Most hotels didn't have much staff anymore - most didn't have sheets. Room service was a thing of the ancient past.
But we did it for the fans.
At every new town they'd give us a heroes' welcome, having hiked in from miles away or squandered their last few gallons of gasoline to drive from farther. They brought their homemade weapons and homemade liquor, ready to fight the enemy and party, to sing along, basically to have a good time. Local angels and regular people, even a few wild peeps wandered in most nights - everyone wanted to see us perform.
We'd become famous after all, even though the old ways of manufacturing fame - television, magazines, movie sound tracks - hardly existed anymore. There was still a lot of radio around, ten thousand backyard stations juiced with solar power, so everyone knew our songs.
They knew our name too, thanks to Pearl, who'd finally come up with the three perfect words to describe us. Even if it is a stupid plural. I mean, it doesn't really make sense without the s at the end.
The Last Day? Come on. That's as bad as the Desk.
So you probably know how the rest of the story goes:
We toured like crazy, hitting the big cities all over the world, playing one show after another until the local population of the enemy had been destroyed. Then we did our famous Heartland Tour, playing every small town that had ever spotted a worm-sign in the distance and a few that hadn't.
We were just as popular overseas. One good thing about singing in a language that's been dead for seven centuries: nobody feels left out.
Especially not the worms.
Everywhere we and our two dozen superhuman bodyguards went, the enemy came, called up from the bowels of the earth by their ancient hunger, unable to resist a thousand tasty humans swaying to Minerva's songs, as tempting as the smell of bacon sizzling in the morning.
Our fans and the angels kept slaying them, until the last few survivors got canny enough to slither back into the depths. The crisis slowly began to subside, the deep-dwelling rats retreating into their unlit warrens, taking the spores of the parasite with them. Thanks, guys, till next time.
Of course, things took a while to get back to normal.
There were cities and societies that had to be rebuilt, and the Night Watch still had to mop up the last few untreated peeps. They scoured the wilderness for those that the anathema had pushed into lonely existences, healing the vampires one by one until they became creatures of legend again. And then the Watch itself disappeared back into the shadows.
The earth was cured - or at least we humans thought so.
No one knew what the worms thought, or if they thought anything at all. We'd killed practically all of them... except for the most intelligent ones, Cal always pointed out. The ones who somehow figured out that our music was deadly. So the next time the worms rise up, they'll all be descendants of those clever enough to escape. They probably get smarter with every invasion of the surface: wormy evolution in action.
Fexcellent.
But the next crisis won't happen for at least a few hundred years, and I'll be too old to tour by then.
Angels don't live forever, after all.
Along the way, Min and I broke up and got back together about fifteen times, and that's if you don't count the breakups that lasted less than two hours. Zahler became a fawesome bass player, and Alana Ray stayed exactly the way she was: ethical, logical, collected. And Pearl is, as you know, running for Mayor of New York again, but that's a whole other story.
By now, we've all been interviewed a million times about the tour. One of Cal Thompson's books covers it the best; he was there watching our backs the whole way. Most of what he says is true, as far as I can remember.
The only really new thing I can add to all those stories is this:
It happened in a small town outside Tulsa, about halfway through the Heartland Tour. That night's gig had been fawesome, us thrashing through a twenty-minute version of "Piece Two" while the crowd killed the local enemy, a giant bull worm whose death throes tore up that Sears parking lot like a rabid dog does a newspaper.
At the after-party, one of the local angels came up to me. She had short hair, wild makeup, and intense eyes. Her broadsword was strapped across