Slaughterhouse High

12. Zipped Lips and the True Meaning of Fear

Condor had been flying on whatever beautiful shit he had swallowed in the car.

He’d been letting the dance music unfold new eternities inside him. Earing the fear, eying the terror that flaked skin from familiar faces, as old mush-jowled Futzy dispersed ’em all, skelter and yon.

He felt heaven come stairstepping closer as they shuk-shuk-shuk ed upward and the handrail, with its hacked worn inked germ-infested splendor, gave them guidance toward a way-the-fuck-up-there staggeringly simplistically functional classroom where once, two years before, Mr. Fink had tossed chalk bits like an outfielder zinging third base to get some kid’s attention.

Blayne, darkly brooding all night, had grown darker still, muttering bunches of creepy shit as they sat there alone under the chalkboard behind Mr. Fink’s desk.

They had named each possible teacher, looking for a slasher. Their yammering faces oozed out of floor tiles or from the shadows beneath the desk, or they fell from the chalk tray overhead.

Zane Fronemeyer, conjured by an unrelievedly morbid commentary from Blayne, had misted up from a fallen eraser, an oblong devilcake dusted with snow, to menace them with a paintbox of horrors.

Condor had convinced him.

It was Fronemeyer.

Their wacko art teacher!

Then the bell clamored like a floodlight all ablaze. No light shone, yet all was light.

Brilliantly limned with light ineffable was this place of salvation. An industrial strength vacuum cleaner of light. A beam of elation. A cockjacking, lobesucking epiphany of hot white jangling lumens.

“We made it!” exclaimed Condor, the drugs surging high in him.

“Yep and it was tough to make,” said Blayne. Beneath his continuing brood, an imp peered out from those wide amazing eyes.

“We’re continually making it, aren’t we?”

“The windows, the wastebasket. It’s a dull make.” Blayne’s face turned nasty and smug. “But there’s a more interesting make waiting for us out there.”

The girls.

“Yeah!” said Condor.

Blayne had lipped Altoona.

Or so he had said in the car.

All night, Condor’s radiant head had waggled between death-dread and the black-laced duo they had avoided talking to, relying instead on odd across-gym anticipatory stares and bizarre but weirdly neat circlings, so close they could touch but pretending to ignore one another instead-all of it a buildup to survival and the costume shop.

“I am one primed monkey!” said Condor.

“One prime mate!” Blayne corrected.

“Ugh. Squirrelly, real squirrelly.” Balls of ticked fur opened up and skittered across the room.

“Squarely so.”

“Double ugh, ” said Condor. “Let’s go get ’em.”

He got to his feet and gave one last look at the last place of instruction he’d ever have to be in. The classroom was a fist relaxed into an open palm, reluctant to release him but not all that unfriendly, despite the years of mind-wounds it had inflicted.

In the corridor, puffs and creases of student body flurried by, relieved, hunting, hunting.

Fuck the hunt. live game.

A flutter of wings brushed against his face, as two chiffoned quail went birding by: Contusa and Calibrianna, caught up in an unending web of in-turned chatterboxing.

Down the stairs, down the stairs, down the stairs.

A mewling slight spewed like a spitwad from Capper McGee’s twist of a mouth as he bounded past them up the stairs. They gave one another fuck-the-silly-bastard looks and wiped McGee’s hurl off like so much fartwind.

Condor loved the building’s dark dead funk at this time of night.

The place was dying. It was yielding them up. And in the bowels of this bowel of a fuckin’ school, behind the scenes, some blood-splashed teacher was right now crimsoning a sink.

As they hit the first floor and headed left toward the auditorium, Condor stopped.

“Hey, watch it!” Blayne bumped him. “What? A glass wall? What?”

“I just had a terrible thought.” Condor saw the girls splayed wide, huge fingers punched deep into their bodies, prying then open like so many crabshells. “What if he got them?”

“Leapin’ Christ, Condor,” said Blayne. “Then they’d be dead, we’d be ess-oh-ell, and I’d be so pissed, I’d toilet-paper the turdsucking slasher’s front yard for a whole freaking year. Now keep moving, will ya? They’re waiting for us.”

Condor moved.

Humiliation clamped about his head.

Damn it, Blayne was deep, Blayne was smart.

Whereas he was dumb and pokey. He’d never amount to much. Even Pim and Altoona-a couple o’ trash-talkin’ gals doomed to lives of dirt, snot-nosed brats, squinty-eyed crooked-lipped drags on ciggies that wrinkled their faces toward cronedom years before their time, and endless ineptly-done housework, as far as he could see-would probably reject him, make him watch, get it on in front of him with his best bud, steal him away, and leave poor Condor forever bereft.

“Oh shit, come on.” Blayne hugged him as they moved, a cheer-up look on his flushed crazed swirly face. “Look, I’m zipping up my slagging mouth.” He did so with a yank, then unyanked the zipper and brushed a finger along the crenelated niobium lining his lover’s lower lip.

“I’m sorry,” Condor said, feeling better.

“Pas de pro-blay-mo.” Blayne tugged open the door to the backstage area and they went in.

Condor heard yells from the auditorium off right. No bodies found yet, though it sounded as if all the seats were being rocked furiously down-up-down-up in the futile search.

They passed a door marked PROPS on the left. Then BOYS’ DRESSING ROOM, GIRLS’ DRESSING ROOM, and finally, partly ajar, COSTUME SHOP. Blayne, hand to handle, zagged in, Condor behind.

The ceilings were high, but the place felt cramped and confined for all the crap jammed into it. Box after box serried and rose to their right and left. Scrawled labels vied with brittle typed ones for the truth about the boxes’ contents.

Shoes lay heaped like war dead below. But before Condor could spook himself too much with the ghostly limbs akimbo’d bodiless out of them, they turned the corner into another larger room, where rack upon rack of fluff and color greeted them, a crazy salad of cloth, sequins, and odd-buttoned garments.

Blayne picked his way through, a jungle hacker amid old-outfit smells. “Yo!” he said. “Anybody home?”

“This way,” trilled an amused voice.

Then Condor followed his date around one last switchback of gray-wheeled racks and faded finery gimcracked together.

There the girls waited.

Altoona and Pimlico, two incredible blips of life grinning and shifting and sexing over by the sewing machines, their legs crossed at the ankles, leaning back everywhere.

Futzy’s mind churned like a washing machine agitator. Pumps and clunky polished boy-shoes in vast mooing herds of babble were moving along the hallway outside the gym. As the scum scurried by, Futzy nodded at them.

It had been all he could do, speaking over their heads from the band risers, to control his anguish at the papier-mache creature before him and to keep from blasting the little shits with both barrels of his anger.

Now a few of their number were dead, waiting to be discovered and brought to the gym.

Futzy had thought that once this part of the evening arrived, once the Poindexter kid and his date had been dispatched, he’d be in for smooth sailing.

But his bloodlust was nowhere near sated, and he guessed he had known that all along.

“Hello, Mr. Buttweiler.” High fluted voice, Charmina Fuchs bubbling by alone. She would make a couple of young studs an obliging breeder some day.

“Charmina,” he muttered, stripping her with his eyes, imagining an impossibly long whiplash sweeping swifter than jag-lightning down the young girl’s cream-curved torso, her skin blushing beneath the whip sting’s fury.

Adora Phipps, wearing her granny clothes and antiquated lobebag, had been strangely attentive tonight. Weird duck, her hair up and wrapped in a tight bun, one strand astray. After the speech, over chaperone refreshments, she’d made feints toward kindness.

Futzy had kept his replies superficial and moved on.

As he watched flocks of boybuddies quickwalk off toward the labs, swivelbutted and gawk-armed, he wondered what the strange lady English teacher, this Adora, would think of his homelife, his cold wives, the spattered blood on his bedroom walls.

Would it shock her?

Would it turn her off?

Or on?

Kitty, holding back her hair with one hand, bent to a drinking fountain.

A rush to Futzy’s brain.

Not his daughter of course, but maddening-without-meaning-to-be Wyn Wynans. She stood up, oblivious to him, licking her lips, and went into the gym with her unworthy date.

A sob escaped Futzy’s lips. Luckily no one was by to hear. They had to pay-they’d pay in spades -for the Ice Ghoul’s return.

He would see to it.

By God, he swore he would.

First, Tweed tried the phone bank near the science rooms by the north exit.

“The phones are hosed,” said Tad Verle, headed back to the gym in a pink bowtie that accentuated his outstuck ears.

She tried both phones. Tad was right. No dial tone. Dead air.

“That’s weird,” she said.

“Your dad’ll be okay,” replied Dex. “Come on.”

“He’ll be worried.” She could feel fret marks on her brow and a tightening in her belly over delaying Dex’s stupid hunt for the slain. “Let’s try the ones by the front door.”

Dex, saying nothing, trailed after her.

Tweed wished he would grow up.

Principal Buttweiler, pacing the hall like a circus bear restive and unbicycled, looked stunned to see them.

He broke eye contact and edged away.

Tweed chalked it up to his unhinged state of mind-the Ice Ghoul, his rumored sado-mates, all of that.

Four phones were located near the entrance, silver corded and stained. Wood partitions scored with graffiti provided token separation between them.

A gaggle of girls were crowded about the left phone. “Shit on a stick,” said a knobby-elbowed girl named Relda Weep, whom Tweed had known since first grade and not spoken to once in all that time.

The girls moved off and Tweed found the same damned dead lines here too.

“This is spooky,” she said.

“Wonder what the deal is.”

“Dad’ll be worried, Dex. He’ll climb the walls.”

Dex looked concerned. “You’re really torqued, aren’t you?”

She nodded and bit her lip.

Dex hugged her.

Her fears conjured her father at home, his voice shifting into a soft dithering dirge as he eyed the phone and bullets beaded his brow.

“I’m sorry,” said Dex. “I wish I could do something. Hey. What if we found Mr. Waddell?”

“The janitor?”

“Sure. He could fix it.”

Dex was right. Soft doughy congenial Gerber Waddell, head janitor of the quiet ways and kind smile, would rummage around in his hollowed-out skull and come up with the fix, a found treasure glittering in his brain. She hadn’t seen much of him since he had switched on the colored lights. “Where do you think he might-?”

A cheer went up beyond the table where Mr. Dunsmore and Daub Murch had sat, signing seniors in. A back-walking, front-walking band of kids appeared, surrounding and egging on a pair of football jocks who were carrying the corpses of two girls.

Oh lovely, came Tweed’s first thought. Female dates, just like twenty years before. Wouldn’t that non-linearize poor old Mr. Buttweiler!

Then she fixed on the victims, their heads rollicking jerkily in the crooks of elbows.

The one with the O’d mouth and not a drop of blood anywhere was Flense, a math whiz and a quick wit. It chilled Tweed to see the wan, slack-jawed face of a long-time friend approach so.

And lumbering by beside her in a crewcutted jock’s arms, her fingers missing from the hand in front and a bib of blood splashed like a riotous poinsettia where her belly should have been, was Pescadera Carbone. Pesky. Flighty, funny, and now lifeless.

“Oh, God,” said Dex. “It’s so…”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

Tweed stared at them.

The slow parade rhythmed by, some of the students sobbing, strange grins lighting other faces, all of them awkwardly taking up the pace no one in particular had established.

Dex and Tweed, latching onto the tail, made their way toward the gym. A great pain lanced through Tweed’s gut, a pain inscribed with two names: Pesky and Flense.

But also there, and all about, were bright pings of joy, bubble bursts, sniffs of champagne, and each one said, Not Lon. Not Jerzy. Not Camilla. Not this friend or that.

The ping which burst most often, again and again, proclaimed, with sweet relief, Not Dex!

“Let’s go inside,” he said softly.

Tweed hugged him, long and teary, and they did.

