by Fox J Wilde
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Lebensmüdigkeit!
Familienkreis
Verräter
Kältewelle
Großvater
Vorgetäuscher Held
Interhostel
Das Mission
Katharsis
Das Großartige Spiel
Der Gesuchte Anführer
Komplikation
Kunststück
Schadenfreude
Wilderness of Mirrors
Übertragungen
Räder in Den Rädern
Die Wahrheit Wird Dich Befreien
Das Verdickungsdiagramm
Quagmire
In Schadlicher Weise
Überfrau
Pantheon
Epilog
RESISTANCE SAGA
PART I
FOX J. WILDE
Copyright © 2019 by Fox J. Wilde
www.foxjwilde.com
Edited by E A Hatcher
Cover design by Andrej Semnic (aka semnitz)
Interior design by TeaBerryCreative.com
The TL:DR version of the legal nonsense: share it to your heart’s content. Burn the book if you don’t like it. Quote me if you like (but please do quote me), and no I don’t care about online piracy. Not in the least. Sweat your own blood, and don’t plagiarize.
The right of Fox J. Wilde to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Don’t hate the player; hate the game.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in a separate document or publication, digital, physical or otherwise, that bears the name of anyone other than Fox J. Wilde, without the expressed permission of Fox J. Wilde. If you think it’s illegal, it probably is.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real people, alive or dead, is purely coincidental. Blah blah blah, you get the idea.
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-7336362-1-6
ISBN (e-book): 978-1-7336362-0-9
ISBN (a-book): 978-1-7336362-2-3
!!! TRIGGER WARNING !!!
This book contains scenes that might be upsetting or traumatic to individuals sensitive to the topics of sexual assault or rape. It is not the author’s intent to glorify this behavior, but to expose an unfortunate reality that many of our friends, family, neighbors, and even enemies have to live with. These scenes appear in the following chapters:
Das Mission
Kunststück
Das Verdickungsdiagramm
Acknowledgments
To the real Lena: I will never be able to use your real name, as you were every inch the quiet professional. You were as much an example to women as you were a leader of men. I’m honored to have been one of your secrets, and you will forever remain one of mine. You will always be loved, and never forgotten.
To my Editor Liz: Thank you for convincing the world that I’m a decent writer. I’ve officially replaced the semicolon with the em-dash for ‘punctuation mark that Fox misuses the most.’
To the Six Underground: never perform an extraction in your bathroom with gasoline and an ice bath after ‘Nair’-ing your ‘down there’-hairs. The feds are still confused by that one. Thanks for the birthday present, but you are never getting your ten dollars.
Amanda, Eric, and Elizabeth S. Cullen: you are better beta-readers than I deserve. Eric, you are right: my German is terrible.
Talanton: Thank you for finally naming the book.
Pawn to D4
Let East Germany be free!
From this Imperialist tyranny!
That’s the way it’s gotta be
If it was up to me
America can’t you see?
It’s political slavery!
East Germany must be free!
To be its own sovereign country!
—“Capitalism Down”, The Dead Weights, 1981
Lebensmüdigkeit!
Lena Schindler screamed at everyone. The crowd gathered inside the tiny church was small; perhaps only twenty men and women in total, if you didn’t count the few greasy and leather-clad couples making out in the confession booths near the back of the room. Yet while the crowd was small, the godly little auditorium they prepared to unleash ungodly hell upon was practically bursting at the seams with the steam of bodies preparing for war.
The tattoo-covered confluence stood aghast as the young woman, battle-clad in graffiti outlandish and greasy hair, catapulted her minute frame headlong into the crowd. She didn’t need to push her way through. The motley bunch that stood in wary attendance had seen this before, and quickly stepped out of the way. When Lena got like this, her fists flew; and she was well known for her flailing uppercuts among many other things.
“Das ist mein fickin lied!” she howled and right on cue the band began to tear the crowd apart note by note.
Instantly, as if a military claymore had been set off sending steel, shrapnel, and dastardly-otherwise careening through an unsuspecting crowd of innocent onlookers, the small auditorium became a seething mass of mangling humans dead set on mutilating one another. They pushed and shoved against each other as Lena, a one-woman wrecking ball, jumped right into the middle of the carnage. She gave no quarter; she didn’t need to. They all knew the rules. She was the dominant alpha in this relationship, and by the end of this song, everyone who didn’t know it already most certainly would.
Riff by riff, beat by beat, and shriek after bloody shriek the music took its pound of flesh while the musical equivalent of a bazooka exploded its way into the chests of the attendees, filling them with the lifeblood of chaos and carnage. It was latent lifeblood perhaps, but it was now exactly where it should be; mixing dangerously with adrenaline and booze, pumping furiously in a sadistic serial of serrated hearts. Lena called, they answered. She assailed them, intentionally insulting their capabilities with a vulgar display of power. Like the miscreants they were, they seemed quite keenly bent on reciprocating. Thus, clothes went the way of the buffalo as sweat, bruises, and worse formed in equal measure.
