Six Strings to Save the World

by Michael McSherry

  “This is a stupid joke.”

  “Dex, listen. I’m not lying.”

  “I need to go study.” Dex turns around to head back to his mower.

  “Wait!” I yell. “Just hold on. Let me show you something.”

  Dex turns around with an exasperated sigh. “What?”

  I hold up a finger, then turn back around to the trunk. I’ve got butterflies in my stomach. With a deep breath, I reach into the trunk and grab hold of the guitar by the neck. The hair on my arms bristles up for a moment then settles back down. I draw the strap over my shoulders and settle the guitar in place.

  “Promise you won’t tell anybody,” I urge.

  “Tell anybody what? That you’re crazy?”

  “Just swear.”

  “Fine. Whatever.”

  I go up to the barn doors and slide them back, stepping into the relative darkness of the barn. “Flip the breaker off, will you?” I ask. Dex follows behind me, though not without another exaggerated sigh. He goes over to an old breaker box and flips the master switch.

  “Okay,” I tell him. “You stay there, and just watch.”

  He folds his arms while I continue past Dex’s worktables into the empty, dirt-floored center of the barn. I set my hand on the volume knob and give it the slightest twist. I take the treble down with another knob. My hands are shaking and I turn back to look at Dex. “Seriously,” I caution him. “Don’t freak out, okay?”

  “Whatever!” Dex yells, now blatantly angry.

  I square up in the middle of the floor. I don’t want to hit the strings too hard. I decide against any power chords. No guitar pick. I’m struggling to think of how to begin, but as my left hand comes to rest on the fretboard and my right fingers seek out the strings, I just go. Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” starts out clean and mellow. It’s not a busy ramp-up, just a pleasant series of notes that rise and fall through each bar and repeat. It’s a simple, familiar intro, and before I can think too much about it, my fingers are plucking away the tune.

  Just like before, the sound is too loud for an electric guitar without an amplifier. It fills the air, and as I bounce between notes I see the electric-blue lightning dancing from the head of the guitar. Only this time the lightning seems almost… calm. Controlled. Tendrils of it curl out from the body of the guitar as well, flicking at the ground below my feet.

  I repeat the progression, closing my eyes. The sound is full and rich, and I can feel the electricity tracing its way across my skin. The music has a color in my mind. A taste.

  “Caleb!” I hear Dex yell.

  “I know!” I yell back excitedly, opening my eyes. “Check out the sparks!”

  “You’re flying!” he cries out, wide eyes.

  “What?”

  He points at my feet. “YOU ARE FLYING!”

  I look down at the ground, but it’s a lot farther down than I expect. My feet dangle below me, and webs of blue electricity leap away from me, arcing down to stab at the dirt. I yelp in surprise, slamming my palm down against the strings as I stop plucking. It’s like someone cut whatever string was holding me up. My stomach flips with a swooping sensation as I topple forward, spinning.

  The ground rushes up to meet me.

  Chapter Three

  I hit the ground. Hard. I expect pain, but it feels more like somebody swung a heavy pillow at my face. The world’s upside down now, and I’m looking at Dex running toward me, yelling frantically. “Are you dead? Caleb, are you dead?!”

  “I’m fine,” I say, rolling over and standing up. The Gibson is still strapped to my chest. Instinctively, I check it for damage. But the fall didn’t hurt it at all. It is meteorite proof, after all.

  “What’s going on?” Dex barks. “Caleb, what just happened?”

  “I don’t know!” I yell. “There’s something wrong with this guitar.”

  “You think?!”

  I tell Dex all about the night of the meteorite shower, the power at my apartment, and Agent James Dorian. Dex listens to me through it all, never asking any questions, and when I’m done he stays quiet for a long time. Eventually, he reaches out to touch the guitar with a hesitant finger. A blue spark leaps from the string to meet his finger with a small popping noise.

  “Ow!”

  “Sorry! I didn’t do that.”

  “I bet it’s some sort of government experiment.” Dex whispers, leaning back in to study the guitar while sucking on his finger. “What else can it do?”

