Spells Like Teen Spirit

by Kate M. Williams

  “Hey,” she said, her voice unsteady, “something’s about to happen, but I don’t really understand what.”

  Then a guitar came flying through the air and smashed into the van’s windshield.

  Everyone in the van screamed, and Cassandra slammed on the brakes, sending us all tumbling forward. The guitar had hit hard, leaving the windshield spiderwebbed, and I gasped as it picked itself up and swung through the air again. This time when it collided, the windshield shattered. I threw my arm up over my face and squeezed my eyes shut, and when I opened them, my pink dress was covered with glass.

  “What the heck was that?” Cassandra screamed.

  I was scrambling to unhook my seat belt when something crashed into the van from the side, denting the metal and sending the van skidding down the street. I grabbed the door handle and held on as time seemed to momentarily slow. I looked up just in time to see that the van was heading straight toward a telephone pole, so I raised my hands and gave the hardest kinetic shove I’d ever given anything and sent the van skidding back in the other direction. The van turned in a half circle before it came to a stop in the middle of the street, facing the opposite direction. Circe and Ruby screamed, and Mallory woke up as she collided with the side of the van. Cassandra got her door open before me, and started to climb out.

  “Oh my God,” she yelled, diving back in and pulling the door shut behind her, a split second before something smashed into the van again, making the experience feel like the worst amusement park ride I’d ever been on. I now had whiplash in both directions. I managed to unhook my seat belt and get my door open. “Stay in the car,” Cassandra yelled, so I pulled the door shut again. “No, not you!” she yelled. “We have to distract it, or it will smash this van to bits.”

  “Okay,” I yelled back. I jumped out, and the broken glass from my lap cascaded down my skirt onto the street. “But what is it?” I asked, dazed, but I saw it as my feet hit the pavement.

  It was a hard-rock monster.

  I couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. It stood two stories tall. Its arms were mic stands, and its fingers, what had just broken our windshield, were guitars. Its body was a bass drum, its head an amp. One leg was a bass guitar, the length of a short school bus, and the other was a keyboard. Every time it moved, the instruments that made up its limbs gave off sounds that reverberated down the street. Distorted guitar string twangs that made my ears ache. In any other circumstances, I would have laughed. But it was held together by a red, fuzzing energy, glowing in its joints, and it was gearing up to take another swipe at the van.

  Cassandra sprinted at it. “Over here, you big poser!” she yelled. Then she threw out her hands, sending two streams of fire right down the middle of the street toward it. The monster stopped and turned to her, its hand splayed flat like it was about ready to give a high five, the energy that held the guitar fingers together sparking red, and then it swung at her.

  I held out my hand and was able to use my kinesis to lift her up into the air and out of the way, but the guitars swung so close to her that they cast a red light onto her cheek. I set her down, and the monster momentarily forgot about her because it was now focused entirely on me. It ducked Cassandra’s streams of fire and took a step closer to me.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Cassandra raise her hands and sweep them in a circle, and a ring of fire burst up around the monster, the flames taller than me. The monster howled, which sounded like someone falling and grabbing on to a keyboard to try to steady themselves, and then the monster began to grow. Up, up, and up it stretched until it was three stories high, and it stepped over Cassandra’s ring of fire.

  “Oh crap!” I heard her yell as the monster roared again and prepared to hit me.

  I held out my hands and directed the full force of my kinesis at its swinging arm, but when my powers hit it, I felt like I was plunging into a tidal wave. I struggled to find my breath, and heard something far off. I dropped my hands, pulling my kinesis back to me, and realized what the sound was: it was voices, specifically Cassandra, Circe, and Ruby, screaming at me to run.

  So that was what I did. The monster was big, and I wasn’t fast, so just like I had seen prey do on nature documentaries, I zigzagged back and forth. I jumped a curb, ran around a tree, and then darted between two cars as I sprinted back out into the street. I raced across it and into someone’s yard, skirting an icy birdbath. All the people who had piled onto their porches to watch Superfüd’s house go up in flames had gotten more than they’d bargained for, and now people were screaming and running back inside at the sight of the monster.

