Cry Havoc

Chapter 4
Recon

Chapter Description: from Book One: Domination

monday 18 september - 1:45 PM

Rico “Recon” Velez was the brains of the operation. One wouldn’t know it to look at his report card; the gifted teen’s interests and priorities fell well outside the purview of academic achievement. His disdain for structure and expectation was legend. Even so, Recon conducted independent research and flexed his critical thinking muscles as hobbies, and he, when confronted with a dilemma, always seemed to have his hands wrapped around the best possible solution. This made him the perfect counterpart to Impulse-- a kid with an equal affinity for chaos, but with none of the technical finesse demanded of generating it efficiently and definitively.

Recon didn’t like Mr. Benes’s tone of voice as the Tigers took their leave of the assistant principal’s office. Moreover, the administrator’s uncharacteristically dismissive demeanor, tinged with a twist of outright threat and coupled with the vague air of self-satisfaction, left the boy ill at ease. As soldier and spy, the departing Recon, with a grace and deftness he had spent years honing, affixed a tiny, wireless transmitter to the underside of a lamp table positioned directly outside Mr. Benes’s door, in the office of the man’s secretary. For the next several hours, the device sent a low-resolution .WAV file to a digital audio recorder Recon kept in the pocket of his leather jacket.

The high school senior had hoped to score any number of juicy tidbits, the likes of which he had previously seen in some of his favorite films and television programs... evidence of an affair between Mr. Benes and his secretary, for example, or perhaps a less damning instance of professional misconduct. Anything that he could lord over the insufferable administrator and keep under lock and key as the quintessential blackmail. Total inviolability for him and his associates.

What he ultimately recorded, though, was nothing quite so exotic. But, Recon later decided, the fruits of his espionage could still prove useful.

It was when the bell rang immediately prior to the final period of the day that Recon decided against going directly to his class -- psychology, a subject he could barely tolerate and was attempting for the third time to pass -- in favor of ducking into the boys’ restroom and listening to the audio he had gathered. He locked one of the stall doors, connected a pair of ear buds to his DAR, and fast forwarded through hours of silence and bureaucratic minutiae until he finally came to the sound that captured his attention... the sound of money.

“Five hundred dollars,” came the voice of a one Mr. Benes.

“Five hundred dollars?” The shocked cadence of the assistant principal’s secretary.

“He’s worth it,” said Mr. Benes. “Such a good kid. And it’s his 12th birthday... that’s a big one. He’s never wanted anything in his life more than he wants this bike. It’s not until Saturday, but I had to go ahead and pick it up before someone else did.”

“Tim doesn’t suspect anything?”

“Well, it’s in the garage, and I covered it with a tarp. I hustled it away to the corner where the lawnmower and the snowblower and all sorts of other things are just piled up. If he knows it’s coming to him, he’s doing me the courtesy of not saying anything. Letting me enjoy the pleasure in giving it to him.”

“You raised a good one, Mr. B.”

Nailed it, thought Recon. He wrote the facts to his memory. The teen didn’t know whether Impulse and Loudmouth were prepared to graduate to full-on burglary just yet, but he figured there was no harm in simply proposing the theft. Given a little over four days to prepare, Recon reasoned, he had more than enough opportunity to scout out Mr. Benes’s property and whatever security measures the suburbanite had installed. At long last, the Tigers had been presented with the chance to cause their foil and avowed enemy, the tightass starched shirt of an assistant principal, some tangible harm.

Recon hung around and continued listening to the recording until the dismissal bell blared. He had been hoping for some more, better ammunition, but these hopes were not well-founded, and the remainder of the audio file contained absolutely nothing of utility.

The hallways were packed with restless students eager to get home and leave the hard work and drama of high school behind. Recon wound his way towards the front door. When he was fewer than 100 feet away from it, his eyes couldn’t help but be drawn to the telltale purple backpack of Steve Benjamin, a slightly-built sophomore the Tigers had been tormenting with some regularity since he first came to Tupper High just over a year prior.

Steve was quiet, reserved, and kept mostly to himself, rendering him easy pickings for anyone who sought to improve his or her own social standing at the 15-year-old’s expense. He never fought back or stood up for himself to any appreciable degree; this tended to take all the sport out of antagonizing him, but the Tigers were rarely in the mood for a challenge, anyway. They craved cheap and easy amusement. And, on that particular Monday afternoon, an undiscerning Recon felt as if he could wring a thrill out of his proximity to the little dweeb before embarking on his mile-long after-school walk to Gold’s Gym.

Recon moved swiftly, swooping in like a hawk, deadly and silent. It was simply a matter of the larger teen latching on to the leg cuffs of Steve’s khaki shorts and jerking downwards with a deft and muscular motion. When the khakis came down, Steve’s light-blue boxers went with them, and -- before the late bloomer of a boy even realized what had happened -- he stood, naked from the waist down, among nearly a hundred departing peers.

Steve was not proud of the equipment he boasted beneath his waistline, and he had no reason to be. He looked like a prepubescent boy three years his junior; his adulthood was taking its sweet time in arriving, and only the minor whisper of a few stray pubic hairs flanked a two-inch penis that the boy himself could barely stand to look at, let alone publicize for an entire school that would no doubt spend the impending three years tormenting him on its account. It’s hard enough looking like a little kid when you are one-- but, for the 15-year-old Steve, it was a nightmare from which he had always hoped, and failed, to awaken.

The laughter burned like napalm and the pointing fingers of high schoolers from all four grades stabbed into Steve as needles. Time slowed down for Recon’s pathetic quarry. Steve Benjamin, his heart in his stomach, clamored to and succeeded in returning his pants to his body, but the damage had already been done. The afterthought of a prank, juvenile as it had been, was going to be the talk of the whispering halls for at least the next week, if not longer. Hoots and hollers of “Babydick” echoed in the boy’s head. Hot, salty tears welled up inside his eyelids, and they had begun to course down his cheeks long before he scrambled out the front door.

As for Recon, his appropriately catlike agility enabled his quick and easy escape. No one had seen a thing. Just another harmless prank, as the senior regarded it... no harm, no foul.

to be continued