Chapter 2

One of the girls used her cellphone to call 911 to request cops and EMS (Emergency Medical Services). I used my cellphone to call home to ask Mom and Dad to come pick us up. None of us, except for me, was dressed in undamaged clothes. Beth reclaimed her skirt before the cops or EMS showed up, and she stole a belt from one of the downed boys to keep it in place. The cops, EMS, Mom and Dad, and a TV crew all arrived at about the same time, and the next hour was spent in answering questions.

Interestingly, the subject of our bean bag guns never came up, and we never mentioned them, so they went unnoticed. All of the boys happened to be over 18, so there was no question of them being juveniles and practically immune to the so-called justice system. All of the attacking boys were arrested for assault and battery, and the question of attempted rape was left hanging for the moment. Beth and I were not charged as we claimed self defense, and our reputation as the Killer Bs made the cops leave us alone.

When we got home and had convinced our parents that neither one of us was hurt, we had a conversation with Mom about what could be done to convert the guns into repeaters. We had proof that single-shot weapons were just not going to cut the mustard. Mom agreed and immediately started trying to figure out how to make our guns into repeaters.

It did take longer to come up with a repeater design than to develop the original guns. The final result was an interesting arrangement in which the envelope of marbles was stuffed inside a paper tube. The idea was to keep the ammunition rigid while it was inside the gun so that it would not foul the mechanism as it was being loaded and operated on inside the gun. Mom had come up with a little gadget which stripped away the paper tube as the round was fired. The actual projectile was essentially what we had been using in the first version of the gun.

The magazine for the gun was a classic box style. The magazine held 10 rounds, and the capacity of the air bottle was increased to allow shooting 30 rounds before it had to be replaced. The resulting gun and ammunition had a bone-breaking range of about 20-25 feet and a range of 50 feet or more to produce a painful strike. We felt that was adequate for the applications we expected of the gun.

When Mom gave us the guns, she was adamant that we were not to use the guns to start trouble, only to stop it. When it came down to a final consideration, neither Beth nor I were bloodthirsty enough to argue that admonition, and we went back to our usual activities.

Along with most of the other kids at the high school, we had been troubled by bullies when we first entered school, but our reputation as the Killer Bs and our obvious self confidence soon put a stop to that. We enhanced our standing among the other kids by reacting forcefully to any signs of bullying. Our mere presence put a big dampener on the amount of bullying in school by the end of the first month. Even the school administration was unofficially happy about that, though they never said anything.

About half-way through the school year, the drug trade became noticeable, mostly among the Seniors. This was four-year high school, so Beth and I were rated as Freshmen, and that put us beneath the notice of the drug pushers. It was not because we were too young to be using drugs, but because the pushers did not think that we would have access to the money required to support them or the habit.

We found out about the trade kind of accidentally. The lunch schedule was staggered because there were so many students that all of us together would overload the facilities. I can’t imagine why the schedule was such, but the Seniors and the Freshmen had the first lunch period and the Sophomores and Juniors had the second. Anyway, it was at lunch period that we stumbled upon what was going on.

We had finished eating and were walking around the open “play ground” during the last few minutes of the lunch period before our next classes. There were some trees growing at one corner of the field, surrounding a wet-land that was off limits for development as part of the ecology movement. A lot of the Seniors used the trees to mask their make-out efforts, and Beth and I were curious as to what they actually did. The mystery was caused by the fact that most of the ground was always too wet to sit on comfortably.

We walked through the wet-land and were generally ignored because, by being one male with one female, everybody assumed that we were there for the same reason that they were. We were kind of disappointed because what we saw was a lot of holding hands and kissing, and we were at the stage of development when we didn’t really know how much fun that could be.

The situation changed when we came to a small pool of water. On the other side, there was a man who looked to be in his 20s handing a plastic bag full of other plastic bags containing a white powder to a boy who was a Senior known to us by sight. The Senior handed the older guy some money, and the older guy left the area immediately.

Because of some intervening bushes, we had not been noticed. The boy who had accepted the plastic bag stuffed it into a backpack. He left the wet-land preserve as soon as he had done that, and we did not see him for the rest of the afternoon.

Well, we had seen enough TV to be able to figure out what was in those plastic bags, and we wondered how we should handle the situation. The simplest and easiest thing for us to do would be to report what we saw to the Principal’s office, but we figured that would be a waste of time. The same for reporting it to the police. It would just be our word against someone else’s word, and who was going to believe a couple of Freshmen? We had no hard evidence of what we had seen, so we had to get some of that.

Our first idea was to try to photograph a sale taking place. We could use our smart-phones to do that, but we had to be careful to kill the flash attachment so that we would not broadcast what we were doing. We knew that was something that could be done, but we really had to dig through the instruction manual to find out how to do it. Actually, it was Beth who found the instructions first, and doctored both smart-phones.

Naturally, the next day, a Friday, was too rainy and generally messy for anybody to use the wet-lands during lunch period, so we had to wait until Monday to try out our plan. However, over the weekend, the TV reported two more over-dose deaths from unusually strong heroin. Uh-oh, we had better get our asses into gear!

Monday, we got smart and took our lunches in paper bags, as did a lot of other kids, so we did not look out of place as we walked to the trees at the beginning of the lunch time. A lot of kids were already there when we arrived, so we had to learn how to mesh with the program better. We found a downed tree and sat on its trunk while we ate our lunch. We ate as fast as possible so that we could start our hunt.

Ah-ha, we spotted the Senior from the previous Friday walking away from a girl and toward the same pool of water where we had last seen him, and he was wearing a backpack. We followed at what we thought was a discrete distance and headed to our previous observation point when we got to the little pond. We got out our smart-phones and prepared to snap pictures. We figured that we were more likely to get good evidence if we both took pictures.

We had to wait almost 10 minutes before the older guy showed up, but they went through the same routine as before. We could hear them talking, but we could not make out the words. It was just as well that we were not trying to record what they were saying, though I did wonder what it was. I guessed that they were setting up the next meeting, but I could not be sure.

We wound up taking about 15 photos each, and some of them showed the faces of the two very clearly. We were happy with our results and left for the school building. That evening, we printed the pictures and picked out the 10 best from the point of view of showing what had happened and showing the faces of the two boys. Okay, now what?