Death #15:
Jungle Fever
By Julie
The NKOTBSB tour was winding down, but
their show in New York was just getting underway. The Backstreet Boys had taken
the stage for their medley of ballads, and their most dedicated fans screamed
with delight as they sang the final notes of “10,000 Promises,” a song most of
these American fans had never heard live in concert before. The raised platform
they’d been standing on slowly lowered, and they moved to the catwalk, where
four stools had been placed in a line, for the next song in the set, “I’ll
Never Break Your Heart.”
It was one of Nick’s favorite and least favorite
parts in the show. “I’ll Never Break Your Heart” wasn’t a song he cared much
for singing; he didn’t have any solos, so he was stuck doing the boring
background vocals and harmonies on the chorus. It was a song that made him
empathize with Howie, who had always been limited to those parts.
On the other hand, this was the number where they
chose fans out of the audience to serenade, and Nick liked that. He liked
picking the most random people to pull up onstage, making his admirers look at
each other in bewilderment. He liked teasing the girls, dangling his rose in
their faces, thrusting his junk in front of them, then jumping back out of the
way before they could grab either one. He liked entertaining himself and the
crowd while they sang the most boring single in the Backstreet Boys’ song
catalogue.
That night, as the four Boys moved to different
sides of the stage to find their fans, Nick took his time making his selection.
He carefully scoped out his section of the crowd, surveying his options. AJ and
Howie usually brought up hot chicks, while Brian stuck to little girls and his
own relatives, but Nick got a kick out of picking the kind of people no one
would expect him to pick – fatties, uglies, crazies,
and so on. He smiled at a four-hundred-pound walrus bobbing up and down in the
front row, smirked at the drooling girls in the back waving posters that
offered to have his babies or be the frog to his chimp, and ignored them all.
His eyes finally came to rest on a sign sticking
out of the middle, bright yellow with black letters, which said, PICK
ME NICK! I COME FROM THE CONGO! The girl holding it up looked like she came from The
Congo. She was wearing a brightly patterned headscarf and a long, flowing dress
that made her stand out from all the white girls crowded around her in jeans
and t-shirts. He smiled and beckoned to her, pointing her out to security so
they could go and get her. He saw her eyes widen as she realized he had chosen
her, and he knew he had made her night, maybe even her whole life.
Sadly, he didn’t know that choosing her would mean
the end of his.
The security guard brought her up to the stage,
and Nick met her at the stairs and walked her across the catwalk to the last
stool in the line. He felt good about himself as he helped her onto it,
noticing how skinny and sickly she looked. He thought of the starving African
children in those old commercials with Sally Struthers pleading for sponsors,
and he congratulated himself on being charitable and choosing her.
Then the band started playing, and AJ started
singing, and Nick started up his usual antics, prancing around the girl on the
stool while making sure he stayed just out of her reach.
“I’ll never break your heart…”
He twirled and thrust and toyed with the
long-stemmed, red rose in his hand, offering it to her, then snatching it back
with a smirk when she tried to take it.
“I’ll never make you cry…”
The poor girl was shaking, swaying on her stool as
if she might swoon in his presence; moisture seeped from her eyes, and Nick
milked it for all it was worth.
“I’d rather die, than live without you…”
He touched her shoulder from behind, tugged on her
headscarf as he circled around her, and finally threw himself backwards across
her lap. He heard the crowd scream, delighted by the little show he was putting
on at his end of the catwalk, and he grinned, pleased with himself, happily
soaking up the attention.
“I’ll give you all of me, honey, that’s no
lie…”
As he started to get off her, he felt something
warm and wet spatter his face, and he looked up at the girl in confusion, just
as a second drop hit him right in the eye. “Ugh!” he gasped, scrambling up and
wiping his eye, which was burning. His fingers came away wet and sticky, and
when he held them up to his face, they shone with red in the spotlight.
