Slaughterhouse High

3. A Delectable Frenzy

Whap-whap-whap, went the blades of the chopper, off-camera.

On a wall-sized screen at the far end of the Cabinet Room, toy houses on winding streets drifted past far below. Inset on the lower left, a woman with a mission waved to her husbands and drove off in a late-model car.

This year, a school in a suburb of Dallas had been chosen for the high mucky-mucks’ delectation.

The designated slasher?

Karn Flentrop, a Home Ec teacher with killer gams, a clench-fisted upjut of breasts, taut and tantalizing lobes, and the perkiest bloodlust in her every glance.

For the camera’s benefit, Ms. Flentrop’s threesome had lingered over a love-hug in their living room.

Hunched, head turned, glued to the tube as he had been for hours sat Willy Wanker, the Secretary of Cultural Impoverishment.

Wanker seldom spoke in meetings, nor did anyone interact with him. His preferred mode of communication consisted of an unending stream of pontifications e-mailed out to all and sundry.

The Secretary of War, a chubby boozer named Barnaby Sloper, he of the bullet head and outsized belly, cracked a joke and wangled his bulk into a chair. Cabinet appointees on either side of him gave polite chuckles.

Then the door opened and a Shite House lackey with a red face and a rumpled suitcoat bellowed, “President Hargill Windfucker.”

All rose to acknowledge their commander in chief. As Cholly Bork tiptoed Windfucker through the door and across the carpet, the elected marionette’s limbs lightly clacked like hanging beads parted by a sylph’s hand. The Vice President and his entourage followed.

“Be seated, gentlemen. And lady,” said the President in Bork’s voice, his hands magnanimous, his back angled in a ceremonial bow.

They took seats.

A raised finger, a twist of the neck. “Brief us, Mr. Hix.”

Chief of Staff Blathery Hix, a fat folder beneath one arm and a headset on his head, stood next to the President’s chair. “Top right, Mister President, coming into view, is Choke Cherry High. Built in the forties. Nicely run down, not enough money, fuck the kids. They lobbied hard this year for the privilege of a presidential viewing, hoping for funding in return. I gave them our usual empty promises.”

“Never commit when you can waffle, Hix.”

“Yes, sir. Activate tunnel cameras.” The helicopter view vanished. The screen jumped to a slow infrared glide through the secret backways of Choke Cherry High.

Delia Gaskin rinsed off the whipped suds she had worked up. Then she toweled dry and squeezed a dip of skin cream into her right hand. The cream went on smooth, circled along her cheekbones and sharped back and forth over her nose with one flexing palm.

Delia wore her thirty-eight years well. As one approached forty, one’s face tended to take on spots and blemishes. Nothing near as unsightly as the blotch-bursts of sexagenarians like Futzy Buttweiler. But the vibrancy of youth inevitably faded. That hadn’t yet happened to Delia, and for that she was grateful.

Skin care paid off.

Wigwag padded into the bathroom, gave a doleful double-wumpf in protest, and padded out, his message delivered.

The fur which rimmed the lop-ends of Wigwag’s ears bore toothmarks. Delia reminded herself to brush them out before leaving for the prom. It wouldn’t do to fuel, with the kindling of truth, student rumors of her peculiar ways.

In a distant room, a TV newscaster droned on unintelligibly.

Delia buried her face in a thick towel, not bothering to pull it off the rack. Before paper towels and blowers, restrooms had sported unending tugs of linen. The unrolling, eternally dreamy swatch of students passing through Corundum High reminded her of those endless linen strips. They passed along patterns of speech, class notes, cruelties, and rumors, one generation to the next.

Especially rumors.

But Delia wasn’t simply a pet lover.

She had a much more interesting life than anyone might suspect. Brest Donner, the tenth grade biology teacher, had stolen a moment with her in the infirmary yesterday.

Brest was a sweet armful.

Her lips had sucked at Delia’s friendship lobe, then brushed past her mouth to nuzzle and nip at the bagged left lobe, while Brest’s own stylish lobebag swayed a tantalizing few inches away.

Brest’s and Trilby’s marriage to Bix Donner was crumbling, she had confided. She thought it conceivable that they might whisk Trilby’s little girl away with them and go it alone.

