Six Strings to Save the World

by Michael McSherry

  I count several seconds. Then we hear what sounds like distant cannon-fire breaking through the air. It’s almost like staccato thunder, the way it cracks then fades without the follow-up grumbling of a real storm. It continues like this, more bright lights and cannon blasts, for almost two full minutes. Dex and Tori are caught up in all of it. But a sense of dread is filling me, the kind your body knows about before your brain gets around to figuring it all out.

  Alto’s Music.

  What if something happened to Dad’s shop?

  The meteor shower finishes abruptly, darkness reclaiming the sky.

  “That was incredible.” Dex’s voice is full of wonderment. Tori is already re-watching the video she took.

  “If you see my mom, can you tell her that I just needed some time alone?” I ask Dex and Tori. “I’m going for a walk.”

  “We’ll come,” Tori says, pocketing her phone.

  “Nah, it’s okay.”

  “Are you?” A hint of concern is back in Tori’s voice. She tucks her hair behind her ear.

  “Yeah!” I smile. “I just need some quiet. I’ll be back soon.”

  I leave them on the bleachers and walk quickly back to find my car, keys already in my hand.

  * * * * *

  Getting out of Blake isn’t as easy as I’d hoped. There are government cars and local police on the highway and county roads, and I have to turn back more than once. But there are more than a few access roads and biking trails that the police aren’t covering. It takes me forty-five minutes to trace my way back to the outskirts of Tempus, always staying off the main roads, but eventually I work my way to a bike-trail shelter half a mile from Alto’s Music.

  I’ve got three missed calls from Mom already. I text her once to tell her I’ll be back soon, but she’s not buying that. I turn my phone off just to kill the repeated buzzing of her follow-up calls. I feel bad for making her worry, but I need to see it for myself. Working my way through the tall grass in the general direction of Dad’s shop, I light the way with my cell phone. Eventually, I clear some trees and come out into the clearing beside the county road.

  Worst fear confirmed: Alto’s Music is just a crater.

  A deep crater.

  Bits of wood, concrete, and glass litter the ground. Some larger debris near the edge of the crater is on fire. I can’t breathe. I’m looking at the place where Dad’s shop used to be. It’s all gone. All of it.

  I don’t even think to cry.

  The ground around the edge of the crater juts up into a ring of dirt and rubble, all of it pushed away from the center of the wide circle. An intense heat pours away from the place, like an oven turned on low. I can feel it pressing against me, but I get closer. Then I’m up and on top of the mound of dirt, looking down into the pit.

  A few stray fires flicker here and there within the crater, chewing their way through the remains of wood framing. By their light, I catch a glinting reflection from something smooth and polished farther down in the crater. I scramble down the side of the pit, sliding on loose rock and soil, still hot to the touch. I squint into the semi-dark.

  Am I hallucinating?

  I must be hallucinating.

  Because there’s a guitar wedged upright into the ground at the center of the crater.

  It’s too weird to believe, even when I’m standing at the bottom of the pit, looking right at it. A giant space rock crossed countless miles at unimaginable speeds, survived its descent into the atmosphere, vaporized an entire building, and yet: here’s this guitar. I hurry over to it, the heat stinging my face.

  It’s a 1961 Gibson SG. Dark blue. Cleanly polished. Flawless.

  And it just survived Alto’s Music’s personal Armageddon.

  Sirens wail somewhere in the distance. The heat presses in all around me. Sweat pours down my back, my chest, my face.

  Without thinking, I lean down to grab the guitar. With a deafening popping noise, an arc of bright blue electricity jumps from the strings to my hand. The pain is instant: it springs up my fingers, through my arm, and across my chest. My muscles lock and I’m thrown backward. I hit against the dirt side of the crater fifteen feet behind me. My vision swims but I blink a few times until the world stops spinning.

  Did I hit a buried power cable?

  Either way, I’m holding the guitar in my hand.

  It’s cool to the touch.

  The sirens are louder. Closer.

  I scramble up the side of the crater, guitar in hand, and take a moment to look once more at the smoldering remains of Alto’s Music.