His mouth fell open in shock, and he gaped at the
girl on the stool, the girl he’d brought up to serenade. At first, he thought
she’d just gotten a nosebleed. Indeed, blood was dripping from both of her
nostrils. But that wasn’t all. It was also pouring from her mouth and trickling
out of the corners of her eyes, like bright red tears. Her face was blotchy and
streaked with red, and in the bright spotlight, he saw something he hadn’t
noticed before: a rash of reddish pustules, standing out on her dark skin.
He backed away, disgusted and horrified, as she
sat there and shook, raising her hands to her face. But when she started to
topple off the stool, instinct kicked in, and he sprang forward to catch her
before her head hit the stage. He lowered her to the floor, where she writhed
and convulsed, her bloodshot eyes rolling in their sockets, bloody vomit
foaming out of her mouth.
“Somebody help her!” he cried, and as security
rushed onto the stage, the music stopped, and all he could hear were the
audience’s screams. He knew they weren’t screaming for him anymore.
Out of nowhere, his bodyguard appeared and pulled
him off the stage, saying, “Come on, Nick. Let the paramedics help her. There’s
nothing you can do.” He escorted Nick to the dressing room under the stage,
where Brian, AJ, and Howie were waiting in shock.
“Nick, what happened?” asked Brian, whose stool
was on the other end of the catwalk. He probably hadn’t seen a thing.
Nick shook his head. He held up his hands. They
were shaking. Shaking and soaked with the girl’s blood.
***
One week later, a man and a woman stood on either
side of his hospital bed, staring down at him. His face was gray, except for
the hemorrhagic rash that polka-dotted his skin. Blood oozed out of the corners
of his eyes, the sides of his mouth, his nose, his ears, every orifice of his
body, a sign of the massive internal hemorrhage happening within it. A
ventilator forced air into his failing lungs, but not even the machine could
keep him alive much longer. His blood pressure was dangerously low. His organ
systems were shutting down.
It was only a matter of time, the nurse realized
sadly, as she looked at him through the clear face shield in the helmet of her
Hazmat suit, which she wore to protect her from the virus that had infected
him. “Did you ever imagine we’d be dealing with ebola here, in
New York?” she asked the doctor who stood across from her, looking more like an
astronaut than a physician in his protective garb.
“Never,” he replied, shaking his head.
The last week had been the most intense one of her
young nursing career, the hospital filled to capacity with fans who had been
infected at a New Kids on the Block and Backstreet Boys concert. The source of
the deadly virus had been traced to a young woman who had flown in from the
Democratic Republic of the Congo. She had died the night of the show, and
everyone who had been exposed – fans, venue staff, bodyguards, roadies, band
musicians, and even the boyband members themselves – had been hospitalized and
quarantined.
Nick Carter had been among the first to start
showing symptoms. Five days after exposure, he’d spiked a fever, started
vomiting blood, suffered severe bouts of diarrhea. They had watched him
deteriorate over the past few days, but even now, seeing him in his final
throes of death, the nurse still couldn’t believe it.
“I used to like their music,” she murmured. “The
Backstreet Boys. When I was a teenager.”
The doctor snorted and said nothing. She didn’t
expect him to understand; he was practically her father’s age and didn’t have
daughters.
“Yeah, I-” she started to go on anyway, but she
was interrupted by a high-pitched alarm, as the heart monitor flatlined. She
sighed and bowed her head. It had only been a matter of time. “You wanna try
anything?” she asked the doctor.
He shook his head. “No point. I’m calling it,” he
replied flatly. “Time of death, 22:50.”
She made note of it on the chart and got the death
kit. “Should I clean him up?” she asked, looking down at his bloody face, as
she unhooked him from all the machines and monitors.
“No point,” the doctor said again. “The body will
need to be incinerated.”
The nurse swallowed hard. “He was my favorite, you
know.” She felt a rush of emotion as she draped a white shroud over his ravaged
corpse. “He used to turn my insides to mush.”
“And now it’s his insides that have been
liquefied,” said the doctor. “And we’re stuck with a ward full of bloody
boyband fans.”
***