS!!!!

It helps if you say it while making the sign of the devil.

Demon, Star, Alien, Cat
by Greg van Eekhout

I went at the head with tiny licks and nibbles.

"Goddamnit," the Demon said, throwing his arms up in exhasperation. "That's not how you eat these things. I swear, if it's not a goddamn vegetable or a fungus you guys have no idea what to do with it." He reached for my popsicle. "Hand it over and watch."

I was an Institute-trained engineer with a specialization in archaic technology, but since the Demon's revival, I'd become his designated handler. He lived with me in my two-room dome, complaining every time he bumped his frizzy head on the ceiling. My orders were to watch him, give him whatever he wanted, and help him assimilate to life in 2305.


I gave him the popsicle, a frozen confection we'd made to his specifications. It was shaped like his own head with stylized coloring. White face. Black lips. Black spiky shapes around his eyes. "Beautiful," he declared. And then he showed me the proper way to eat it. He unfurled his tongue and curled it around the miniature icy head and took a long, loving lick of himself. "Just beautiful. We're gonna sell these by the truckload."

* * *

Once Institute archeologists had found the Demon's cryo-tube in the rubble of a Scottsdale, Arizona office park, it took two years of legal wrangling to figure out who owned him. We thawed him out and replaced his heart and within five minutes of his revival, it became clear nobody owned him. In fact, it wouldn't take long before he owned us. Focusing a look of contempt on me, he said, "Get a pen and write this down, kid." He stood for the first time in over 200 years, wincing and wobbling, but remaining on his feet. He was obscenely tall and hairy. "I'm starting up the band again," he announced. And then, more to himself, or to an unseen audience: "We're going to be the greatest band in the land. And we're coming to your town."

* * *

I had to break the bad news to him. We couldn't find his bandmates. By the time he'd died, there were eleven cryogenic facilities licensed to freeze and preserve the deceased with hopes of later revival. The site in Scottsdale was the only one that hadn't been meat-robbed during the Unrest. His bandmates, unfortunately, had been stored in Los Angeles.

I expected him to throw something at me. He was given to towering rages, such as when he learned he couldn't get gasoline to fuel his Bentley, which we had found on display while touring the Smithsonian.

But now he merely patted his furry stomach and popped a strawberry in his mouth. "Not a problem, kid. If I can't wake up the old band, I'll just have to build me a new one. Get a pen."

* * *

In the spirit of cooperating with him (he was insufferable when he didn't get his way), the Institute hauled in cartons of old media and technology capable of displaying it. Videos, audio recordings, books, periodicals, comics. For weeks, I immersed myself in the Demon's venal past. If it could be heard, seen, eaten or rubbed on, the Demon had sold it. I saw common household items from the Demon's day emblazoned with his image and those of his bandmates. Clothing, tooth brushes, lunch boxes, towels, pillowcases, surfboards, guitars, motorcycles, coffins. After a while, I felt sick and heavy, as if I'd eaten too much mushroom cake.

"Why would you need a special box to carry your lunch?" I asked him.

The lab cleaning-bot's head bobbed between his legs. "So you don't have to keep your cupcakes in your pants," he said.

"But ... why does your face need to be on it?"

"Who else would you want on it? Jane Fonda? The Dukes of Hazzard?"

I headwired these references and was no less confused after they'd been glossed for me.

"Look, some kid drags his ass out of bed, has spit wads stuck to his neck by the time he gets off the school bus, his teachers drone the three R's into him for three hours, he gets his ass kicked in PE. But lunch time comes around, and he pulls out that lunch box and sees me and my boys in full make-up and regalia, and for those twenty minutes while he's eating the baloney sandwich his mom makes for him every fucking day of his life, he's in another place. It's a better place. It's a place where he's invincible, where all his parents and his teachers and all the assholes of the world are off in a corner somewhere with their thumbs up their asses. It's a place where his best friends are superheroes and rock and roll rules."

I was even more baffled than before. As with most of his speeches, my headwire couldn't keep up. "But if it's such a good thing to have your face on his lunch box, why don't you just give it to him? Why does he have to buy it?"

He stared at me a while before dismissing me with a wave of his bejeweled hand.

* * *

The Demon held auditions with humans and declared each and every one of them a pathetic mushroom head. I suggested robots, but he struck the idea down, not because artificial elements would make his band a pale reflection of its original formulation, but because it was uncomfortably close to the plot of a certain 1978 made-for-TV movie featuring his original band. "Let's not resurrect those phantoms," he said. So organimechs were the answer. They hadn't been manufactured in fifty years, and most of them had rotted away in storage sheds. But after weeks of searching, I managed to track down the granddaughter of an eccentric collector who had preserved three organimechs in blister packs.

"He kept them frozen," I explained to the Demon.

He licked his lips and chuckled deeply. "Perfect."

The Institute assigned staff musicologists to teach the organimechs how to make the Demon's music. One organimech learned drums. The other two, guitar. It took months, and the noise they produced was unlistenable, but even I had come to believe that this was a matter of taste. Their noise seemed consistent, and they were learning to make it all together at the same time.

The Demon worked them hard. Morning till night, a couple of hours rest (sleep for the Demon, fluid replacement for the organimechs), and then more rehearsal. No one worked harder than the Demon himself. He was tireless, badgering Institute engineers on the quality of their old sound technology reproductions, sketching outlandish clothing for them to make, but mostly calling up glowing little numbers on the air-display and moving them from column to column. This, I took it, had something to do with money.

