Fairy Metal Thunder (Songs of Magic, #1) (23 page)

“Zis is an emergency!” Franco said, running
up to them. He wore some kind of radio/microphone headset now. “You
must play now!”

“That crowd’s going to eat us alive,” Erin
said.

“Ze show must go on!” Franco said.

“Great,” Mitch said, shaking his head.

All the overhead stage lights went out. In
the dimmed footlights, a couple of stagehands helped them set up.
Grizlemor quietly appeared and disappeared when the stagehands
weren’t looking, helping to bring out the pieces of the drum kits
and the keyboard arrangement.

The crowd kept chanting “Ze-bras!
Ze-bras!”

Jason looked out over the huge crowd, stunned
by the sight of so many people eager to hear them play. Right now,
he was a shadowy outline against the city lights of Minneapolis
glittering behind the stage. In a few minutes, the big spotlights
would come on, and he’d be looking at a sea of faces. And they’d
all be looking back at him.

“What do you think?” Erin whispered beside
him, looking over his shoulder.

“We’ll just do our best,” Jason said.
“They’ll like it or hate it.”

“I am totally scared right now,” she
whispered. Jason took her hand, and she squeezed her fingers around
his for a minute. Her cheek was next to his. She was close enough
to kiss, but Jason resisted the temptation.

Erin stepped back and blew a few notes on her
harmonica. A slight breeze crossed the stage.

Finally, Mitch and Dred announced they were
ready. The band did a quick sound check, and as usual, the
instruments were perfectly in tune with each other.

“We are ready to play, yes?” Franco asked. He
touched a button on his headset. “Ladies and gentlemen…you have
been chanting for zem all day…ze Assorted Zebras!”

Franco dashed out of sight as the curtain
opened. Ten thousand audience members screamed and cheered. The
wave of sound was so loud it seemed to push Jason backwards. He was
overwhelmed by all the faces—but then the spotlights flicked on,
and he couldn’t see them anymore.

“Hello, Minneapolis!” Erin said into the
mike, and she grinned from ear to ear when the crowd renewed its
cheering.

Dred, Mitch and Jason started playing.
Jason’s guitar sounded electric now, as if it already knew what he
was about to play.

Erin gazed out at the lights and the wild
crowd. Then she sang the first verse of “I Love Rock and Roll” by
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts.

The crowd erupted again, howling and
clapping. Jason felt the guitar growing warm in his hands. The
strings drew his fingers toward them like iron to a magnet. He
barely had to concentrate. It was almost as if he were just an
audience member, listening to the music as it happened.

Jason glanced around at Mitch and Dred. Both
of them wore huge smiles, entranced by the music.

When they reached the end of the song, they
stopped playing their instruments, but Erin spontaneously decided
to sing the chorus one more time, a capella. It was just Erin’s
voice over the amplifiers, plus thousands of delirious audience
members singing the words along with her.

When she finished, the crowd howled and
cheered and stomped. She looked at Jason, and they shared glowing
smiles.

From there, they played “Cinderella Night,”
since that was the first song that made them popular. Then they
continued through all of Erin’s songs. Jason could feel the
audience turning somber, then sad, then cheerful, then ecstatic,
reacting deeply to the music. His guitar grew hotter and hotter in
his hands, and he found himself drifting towards the cool, damp air
pouring out from Mitch’s keyboards.

The audience grew crazier and more excited
with every song. When they hit the end of Erin’s list, she started
a new song, apparently improvising the lyrics. Jason had never
heard it before, but his guitar seemed to know just how to play it.
It was a light, cheesy, nonsense song that didn’t sound like
anything Erin would write:

Everybody wave your hands!

Everybody shake your pants!

Everybody do it, do it, do it,

Everybody do the sugar dance!

The sugar dance! Yeah, yeah…

The sugar dance! Yeah, yeah…

The entire crowd danced together, suddenly
synchronized as if they’d all practiced the dance together before
coming to the show. It reminded Jason of that bizarre moment in any
musical when suddenly everybody broke into song and choreographed
dancing. He’d sometimes wondered what that would be like in real
life, if you could just be at school or work and everybody stopped
what they were doing to sing and dance together.