If they were circumspect, a female threeway, despite its risk and illegality, might be in the offing.

Bix. Bothersome Bix. Two years before, he had hit on Delia at a faculty-staff retreat. Boorish lump. It never ceased to amaze one, the mates people chose.

The Donner family was slated to chaperone tonight. No doubt, beady-eyed Bix would laser-beam an unwanted glare of lust again and again across Delia’s body. That would make things more difficult by half.

But if she cut the sucker down early, she could scoop out some breathing room. Enough, perhaps, that she might manage to set aside the trauma of her own prom, two decades past, and ease into the evening’s festivities.

Delia dried her lobes vigorously, musing at how plain and unarousing lefties were when one was alone. Really, lefties weren’t all that different from righties. Yet the world made such a big deal of covering them at puberty.

America did, anyway. Europe was, as usual, far more enlightened.

Bold upon the beaches.

Delia switched off the bathroom light and strode through her apartment. Her low-slung pup trotted after, a swinging hammock of dogflesh.

The TV voice grew louder: “Here on the eastern seaboard, it’s ten to eight. High school doors are about to close. In the more westerly timezones, students and faculty prepare for the evening’s events. DBC will provide comprehensive coverage throughout the night, as schools report in. Turnabouts, bizarre methods of slaughter, live updates from selected high schools—it’s all here for you, all evening and on into the night, at News Central on DBC’s Prom Night Special.

“Tuck Winter has news elsewhere. Tuck?”

Delia glanced at the set. Her body flexed as she walked, more buff than her school uniform led people to suspect.

Dewy-eyed Watt MacQuarrie, standing before a map of the nation, had just swiveled his head toward prankster Tuck Winter, a dumb weather jock whose smug mannerisms Delia hated.

Tuck Winter clearly had aspirations beyond weatherboy. Tonight, he wore a somber face. His left earlobe sported a staid lobebag, unlike the flamboyant ones fans of his weather report were forever sending in.

“Thanks, Watt,” he began. “The RepellingCant primary took a nasty turn today, as Carty boosters released a videotape in which Bork Berenson kneels to—”

Delia tuned the sucker out. She left the bedroom door open, in case a sound-snippet lashed in to tantalize.

But as she shrugged into a dressy outfit, not her perennial school-nurse whites, she caught only snippets of the odd report. Plans for the next day’s corporate picnics, where the deadwood would be picked off to make way for the previous night’s grads. The uptick in stocks tied to mortuaries and crematoria. And some dull editorial on back-biting and finger-pointing among members of the Committee to Assassinate the President.

Commercial music blared.

Delia snugged a blue chiffon bag up about her left lobe. The bow that concealed its elastic tickled her lower helix.

She examined herself in the mirror above her dresser. Dark hair, short and styled. Skin pale and smooth.

A quick rummage through her gym bag. Yep, everything in its place.

The TV audio shifted into the languid unwinding of a saxophone melody.

Delia rushed out to watch.

Resentment toward the rules that dictated who could serve as a designated slasher routinely seethed in her head. Now, that resentment was augmented by the excitement these controversial new perfume ads produced in her.

The eye of the camera caressed the bare sleek cocoa back of a model. As her provocative voice pressed all sorts of sensual buttons, her delicate fingers toyed with a drawstring. The top of the model’s lobebag loosened.

She coyly smiled.

Abruptly, the lobebag fell free, a daring stretch of skin coming into view. And as the uncovered tip threatened to hit the eye, the camera cut to a sea anemone provocatively waving its tentacles.

Killer.

Delia’s mouth watered and her rage grew.

The fuckwits at the FCC had threatened to pull the plug on this daring ad campaign.

At Corundum High, an equally arbitrary and infuriating imposition of authority dictated that teachers alone—no staff, no principals, and never a school nurse—could off the prom couple.

As far as Delia was concerned, the airwaves belonged to everyone and should be entirely free. Lobesucking orgies on TV ought to be, if demand required, the order of the day.

And all adult employees of a high school ought to have an equal chance at being chosen.

Indeed, it was her opinion that passion and zeal should favor those who would put fire and fury into the kill. Delia had vast stores of rage in need of release, both from the student ridicule she had to endure each day and from the painful memories of a love dismembered.