  And, no doubt, at the sight of things everywhere spontaneously bursting into flames as Cassandra tried desperately to get the monster off my trail. I ran past a blazing tree and a station wagon that was on fire. The monster, unfortunately, seemed to have figured out my game, and as I ran into yet another yard, it didn’t even follow me. It just waited in the middle of the street for me to come back.

  As I scrambled through a front yard, I used my kinesis to grab whatever I could and throw it. A wheelbarrow, an old tire, a heavy cement garden gnome. The monster just swatted everything away like they were gnats. Behind me, I could hear Cassandra screaming at me, but what she was actually saying was drowned out by all the sounds—the monster itself, the fire, the sirens, the people, everything.

  Before I knew it, I was almost back to Superfüd’s house, the fire Cassandra had set now glowing brighter and closer. I could see that at the top of the monster’s head was the very cymbal, now enlarged twenty times, that the band had been arguing about when I’d been in the back of their car. In the light from the fire, I could see that the grass blackened every place where the monster stepped, and at its passing, a pine tree shuddered and dropped all its needles.

  I kept throwing whatever I could at it, which slowed it down a little, but I was running out of lawn ornaments. Also, I had a feeling that there was nothing I could do that would stop this thing. To stop it, we had to stop Superfüd.

  At their house, I turned up the driveway and then stepped into a hole, twisting my ankle with a searing spray of pain. I hit the ground hard, embedding rocks into my palms as I tried to catch myself with my hands. But a tiny bit of fuzz caught my eye. The teddy-bear-turned-talisman. Or at least its head. I grabbed it and then rolled over onto my back. I saw the monster for a split second, and then my vision went black and there was hair in my eyes.

  “Get up, get up, get up!” Cassandra shouted as she pulled me to my feet. “I don’t know how to stop it,” she said. “It’s not a demon.” As I put weight on my ankle, I was aware of the pain but distanced from it, and I felt a buzz through my entire body, like I’d just slammed an iced Venti and was going back for a refill.

  “Torch that Beetle!” I shouted at Cass, pointing at a nearby Volkswagen. Without asking questions or hesitating a second, she held out her hands and did it. The car went up in flames.

  “Sorry, bug,” I said as I used my kinesis to grab it, and then I hurled it, with surprising accuracy and force, at the top of the monster. The flaming bug collided with the amp that made up the monster’s head, and in a shower of flames, sheared the head straight off. The amp sailed through the air and landed with a skid in the middle of the street, shrinking back down to normal size as it did so. Decapitation did not stop the monster, though. Instead it just seemed to make the creature madder, and now that Cassandra and I had basically trapped ourselves between a rock and a hard place—between a burning building and a three-story music monster—we couldn’t run anymore. The monster, it seemed, was trying to slap us, swinging left and right, its guitar fingers splayed out.

  “Split up!” Cassandra shouted at me, before taking off to one side of the yard. As I ran to the other side, I saw the monster swipe at her. She dove to the ground and flattened herself, but as she did so, she held out her hand, and a Mitsubishi Ecl
ipse went up in flames. Instantly I grabbed it and threw it, just as I had before, and this time it severed the guitar fingers and sent them flying in all different directions. The Mitsubishi Eclipse crashed into the neighbor’s house and took out their front porch. My bad.

  The monster glowed an even brighter red and swung at Cassandra with its other hand. Cassandra pushed herself up off the ground and then darted right between the monster legs. The PT Cruiser was only a few feet from me, and it went up in flames. The sight of it roasting like a purple marshmallow made me giggle, and then I picked it up and chucked it, this time aiming right at the base drum that made up the monster’s body.

