Tom Schreck: Out Cold

"Okay, I've given it a lot of thought and it's one of two things," Karl said the second he walked through the door. It was like we were already in mid conversation and with Karl, who knows, he might have been talking to me his whole trip back. Just the same, it confused Al who got excited about a human coming through the door. He began to go into his attack-asgreeting thing, but stopped and spun around three or four times.

"I'm listening," I said.

"Either Newstrom switched plans and is sending us a message by having it in another Crawford or he's trying to confuse us."

"I thought he wanted both of us dead."

"He definitely does, or at least wants us to believe it."

"Why?"

"If nothing else, to remain unpredictable." Karl walked past Al and sat in the sparrow lookout chair. Al raised his eye brows, closed his eyes again.

"So what the hell do we do with our own little McDonough trench coat mafia?"

"We keep our surveillance up," Karl said while he thought of what to confuse me with next, the phone rang. It was Jamal. We exchanged Salam Alekums and Jamal got right to it.

"Duff, I'm probably gettin' as crazy as the paper says you are, but you know those kids your friend was sure were up to something no good?"

"Yeah?"

"All eight of them are out today."

"Is that unusual?"

"Hell yeah," Jamal said.

"Jamal, we followed them the other day and I found some serious assault rifle shell casing near their hang out."

"You what? Never mind-did you tell anyone?"

"I called Kelley and by the time he showed up the casings were gone." I waited while Jamal went silent. He was quiet in the way people are when they're pondering the sanity of the person they're talking to.

"Duff, I don't know what to make of that, but you should know about this next thing 'cause you'll probably hear something about it on the news."

"What are you talking about?"

"The school is in lockdown while it is searched. There was a message scrolled in blood in the second floor boy's bathroom. They're not taking any chances."

"What did it say?"

"You ready for this-it's a bit deep. Here goes: 'Tomorrow the blood will flow from the hypocrite warriors. The true warriors of the city will rain down from the mountain top and they will die.'"

"Jamal-what the hell does all that mean?"

"No one fuckin' knows. Maybe they just have a social studies test they didn't study for."

"Must be one hell of a test," I said.

The next morning Karl, Al, and I went to McDonough High at six. There were police on every corner and if you weren't a student or a parent you weren't allowed within two blocks. Police ran wands over every student as they entered the building. The closest we could get was three blocks away.

By the time the bell sounded, it seemed like everything was under control. Police remained at every door and on the four corners surrounding the school. We waited until ten and then drove to the bowling alley to check out their hangout. We parked in the empty bowling alley lot and walked around the corner. No one was there, but as we walked to the center of the area we could see something had been painted on the back wall of the bowling alley building.

The blood will spill down the warrior's mountain. Their Abercrombie and Fitch will be stained forever!

"What the hell does it mean?" Karl said. He squatted down and picked something up. "More shells."

"I'd feel a whole lot better if I knew where these punks were," I said.

"Yeah, I say they hit McDonough after lunch."

"And what do we do?"

"We wait, watch, and pray," Karl said. That was exactly what we did in the El Dorado, after we parked by McDonough. Al kept it interesting by farting a lot and Karl gave me long explanations on UFO's, Bigfoot, and the conspiracy that got Malcolm X killed. We talked about hydrogenated fat, Oreos, and the use of pesticides. We talked about social work, the military and whether or not the Yankees pitching would hold up. Al flipped over on his back, would eventually get restless, clear his intestines of gaseous build up, and flop over again. Elvis did Gospel and then the Elvis is Back album from when he returned from Germany. Nothing happened at lunch and at 1:37 p.m. Jamal spotted us as he walked to his car. I gave him a faint beep and he squinted in our direction. Once he realized it was us, he came over.

"They never came in," Jamal said.

"Everything normal in there?"

"If you call everybody being petrified, cops all over the place, lockers being searched, dogs, and metal detectors normal."

"Jamal, what's your gut tell you about these kids in black."

"I don't know, Duff. I've been doing this a long time. They're goofy white boys who banded together to do goofy white shit your people do-watch Star Trek, laugh at Seinfeld, play Dungeons and Dragons-that shit."

"Could they be killers?"

"I don't know, Duff. Hey, I read Psychology Today. They're angry, dis-en-franchised and their parents aren't around. Shit, describes most of the student body."

"What about the shit written in the bathroom?"

"Don't know. Creepy shit, but whether or not it was just stuff to get out of school or genuine warning I don't know."

"It said something about mountains, warriors and the Gap?"

"Abercrombie and Fitch. C'mon Duff, the cool white kids stopped goin' to the Gap."

"Hold it!" Karl startled us with the yell. Al sneezed and cleared his jowls from the outburst.

"What's up Karl?" I said.

"Mountain, warriors and a reference to rich clothing?"

"Yeah, so?" Jamal said.

"VHS's nickname is the Mountain Warriors. The kids all wear Abercrombie and Fitch," Karl said.

The three of us got real quiet. Al was sitting up.

"And the kids we're looking for ain't here," Karl said. I put the car in drive without saying goodbye to Jamal.

We flew the country back roads to get to Vorhees Park. Karl talked a mile a minute and Al had picked up on the energy level and marched back in forth on the back seat, grumbling to himself.

"We could actually stop it this time, Duff. We can make it fail. It's never failed before," Karl said. His speech had trouble catching up to his thoughts. "I can't wait. I hope Newstrom is there in person. I want to look him in the eye when we stop him."

I didn't know what to think and decided to keep my mouth shut. In this up to my eyeballs, but not for a second did I get completely comfortable with whether it was true or if I was crazy. If true, me, a crazy guy and a basset, were about to try to thwart a guy with world class weaponry and a trained group of disgruntled Dungeons and Dragoners.

"Duff, this could make it all right again, do you understand?

You gotta let me play it out. You gotta," Karl said. I could feel him staring at me while I kept my eyes on the road. I tried to deliver my body to where we went without doing a lot of thinking.

"Karl, I'm in this. I'll let you play it out," I said.

"Duff, I mean to the ultimate. I mean no matter what." I looked at Karl.

"I mean I want to die doing this if the situation calls for it." I looked at him for the first time during his rant. Our eyes locked for a moment.

"You gotta promise me, Duff, you gotta."

I looked at him for a long time.

"All right, Karl, all right," I said. We pulled into the VHS parking lot. Despite our urgency, it looked like any other suburban high school on a late summer day. A bronze statue of the Mountain Warrior greeted us at the entrance to the campus. You could tell the statue was relatively new. The warrior no longer resembled a Native American like it had for years. Now, a Greek type mythological character with wings on its head and feet and somewhere, some old time Greeks were offended.