What had begun in the burgeoning tumult as a tentative shuffle became a roiling pit of disaster as the beat drove faster, faster, and (if you could believe it) even faster. Accuracy was hardly the goal. This was neither a precision strike nor an assault with a particularly well-thought-out plan of action. This was a show of force; a retaliation. Its only intent was to send a message violently conveying pure disillusionment while aptly describing the consequences of what happens when the immovable object of ‘The State of Things’ collides against the unstoppable force of youth and puberty.
As individuals they were weak; mere refuse in a world that spun faster than their heads struggling to wrap around it all. But together they were the reckoning and resistance, the bullet and the powder, the hard-cocked middle finger to the system and the coup d’etat to all that was sacred. Behold, one and all, the discarded ideology of the stale and staunch overlords at the feet of human pressure-cookers who were just fed-the-hell up.
Dogma, fervor and hubris. Maybe it didn’t have religious significance…eh, fuck it.
The drummer blast-beat his utterly damnedest while no less than three guitarists pounded on their instruments as if they were attempting to bail a sinking life-raft. They had no bassist—the venue had forbidden it after their last show when a rafter collapsed. Perhaps it was best the church never found out how many attendees were hanging from it during the last song of that night.
Undaunted, the (now former) bassist was casually tossed a spare guitar and was fully content to beat
on this poor block of wood and copper-windings to songs he barely knew and couldn’t be bothered to learn. That would have been missing the point. The art of social retribution was one of exhibitionism, and revenge was a dish best served cold. Just as a tree falls in the woods, both only existed if they were on display with as many witnesses as possible—and these punks had a lot riding on the exhibition they desperately craved.
“Wie lange muss dieser Kampf weitergehen?!” Lena howled, and the crowd responded in kind. They all knew the words by heart; even the few stragglers seeing the band Lebensmüde for the first time, resonated with their meaning. This was an anthem of discontent with lyrics that connected with the oppressed and uninspired alike. Lena knew this, so she howled it again, beckoning all to join in.
“Wie lange? Wie lange muss dieser Kampf weitergehen?!”
Amplifiers were cranked far past what their components could dish out. Drum-heads threatened to cave in. Strings were pushed ever-closer to snapping and speakers clipped heavily. Even the throats of the crowd were rent raw with passion as they struggled to be heard over the dissonant cacophony. Lena herself remained completely undaunted, however, beckoning with a raspy voice characteristically unaffected. She vowed to change that. If her vocal chords weren’t torn to shreds by the end of the show, then the show would continue until they were. She would outlast the power in the building if she had to.
Time had become a malleable thing for her to control. Murderously, she spun the crowd around the room the same way she twisted the microphone cable around her neck, attempting to choke herself as she screamed. The band only played louder and faster as if to call her bluff. They knew the rules; if she actually died it would be a good death. And if she lived…better luck next time.
Seconds later, as if by divine intervention, the first song ended. Lena, clad in graffiti outlandish and hair soaked through with the sweat of no less than ten people, stretched her arms out to receive the tribute of her public. Fists churned, chests beat, feet stomped, and voices raised to show their approval of the massacre. Out there on the streets she was nothing special. But in here she was a gladiator; a prized cage-fighter and victorious champion of the underground. Anyone who said otherwise, well, they were welcome to challenge her for dominance. This was her stage, her Colosseum, and in here, she was a God.
Just a year ago you would have never recognized Lena Schindler. As a gangly, awkward teenager in the throes of acne-apocalypse and hormone waterboarding, she had carved out her place in the world by taking up as little space as possible. She would sit in school, arms pulled inwards and legs close together, fearful of any adverse attention from her schoolmates or teachers. When called upon to answer even simple arithmetic questions, her responses would become a strange toss-up between a stutter or a squeak. Either was met with laughter and the warm spread of embarrassment across her cheeks.
That is, until she discovered the punk rock scene emerging out of Leipzig. That’s when everything changed. She still weighed barely anything. But now she dressed like a thumbtack ruffian, acted like a vagabond wretch, and smelled like the devil’s arse. Also, she was notoriously loud. Maybe at school or in public, she would still stutter or squeak, and well that she should: once she assumed the trimmings and trappings of “Schoolgirl Lena”, she was once again relegated to her not-very-special self—arms and legs pulled inward, and mouth closed for good measure.
But now she had found her alter-ego and she had found a community and her calling to go along with it. Finally, there was an art that spoke up as a rule and sat down never. It was a scene that pushed, shoved, and wildly proclaimed the emotions she had long since felt, since before she even knew she was feeling them. In this shit of a country she was an outsider. But in Punk Rock she was home anywhere it was playing.
Her guitarist snapped a string. He launched into the next song anyway.
Half the crowd looked to be on the verge of collapse. As the final song reached its conclusion, the only one truly left standing in all aspects of the colloquialism was Lena. She stood as a general would at the end of a great battle, towering over the dead and bleeding. She howled into the growing silence, assuring herself of her solitude. Only then did she allow herself to pass out. This is how these affairs always ended, with Lena slipping into unconsciousness from screaming and the recovering crowd lifting her back onstage. It was how these things were supposed to go, after all.
