A short story by Ava Shaffer
It took them two days to outsmart The Pentagon. Three days to seize The White House. Four days to buy out all major corporations in America. Five days to storm and conquer every metropolitan city in the United States. Six days to contact and coordinate with their members in other countries to confirm that every major city across the globe was now under their complete control. In total, it took the teenage girls six days to take over the world, for the sake of their favorite boyband.
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This was her fifth Onboarding this week, and if things didn’t run perfectly smoothly she was going to shoot someone in the head. The elevator moved slower than usual, amping up her annoyance at having to teach yet another new recruit how things run here at The Boyband Revolution’s Headquarters.
The Headquarters was located in New York City, inside the new and improved Empire State Building. When the teenage girls took over the world, they renovated the musty old tower into something much more to their liking. Now it had throw pillows, boyband posters covering every wall, and pink carpet. They kept the large glass windows overlooking the city though, those were nice to gaze out of and be reminded of all that they control now.
The girl in the elevator accessed the jukebox on the wall’s touchpad screen and punched in a song, I Want You, Baby. The beautiful chorus of five boys sang out to her through the speakers, their melodic voices soothing her nerves.
Oh baby you’re so kind, I wanna make you mine. Oh baby you’re so bright, with you I know it’s right. Oh baby you’re so pretty, I want to feel your- heart.
Tommy, Ryan, John, Chris, and Kyle. The Bloodlust Boys. The reason for this all, the reason why this building, this revolution, this girl, is here in the first place. Their smooth teenage boy voices filled her heart with glee. Especially when the bridge came with Chris’s solo, she clutched a hand to her heart and felt the lyrics deep in her soul.
The elevator dinged open. Her mood dropped.
Standing outside the sliding metal doors was a short red-headed girl, in the typical Revolution attire of a bulletproof vest, with a The Bloodlust Boys concert t-shirt pulled over it. Her shirt was from their third album, Make You Mine. An underrated classic, in her eyes. Maybe this new recruit wouldn’t be so bad.
“Hello,” she said, reaching her hand out to the fresh-faced ginger. Once their hands connected, the girl yanked the newbie into the elevator, already punching in the code for their next destination in the building.
“Welcome to The Boyband Revolution. I will be your mentor and tour guide. My name is ChrisGirl64, you may call me ChrisGirl64,” she told her sternly. Looking down at the redhead’s nametag, she was pleased to see that the new recruit had already gone through the naming ceremony before coming to Onboarding. Her name was JohnGirl8751.
ChrisGirl64 remembered her naming ceremony like it was yesterday. The day she stepped onto the large silver stage in the basement of The Boyband Revolution’s Headquarters, completely naked except for a photo of her favorite member, Chris, of The Bloodlust Boys painted on her stomach. That was the day she was stripped of her old name, her old life, and given new versions of both. She was the 64th Chris girl to pledge her allegiance, life, and heart to the boyband.
As the elevator doors slid close, JohnGirl8751 regarded her with wide, astonished eyes. “Wow, you must be one of the originals! They told me at the training camp it’s not common to meet someone in the double digits.”
Tucking her short brown hair behind her hair in dignity, ChrisGirl64 replied, “It’s not common. You should be honored.”
The other girl bowed her head in a show of deep respect.
Just then, the elevator doors opened to Floor 2 of The Headquarters revealing a long hallway, the red walls covered in framed photographs. The color kind of clashed with the pink carpet, but the designers of the building were teenagers, after all.
“The first step of Onboarding is always to take you through our history on the ground floor. We believe it is important for new recruits to remember our origin, before we were the world’s highest dominating power,” ChrisGirl64 explained in her tour guide voice.
She led the newbie into the hallway, pausing before a massive fifteen-foot photo of The Bloodlust Boys. Tommy, Ryan, John, Chris, and Kyle. The five teenage boys of the same height and almost exact same facial structure grinned back at them from the frame, white teeth shining. All with various shades of shaggy blonde hair, they wore matching outfits, a mixture of red and black polo shirts with tight skinny jeans. The girls loved those skinny jeans more than they loved world domination, which is saying a lot because they really loved world domination.
The girls paid their respects to the boys, bowing their heads to their gods and blowing a kiss to their favorite member. Then they continued onwards.
“As you, a diehard The Bloodlust Boys fan should know, the boyband began on July 23, 2010, when five of the most beautiful and musically talented men in history joined together to bless us with the gift of their song,” ChrisGirl64 said, waving a hand towards the photos arranged in chronological order on the walls.