Whatever campaign the Demon was planning, things seemed to be taking shape. To my eyes, at least. But the Demon wasn't satisfied.

"We're not supposed to be John Denver," he bellowed in the face of the drummer. "You've got to pound those toms like you're pissed at them. And you," he said, turning on the lead guitarist. "You can pull off a sloppy lick here and there, but you have to put your back into it. You're a hero. A guitar god. You're not fucking James Taylor. That thing around your neck is the biggest cock in the land. Stroke it, for God's sake."

He appealed to the singer/rhythm guitarist in desperation. "Do you have any idea what they'll do to me if we suck? They'll assimilate me. They're already trying. Do you know what that means? Have you seen where I live? It's a fucking dome. A two-room dome that smells like a Vietnamese restaurant. I'd rather they put me back in that fucking freezer. Rock saved my ass from being a fucking public school teacher in a corduroy straightjacket, and it's gonna save my ass again." He faced the band. He took a breath. And when he spoke again in his low rumble, I saw a child with a lunch box, many years removed. "God gave rock and roll to us," he said. "And it's our job to wield His thunder."

* * *

The hall was a vast, echoing barn. They'd held beheadings here during the Unrest, and now it was used for picnics during high UV months. The Institute, still bending over backwards to accommodate the Demon they'd brought back to life, rented it out for the night. "A premiere," the Demon called it.

I headwired the unfamiliar word.

It meant a kind of beginning.

"Now, kid, I'm giving you an amazing honor. Really, you should get down on your knees and lick my boots for this. I'm going to let you introduce us to the crowd."

"Oh," I said, "Really, I just couldn't. It's too much. Maybe you could just introduce yourselves after the show --"

He put his big hand on my shoulder. "I know, you're overwhelmed. Who wouldn't be? But you've been real good to me, kid, sharing that awful, godforsaken little hovel of yours. Sure, you got more tail from my cast-offs than you would've had in three lifetimes on your own, but still." He lowered his head and looked me in the eye. "I want you to know I appreciate it, and that's why I'm letting you introduce us on the night of our come-back."

"I don't know what to say." Really, I didn't. Hello, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you survive this noise.

"Of course you don't know what to say. How could you? You're a mushroom head. That's why I'm going to tell you. Get a pen."

I already had one ready.

I was a good roadie.

* * *

The show was brilliant. At least, for a certain value of brilliance I'd learned to judge from studying the Demon's history. The band transformed itself. They wore black fetishistic costumes with shiny metallic bits. They displayed much body hair. Their make-up turned their brutal faces into abstract art.

And they had learned to perform to the Demon's satisfaction. The cat man pounded the drums with consistent rhythm and was very loud. The space alien played his guitar very quickly, striking poses that emphasized the drama of his playing. And the one with the star over one eye made impressive shrieks with a vibrato that the Institute musicologists agreed was not dissimilar to opera.

But it was the Demon who finally convinced me that this band had been worthy of the adulation they'd received back in their time. He played a bass that looked like a medieval weapon. He strode across the stage on boots with fangs. He breathed fire. He vomited blood. He brought down the thunder.

And by the end of the night, I found myself in the wings, sweating and aching and screaming and pumping my fist in the air. I behaved like a vulgar animal, and if I'd had any money, I would have tossed handfuls in the air.

The music and the visuals, I believe, triggered certain hormones that aroused my excitement. The Institute's writing a paper on the phenomenon. But it's all bullshit, as the Demon would say.

Because, really, I got it.

I got what the Demon was doing, and why the lunch boxes were important, and even why it was okay to profit from them.

"You don't have to sell out," the Demon was fond of saying, "so long as you can get people to buy in."

* * *

After the show I approached the Demon in his dressing room. His face was a muddy wash of black and white and flesh. He wore the bathrobe the Institute engineers had fashioned for him. "Where'd the rest of the guys go?" he asked. "Getting some tail?"

"Yes," I said. Though, actually, the three organimechs were off having their fluids replaced.

"I'd call that a pretty decent premiere," the Demon said. "Not a bad way to start a tour. We'll play Detroit next, of course. A few months on the road domestically, and then Japan. We were monsters in Japan. Anything happening on the Moon? Even Led Zeppelin never played the Moon."

I let him go on. A tour was like a war, he was telling me, and now that he'd revealed himself to be the baddest motherfucking warlord on the planet, there'd be no more salads and dome houses for him. The tour would bring in shiploads of cash, and fans, and girls, and merchandise opportunities.

Eventually, I'd have to tell him the truth.

The crowd of thousands he'd played to tonight had consisted of me, a handful of Institute employees, some historians and musicologists, a few sensation seekers, and sixteen thousand holographic projections.

Maybe I'd tell him that later. If I had a chance. The Institute was considering sending him back to the freeze. Obviously, he wasn't adjusting well to 2305, and they wondered if it might not be cruel to keep him alive.

* * *

Seventeen months later, I was peering around the curtain from backstage at Luna Industrial Station Four. In the throng of miners, mechanics, microwave technicians and algae farmers, at least half were wearing make-up. Against white faces, I saw green cat eyes and whiskers, and silver alien masks, and black stars painted around impassioned eyes. Most of the anxious crowd, though, wore the face of the Demon.

Just as I did.

In the end, the Institute had dragged him shrieking and howling back to the freeze, his steel-heeled boots trailing sparks. And after they sealed his tube, not a single original member of his band remained.

I strapped on his bass guitar. Blowing a big, fat, wet kiss to his memory, I got ready to sell some lunch boxes.

--

Demon, Star, Alien, Cat by Greg van Eekhout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.