“Hi, Blayne,” Altoona said. Friendly sarcasm and at-lastness colored her words. “See anything you’d like to try on?”

“Yep,” he said. “Two things.”

Condor stood next to him, a hair taller and hyped, his lip-zipper aglisten with fresh licked spittle.

Altoona’s left hand lightly gripped the rounded edge of a sewing table. Pim’s laced fingers stroked her date’s knuckles in high elation.

“Hi, Blayne,” Pim said. “Hi, Condor.”

“Hello,” Condor tried. Something in his tone provoked a round of giggling.

The windowless costume shop had its lights up full. Though the place went on for miles, the myriad racks, choked with costumes and huddled about them, made it feel somehow cozy.

Altoona became aware of her heartbeat, a delicious anticipatory lub-dub, lub-dub.

“You guys sure look sharp,” her lover said.

She knew the soft-voiced anticipation that seized Pim in the prelims. That’s what Altoona heard now.

It gave moisture and swell to her gens.

“And you girls look rounded in all the right places,” said Condor.

It sounded stupid, fake-suave.

When Condor cast a look of embarrassment in Blayne’s direction, it led to a second volley of laughter, during which Blayne ushered his friend forward.

“You take the stuff?” she asked. It hadn’t done much for her, but Pim was pretty loopy.

“Oh yeah,” Blayne said. “A killer coaster.”

“Setting mostly,” she commented. “But now that we’re past the slaughter, ain’t nothin’ but smooth sailing and clear vistas ahead.”

Blayne nodded as he came closer, but it was clear he wasn’t one bit interested in listening.

He cobra’d Altoona’s eyes. His hand found her free hand, their fingers entwining at their sides as he eased in to kiss her.

There was that warmth again, a zillion times warmer. His rough-nubbed lips pebbled across her pillowy ones. It turned Altoona on.

She tongued metal.

Rise, fall, rise, fall of zipper-teeth.

Cabrille’s handiwork indeed. Much like the licking she’d given Pim the night before, but oh so different as well.

Condor and Pim were engaged in an awkward embrace, rocking and swaying, their lips blending.

Blayne’s mouth slanted across her cheek to her right earlobe, his zipper moving like a moist blunt blade pretending to cut her face.

Friendship lobe indeed!

It was more like another lefty, her sexlobe’s twin, when the metal ring of his lips encased her flesh. She gasped upon his cheek when he fingered her left lobe through its lobebag.

First fondle.

She boldly did likewise to him, diddling him through his thin, flexible leather.

The daring of it! If anybody caught them, they’d be expelled. Denied graduation.

Forced to repeat senior year.

Forced to attend next year’s prom.

It made what they were doing explosively exciting.

Pim was moaning beside her.

Glancing over, Altoona saw an inept hand fumble at Pim’s lobebag, tug on its bowstrings, yank it swiftly off. The sight of the exposed sexlobe jazzed and juiced her.

Pim’s head swung right, her heavy-lidded eyes aglow with drugs and desire, as the usually shy Condor slurped eagerly at her engorged lobe.

Blayne wore a tight elastic designer bag, as did Altoona. He was shimmying hers down and she his, his lobe so nice and thick and warm and sexy beneath her fingers.

Blayne eased her head around.

Racks of courtly costumes hung like dead kings and queens crammed together.

The touch of his tongue, the cool slide of zipper teeth, took her breath away. Her quim was dripping, the swollen labia tight about zip-jags of niobium.

As much as she longed to be sucked into lobate ecstasy, she wanted even more to lick Blayne there too at the same time.

Impossible.

She stopped him and whispered the word into his left ear, her chin at his sexlobe as she spoke: “Foursome.” She drew back to see his eyes flare with naughtiness and delight.

Then Altoona was both leading and being led, Blayne hovering at her left shoulder, laughing but mostly keeping his lips at her lobe.

She laughed too.

Into the other couple they toppled, a slow sensual collide, her lips finding Condor’s sexlobe while he tongued Pim’s.

Blayne’s muted moan at her lobe, the tiny pain of zipper teeth biting into her arousal, signaled what she sensed: that Pim’s hot mouth had moue’d around his engorged lovelobe, their illegal lovesquare at last complete.

Now all was sucking and being sucked.

Hands roved in every direction. Belts were yanked off, skirts raised.

But head play held sway. It was so majorly mindblowingly incredible, moving higher at each tongued urging, passing them on, grokking that Condor was turning Pim on with the same curled spiral of energy.

And she Blayne.

And on back to Altoona.

Pim climaxed first, that sweet tight sexy childlike unngh that Altoona so loved, with the upward flip which led so sweetly from one catch breath to another.

Then they all came, an absurd lovely quartet of uninhibited noise.

In the midst of her orgasm, she felt Blayne ease past her panties, stretching the lacy thigh-hole.

He found what he sought.

Zip-teeth.

Her inner labia behind them.

He used her hot quim to wet her nub, gently circling there, his knuckles knocking lightly at embedded metal.

Then she was off again, thrusting, gripping Blayne about the shoulders, wanting him inside her so badly, wanting his lobe on her nipples, on her clit, wanting it all.

Pim would be there to help, or to be set upon in turn.

And Condor too, damn their warped society so insistent on three! He would make four, and four would be just fine. Then she couldn’t think anymore, surges of orgasm rotating the tinseled costume room about her like a carousel.

“Hey, I know!” Blayne said. She only half heard him, hugging him, gasping downward, the sturdy table behind her a blessing to her balance.

“What?” said Condor, too loud but that was okay. The poor dear was excited and riding high on some pretty good shit.

Pim toyed with his zipper pull, there where his smile came to an acute angle that pointed to his friendship lobe.

“Take Pim’s clothes off, I’ll show you.” He had already unzipped Altoona. Now he eased the leather skirt down over her ample hips. She did thigh sways to help out, kicking her pumps off on the thread-wisped floor.

Her leather vest hung open.

His hot hands smoothed over her tummy, her spine, went through her private hair and down her butt slit, caught at lace briefs and eased them off and away.

“We gonna dress ’em up?” Condor asked. He was slower in stripping Altoona’s girlfriend, but Pim’s succulent body finally came full naked into the costume shop’s gaudy light.

“No, stupid.”

“Aw, come on, guys,” said Pim. “Dress us up.”

Blayne leaned over and kissed Altoona’s lips. He caressed her sexlobe with one hand and pinched a nipple with the other.

She seized up in that hot frenzied way as if someone had dropped an ice cube down the back of her dress. She didn’t mind a bit.

Blayne broke the kiss and said, “I have a better idea than playing dress-up. You’re gonna like it.”

He knelt before Altoona, using her leather skirt to cushion his knees. Angling his neck to the right, he lined up his lips with her labia.

Condor caught on and did likewise with Pim.

It was a gas, watching Condor and Pim fumble their zippers together, even as she and Blayne did the same. It was like being tickled in lots of yummy places while trying to zip two sleeping bags together with greased fingers.

Blayne slid his zipper pull, the one along his lower lip, into the starter at the base of her right labia. Altoona made a try at hers, joining it with his upper lip starter, but he began to tongue her and that threw her off.

“Wait,” she said. “If you keep doing that, I’ll never get this in.”

He held off.

Then she had it.

It didn’t catch on any skin along the way, but glided up as his glided down on the right, making an intimate seal between them.

Everything felt fine and warm and good.

Then his tongue resumed, a wet rouse where their lips conjoined, perfect union, his head giving her its ardency as he rhythmed there.

She glanced at Pim, who was getting off in that special way of hers. Pim looked like a soft pink dream without clothing. And her squirms-as Condor, intimately lip-zipped, lapped her-seemed to say, Robe me in all the world’s wonders, wash me in sunlight, let perfect ecstasy swallow me up.

Altoona stretched her right hand toward her girlfriend and Pim seized it in that sweet grip.

Life radiated upon her oval face.

This moment felt like a pinnacle of bliss, which surely it was. Yet it was the beginning of something even greater.

Oh, Jesus.

Her kneeling boy-lover, with his lashable back, killer tush, and steely smile, swept her up into a yummy rhythm. Her joy began to rise again. “That,” she said to Blayne. “Yes, that.”

Pim’s right hand was stroking Condor’s hair. “Honey, he’s so good,” she said to Altoona, almost as if her new boyfriend wasn’t there, almost as if he were a trained monkey that couldn’t understand. “His mouth is so fucking incredi… mmmm… oh, yeah!”

Altoona winced. She nodded, unable to speak one word as the tremors seized her. Her hips swayed as Blayne’s head moved in perfect harmony. Their blent love surged upward.

Then a hand appeared on Pim’s head, grasping her hair and yanking back so hard that her neck made a snapping sound. A blade came across the arched skin, opened up a red blurt-and-spill down the curve of her body and a cascade of blood onto Condor’s side-turned head.

A face emerged.

It came toward her.

Blayne struggled below, panic in his eye.

The hand came in rough and scrabbly at her head, her hair, hanks yanked back, a crude tug that wrenched a neck muscle.

Just as the face registered with her, the name rushing in, a tautness bloomed in her throat, too fast for her hands to avert it, then a hot outgush along her breasts and belly, cooling as it came, and no-breath, nothing, nothingness closed upon her.

13. Unearned Sighs of Relief

Kyla followed Patrice into the gym.

For maybe ten token minutes, they had half-heartedly searched for their classmates’ corpses. To hell with school spirit. Then they headed back to the gym to wait for the bodies to be found and brought in.

A bridge had been crossed.

Kyla saw it in the teachers’ faces and in the way the chaperones looked at everybody.

Though the grown-ups remained aloof, a new bond, a bond of adulthood, had begun to form between them and the returning survivors.

Mostly, Kyla didn’t feel grown up.

But an essential part of her did.

On the bandstand, riding above soft cymbal brushings and steady bass drum thumps, Jiminy Jones noodled ineptly on his downturned muted trumpet. He had one of those bulb-mutes in, the kind that laced his playing with silvery silken regret and caresses that zinged straight to the heart.

“Oh, Kyla,” whined Patrice.

Kyla followed her lover’s eyes.

She wasn’t looking at Pesky and Flense, their bodies lying there like broken dolls beneath the Ice Ghoul’s triumphant leer. Nor was she wasting time on the principal, who stood by Miss Phipps holding his speech notes, pale and really upset about something.

No.

Patrice’s eyes were trained on Fido Jenner. One hand was stuck in his pants pocket. In the other, he held a paper cup.

Bowser stood beside him.

They were grinning.

Why? Because that slim tramp Peach, Cobra’s girl-or from the look of it, Cobra’s ex -girl-was talking them up, fondling their friendship lobes, hipping and breasting and just generally slinking outrageously before them.

“He’s breaking my heart,” Patrice went on.

“You can’t push the river, sweetie,” Kyla said, trying to be as gentle as she could. “If it wants to flow toward us, it will. Besides, he’d have to break up with Bowser, if we were to have a prayer.”

Or she and Patrice would have to break up, but Kyla didn’t mention that.

Petulant: “Bowser McPhee isn’t worthy of Fido. He never has been. And he never will be. It looks to me like Peach is doing one heck of a job pushing her river.”

Kyla stopped feeding her whining girlfriend. She was feeling jubilant as all get-out. There they were, numbered among the survivors!

Too bad about Pesky.

Too bad about Flense.

But the important thing was that she and Patrice had made it. They were alive and free, a rush of exhilaration coursing through her.

Odd, how you could be shackled and never know it till someone took a sledgehammer to your bonds and set you free.

“I could use some food.”

“Get some for me too, okay?” Patrice said, dole-eyed above sultry trumpet sorrow. “I don’t want to go near him.”

“Sure.”

Kyla headed off.

Patrice was a tad bit irritating. Kyla had heard that all sorts of splits and new pairings, and sometimes the beginning of threesomes, were often precipitated by surviving the kill.

