Young Team

Young Team

Gang culture is a problem most places have to deal with, Braevarn is notorious for its Ned culture, groups of teens meeting up every weekend, most of them carrying weapons, sharing a drink and then looking for a fight with a rival gang. What makes them rivals? Being from another housing scheme or postcode. These teens live for these running battles. Braevarn has its quiet areas but has its fair share of more run down lesser off council estates and it is these areas where the problems lie.

These teens are fanatical for their team and will defend their area to the end. If you end up walking through a rival area and are spotted, it can be extremely dangerous. They are known for planning and arranging running battles in the streets armed with weapons such as knives, baseball bats and hammers and have resulted in dozens of fatal attacks over the years. Communities have tried to stop this culture for decades but no matter what they try, each new generation that comes up, they keep falling into the same culture from having bad role models and being products of their environment.

Glenbrae Park is one of these council estates in Braevarn which is plagued by gang violence. Surrounded by rival schemes, this area is one of the most notorious for these ‘young teams’ who patrol and defend their schemes and wear it like a badge of honor, ready to kill and die for their crew. This area has the highest statistics for assaults in the entire town on the count of how close each scheme is to each other right in the heart of Braevarn.

Johnny Watson, a die-hard member of the G.P.Y.T (Glenbrae Park Young Team) a battle hardened crew of around 30 members, wakes up on a Friday morning buzzing for the chaos that the weekend has in store for him, like every weekend he pockets a lock knife and heads out to meet up with his boys, consume alcohol and then go out seeking a running battle with a neighboring crew who are doing the exact same thing. Johnny had lost his older brother to gang violence a few years previous but it didn’t deter him, he didn’t care if he ended up with the same fate, this was the lifestyle he loved.

Johnny’s brother Eddie was a legend to their crew on the count of how hardline he was for his actions a year before his death when he caught a rival tagging their gang name deep inside Glenbrae Park territory where he caught the young man in the act and shot the rival with a sawn off shotgun and then waited until after the funeral and burial, he then dug up the body and left his corpse outside his family’s doorstep to find which then caused retaliation that caused Eddies untimely death. These actions made Johnny’s brother forever a legend with his crew and Johnny was just as fanatical and down for his crew as his brother was.

The team run on a type of rank system, there were the top five which consisted of Tony ‘Ants’ McMillan, Johnny Watson, Wullie Davies, Mikey Taylor and Adam Evans. Ranked in that order of seniority. The rest being footsoldiers.

Ants was a loud charismatic seemingly insane young man at nineteen who called the shots in his crew, standing at five foot ten, he loved a party and loved a fight more. Usually dressed in a full tracksuit the same went for pretty much every member of every young team in the town, they had their own dress code and you rarely seen them on their own. Ants face was covered in battle scars from over the years and he was proud of them, some of these scars came from the same single incident where they were completely outnumbered and he got chased and caught, beaten and slashed, the rivals then stole his phone and he had to walk back to his territory battered and bloodied.

However, weeks later he got his revenge when he and another one of his boys went deep into enemy territory and caught one of the guys who attacked him and stole his phone, he stepped out as the enemy recognized him, paranoid because he was alone, he reached for his phone nervously pretending to type on it and without hesitation Ants pulled out two snooker balls in a sock and battered the young man repeatedly and stole his phone and watched the lad scramble away to find backup. These type of tit for tat attacks were somewhat the norm in these areas and the gangs thrived when the local festival came annually every summer, BIG in Braevarn, which was a day for families and music lovers to come to a park in the town center with live music and was supposed to be a good day in the sun. The gangs seen this as the perfect excuse to arrange every young team in the town to arrange pitched battles to see what team was the best and the ‘top dogs.’

They eventually stopped the festival because of the carnage that occurred every year.

Glenbrae Park was one of the teams which had lost the most members to life sentences also, having lost three hardcore members down to separate unrelated murders. The most well-known case being sixteen-year-old Nick Wood who attacked and killed three men in the same night, two being rival gang members and the third being a random man walking home from a night out who wasn’t involved in any gang activity, simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Ants, having just woken up that Friday morning hearing a knock on the door, he got up yawning and stumbled to the door, Johnny was there to meet up and plan their weekend. They had planned to summon all members that day. They needed everyone to turn up for the battle they had arranged against Ardmore Rise, a neighboring crew who on a good day, had a team of going on up to one hundred boys. The crew always met up at ‘the wall’ which was a brick wall next to steps and a big patch of grass with a cycle lane that crossed it which lead up to a golf course. They strategically used that as their hangout due to the multiple exits and ability to see surprise attacks.

