Six Strings to Save the World

by Michael McSherry

  It sounds like one of Dex’s garbage dubstep songs.

  The drums erupt again, matching the unnatural melody. A burst of red, hazy energy flies from the center of the black orb, pulsing in time with the drum beat. Two of the shimmering spheres fly inches on either side of my face as I flinch downward. A third catches me in the shoulder, and I scream as pain blossoms down my skin.

  “Shoot it!” I hear Dex yelling. I can see him cowering behind a nearby tree, pointing to the guitar I’m still holding in my hands. “Play something!”

  I bite against the pain and slam my palm against the volume knob, dialing it to full. My left-hand fingers trace out the shape of a power chord on the first three strings, and with my right hand I slam down across the strings with all my force.

  A brilliant bolt of blue lightning crackles its way up through the strings, exploding outward and leaping toward the creature. In a wash of light, I see it raising one of its spindly arms in front of its black orb head. There’s a sound of screeching distortion as the bolt connects and a flash of pure white light so bright that I have to look at the ground. The force of the chord I played pushed me back across the ground six feet, leaving furrows of dirt and leaves in front of me.

  The light fades and the air seems to sizzle. Steam is rising up from the ground.

  But through the steam, I see the glowing shape. The thing is still standing there, but now one of its arms is missing below the oversized elbow joint. Flickering sparks erupt from exposed circuitry. It takes another step forward and the drums begin to play, a sharp electronic melody growing in volume with the drums.

  “It didn’t work!” I scream.

  “Run!” Dex yells.

  But it’s too late. I can see the other hand coming to a hot red glow, pointing directly into my eyes. There’s no time to turn. No time to run. As the bolt of hazy, crimson energy rushes at my face, all I can think is: I wish I hadn’t lied to Tori.

  The shadow of a person in front of me eclipses the red light. With a flash of movement, the crimson pulse is deflected to the side, crashing into the ground with a deafening roar. The person in front of me is facing the creature, but in the hellish glow of the explosion, the blue suit, black shoes, and close-cropped haircut are unmistakable. And he’s got a cherry-red bass guitar in his hands.

  Agent James Dorian takes a moment to look over his shoulder at me. “Didn’t I tell you to keep an eye out?”

  Then he turns back to the creature, his fingers settling on thick bass strings. His first note seems to fill the air, a thick, rich sound that interrupts the creature’s electronic blaring. He lets it ring loud and wide, sending the trees around me shaking. The creature stops, frozen in place.

  Then Agent Dorian starts to play, his thumb slapping the bass string for a buzzing first note that blends into the familiar, bouncing bass line of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” The bass line continues on, and as it does, a flare of light shoots forward ahead of Agent Dorian. The ground below the creature explodes in a brilliant wash of red and orange flames. The thing tries to walk forward, and I can hear it attempting to blare a feeble electronic melody over Queen.

  But the fire continues to grow in intensity, blindingly bright. Even this far back, I can feel the heat pressing on my face. With a blare of static, I see the thing in the fire collapsing, melting away into the ground. Only then does Agent Dorian stop playing. He turns around to look at me, a dark silhouette against the blazing wildfire behind him.

  “You okay, kid?” he asks.

  “What… how…?” is all I can manage.

  “Howsabout you, Bookworm?” he glances over at Dex, who comes staggering forward, gasping for breath.

  “Meh, you’re both fine.” Agent Dorian nods. “We should probably get out of here, though. Sound good?”

  “You d-did that?” Dex stammers, pointing a shaky finger at the fire behind Agent Dorian.

  “Thanks for reminding me,” Agent Dorian says, turning around. He turns a knob on his bass. The blaze disappears instantly. I blink, dazed.

  “What was that thing?” I ask.

  “Alien robot, bent on conquering the galaxy. Now come on. I wanna show you my spaceship.”

  Chapter Four

  Dex is stammering too badly to make any actual words. I’m not sure if it’s just the growing moonlight, but his face looks like it’s gone pure white. While he’s busy making sounds that remind me of his screeching lawnmower, he’s pointing a finger at Agent Dorian, then to the cooling pile of monster metal, then to me, then back to Agent Dorian. He does this a few times.

