Cry Havoc

Chapter 1
Tigers

Chapter Description: from Book One: Domination

monday 18 september - 12:15 AM

The moon was just past its first quarter. Maker’s Point, a quiet, upper-middle-class town in the Midwestern United States, had been enjoying nigh-flawless weather as the waning summer plodded inexorably towards the hamlet’s treasured autumn. The crescent in the sky, then, glowing with solar reflection, shone down upon the still neighborhood roads like a perspicacious oracle, its guiding light periodically interrupted only by wisps of ethereal cloud cover, marching in silent step across the sky as would a parade of ghosts, the engine behind a mission mere men could only ponder as they concomitantly lamented the bondage that assigned them in perpetuity to an utterly unremarkable earth. Crickets could be heard. But, in a startled shift reminiscent of the turn of a radio’s dial, the song of the insects ultimately gave way to the tinkling of metallic chains.

The Tigers were on the prowl.

They were a gang, inasmuch as a trio of high school seniors could be referred to as such. MS-13 they weren’t. Domination is a relative quality, though, and, as far as the baloney-and-mayonnaise-on-Wonder-Bread community of Maker’s Point was concerned, the Tigers comprised a true menace. They were thieves and they were vandals. Rumor had it that their leader, Impulse, was possessed of a violent streak, but the whispers that crisscrossed the asphalt grids of the town’s prefabricated subdivisions went perpetually unsubstantiated. Impulse was no idiot, and he preferred to indulge his darkest demons bereft of the eyes of incidental witnesses. And, in the offchance such delinquency were to be witnessed, Impulse was all but certain that he could rely on a bystander’s silence. Misdeeds were forgotten almost as quickly as they were written to memory. Such was the sphere of influence the Tigers exerted on a population too naïve to realize that they tiptoed on eggshells among a handful of youngsters powered solely by ego and swagger.

Of the three, Recon most appreciated the outfits. The de facto “uniform” of the Tigers, as it were, appealed to most of the senses. The neighborhood’s atmosphere had been pierced by the harmony of stainless steel chains, a dozen and a half in all (four per boy hung limp from their pitch-black leather jackets, jangling along with an additional two draped along their blue jeans). If the metal sang, the percussion was provided by the stiff heels of each teenager’s equally black cowboy boots clattering upon the pavement with every step. The smell of the animal skin followed the gang like an enveloping gust. As if their getups were not theatrical enough, each boy boasted countless rivets lining their jackets, belts, and leather wristbands; the moonlight glinted off the knifepoint vertices of the pyramidal studs and lit the 17-year-olds up like a sacrilegious analogue of Christmas.

Those who weren’t at once intimidated by the Tigers’ leathery armor and stern countenances -- and Impulse had never been given reason to believe such a person existed -- would have certainly noticed the care that had gone into the selection of the boys’ shirts and jeans. The former were naught more than simple A-shirts, pure white “wife beaters” (as a self-satisfied Impulse irreverently referred to them), selected for their ability to accentuate the teens’ exaggeratedly chiseled musculatures, three years of religious gymgoing in the making. They topped tight, boot-cut, size 34 blue jeans, chosen by virtue of their propensity to draw attention to rock-hard and round asses while cradling precociously massive genitals in contoured, denim flies that left nothing to the imagination.

Loudmouth regarded the insignias plastered to the backs of their leather jackets with the highest esteem. Bengal heads, imposing in their minimalism, crafted in orange, black, and white. The emblem of the Tigers. The last thing many high schoolers saw as they picked themselves up from the ground to which they had been thrown, their attackers clanging and clomping their ways out of sight, but forever after top-of-mind.

And it was this unmistakable clanging and clomping that adulterated the twilight’s serenity in the early morning hours of the Monday immediately preceding the autumnal equinox. The Tigers were patrolling Sequoia Street, having earlier resolved to characterize this night by petty theft. For all the hubris of their collective attitude, for all the intimidation they sought to instill in their victims with their bodies and the clothing in which those rippling frames were ensconced, the three were low aimers. They skirted the law by thinking small. To subvert the lyrics of the King, the Tigers were perennially a little less action, a little more conversation.

“We go down one side and up the other,” Impulse hissed in a hoarse and throaty whisper. “Just pull the signs out of the lawns. It’s only wire-- should come out easy. Recon?”

“Yeah?” A slightly higher voice.

“Motion detectors?”

“Most of the houses,” replied the boy. “But none of them go out as far as where the signs are. Just hug the sidewalk. Reach out. Be quick, be cool.”

“Loudmouth?”

Loudmouth nodded.

“How long do you figure it’ll take to clear out the street?”

Loudmouth held up his right palm, all of its fingers outspread.

“Five minutes,” confirmed Impulse. “Let’s do it.”

Maker’s Point was in an election cycle, a town on the verge of appointing a new sheriff. The sitting face of the law, Sheriff Leslie Brynner, had gradually disgraced herself with misappropriated funds and a generalized sheen of ineptitude. In 22 months, she hadn’t been able to bring a single one of the Tigers to justice-- a professional enforcer, outwitted and outmatched by a small handful of full-time, low-rent miscreants. She had been recalled. Of the two police officers campaigning for the position, only one of them had the near-unanimous support of the residents of Maker’s Point. His was the name on the gallery of yard signs. And it was such an unusual name, so incidentally juvenile in its double-entendre, that the Tigers simply could not resist the allure of collecting as many of the novel campaign signs as they could manage.

And that’s precisely what the threesome proceeded to do. Moving with all the agility and efficiency of the jungle cats for which they had christened themselves, the trio coursed through the neighborhood, plucking signs from meticulously-maintained lawns and cradling their quarry against their sides. Just as Loudmouth had predicted, in five minutes’ time, Sequoia Street and its abutting avenues had been picked clean of the rising officer’s campaign ads, pinprick holes in each lawn’s dirt serving exclusively as mute testimony that anything had ever been there.

With Phase One complete, the Tigers descended upon Thomas Tupper High, their school and stomping grounds for over three years, and broke in. It was their most daring lark to date. Only because of Recon’s lust for location research and Loudmouth’s idiosyncratic communication skills were they able to slip in and out undetected.

Their mission objectives had been wholly satisfied by the time the three Tigers separated from one another and returned to their respective homes. The halls of the school, meanwhile, were lined with campaign signs, pounded inelegantly into walls and locker doors.

to be continued