by Fox J Wilde
“Why would I even think that Patrick had that much power?!”
The Dragon Lady kept her composure, as if she knew who Vivika had been talking about all along. Yet there it was…the slightest hesitation. For a second, she seemed to stumble, as if wondering if Vivika had misspoke.
“The stupid Soviets and their stupid mind games!” Vivika wailed quietly, “All they do is threaten, and threaten, and threaten! ‘We’ll kill you if you don’t do this…we’ll torture all your friends if you don’t do that...We’ll kill your parents…We’ll gouge out your eyes…After you get threatened, and beaten, and raped and…and…then Patrick was doing it too, so…” Vivika was crying openly now, which drew glances from a few casual onlookers. Yet inside, she was cheering roundly. “The evil bitch is buying it! Yes!”
“Wait just one second,” Dragon Lady started, but Vivika was having none of it.
“And then Lena…oh, that was just too much.”
“What happened with Lena?” Dragon Lady asked, confused.
“Wait, you don’t know?”
“Well…of…of course, but...” Oh, the sight of Dragon Lady stuttering might have been the most satisfying thing that Vivika had ever seen. Vivika had her in her sights, and was about to pull the trigger. Oh, and how good it was going to feel…oh how good, indeed.
“You didn’t know about Lena?”
“Of course, I knew about Lena.”
“Really?” Vivika asked, feigning confusion.
“What, do you think I’m stupid?”
“Then you knew about her Grandfather?”
“How did you know about her Grandfather?!”
“Because Patrick told me!”
“What did Patrick tell you about her Grandfather?!”
“H-hold on a second.” Vivika stuttered, “That’s what I thought this was all about.”
“What are you talking about, dear girl?” Dragon Lady said in a tone that dangerously bordered on ‘polite’, and Vivika realized that the next words she said would have far-reaching implications. Perhaps even better, the words would likely be taken at face value…at least for the moment. Slowly, Vivika cocked the hammer back, and fired a lie straight into Dragon Lady’s face.
“About Patrick trying to get me to spy on Lena and her Grandfather for the Americans?” And there it was, dawning the way a tsunami dawns on a small fishing town in the middle of the Pacific ocean: the look of complete and utter paradigm apocalypse.
“Excuse m-me?”
“What?” Vivika asked, innocent-as-could-be.
“Y-you…y-you must…you must be absolutely sure about what you just said.”
“W-what did I say?”
“You know what you said!” Dragon Lady yelled, slamming her hands down on the table, which drew the attention of nearly everyone in the small cafe.
“What? About Patrick working for the Americans? Wait, you didn’t know that?!”
“I knew it!” Dragon Lady howled. “I knew that little prick was up to something!”
“Well, that’s why the Soviets were forcing me to spy on Lena and Patrick! Or, at least I assumed so, anyways.”
“Alright, kid, you’ve had your fun,” a voice said, as a man slid into the seat beside Vivika.
This new person was the one that Lena called ‘Red Hat’. Vivika had guessed at least one HVA agent was around somewhere, but she hadn’t figured out where. Now that it was this agent, however, Vivika swallowed her heart. This one was almost as cruel as the Dragon Lady, and probably smarter.
“You heard that, right?” Dragon Lady asked.
“Yes, yes, I heard all of it.”
“Do you think it’s true?!”
“Honestly, no I don’t.” he replied. “I think our little friend here is lying through her teeth.”
“Check…check...” Lena said calmly through the microphone as the crowd cheered.
As soon as Lena had snuck into the venue, she had made her way to the most populated area she could find, which happened to be backstage. The place was frenetic with pre-concert activity. At first, she couldn’t think of anything besides Patrick. He had to be somewhere—especially since he knew precisely where she was going to be in less than an hour. She genuinely considered running as far West as she could possibly get and…well, she didn’t really have much of a plan after that. Of course, once the Dead Weights showed up, well, she almost forgot her troubles.
