This is my entry for the week #12 of the awesome contest held by 
More informations about the contest may be found here: https://steemit.com/contest/@f3nix/finish-the-fiction-story-contest-week-12
opening
"Mendo, d’you know where you can stick your fucking sense of adventure next time?" Tres-Culos, bassist of the Tortillas de Pelo, broke the silence suddenly in his usual volcanic style.
Mendoza, continued to observe a mummified bug, relic of past winters, stuck between the window and the cracked sheath of the old Chevy van. He was about to reply when a burp of Tres-Culos banished the words from his mouth, making the interior of the van rumble with an echo-like effect between the cardboard walls of the vehicle.
For a fraction of a second, Machete stopped the chord progression of his new-born piece - somewhat way too similar to Ramones' “Do not Want to Grow Up” - and he cast a sardonic look at Tres-Culos. At the wheel of the Chevy, Tío Billy was a monolith in a leather jacket and Tom Ford.
After all, TC was right, the journey through the glacier was a bad idea. The members of the punk-rock group had come out with their bowels well tangled and the alpine vegetation, more than relaxing them, made everyone feel like sugar cubes dipped in a glass of viscous absinthe.
At least, now the van was sailing calmly through the grassy sea of that mountain valley. Mendoza thought back to how they had ended up accepting that unusual engagement and how unlikely it was that the mayor of a small village, nestled in the middle of the Alps, could have paid them handsomely and in advance to perform at the "Meat Festival".
They had accepted without asking too many questions. Only God, or someone else in his place, knew how much they needed a healthy injection of money and he was tired of recycling picks from every piece of fairly stiff plastic.
Meanwhile, Tío had nailed the old Chevy in front of a crossroads, undecided on which way to get to the village of Saint Judas, their final destination.
From the dusty window, Mendoza's attention was captured by a roadside shrine. It contained a simple painting, representing a lady dressed in a blue tunic and with open arms. On closer inspection, the madonna showed an awkward bright red skin. "Almost skin stripped" he thought, increasingly immersed in the picture. The protruding black eyes of the figure were pointy and vivid blades, thus contrasting with the pale, expressionless faces of the faithful kneeling around her. Only the noise of the Chevy starting to climb the mule-track broke the hypnotic observation of that strange religious representation.
The vehicle was trudging for a good hour through an anaconda of endless hairpin turns. Machete was almost interrupting the arpeggio to complain about the roadmap’s delay, when finally the village of St. Jude was revealed to the band's eyes. A myriad of small houses proliferated under the geological anomaly called Butcher’s Hook, a mountain whose top was bizarrely bent over itself, casting a perennial shadow over the village.
"I will need a steady and uninterrupted supply of booze tonight" Tío Billy solemnly noted.
My ending
Finally, after a last hairpin bend turning worse than Tres-Culos' stomach after the last party, the ramshackle Chevy van made its entrance into the grim agglomeration of sloping-roofed houses.
They were located all around the only more or less flat space, perennially under the shadow of Butcher's Hook. A banner hung sideways and soaked in rain between two houses, said: "St. Judas Meat Festival, tonite! " The red ink was dripping down like blood from the nose of a drunken pub brawler.
The houses seemed to be inhabited by a tribe of squatters: they were battered, painted in gaudy colors, and messy tags like splatters of vomit, rusty rims and broken wagon wheels hanging on the facades, wrecked carcasses and heaps of firewood in the porticoes or in the untamed gardens in front, metal drums in which the embers of fires sparkled red.
Tìo Billy put an end to the engine agonies and opened the creaking door. "Well, here we are, I would say!" he said, thrusting an elephant-sized Dr. Martens into the dirty mud and hoisting his tonnage out of the vehicle.
"What a shit!" Tres-Culos said, stepping out of the car and releasing a fart that had been inside for at least half an hour. Machete made more or less the same sound on his guitar and began to embroider it on one riff.
"Be quiet, idiots, someone is coming!" Mendoza exclaimed, trying in vain to find some dignity. The curves and the ups and downs had made his mouth taste like a tuna can open for a week.