The pair left Ants’ house armed with a kitchen knife and a box cutter, they started off to the meeting point to meet the rest of the troops and like clockwork the group filtered in from all directions, like rats pouring in from the sewer. They had a plan of action, a strategy which proved successful in the past against other enemies. They left piles of bricks and bottles all around the area, knowing full well Ardmore were coming in cars for an attack to catch them off guard, however, they anticipated this.

The drinks were flowing and the boys were getting hyped for the attack that was pending and it didn’t take long before the three cars full of boys pulled up on the road about forty feet from the wall, Ants and his boys waited until most of the boys got out of the cars and then ran to the piles of bricks and bottles and started targeting the cars knowing full well the driver would drive away to save his car from getting wrecked. The engines roared over the sound of smashing glass and dull thuds against metal, as the tires screeched and spun. The cars took off leaving a handful of their boys who couldn’t get back into the cars in time leaving them sitting ducks deep in a dangerous place and once the cars were gone the remaining boys were chased, literally running for their lives deep in a scheme they would now have to run through to get to safe ground. It was a victory. They might not have caught the stragglers who took to their heels and fled but it was a victory all the same.

The enemies had gotten away that time, but the weekend was still young and they knew that retaliation was a big possibility. More like a certainty.

Johnny was Ants’ right hand man, at fifteen years old he was the second in command and just didn’t give a shit, a short stalky boy who stood at around five foot four, he wasn’t an imposing figure but he could handle himself and was known for being fearless and ruthless. Built like a pit-bull, he would be in with a chance at coming out on top against most lads in his age group in the town, short dark hair always wearing a baseball cap and the signature tracksuit and carried some form of bladed article. Most boys involved in these type of crews carried, they knew others all carried so it was a form of reassurance that they better having it and not needing it, rather than need it and not have it.

Glenbrae Park was a typical run down council estate crippled by addiction and poverty, mostly grey high-rise flats with back alleys and footpaths like a maze which was easy to get lost if you weren’t from the area. The young team controlled the streets and were known for antisocial behavior.

After the encounter at the wall, the crew went a walk around the scheme to make sure their territory wasn’t being invaded. Patrolling was necessary. The crew split up, wandering aimlessly binge drinking and being loud and aggressive, feeling unsatisfied so far with their evening, the team then split up into smaller groups, some would walk the streets and others would go to houses to consume more alcohol and drugs.

Later that night Johnny had gotten word that the Ardmore Rise crew were trying to organize a fight for the following day in a children’s play park on the edge of Glenbrae Park and within minutes it was arranged. They had clashed a number of times in the past and it looked as though it would never end.

Johnny and Ants went to a ‘party house’ for the night to get loaded and prepare for the battle they had arranged for the following day. Along with a group of the other lads, the music was loud and the young team were louder, the sound of singing and cheering with glass clinking sounded over the hard Trance music that was thumping through the speakers. They never heard from the neighbors from through the walls or downstairs, nine times out of ten they were also partying or were some form of drug addicts who didn’t want the trouble at their door.

The team partied on through the night while keeping in contact with the Ardmore Rise crew by text messages and phone calls. They had arranged a battle for ten in the morning at the welfare park and both sides were preparing for it. The atmosphere in the party house was electric and the lads were pulling out all sorts of weapons in preparation, including machetes and bats.

As daylight began to creep through the gap in the curtains, the crew knew the fight wasn’t far away now. They didn’t need sleep, all they needed was more alcohol to keep their buzz going and by 9am they were up and bouncing, adrenaline making them primitive and rowdy. They all got ready, tooled up and headed out to meet the rest of the team at the park. This was it and as always it was a must win situation on the edge of their own turf.

They walked down the quiet terraces with more boys joining on to the group with each passing corner and junction they crossed, heading towards ‘the welly’ with bottles of alcohol in one hand and their weapons either hidden up their jackets or up their sleeves, marching to the battlefield with purpose and filled with adrenaline. They had full numbers and knew not to take this opposing crew lightly.