  Dex’s voice is calm, more curious than anything. I call it his puzzle-mode. It’s the same reason he gets advanced coursework in math and science, and why he finishes every problem in every textbook, regardless of how many the teacher actually assigns. His brain doesn’t like question marks. And most days, I feel like he’s seeing just a little bit more of the world than everybody else.

  “Well, there’s the whole unexplained volume thing,” I begin. “And the lightning. And apparently the, uh, flying.”

  “You didn’t know about that part?” Dex has the beginnings of a smile on his face. He’s already pulling his pencil from behind his ear, flipping through pages in his steno-pad.

  “No.”

  “Well, you were about ten feet off the ground.” Now he’s got a full grin on his face as he jots a note on a fresh piece of paper. “There wasn’t any visible thrust mechanism.”

  “What?” I ask, confused.

  “I don’t know how you got off the ground,” he explains. “It’s like levitation. Magnetic, maybe? And to create electricity like that, the guitar has to have some sort of power source. Or be some sort of power source.”

  “Beats me. But you see why I’m a little worried?”

  Dex waves the question off like it’s annoying him. “Things only happen when you play it?”

  “So far.”

  Dex’s face gets serious. “Caleb, I saw you face-plant into the ground from ten feet in the air. And absolutely nothing happened to you. No bumps. No bruises. Not even a scratch.”

  “I got lucky,” I say.

  He leans forward and slaps me across the face.

  “What gives, dude?!”

  “For science!” Dex proclaims. “What’d that feel like?”

  I touch my cheek out of reflex, but Dex is right. It didn’t hurt. At all.

  “Like a puff of air, I guess.”

  Without warning, Dex kicks me in the shin. I watch the toe of his shoe connect with my shin, and expect a flash of pain. But his shoe just feels like a little bit of pressure on the skin. I start to laugh, and Dex starts to laugh too. “I barely even felt that!” I yell.

  “Set the guitar down quick,” Dex says. “I want to try something.”

  So I pull the guitar strap back over my head and set the guitar down onto the ground. As I stand back up, Dex winds up with another kick and hits me solidly in the shin. This time the pain is instant, and so bad it drops me to the ground. “Agh!” I manage, drawing my leg up as I grasp at the spot where Dex’s shoe hit me.

  Dex is laughing maniacally now. “It’s the guitar! It’s the guitar!” he yells elatedly.

  “My leg!” I yell back at him, gritting my teeth. I pull up my pant-leg. Dex’s kick scraped a good amount of skin back, pinpricks of blood already welling up.

  “Touch the guitar.”

  I reach out and grab onto the Gibson’s neck again, and instantly the pain fades away. Now I’m trembling with excitement. “Feels better,” I say in a whisper. “Feels great.”

  We watch as the scraped skin draws itself back down into my leg, the wound closing up. I wipe the little bit of blood from the area clean with my sleeve, and we’re both left looking at a perfectly normal patch of skin. Like nothing ever happened.

  “This is too crazy,” he breathes in a hushed voice. “Brush yourself off. You’re filthy.”

  Dex is right; I’m covered in dirt. I stand up with the guitar, slinging it over myself once more. I’m busy wiping off my pants, stooped over, when I feel a moment of uncomfortable
pressure against the back of my head. The pressure is accompanied by a dull thud and a cracking noise. I see a spray of wood fragments fly over my shoulders, peppering the dirt in front of me.

  I turn around and Dex is standing with half of a piece of lumber in his hands, his eyes agape as he looks at me.

  “Did you just hit me in the head with a two-by-four?!”

  Dex starts laughing.

  “You could’ve killed me!” I scream at him, angry.

  That makes Dex howl even louder. He’s doubled over, gasping for breath, and soon I’m laughing, too. All of this is just too weird. We laugh until there are tears in our eyes. When we finally stop, things settle into a long, uncomfortable silence.

  “You know you can’t tell anybody about this, right?” I ask.

  “I know. Have you told Tori?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” Dex nods. “Don’t.”

  * * * * *

  Tori texts us Saturday night to see if we want to stream a movie. We both think up some lie to get out of it—which makes me feel terrible—but Dex and I can’t really tell her the truth.