A thin guy had come out of the biggest and most colorful house, with a tuft of black hair on the top of his shaved head. In the wet cold of the square, he seemed comfortable wearing a pair of jeans and a dirty leather jacket, originally white, open on a red shirt. He smiled sideways, took the cigarette out of his mouth and exclaimed:
"Hi, you must be the band! I'm the mayor of St. Judas, you can call me Joe! Follow me, I'll show you the stage. "
Mendoza noticed that Joe had eye bags worse than his and smelled like dead rat, but after a quick questioning glance with his companions, he thought about the already credited pay on the bank account and shrugged.
The stage was in a very large shed, immersed in a semi-darkness. Things were hanging on iron bars on the ceiling, perhaps chains, and there was a strange iron smell. Mendoza didn’t mind the post-industrial atmosphere.
"To be big, it's big, but the lights?" Tìo Billy asked, while Tres-Culos and Machete carried on with the sound check, experiencing the echo effect of their burps in the vast empty space.
Mayor Joe made another smile, crooked like a hooligan's stab. "Don’t worry, we'll take care of that, you start assembling instruments and amplifiers. For anything, I sent you four guys to help you, they can do with stages! "
"Now I leave you, I have a couple of important guests coming for the party. You'll see, tonight with the people and all the rest, it will be a kick! "
The four Tortillas de Pelo, still a bit perplexed, remained to mount the stage. The four helpers sent by Joe seemed like brothers: all with hair fringes to the nose, dark glasses, black leather jackets, nearly incomprehensible when speaking. They were called Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy and actually they knew how to do it: in a short time they set up all the instruments, the sound system and the lights, while the four musicians plundered a case of beers that Joey and Dee Dee had brought. Johnny looked the hardest: Mendoza caught him trying if there was power in the system by sticking a cable into his mouth. There was a tremendous discharge, Johnny smiled as a smoke that smelled of bad hamburger came out of his mouth and said only: "It works!"
"I get everything back, it's not shit, they're cool!" Tres-Culos said happily, emptying two bottles at the same time into his gullet.
An hour later, the shed was packed with punks who were moshing with a howling ferocity. Who would have thought? St. Judas, lost at the top of the Alps, was a kind of punk village populated by a humanity that seemed to have left the suburbs of London in '77.
The Tortillas de Pelo were doing their best on stage to unleash more the undulating mass of mohawks and studs.
Mendoza, shouting into the microphone, glanced at a sort of raised metal walkway, on which Mayor Joe was attending the concert in the company of some semi-naked crested chicks and two guests: a pocked man, dressed as a motorcyclist, with the biggest pair of mustaches he had ever seen, and an androgynous and glittery figure with a lightning painted on his face and fiery red hair.
After a good hour of concert, the mayor raised his hand and silence fell. The sound engineer, a skeletal and spirited dude named Sid, had muted all the instruments. Just for a few moments, the uncertain beat of Tìo Billy on the drums resounded in the silent shed.
The four were about to ask for explanations, but a horrible creaking sound covered everything. From the ceiling, heavy rusty chains descended on the stage, at the bottom of which were huge butcher's hooks. Hanging from the chains, there were Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy. With expert and quick gestures, they drove the hooks into the backs of the four Tortillas de Pelo, which were hoisted immediately a couple of meters above the stage.
As they screamed and writhed in pain, Mayor Joe spoke in a stentorian voice. He was no longer smiling:
"People of St. Judas, thank you for coming to our Meat Festival even this year. Even this year, together with my friends Lemmy and David, here, we listened to demos and traces of thousands of shit groups, which tarnish the punk name by proposing commercial and watered down broth, acting as poser and thinking that it’s enough to wear a pair of combat boots and coloring their hair in a strange way, getting drunk and not knowing how to play, to be like us. Even this year we chose the worst group, we invited them here and, in the name of the real punk, now we'll cut them! Punks, out the blades! The Festival begins! "
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You receive an unfinished fiction story or a script weekly on
You finish it with your own post or a comment in the comment section. A limit of 500 words is recommended.
YOU WIN! 3
shares to the writers with the best ending + SBD payout (+1) between all the participants who won't get one of the 3 shares.