That was what Fido seemed to be engaged in.

And Peach’s scuzzy boyfriend, Cobra, was hip-deep in conversation with-of all people-Sandy Gunderloy and Rocky Stark. He was staring at the cheerleader’s breasts, pretending he wasn’t upset at Peach’s having deserted him.

The creep was miffed though, powerful miffed. Kyla could tell.

Clusters of kids stood around jabbering about the dead girls. Kyla skirted their conversations, the perfect eavesdropper, not being asked to join in, of course. That never happened.

The long table of food drew nearer. This was a special night. A binge was definitely in order. The cold cuts called to her in all their splendor.

Kyla glanced back.

Poor Mr. Buttweiler hadn’t moved a muscle. He stood by the bandstand, Miss Phipps talking at him. Something was definitely bothering their principal. Something besides his dead daughter.

He just stood there staring at the Ice Ghoul and at the bloody couple splayed before it.

Kyla wondered what special hell he was in that could bring such a low, mean, sorrowful look to his face.

Each kill affirmed the rightness.

And the righteousness.

There’d been a concern that conscience might get in the way. Antiquated, wrongheaded conceit.

Come right down to it, these were acts of love, acts that helped heal wounds.

Killing the compromised punkfucks in the costume shop had been a joy. The bloodrush down torsos, the crimson that painted breasts, bore a certain savage grace.

Consumed by the heat of perverse lust, the writhing wantons had, in an instant, flopped dead and cold.

This Pimlico and her Altoona may have jerked about like severed frogslegs as they died. It was impossible to tell, what with their blood-splashed guyfucks struggling to unzip their mouths from the girls’ vulvas as the knifeblade opened the throat of one, then the other.

Then, peace reigned everywhere.

Bright, red, wet, and full of love in the costume shop’s pure light-such was the calm, a calm more like a cathedral than a high school.

The corpses could have been left the way they were. But it offended one’s aesthetics.

Far better to unzip them, despite the sticky blood-bother. Things went smoother, now that the struggles had ceased.

Death simplified matters.

Stick the boys together first. Lined up, rolled out, facing each other, the damned zippers didn’t match up, both pulls located on the right lower lip.

Slide one boy around.

Slick leather made the pivot easy, Condor’s chin to Blayne’s nose and vice versa, the two of them stretched out thin as rolled dough oozed over with burbles of cherry liqueur.

Clots between the zipper teeth made the going tough. But at last, twice over, an upper lip was successfully joined to a lower.

Touching. An insufferably cute kissing pair of bloody punkfuck lowlife losers.

Then a rack of Beefeater costumes was wheeled free of the crammed congestion. Bulky red and black uniforms harrumphed to the floor, moth-musty padded stuff that three years before had strutted and sung, beneath the baton of Jiminy Jones, in a failed attempt at light opera.

The dead zip-mouths were heavy little fucks. But eventually they made it over the thick metal bar, Blayne’s nape creased and deeply lined from the weight of his corpse, the abrupt angle of his back-bent head, the wide open smile opened in his neck, the lipstrain of his best bud’s zipped body pulling down on the other side.

They looked uncomfortable indeed.

Their skin might give, before anyone found them.

Then again, it might not.

Time for the naked girls, flops of meat and bone that had once tantalized. There was no attraction here now. But the light falling harsh on lifeless, blood-splashed skin carried a certain charm. It touched memories. It soothed them. It gave assurance that this act was not only just but that love’s revenge demanded it.

The girls proved more difficult to get right.

Dragging Pim on top of Altoona was easy, one dead face skull-smacking the other.

But managing the zippers was hard.

All that leg flesh. Thighs. The gleam of matched niobium between the anuses was the only part visible, that and the zipper pulls.

No room to maneuver there. None.

These two had been lovers, of which the world was owed proof. Not to zip them together simply wouldn’t do. They required the same treatment as the boys, to be racked up there, hanging over the big iron bar by their parts.

Visions of cooked chicken arose, one leg snapped aside to reach meat. Dig a knee into the small of the back, grasp the right thigh with both arms, and lever it sharply up, using every ounce of strength-that was the way to proceed.

Something snapped, a dull pop, a thigh bone dislocated. Discoloration bruised the stretched flesh, a major vein broken by exertion.

But it allowed sufficient access.

The girl’s zipper pull slipped over its first tooth and drew up nicely.

An obedient little mechanism.

Her left leg bent back more easily than her right.

There was only one slight vulval snag, halfway up. But backtracking a few zip-teeth set things right again.

Jesus, the lifting! It deepened one’s respect for the poor joes who load haunches of beef onto meat trucks.

At last the females were up, slid onto the bar next to the dead boys but not touching them. Propriety had to be maintained.

Heads down. Blood would have dripped from them if there’d been any left.

The stocky one-it felt wrong to call this dead thing Altoona-threatened the balance. But the other girl’s oddly angled, disjointed thighs tipped sufficiently in the opposing direction to steady them on the clothesrack.

As the rack rumbled toward the passageway, the foursome swayed like commuters on a subway car.

It would be good to position them where the others would discover them.

Raise a few hackles.

Make the little shits shit their britches, get the blood pumping, their adrenalin flowing, divide and conquer them.

Perhaps at some point, the hunger would be satisfied.

But there were plenty of worthy victims out there, the evening was still young, and after all, wasn’t prom night made for love?

Peach felt sexy and free.

And her own damned woman at last.

As she and Cobra, him with his back turned, had risen from their waiting spot, Bowser smiled, blew her a kiss, and left with Fido.

That had been enough to jazz her.

Almost before the echo of the find-the-dead-folks alarm was finished, Peach blurted out that they were through. In spite of Cobra’s stunned disbelief, she held her ground, taking his abuse and riding out his little-boy tempest, knowing in her heart that what she was doing was right.

Now, having sauntered brazenly up to Bowser and his increasingly okay date Fido, Peach Popkin was suddenly on top of a world she hadn’t known could exist.

Blue, red, and orange lights maundered high in the gym, catching balloons and streamers up by the rafters. Wherever her gaze fell, young gods and goddesses looked back, disbelief and elation in their eyes.

Peach had worried that Cobra would make a scene. But he didn’t. Sandy and Rocky, of all people, had caught his attention. He even ignored his gang members, almost as if they had split up too.

“Yeah, well you’re cute too,” said Peach. “You’re both cute. Isn’t it neat?”

Fido’s clownish look made her laugh.

Bowser said, “You mean surviving? Yep. Too bad about Pesky and Flense, but I guess someone had to bite it.”

“No, silly,” she said, “I meant isn’t it neat that we feel so good together? I love your lobes. Do you love my lobes?”

They averred that they did, very much.

“Do you think you two could, I don’t know, futter me a nipple or something? I’d love you forever.”

“I’ll bet Bowser could,” Fido said. There was a hint of fear in his voice.

But he was wiry. Peach recalled his supple way of threading the hallways between classes, a skim past the lowing herds without touching them, almost balletic in his grace.

Fido was a mercurial sort. Come futtering time, he would slip past a flurry of cuts and rends as the senior class tore into the sacrificed girls. Beneath it all, his butcher knife would zip in, copping a prize Peach would cherish for years to come.

“I’ll bet both,” she said, moving in to plant a lush kiss on Fido’s friendship lobe. In doing so, her breasts splayed shamelessly against the poor boy’s suit front. Peach heard him gasp.

“Would you crop us if we did?” he said.

“Hmmm, neat idea,” cracked Bowser. He mock-leered at her, but he was one excited boy, as his tented crotch made clear.

“Sure I would,” said Peach.

Cobra’d always been the one to crop, to whip, to slap and smack. It did neat things to her head to imagine doling it out instead.

“I’d crop you both with such love, your flesh would throb for days and days.”

Cobra’s violence had been so ugly and mean. While that had had its appeal, what Peach felt now seemed so much more limitless and pure.

“And you know what?”

“What?” asked Fido.

“Sometimes,”—she brought their heads near her mouth, Fido’s friendship lobe on her right, Bowser’s bagged sexlobe on her left—“sometimes, I’ll want the two of you to crop me!”

Her hands cupped their napes where a barber’s razor had edged off stubble. Dry fear-sweat mixed there with some sort of yummy fruity cologne.

Their hips came close enough to hers that she could feel hints of hard cock on either side.

At any moment, Futzy Buttweiler would have his say. They would dance and dance and finally futter the dead couple. Then it was off to some place private, a place where she could show these cute boys lots of good things to share.

On the far edge of the gym, still near the hallway, stood Dex and Tweed holding hands.

There would be time enough to get closer to the Ice Ghoul, check out the sprawl of Pesky and Flense, how their bodies were arrayed and how best to approach them when midnight came.

At the moment, Dex felt oddly detached from it all.

The phones had unsettled him.

The dead girls as well, dripping blood down the hallway.

And now the principal.

Mr. Buttweiler and Miss Phipps were huddled by the bandstand. They had been huddled there for some time.

What was the delay? Why didn’t he start?

The doors to the gym were clear, everyone but a few stragglers inside again.

But something kept Mr. Buttweiler from the mike, and now Mr. Versailles and Miss Brindisi came in to confer as well.

Dex thought he must be imagining it, but their eyes seemed often to peek up and glare at him and Tweed.

Had they done something wrong? Had the paperwork been screwed up? Had they been sitting under the wrong number? What was the penalty for that? And would they get a chance to show what had been written in their packet before the law came down, by mistake, on them?

Dex patted his coat. Something springy responded from the inside pocket. Relief. The paper with their location and number.

“What?” asked Tweed.

“Nothing.”

“Come on.”

“Just making sure the paper’s there.”

“What paper? Oh you mean the one about where to sit. Why?”

“Nervous habit. I don’t know. What if we sat in the wrong place?”

Tweed squeezed his hand. “Silly, we did just what the paper told us to do. Besides, what difference does it make? We’ve got our designated victims. Jeepers, I can hardly see them through the crowd.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” said Dex. “I wonder what the hangup is.”

“Mr. Jones can’t play for beans, can he?”

Dex laughed. “Sure can’t.”

Yet another reason for the principal to start speaking. Shut up the noodling muted trumpet and Festus Targer’s random bass thumps and steel-brush cymbal circlings.

Futzy Buttweiler would release some hot air about the girls, about sacrifice, prom spirit, motherhood, and apple pie.

Then Jiminy Jones would call the band members back to the stand. Tweed would pick up her ’bone and Dex would strap his sax to his neck and stick a reed in his mouth to moisten it and secure it on the mouthpiece and they’d be off and away into the music again, flying high.

But the minutes slid by and Futzy Buttweiler kept conferring with the faculty.

Dex’s elation at surviving had begun to turn into something else, something unsettled, an uh-oh not yet fully understood.

“My God,” said Tweed in a dreamy voice, “this is a special night. There’s ozone in the air.”

Dex sniffed. “If you say so.”

“Silly. I is so. So let’s have a smile. There, that’s better. Is my yummynums impatient for Mr. Buttweiler’s immortal words? Me too. Just soak in the atmosphere, Dex. Okay? We’re not gonna pass this way again.”

“Right-o,” said Dex, giving Tweed’s hand a squeeze.

But in his heart, the dread just got thicker and thicker. Come on, Futzy, he thought. Say it. Get this show on the road.

And for the love of Christ, stop staring at us!

14. Prom Askewity

Tweed’s dad shut off the TV and his Personal Flogger. Wincing from the welts, he shrugged out of the device and wiped his eyes with a tissue.

The same damned dirge rose from his lips, his voice quavering as Tweed’s memory persisted.

Smiling.

Standing at the door.

“Good night.”

A vision. The sudden flash of her life. She had popped from Cam’s womb, growing much too fast toward womanhood.

And now?