  Bad choice. I’d been trying to hit it where it would hurt, but the car just crashed right through the center of the drum, leaving the metal circle intact, with a singed PT Cruiser–sized hole right in the middle. The car hit the pavement and skidded to a stop, upside down in a front yard, and knocked down a mailbox. I winced. I was pretty sure this was a federal crime.

  None of this distracted the monster, though, and it seemed dead set on getting Cassandra. She sprinted to behind a tree, which the monster uprooted with one swing of its one arm.

  I started to spin in a circle, not sure what to do next, since flaming automobiles didn’t seem to be doing all that much good. And then I saw them, a little behind the house, previously blocked from view by the car.

  Superfüd, standing in a circle, absolutely motionless, their heads all tilted back toward the sky, their arms to their sides, palms forward. It was like they were worshipping something, and then, in the center, I saw that they were. It was a pile of Beanie Babies. I wasn’t even surprised.

  Clearly they were in the middle of channeling whatever was controlling this monster. Maybe this was going to be easy. Disrupt the channel, disrupt the monster. I raised my hands, ready to give all the guys a shove hard enough to knock them onto their butts. And then something hit me, plowing me into the ground. My body screamed in pain as I scraped into a bush.

  It was a giant guitar. It felt like I’d been run over by a truck. My head was ringing, my vision was blurry, and I couldn’t tell which way was up. I had a feeling that the guitar wasn’t going to stop at just one smack. It wanted to squash me. Cassandra screamed my name as the monster reared back for another swing. I used my kinesis to grab a nearby outdoor lamp from someone’s front yard and yanked it out of the ground. As the monster swung an arm toward me, I swung the lamp toward it, and managed to hit the mic stand with the lamp before it hit me, sending a clang ringing out. I didn’t have time to breathe before the monster lashed out again, and I did the same, this time catching it on the other side.

  Cassandra came running toward me, and the monster turned to her and kicked at her. She dove out of the way and rolled under a bush, but then with one fell swoop, the monster ripped the bush right out from over her. The monster now had no head, one arm, and a hole in the middle of its body, but it continued to glow red where its limbs had been. It was energy, pure Red Magic, and as it loomed over Cassandra, I realized it was unstoppable. In that second, I had to make a choice, and I decided that right then, at least for the next fifteen seconds, Cassandra could fend for herself.

  I turned and ran back toward the band, and when I was about twenty feet away, I held up my hands and shot my powers their way. But they didn’t even budge. It felt like I was reaching out into a void. My kinesis felt like it was being pulled out, and out, and out from me. Cassandra started to scream, and I turned to see that the monster had momentarily forgotten about her and was just standing there. But it was getting bigger. I gasped, and then looked back at Superfüd. My kinesis hadn’t stopped them. Instead it had made them stronger, mixing my own innate magic with their acquired powers.

  I felt a vibration in the air, and the ground beneath my feet started to shake. Across the street, a tree was ripped from the ground, a massive oak, and it zoomed through the air until it connected with the monster’s body, replacing the missing arm.

  Cassandra had been fighting for her life when I’d tried to use my kinesis to stop Superfüd, and now that she had a break, she seized her moment, running toward them with her hands out. “Cass, no!” I screamed as flames started to lick up their pants legs. The monster let out a howl like a thunderclap. From down the street, a garden shed rose up and flew through the air, and joined everything else as a replacement head.

  “What is going on here?” Cassandra screamed, watching in horror as her fire sputtered out.

  “Magic won’t stop them,” I yelled back. “It just makes them stronger.” Cassandra’s hands dropped to her sides, and for a second, we both just stood there, two girls who had barely escaped death by guitar and now had no idea what to do next. There had been no sign of Mallory or Ruby, and I had to hope that Circe had somehow hidden them and kept them safe.

  The monster, now apparently feeling itself, was no longer just content to destroy me and Cassandra, and with a swipe of its new tree arm, it leveled the house two doors down from Superfüd, leaving it looking like a mobile home that had just been through a tornado. “Those neighbors must have called the cops on band practice,” Cassandra said, and I couldn’t help it. I laughed.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” I said, and she shot me a weird look.

