24, Rave

“This noise is what a Walmart full of cocaine sniffing bull elephants having an orgy might sound like.”  Dale O’Connor hated club music but he his body moved to the beat involuntarily. “I refuse to believe that this is even real music. It has to be a practical joke being played on all twenty thousand of us.”

“Do you ever feel like we’re all trapped in an alternate reality?”  Special agent Trent Murdock was wearing hot pink leather bikini underwear and cheap flip flops.  He waved bright neon glow sticks and moved in rhythm with the massive audience.

“Look who you’re talking to.”  Murdock’s best friend and fellow special agent Dale O’Connor was wearing a tuxedo and sunglasses even though the sun had been set for over an hour.

Murdock’s mostly naked body was decorated with body paint that gleamed a beautiful purplish color in the ambiance of the black light coming from the stage.  “I mean, for real, Doc.  What’re your thoughts on the possibility of this life just being a cruel dream simulation for some advanced alien species?”

“You’re starting to ask the right questions.”   O’Connor stared through his sunglasses at his hands.  He was fascinated like a child discovering something new, but he didn’t mention it.  “Soon, you’ll see the lies all around you.”  

“Love’s not a lie.  I know that now.”

The electronic dance music thumped hard and the subwoofer sound waves radiated through their bodies.  Murdock seemed to be in a happy mental place, but O’Connor’s mind was getting really wound up with worry and tension.  This was the perfect time to share his inner conspiracy nut job theories.  “You’re being held down, brother, but fear not.  The resistance is near.”

Trent Murdock twirled and twisted to the beat of the loud music.  “I’m seeing it all for what it is,” Murdock said with a breathy tone.  “Life really is about love.  That’s it.  Love is the only thing that matters.”

“Unless we’re in a simulation run by aliens.”  O’Connor was dead pan as he spoke.  He looked intensely at his friend but didn’t seem to focus on his face.  “If that’s the case, we need to find and destroy our alien overlords.”  He believed every word that came out of his own mouth even though he couldn’t physically feel his cheeks or tongue anymore.

The music festival ambiance was joyous.  People danced and waved glow sticks as the beat hypnotized the crowd.  Murdock and O’Connor were on a relaxing vacation in Florida.  The sand was still warm well after the sun had gone down, and the massive stage was set up so the night time ocean filled the background view.  Both men had each consumed a pill of ecstasy several hours earlier for the first time ever in their lives, and it was affecting each of them very differently.

“We shouldn’t just assume that they’re enemies right away, Doc.  We need to establish communication and learn what kind of spiritual teachings about love that they can share.”  Murdock lost his concentration and stared wide eyed at a green glow stick he was holding.  “The beauty is incredible,” he muttered.

“We don’t know if they’re biological like us or if they’re some other form of energy or matter.  Regardless, we must find out and in the case that they’re adversarial, I’ll slice their alien throats.”  O’Connor hadn’t smiled for four hours, but his body subconsciously moved side to side with relative coordination to the groove of the music.  

“What if they don’t have throats?  What if they’re just energy masses that emit pure love beams?”

“In that case, they’re not our enemy.  But in the scenario we have been discussing for the past five minutes, the alien overlord is an oppressive force.  Whatever the case, I’ll make a bomb out of anything in this universe.  If the bad guys are made of energy, I’ll figure out how to make a quark grenade or something.  Watch out.  Boom goes the dynamite when I’m around.”

O’Connor was looking manic and mimicked throwing a hand grenade, but then he looked deeply confused as he contemplated how small a quark hand grenade might actually be.  Murdock smiled widely and pointed at his best friend’s face, laughing.  O’Connor shrugged.  “It’s my fate, Murdock.  I can’t help it.  I’m a soldier and I’ll die fighting the enemy.”  A bead of sweat dripped from O’Connor’s hair line to his lower lip.

“Doc, the fabric of space and time would rip apart if the underlying plane of light and love wasn’t holding it all together.  It’s all possible because of The Source, brother.”

O’Connor’s mouth felt dry.  “Jesus, Murdock, yes, all life shares the same DNA building blocks.  We share something like sixty percent of the same DNA as a dandelion, but I’m starting think you personally share a much higher percentage than others.”

“Oh, I assure you that the dandelion plant spirit has an intelligence that we can learn from if we only listen.”  Trent Murdock touched his own nipples and inhaled as if he’d been dumped into cold water.  “That tickles!” he said to himself.

“I seriously hate this music.”  At that moment, a group of very muscular frat boys walked by.  The biggest one bumped into O’Connor with his shoulder.  The secret agent was knocked backwards but stayed on his feet.  “Oh my,” O’Connor muttered.  “No need for that kind of stuff now, lads.”

The frat boy was clearly high pills or powders, O’Connor couldn’t tell right off.  What was clear was that he and his friends were assholes.  “Yeah, pal?  What’re you gonna do about it, pussy?”

Trent Murdock had been staring at the light show on the stage, but something in his subconscious could sense when trouble was brewing.  “Gentlemen!” Murdock called out.  “Are you looking for fun, or are you looking for a fight?”