  “How— What the— Who in the—” is all he can manage.

  Something in his head decides it’s time to shut down, and he faints. Dex would call that a blue screen.

  “Bummer,” Agent Dorian sighs then turns to me. “Like I said, we should get out of here. Grab the damsel.”

  “Agent Dorian, just what—”

  “Not an ‘agent,’ kid. Not a ‘James’ either, for that matter. Just call me Dorian.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me what’s going on!”

  Dorian gives me a chilling smile, one without even a hint of warmth. He runs his fingers down the length of his bass guitar’s strings, sending the leaves of the trees around us shivering like a heavy wind just came through. “Fine. If you want to hang around, that’s up to you. I’m sure more of them will be coming.”

  He doesn’t say anything else, just turns around and starts marching off into the woods, singing Queen as he walks. I look at Dex, who face-planted into a pile of dried leaves. I sling my guitar over my back and stoop down. “Wake up, man!” I flick him in the ear but he just starts to snore. Putting my hands underneath him, I lift him up. He feels as heavy as a pillow.

  It takes me a second to catch up with Dorian. He’s charting a random path through the woods, slapping low hanging branches as he goes.

  “Did you say spaceship earlier?” I ask him.

  “Yup,” he says.

  “Like, you’re with NASA or something?”

  “I’m not from around here.”

  “So, like—Russian? You’re a cosmonaut?”

  “No, Comrade. Think bigger.” Dorian points up into the night sky.

  I stumble in the dark and nearly dump Dex on the ground. “You’re an… alien?”

  “Bingo. Now stow it, I forgot where I parked.”

  We emerge from the woods to the edge of a small lake. The moonlight bathes the water with a pale glow, and distant owl-calls floats over the water. It’s peaceful, so much so that you’d never guess that a robot just tried to kill me and one of my best friends five minutes ago.

  Dorian scratches his head for a moment, then digs into his suit-jacket pocket. He pulls a set of jingling keys out. In the dim light, I can see that he’s got what looks like a perfectly ordinary car fob in one hand. He turns left and walks the shoreline. I follow closely behind as he begins mashing the button repeatedly. “I tell you what, kid, it’s hell getting old.”

  “You don’t look old,” I say, like I’m reassuring some old lady in the grocery check-out.

  “Earth standard, I’m about six-hundred years.”

  I don’t know what to say to that. I assure myself that this might all be a dream. That’s the only thing that makes sense, so I keep on repeating the possibility in my head as I follow the six-hundred-year-old bass-wielding alien-robot killer along the shore while he looks for his spaceship.

  A burst of gurgling bubbles breaks the water about fifty feet out from the shore. “There she is!” Dorian calls out. He points his remote out toward the water and gives his remote another tap. Something bright lights up under the water, and more bubbles start to foam up. The light expands in a broad line along with the bubbles, a yellow haze that takes the shape of a long oval. The light grows in intensity as something moves upward through the water.

  Then it’s breaking the surface, and I’m doing my best not to faint along with Dex.

  It
’s a submarine.

  A giant…

  Yellow…

  Submarine.

  It’s forty yards long, at least, with a broad, flat top lined with a ring of lights. One of the lights swings to face us, forcing me to squint heavily. The thing continues to rise up, revealing several levels of round, porthole windows along its side.

  It doesn’t stop rising.

  Up and up it goes, until it’s merely floating over the lake, pouring off sheets of water. It starts to move toward us.

  “It’s a sub!?” I shout, confused.

  “The Carnegie.”

  “Huh?”

  “The Carnegie. Every ship needs a name, you know.”

  The giant yellow submarine—the Carnegie—hovers toward us until it’s nearly at the shoreline. Then a seam of light ripples into being between two of the porthole windows, taking the shape of a broad rectangle. The wall there seems to melt away, leaving a perfectly obvious doorway. A smooth, metallic ramp extends from within, plopping onto the wet sand before us. Dorian walks forward without hesitation, his black dress shoes clunking along noisily. He stops at the threshold, turning back to beckon me forward.