Perhaps tonight would be different.

Things might work out for her.

Maybe Bix would bite it big-time. Brest and Trilby would love her. And she would see the nastiest students sprawled dead upon the Ice Ghoul’s lap, ready for a well-deserved futtering at midnight.

Or perhaps the night held greater wonders than Delia dared imagine.

Somewhere in America’s heartland, deep in an urban pustule, a cadre of anti-slasher terrorists, clad in black, slinked along back alleys to gather in the basement of an abandoned elementary school building.

Their leader, lit by moonlight streaming through a caked window, peeled off her ski mask and tucked it into her belt.

Emboldened, her co-conspirators unmasked too.

Eyes flashed from face to face. Great fear dwelt in them. Pride and excitement. The black-clad crew numbered seven, a spinoff from an above-ground anti-slasher organization the government begrudgingly tolerated.

“Let’s review the plan,” she said. “You and you will detain Sheriff Boltz once he has locked down the school. Gag him, secure his arms, hurry him into the passageways, sedate him, then give me the word.”

“What if he puts up a fight?”

She paused, then steeled herself. “Years of talk have gone nowhere. They’ve shrugged off our protests and petitions.” She laughed. “Listen to me. You guys have it memorized.”

Eyes on fire, she addressed the questioner: “Use any means necessary. That’s why I chose the two of you for this mission. Minimize his pain, but don’t hesitate to inflict it. If you have to, waste him. We cannot afford to raise an alarm. The syringe will make him docile but its effects are not instantaneous.”

She glanced up into the moonlight, her face tense. Had she heard something?

No.

“You three take the east wing of the school. By now, each of us has burned into our brains a map of the backways. Me and my hubbies will handle the west wing. With luck, we’ll be there before the slasher and catch him coming off the elevator from the underground garage. They’ve secured the garage with a punch code, alarms after the third wrong sequence, so that’s out. Other questions?”

She scanned them, her jet-black mop of hair clinging to her scalp.

“I’m proud of you all. Our kids are at stake, their lives yes but also their minds. They will not be inured to violence; we and folks like us will see to that. With luck and the grace of a reasonable God, we will end this horror in our generation. There I go again!

“One last check of the walkie talkies.”

They tugged them from their belts.

Dexter Poindexter’s senses had never been more attuned to his surroundings.

The coupe’s interior swirled with seeped-in aromas: cheeseburger wrappings, gym sweat, whiffs of adolescent horniness. Gleams of moonlight shot knife-sharp across the dashboard. The plastic steering wheel slid cool and stippled through his fingers.

A twelve-year stint of classes had come to an end, the last exam passed, the last cafeteria meal chowed down, the last homeroom roster called.

Tonight was the culmination of so many months of attending school that Dex’s memory knew nothing else.

True, summer vacations had supplied breathers that, at their best, stretched to eternity-beaches and boat houses and waterskiing on upstate lakes.

But every September, new looseleaf notebooks were purchased, their pungent faux-leather smell beguiling the nose. Book covers were bought as well, Corundum High’s colors, a fierce-eyed gray-and-green ram surrounded by ornate shields scrawled with latinate sayings.

Strange as it seemed, the terror Dex felt about school’s not resuming in the fall seemed far more heart-stopping than tonight’s slim chance at being hacked to death.

No matter whose life ended at the tip of the slasher’s blade, he and Tweed would be touched by the killing. Worse if two of their best buds, or particularly bright-futured seniors, bought it.

But they had been steeled for that.

The victims’ names, engraved in proud italic, would be added to the gold plaque in the display case at Corundum High’s entranceway, their lives lauded in the newspaper and in local churches the morning after.

And life would go on.

Familiar streets peeled away, the same houses he passed whenever he drove to Tweed’s place, rang her doorbell, and gave a “Hello, sir” to her dad, Mr. Megrim, Dex’s eleventh-grade history teacher.

Tonight, house fronts glistened with street light. Clusters of people peered from windows or lingered on front porches, watching passing cars and wondering about who rode in them.

Moms and dads driving their kids to the prom? Spiffed-up promgoers possibly high on drugs? Or some over-curious night-cruisers?

