Kill Riff by E.N. Dahl

Kill Riff

By E. N. Dahl

Jamie invited me to see Kill Riff. I had nothing better to do. Besides, you don’t say no to a free show. She offered to foot the bill, so we arrived at The Hammer, where I blindly followed the swish of her mint green blouse through a mindless horde of pre-drunk superfans.

I’ll admit, I didn’t pay attention to the opener. Whatever the band was, they did okay. It’s rude not to listen, worse not to pay attention, but a man five years older than my dad and fifty pounds heavier kept ‘accidentally’ bumping me. This kept happening even when Jamie and I moved another hundred or so feet into the floor crowd.

Then the main band took the stage. A shaggy-haired man with three days’ worth of stubble and enough acne for my old school’s senior class stumbled up to the mic. Behind him, a surly drummer tapped his drumsticks together, pretending to warm up, while the bassist tipped his flask to the sky, oblivious to all of us.

“We are Ultra. Are you ready for this shit?” The singer yelled, his voice half-Mick Jagger, half-Gilbert Gottfried. We’re talking bad. All my love to the two celebrities, but this shrieking harpy of another faceless, no-name, middle-aged singer hurt my ears. I actually got offended that Jamie brought me here at all.

I tapped her on the shoulder. Her head swiveled around, body angled toward the stage, bouncing and buzzing with excitement as her dirty blonde ringlets swam around her shoulders. She wriggled her eyes in a What’s up? The way she could say sentences, hell, whole paragraphs with her eyes is why I started dating her in the first place.

Unlike hers, my face couldn’t make such eloquent expressions, so I resorted to words.

“I thought you said we were seeing Kill Riff?”

She grinned, eyes slowly shifting to the side. I followed her gaze as the lead guitarist trudged out from backstage.

Unlike his dudebro bandmates, he wasn’t sullen or low energy. No, this volcano smoldered, radiating, tense and hostile. He dragged his guitar behind him, the body all sharp edges that audibly carved up the floor, faint sparks jumping up from where it ran over metal. The neck ended in a point, more spear than instrument. He took his place, twisting the guitar around to play, revealing a white surface stained a dark red.

This had to be Kill Riff. One glance into Jamie’s opalescent eyes confirmed.

I didn’t get it until he started to play. From the outset, the same lethargic atmosphere from before continued to saturate, bogging down the others, but he shredded through a song they hadn’t bothered to introduce, hand flying from chord to chord so quick I couldn’t keep track of its movements. He played with his bare fingers, played in a way that made it clear he never once used a pick in his life. Every move made it clear he’d been born to make two handed arpeggios look like the twelve-bar blues.

As the song crested toward its crescendo, Kill Riff let a note linger, pointing out into the audience. Jamie began swatting me rapidly on the shoulder, pointing through the teeming masses. The creep from before was being shoved toward the front, then a group of ten or so people, aided by security, hoisted him up onto the stage.

He had just enough time to lift his shirt and start slapping his rotund belly when Kill Riff strummed the final note. Rather than let it fade, he turned, both hands on the neck, and swung his guitar at the man they’d brought before him.

I guess the edges were sharper than I realized. His head came clean off his shoulders in an explosion of blood, red gushing straight into the air, arterial spray dousing the front of the crowd. The venue shook with cheers and claps as the man’s corpse fell to the stage. It barely hit the ground before roadies sprinted forward to remove it from sight.

This wasn’t my scene. Wasn’t Jamie’s either. I turned to my girlfriend with an open jaw and wide eyes. Talking with my looks wasn’t a skill, but my message couldn’t have been clearer.

“It’s an act!” She nudged me with her elbow. “A gimmick. Look at them. You think anyone would bother seeing these guys if they didn’t put on a good show?”

She had a point. Though the display did seem to energize the others a bit, Kill Riff remained the only excited member of the whole band. He wailed and strutted and shredded his way into the next song. Jamie put her hand around my waist, telling me to ease up. We met at a concert a lot like this one, after all.

Time hadn’t dulled our adrenaline junkie habits, so I tried to get into the music for her sake. I head banged, I thrashed, I moshed, but I always returned to her side. Sometimes, we’d split up for a while—not because we wanted to, we just weren’t the clingy losers who need to be together for every second of every day. Not tonight. She caught onto my discomfort. We didn’t leave, but she stopped seeking out the pits. We hovered at their edges while person after person got ‘chosen’ from the crowd and executed, live.

Jamie started looking a little queasy too. The stage was drenched in blood by this point, Kill Riff’s guitar slick, shiny with red. How he managed to keep playing baffled me.

Then the singer drunkenly mumbled something about them starting their final song. I wasn’t the praying type, but I asked all the gods I could think of that it would be over soon.

It was, because as Kill Riff ripped into the end of this finale, he pointed straight at me.

Hands lashed out from every side, throwing me into the air. I never weighed much, so it was easier for them to crowd surf me to the stage, despite my screaming. I clawed at every eyeball in my reach, but the only set I cared about stared at me, Jamie’s bewildered look saying, You’re not supposed to be part of this show. Then, a slight shift as she watched me kick somebody’s nose into his skull, the crunch of cartilage carrying over the unenthusiastic bassline, as her face screamed, They really are killing people.

I didn’t have time to wonder how they were touring like this and getting away with it. If they really did slaughter a dozen or so people at every venue, surely, somebody would’ve arrested them, right? Or attacked them? Or filed a formal complaint with their production company? Something?

A final heave unceremoniously hurled me onto the stage, where I landed on my wrist wrong, a sharp crack resounding from my right arm. Didn’t need a doctor’s note to know that bitch was broken in three places, and my scream only made the crowd cheer.

Kill Riff stepped toward me. I craned my head to the side and saw him raise that bloody axe to decapitate me.

“Stop it!” Jamie screamed, faint over the commotion, but I moved to the side as he swung, the edge burying into the stage surface.

The whole venue fell silent.

Then Kill Riff growled, his lip twisting up in a snarl as he yanked his musical weapon free. Jamie’s footfalls grew closer as she ascended the stage. I looked toward the singer.

“You gonna help me?” I screamed at him. “I’m not part of this!”

He snorted. “I have to tour with this psycho. You really think I want to piss him off?”

No wonder they were so low energy. They had to endure this shit at every concert.

Kill Riff stomped forward, raising his guitar overhead again as Jamie sprinted up from behind, yelling. I saw his snarl become a grin just soon enough for me to cry out, but not soon enough for her to stop. As he swung, he shifted the body’s weight, bracing his hand at the valley of its flying V to thrust the neck backward. It rammed straight through her stomach, crimson bursting out as I scrambled to my feet, charging him. He had enough strength to hold her off the ground, feet dangling, then set her free by tilting the neck down and letting her slide off. She hit the stage with a wet thump, gagging as she drowned in her own blood.

I knew better than to try to attack him. I slid in the viscera of who knows how many people, dropping to my knees, cradling her head with my one good arm. A spotlight beamed down on us as panic-stricken, coke-fueled roadies dashed around, clearing equipment from the stage. Kill Riff chuckled and vanished behind the curtains as I begged for somebody to call 9-1-1, knowing they were listening, just that they didn’t care.

The singer coughed into the microphone as Jamie’s eyes lost focus and my heart tried to rip its way out of my chest.

“Thank you for coming, I guess. We’re Ultra, featuring the legendary Kill Riff,” he sighed. “Hope you enjoyed the show as much as we did.”

The audience cheered, and the lights went out.

This story was originally printed in Issue #1. Pick up the entire issue here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/626379306/the-rock-n-roll-horror-zine-issue-1
See more of E.N. Dahl's writing here: https://endahlwriter.com/