  “Come on, already. You’re letting all the cool air out.”

  I’m trembling. “Uh… I have a curfew!”

  “Of course you do,” Dorian snorts. Then he walks farther inside the giant yellow submarine, leaving me shaking in the sand with Dex busily snoring in my arms. With one shuffling step, I put my right foot onto the ramp.

  Because how could my day get any weirder?

  * * * * *

  The door behind me reappears, the ship’s metal flowing to cover the empty space, and I’m left standing in complete darkness. I can hear Dex breathing, and I can hear a distant humming noise. Shifting Dex’s weight onto one arm, I stretch my free hand out and shuffle nervously forward, trying to feel for a wall, or anything.

  “Uh, Mr. Dorian, sir?” I call out. My voice seems to echo back at me.

  “Get it through your head: just Dorian.”

  The floor flashes to life with a warm blue pulse, illuminating a large, open room. The walls and ceiling look like smooth, white marble. Interspersed along the wall are several of the round porthole windows. To my right, at one of the room’s ends, there’s a row of seats and storage containers fixed to the wall. They’re some of the only noticeable furnishings in the place. And at the other end of the cavernous room, I can see what appears to be a large, eight-foot wide glass tube leading up into the ceiling.

  Dorian is by the tube already. He places his palm against the wall and the marble-looking surface begins to ripple. I remember spilling a can of white paint in the garage when I was little, and watching it creep like thick cream across the floor. The wall reminds of that. It’s shifting, oozing, reforming, and then there’s a broad gap opening in the wall. Dorian removes his bass and places it up into the enclave.

  “Come here,” he beckons me forward. “Flowmetal is adaptive.” He taps the white surface pointedly. “One hand on the wall.”

  I walk forward to join him.

  “Gimme,” he instructs, taking Dex from me. “Now go ahead.”

  I put my hand on the wall, the same way Dorian did. It’s warm, and I can feel an almost electric tingle run its way through my fingers and up to my elbow. The flowmetal gives way, sinking away from my touch to form a second enclave. There’s a guitar hook waiting there.

  “Hang her up,” Dorian urges.

  I hesitate for a moment, reluctant to give up the Gibson now that I’ve seen what it can do. Is it dangerous here? Is Dorian dangerous? If he is, I doubt there’s anything I could do. I place my guitar gingerly on the hook.

  Dorian turns, still carrying Dex, and I follow him toward the tube. The walls pulse with a wash of brilliant red and I feel the slightest swooping feeling in my stomach. “Gravity mods are acting up,” Dorian grumbles absent-mindedly.

  As I pass by a porthole window I gaze out. All I can see are shrinking trees and the lake falling away as we rocket upward. “We’re flying!” I yell in surprise.

  “It would be a terrible spaceship if it didn’t,” Dorian huffs over his shoulder. He comes to the glass tube and just steps through it. He turns around in the middle of the column, looking at me with vague annoyance. “You coming or what?”

  I take a breath and touch my hand to the glass, expecting some sort of resistance. My hand passes through it with nothing other than a cool tingling. So I close my eyes and take a couple more steps forward, trying my best to calm my breathing. I can hear my heart pounding away in my ears. Absentmindedly, I feel for my phone in my pocket and wonder if I should text Mom. But what would I say? Hi Mom. Alien abduction. Might be late, don’t wait up. Xoxo. I’m sure that would smooth things over.

  My feet leave the ground and we’re floating up. Dorian is still beside me, holding Dex and looking bored. The light of the open room below disappears as we continue beyond the ceiling and up the tube. We’re in total darkness for a moment.

  Then light pierces down from above. The float-tube emerges into another cavernous room, though this one isn’t nearly as empty. It’s lit by a series of bright strips banding the ceiling. The walls here are the same weird marble that dance with flickering reds. There are dozens of giant display screens set along the walls, all flickering yellow on black with strange-looking symbols. Some of the screens, though, are showing familiar news stations with reporters droning on with low volume and captioning. Between those screens are the same round porthole windows as the room below.