The answering machine on his nightstand caught his attention.

A one. Not a zero.

A deep red number one, staring back at him.

Why hadn’t he noticed it there on the phone?

How had he missed the ringing?

Before his bath. Toothbrushing as sinkwater furied from the faucet. Humming a foamy fossil-fossil-fossil mazurka.

Matthew bet-no, he knew -that that was when the call had come.

He hit Play.

An unfamiliar woman’s voice scoured inside his head, using his daughter’s name. She berated him and confirmed his worst fears.

Matthew had to play it twice to get it all, its harsh message of death and possible salvation so unsettled his mind.

There was a tight fear in him and a sobbing.

But there was also anger. At himself, at Corundum High, at the entire warped ritual so ingrained in the culture.

If this unknown caller spoke the truth-and her words carried conviction-Tweed and Dex were either dead or saved. Either way, it was too late to do anything about it.

But his anger grew. It refused all reason, shaping its own reasons, acts that impelled.

Kill the killer.

Leap to the gym lectern and grab the mike.

Shame the entire student body, the faculty, with an impassioned speech that would haunt them the rest of their days, that would force them into battling against the custom’s continuation, that would at the very least halt the futtering of his daughter and her boyfriend.

He would bring them home in one piece. He and the Poindexters would join hands, mourn for the dead, speak from the heart in support of the anti-slasher movement.

Matthew dressed, muttering, singing a song quick and curt and choppy. The sobs that welled up threatened to crush him. But he gritted back his tears and pressed on.

Insane, this pointless flurrying, he thought. Tweed is dead. Stolen from him.

But his fingers vigorously zipped and buttoned, thrusting wallet, keys, coins, and handkerchief into his pants pockets.

He bounded down the stairs.

Stopped on the last one and stared.

By the front door beyond her fluxidermed moms, Tweed at her loveliest looked back.

“Good night.”

Matthew’s palm arced on the newel post. He headed away from the vestibule, into the back of the house and along a hallway.

“I’ll get them.” The phrase matched his stride, drums and percussion sounding in the background. “I’ll get them.”

Into the laundry room, past washer and dryer, he tore open the door to the garage and hit the button, shoulder-high on his left. The garage door rumbled up.

His eye caught the hatchet on the wall, nails angled to hold it, a worn leather cover sleeved on it like the hood over a hawk’s eyes.

He grabbed it. Solid heft. It bounced once on the passenger seat.

Then he fired up the car, intent on getting to Tweed, on saving her or making them pay for her life.

Something. Anything.

It was against the law for anyone but the designated slasher to use the school’s backways.

But the law wasn’t going to stand in his way. Not tonight. He wouldn’t allow it.

Matthew backed out too fast, rotating the wheel. Drumming filled his head. Percussion. A surge of fierce melody. The garage door jiggle-rumbled down in counterpoint. The roadway at the end of his driveway curved and reversed beneath him.

He gave a bitter laugh.

“I’ll get them.”

Crazed father to the rescue.

The trumpet wept and wailed like an old man slumped over, smoking a cigarette, eyelids heavy, against a moonlit wall in an alleyway.

Sandy’s boyfriend looked dazed, as he often did. Rocky rarely gave himself credit for having any brains. “But I thought,” he said, “our third would be some guy outside of school.”

“I did say that,” said Sandy. “But Cobra is different.”

Cobra was staring at her breasts, but she could tell his attention was divided. His glance flicked toward Peach Popkin, who was cozying up to two losers. “Hey Rocky, come on,” he said. “I’ve never been part of this fuckin’ school, and you know it.”

Sandy felt exceedingly jazzed, as if her entire being were drenched in lubricant and every move she made, down to the least breath, turned her on even more.

She was used to erectile eyes painting sex patterns on her body. Mostly, that had been a subliminal annoyance. Not until this moment had she herself felt a fraction of the fantasized sensuality at play in those eyes.

The concluding bell had done it.

It sparked something in her. It planted a seed. When she and Rocky burst out of that smelly locker room with the other kids, it felt as though she rode on a wave of freedom.

She was free to be whatever she wanted. No limits. The balloting was done, Rocky would be king, she’d be queen, and no one could coerce her into fulfilling some fantasy of theirs.

Not any more.

They would test-drive, at least, this Cobra. He was different. He was dangerous. It would be fun to jump his bones. Fun too to watch the hood and the jock turn one another on.

She couldn’t wait.

“Well, Sandy knows best,” said Rocky.

“Damn fuckin’ straight, she does.” Cobra’s hands did spastic fidgets, a nicotine jag. His eyes slipped up her dress and licked between her thighs.

“But none o’ that drug stuff.” Rocky sat high on his horse, the one whose saddlehorn Coach Frink had stuck up Rocky’s butt.

Cobra looked sharply at him. “Drugs? What are they? I never heard of any dee-are-ugs, not in my whole fuckin’ life. You clear on that, muscle man?”

Sandy imagined the whip in his hand. It made her heart race.

“Hey, but I thought you… I heard that you—”

“It’s all lies, man. Bad rap’s done stuck me with a bad rep all the goddamn time in this fuckin’ shithole. They never get off your back once they climb on. They’re like a Flogger stuck on High with the straps sewn shut. But nobody never proved a thing on me, not one.”

“Sorry, Cobra,” Rocky said, looking cowed. “I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”

Rocky could have torn Cobra in half without raising a sweat. But Sandy guessed years of bull-headed coaches had made him malleable. She and this dark-eyed mini-thug had years of fun ahead, making Rocky perform for them.

“That’s it, guys,” she said. “Be friends. We have a whole dance to feel this thing out—”

“—I’m gonna feel you out—”

“—and I for one am planning to enjoy it.” She could already sense a dark texture to the air, a miasma of thin-lipped disapproval from students and teachers alike, judging the three of them.

It did nothing but turn her on.

The trumpet music stopped. The drummer began a roll, soft, then faster and louder until finally he spangled off a cymbal shining gold and shimmery in the spotlight.

“Fuckin’ Futzy’s up,” muttered Cobra, “ready to spout more prom bullshit.”

The principal held folded papers in one hand and tapped the mike with the other. He was gazing out, white in the face, beyond the gathered masses toward the Ice Ghoul.

Mr. Buttweiler, a really nice man who winked at Sandy a lot, looked seriously psycho tonight. Too bad the prom committee, many of them friends of hers, had trampled on his feelings.

But he would get over it. Maybe it would help him overcome his twenty-year-old funk.

And if it didn’t?

Well fuck him, she thought, amazed at the crudity of her musings. Fuck him to hell and back. He was nothing, now that school was out, over, and done with forever. He was pasteboard where power had stood. Wink at some other piece of tail, you jackass, she thought.

It made her laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Rocky asked.

“Yeah, babe. What gives?”

“None o’ your beeswax,” she said.

Soft sadness through the speakers. “Can you all hear me?” A squeal. He backed off. The feedback died.

“Maybe not now,” Cobra said with a leer, “but me ’n’ old Rocky here’ll crop it out of you later. See if we don’t.”

“Yeah, Sandy.” Rocky adopted Cobra’s macho stance. “Double welts for you tonight!”

“Promises, promises,” she said.

She caught Mimsy and Bubbler pointing at her, fellow cheerleaders who were a longstanding item. The prissy pair of boob-and-panty-flashers acted stunned.

Well, fuck them too, she thought.

Futzy Buttweiler tapped on the mike, leaned around looking, tapped it again, looked closer and flicked a switch on its neck, then tapped it once more. This time, thunks sounded.

He cleared his throat.

Gerber felt like a shirker.

He’d done the flag thing, the colored light thing, the setting up of the mike, the series of bells by which the senior class got herded here and there for the slaughter and the okay-you-can-get-up-now stuff.

All that stuff.

From where he stood, looking down on the prom, he had done all the right things. But he hadn’t hovered as he usually did. He hadn’t been seen by all the right people.

Gerber was spooked.

Maybe it was the big red monster in the center of the gym. Its face was plenty creepy. The ferocity of its stance made electricity shoot up his spine and into his partial brain. He could shut his eyes, or go as far away as his shoes would carry him. But still, them lightning sparks did their upshoot thing and the cold eyes stuck in that wicked red face penetrated deep inside him and urged him to do bad things.

He gazed down.

Ants. The spotlit bandstand. The big red monster and the dead girls. Spiffed-up seniors milled or stood in clumps on the sawdust.

Something kept Gerber company that night, but he didn’t really want company.

Shadows moved.

Even up here.

Was it him? His feet suggested where to go next. He could already see himself there.

Life weren’t fair.

You grew up, got overzealous, maybe one or two people died what ain’t hadn’t oughta.

So what?

But that weren’t how society saw it. Nope, they cut the bad urges out of your brainpan and chucked the cut part in the trash. Made you safe again. They thought. Made you productive and put you in a janitor suit so’s you could serve a good function for your fellow man. They thought.

Huh.

Their knives weren’t so smart.

But he wasn’t about to tell them so. Maybe he knew shit little, like they said. But he knew that if he told them, they would open up his skull all over again, take out the whole damn thing this time, and toss it in the trash.

Ol’ Gerber was too wily for that!

But he was spooked tonight, for sure. He would catch hell for doing or not doing some shit, though he’d done everything he was sposta oughta. Maybe that was the meaning of the shadows and the sounds.

Guilt goblins.

Conscience. That thing without which he’d been operating before they sliced his head open. Maybe it was filling in the empty spaces.

Great. Useless stuff. Hope I don’t catch any o’ that, he thought.

Then he saw the shadow again, even way up here. And he lowered his head and put his big hands on top of it, cringing and feeling tears come into his eyes.

Go away, he thought. Go away.

His feet wanted to move again.

Jonquil stood less than ten feet from the slain girls, sniffing the as-yet subtle smell of death.

No, that wasn’t quite right.

Pesky’s ribboned belly had begun to steam with a stenchy redolence that pleased her, that stoked her lust and made her think of later.

For the past many years, Jonquil had taken to marauding after the prom. She would find some neighborhood in an obscure section of Corundum, draw a bead on some lonely guy or gal or couple through their window, and fuck the juice out of them. Totally anonymous, dressed like a slut on the troll, she acted with complete abandon.

She loved it.

“Ladies and gentlemen…”

Futzy’s voice faltered. He struggled to regain his composure.

Jonquil wondered where Gerber Waddell was. He hadn’t been around all night. Usually he hung about on the periphery of the prom. In some ways Gerber was the prom, hints of violence behind his soothing exterior.

She found other reasons to wonder.

There was something strange about Flense’s body. The solid white of her gown was now wet with blood. It hadn’t been so when they carried her in. An inner wound only now soaking through? Jonquil didn’t think so.

“You have passed a very important stage in your life, a stage that

…” Futzy paused.

A blotch suddenly bloomed on Flense’s right breast, a bright red blotch completely separate from the ribside Jonquil had been looking at.

The blood wasn’t coming from inside Flense at all.

From Pesky? Not a chance. Her corpse faced another way.

Jonquil looked up, noting moisture on the Ice Ghoul’s cheek, a drop at the tip of its beakish nose. Leaks in the roof, Claude had guessed. She watched the drop elongate and detach. A spangle of rain. She fancied she could see the spatter hit Flense and widen the red blotch.

A neuron fired in Jonquil’s brain.

Not water. Not water at all.

“My friends,” said Futzy, departing from his text, “I have to admit to some confusion. Sheriff Blackburn should have been here by now.”

That was true, thought Jonquil. Futzy had made no big deal about it, which was perhaps why she hadn’t noticed it before. Ordinarily, the sheriff would remove the padlock from the gym’s outer door and slip in. By now, he should have been standing by the bandstand, ready to spout his drivel about the community, their new role in it, all that grown-up crap.

“What gives?” Claude came up beside her.

