Home Invasion (Short Story)

It was an old lot that the Girl Scouts used to own, and the drainage
ditch ran right up beside it, even just behind the medieval-looking
footbridge with a secure gate and an intercom. Now the lot had
been split into two streets that the city maintained with curbs,
sidewalks, and proper lines designating the lanes, but no one had
access to them except those in the two giant houses, those they
buzzed in through the gate, and any odd kids psychotic enough
to walk a half-mile in the ditch to arrive at a waist-high chain link
fence at the top of a soil-covered embankment.

I say brave because you had to enter the ditch around the back of
a moldy ice cream place surrounded by neighborhoods that organized
retaliation beat-downs for the Trayvon Martin verdict, random
victims. Equally dangerous were flash floods since there was no
way to scale the walls of most of the ditch, except near the
customized pseudo-plantations, so the trip could turn into a bad
version of Indiana Jones with a flood and tree debris (and the
occasional trash can or cat) in place of the careening boulder.

They could’ve just drunk the canned beer found under an overpass
or smoked biker weed in the ditch in rare seclusion since
everyone’s house was de facto monitored by at least one neighbor
at all times, not in a neighborhood-watch sense, but there was always
someone home, usually someone’s mom or a homemaker with a
good enough nose to pick out jazz cigarettes from among the
Japanese maples and mulch. However, in a fit brought on by the
threat of their futures, not destitute ones, simply futures with fake
constraint that no one intended, not their parents, teachers,
“advisers,” doctors, dentists, cousins, local appointed officials, or
the chamber of commerce, they took both families by surprise and
totally unarmed, unlike those that never emerged from the wooden
badger. Nothing was stolen, only upended or put into some insurance
claim under “irreparable destruction” or “totaled.” Luckily for those
interested in political action, both families were filed under respective
life insurance policies too. I’m not sure what label they put the dead
under if it’s a mass homicide that has a debatably effective and, at best,
unclear political motive, especially when the perpetrators have
everything on their side, as long as they don’t venture over to the
wrong side of the city.