The last thing she smelled before the grey stole her senses was blood and booze. Perhaps ten seconds or five minutes later (it was hard to keep track of these things), as Lena finally came to, the familiar scent of her fans hovering protectively over her informed her that she was safe—perhaps the safest she would ever be, crushed between battered and bleeding bodies that were still ready for a fight if they got the chance. These types were fully prepared to throw down for her music; they’d most certainly throw down for her life. She cherished the moment as sweat and worse dripped off of their faces onto hers.
“Hell yeah!” one called to her.
“Yeah!” another yelled with some additional choice language that needn’t be shared.
As the voices mounted in tandem, Lena knew she had once again done her job for the night; but she had a headache. This was normal for her at the ending of every show. It was the price she happily paid for the reward of a kick-ass performance. With the spectacle now over, the crowd was either leaving or ambling about while congratulating each other on a fine ruckus well-wrought. Now was the time for Lena to sneak outside for a breath, hopefully avoiding any conversation. Like many singers (or most, as she assumed), she was notoriously introverted. With the heart of an artist, the mind of a malcontent and the passions of a provocateur, she was still an introvert first and wasn’t much for conversation at the best of times—and in times like these she needed the peace and solace that only a cigarette could provide.
The church was small. It had been built for a congregation of the older and particularly devout, with glass windows that were equally stained with dust and grime as they were glaze. Splintering wooden pews and lovingly crooked chairs had been shuffled about to rest safely against the walls with far more care than she would expect of her raucous fans. Borrowed carpets and tarps had replaced the far nicer, far holier original carpeting so that the coagulated mess of human goo wouldn’t tarnish Jesus’ house—and more importantly, the chances of them playing here again in a few weeks.
As Lena skulked against the wall hugging the shadows, she was pleasantly surprised to see soiled teenagers carefully restoring everything back to its original setting. Even her band-mates, tired and sore with bleeding thumbs and torn callouses, were taking breaks from stiff and illicit drinks to help push the massive altar back into place. “Good,” she mused. If she timed her smoke just right, then most of it would be done by the time she returned. It was a slightly underhanded consideration, but everyone understood.
“Great show, Lena!”
The voice was hoarse and familiar, yet still Lena winced. Adoration from her public was to be expected, but she was tired now. It had been a long, brutal show and Lena wanted nothing more than to step out of the stinky, sweaty church and into the cold night air for her coveted smoke. Despite this, she turned to acknowledge him, recognizing who he was and…well, damn it.
Hans Schmidt. Hans was a giant of a boy. All seventeen years of his life had been one protracted growth spurt and he hadn’t missed a single meal during the period. He was a talented sportsman, to be sure, and looked every inch the part. Long black hair covered a pair of smoldering black eyes that were set beautifully large in his chiseled face. He had a large nose, but it was a good nose. He had a large chin, but it had a dimple in it that Lena found comforting.
Hans was a relatively new fan of Lena’s band . He had always been friendly with Lena on the occasional meeting at school or otherwise—more so than most people her age who seemed to prefer avoiding her. Hans, however, got along with every
one; it was one of his many great qualities. Still, they hadn’t really connected until he heard through the grapevine that she sang for a band that was surprisingly up-and-coming despite its underground status.
Like many newcomers to the GDR Punk scene, he had been pensive at first, much preferring the comforting and mainstream sounds of Pankow, Rockhaus or City. Once he saw her live, however, he was hooked. He grew his hair out much longer (which his mother apparently hated), purchased clothing he was sure Lena would approve of (or that would rankle his mother even more), and was in the mosh pit nearly every show. He was a true, dedicated fan—a gorgeous, true, dedicated fan. No, Lena could not ignore Hans even if she wanted to.
“Oh, hey Hans!” Lena acknowledged him awkwardly. Realizing that she should probably say something else, she added, “Enjoy the show?”
“It was amazing as usual!” He responded jovially, “Tell me, how is it that you can look even more attractive covered in sweat and blood?”
Lena tried not to smile. Hans and Lena had only really become good friends this last month and had certainly never dated. However, Hans had been a flirt with her since attending her shows—something she would never fully admit to appreciating. She wasn’t very good at flirting back, of course, even if she was in her element here. Thus, she would usually resign herself to staring blankly at him, occasionally punctuated with an awkward, high-pitched laugh that she hoped wasn’t too off-putting. This time, however, she forced herself to say something.
“Ah well,” she said sarcastically, “at least now I look the way I sound—like some sort of dumpster fire.”
“Your voice!” Hans began to playfully mock her, “You sound like a beautiful angel! A sound that truly belongs in this church!”
“Ah yes,” Lena laughed snidely, “A true angel. Do you think the Catholics would like the lyrics about the shit, the fighting or the depression more?”
“Maybe you should write some religious music then!” Hans conceded, ignoring her tone, “Something you can scream about. Like Hell?”