Perhaps they relived their own memories of prom night, memories that fiercely glowed or gave off pale flares of longing for lost loved ones.

Dex released a sigh, not realizing how tight he had held his breath in. He checked his face in the rearview mirror, lobebag stylishly rakish, his skin zit-free from hairline to jaw.

He smoothed through a turn.

The headlights of an approaching car blinded him and passed by.

Dex checked his watch.

Time to spare.

In ten minutes, Tweed would float into his arms, her pink-sequined gown swaying as they went out the door and headed toward the prom and a new life together.

4. Relinquishment

Tweed Megrim twirled before the mirrored door of her rumble-back closet. A pink-sequined vision twirled there in reverse.

Such fluffery looked weird on her, yet she found it strangely beguiling.

She knew her boyfriend felt likewise about his tuxedo. She and Dex were Christmas baubles, gussied up for one another, for public display, and, God help them, for potential sacrifice. It gave Tweed a whole heap of scaring.

To be honest, it thrilled her too.

Dex. Dear Dex.

Elsewhere in the house, Daddy was singing as always a happy song. Visions of Dexter Poindexter swam dreamily before her. Awkward in lobeplay, a heartmelt whenever they engaged in secret bouts of flay’n’heal, Dex was the guy she wanted to cling to forever.

Soon he would arrive.

Tweed scrutinized her face and hair. Not a strand out of place, her complexion peach-perfect all over, her lips bowed and demure.

Condor Plasch, arm in arm with Blayne Coom, intruded on her thoughts. The pierced-in zippers along their lips made her shudder.

Pierced skin was one thing. But one’s lips were permanent, neither growing nor healing with the removal of earring or barbell. Once disfigured, they remained so.

Worse rumors had spread about Altoona and Pimlico, a couple of female punks who had the hots for Condor and Blayne. What they had done to themselves…

Her father knocked.

The door opened a crack. “Hon?”

“It’s okay,” Tweed said. “Come in.”

Daddy lumbered through the door like a burly brown bear. “Tweed, O Tweed, my daughter Tweed,” he sang, “I saw your boyfriend’s car pull up. And by the bye, you move the night to tears.”

Daddy looked none the worse for his non-stop activity: dropping her kid sister off at school for parking duty (Jenna’s prom was a year away, but a healthy streak of morbidity had drawn her to the periphery of this one), and spending an exhausting day at the mall with Tweed, having to put up with the consumerist orgasms of screaming mallgoers, not to mention the tiny squeakers Tweed had done her best to squelch.

She gave her dad a peck on the cheek. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

He trilled an okay and was gone.

For the umpteenth time, Tweed gave herself the once-over.

Downstairs, a doorbell chimed.

The lights in the mirror seemed suddenly to dim. A premonition passed through her.

Out of hundreds of couples-those that had naturally coalesced and the pairs decreed by the principal the week before-she and Dex had been chosen.

Tonight was their last night on earth. They would be murdered by some teacher, a colleague of her father’s and maybe a favorite of hers, oh let it not be Claude Versailles.

Laid before the Ice Ghoul, they would bleed and release. Then, as midnight chimed, they would be hacked and futtered into a frenzy of pieces, their blood staining survivors’ garments, their sundered flesh sun-dried and saved as mementos of escape.

Tweed flushed.

Light rushed back in around her.

It couldn’t be them.

The odds favored their survival.

The same odds favored everyone’s survival.

In a rare moment of mean spirit, she wished that Cobra and Peach, the couple least liked by anyone at school, had been chosen. Then she nixed the thought, touched a fingertip to her friendship lobe for luck, and swished out the bedroom door.

Dex was standing near the piano in his white tux, holding a corsage, looking spiffed up and out of place and beautiful. As her father beamed and hummed, she let her boyfriend’s warm lips cup the tip of her right lobe, then did likewise to him, a chaste gesture of public affection.

Above her left breast, Dex pinned the pastel carnations.

“Perfect, perfect,” sang her father.

He whipped out his camera, a mercifully brief moment, Dex’s arm around her and a goofy grin on his face. Snap. Whirr. Her father’s song turned grim, a rolling barcarole: “If they kill you, you know, I’ll just back!”