“I don’t know.”

“But there’s something far worse,” said Futzy, “than the sheriff’s absence.”

“Oh my,” Claude murmured, “our beloved leader’s about to lose it.”

“With good reason, I’m afraid,” she said. Through a sea of bobbing heads, near chaperone corner, she noticed the strange couple, Brayton and his date. They had this look, a look that bespoke knowledge.

Interesting.

Something more than bloodlust wriggled its sensuous way through Jonquil. She felt, in that tip-tilted gym, as if they were all standing on the deck of a vast ship. Below them, a boiler stoked with rage-more rage than Jonquil had felt in years-was poised to explode.

Futzy’s halting words, the blood dripping from above, the odd couple whose presence somehow tied it all together-these things caressed her so violently, she teetered on the brink of jumping her snooty colleague’s bones right there on the dance floor.

On Flense’s chest, fingers of blood stretched to grope the dead girl’s breast, a clotted palm moist upon her nipple.

“The slain pair you have brought in…,” said Futzy.

Oh my God, Jonquil thought. Sometimes you knew, by the way someone began, how they’d end.

And he did. “The slain pair you have brought in,” he repeated, “are not those who were slated to die.”

There was a beat before the sound began.

Then it was suddenly there, like waves of ants scurrying underfoot at the destruction of their anthill.

Jonquil herself gave a sharp ah, her hand to her mouth. She saw Brayton squint and grab his date’s arm. Raven had gone white, but the starch hadn’t left her face, that stubborn grit Jonquil had found so alluring when they met.

“Pescadera Carbone and her escort are not the designated victims.

I…”

“Great,” said Claude over the tumult. “Just when the school needs a true leader, our beloved Futzy crumbles.”

Then the tenders whose birth timing and the luck of the draw had spared came deadmarching into the gym with their dates. A couple of wrestlers carried the corpses of Butch and Zinc.

“Oh my God.” This over the mike. “Sheriff Blackburn should be.. . does anyone know where the sheriff is?”

A second dead couple, one of them a tender.

Jonquil felt her knees buckle at the sight. She clung to Claude’s arm, moved in, wanting so badly to kiss him.

But he reared back. “Wait now,” came his objection.

Then she heard the sound above, like a diver leaving a springboard. She looked up and saw the falling body.

Impressions through colored light. Something unraveling. A sandbag. Stocky like their missing sheriff. It was Sheriff Blackburn, his eyes bugged out in disbelief, thin glistening erections of zoom. It made not an ounce of sense.

Then he hit the end of the rope, a groan and hold above, and the glistening erections shot from his eyes.

What were they?

One smashed on the floor and skittered like a scattering of hockey pucks. Ice, thought Jonquil. Icicles. But the other hurtled through the air, a javelin, straight toward Jiminy Jones.

If instinct hadn’t made him wince and try to sidestep it, the icicle would have whisked past him. As it was, he flinched into its path, took it full in the right eye, and reared back like a catcher’s mitt on the rebound.

Without a sound of protest, he fell backward. His trumpet dropped from his hands. A clatter of crumpled brass rang out where it fell. The dying bandleader twitched on the risers.

At his rope’s end, the sheriff jinged this way and that, a naysaying puppet saying No! No! No! then oscillating into dead sways.

Amid the screams and shouts that surrounded them, Jonquil, helpless in Claude’s capable arms, rang in with a triple orgasm, wave upon wave of fear and lust and anger informing it, full out.

15. Buttweiler in Charge

Futzy felt baffled, befuddled.

Never in the history of Corundum High had things gone awry at the prom. Sure, one or two inept slasher-teachers had been killed by their intended victims. But that was a turnabout to be expected every so often.

What confronted the principal tonight was sheer madness.

He spoke above the hubbub. For a time, his personal problems took a back seat to this new urgency. His head felt as if it might explode, but somehow his words gathered authority.

“Students,” he said. “Students.”

They ignored him, churning like thick taffy.

“Students.” Calm, persistent.

At the corner of Futzy’s eye, Jiminy Jones’s body twitched. Brest and Trilby, standing with Bix by the refreshments, rushed into the hallway and were gone. Futzy had heard a rumor that their daughter was holed up in the school. More than likely, they had gone to check on her.

A nub of crowd started to drift that way. Futzy couldn’t have that.

“Students.”

They were quieting. The sheriff’s sway at rope’s end had settled slow and easy, like a tire swing.

“You all need to get a grip on yourselves. Get a grip. Calm down and get a grip.”

He repeated the phrase, trying to seize on their chattering minds.

“Get a grip. That’s it. You can do it. Stay here. Stay right here in the gym. It’s the safest place to be. The killer could be anywhere out there. There’s safety in numbers.”

Use fear to halt the mass exodus before it begins.

“I want you to spread calm. Not panic. There’s no need for panic. Hold one another. Assure one another. We’re in control here.”

Jesus, what a lie.

“Teachers and chaperones, please make your way to the bandstand. That’s it. Steady as she goes. We’re in control here. We’ll figure out the best course of action and restore order, calm, peace, serenity. That’s it. We’re doing fine. Everything’s under control.”

Adora Phipps was standing close by.

Elwood Dunsmore sidled his way through the crowd on the right.

Jonquil Brindisi, clutching Claude Versailles’ arm, wore a strange shiny-eyed smile as they approached.

“You folks are handling this just fine.”

He raised one finger in a be-right-back gesture. Then he crouched at the edge of the riser.

The Borgstroms, the white-haired notched elders, had risen and were coming forward.

Nurse Gaskin hesitated, unsure whether faculty and chaperones meant her. Futzy motioned her over, blue dress, short dark hair, Kitty’s age had she lived.

“Delia,” he said to the nurse, “try to find Gerber so we can get the lights turned on full. Elwood, I want you and…” Brest Donner’s husband Bix arrived on the left. “I want you and Bix to hack down the sheriff’s body, if you will. Then toss a blanket or something over Jiminy Jones. Please.”

“No problem, Futzy,” said Elwood, his army brainwashing kicking in. Bix looked less certain. But he nodded and started to leave with the shop teacher.

“Oh, wait, Elwood.” Almost let him get away. Chaos contrived sometimes to muddle the brain.

“Something else?”

“You don’t have a key to the front padlock?”

“No, sir. Only the sheriff has that.”

“Search him. I doubt you’ll find it. How soon could you saw through the padlock? It’s pretty thick.”

Dunsmore grimaced. “Hell’d freeze over first. Maybe an acetylene torch. Get one from the shop, wheel it over, heat up the steel, lever a blast of oxygen at it, we ought to be through in two minutes. I’ll need to have a look at the lock though. They’ve come up with a new tempered steel that resists just about everything.”

“Try it anyway.” Futzy dismissed him. “Jonquil, take over the mike. Talk about the vices in that winning way of yours. Harden them. Calm them. Make them ready for whatever might be coming down the pike.”

“What about you?” Jonquil asked, a defiant little bitch as usual, forever implying inadequacies in him.

“I’ll be back soon. I’m going to my office—”

“I’ll go with you,” Miss Phipps chimed in.

“—try the phone there, call for help if the line’s up, get my gun in any case. Claude, check the pay phones. Rumor has it they’re dead, but I want to be sure. Be super cautious out there and return straight to the gym when you’re done, give Jonquil some backup at the mike.”

“How about us?” Mr. Borgstrom radiated a soft savage bloodlust that was lovely to behold. “What can we do?”

Futzy nodded. “You and your wife stay close by. Provide moral support. With your help, we’ll survive this.”

The eager old couple grinned, their lobes long sucked dry of juice and withered with age. Oldsters were usually a royal pain, their rutted thought patterns blocking the crosscut blasts of creativity. Not these two. An engaging insanity lit their limpid eyes.

Futzy rose again to the mike.

He had cobbled together a plan. Was it any good? He had no idea. Sometimes it sufficed, at least for a time, just to have one.

He summarized it for the senior class.

Then he turned the mike over to Jonquil Brindisi and headed, Adora Phipps at his heels, toward his office.

Tweed suddenly wanted very badly to be home under her comforter. She didn’t feel at all like a grown-up. She felt like a sniveling little kid in need of serious daddying.

Through mercurochrome swirls of light were carried the bloody corpses of Butch and Zinc, the two trumpeters who would trumpet no more. Broken necks, torn eye sockets, deep ripped slashes across their chests. Zinc had been a tender, exempt from all violence, a fortunate white-ball plucker who had struggled to suppress a smile as he walked off the auditorium stage a week ago Thursday. That made his death unspeakably worse.

The wrestlers carrying them laid them before the Ice Ghoul. There was room beside the pair of slain girls. Sheriff Blackburn’s body swayed from its rope at one edge of the sacrificial platter.

The principal tried to calm everyone. But it was hard to process his words.

Tweed’s father had reason to fret. The phones had been dead. Maybe he would call the cops. Maybe they’d break in any moment now to rescue them. Her knees felt weak. now. But the nightmare continued.

Wherever her eyes alighted, looks of panic punched through a restless mill of classmates.

Her boyfriend shivered audibly.

“Oh, Dex, I’m scared.”

“You’re telling me,” he said, admitting his own terror.

The killer’s malevolence lay everywhere, eye and hand full of power. Dex’s sax strap. Tweed had a sudden fear that it might be yanked up at any moment. His neck would snap. She gripped it, wrenched it over his head, and flung it into the churning crowd.

“Hey, what’re you-?”

Tweed hugged Dex fiercely. His balance went haywire. But he steadied himself and hugged her too, his warm sweet head tucked alongside hers. “I love you, Dex.”

“It’s okay. We’ll get through this.” His words were an echo of Mr. Buttweiler’s. “We’ll stay here like Futzy says and we’ll be safe. He and the teachers’ll figure something out.”

“Whoever’s doing this is gonna kill us all.”

“No he won’t.”

“He will. I know it.” It wasn’t over yet. Not by a longshot.

“Don’t work yourself up,” said Dex. “You’re spooking me now. It’ll be okay. You’ll see.” His hands comforted Tweed at her waist.

Everyone had so bunched toward the front that the gym felt suddenly packed, dense with fear and restlessness. Towering above, the Ice Ghoul, its face set in chill triumph, seemed to see many more bodies strewn before it. It lusted after broken bones, torn limbs, futtered flesh-far more sacrifices than had been laid before it.

Knife raised high.

Crude cock viciously erect.

Knees and bent legs. Feet like a runner’s poised at the starting block. Buttocks splayed over one heel.

Its hunger was limitless, its cruel red maw only now beginning to be filled. Tweed hugged Dex closer. She wanted to turn away from those dark eyes, but they held her in their sway, made her look, made her shudder.

Trilby feared she would pass out when rumor came, then was confirmed, that the slain girls had been found in the faculty lounge. Brest held her. A wash of sound rushed through her brain, white noise before a swoon.

“But Pill is in there,” she said. “We’ve got to—”

“Come on,” said Brest. “Bix, you stay here.”

“I’d better go with you.”

“No, Futzy’s gonna need your help,” insisted Brest. “Me and Trilby’ll be careful.”

Trilby had resisted fainting, the gymnasium taking on its painful reality around her. She followed Brest past the refreshment table to the entrance.

The corridor shone with a feeble light full of shadows and menace. That didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but finding her way to Pill. Trilby prayed her daughter hadn’t been killed.

Or maimed.

Or kidnapped.

At a run, they passed by the array of phones, a wall of glassed-in trophies, the entrance doors secured with the lock Elwood Dunsmore had snapped shut. The faculty lounge at the far corner of the building seemed miles away.

“Pill? Honey?”

Trilby shouted the words. Fear gave them a sharp edge. She worried it would terrorize Pill further.

The cherry-stained door of the lounge hung ajar, but no reply came.

Brest shoved the door wide open.

Trilby rushed past.