  “What are you talking about, weirdo?” she said. “I never left.”

  Down the street, the monster picked up a swing set and hurled it at us. Instantly Cassandra broke left and I broke right, and the swing set shattered as it hit the ground, except for the slide, which spun until it came to a stop just a few feet from me. If we couldn’t stop the monster, then we had to at least get it away from there before someone got hurt.

  Then I heard screaming from behind me, a male voice screaming my name. I turned to see that while Cassandra and I had been looking at the monster, the rest of our crew had returned from their Target run. The person screaming my name was Adrian, and he was outside the Explorer, trying valiantly to hold the door closed as the rest of the passengers fought him, trying to get out.

  “What are you doing?” I screamed at him. “Cassandra and I need all the help we can get!”

  “They don’t want to fight the…,” he yelled back, dodging an arm that was trying to hit him out the window, “whatever that is! They want to get an autograph from the band!”

  As I ran toward the car, I noticed it was rocking back and forth. I could barely see through the flames reflecting in the windshield, but I could see that Brian was similarly under siege, and that he was gripping the steering wheel and holding on for dear life with both hands.

  “Drive away! Get out of here!” I yelled at him.

  “Jackson took the keys!” he screamed back. Suddenly Amirah appeared outside the car, standing on the street right next to Adrian, and this startled him so much that he let go of his grip on the door. This split second was all Janis and Ji-A needed. They pushed the car door open, flinging it into Adrian and knocking him to the ground. Pig was right on their tail as they clambered from the car. Amirah had gotten a head start, and, shrieking, they took off after her as she ran straight toward Superfüd.

  “Janis! Stop! Pig, come back here!” I screamed at them, but if they heard me, it didn’t slow their roll one bit. I pulled Adrian to his feet, and we took off after them. Cassandra joined in the chase.

  “Amirah! Wait!” I screamed. “They’re not just bad musicians! They’re evil! This is dangerous!”

  “I’m going to get a lock of what’s-his-name’s hair!” Ji-A screamed, the epaulets of her glorious green dress billowing out behind her. “He’s an Aquarius just like me!” I had no idea how she could know his sign if she didn’t even know his name.

  The band didn’t see them coming.

  Pig launched herself at Brad. Her paws hit his chest and she knocked him to the ground, and then proceeded to cover his face with kisses. At the same time, Ji-A looped her hands into
Chad’s hair, yanking his head down like she was about to knee him in the face. Instead she held him there and screamed for someone to bring her some scissors. No one did, because Janis was busy trying to rip the shirt off Tom’s back, and Amirah was going after Todd.

  “Do not run away from me!” Amirah screamed. “My dad will pay you to play my birthday party! He will pay you a lot of money!” Then she dove at him from behind, pitching him forward so roughly that his forehead bounced off the ground when he hit.

  Adrian stood motionless beside me, and Brian skidded to a stop beside him. Then a tremendous crash caused us all to spin around with a jolt.

  The crash was the sound of a metal storage pod dropping to the street from three stories up, followed a second later by the tree, and then everything else as the monster fell apart until it was nothing but a pile of debris on a flaming block that looked like it had been hit by seven natural disasters at once.

  Cassandra and I looked at each other, then back at the band, who were still under assault from their fans. She cocked an eyebrow. “I never thought of tackling as a viable option,” she said.

  “Oh, you know us,” I replied. “We always make things too complicated.”

  “I have tackles who couldn’t bring down a guy like that,” Brian said, looking at Amirah with admiration in his eyes.

  “It must be her kickboxing lessons,” I said.

  “Should someone stop this?” Adrian asked.

  “Someone should,” Cassandra said, but none of us moved an inch, momentarily handing over responsibility so that we could catch our breath.

  “Okaaayyyyyyy,” I said, drawing the word out and speaking as slowly as I could, “Inter…vene…ing…now.”