  We take a short walk from Dex’s barn along a backwoods trail. The Gibson is hidden away in a hard-shell case inside a dried-up culvert. Dex waits for me with a flashlight while I fish out the case.

  “You think we should just tell her?” I ask as Dex pulls me back onto even ground.

  “No way,” Dex says. “We still don’t know enough about this thing. And if you’ve got government agents poking around your place, you could be putting her in danger.”

  “I just feel like—”

  “A bad friend?” Dex suggests. “Yeah. Me too.”

  I click open the case and look down at the seemingly innocent guitar. Pulling it out of the hard-shell fills me with that same sense of brimming energy, and suddenly things don’t seem so bleak.

  “What do you want to do first?” I ask.

  “A simple experiment,” he says. He riffles through a few pages in his notepad then digs in his backpack. After a moment, he pulls out a short metal pipe.

  “I’m not letting you hit me with that!”

  “Relax,” he says. “As fun as it would be, it’s not for that.” He walks three long paces away from me and clears some leaves from the ground with his foot. Once he hits dirt, he sticks the metal pipe down into the soil. “This is our mini lightning rod,” he says. “And you are our thunderstorm.”

  “Um, sure,” I say.

  “Lightning seeks the path of least resistance to the ground,” Dex explains. “Buildings have lightning rods to allow current to be directed to the ground. People think lightning is unpredictable, but electricity behaves in a very predictable way.” He leaves the pipe in the ground and runs a short distance behind me. “Play something.”

  With a deep breath, I turn the volume knob slightly up, settling my fingers onto the fretboard. I pluck a high E and watch as blue electricity blossoms around the guitar, arcing out from the neck. It jumps the short distance to metal pipe, bending in the air, snapping back and forth among several forking paths, each one leading to the tip of the pipe. It’s beautiful and scary at the same time, casting fierce shadows throughout the forest.

  “Check it out!” I yell excitedly to Dex over my shoulder. I pluck the high E again, this time with slightly more force. I feel a strange sensation, like something is trying to lift me off the ground.

  “Don’t fly, don’t fly just yet!” Dex says, appearing several feet to my left and scribbling in his notepad. “See that little shrub over there?” He points to a small plant two feet to the right of the pipe. “See if you can, I dunno, point it that way.”

  At Dex’s request, I attempt to turn the neck of the guitar slightly right, less toward the pipe and more toward the shrub. The lightning continues to arc toward the pipe, popping and sizzling. “Not working,” I say.

  “Turn more.”

  I continue to turn, pointing the guitar in every direction possible. Always, the lightning arcs toward the metal pole. Even as I complete a full three-sixty spin (and as Dex runs farther away), the forking electricity continues to crackle and pop at the pipe.

  Dex continues to scribble away at his notepad. I continue to pluck a soft, high E, watching the dancing light. I concentrate on the shrub beside it, watching it as it shudders in the gentle wind. I imagine the lightning arcing away from the pipe and touching to the leafy greens, running through it and down to the ground.

  The arc of lightning turns with a loud crack away from the pipe, jumping to the shrub.

  It erupts into fire immediately.

  “Gagh!” I yell, killing the volume and running up to the burning bush. Dex is there too, and together we stamp out the small flame. Eventually, there’s just a pile of char where the bush had been.

  “What’d you do?” Dex asks.

  “You told me to hit it!”

  “No, I mean how did you do that?”

  “I don’t know, I just kind of… thought about it.”

  “But the pipe is a superior conductor.”

  “So what?”

  “So you can control it!” He hops up and down excitedly, flipping to a new page in his notepad. “Okay… Let me see… We already know about the flying, the heightened resistance. How about strength?”

  “Strength?” I parrot.

  “Yeah,” he says, gazing about the forest. After a moment, he rushes forward to a dead tree, toppled over on the ground. “How much do you think this weighs?” he asks, kicking at the trunk.

  “A few hundred pounds?” I venture.

  “At least. Come over here quick and lift it.”

  “I can’t lift that much.”

