The Call (The Magnificent 12 1)

He broke free.

Three steps to reach the door. One, two, three! He snatched at the handle and yanked hard.

The door did not open.

Mack sensed movement behind him.

He spun. Stefan’s fist flew and Mack ducked.

Crash!

“Yaaaah!” Stefan cried.

Mack jerked away, off balance, feet tangled. But he didn’t fall. He backpedaled, needing just to get his feet back under him.

Then he saw the red spray all over the shattered window.

Stefan’s fist had gone through the glass. He had a four-inch gash in his arm, like a red mouth, spurting.

The approaching bullies froze.

Stefan stared in fascinated horror at his arm.

The bullies hesitated, almost decided to keep coming, but then, with a sensible assessment of the risks involved, decided it was time to run away.

They turned tail and bolted, yelling threats over their shoulders.

Stefan used his left hand to try and stop the blood flow.

“Huh,” he said.

“Whoa,” Mack mumbled with a mouth full of shorts.

“I’m kind of bleeding,” Stefan observed. Then he sat down too fast and landed too hard, and Mack realized that what he was seeing here was not a painful but well-timed minor injury. Way too much blood was coming out of Stefan’s arm. There was already a puddle of it on the ground—a little pool was forming around a discarded candy bar wrapper.

The king of the bullies tried to stand up, but his body wasn’t working too well it seemed, so he stayed down.

Mack stared in amazement. In part he was terrified that he was on the verge of acquiring a whole new phobia: hemaphobia—fear of blood.

Escape would be easy. And Mack definitely considered running.

Instead he spit out the shorts. He straddled the seated Stefan and said, “Lie back.”

When Stefan didn’t seem to track on that, Mack pushed him none too gently onto his back.

Mack then knelt over Stefan and pushed down with the heel of his left hand on the wound. This was deeply unpleasant. The blood flow slowed but did not stop.

With his free hand Mack grabbed the aromatic T-shirt and clumsily tied it around Stefan’s massive bicep. He knotted it tight, all while keeping his palm pressed down on the red gusher.

The blood flow slowed some more.

“I can’t keep this up; we need help,” Mack said.

Stefan’s eyes flickered with what would surely be a temporary understanding of the word we.

A powerful word, we.

“You have a cell phone?” Mack asked. Cells were absolutely banned at school, so only about two-thirds of the students carried them.