When she finished, the crowd roared so loud
Jason thought he could feel the stage rumble beneath his feet. It
was exhilarating. It was frightening.

The band members looked at each other,
confused. Mitch covered his microphone with his hand.

“What the heck was that?” Mitch asked.

“I don’t know,” Erin said. “It just came to
me.”

“Can we just do the last song and get out of
here?” Dred asked. “That crowd is freaking me out. Nobody should
like us this much.”

“Yeah, let’s hit the finale and go,” Mitch
said.

Mitch played a synthesized sitar on his
keyboard. Dred and Jason joined in, and then Erin sang the opening
words for “Paint It Black,” another song they’d toyed around with
in Mitch’s garage, though they’d never really played it very well.
Jason thought it sounded amazing with a female vocalist, though,
especially if that vocalist happened to be Erin.

For the first time, they played the song in
perfect sync with each other, without a misstep. They reached the
instrumental part, where Erin hummed instead of singing. Jason
usually bungled this, but tonight it flowed like water, his fingers
knowing exactly where to touch the strings.

Then the guitar seemed to take over, running
away with him. Jason couldn’t stop playing, and the sound grew
faster and louder and more complex all at once. The other
instruments gradually faded and stopped as the band left him to his
runaway guitar solo.

The air around him thrummed with power, as if
all the energy put out by the crowd was flowing right to him. The
guitar was searing hot in his hands now, and the strings burned his
fingertips, but he couldn’t stop playing. He wondered if this was
how Dred felt just before the earthquake. He was afraid it might
be.

The air shimmered and rippled like heat waves
from the hood of a car. He was dripping with sweat, all of his
clothes soaked, his socks squishing inside his shoes. And still his
guitar grew hotter.

The heat waves thickened into a scorching
bubble that surrounded him, distorting the whole world. Sweat
poured into his eyes and the salt stung, but all he could do was
close his eyes and keep playing.

Then, after what felt like years, he reached
the end of his solo. His hands dropped away from the guitar, and he
stumbled backwards, on the verge of a heat stroke.

He watched the thick bubble of rippling heat
float up and away from the stage, out over the crowd. It was as
tall as Jason himself.

The crowd was watching, too.

Jason stared, unable to look away, horrified
that something terrible was about to happen.

When it floated above the center of the
crowd, the huge heat bubble ignited, lighting up the entire
audience like a blinding solar flare. Plumes of fire arced out in
every direction. The flames billowed down toward the crowd—all of
whom stood and watched, their mouths gaping open. Fire was about to
rain down on everyone, and nobody was getting out of the way.

Jason wanted to grab the microphone, warn
everybody of the danger, tell them to run, but he couldn’t move. He
felt like he was in a dream, one of the ones where a monster was
chasing you, but your feet wouldn’t budge.

Then the flames turned to a cloud of red
smoke.

After a moment, the entire audience exploded
in cheers, applause, stomping, screaming and howling. They surged
toward the band, reaching out their arms. Jason and Erin, near the
front of the stage, stumbled back from the roaring outburst. Erin
stumbled and caught his arm, and he somehow kept her from falling.
He wasn’t sure how he hadn’t fallen over himself.

“Is that it?” Erin whispered.

“I think we’re done,” Jason said.

Erin let go of his arm and walked back to the
microphone.

“Thank you, Minneapolis!” she shouted, and
the crowded roared back at her. “Good night!”

The four of them got offstage as fast as they
could. In Jason’s case, this meant a slow stagger, and he was the
last one to escape into the wings.

He immediately peeled off his black t-shirt
and tried to mop up his face with it, but the shirt itself was
dripping sweat. A stagehand gave him a Spoon and Cherry Festival
t-shirt, and Jason mopped what felt like a gallon of sweat from his
hair, face, and neck.

“Wow,” Erin was saying. “Wow.”

“No kidding,” Mitch said.

Dred was just shaking her head, a smile
burned into her usually impassive face.

The audience’s howling and screeching
gradually fell into a steady pattern, a single repeated word
echoing again and again through the theater: “En-core! En-core!
En-core!”

“Oh, we can’t,” Jason said. He was out of
breath and close to collapsing.