  With something that feels like a gentle nudge from everywhere at once, the tube spits us through the glass again onto the floor. I bump into Dorian as I shuffle forward, gaping about overhead.

  The rest of the room looks like… a little bit of everything. There are antiqued wooden tables with spindly hairpin legs, metal chairs with straight backs, and more than a few oddly colored and overstuffed chairs and sofas interspersed along the floor. Farther down the cavernous room, I can see what looks to be a long, curving counter with tall stools spaced along the counter. Behind the counter there’s a spacious—kitchen?—area with polished dark metals to contrast the pulsing white walls. At the end of the cavernous room I can see what looks to be a giant drum set on a raised platform, facing out through a dome of clear glass. The night stars are visible through the dome.

  There are two people here, too: one behind the counter, in the kitchen-looking space, and one seated at one of the tall stools.

  Dorian dumps Dex unceremoniously onto a ratty-looking couch. He turns around and looks me over.

  “On a scale of one to ten, how much are you flipping out?” he asks calmly as he removes his suit jacket, laying it across the back of the couch.

  “Oh, probably like a ten.”

  “Well, you know what they say: These go to eleven.”

  He slips his tie off and undoes the top button of his pressed white dress shirt. As he does, his skin turns from a tanned bronze to a light red. His irises turn from a light blue to a dark purple. Several things that look like tattoos, strange characters and drawings, shimmer into existence on his skin. But they don’t stay in one place; rather, they crawl across his skin, shifting and sliding slowly in a kaleidoscope of colors and lines.

  “You’re right,” I say. “That’s pretty messed up.”

  “Raeklailax,” he says.

  “Bless you.”

  “Funny,” Dorian grins. “It’s where I’m from, kid. Homeworld.”

  “Oh,” I blink, still on the edge of freaking out.

  “Shall we meet the team?” Dorian hooks his thumb to the people standing farther down at the counters.

  “Team? The team. Uh… yeah. Sure.”

  There’s something off about the two people at the counter. The one sitting is a woman. Well, she looks feminine, at least. She’s slender and wearing a bright green sundress, something that looks like it was made for a jaunt in the park. But she’s also a light blue. She has a pixie-cut
of paper-white hair. As we get nearer, I notice that she’s slightly… see-through? The light of a display on the opposite side of her face glows through her cheek. She brings a cup to her lips, takes a sip of something, and her skin flashes with a jolt of sunflower yellow.

  The thing across from her is entirely different. Where Dorian and the woman have a human shape, with things in roughly the place they’re supposed to be, this alien has four arms, a narrow head, and no eyes. It’s got grey skin, and at the end of each arm, a seven-fingered hand with digits that seem capable of bending in any direction.

  “Hail, Son of Earth!” the grey creature booms in a deep tenor. It—he, I think—slides a cup across the counter toward me. It sloshes with a black liquid. “I have prepared a caffeinated beverage for you.”

  “Careful,” the woman says, turning her face to me. “Mixy’s coffee kicks like a mule.”

  “Th-thank you,” I say to the thing named Mixy. I take the coffee and he remains there, frozen like a statue until I realize he’s waiting for me. So I take a sip. The flavor is better than any I’ve ever tasted. Delicious. Full. Beyond incredible. It’s like stepping into a hot shower after being cold for too long, the way a shiver crawls its way down my spine and back up. “That’s amazing,” I breathe.

  “Your species lacks the olfactory precision to recreate my methodology. I have also genetically modified my own plants for optimal flavor.” The grey thing leans over the counter, propping himself on two hands while the remaining two extend toward me. “I am Mixy, Earth-Son. How do the stars celebrate your honor?”

  “What?”

  “He wants to know your name,” the woman says.

  “Oh, I’m Caleb. Young. I don’t mean to be rude, but how do you…?”

  “See?” The creature laughs. “My world is one of smell, touch, and sound. I perceive more of them than you could ever hope! The world hums, and I sing along. The song is my eye!”

  “His people have a preternatural spatial awareness,” Dorian explains. “Vibration-based. They never evolved eyes.”