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 unholy 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 alclass="underline" 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.