Strangely enough, Matt was nowhere to be seen; yet the Dead Weights seemed to be rather nonplussed about the whole arrangement. Honestly, Lena couldn’t tell if they were in on the whole situation, or if they were just going with some artistic flow that she herself wasn’t privy to. It may have been a few good, solid hits off of the backstage peace pipe—but as long as they had a lead singer, it seemed, they didn’t particularly care who it was. A few cuss-laced introductions, a few hits of teen spirit, a few shots of liquid courage later, and the troubles were absolutely forgotten for the moment. The plan was simple: just make it up as they went along. At first, Lena reacted to this plan with a note of horror. Yet, as the hits off of the peace pipe became more frequent, and the familiar wooziness it imparted settled pleasantly at the base of her neck, well…I mean, you know…whatever, man.
Soon, the crowd began rifling into the auditorium, and the heat emanating from the thick crush of bodies signified the row that was soon to follow. This brought them to this precise moment, where Lena was having a full-on argument with the sound-engineer through the speaker system that only she could hear.
“Give me just a little more.” he laughed.
“Check! Check!” Lena said louder.
“Alright, look,” the sound engineer said through the monitors, “you are about to make history here. But I’m not letting you sing until you sack up and scream your guts out.”
“Sack up?” Lena said loudly through the microphone, much to the aplomb of the crowd who didn’t hear the other half of the conversation.
“Sack up! Sack up! Sack up!” the crowd began chanting loudly.
“Oh, you people on that side of the Wall probably don’t know what that means.” the sound engineer responded, “Well, now look at what you started.”
“I’m sorry?” Lena ask-apologized, meaning to ask him to repeat himself. Instead, it was the crowd who must have assumed she was taunting them. Thus, they repeated themselves louder.
“Sack up! Sack up! Sack up!”
“I can see why you’re famous, you epic little monster. Now just sing some shit and I’ll figure it out.”
Lena looked to this side and that, checking to make sure that the band was still backing her up. Quite the contrary: one was ham-fisting his bass guitar while drinking a fifth of vodka, the guitarist was flirting with a cute girl at the front of the stage, and the drummer…well, it looked like he was sniffing a white powder off of his snare drum.
“What a weird thing to do.” Lena thought to herself before motioning at the guitarist.
“What the hell do you want?!” he yelled at her.
“Play something, you asshole!” Lena screamed louder.
“Don’t you tell me what to do, shit-head!”
“See what happens if you don’t!” she threatened.
“Oh, I can’t wait to find out!”
“See if you like what...”
Just then, the bassist and drummer exploded into a sonic onslaught so terrible, it threatened to confuse even the gods of the avant-garde, who no-doubt looked on with a sense of pride. Lena, not having the slightest clue what key this was supposed to be in, resigned to simply scream as loud as she could through her microphone.
“Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh!” she wailed in the key of bullshit. The crowd attempted to meet her halfway, by finishing the sentence she didn’t know she had begun, as the guitarist began flailing away on his wooden scepter. As if compelled by some unh
oly demon, the crowd became a roiling thing, coalescing into a dangerous, three-dimensional pogo of fists and feet alike. As the band recognized the crowd’s dire straits as a thing to encourage wholeheartedly, the battle-clad star-dogs championed for a tilt in the lists, with no expense spared.
Safety went from suggestion to afterthought as blood began to boil. And with that, multiple members of the throng sought momentary refuge onstage, only to launch themselves ass-first back into a sea of hands that promised to catch them—or, at least, attempt to. Those that made it were thrown rearward, whereas the ones that didn’t…well, they were somewhere, and that seemed good enough for the moment. As the swelter increased and sweat poured out of the hearts of her adoring public, Lena raised her fists in formidable salute to the challenge ahead. Yet as her vision closed in, and color after color faded into monochrome, Lena finally realized that she was still eliciting her first scream of the night. “Ah well.” she thought to herself, “I haven’t tried passing out at the beginning of a show yet.”