Spatters of blood by the paper cutter. On the floor. On the-Oh, my God!-on and running down the splintered wood of the coat closet.

“Pill?” A sob choked her. “Pill? It’s Mommy.”

Brest grabbed the knob, silver smeared with streaks of blood.

Trilby would have eased the door open, but Brest, always more violent and impetuous, flung it back and held her splayed fingers out to catch the rebound as it banged off the wall.

Pill sat cowering in the corner.

No blood.

In her arms, held so tight as to deform its plush body, Gigi the goat tried to comfort her.

Her face held shock. Her eyes took their time focusing. She looked smaller, every limb tight, as if the muscles tensed around her bones drew all her flesh inward.

“Come on out, Pill,” Brest said.

But Trilby tore past her, went into the coat closet, crouched to her child and peeled her from the flimsy wood walls and into her arms. Her skin felt ice cold.

“Mommy?” A voice barely audible. “Mommy?”

“Yes, Pill. It’s Mommy. Mommy’s here. You’re safe now.” Nothing mattered but holding and soothing her little girl.

Brest’s attempts to break them free of Bix and trio them up with Delia Gaskin, Bix’s openly expressed wish for extramarital affairs, Trilby’s own subservience to Bix and Brest, not just under the riding crop but in everyday life-none of that mattered now.

The one thing of importance in the world was hugging Pill. Bringing her back. Healing her in the days ahead, once this nightmare was over.

“He killed them, Mommy.”

“I know he did, Pill. But he’s gone now and Mommy is here and you’re safe. Safe as can be.”

“The man in the janitor suit. I saw his hand. It had a knife in it. The girl was just asking. That’s what she said. I’m just asking. But he killed her.” Her voice, weak as tea, lanced Trilby’s ear with hurt.

She rocked her little girl there on the floor of the coat closet.

Brest’s shadow fell on them.

The child suddenly let go of her goat and groped at her mother, her head nestling deep into Trilby’s neck, her hands as clingy as claws high up where the shoulderblades nearly met over her mother’s spine.

“He killed them both, Mommy.”

“I know he did, Pill,” she soothed. “I know.”

16. In the Midst of Mayhem, Love

Bray and Winnie had entered the gym with the bodies of the dead trumpeters, stunned at the savagery of the kill.

Bray nodded as his date-that’s how he had begun thinking about Winnie-angrily abandoned her optimism. They followed the seniors, attached to the crowd but not integral to it, off far enough that no one could hear their conversation.

She understood now, she said, that their killer friend wasn’t the champion she had believed him to be.

Disillusionment lay bitter upon her face.

Then they had seen the slain girls and “Oh, Jesus,” Winnie had said, nearly in synch with his unspoken thoughts.

The sheriff had fallen.

The bandleader.

And Bray understood that he and Winnie, there under false colors and archly eyed by the amazing Miss Brindisi, were quite possibly in the deepest of shit one could be in.

Through the principal’s speech, through the huddle of faculty and the uneasy buzz of students, Bray held Winnie. She seemed airless, without focus. A forlorn sylph. Even in her distraught state, he thought, she was gorgeous.

He would protect her.

He felt brave. He didn’t know why such a feeling had come to him, but it had.

While Winnie, gung-ho for glory at the start, had deflated, Bray had somehow gained in strength. Poor lamb. They would survive this night somehow. Then they’d go off and start a life together.

Her head suddenly twisted up, her eyes newly flaring. “Where’s that packet from Fronemeyer’s house?”

“In the car. Why?”

She slumped back down. “Great.”

“Except for this.” He reached into his tuxedo jacket and pulled out the thick sheaf of twice-folded paper. “In case we wanted to go exploring, I thought—”

“The map!”

He unfolded it like a flower coming into bloom. Four pages, stapled, the top one with a three-digit combination Bray guessed allowed the designated slasher, and him only, access to the school’s secret passageways.

“We could—”

It occurred to him too. “Of course.” Their means of escape. Why hadn’t he thought of it?

“—find him,” she said, “and reason with him.”

“It’s our way out.” Then Winnie’s words registered. “Hey, wait a minute. I’m not gonna let you get near our madman. He’s wigged out. He’ll kill us both.”

“No, listen.” Winnie paused.

Bray could tell she had been ready to go at him again. To attack his cowardice. But now her mind slipped into gear, more furious in its cogitations than he’d ever seen it.

Jonquil Brindisi stood at the mike. Two men were near the Ice Ghoul, hacking at the rope that held the dead sheriff aloft.

Winnie’s hands danced in colored light as she pieced things together. “We find him,” she said. “We sneak up on him, overcome him, maybe knock him out. Then we reason with him, we talk to him, for as long as it takes. We get in touch with his problem, soothe him, convince him he’s already done enough to solve it. Then we get him to confess, give himself up, make a speech to the press, go national.”

“Oh sure, Winnie. And he’s just gonna go along—”

“Yes. He will.”

Bray stopped speaking. Her certainty never ceased to amaze him.

“He will. No two ways about it. I can do it. I can convince anybody of anything.”

“I’ve got a better plan,” he said.

They blended into the crowd in a reasonable fashion. But Bray felt that a spotlight had been trained on them. At any moment, Jonquil Brindisi would point an accusatory finger at them and have them torn apart, futter bait for the frenzy that lay just beneath the surface for the poor panic-stricken kids around them.

“Here’s what we do,” he went on. “We escape into the hidden backways. We find the designated slasher’s private parking area. Using his car, we blow this town, this state, this whole wretched nation. And we start a new life together, plain and simple, somewhere else.”

“They hunt us down.” She said it as if she could see it. “They scapegoat us for tonight’s outrages. They toy with us on the tube. They tear us apart, they torture us. They put us on Notorious next year, an extra special three-hour version, a slow hellacious juicing.”

She made him see it.

The pauses between sentences, the stare full of import and meaning, made him see it.

Winnie’s arms came about him, her lips near his friendship lobe. “Bray, my strange lovely man, one way or another, they’ll fry us. Finding the killer is our only choice.”

Bray could hear Jonquil’s words at the mike. Tough talk, thrusting iron rods up into youthful backbones. Without looking at her, he knew she was brooding on them. Her accusation might come at any moment.

Winnie felt warm and solid in his arms.

“Do you understand?” she murmured.

He kissed her neck, her cheek, her lips. Her nape felt so perfect against his palm.

“Let’s go,” he said, determined. “Let’s find him.”

Winnie took his hand. They sauntered toward the door the two women had rushed out of.

Bray thought they’d be halted at any moment. “Wait a minute,” her stern sexy voice would rise, “where do you think you’re sneaking off to?”

But through his envelope of fear, past the refreshments and out the door to the hallway, Bray and Winnie walked hand in hand, toward a meeting Bray wasn’t looking forward to at all.

On the way to his office, Futzy wracked his brain for a suspect, sharing those that came to mind with meek mousy Miss Phipps.

Maybe Zane Fronemeyer had gone insane. But anyone acquainted with Zane would scoff at the very idea.

Might it be the mean-eyed, blubber-chinned cashier in the cafeteria, Skaya something, whose face looked as though she’d been pickled in bile from the moment she was born?

Or one of the newer faculty members, the untried, untested, unknown, indeed unknowable ones fresh out of college?

“Gerber Waddell,” Miss Phipps suggested.

Futzy stopped on the stairs.

The building smelled musty, layered with dust.

“Gerber,” he repeated, mulling it.

They continued upstairs. Futzy was deep in thought. He hadn’t seen the janitor since the lights dimmed and rainbowed. Had Gerber, in his years of subservience, finally somehow triumphed over the intent of his lobotomy?

Each year, Gerber changed the designated slasher’s combination to the backways. He wrote it on the map contained in the slasher’s packet. Did anyone else know it? No one at all. Gerber always surreptitiously slipped it in, last thing before delivery. Futzy himself made a special point to avert his eyes when he gaped the mouth of the envelope to receive it.

Futzy opened his office door for Miss Phipps. As she walked past him, he caught a hint of her perfume. Lilac? Some old lady scent. Her dress was dark velvet, swaying at the ankles. Old lady dress. A crime. Behind her gold-rimmed glasses, her young face made a thin oval.

“Find the snubnose,” he said. “Top drawer, I think. I’ll check the phone. Be careful with the gun. It’s loaded.”

“All right.”

He moved to the desk and lifted the receiver.

No dial tone.

The lines had likely been cut somewhere deep in the building. But it felt as if his lair had been violated.

Gerber, the shy feeb.

It had to be him. Somehow, Futzy would find him, put a bullet in what was left of his brain, spare him the torment of being sentient when the graduating class sailed into him.

Miss Phipps rummaged in the desk drawer and lifted something out. She raised it. Against her delicate fingers, Futzy saw the velvet backing. “Is this her?” she asked. “Your daughter?”

“How…” dare you, he was about to say.

She picked up on it, flustered: “I’m sorry, I—”

“No, wait. It’s all right.” Futzy approached Miss Phipps, her look of fright softening at his reassurance. “That’s her. Yes. That’s my little girl. My Kitty.”

“She’s beautiful.”

“She is,” he said. “She was.”

Miss Phipps sensed the rawness in his voice. She set the picture facedown in its drawer, which she closed. Her eyes glowed with compassion. Her body moved closer.

“Now wait a minute,” he said.

Something was blossoming in her eyes, behind those prim frames.

“I don’t want to wait any more,” she said.

Futzy took in her ache, her mouse-beauty, the look he had always assumed meant nothing more than bland respect. Now, as she came near, that look softened into something else, something warm and inviting.

“You’re… I’m—”

She surged toward him, a velvet dream, her lobebag angling as her head tilted in. A tight lipline puffed and swelled and touched his mouth, tasty, warm, moistening beneath the flicker of her tonguetip.

Some women came at you, when the moment finally arrived for such a bold move, tentatively, their hips seemingly dead, their torsos not much better. Adora Phipps wasn’t like that.

Her whole body, behind its deceptive folds of old-lady velvet, exuded urgency, pushing against him in a solid wave of give me, give me.

Futzy’s hands glided past her waist to her rump. The fabric slid over naked curves of flesh.

No undergarments.

Adora broke the kiss and hugged him fiercely, grinding herself into him.

“I don’t think we should—”

“Shut up, you!” she said, forcing his lips open with hers, tonguing him as her hands snaked below his belt and found his zipper. The mousy little English teacher, bold as any whore, had backed him up against his desk.

His hands rose and clutched as they bunched up vast accumulations of velvet, shoving them up her body like rolls of hippo fat, gathering more and more of the stuff to make them heavier still.

His organ popped out into Adora’s hand, just that little bit longer and fatter for the Tuffskin he had beefed himself up with.

She eased him back. Futzy felt hem, naked thighs, and perfectly cuppable buttocks, her cleft moist and jesus christ warm and wondrous where his fingers brushed it.

Something, a pen set, jabbed against his coat. Then it gave way, propelled off the front of the desk to smash against the floor.

Adora pillowed Futzy’s head on an unabridged dictionary and climbed aboard him, an animal, this prudish covert brainy genius thrusting her taut love-sleeve down about him, deep to the balls, riding him, her hips in sexy sway, her face hypnotic, her eyelids shut, a sheen of lovesweat even now beginning to glow upon her brow.

Futzy swam in revelation.

Opaque encounters now came clear, the many odd looks she had given him: her love for him, and, far stranger, his love for her.

He wanted her, he needed her, he adored her.

In a matchless conjoining of flesh, Adora rode him, her balance precarious but for Futzy’s hold upon her waist. He worried about her knees, a hard polished glass surface to either side of the blotter. But Adora, consumed in ecstasy, paid them no mind. She muffle-moaned into his mouth, getting off, her hip thrusts and her fierce climax bringing him off as well.