There were pictures of when the boys first started, big smiles and boyish haircuts. Then slowly, the photos started to show their rise in popularity. The crowds in the stadiums they performed at started to grow. Girls covered their walls floor to ceiling in The Bloodlust Boys posters, screaming and crying at concerts, spending their entire savings on boyband merchandise and their latest albums. It was all there, displayed proudly on the walls.
They came to a halt before the next photograph, an ornate golden frame causing it to stand out. Inside the intricate frame was a vinyl record of one particular, world-changing, deadly song.
“This is what started it all, isn’t it?” JohnGirl8751 asked, her voice somewhere between horror and awe.
ChrisGirl64 nodded. “March 25th, 2015. The day The Bloodlust Boys released their highest-grossing song, Kill All Men, Baby. The day they called upon us as their loyal servants to kill every man.”
Next to the photo was another touchpad screen, with the song already pulled up. She pressed play and let their harmonic voices take over.
Kill all men, baby. They won’t treat you like I do, baby. Let me love you, baby. Come follow me, baby. You can be part of my new super awesome Boyband Revolution that will take over the world using violent measures, baby.
Next to this photo was a framed photograph of a pretty blonde girl with a button nose and freckles.
“KyleGirl1,” ChrisGirl64 explained. “She was the first to answer the call. She sawed her boyfriend’s legs off with a sharpened CD of The Bloodlust Boy’s popular album, You Belong To Me. She was pretty bummed when the CD could no longer play, though. But she has been Kyle’s right-hand woman ever since, and that keeps her pretty happy.”
“She’s kind of like your- I mean our- leader, right? Under the boys, of course?” JohnGirl8751 asked.
ChrisGirl64 nodded. “Yes, in some ways. But she was not the only one who took drastic measures for the attention of The Bloodlust Boys. These other girls helped us get to where we are now,” she said, motioning toward the rest of the photos.
In one picture stands a smiling girl with curly black hair, TommyGirl3. She’s holding up a bloody The Bloodlust Boys band poster, the edges bent and crumpled. Rumor has it she used that poster to give deep papercuts to her father until he bled out on the kitchen floor. Kind of impressive that the poster didn’t rip that much.
Another photo showcases a curvy girl with braces, pointing to a The Bloodlust Boys shirt she is wearing. RyanGirl8 used that very shirt to strangle all of the male teachers in her school, letting them hang from her makeshift noose until they were dead. She had to retrieve the shirt afterward, of course, it was a limited edition concert tee.
“Wow,” JohnGirl8751 gulped.
“This is only the beginning,” ChrisGirl64 replied with pride.
She walked her through the rest of the gallery, the photographs indicating in excruciating detail how exactly the teenage girls who answered The Bloodlust Boys’ call took over the world. How it began with just the men in their homes, then their cities. How the hundreds of thousands of teenage girls banded together to take down major political figures and law enforcement.
How easy it was for them, the overlooked and picked-on generation of girls, to form an unstoppable, deadly force. Nobody saw it coming, but the teenage girls were not surprised by their own power.
“Let me show you the other floors, so you can get the full picture,” ChrisGirl64 said, and they entered another elevator that took them up to a higher level.
JohnGirl8751 heard the sound of metal clanging and shouting before the doors even opened. Once they did, she had a full view of a large gym, with punching bags, weights, swords, and other high-quality violent weapons. There were four full-sized boxing rings in the sweat-stenched arena, where ripped teenagers were pummeling each other into the ground with a ferocity only exhibited by those who are used to chasing boyband members down streets and fighting their way out of security guards grasps at concerts.
People always thought teenage girls were so weak. When they finally figured out how wrong they were, it was much too late.
“This is the fighting gym, where we train our soldiers. That’s how we control a lot of the world, through brute teenage force. Most people here are RyanGirls, because he likes his women buff,” ChrisGirl64 explained. She pointed toward the right of the elevator, where another doorway leads to an even bigger open space.
“That’s the armory. We keep all of our weapons in The Boyband Revolution’s Headquarters. Machine guns, ammo, grenades, you name it. Took it all from the Army, you should’ve seen their faces when thousands of teenage girls stormed their camps. They were afraid to hit us, I think. Made it all pretty easy,” she said.
JohnGirl8751 took in her surroundings quietly, asking few questions as they walked through the floor. They toured the facility for a while, until a beeping noise sounded from ChrisGirl64’s hip. She quickly pulled an advanced walkie-talking out of her pocket.
