The congresswoman is dressed in a overlarge t-shirt and pair of slacks that offer no clues to their brands. She has changed clothes since the time of her abduction. She is not wearing makeup, and to most the general public there is a haggard look to her face, lines that are deeper than usual. She has bruising around her neck which is evidence of possible choking, torture, or as the CIA would define it, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. She sits in the chair and the clamps are locked into place. She begins to talk, or more accurately, read, from a source just off camera.
"We will stand up for ourselves." She says. "We will not accept defeat. We will live side by side, next to you, or will live alone, but we will not accept living beneath you. Test us and we will show you."
Her lips grow tight for a minute, in a gesture of defiance. Then someone says "Continue." In a female voice.
"We are stronger than you." Bachmann says. "And we are smarter. This is our home. We have as much a right to it as you do. This is only a warning."
Bachmann breathes in sharply. A smaller person in black fatigues steps in behind her. With a quick motion, the person grabs her from both sides of the head, and rips upward. There is a sharp tearing sound. The head comes free, along with a length of Bachmann's spinal column. In what was one of the video's more popular and less mature comments "Scorpion Fatality!" The similarity was given between Bachmann's execution and a maneuver from Mortal Kombat, a mid-nineties arcade game. Another comment "Not enough blood" drew strong criticism and conversation, in which it was revealed that the commentator had been led to believe by popular entertainment such as the "Kill Bill" movies that, upon sudden decapitation, an individual’s neckless body would erupt into a fountain of red. To correct this misled belief, other decapitation videos are linked in the comments thread.
The screen goes black, and the words
DONT FUCK WITH US
are displayed. This is the end of the video.
AFTERWORD
I don’t do research for most my writing. It probably shows. But for this one, I let a lifetime of action movies and thriller books be my research. I owe a special debt to the works of Quentin Tarintino and Stieg Larson.
I would like to add that the entirety of this book, every word of it, is a work of fiction. Where public figures are depicted, they are depicted in a fictional way. There are a lot of people out there with a lot of different religious and political beliefs, and I hope I didn’t offend to many of them. This book is entertainment, nothing more. In the interest of full disclosure, I consider myself a Democrat, although I fear that I have already made that obvious with the above work.
Merrell Michael
Beaumont, Texas
September 2012
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