Into her sweet waiting lovewomb, Futzy arced his seed, the pair’s urgency fueled by years of denial and by what was transpiring in the gym.

Adora collapsed upon him, exhausted, laughing aloud. He fancied the glass top, stretched almost to shattering, might give way beneath them.

“Whew.”

“No kidding,” he said. “I think you found the gun.”

“I most assuredly did.” Her eyes glistened above their shared laughter.

He looked at her. “You’re my wife!”

“I don’t think so.”

“No, I mean really you are. We’re in a tight spot—”

“Well you certainly are.” She gave his cock a vulval squeeze.

“—we, unnngh, I mean there’s no time for bullshit at a time like this. We could die at any moment. You and me are crazy to be doing this and I love it. I love you. In the morning, if we’re still alive, I’m reclaiming my life, I’m putting my foot down, I’m ordering the sorry bitches I married to pack up and get out.”

“They’ve hurt you,” she said. “I’ve heard stories.”

“I let them do it. I needed it. I don’t need it any more.” It was true. Adora had broken a logjam in him, one that had robbed him of years of happiness.

Right now, however, he had a school full of terrified students to save. but they’re all mine. Eventually the little savages would throw off their inanities and insensitivities, straighten the warps in their warped little noggins, and grow into the imperfect adults we’ve somehow managed, the rest of us, to become.

“I love you, Futzy.”

“I love you too, my sweet Adora Phipps.” He gave her a quick kiss. “We’ve got to go.” She nodded. “But this isn’t over. This has only begun, you understand?”

“I do.”

A humming kicked on. The service elevator on the far side of the wall was in operation. During school hours, a host of sounds masked it. But here, at night, with the throb of music no longer pounding in the gym, the elevator’s hum could not be mistaken.

They heard its door open.

Something rumbled out, into the hallway, just outside the principal’s office.

Futzy helped Adora off, the flesh that joined them reluctant to let go. The snubnose lay in the middle drawer. He drew it out, moving swiftly and soundlessly to the door.

Adora swayed behind him.

Get back, he motioned. Then he yanked the door open.

The stench of death assaulted them.

A clothesrack. A confused tangle of limbs, oddly bent, more flesh than went with two bodies.

Then Adora gasped and Futzy resolved what he was seeing.

Not two but four bodies.

The zipper-mouthed boys zipped together, clothed and bloody.

And the girls who went crazy over them, naked, broken-limbed, somehow joined at the crotch. Bloody gleams of zipper. The rumors about them were true.

Adora gripped him from behind. She bit his shoulder through a thickness of suitcoat, saying nothing. Then her sobs took on volume, and the depth of her fright set his own mood plunging.

Matthew Megrim had never been the designated slasher. But he knew, as did most teachers, the location of the unassuming, vine-hidden, slightly rundown garage a block east of school.

It was tucked into a quiet residential alley. A punch code that ought to have changed each year, but never did, secured the garage. The teachers knew it and kept it secret to avoid the inevitable student pranks.

Rolling down his window, Matthew punched in FUTZYB. The garage door opened. His mind dwelt on the unknown slasher, on his daughter, and on his drowned wives, fluxidermed in the vestibule of his home.

Cam and Arly’s death had been terrible and swift, an act of God.

Tweed’s death, if indeed it had happened, would be a perversion, the assumption of godlike power by mere mortals.

Inside, a bend of lights lit a ramp that corkscrewed down out of sight. To hell with the law, thought Matthew, and drove ahead. In the rearview mirror, as his descent began, the garage door rumbled shut.

The dirge once more filled his mouth, wordless, full of ire and regret, an opera hero, treacherously murdered, gone down to death. The song, as did his mind, danced with fire. Someone must pay, it said. Wrongful death must not go unpunished.

But hope burned strong as well.

On the phone, the woman’s voice had spoken of possible salvation, as if she, whoever she might be, would do her best to stop it.

Matthew had passed the school, its skull-flag flapping in the night breeze.

Now, parallel fluorescent lights led the way down the ramp, affixed where the damp gray cement walls met cement ceiling. A slow steady half-block of driving drew his car beneath Corundum High.

The ramp widened onto the slasher’s parking area. There sat a bulky powder-blue car waiting for its owner.

Whose was it?

On school days, Matthew tended to arrive early and leave late. So his knowledge of other teachers’ vehicles was spotty.

No time to rummage. It would be clear once he met the slasher, and there’d be only one such roaming the backways.

Matthew parked beside the powder-blue car, yanked up on his handbrake, and killed the engine.

“I’ll get them.”

On the driver’s side of the slasher’s car, in harsh light, stood an elevator.

What a joyless grimy hellhole this was. It ought to have been more inviting, a dark version of the faculty lounge perhaps.

What was he thinking?

More societal indoctrination. Years of it drummed into him, into them all.

They ought rather to shut down this vile place, bulldoze earth into it, strike flat the garage, close off the backways at school, close off all backways everywhere at every last high school in the Demented States of America.

It was nothing short of barbaric, this ritual slaughter of the young.

Matthew stared at the hatchet on the passenger seat. Fool thing wouldn’t be needed. The anger had drained from him, leaving urgency, yes, and regret. What was done was done, though he much feared what that might be.

Leaving his car, he approached the elevator, its metal surface scarred and dinged red with age. He punched a battered silver button.

Nothing.

He tried it again, held it down.

Something connected. Motor sounds, rumblings from above. Would they betray his coming?

What did it matter?

He would find the slasher, verify the phone lady’s story, milk his colleague-assuming said colleague hadn’t died at Dex’s hand-for details about Tweed’s murder, details he would then use to shame the promgoers.

There would be no animosity, hard feelings, nor thirst for revenge against the one chosen to carry out the slash. That was an impersonal task. An honor. One did the deed, then let it fade into collective memory. To some, it was a revered act of heroism.

To others, it was a scandal.

Krantor Berryman, the earth science teacher, had been routinely shunned for years.

He had been chosen once.

Rather than take part in what he called the country’s shame, he had paid his fine and served a year in prison.

Now, Matthew, as the elevator door opened and a blast of rank air billowed forth, vowed to join forces with poor Berryman.

He had gone along with the others, shunning the outspoken anti, like the rest. But all that, he vowed, would change.

Do it, thought Matthew, the sound of those words trumpeting in his ears like a clarion call.

New waves of anxiety about Tweed flooded him as he ducked into the elevator and punched for ascent.

17. Darkness Descends

As she left on her assigned search for the janitor, Delia Gaskin met Brest and Trilby Donner heading for the gym.

Her longed-for lovers.

Pill clung to Trilby. the little girl’s tear-stained face, blanched to the lobes, was scooped hollow. She seemed to have staggered off a rollercoaster, vowing never to ride one again.

“What is it?” asked Delia, laying a concerned hand on Brest’s arm.

“She’ll be okay,” said Brest. “Trilby and I thought Pill would be safe in the faculty lounge. She heard Pesky and Flense being slaughtered. She even saw part of it through a crack in the closet door.”

Concern washed through Delia. “Does she need to lie down? There’s a nice comfy bed in the dispensary.”

“Do you want to, honey?” Trilby asked.

Pill shook her head decisively. She gripped her mommy’s waist tighter than ever.

There would be no chance, thought Delia, to do her nurse number on the frightened child.

Not yet anyway.

“The poor girl’s really upset,” Delia said. “Did she get a good look at the slasher?”

“Not from what we can tell,” replied Brest. “Just a lot of noise and voices, a knife flashing by, an arm in a dark blue sleeve.”

“Sounds like Gerber Waddell.”

“That’s what we’re starting to think. We’re wondering if maybe the surgeons missed one small chunk of brain and his dormant urges are just now catching up with him. He’s reverting to what he was.”

“Futzy sent me to find him and get him to turn the gym lights up full. Sounds like you two haven’t seen him.”

“Not a sign,” said Trilby, Pill staring up at Delia from her mommy’s waist. “I haven’t seen him all night.”

“Well, I guess I’ll check the band room.”

“Be careful,” said Brest, glints of lust peering through her concern.

“Don’t worry. I’m stronger than I look.” Delia smiled grimly and left them.

Glancing back, she saw Bix come up to them, his gaze drawn to the child, then shooting along the hallway toward her.

Fucking nuisance. The one damned thing that stood between her and his wives.

She reached the band room door and tossed another glance backward. There was Bix, still staring at her as his hand caressed the back of his child’s head.

He would come after her. Delia could sense it. He would make his move.

And she would make hers.

She pushed open the door. The shadows were darker in here, a lone dim lightbulb casting much of the room into obscurity. It was a decidedly creepy place, what with the tall gray semicircle of doors, each concealing instruments and music stands. And possibly more.

It was quiet here too. The stillness of a volcano readying to erupt.

No janitor of course. Delia had known she wouldn’t find Gerber here. But she supposed she ought to try a few doors, if only to go through the motions.

A noise behind her.

Big surprise: Bix Donner walked in.

She hoped he had been circumspect.

“Hi, there.” Almost a whisper in church. “Mind some company?”

“You never give up, do you?”

Bix chuckled softly. “Nope, not where a beautiful babe like you is concerned. Cupid’s arrows pierce deep.” He approached her, each level of wood flooring groaning as he ascended.

“Did you tell your wives where you were going?”

“I told them I’d take a spin past the science labs, see if our killer shows himself. He’s gotta be one sick gent, a real nutcase. But if I could come at him mano a mano, I’ll bet I could take him.”

“Heroics, huh?”

Bix shrugged. “Why not? Maybe that’s the way to my Delia’s heart. Unless of course… you’d like to give in to your little Bixie-poo right now.”

He took a step closer.

Delia held her ground.

“Unless,” he said, “you’d like him to kiss you right where you stand.”

She sensed heat and a faint whiff of musk lifting off his body. His hungry eyes peered out of the obscurity, searchlights slashing nightfog to ribbons.

“I’ll tell you what I’d like,” said Delia, swaying with him, almost touching him, toying, tantalizing, turning him on. “I’d like you to find our killer—”

“Ummm hmmm?”

“Walk right up to him—”

“Ummm?” Smug smile.

“And do this.”

Delia’s right fist was pulled close by her side, tense as a steel spring. She had kept her tone calm and casual. Now the fist shot out, a dark thunderbolt to Bix’s solar plexus, knuckled, swift, deeply damaging.

He went to his knees.

Big man brought low.

His hands fumbled at her dress.

She backed away, then turned to the standing lamp.

He would take a good few minutes to recover, but Delia saw no need to wait that long.

The lamp pole was thick and securely screwed into a heavy base, an ample supply of cord coiled beside it that snaked off to a wall socket.

Delia lifted the lamp and upended it.

The on-off pull jinked against its lightbulb like a distant tricycle bell.

This is for Trilby, she thought, swinging the lamp base against the side of Bix’s head with all her might.

And this is for Brest.

The first blow had collapsed him. The second came down squarely on his face, staving it in beneath the eyes. A big iron smile punched across his nose and cheeks, a pleased dent that spewed bloody ecstasy.

Damned pole wasn’t long enough to keep his blood from spattering her dress.

Stability returned to the rocking room. The one pale light, moving with her attack, had made shadows dance. Now they calmed.

The Bixmeister was stone-cold dead. Could she be sure? Delia righted the lamp, slipped out of a shoe, and pressed her foot against his chest.

No heartbeat.

She toyed with smashing the lightbulb. She would grind hot shards of glass into his eyes in the darkness she had brought on, just to be sure.

But other matters needed attending to.

And the air wasn’t moving above his nostrils.

Delia slipped her foot back into the shoe and wiped down the lampstand.

Should she check on the janitor? No need. His bonds were surely as secure as the last time she had checked and the time before that.

Her heart thrilled with love.