Arriving at the park the place was deserted as they walked in from the top end, down into the park and stood by the swings and climbing frame. They knew that the Ardmore Rise would be coming from the bottom end through the trees, they waited. With jelly legs and hearts pumping out of their chests it was a feeling they craved. Like a drug they were all addicted to.

They stood in the play park, ready and waiting until their runner came sprinting through the trees towards them. ‘They are coming’ he shouted as he came bounding over and slid the bottom end of a pool cue out his sleeve. The roars started, screaming with adrenaline, enough to deter any sane human being as the weapons which were concealed were now out and brandished.

The opposing team started making their way through the trees and into the bottom end of the park in droves, like an army of ants the numbers just kept coming, jogging towards Ants and his boys, not slowing down, just keeping a steady pace towards them like terminators programmed to have no fear.

The roaring from both tribes scared dog walkers and pedestrians fled for their lives. The two teams knew it would only be a matter of time before the police were on top of them so they charged towards each other like a medieval battle, throwing bottles and clashing in the middle. Boys swinging machetes at others trying to dodge. They separated and one boy from Ardmore was caught and kicked, punched and hit in the back of the head with a claw hammer and then left to scurry back to his own ranks. Bottles and bricks flying in all directions as all at once kicks and blows rained in from both sides.

Within minutes the brawl was over, Ants and his boys started to retreat the way they came from while the Ardmore Rise boys picked up their injured and headed back to the tree line, still throwing bricks and debris at their opponents as they walked away. Johnny split from the group with a handful of his boys, bloodied and buzzing from the brawl, the team split up and went in different directions to meet up at the wall to throw the police off their trail.

‘Fuckin’ easy.’ Johnny shouted as they made their way back through the urban jungle of their scheme, through the maze of back alleyways. His hands shaking, his heart racing. This was the rush he was addicted to as he led a small group of his boys back to the wall at the other end of their turf. The older boys from the crew went to the shop for more alcohol and the younger teens walked the few streets away to their meeting point at the wall as they arranged to meet the rest of the team who went in other directions.

By eleven o’clock that morning the team had assembled at the wall, the drink flowing and the boys were cheery and looking for a good party, most now up for anything and ready to fight again at any moment. The boys then split into groups of ten and ordered to go to different party houses in their groups and told to listen for orders to re-assemble if anything else happens throughout the day. They knew the police would have heard about the fight that day and Ants didn’t want any of his boys being arrested. He needed the numbers, just in case.

Most of the crew immediately split and filtered away in different directions, leaving only the recon runners to hang around which was mostly young boys aged twelve to thirteen who would fly under the radar, ready to alert the rest of the team if anything happens.

Johnny took some of his troops to a house along the main street and called some of the local girls from the area to come and party with them after they arrived at the house. They put the music on and before long the girls arrived. The girls partied with the guys a lot of the time at weekends. Chelsie was the most popular, a dark haired slender girl who was from the housing scheme and her friends Abby, Emma and Zara. Emma had a thing for Johnny and they arranged to meet up a few times but with the chaos of Johnny’s life, the plans kept falling through.

Maybe tonight is the night something will happen between them she’d hoped and mentioned to the girls before they had gotten to the house. Emma was a short girl, petite with long blond hair with extensions and fake eye lashes. She sat on the couch wearing her white jacket and her tight blue jeans, clutching on to her bottle with her eyes locked firmly on Johnny as he jumped around the living room to the music and telling stories and generally being hyper before counting two ecstasy pills onto his hand and swallowing them both before putting both his arms around two of his boys as he told the girls about their fight earlier that day.

Wullie was racking lines of cocaine out on a dinner tray and quickly sniffed one before passing the tray around the room to the rest of his mates. The tunes were pumping and the atmosphere in the house was happy and by this time Johnny was sat in the corner coming up like a rocket from his pills. His eyes huge, as if popping out of the sockets, sat beside a young boy ‘Daza’ who was his age who also had taken some pills.

‘I love you man’ Daza said to Johnny and the pair hugged, completely loved up as if they were in their own separate party. Not really noticing the coked out group around them jumping around to the Happy Hardcore music singing along to the happy lyrics and dancing to the happy melodies.

Emma had drunk enough alcohol to give her the Dutch courage and decided to take action and walked over and grabbed Johnny’s hand. ‘I need to speak to you privately’ She told him as she led him into one of the bedrooms.