“Please, you must play one more,” Franco
said, arriving to meet them. “The crowd, zey will tear ze entire
place apart wizzout an encore! And for me. I want to hear encore,
too.”

“We don’t have any more songs,” Dred said.
“Unless Erin wants to make something up again.”

“We could do another cover,” Mitch
suggested.

“Wait,” Erin said. “We do have one more
song.” She gave Jason a sly smile. “Will you get the lyrics from
the tent for me?”

“Oh, no, wait,” Jason said. “We haven’t
practiced that one at all. I don’t even know if it’s ready. Or if
it’s any good.”

“It’s good,” Erin said. “I like it.”

“Really?” Jason blushed. “I kind of did work
out something on the guitar for it…”

“Fine, you guys lead, I’ll follow, whatever,”
Mitch said. “Let’s just give this crowd something before they
riot.”

“Let’s go,” Dred said, jogging up the steps
to the darkened stage. She looked eager to play more.

When they were on the stage, Erin took his
hand.

“I want you close when I sing this,” Erin
whispered. “You’ll do some of the vocals.”

“I’m not any good at singing,” he said.

“Maybe that’s what you thought before,” she
said. The spotlights lit up again so the big crowd could see them,
and the Sculpture Garden filled with cheers and screams. “But look.
You’re a rock star now.”

Jason looked out at the mass of ecstatic
people, and he couldn’t help smiling.

“Do you guys want a little more?” Erin asked
into the microphone. They roared back their assent. “How about a
new song nobody’s ever heard?” They cheered again. “This one is
called ‘Angel Sky.’ It was written by our guitarist, Jason
Becker.”

Erin took Jason’s hand and raised it high,
and the crowd went wild.

“Hey, let’s hear it for our drummer, Dred
Zweig, too!” Erin said, and Dred tapped out a quick rhythm, to more
applause. “And the guy who put this band together, our keyboardist,
Mitch Schneidowski!”

“
Mick
,” Mitch said into his mic, but
his voice was drowned under the tidal wave of screams and cheers.
He looked out on the crowd, blushed crimson, and then waved.
“Forget it.”

“Jason, get us going,” Erin said.

Jason started to play the guitar part he’d
practiced for her song. It came out smoothly on the fairy guitar,
not hesitant or choppy at all. He repeated the opening a few times,
letting Erin and the others hear it and get used to it.

Instead of singing, Erin spoke into the
microphone again.

“You know how the sky looks when a storm is
over?” she asked. “Those golden beams of light ripping up the dark
clouds? My grandmother told me that was the angels coming back to
chase away the darkness. She called it an angel sky.” She turned
from the audience to look at Jason, but she kept her mouth by the
microphone. “I told Jason about it before rehearsal one day, when a
storm had just ended. I showed it to him. I guess he was
listening.”

Jason gave her a smile.

He played the opening again, and Erin
sang:

After the storm,

You bring the light

I saw the angel sky

In your green eyes…

Jason’s guitar knew just how to play the
song. This time, the guitar wasn’t overpowering him—he was putting
himself into the instrument.

The rest of the band joined in softly. Jason
sang the chorus parts along with her.

By the end of the song, half the audience was
in tears, and half of them were kissing each other.

“Thank you, Minneapolis,” Erin whispered
again into the mic. She was crying, too. “Good-bye.”

They left the stage to softer, gentler
applause.

“Ze coordinator is horrified about ze
pyrotechnics,” Franco said in the hospitality tent. Everyone was
relaxing, having pops or Yoo-hoos. Grizlemor had hidden himself
somewhere. He’d spent the show eating every morsel of food on the
table. “But I tell her: no, zis was not planned…but yes, no one
was harmed, and ze audience is going home happy.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Jason said. “We
should have, uh, mentioned it was going to happen.”

Franco looked at the stripped-bare
refreshment table. “Do you require any additional hors
d’oeuvres?”

“Anyone?” Mitch asked.

“I think we’re good,” Erin said.
“Thanks.”

“I should tell you, your music…” Franco
began to weep. “Your music!” Franco bawled and threw his arms
around Mitch, who stood near him. He cried into Mitch’s
shoulder.