Maybe Kitty Buttweiler had been lost to her twenty years before, Kitty and her cute date slain in sacrifice to the Ice Ghoul.

But there lay now before Delia, if she played the game right, the sweet prospect of loving Brest and Trilby Donner in secret.

She had to resist the temptation to keep on killing, as strong as that temptation was. More precisely, she needed to fit each remaining death into a grand scheme that would divert suspicion to Gerber Waddell.

She turned away from the tall doors and the false walls behind them, the myriad entrances to the backways.

No.

She would leave by the band room door.

She would run in panic down the corridors to the gym.

Had blood splashed her gown? If so, that was all to the good. It would corroborate her story, make it more chilling, more convincing.

Behind her, as she left, all was still and silent.

“You’re squeezing my hand,” said Tweed.

Dex became aware how tense he was, from his shoulders to his fingers. He let go. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

He stroked the small of her back and gave a nervous laugh. “I’m just…” He set his punch glass on the refreshment table. “It’s just that it’s hard standing here doing nothing when some… some son of a bitch is—”

“I know, Dex.”

“And Jiminy Jones. He was so all of it, is the music-and his angry baton slashes when the trumpets rushed.”

“I liked Mr. Jones too.”

Dex hung his head.

All his life, he had been steeling himself for this night, ready to fend off attack despite his fear, eager for the moment when the bell that meant freedom sounded at last.

Now that bell had rung and he had felt the elation of survival. Then he had discovered, as had they all, that their survival was by no means assured. Attack could come at random, from any quarter. It was no longer a controlled quantity within a measurable slice of time.

Dex turned to Tweed. “I want to be brave. But it’s so hard. He could be anyone. He could be within reach of us right now.”

“I know.”

“I’m scared, Tweed. It’s one thing to… how can I defend us from this? I’m just some stupid kid who… no, wait, I’m a man, I can do this thing, I can do it.”

Then the tears came, and Tweed crushed her crinkly dress against his body. She hugged him fiercely, braver by far than he.

It wasn’t fair.

He would lose her for being a coward. She would pretend nurture now, but when they were out of the woods, she would drop him for some other guy.

He had felt brave earlier. He had prepped for braveness. He had even secretly lusted to go into teaching one day, instilling in the young a love of the greater vices perhaps.

Like Jonquil Brindisi.

What moved people to do what they did? The question had always fascinated him. Besides, it would give him a shot at being the designated slasher some day, taking out bullies like Stymie Glumm or Angelo Manglebaum.

He would never tell Tweed’s father that. Nor would he argue against the anti-slasher cause with him.

No. The law said Mr. Megrim was entitled to his opinion, as long as he limited himself to talk alone. In time, he would come to accept his son-in-law’s differing stance on the issue.

Dex’s tears began anew.

All of that was past.

“I’ve got to… to get it together.”

“Dex,” soothed Tweed in his ear, “let it fall apart for a while, okay? You’re in my arms. You’re safe here. Just let it fall apart. It’ll come together soon enough.”

Dex buried his sobs in her hair, the aroma of hair spray cloying but comforting.

As distraught as they all were, he didn’t want his classmates to see him crying.

They would remember afterwards, when this nightmare was over. It might ruin his rep. It might condemn him and Tweed and their chosen mate to a life of poverty and scorn on the outskirts of society. Prom bravery counted for much. Tonight might be judged differently, but he didn’t want to bank on that.

“I guess,” he said, calming, “I guess I just prefer… you know, everything in its place.”

“You do.” Tweed stroked his hair. “You’re that way. But tonight we’ve got to roll with the punches. It’s tougher than we thought it would be, that’s all.”

“It is.”

“Dex, just know that I love you and I’m with you, no matter what happens. Whoever’s doing this will be caught, and killed, and torn apart. Futzy and his staff will see to that. They’ve got to, they really do. Have faith in them.”

“I will,” he said, wiping the tears on his tuxedo sleeve.

But inside, Dex had no faith at all in Principal Buttweiler and his staff, who, from the look on their faces, had not the slightest clue about how to bring the rogue killer to justice.

Peach had never seen anyone look as stunned as Bowser McPhee.

To tell the truth, Peach couldn’t believe what was going on either.

The multiplying bodies were bad enough.

Some teacher had gone off his nut.

Eventually, she had no doubt, he would be found and futtered. A few more classmates would eat it and the school would gain some notoriety, but Peach was sure she would survive.

Death-her own, that is-was not within the realm of possibility.

Bowser was a bit more upset by the killings than she. But what really seemed to torque him out, and how could Peach blame him, was Fido’s reaction.

Fido had paled and woozed-and simply walked away from her and Bowser.

Right straight to the fat chicks over yonder, a pair of mustachioed slugs pup-tented in plug-ugly, wallpaper-inspired dresses whose green and magenta blooms splashed garishly everywhere.

In-fucking-credible!

“I can’t believe he did that,” Bowser repeated. “The simpering little bastard took a hike.”

“He wants to marry a couple of blimps!” The nerve of anyone rejecting her for two lard-lugging losers like Kyla Gorg and Patrice Menuci.

“He was my forever.” The poor boy was really broken up. “How’s he gonna get home? What’ll I tell my folks?”

Ms. Brindisi and Mr. Versailles were speaking at the mike like Academy Award presenters.

The sheriff’s body had been carried to the band risers, a tarp thrown over him and the music teacher.

Peach wished they had joined the other dead folks in front of the Ice Ghoul. Putting them on the risers seemed to expand the ghoul’s dominion, as though the huddle of frightened seniors between the creature and the wall behind the bandstand now fell beneath its sway.

“Whynchu take Fido aside and talk it over?”

“I don’t know,” said Bowser, stunned all over again. “I guess I oughta do that. But I feel like saying, Fuck it to hell and back. He’s not worth it, walking away like we meant nothing to one another. We were everything, Peach, I shit you not, everything to one another.”

“So take him aside and tell him that.”

And do it, oh please God yes, she thought, do it before he touches those blubbering tent-sprawls of noxious girlflab.

“I won’t,” said Bowser. He gritted his teeth and flexed his fists. “I can’t, but I will.” But before he took his first step, the teachers at the mike were saying, “Make way for her.”

Make way? Who was there to make way for?

Peach, hearing fresh rumblings ripple through the crowd, craned her neck to see.

Nurse Gaskin’s bobbing head moved off to the left, her hands raised to slice through a dappled sea of bodies. Someone near Peach passed along rumors of blood on her dress.

“They’re saying her dress is bloody,” said Bowser.

“I hear them,” said Peach.

Beneath a glisten of blue and pink and orange lights, the nurse passed through a jostle of students to the risers and the mike.

She looked shaken as she shouldered the two teachers aside and clung to the mikestand, a grasp at salvation.

“It’s…”

She covered the mike and spoke briefly to Mr. Versailles, then back, as distraught as Peach had ever seen anyone.

“It’s the janitor. We were in the band room, me and Bix Donner.”

On Peach’s right, a high hoot sounded from a woman holding a little girl. The woman raised a hand to her mouth. Brest Donner, Peach’s biology teacher, gripped her fiercely in her arms.

Oh yeah, Ms. Donner’s wife.

“I…” The nurse brushed off Jonquil Brindisi’s hand.

The stains on her dress sickened Peach.

She pictured Ms. Donner’s husband-this Bix guy the nurse was yammering on and on about, who had helped Mr. Dunsmore cut down the sheriff’s body-being stabbed by the feeb janitor, blood from the wounds spraying upward to splash Nurse Gaskin’s dress.

“I yelled at Gerber,” she said. “I tried to stop him. He just kept coming at Bix. Then he swung the lampstand up and slammed it down—”

The nurse covered her mouth, her eyes hot with tears.

In an instant, Ms. Brindisi was beside her again, speaking words Peach couldn’t hear.

Nurse Gaskin nodded.

A final thought occurred to her.

She dipped again to the mike: “Trilby? Brest? I’m sorry.”

She almost seemed to regret her own survival.

“I’ve always treated the poor man well. We all have. Gerber couldn’t help what he was, and what he’s become again. He vanished through the band room doors into the backways. I…”

Her hand fumbled for a tissue in her right pocket.

That’s when the lights went out.

There was a loud noise, like a big switch being thrown ker-chunk.

The image of Ms. Brindisi and the nurse hung in a ghostly afterglow, then wiped away to black.

Peach, fear ballooning in her like a sudden burst of fever, found Bowser’s waist and clung to him.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

Peach saw the janitor coming at her from all directions, that benign wisp of a grin cracking open to reveal madness, bloodlust, a rapacious urge to kill.

A voice began, booming from the PA system.

At first, she thought it was the janitor’s. But the fear that quavered in the words and their deeper pitch identified the dead sheriff, speaking no doubt under duress.

“Boys and girls,” said Sheriff Blackburn’s voice, “the front entrance to the school is open. You must not stay in the gym. If you stay here, you will die. I repeat—”

But the voice repeated nothing.

Peach could almost see him looking up from a scripted text, looking up to see a sudden blade come sweeping in. A rushed shoved grunt of impalement had been caught on the tape, chilling in how nearby it sounded.

Faintly, over a renewed sweep of crowd noise, Peach heard Ms. Brindisi.

“Stay where you are!”

But that was futile advice.

Peach wanted out of there that instant, and every one of her classmates wanted the same.

The babble surged.

The bodies moved her, shoved her, precisely where they all wanted to go. Screams lanced through the panic. A few seniors went down in the crush. Or maybe Gerber Waddell had swept in to slaughter them. Who could say? Peach only knew she had to escape, and fast.

The opening to the dim hallway loomed before her. She shoved the kid in front of her, Sorry on her lips. But she wasn’t sorry at all. Nor were those in back who propelled her forward.

Above the melee, loud and distorted, a sad gentle singer from the fifties sighed, “I’m Mister Blue, wah-o-wah-ooh.” Interspersed, Gerber Waddell’s familiar chirp stole in, sharp and piercing: “Hi there, hi there.”

“Oh my god, he’s got me,” shouted some frightened boy. The janitor strode among them, cutting, slashing, killing whatever got in his way.

Peach squeezed through the dim rectangular archway. A crush of bodies threatened to snap her ribs, so great was the pressure on all sides. But she made it to the corridor, holding miraculously to the back of Bowser’s suitcoat.

The air cooled.

The flow of students carried her as swiftly as before, but with less threat of violence.

They would escape.

She knew they would.

She and Bowser, they’d be all right, no matter who else fell to the killer loose in the school.

The corridor still lit with its dim lights, the crowd rushed and shuffled toward freedom.

But screams arose from those who reached the front entrance first. Word rippled back, even as they pressed on, of fresh corpses awaiting them there.

Peach and Bowser rounded the corner.

Miss Phipps and the principal, ashen-faced, stood beside a grotesque clothesrack they had just wheeled in. It bore four broken bodies.

Elwood Dunsmore, the shop teacher, his face blasted and blackened by a smashed blowtorch, lay propped against the padlocked doors.

And impaled on the upraised knife-arm of a sculpted Ice Ghoul, dripping blood and water down the cold crystal of its body, were the corpses of Brandy Crowe and Flann Beckwith. A fresh icicle jutted from each eye, crazy antennae in a mad game of Cootie.

Frenzy surged in Peach.

And in the crowd.

Bowser’s face looked ready to explode. “We’ve gotta get out of here,” he yelled. Peach could hardly hear him through the din.

She grabbed his hand and together they raced off through fractures in the crowd.

Everybody had been set off, ping-pong balls and mousetraps.

Rude slams and brushes buffeted her, like the best of slap’n’smack dancing, only far more hectic and nowhere near as fun.

They would break free, she and Bowser.

There had to be a way out.

And they’d find it, her classmates be damned.

A mad scurry filled every glance she threw.

They were all out for survival, thought Peach. And not one of them would survive.