There were ten total young men in their early twenties, all drunk mixed with other rocket fuel chemicals.  O’Connor sized them up and said, “oh man, this isn’t going to end well.”

“Damn right, buddy!” yelled the big frat boy.  “I”m gonna kick yer ass!”

O’Connor took a very long blink, then smiled widely.  “Oh, no, you’ve got me all wrong.  I’m not talking about us being in a rough place.  I’m talking about y’all.  This isn’t going to end well for any of you.”  The frat boy became very aggressive and puffed his chest out to shove it at O’Connor.  “Yeah, there’s only ten of you.  Oh well.  If you had twenty or more, then you may have had a chance.”

“You wanna fucking go, buddy?”  

The invitation for a fight sealed the young man’s fate.  

Without warning, Murdock lunged in front of O’Connor and threw a very powerful left jab at the man.  The force crushed the frat boys jaw and he went down howling.  Doc yawned as Murdock jumped over the man and lunged for the next two guys in the group.  The two men hadn’t expected the speed of this attack and their heads connected as Murdock smashed them together as if he were some super hero in a cheesy nineteen seventies kung fu movie.  

“Show off,” said O’Connor sarcastically.

“A little help here would be nice!”  Trent Murdock was a damn good boxer and not half bad at other mixed martial arts.  He blocked a few drunken punches and countered with a few combinations that put three more wasted frat boys to the ground.  The crowd was backing away from the violence and bouncers in bright yellow coats were running for the action.  O’Connor stood lazily and when it was done he’d watched Murdock knock down eight of the ten men.  The last two of the group wisely ran away as the bouncers converged on the scene.  

“Ma’am!” Murdock said loudly to the approaching bouncer, “I can explain!  These men wanted to steal my underwear and I had to use force to defend myself!  I feel violated!”

The ecstasy buzz was so foreign and strange to O’Connor that he had a very difficult time formulating sentences, but he had his mind set on talking their way out of this situation.  “I hate club music and if I wasn’t high on drugs, I’d have left long ago.”

The main bouncer was a large woman who stood several inches taller than O’Connor.  She reached out to grab O’Connor’s arm but as she grasped, O’Connor twisted his body to where is arm moved out of the way.  She grabbed air.  In that same motion, he’d dropped a handful of instant smoke bombs that smelled of uric acid.  The piss smell made the bouncers recoil with closed eyes to escape the smoke filled the air.

In the following ten seconds of hazy confusion, Murdock and O’Connor disappeared.  When the smoke cleared, the bouncers were all standing dumbfounded. They glanced around for the man in the pink speedo accompanied by a man in a tuxedo wearing sunglasses. 

As if the agents had anticipated that they might need to change their appearance, O’Connor had managed to slip Murdock a long sleeve shirt that he had folded in the pocket of his tuxedo along with some thin cargo shorts.  In a handful of seconds, Murdock had gotten naked and buried the pink speedos in the sand, then slipped on the clothes.  

In the same amount of time, O’Connor had shed the tux and now was wearing a tank top that said “Ginny’s Gin Joint” advertising a bar that really looked more like a glorified cabin by a mountain lake.  His sunglasses were gone and he was wearing a bright orange bandana on his head.

The costume change had all happened in the span of only a few seconds while there was smoke everywhere, and then the agents were able to sneak back into the crowd as if nothing had happened.  The music played loudly, the bouncers ran around in confusion, and eight very frat boys lay on the ground in pain.

As if none of that had even occurred, O’Connor commented, “Do you think we’ll do anything exciting while we’re here in Florida?”

The feel good buzz was radiating through Murdock’s body.  “Yes.  I think we should get a plane for Porter as a token of our appreciation.”  

“Or we could get her a gift certificate to a taco truck or something.”

Team Whiskey had been working hard for several months and this vacation was a much needed time of rest and recovery, but these agents were dysfunctional.  They needed to be in the action at all times or life didn’t feel right.  

“We should’ve joined Miller and Lorenz on the southern Columbia mission,” lamented Murdock.  “I love them.  They’re such amazing people.”

A bouncer ran behind O’Connor and spoke into a walkie talkie.  “No sign of them here, boss!”  The bouncers were still looking for the agents.   

Completely unconcerned, O’Connor brought back up the conversation.  “Miller and Lorenz are prisoners in this material dimension that we simply refer to as the universe, just like you and me.  We’re all connected, and I’m going to break us free.”

As if he understood ever word his best friend was saying, Trent Murdock simply said, “love is the glue that holds the universe together, and god dammit I love killing bad guys.  We gotta get back to work after tonight.”  He touched his nipples again to see if they were still ticklish.  They were.

In the distance, a DJ bounced up and down while the beat thumped powerfully through overpowered speakers, but in reality the DJ didn’t do shit other than hit PLAY on an iPad as opposed to spending years to learn and master an instrument and then write his own material, only to go out and live the hard life of an independent desperate musician, gigging at festivals and music clubs while socially begging for positive validation at every opportunity for the rest of his needy ass life.