“Hi, everyone,” she says, “I’m Carly’s mom.”
There’s another huge scream.
“Thank you,” she says. “Carly has something she’d like to say to you.”
The audience quiets down. Every girl there is pulled as taut as a bow to listen to Carly. I hear a girl behind me say, mournfully, “I wish I had cancer.”
Carly’s mom brings the microphone over to Carly. We can hear her ragged breathing for several beats before she says anything.
“Yikes,” Mel mouths to me with a sad look.
“Would you…” Carly says. Breath, breath. “Please…” Breath, breath. “Welcome…” Breath, breath.
“Bolts…”
That’s all she gets out because the audience screams like they’re watching their families be murdered in front of them.
Bolts of Fire are walking onstage.
There are five of them, they’ve got names, I could probably tell you what they are if I search my memory, but how can it matter? The noise in here is so bad my phone is vibrating even though it’s not ringing. Mel has her fingers firmly in her ears, and I can see a father in the row in front of us sympathetically pointing to the earplugs he’s wearing.
The Bolts of Fire guys – all in fashionable stubble with fashionable lopsided hair that manages to weirdly suggest that they’re both thirty years old and fifteen years old at the same time – bask in the applause for a minute, then gesture for the audience to quiet down. This takes a while, and even then it’s only relatively. The dark-haired one who does most of the singing talks anyway.
“Thank you all so much!” he says.
Another skull-fracturing roar.
“Ready for a good time, people of–” and then he names, not our little town, but the larger town about an hour away. The audience roars anyway. Mel shoots me an irritated look, but I can’t hear a word she says.
“We’re here today,” says the blond one who doesn’t sing very much but who’s prettier than the others, “for one special Bolts of Fire fan.”
Another roar as they put a Bolts of Fire cowboy hat on Carly’s head.
“We’re going to start,” says the one whose voice you can always tell is modified by computer to make him hit the right notes, “with Carly’s favourite song.”
“Maybe you know this one,” says the main singer.
He sings an “oooh” and holds it, the others joining in one at a time. I look at Meredith. She’s pretty much tearing her shirt in ecstatic weeping. I put an arm around her and she leans into me, holding on like I’m comforting her at a funeral.
Then Bolts of Fire, all together, a cappella, surrounding poor Carly in her wheelchair: “I broke Bold Sapphire’s heart on the day she turned eighteen…”
And the scream from the crowd is so loud that it takes a second before we realize that a bomb has gone off.
At first, we all assume it’s some kind of bizarrely timed firework from behind the stage, but then pieces of stage set and burning curtain come flying straight at us, Bolts of Fire have been knocked to the ground, and Carly’s mom and nurse have wrapped themselves around Carly’s body to protect her.
As the debris starts falling – fortunately it seems to be mostly styrofoam and cheap fabric – the screaming of the audience changes so much you can feel it in your body, a rising terror that seems to come out of the ground like a flood of water, rising up to choke you before you even start to swim.
We are in the most incredible danger.