People found her father’s habitual singing strange. His history students especially. But though he claimed he had spoken normally before he turned twenty, his singing was all Tweed had ever known.

It seemed perfectly… well… like Dad to her.

“Don’t worry, sir,” said Dex. “We’re not the ones. We can’t be. But if we are, we’ll survive it. I’ve been working on my moves. Any teacher who touches Tweed is dead meat.”

Dex exuded more confidence than Tweed thought justified, but she blushed with pride.

Dad sang about the TV show Notorious, how they saved the yummiest executions for prom night. Tonight’s fry of a pair of mass murderers promised to be extra special, he told them.

Then Dex shook his hand, assured him he would have Tweed back by midnight, and they were out the front door.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Oh, sure.” Tweed swept her prom dress clear of the passenger door slam.

When Dex slid behind the wheel, she felt impelled to elaborate. “To tell you the truth, I’m scared. Not about the prom so much as about losing you. But if I have to go through this, and jeez I guess I do, you’re the one I want beside me more than anybody in the whole wide world.”

Dex kissed her. “Me too.” His left hand gave her lobebag a quick feel. Tweed gasped at her sudden arousal and turned away. “Not here,” she said. “Not yet.”

He mumbled an apology.

“No problem,” she said.

After the ordeal-once they had used the tiny cleavers hanging at their waists, once the mass futtering had stained their clothing, their legs were danced to exhaustion, and they sat side by side parked on some bluff-only then would she sanction Dex’s loving feints toward lobeplay. Perhaps she would initiate a few herself.

Dex fired up his coupe and grinned. “Your dad sure is hyped.”

“He’s nervous. He really hates prom night.”

“Of course,” Dex said. “There’s you and your sister.”

Tweed shook her head. “He’s never liked it. We make it worse, of course, me being in jeopardy this year, Jenna next. But Dad contributes to the anti-slasher cause. Sometimes, he attends their meetings.” She raised a finger to her lips. “Our secret.”

“Sure thing.” Dex signaled a turn.

“There’s no telling with parents,” he went on. My mom’s really into dog-cracking. We went to a contest at the fairgrounds last week and she screamed her lungs out for this swung sheepdog. Poor thing didn’t have a prayer against a Saint Bernard maneuvered by a Scotsman. At home, Jesus the Lion is forever on her lips. She likes to shout at sit-com characters to ‘throw the other fist.’ But get her off by herself, just you and her? She’s as quiet and kind and considerate as anybody you could name.”

“I like your mom,” Tweed said.

Dex took his eyes off the road. “She likes you too.”

“I’m glad.” She snuggled closer. “Do you think Mr. Jones’ll make us play a lot?”

“Nah,” said Dex. “He’s rehearsed our butts off, but I think he’ll do like last year. Give us a solid hour of playing, bust our chops, then let the seniors go, and play the remaining sets with a smaller group, him on trumpet—”

Tweed groaned. “He’s so awful!”

“Old blubber lips.” Dex laughed. “Around ten, he’ll throw in the towel and give the rest of the night over to slap’n’smack and dreamy ballads off the turntable.”

Tweed caressed Dex’s tuxedo’d arm. “I hope he plays loads of dreamy ballads.”

Dex smiled. “It’s going to be a special night, isn’t it?”

“We get past the ordeal, you bet it will be.” She put lots of promise in her look. Elation rose in her sweetheart’s eyes.

They had their whole lives ahead of them. Once the fear lifted, the chosen couple had been slaughtered and futtered, and they knew what positions the killings at tomorrow’s corporate picnics opened up, she and Dex could think about directions.

About the future.

About tripling up with someone known or not yet known, someone who would augment their twosome in a splendid new way.

“I love you, Dex,” she said, and he shyly said, “Well shucks, me too, right back at ya.”

Gerber Waddell loved taking showers. Hot water thundered down. Nobody swatted his hand away from his naked sexlobe. And he didn’t have to hide his anger behind a benign smile.

Gerber tugged at his roused lefty like a bell-pull. In his mind’s eye, the generous lips of Jonquil Brindisi, teacher of big sins, teased his sexlobe.

This phantom Jonquil rose from the billowing steam, slurping him in, disgorging him. Her eyes hungered for payback.

Like a panther she padded before him, one hand spanning to finger her nipples, the other down-and-in where she rocked.

