"Aww, man. I been lookin' all over for that."
Dave turned to see a scruffy headbanger, wearing tattered blue jeans, a black T-shirt with the word "SKULL" and an armless jean jacket. A cloud of old beer and stale smoke seeped from him, hung in the air around him.
Dave looked again at the CD he held, noticed that the headbanger's T-shirt matched the CD's artwork.
SKULL, the cover screamed in sharp, iron letters that dripped blood. The liner pictured four longhaired, spaced-out kids leering over a nubile girl writhing on a stone slab.
The man looked at Dave expectantly, as if he might return the CD to the bin, when Dave was struck by his strong resemblance to one of the band members on the album cover. But the disheveled man looked more burnt-out than the slightly post-teenage musician pictured on the liner.
"Skull, huh? Are they any good?" Dave asked.
"Oh, man. Are they any good?" The man threw his hands up, turned and disappeared into the crowded store as quietly and suddenly as if he had never been there.
Shaking his head, Dave took two bills from his wallet, handed them to the girl behind the counter, then pushed his way to the parking lot.
As he waited for the car to cool, he dumped the CDs onto the seat. He opened the Skull case. The song titles read like a lexicon of heavy metal. "The Blood of Satan," "Hellfire and Damnation," "Virginacide," and the particularly interesting "Fuck the Pure/Puree the Fucks."
The disc was slightly warped, its edges blackened as if singed. It was hard to tell if it had been manufactured like this or if the disc was damaged. He slid it into the mouth of his car's CD player, not sure of whether it would play.
By the time he pulled onto the freeway, the first seven tracks on the disc had played. The album was poorly produced, real garage-band shit. And like the song titles, the lyrics were pretty standard, heavy metal love/death/Satan/hell stuff.
Dave's free hand moved to eject the disc, but stopped as the first notes of the eighth track began to play. This was not the same caterwauling he had heard before.
Dave picked up the cracked jewel box and pulled out the liner notes. "The Fire of Love."
He listened to the lead singer slur:
The fire of love has cast a glow
A soul's mirror to the fire below
The fire of love will catch up with you
And burn your body and soul through and through
And no one knows
Where the fire of love glows
Tonight....
And then a chorus of low voices took up a chant that raised the hairs on the back of Dave's neck.
Carl Unger, Carl Unger, Carl Unger....
He stabbed the search button again, and the machine obediently gurgled back 10 seconds.
Carl Unger, Carl Unger, Carl Unger....
"Carl Unger?" he laughed. "That's weird."
Like Dave, Carl was an auditor at the regional IRS office downtown. Dave knew him in the vague way workers at large offices knew each other.
He played the section of the song several times before he ejected the CD, put it into his briefcase. He'd play the song tomorrow for Carl on the portable CD player he kept in his desk. That'd be sure to get a laugh.
)
Dave buys a bootleg CD of the heavy metal group Skull, and notices it contains eight songs where the original vinyl record had only seven. On the mysterious eighth track, Dave hears background chanting calling the name of a co-worker ... who doesn't show up at the office the next day.
