“Germany?” Lena howled, and the crowd roared in response.
“GERMANY?!” she howled louder. The crowd stomped and roared louder as well.
At that moment, Lena felt something. It was something different and hard to describe. It felt like violence—the insatiable desire to just absolutely wreck something. Yet it also felt like invincibility, as if she was free to commit any atrocity she wished, in full view of everyone. Perhaps it was the ‘full view of everyone’ part that really fueled her up. Not only was everyone hinging on her every word and every movement, but they were giving their energy to her—using her as a siphon. She was now the avatar of the moment. A unique creature with the responsibility of converting the crowd’s anticipation into a release of orgasmic catharsis.
Words welled up inside of her then like divine poetry, with neither thought, consideration or intent. She wasn’t putting a phrase here, a stanza there, or cobbling together a cogent theme to haphazardly express the general feeling… no. Every utterance was already written for her, as if burned into the lining of her soul, ripe for the taking and begging for the reading.
“Here we all are!” she began, “All one people… one strong and resolute family, all on one side of that little Wall over there: an utterly meaningless symbol of oppression. Utterly meaningless, just like every symbol the world over. They all lay under our feet, trampled, like filthy napkins discarded after a glorious meal well-devoured. ‘They’ have many things to say. Things about ‘falling in line’, or ‘doing for your country’, and threatening us with retribution if we don’t. All empty threats, like ashes falling on a lonely desert road… all empty threats, like empty magazines loaded into toy rifles.”
“Like the Wall… like the bomb… like the cell… like the shackle… they aim to oppress; to silence; to beat down into submission. But we will not submit, and we will not be silenced. The oppressors oppress no longer. For it is here that we shall make our stand… it is here that we shall make our voices heard. It is here that us—the chosen few, the miscreant youth, the resolute unwanted and the utterly incorrigible—it is right here that we make our case.
“To the Stasi, to the Politburo, to the Soviets, to the Americans, and to all forms of oppression the entire world over, hear our words, so that you may understand our thinly-veiled threat: no matter where you are, or how you try to enslave us with your guns, or your bombs, or your riot sticks… we the people have a simple message for you, and our message is simply this: you can fuck right the hell off.”
“Mad Bunny! Mad Bunny!” the crowd answered, “Mad Bunny! Mad Bunny!”
As Lena looked about the crowd, simultaneously filled with the fluids of victory and exhausted at the effort, she chanced to look over at Vivika. Vivika simply stared at her, wide-eyed, as if seeing her for the first time in her life. She didn’t say anything out loud, but Lena recognized the impression that she had just seen the real Lena. Vivika was awe-struck.
“Where the fuck am I?” Jakob whispered to himself as he curled up into a ball, holding his head.
The alleyway was dark with night and filled with the stench of rotting garbage from the nearby dumpsters. Fluids and grime of unknown origin clung to walls and asphalt alike, with various microbes finding a new home in his various wounds. Jakob was covered in cuts and bruises. Minor though they might be, they had begun to disturb him. He didn’t remember how he found his way here. Truthfully, he didn’t remember much of anything. He simply clutched his head, trying desperately to massage the searing headache that had formed only minutes before. “The hell… where the hell am I? What the fuck is going on?!”
No matter how hard he tried to find his voice, though, it proved to be as futile as finding his feet. He was stuck here, shivering with cold and weakness alike, as if all the energy had been sapped from him in the previous hours of… whatever had happened.
Incongruent images flashed in his mind’s eye, with large groups of people laughing, a fist fight he thought he had been involved in, loud music coming from absolutely everywhere, and chairs being thrown every which way. He couldn’t figure out which parts were real, but he legitimately began to hope that the more violent, chaotic parts were more a creation of his addled imagination than actual reality.
“The hell… what the hell did I do…”
“Don’t try to move.” a voice answered, surprising Jakob.
“Who the… who the fuck are you?!”
Jakob couldn’t focus correctly, but as he rolled towards the voice to get a better view, he saw a pair of boots standing impatiently in the soggy grime of the alleyway asphalt. He turned his body to look up, and up, and up… and saw particularly unimportant-looking pants, matched with a nondescript looking jacket. Yet when Jakob looked at the young man’s hands, he managed just a little more focus. The man held a small pistol, and it had a long, slim tube on the end of it.
“I’m telling you,” the voice said, “Don’t try to get up. Let’s not make this any more difficult than it already is.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?!” Jakob howled, managing to rally his voice.
“Shhhh… let’s keep our voices down, eh?”
Recognition dawned then. It was Victor, the mild-mannered tour manager. And he looked… well, triumphant in a way.
“The fuck is wrong with me? Why the hell can’t I fuckin’ move?!” Jakob cried.
“Because I laced your beer with PCP.”
“The hell… why the bloody hell would you do a thing like that?!”
“Because you needed to disappear.” Victor responded, “You were right about one thing: your band is The Mad Bunny, and you are as unnecessary to that arrangement as a thing could possibly be. Especially since we had a new guitarist in mind.”
“Oh, what the fuck…” Jakob began to cry, as he clutched his head.
“We had a purpose for your band, and that purpose required you to run off into the night so that we could engineer a meeting. You performed admirably, and for that I should thank you.”
Jakob was sobbing then. He felt betrayed, useless and angry; but more than those emotions, he felt afraid… what was their tour manager doing with that pistol in his hand?!
“I’m not going to pretend I relish this,” Victor knelt down beside Jakob, “This was never my favorite part of the job. I have a female counterpart that would absolutely love this…” then, he added with a laugh, “Of course, she would probably like cannibalism. But no, I try to be decent about these sorts of unseemly things.”
Jakob cried, fearing for his life. Yet, through his horror, he still managed to hear a soggy plop of a hand-sized cardboard box right next to his head. Focusing in on the source of the sound, he saw it—a cigarette box, with one smoke and a box of matches left in it.
“Go ahead. I don’t want there to be any hard feelings between us.”
“The fuck are you talking about? What do you fuckin’ mean ‘hard feelings’?”
“Look,” Victor responded coolly, “Either smoke the cigarette or don’t. I’m just saying, if I were you, I would use this moment wisely. You never know what could happen next.”
Despite his fear, Jakob fumbled for the box, grabbed the cigarette and lit it. He drew in the life-giving smoke, and immediately felt somewhat better about everything.