They sat on the bed and she had begun to ask him why he hadn’t met up with her yet. Johnny sat there coming up hard on ecstasy and getting with a girl was way down on his list of things to do at that point. He lifted his hand and looked intensely at it turning it from back to front then lifting her long blond hair before letting go then she leaned in for a kiss. They kissed for a moment before she put her hand down his trousers and burst into laughter.

‘It’s usually bigger than that honestly’ he told her laughing before falling back on the bed, the room spinning and his heart thudding. Feeling like it was about to fail at any moment. Realizing that he was completely un-bothered about Emma and clearly on another planet, she got up and stormed out of the room to go get her girlfriends.

Johnny wriggled around the bed, the soft sheets feeling amazing on his skin, his legs rubbing up the walls, he felt as though he was wrapped up in cotton wool, the last thing on his mind at that moment in time was sex. He rolled around the bed on his own for a while until his ‘come up’ had levelled out but he was still boosting and felt as if he would never stop coming up.

As Johnny lay on the bed entirely on his own planet for a while, the rest of the party kept rocking on. The drinks were flowing and the place was jumping, the hours seemed to fleet by and the day passed quickly and before they knew it, it was late afternoon. Johnny emerged from the bedroom with his baseball cap turned backwards, bumping into walls as he entered the living room looking for more alcohol. The group cheered at the sight of him as if they hadn’t seen him for a month.

It began to get dark outside and the party was in full swing as Johnny’s phone began to ring. He picked it up and answered it to hear one of his runners screaming and out of breath.

‘They’ve killed him, they’ve killed him!’

‘What are you on about? What’s going on?’ Johnny asked in a concerned voice.

‘These crazy older guys’ there was women too, there is hundreds of them, they stabbed Danny, we run away and they kept stabbing him! They are at the wall’

Hearing this sent a chill which cut through Johnny, he was still heavily intoxicated and knew he had to act fast as he jumped up and alerted the rest of his boys in the house to stand to. They all grabbed their weapons and ran out of the house, ready for a fight. But this wasn’t going to be any type of fight they had before. Johnny ran through the room and pulled a box from under the bed and rummaged inside it before pulling out a 9mm pistol. He pulled out the magazine and there were ten rounds in it. He then ran outside to meet the rest of his boys, his vision still doubled.

Johnny and his boys jogged down the street towards the hangout while alerting the rest of the team who were all in different houses and told them to meet them immediately and to get to the wall armed and ready to go. They soon reached the wall. It was now dark, the sky was a deep dark blue and as they ran down the steps at the wall and got onto the grass, they noticed flames in the distance coming down from the footpath alongside the wall and coming from multiple other directions.

It was flame torches and as they tried to make sense of what was coming their way the rest of the team had arrived and joined the group.

‘There is hundreds of them’ A young boy shouted as the flames got closer and closer, the strange people were closing in on them wearing pure white robes with primitive paper Mache masks that seemed to be made by the people wearing them. They nearly had them completely surrounded apart from the lane in which the boys had came from.

The strange group of fully grown men and women then attacked a random man walking past at the side of the road just meters away from the grass in which the group of boys stood. The stranger’s white robes splattered with blood, letting the boys know that they have attacked many people at random and are going to continue doing so.

They surrounded the man and began chopping and slicing at him with swords and blades with extreme ferocity. The man was trying to crawl away but one of his arms were hanging on by a thread of flesh before one of the masked men delivered the final blow to the back of the man’s head with the sword, almost decapitating him.

Seeing this, most of the young team began to run away back up the steps and away up the lane at the top of the wall, leaving Johnny and Ants with a few stragglers who were shouting to retreat before Johnny lifted the pistol and fired a round at the group of maniacs who began to charge towards them, hitting one in the chest, dropping him. This now showing them that they have a gun, hoping to scare them off but it didn’t even phase them as they kept charging towards them screaming at the top of their voices in terrifying haunting howls.

The young team started to retreat up the stairs and up the lane to try find the rest of their crew, Ants was the last one to get to the lane at the top of the steps and he could hear the maniacs steps directly behind his, he could feel their screams only meters behind him, he ran as fast as he could, clutching on to his kitchen knife as tight as he could, panicking in case he got caught because he knew what would happen if they got a hold of him.

They reached the street at the back of the wall and ran head on into the rest of their crew, along with some older guys who had heard that their area had been attacked by these lunatics. All wielding hatchets, machetes and other hand held weapons, they had a group of around thirty and waited in the street for them to appear at the top of the lane. They seen the fire torches first and only heard some sort of horn getting blown, it was a haunting sound, like a sound of impending doom.