  Chapter Two

  Dad used to say that the best liars always give up a piece of the truth. I get back at 2:00 a.m. and when Mom starts lecturing me, I tell her where I went, and some of what I saw. Alto’s Music is blown to bits and my dream is dead. She goes a bit easier on me after that. She can tell how upset I am. But like Dad said, only a piece of the truth. I don’t tell her about the guitar stowed away in my car’s trunk.

  I’m still half-convinced I imagined that part.

  We sleep the first night on the gym floor while FEMA figures out how best to deal with the situation. The next day, volunteers from around the state come together to provide food and clothing for the Tempus exiles. A horde of tottering church ladies drop off mounds of tater-tot hotdish for lunch. Mom eventually lines up a room for us with one of her nurse friends in Blake. Dex and I get sleeping bags on the floor and Mom gets a pull-out couch. She stays plenty busy picking up extra work at the hospital.

  Dex, Tori, and I spend two weeks making the best of a bad vacation. They’re extra nice to me once I tell them about Alto’s. They knew how much it meant to me, and they do their best to keep my mind off it. We listen to music. We loiter at a local gas station. We dodge the news crews prowling the area for interviews while they wait for the government’s go-ahead to re-enter Tempus and document the destruction. Tori and I briefly consider studying for finals while Dex uses the opportunity to make detailed outlines for every one of his classes. We find a good park where we can fill our empty days waiting for the whole mess to sort itself out.

  Mr. Patel fled Tempus in his pajamas, but for some reason, he thought to grab Tori’s violin before evacuating. Tori brings it with her everywhere, and during the days when Dex is working on his advanced calculus and I’m busy counting tree leaves, Tori practices. She’s the hardest worker I’ve ever known—her dad pushes her pretty hard—and every bit of love I have for my guitar, she pours into her violin. I spend hours listening to her play.

  I’ve seen this girl stub her toe on a flat floor. I’ve seen her trip standing still. She’s not allowed to have open-topped drinks in my car because half of whatever she has inevitably ends up on my seats. That’s how you get ants. My point is that Tori is a klutz. But when I watch her play violin, she moves with easy, natural grace. Like a penguin: stumbling on the ice but soaring elegantly in the water.

  More than once, I think about telling Dex and Tori about the guitar. But something stops me.

  After all that time in limbo, FEMA gives us the go-ahead to return home, assuring us that they’re going to be restoring power to the grid that day. We head back into Tempus along with a line of a few hundred cars, surveying the damage in the late-afternoon sunlight. Several buildings are damaged. One of the grocery store’s walls caved, and the northbound signal of Tempus’s one stoplight is gone, torn away by something that left a huge furrow in the ground across the road. It’s strange; everywhere I look, signs of damage, but no remnants of any actual meteorites.

  I pull in behind Mom at our apartment. Mom gets out of her car while I park, and we go in together. Stepping back into our small apartment doesn’t feel like coming home. Never did. I always thought of the place more like a motel. Mom had to sell our real home after Dad died.

  Mom does her best to try and restore a bit of normalcy. The power still isn’t on, so she lights some candles. We have water pressure and gas, so she uses a match to light a fire on the stove to cook so
me pasta and canned sauce. The apartment has a nasty smell to it; I take that as a warning against opening the fridge. After dinner, Mom tells me she’s going back to the hospital to pick up another shift and asks that I clean out the refrigerator. Normally I’d procrastinate a bit, but as soon as she’s out the door, I’m shoveling spoiled food into the garbage and hucking containers into the recycling, gagging when I pour a half-gallon of curdled milk down the sink.

  Full bags in hand, I rush outside and heave bags into their bins, then run over to my car. I key open the trunk, and there she is: the Gibson SG, in all her glory. I take a moment to look around the empty parking lot, then spirit the guitar back inside my apartment. Carrying it is strange. When I hold it, it’s like my whole body buzzes.