But as she sucked his lobe, her skin veined, red and cracked, falling in chunks to the stippled floor. The scalding water needled her until she bled, pain everywhere upon that gorgeous body.

Still, she endured it, her lips fixed on his pleasure, though every suck trebled her agony and plashed the floor hot with crimson.

“Eat it, you snooty little bitch!” he muttered. How she deserved her pain, after years of an aloofness that screamed, I’m better than any lowlife janitor.

Then Gerber Waddell rose heavenward, careful to damp down his howls of joy. Beating streams of water sculpted perfect orgasm from the oval of his mouth.

Drifting down, Gerber stayed with his hatred. Tiles cooled along his spine as he bent at the waist, a jogger stitched for wind. His hair twisted in thunderous waterfalls.

Past torments paraded by.

The corporate heights from which he had once judged others.

The picnic murder of a woman he had loved, his own hand on the knife, and a lethal slash at the jealous bastard who had contrived for her to be chosen.

The petitions.

The forgiveness.

Sojourns in white rooms where they pried out chunks of his brain, taught him docility, thrust a mop and a bucket into his hands. And, after many years, tools.

Tools had their uses. Lately, Gerber had pondered them, how they might express impulses too long damped down and denied.

He slammed the faucet shut. Blasts of water shuddered to a halt.

Gerber rumbled the opaque door open and snagged a towel off the rack. Them green-coated scumsuckers had made a mistake. For all their hacking and hewing, they had missed a spot.

The urge.

Mild Gerber, feeble yes-man at Corundum High.

He’d teach them. He’d whip their fannies. Any more cheek and he would reach into his utility belt and tin-snip their lovelobes off.

Gerber stood before the steam-coated mirror, savagely brushing his teeth. His left hand sawed vigorous and wild across his jaw. The fingers of his right hand stilted against the counter, bamboo shoots white with tension.

When he emerged, the Bleaks were watching TV in their bedroom at the end of the hall. Missus Bleak chirped, “Water okay, Gerber?” and he said “Yes’m, it was,” a hand concealing his left lobe, a towel tucked about his waist.

Gerber went into his room, where Mister and Missus Bleak’s grown son had lived. Blue-black janitor duds lay like a dead flat man on the bed, undies and socks beside them. Off days, he wore Salvation Army crap, clothes that felt more like him than these did. Deceptive comfort for the normals. Put Gerber in somebody else’s house, somebody else’s uniform. Peg him. Make him safe for mobocracy.

But when he wore thrift store hand-me-downs, his thoughts came more easily. And when he wore nothing at all, they tumbled about in his head, wild, nasty, and free. Lull the bastards. Put him in safe togs, slip a denim lobebag over his lefty.

But a game had two players, he thought. One day, one night, he would break a few rules and loose the demon again.

Maybe tonight. Prom night. A night of beauty and savagery. It would be easy to throw a wrench or two into the cogs. All it would take was simply to give in. To act, once more, upon those suppressed urges.

Gerber pictured Missus Bleak coming through the door. Like a pork-bomb, she flew straight apart, warming the air with outflung spews of gore as her pudgy face exploded.

Somehow, it made this more like home.

More inviting.

Shiverful, spineful.

Mia Jenner gave her younger husband Bonn a look, then tossed barbs at Pelf, who sat cozy in his favorite armchair, pooled in lamplight.

“I can’t believe you’re doing that,” she scolded. “Really, Pelf.”

The older man peered over his glasses, one finger stuck in the library book. “Doing what?”

Exasperated eyes. “Reading.”

“I read every night.”

Bonn chimed in. “This is Fido’s prom night. He’ll be down soon in his tuxedo. Bowser will be showing up in his tuxedo. Look at you, sitting there in your robe and slippers.”

“Like this was any old weekend,” added Mia, snaking an arm around Bonn’s waist.

“To hell with Bowser McPhee.” Pelf’s familiar grin slung above his jowls. “I luxuriate on Saturday nights: a soothing bath, a good book, a tumble in the hay and a perfect lobesuck with you two fine folks.” He brushed aside the world. “People make too much of prom night. Let Fido and Bowser have fun, let blood be spilt, but for gosh sakes, let lovable old Pelf read his thriller.”