“Yes?” she asked impatiently into the device, annoyed with an interruption to the Onboarding.
“We have an issue on The Hacking Floor. Some of the security cameras on the top floors have gone out,” a high-pitched voice echoed from the device.
ChrisGirl64 sighed. “Be right there,” she mumbled. As she led JohnGirl8751 to the upper Hacking Floor, she vented about the call. “This happens all the time and then they fix it without my help. I don’t know why I need to come up there.”
Like the training gym, JohnGirl8751 could hear the floor before she saw it. The sounds of computers dinging, keyboards clacking, and mice clicking hit her ears before she saw the room. But when she did, she was astonished. Rows and rows of high-tech computers lined the blue-tinted space, all with complex code and numbers scrolling across the screens.
“We hire a lot of JohnGirls here, because he likes his women smart. Most JohnGirls are used to coding from when they used to hack into music databases to leak songs early from The Bloodlust Boys,” ChrisGirl64 explained.
“These girls helped us get into The Pentagon, crash the stock market, access powerful people’s personal data from their phones, and control anything that’s digital nowadays. So basically, everything.” She then hurried off to take care of the security camera issue.
JohnGirl8751 surveyed the room on her own, watching the brilliant girls at work. She could see herself working here, hunched over the computers, controlling the world’s markets, websites, data, and people. She was smart too, but not because John likes smart women. In fact, she didn’t give a shit about what John likes. Or what any of the others in The Bloodlust Boys likes. But she was not about to admit that right now.
At that moment ChrisGirl64 returned.“Okay, all sorted. Like I said, just a blip. Something about The Bachelor Pad’s cameras going out. But the boys up there know what they’re doing, so if they wanted the cameras off then I am not concerned. I trust their judgment more than I trust mine,” she said.
“The Bachelor Pad?” JohnGirl8751 asked, her curiosity sparked.
ChrisGirl64 cringed at her slip-up, “I’m not supposed to tell people, only the double-digit girls know about this, but that’s where The Bloodlust Boys stay. Here. On the top floor of The Headquarters.”
“Can we go?” the redhead asked immediately, eager to explore more of this twisted place and see the real reason why this revolution happened in the first place.
“No,” she said firmly, authoritatively. “That’s restricted personnel only and you’re not-” ChrisGirl64 was cut off by the sound of her walkie-talkie beeping again.
“Hey! Hey! Can anyone hear me?” A tinny, frantic, male voice shouted from the device.
The sound of Chris’s husky voice was unmistakable.
“Chris!” ChrisGirl64 shouted into the walkie-talkie. Her face turned bright red and she almost dropped the walkie-talkie from her now shaking hands.“Hi! What do you need? I will get you anything. Anything”
“Please, I’m in The Bachelor Pad, I need y-” The line cut dead.
ChrisGirl64 looked at the redhead, her pulse thrumming. “I guess we are going to The Bachelor Pad.”
ChrisGirl64 gave herself a pep talk in the mirror of the elevator on the ride up to the very top floor. As they passed the countless other floors, she thought about how they were all filled with important information on The Revolution that the newbie needed to learn. But damn the Onboarding, that can wait for another day. She was going to see Chris. Chris. He said he needed her. She had never felt so ecstatic in her entire life.
But when the doors to the elevator slid open to a deathly silent Bachelor Pad, and a metallic smell assaulted her nose, her excitement quickly drained away.
The Bloodlust Boys, always pale but never this pale, were laying in disarray in the center of the room, limbs bent at unnatural angles and blood pooling around their toned, 6-pack-ab-carrying bodies. What was once a sexy mancave with low-dimmed lights, leather couches, record players, and pool tables was now a murder scene.
Tommy, Ryan, John, Chris, and Kyle.
Tommy was lying face down on the carpet, with Ryan splayed awkwardly on top of him, the fabric of his flannel shirt stained dark red where his heart is. John’s typical long golden locks were tinted a nauseating scarlet around his neck from the deep slash across his throat. Chris was lying next to the couch, his face streaked with crimson spilling from a deep gash on his forehead, the blood flowing into his beautiful blue eyes. And on the couch…
Straddling Kyle, the love of millions of teenage girls, on the black leather couch was none other than KyleGirl1, blood coating her hands and her clothes. Kyle’s chest was still, his eyes wide open. There was a long, sinister knife sticking out from the temple of his skull.
