Oops, Darren thought again. That probably didn't look good. But then, if Matt wasn't so fucking clumsy on his feet he probably would've been braced a little better. Hopefully he'll learn from it. Maybe if he smoked out a little and let himself chill like Coop and I, he'd do better up here.
Darren worked his way back toward his microphone, bouncing all the way. Halfway there he crossed over Jake's guitar cord, caught it with his foot, and ripped it cleanly out of Jake's guitar, instantly silencing the backing riff just before the end of the solo and the beginning of dual riff portion of the song. He didn't even notice that he'd done it. When he heard Jake's guitar go quiet he turned and saw the singer frantically moving across the stage to pick up the end of the cord and plug it back in and concluded that Jake himself had been the one to cause the mishap.
And they give me shit for stepping on my cord that one time, Darren thought. I'm never gonna let his ass hear the end of this one.
Matt covered for Jake the best he could by extending the solo for another ten seconds, long enough for Jake to plug back in. He then repeated the ending, leading them back to the cue for the next section of the song. They hit the dual riff and then separated back into lead and backing. Jake sang out the third verse and the final chorus grouping and they worked their way into the final crescendo. This was what Darren had been waiting for.
Darren longed to perfect a move for the final moments of the last song. He wanted to do a double jump and then twist three hundred and sixty degrees in a circle on the third jump. The first time he'd tried it he had been too close to his microphone stand and had knocked it over. The second time his three-sixty had ended up being a one-eighty and he had been facing the wrong direction. This time, he was determined, he would get it right. He had the rhythm, he was back far enough from his mic, and it just felt like something that was meant to be. He would pull this off just before the final climax of explosions and the crowd would go wild, would scream his name, and the next day, in the Austin papers, it would his name the concert reviewers would mention instead of Jake's or Matt's or Bill's.
The moment came. To his right, Matt and Jake pounded off the final notes. He jumped twice with the ending beat and then leapt high in the air for the third leap. As soon as his feet left the ground he spun violently to the left, imparting himself with enough force to make it all the way around before his feet came back down. The maneuver might have gone off as planned but he forgot one little thing. He forgot to make sure he cleared his own guitar cord. It wrapped neatly around his legs, effectively binding them together, and when he came back down he was unable to spread them to keep his balance. He pitched forward, feeling himself falling towards the stage. Instinctively he tried to counter this by giving one more hop forward and, in doing so, he jumped right into the midst of the danger zone surrounding the pyrotechnic charge situated in front of his microphone. The cord pulled tight as he reached the end of his slack and he pitched forward again, the neck of his bass knocking over his microphone stand, his body achieving a horizontal orientation. He found himself looking directly down into the pyrotechnic charge and, in sudden terror, he managed to turn his head to the left.
He heard the boom, louder than it had ever been before. A bright flash of light blinded him even through his closed eyelids and burning pain seared up the right side of his body. The air was blasted out of his lungs and he felt himself flying through the air, twisting around and around like a football thrown in an awkward spiral. And then he was crashing down on a sea of human bodies, hearing the faint sounds of screaming through his violently ringing ears.
Holy fucking shit! Jake's mind screamed as he watched Darren go flying eight feet into the air, spiraling around and around, and landing somewhere in the darkness of the mosh pit in front of the stage. The cheers of the audience cut off in an instant, as if a mute button had been pushed. From the mosh pit itself, he could hear screaming over the ringing in his ears.
He spun the volume knob on his guitar to the zero position and dropped it to the ground, rushing forward, grabbing the main microphone as he went by. He looked down but could see nothing but a squirming mass of bodies in the darkness.
"Everyone," he said into the mic, "please back away from him. Give us some room. Stay back!"
Matt came rushing by on his right. He leapt off the stage and into the mosh pit and began pushing his way through.
"House lights!" Jake said into the mic. "Turn on the house lights please. We need to see down there."
The lights clicked on, illuminating the chaos below. Jake dropped the microphone and jumped off the stage as well, finding himself surrounded by sweating bodies. He began pushing through. "Back away," he said. "Back away. Let me through."
He worked his way to Darren's position, elbowing and forcing his way through the gathered crowd, none of whom were heading his pleas to back away. Finally he stood looking down at the bass player. He was on his back, eyes closed, smoke rising from his body, particularly his head where a good portion of his hair had been burned off. The right side of his face, his right arm, portions of his exposed right flank and stomach, and a good portion of his right leg were bright red in color, like sunburn only much worse. His bass guitar was lying next to him, the neck broken in half, the strings snapped and hanging free, the body charred and smoking. Matt was kneeling next to him, shaking him.
"Is he dead?" Jake yelled.
"If he's not I'm gonna fuckin' kill him!" Matt yelled back. He gave an extra-hard shake. "Darren!"
Darren's eyes flew open, gazing around, unseeing. "My cock!" he yelled, panicked. "Did it blow off my fuckin' cock?"
It did not blow off his fuckin' cock. The leather shorts he wore had protected that portion of his body. Nor did he suffer any broken bones from either the concussion or the spectacular flight through the air (although three members of the audience were injured when his two hundred and thirty pound, smoking bulk landed atop them). What he did suffer were second-degree burns all over his right leg, right arm, right chest and abdominal wall, and the right side of his face and neck. He also suffered a massively ruptured right eardrum, which left it doubtful that he would ever regain full hearing on that side. His hair was flat out gone, most of it burned off in the explosion, the rest shaved off in the Austin burn center later that night. For the next forty-eight hours he lay in a hospital bed, a morphine drip keeping the worst of the pain under control while blisters rose and fell on his burned skin.
They discharged him with a prescription for heavy-duty pain pills and strict instructions to change his dressings once a day and to maintain bedrest until the skin healed. They wanted him in for check-ups every three days for the next two weeks. But this was simply not to be.
"We had to cancel the first two shows in Dallas," Greg said as they climbed on the bus in the hospital parking lot, "but they're setting up for the third right now. We should make it there by three o'clock this afternoon. We won't have time for the usual interviews and autograph sessions, but we should be able to make the sound check on time."
"Wait a minute," Jake said as he heard this. "Are you saying we're not going home?"
"The show must go on," Greg replied. "It's bad enough we had to cancel two dates in one of our biggest cities. Do you have any idea how much revenue we lost?"
"Darren can't play like that," Matt said. "He looks like a fuckin' cartoon character that got shot with a cannon."
"And his eardrum is ruptured," Jake added. "Didn't they tell him to avoid loud noises until it healed up?"