Suddenly, Matt ran over to her, guitar clutched in a death grip, and leaned into her microphone, screaming, “The Mad-fucking-Bunny! Wooo-oo-ooo!!!” The crowd responded so loudly, Lena swore she would pee herself.
As the crowd began chanting, “Zust-immen! Zust-immen! Zust-immen!” she looked beside her to see Vivika blowing kisses at everyone. She looked behind her, to see Vortecx twirling a stick with a wild grin on her face. Matt, of course, was egging the crowd further on by pointing his guitar out from his crotch, like a… well, you know… and pumping it as if… well, you get the idea.
“Zust-immen! Zust-immen! Zust-immen!”
“You folks ready to rock it?” the engineer’s voice cut through the monitors.
“I g-guess…” Lena said, hoping the crowd didn’t pick up on that.
“Well, get to it then. You’re all good to play.”
Lena stood there, holding her microphone awkwardly. Her feet were nailed to the floor—where did she even begin?! She felt wholly unprepared for this experience. Sensing her disquiet, Matt strolled over, full of swagger and confidence, and leaned into her with a smile.
“Just shout, ‘hey assholes’… they’ll love that.” he whispered.
“Hey assholes!!!” she shouted, on autopilot.
The roar of the crowd filled her soul then and she easily fell back into her familiar role. She was now absolutely in charge of the situation, and everyone in the crowd would pay homage to her, or else.
“Das ist mein fickin lied!”
As if a scene from a military movie, Lena the general dropped her arm. It was in no ways less violent than the way an executioner would drop an axe, or a nuclear warhead would drop molten fallout onto the heads of an unsuspecting public. Within milliseconds, the pent-up violence of the crowd surged into a wanton display of pure, unadulterated Armageddon. Hundreds of bodies smashed into each other, with less and less living onlookers by the minute. Matt’s guitar wailed in a cacophony of dissonance as Vortecx slammed his drums with the force of Odin himself. And those keyboards… oh, they were so perfect, it hurt.
With no warning whatsoever, Lena was upside down. Overcome with emotion, and refusing to let the crowd establish a pecking order without her royal permission, she launched herself head over heels into the seething mass. Between five and fifty pairs of hands grabbed her, groping and supporting her frame as she threw ankles and elbows their way. She felt a solid connection with a skull or two, and she noticed a few fists reciprocate. This wasn’t going to be easy… but it was a fight she was fully prepared to win the living shit out of.
The screaming mass slowly rocked her over towards the stage, practically launching her back on. Recovering onto wobbly legs, she nearly threw herself out again. The crowd raised their hands to catch her… and she smiled at her joke. Grabbing her microphone, she began howling into it with all the ingloriousness of a rabid banshee. She threw all the force she had into it, fully intent on shredding the sound system. As if sensing her challenge, the engineer boosted her vocals—he wasn’t the least bit afraid of her… yet. But she noted his response to confirm their newfound rivalry. By the end of the night, he would be licking her sneakers in tribute. Vivika was in the crowd now—she had missed a section, but no one cared. As she flitted over the groping mob, she grinned wildly, immensely pleased with herself. Lena shouted happily at her, but was nearly shocked when Vivika disappeared under the surface, “She can take care of herself.” Lena thought. She was a fighter, that one.
“This is awesome!!!” the voice of Matt screamed into her ear.
She turned to witness him flailing his guitar about as if struggling to kill the thing. Realizing quickly that his instrument wasn’t going to die that easily, he kicked his leg out, and slammed the strings so hard, she feared it would snap in half with sheer force. It didn’t die—he slammed harder. Yet his face told a story that his guitar must have feared, that by the end of the night the poor instrument would lay crushed and broken onstage—along with four others that would likely meet the same fate.
Vivika finally surfaced. The crowd had attempted to spread out so she could safely recover, yet she was having none of this. She made her disapproval clear by pushing, shoving and other general acts of sweaty misbehavior. Luckily, she had seen fit to change her shoes beforehand and was well prepared for her dance in the melee. She was bleeding from somewhere on the side of her head, and she winced as if a rib were broken. Yet she stood in the middle of the frozen mosh pit, beating her chest like a gorilla and screaming at the top of her lungs. It dawned on Lena that she might now have a worthy challenger. By the end of the night, she aimed to disprove that roundly.
As the sonic onslaught charged on, gaining steam by the second, a profound realization dawned on Lena the way the smoke had dawned in the green room less than a half-hour before: This right here… this was exactly where she wanted to be, and precisely what she wanted to be doing. This moment, this feeling… nothing else could possibly compare. Not sex, not drugs, not any interaction that a human was capable of manifesting with people, creatures, nature or otherwise, nor any amount of profundity gleaned from any spiritual practice would taste as savory sweet.
Once Vivika was back onstage, the four musicians fused. Lena looked to her left, to her right, and behind. Four had become one entity, separated only by the individual parts they had to play. But just as a note is never separated from the parts that bolster it, they fought as one, assailing the crowd with small-team tactics worthy of any military unit. They were the elite; they were the powerful.
The guitars preyed upon the unwary few, slicing them to bits for a readily digestible meal. The drums smashed through the many blockades of inhibition set up by years of vile repression. Behold, a brazen he-bitch brandishing battle-drums for the violent and un-appeased. The keyboards were much less a thing of wire and wood, and far more the harp of a fifth-dimensional being who pulled at the strings of its lessers, forcing the flat earth down into the dawning of a new, more three-dimensional age.
She looked out to the crowd now. They knew her, and she knew them. No, she didn’t know their names, but names were meaningless anyway—they were nothing, but decrepit titles designed to denigrate the oneness of bodies colliding in tandem, “There…” she thought as she spied one young man flipping and turning on a pile of elevated hands, “That one has found his place… he is just like me.” Like a puppet attached to musical strings, Lena realized that she had complete control of the man. If the beat thumped harder, so would he; so would everyone. If the tone soared, they would all reciprocate in kind. Here, in a temporary existence forged with every second of the past leading up to it, the only thing worth fearing was the future. For this was the cult of the moment—the religion of the now.
As she sweat and screamed, pouring every ounce of her soul into the performance, she straining her vocal chords and her body to the limit. Yet she relished every bit of the moment. Like the church performances before, and against all odds, she had rejoined her commune, her kin, and her clan. Soaked to the bone with the apparition of fate and wanderlust apparent, the divines had catapulted her into a stark coalescence—one of marked simplicity and subliminal refuge. She was home once again. The prodigal daughter had returned. This… this… was how she wanted to feel for the rest of her life.
As the first song drew to a close, the lights went dark, and the band was now dimly lit by the glow of the amplifier lights behind them. The crowd roared, and Lena was honestly relieved to see a blood-covered Vivika still standing next to her.