She awoke to a mystery. Hands were utterly everywhere, covering a sea of darkened faces that screamed at her with such religious fervor, she damn near thought herself some sort of Messiah. Yet as she came to realize that she was upside down, she subsequently realized that she was crowd-surfing. Somehow, in her haste to pass out from lack of oxygen, she had neglected to die onstage. Now, here she was being passed around the room like some holy effigy, her own battle standard and badge of royalty. The sound of it all was overwhelming, and her nose filled with the scent of blood, sweat, and glorious halitosis…maybe a tooth or two flying across her field of vision, if those had scents.
And then like that, she was on the ground. Despite the violence, the crowd paid the respect due her high social status as their rightful Monarch, and set her down gently. This was an offense that would not go unpunished, so long as she was in charge.
As the music wailed behind her, the crowd stopped. They knew they had erred against her royal countenance by not killing her where she stood. Loyal subjects down to the man, they bowed their heads in preparation of her decree for retribution. She raised her hands above her head, and lowered them slowly, until they were outstretched the way Moses would part the red sea…and so it did part, with half the crowd in front, and half the crowd behind.
“Come on you ingrates!” she howled, “You know that’s not good enough!”
The crowd in front of her contracted into the closest wall, nuts to butts, until oxygen itself couldn’t squeeze in between the cracks. The crowd behind her contracted into their wall in such a fashion as to become a neutron star of such potential energy, it threatened to rip the planet apart. Anticipation grew, tempers flared, nostrils snorted and eyes met their opposition in preparation for the massacre. In time, the history books of the future would no doubt claim this as the genocide that topped them all: the war between that wall and the other one over there. But it became readily apparent that this description wasn’t nearly good enough as Lena lowered her hands to her sides and blared, “Kill each other!”
Lena, caught in the middle, was hardly spared the brunt of the occasion as the two walls of death connected. She felt things inside of her shift out of place, and things crack that shouldn’t have. Yet, despite how very bad this idea was in the first place, immured within a roiling pit of human disaster, she decided to improvise. Like that, her fists met faces, and her steel-toed bludgeons connected with far-softer shins, until she was sure that the blood covering her wasn’t merely her own. She owed it to them, after all…a good leader knows her place. She knew that the only right way of placing her slaves into harm’s way was for her to accept the greatest portion of danger for herself.
The crowd recognized this, and thanked her with uppercuts aimed to end her life. She met every attempt with headbutts and flying knees, round-housing her way back onto the stage. It was far less an attempt to save what little life she had left, and more of a red-carpet walk back to her throne. They would not topple her this day, and they knew it.
As quickly as it began, the moment ended with the band stopping as one. Magically, Lena was onstage at the precise moment this happened. There was no cheering. There was no breathing. There was neither sneeze, nor cough, nor meaningful signs of life as The Mad Bunny and the Dead Weights looked out into the conquered kingdom.
And then it happened again—the overwhelming feeling of…well, whatever it was. It was a crazed, intoxicated, adrenaline-soaked feeling of impulse welling up in her chest like a fountain of inspiration; the dope-soaked culmination of the moment in its entirety, and all the energy that the crowd produced funneling into her, to be transfigured into a catharsis of painted words. She alone knew what must be said; she alone knew how to say it. Thus, with reckless abandon and forethought to the wind, she opened up and channeled.
“Germany!” she howled, and they howled back.
“I said Germany!!!” she howled louder.
“You had one job.” Matt said, as the crowd roared, “You had one fucking job, and you couldn’t even do that.”
“I delivered her, Matt.” Patrick said, motioning towards the stage, “There she is!”
The crowd was packed into the large auditorium like a bunch of moshing sardines. Yet a few feet of space was graciously imparted to the few non-participants that stood at the rear walls, holding drinks, making out or trying to have fruitless discussions. Patrick and Matt used this as an opportunity to not only keep an eye on their mutual charge, but have their clandestine meeting.