  I go into my bedroom with a candle and put the guitar on my bed. It looks perfectly normal sitting there. Nothing about it screams, I’m meteorite proof! Sitting down and taking it in my hands, holding the body up so I’m looking over the bridge and up the fretboard. A good neck will have the smallest hint of a bow to stop the strings from buzzing against the frets. And this guitar looks like it’s in the sweet spot. I bring it back down and settle the guitar over my thigh.

  That feels like home.

  I take my thumb and pluck the low E string.

  Three things happen: there’s a flash of bright blue, the lightbulb over my head explodes, and I hear a sound so loud that my teeth vibrate. Instinctively, I twist the volume knob and the sound cuts out. Now I’m sitting in the relative dark of candlelight again, my heart pounding in my chest, because I’m more convinced than ever that I’m going insane.

  Electric guitars don’t work like this.

  They plug into amplifiers.

  Those plug into power outlets.

  No power, no amp, no noise that loud!

  But the sound was unmistakable: a bass-heavy, pitch-perfect E, the kind you might expect out of a full stack of amplifiers. I’m suddenly aware of other noise in the building. Our upstairs neighbor stomping around. Dogs are barking. So I’m not going crazy. This guitar is loud without an amp.

  Okay.

  What would Dex say? Scientific method, idiot. Got it.

  Step one: Ask a question. Okay. What gives?

  Step two: Construct a hypothesis. Sure. Something is horribly wrong with this guitar.

  Step three: Conduct an experiment.

  I tentatively put my fingers back on the volume knob. I give it the slightest turn, barely rotating it. I’m expecting to hear some sort of feedback like you might get from an amp, but there’s nothing. Of course not. Why would there be? Still, I was expecting to hear… something.

  With the slightest tap from my thumb, I set the E string vibrating again. I gasp as a thread of bright blue electricity arcs from string to string, starting at the bridge and bouncing up the neck in a web of forking energy. The lightning hops between the tuning pegs, terminating with a crackling noise. As the E string rings out and fades to silent, the lightning sparking along the guitar becomes less frequent. Hesitantly, I touch my finger to one of the bolts. It jumps to my finger, but it isn’t painful. Just warm.

  Leaving the volume knob barely turned, I get an idea. I tentatively bring the fingers of my left hand over the strings, settling them into a familiar position. Middle finger, G, index finger, B, open D, open G, open B, pinky finger G. The G Major chord is the first one Dad taught me, and I can remember the way my hand felt like an awkward claw for the first several weeks of practice.

  Seconds pass.

  Then I bring my right index finger sweeping over the strings for a full chord.

  This time forks of lightning surge from the bridge, up the strings, and erupt from the head of the guitar. The lightning illuminates my room like a camera flash and I can see the lightning arc to multiple points along the wall. The sound is there, not as loud as before, but it’s a full and balanced G chord ringing too loud for a guitar without an amp.

  I hear the microwave in the kitchen beep as it comes online. The light over the kitchen table sparks to life and the air conditioner in the living room window starts humming, circulating air. There are sounds of pleasant surprise throughout the building, too. I can hear the woman upstairs yelling to her husband that the power’s back on, and that they might be able to catch the “end of the Pack game.” Ugh. Wisconsinites. The old man who lives next door wastes no time in flicking on his TV.

  I let the chord fade and the lightning dims, diminishing to mere sparks.

  There goes the power again, everything flickering to darkness.

  Oops. My stomach does a flip and I take the Gibson off my lap, making sure that the volume knob is zeroed. It’s not like I can apologize to my neighbors. What am I going to tell them? Sorry I and my magic guitar pulled the rug out from under your feet? I don’t know much about institutions, but I think that story might get me a cozy bed in one.

  I slide the Gibson underneath my bed, my heart racing, and tell myself I will not touch that guitar again today. I head out to the kitchen to grab a dustpan and head into my bedroom, picking glass from my floor by candlelight.

  Two hours later, the real power flips back on and stays on, lights and chiming appliances coming alive together. I breathe a sigh of relief and feel the tension sliding from my shoulders. But I still end up checking on the guitar—my guitar—a few times every hour, right up until I go to sleep.