  “You couldn’t fly either,” Dex rolls his eyes. He tucks his notepad and pencil into his pocket, beckoning me over. “Get over here.”

  I comply begrudgingly, joining Dex beside the fallen tree trunk. I sling the Gibson behind my back and hunch down. The trunk is too thick to really just get my fingers under, so I have to wrap my arms in an awkward hug around the trunk.

  “Remember to lift with your legs, not your back,” Dex cautions. When I glare at him he shrugs. “Form is important!”

  With a deep breath, I lift upward. The tree trunk follows me up easily, branches and dead leaves falling as the trunk comes off the ground. I can’t believe it. I turn the trunk as I pull it up, righting it parallel with the other trees around us. Soon enough, I’m standing with a twenty-foot log in my arms. It feels about as heavy as a fat dachshund.

  “Check it out!” I yell, blood pumping in my ears.

  “This is incredible! There’s so much we should—”

  I hear it an instant before I feel it: a screech of static. The tree trunk explodes in a shower of splinters as something hits me hard in the chest, and the world is engulfed in a flash of red light for a moment. I’m spinning through the air. Whatever the guitar did to make me tougher before, it’s not working as well anymore. Because it feels like I just got hit by a bus. Wind rushes by my ears, followed by the crack of more wood being split.

  My world goes black. Only for a second. Then I’m looking up from the ground and seeing the shadows of foot-wide broken tree trunks I had just been thrown through. I glance down and find that I’m still clutching the guitar tightly, and know that if I hadn’t been holding it, I’d be dead right now.

  Dex’s head comes floating over me as my vision swims, eyes wide in panic. “Get up, get up!” He shakes me violently, pointing at something with his flashlight. I follow the beam, tracing a path of broken trees several dozen yards through the woods and into a clearing.

  Someone’s standing there.

  No.

  Not someone.

  Something.

  It’s man-shaped, in the sense that it has a head, arms, and legs. But it’s covered in a highly polished black metal. Its limbs are too thin, too long, with impossibly large joints. It turns slightly in the weak light, and I catch a glimpse of its head: a large, obsidian orb with
a single, glowing circle of dark-red dancing erratically over the sphere’s surface. The ring—the iris—narrows on me as Dex helps pull me up from the ground. Then the light brightens slightly, expanding to cover more of the sphere.

  “Get up, Caleb!” Dex screams in my ear, trying to help me to my feet.

  The thing extends a broad, three-fingered hand toward us. The center of its palm warms to a bright red glow.

  “Get back!” I shout, pushing Dex to my right. He goes tumbling back across the ground, arms and legs pinwheeling as he slides across dead leaves for several yards. Oops. Much harder than I intended. Another burst of static and a ball of red light hits the ground behind me. Dirt, rocks, and leaves erupt upward in a shower. I scramble to my feet as several trees along the path splinter apart and fall to the ground.

  The thing begins to move toward me, its movements fluid and terrifyingly fast.

  Its foot comes down heavily on the ground and its obsidian orb of a head begins to shift its shape. The red light glows brightly as the center of its head folds in on itself, turning to a shallow well. Then I hear it.

  The drum.

  It sounds like a deep, heavy kick-drum. It pounds once, like a deep thunder, and the whole forest seems to tremble with the force of the sound. The drum pounds a second time. A third. A fourth. The beat forms a steady rhythm, an unmistakable tempo. I can see the thing’s head pulse with the beat as it takes several more shuddering steps toward me. Its entire body is beginning to vibrate into a blur as the drums continue to echo a steady, hammering rhythm.

  Its metallic body flashes with a rainbow of light as a second noise joins the kick drum. It’s a snare drum, crisp and precise with a snap like a gun. But it’s modulated, not quite the real deal. And as I’m watching the thing continue to approach me, the imitation snare drum comes in on beats two and four, hammering out a basic beat.

  The creature freezes, extending two palms toward me. The drumbeat falls silent, but in its place, an eerie series of electronic tones chart a familiar minor scale. The notes come in quick sixteenth notes, a rapid succession, and as they run to the top of a scale the thing’s hands pulse red.