The cult came rushing out of the top of the lane like a never ending intrusion of cockroaches, as soon as they got into the street they attacked everything and anything in sight, smashing windows and trying to kick doors in, stopping cars and hacking the drivers and passengers to pieces as more and more of them rushed out of the lane at the top of the street. Johnny fired another shot into the middle of them as they were pushed back down the street.

The maniacs were at fighting distance now and the sounds of people screaming and sharp metal hitting flesh was unbearable as the boys dragged their wounded friends away before they were murdered. Johnny had a plan. ‘Get to the welly!’ he screamed, telling his boys that the play park will be their last stand with it being fenced off they could use it as a sort of fort and guard themselves in a circle. They ran to the park with many of these screaming lunatics hot on their heels, the slower boys being picked off one by one from behind and mauled by these animals.

Johnny stayed back as he tried to get as many of his boys safely into the play park in the middle of the welly so they were behind the fence, firing shots at his pursuers before being tackled to the ground. ‘Boys!’ He screamed as he put the pistol to the man’s head who was on top of him hyperventilating as if relishing in the thought of killing him, he pulled the trigger and blew the man’s brains out. The popping sound of the pistol was heard over everything else and as he pushed the corpse off him and got to his feet, aiming the gun at the rest of the people running towards him didn’t even deter them. They kept coming.

Ants ran over and dragged Johnny away and told him to get into the play park with the rest of his boys, essentially saving his life before he himself was caught by the rest of the cult and within seconds Ants was surrounded and overpowered and chopped and stabbed by a never ending amount of these lunatics. ‘Tony! No!!’ Johnny screamed in despair, but it was too late, the play park was completely surrounded and the crew of boys were around the perimeter of the fence which surrounded the play park swinging their blades, hatchets and hammers over the waist high fence, using it to keep the maniacs out.

Anyone who tried to climb the fence was stabbed and attacked, so it was a type of boundary for them to hold their place and not let anyone breach it.

The battle ensued with the young team slashing and stabbing at their necks as the lunatics swiped back, with heavy casualties on both sides, the young team struck lucky when the Ardmore Rise crew came through the trees to attack Glenbrae Park in a sneak attack and noticed that there was already a battle going on, the Ardmore boys had their full numbers and decided to attack.

They charged across the football field and towards the play park, not knowing who was actually fighting there and with all the loud screaming and intense fighting going on, the maniacs never heard the Ardmore team approach from the rear. They finally reached them and began attacking from behind, the sounds of dull thudding and punches landing and people screaming getting slashed and stabbed was heard all around the park and when the masked maniacs turned to face the attack from behind, Johnny and his boys attacked them as they turned.

Bodies lay all around the play park and the robed maniacs seemed to have a lot more casualties than the young team. This second wave of fighting boosted morale, with none of the Glenbrae team even understanding who came to their aid but they kept attacking and now it was the cult who was surrounded. They began to retreat out of the park, now being pursued by the young team with a massive amount of cult members dead or severely wounded.

Johnny firing shots at them as they ran, hitting two in the back as they fled for their lives. He was now out of bullets, he attended to his wounded boys. The leader of the Ardmore boys walked up to Johnny and shook his hand.

‘What the fuck was that all about?’ He asked Johnny.

And it was at that moment the two teams had come together and vowed to stick together and realized that their petty differences meant nothing and showed them that they stand a better chance sticking together. For the first time in Braevarn’s history, the young teams pledged to stand side by side against outsiders who wanted to come to harm them or anyone in their town. It was a milestone and from that moment on, there was a truce among all young teams in the area.

Johnny looked around at the bodies strewn across the grass in the park. They were battle hardened teens but this was a fight they would never forget, bodies littered the entire housing scheme and no one had any idea who these people who attacked were or why they invaded their area.

The two teams realized that together they were stronger and they made their way out of the park with the sounds of sirens in the background and the blue lights lighting up the dark streets in the distance.

In the coming days, the housing scheme was flooded with police and news reporters and it was later reported that there had been a satanic death cult in the area and they had been given orders to invade and kill anyone they could catch. However, they didn’t anticipate that the streets were already patrolled by battle hardened youngsters who would die to protect their turf.