  * * * * *

  Mom gets back from her overnight at 5:00 a.m. I spent most the night obsessing about the guitar under my bed, so I’m a bad mix of exhausted, anxious, and paranoid. I make Mom a meal and watch as she trudges off to bed.

  I get a message from Tori an hour later linking Dex and I to the school’s website. We get to take our finals online. Dex responds with a puking emoji. His favorite part of exams is getting to be the first to hand in his test. I’m still texting back and forth with them when I hear a knock at the door. I pad across the living room and draw the door open.

  A man in a navy-blue suit is waiting in the hallway. He’s wearing a crisp white button-up with a black tie. He’s tall, well over six feet, and thin. His face is square with a strong jaw shadowed by a stubble of beard. His hair is cropped close to his skull, slightly longer on the top than the sides.

  We stare at each other for an uncomfortably long time before his features break into a movie-star smile.

  “Good morning, sir. My name is Agent James Dorian, and I’m wondering if you might be available to answer a few brief questions?”

  “Agent…?” I echo.

  “James Dorian,” the man nods. He places his fingers gently on the door and pushes it slightly wider. “So? Can you answer a few questions?”

  “About what?”

  “Problems with the power grid. There are some… anomalies we’ve picked up in the area.”

  “My mom’s asleep,” I say cautiously. “Can you keep your voice down?”

  “Care if I come in?” he asks, ignoring me.

  “How about you leave a card?” I wedge my foot on the back side of the door, stopping Agent Dorian from nudging it open any wider. “And we will call you, when it’s more convenient.”

  For a moment, Agent Dorian’s eyes dart over my shoulder, scanning the inside of the apartment. Then he laughs, patting at the breast pockets of his crisp suit. “You know what, I think I left them back at the office.”

  “That’s too bad. Thanks for stopping anyway!”

  I attempt to close the door in Agent Dorian’s face, but now he’s got his black dress shoe wedged on the opposite side of the door. “I’m wondering if you heard or saw anything strange in the area yesterday?”

  I feel a chill run down my spine. “No, sir,” I answer.

  “Any strange noises?”

  “Strange noises?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, sir. Nothing like that.”

  The corner of his mouth turns up slightly. “Huh. Well, then I’m stumped.” Agent Dorian scratches at his head and shrugs, removing his foot from
the door. “Keep an eye out, kid.”

  “What agency did you say you were with?” I ask as Agent Dorian turns back down the hall.

  “I didn’t.”

  I close the door and bolt the lock. Then I text Dex.

  * * * * *

  Dex lives two miles south of town on an old, unworked farm that his dad inherited. Dex spends most of his time in a shabby barn on ‘the back forty’ taking apart and reassembling computers in his spare time. That’s where I tell him to meet me.

  I’m sitting on the hood of my car outside the ratty barn when Dex comes rolling up on an old riding lawnmower. It doesn’t even have blades. He found the thing tucked away in the barn when his family first moved in, and spent countless nights after school retooling the entire thing. Its engine whines like a possessed cat and burps smoke with alarming regularity, but you have to hand it to Dex; it’s an impressive resurrection.

  Dex kills the engine and hops off the mower.

  “This had better be good,” he says, pulling his steno pad from his pocket and slapping at its cover. “I was right in the middle of my calculus outline. You know I love calculus.”

  “Save it, Einstein,” I say.

  “Leibniz,” he mutters. “Or Newton.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” Dex shakes his head. “What’s this about?”

  “Come here.” I beckon him over to my car and pop the trunk open. Dex swings the trunk up and looks over the Gibson for a few seconds. “You bought a new guitar? I thought you were helping your mom with rent.”

  “I didn’t buy it,” I admit. “I found it.”

  “Found it? Found it where?”

  “In Alto’s crater, the night of the meteorite shower.”

  “Bull,” Dex scoffs. “Seriously, where’d you get it?”

  “I’m not lying,” I insist, trying to get across how serious I am. “That night, I came into town to check on Alto’s. I found this guitar at the bottom of the crater.”