“No, no, no, no.” Matt shook his head with contempt. “You didn’t deliver her…she showed up. Tell me, if she hadn’t decided to come here, but had instead run West, then what?”
“Well, she wouldn’t have…”
“Then what?”
“I mean, it wasn’t...”
“Then what, you idiot?” Matt repeated. “The question isn’t going to go away because you want it to. You fucked up and you got lucky that she didn’t bolt! Be some semblance of a man, drink your grog, and own up to it.”
Patrick paused for a second. He knew that Matt was once again dominating him, and he was once again allowing it. Oh, how he hated this man. “I don’t know,” he snapped. “Why is she so important to you, anyways?”
“I’m just about done explaining things to you.” Matt said, viciously. “So far, it’s been a pretty clear narrative of you not following instructions, and then subsequently messing things up. Now, because you’ve messed things up yet again, here we stand with me having to fix everything, as usual. Tell me this…why should we keep our word and bring you over?”
“Oh, like you were going to anyway,” Patrick said acidly.
“Excuse me?” Matt said, surprised.
“You can’t expect me to believe you were going to make good on your word. Not now…not after how complicated things have gotten.”
“Then why are you here, Patrick?”
“I’m here because…”
“Patrick. Why are you here?”
“Because...” Patrick attempted to restart, before being cut off again.
“I’ll tell you why you are here, you idiot.” Matt said with a tone that was becoming angrier by the moment. “Lena is here on good faith…a gesture on the part of your case officer, while he holds Vivika as collateral for the deal that is currently transpiring.”
“What deal is...” Patrick began to ask, before being run over by Matt who was now openly yelling.
“You, unlike her, are here solely to make amends. You are here because you did something that is beyond forgiveness…and there are certain ways that reparations are to be made.”
“What in the blazing fuck are you talking about?!” Patrick said, before he heard the voice of Lena screaming through the speakers, as the crowd silenced to hear her.
““Germany!” she began, and the crowd roared so loud that Patrick’s heart skipped.
/> “I said Germany!!!” she yelled again, and again the crowd roared with such ferocity, Patrick nearly pissed himself.
“Here we stand…brother with brother, sister with sister…hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder…and yet, do we really stand together? I say no!”
Silence swept over the crowd then, as confusion over the turn of events caught them abruptly. ‘What is she saying?’ they all seemed to ask, ‘what is she getting at?’ Ignoring their confusion, she continued her onslaught.
“I say ‘no’ to this preposterous claim that we, as one whole, stand together. For if we truly did, we would not merely be gathered as a group of common interests, as if to congratulate ourselves on holding equally dear a set of nuances and trivialities. We would not be exclusionary, as if to keep any challenging opinions at a comfortable arm’s length, while judging the acceptability of our neighbor by his performance of the secret handshake! No!
“If we truly stood together, we would rally under the banner of a meaningful cause! A cause that is just; a cause that is universal in its declaration; a cause that sings into the hearts of all men; a cause that transcends color, creed, religion, culture, lifestyle, and even language! It would be a cause to echo throughout the ages! A cause that would make the great, the powerful, and the evil alike tremble in fear at the very mention of our name!
“Such a cause would require no secret handshake! It would need no explanation, nor slogan, nor logo, nor creed. It would be such that even the very mention of it would manifest arms everywhere a word of it was uttered! It would be righteous through and through, so as to cause the farmer to lay down his hoe, and the miner to lay down his pick. The wife, the husband, the old and the young—all would forsake their individual identities to take up arms against the known enemy! Our justice would be swift; our judgment merciless! Our swords would be sharp, and our cuts true, to set the heads of our enemies upon the highest spikes of the burning battlements!”
The crowd roared in defiance, resonating with her words. It was as if a grand general was standing between them and an opposing army, giving strength to their limbs for an ensuing slaughter. Victory was upon them, and everyone longed for the taste of blood. Yet Lena was not about to let them taste it, as she continued to cuckold the masses.