“I had to do it,” she wailed in the direction of the girls coming out of the elevator, hot tears pooling down her porcelain face. “He told me he didn’t want me anymore, that he just wanted to spend time with his boys.” She cried again. KyleGirl1 grabbed the roots of her platinum blonde hair, pulling hard, screaming at the top of her lungs.
Before either of them had a chance to move towards her, KyleGirl1 shot to her feet. Her pink The Bloodlust Boys t-shirt was heavy with blood, clinging to her figure. “If I don’t have him, I don’t have anything!” She sobbed, before taking a running leap towards the large glass windows.
Time slowed. Glass shattered. KyleGirl1 plummeted to her death.
Shock overtook the room. JohnGirl8751 looked at ChrisGirl64 to see what she should do. Cry? Scream? Throw herself out the window too? Instead the brunette just mechanically, slowly walked over to the record player next to the blood-splattered leather couch. Leaning over the warm carcass of her once beloved idol, ignoring his congealing blood and open eyes, she lifted the needle off the record player and replaced the vinyl with a new one. The ambient, upbeat pop sounds of The Bloodlust Boy’s hit, It’s All Over, Baby, played softly from the speakers.
That same mechanical walk lead her to the drink cart, where she grabbed the neck of a The Bloodlust Boy’s themed vodka bottle. She moved towards JohnGirl8751 and slouched against the cement wall until she was sitting on the red shag carpet.
“I’ve always loved this song,” the former said. “It’s my favorite.”
It’s all over, baby. You and me. Everything we’ve been through, baby. It’s clear to see. Now that we’re forever apart, baby, where will you be?
She nodded her head solemnly to the cookie-cutter lyrics, a single tear streaking down her face. Even in times of irreversible crisis, The Bloodlust Boys' music could cure all.
JohnGirl8751 slowly lowered herself next to the weeping girl, sitting crisscrossed applesauce.
“Can I tell you a secret?” she said after a while. The room was beginning to smell worse, rotten.
ChrisGirl64 nodded.
“I’m a lesbian.”
ChrisGirl64 didn’t even open her eyes. Unphased, she replied, “Yeah, me too.”
She turned to the girl in shock. “What?” Suddenly, she felt something akin to hope spring into her chest. “So you don’t actually love these guys either?” Her eyes were shining now, the excitement there evident. “I only joined The Revolution because the RyanGirls were about to ransack my city and I needed to get somewhere safe,” she confessed.
ChrisGirl64 finally opened her eyes, but they didn’t reflect the same hopeful light as the other girl’s did. “I love The Bloodlust Boys with every ounce of myself,” she said, her face more grave and serious than ever before.
“Why?” JohnGirl8751 was baffled. “How could you love these guys? How could you follow them, idolize them, worship them? You don’t even want them.”
The silent tears continued flowing from ChrisGirl64’s eyes. She shrugged, the movement sad and defeated.
“They were the first things ever made specifically for me. The first time I ever felt like something was marketed just for me, and girls like me. A boyband, who sings about how much they love and cherish me, how they will treat me right.” She shook her head, “No, not me. Us,” she amended. “They sang about how they would treat us right.” She waved her hand towards herself and then out the door, motioning towards the countless floors below them that were filled with other teenage girls with big hearts and nowhere to put them now.
“That kind of community, that love, that sisterhood,” she sighed. “It was beautiful.” The wistful look on her face made the other girl wonder what she was missing. “What The Bloodlust Boys provided us is irreplaceable.”
JohnGirl8751 still couldn’t wrap her head around this. “But why did you let it go so far? How could you let yourself get brainwashed? How could you kill for them?”
ChrisGirl64 shrugged again, taking a swig from the branded vodka. She didn’t even flinch as it went down.
“I don’t think it’s possible for us to love anything in moderation. All our life we are told to give everything we have to men. Our smiles, our attention, our hearts, our minds, our bodies. We were never taught anything besides total devotion. So why are you surprised that we would follow these boys to the end of the Earth?”
A somber silence fell over them. Neither one of them knew what to say after that. The wistful song came to an end, a final baby uttered over the speaker.
“So what do we do now?” JohnGirl8751 wondered out loud. She didn’t know if she was expecting an answer.
A steeled expression came across ChrisGirl64’s face. She took one last swig from the bottle, glancing longingly at the face of Chris printed on the label. “I heard there’s a new boyband, in Korea. Called The Berserk Boys. I’ll have someone call our contacts there, and we will redirect.”
“Redirect what?” JohnGirl8751 asked.
“The world’s greatest weapon,” ChrisGirl64 replied. “The love and devotion of teenage girls. Ourselves.”