Mia turned to Bonn. “He’s begging for it.”

“I think so too.” Bonn eyed the instruments of pleasure on the coffee table.

“Isn’t he begging for it?” asked Mia.

Bonn reached to retrieve.

A pair of stiff riding crops stuck out from between his fingers like black leather drumsticks. “Yes honeybunch, no question.”

He handed Mia her weapon of choice.

“I’m not begging for it,” Pelf insisted, grinning as he closed his book.

He probed deep into the cushion crack and coaxed out a hand-tooled, vegetable-tanned, sharkskin beauty, the riding crop his spouses had given him on his fiftieth birthday. Despite eleven years of wear, the thing had staying power and a humming thwack that sang of quality. It shone with crusted weltflow. Pelf gripped its handle and hunched forward.

Bonn said, “Let’s get him,” and charged in.

Mia followed, raising her lustiest yowl to the rafters. Her crop whistled down hard on Pelf’s terryclothed buttocks as he rose to meet his attackers.

Back into the armchair they drove him, riding its floorward arc but not missing a battering beat as they tumbled across the carpet.

Mia lost herself in gaiety and torn clothing, ending up in her favorite position: cushioned by soft pillows, plugged below, her crop hand free to punish her lovers.

Bonn crouched to rouse her as his lickables bobbed hot against her lips.

Their laughter stopped when Fido yelled, not for the first time, “Dad, Mom, Dad. Bowser just drove up.”

Mia, unBonning her mouth, angled toward her son. Spiffed and slicked to steal the heart of any youngster, Fido, class clown, stood there waiting for his special night to begin.

Door chimes rang out bing-bong-bing-bong, followed at once by Bowser McPhee’s irritating shave-and-a-haircut rap.

The skin on Pelf’s shoulder was red and raw. He slipped out of her, pulled about himself the tatters of his bathrobe, cinched it, and said he would get the door.

Mia righted the armchair and sat down.

She’d be damned if she would bother getting up to greet a belligerent little no-account like Bowser McPhee.

She touched the gaping flesh of one welt and made sizzling-lips sound and a face of pain. As the door opened, her fingers shot up to check her left lobe.

No problem, nothing showing, bag in place. But it never hurt to be sure.

Bowser McPhee was as fleshy and dark as ever. “Good evening, sir. Good evening, sir.” He waved at Mia and she nodded. “Ma’am.”

Fido came into the creepy kid’s arms as they traded perfunctory right-lobe kisses.

Her husbands engaged in small talk, half-nods and smiles in her direction, until her son and his date were out the door. Mia crossed her legs. Her fingers fidgeted on the chair’s arms.

Bonn misinterpreted. “Worried?”

“Nope,” she said. “My son’s from a charmed line. Fido will come home with a choice slice of flesh in his Futterware. But my God, he could do so much better than Bowser McPhee.”

“Bowser is a bucket of slime, isn’t he?” said Pelf. “But our boy is young. He’s testing the waters. I don’t believe the McPhee kid will be his final choice.”

“We shouldn’t have picked a dog’s name,” said Mia.

Bonn spoke up. “Something more normal may have helped.”

Easy for Bonn to say, thought Mia, since he had had nothing to do with the decision.

“Dog names were all the rage back then,” said Pelf in their defense. “Mia and I had no way of knowing. Besides, we’ve met plenty of Rexes and Spots, even another Fido our son’s age, who have all been super kids. Nope, I don’t think his name’s the problem.”

After a glum pause, Bonn offered, “At least he has a date. The school didn’t have to pair him up.”

“Small favors,” Mia said. Her younger spouse was a handsome brute, juicy with passion, but his mind was as limp as week-old lettuce.

“Don’t worry,” said Pelf, massaging her shoulders. “He’ll turn out fine.”

“Once he dumps that walking embarrassment.”

Pelf gave Mia’s right cheek a resounding swat, raising a blush there. “For the love of Christ, sweetie, relax. Fido has more sense than people credit him with. Sure he’s in tight with Bowser McPhee now. But it’s more a buddy-buddy thing than love, from what I can see.”

Mia took the hand that had struck her. “You think so?” She raised it to her mouth and bit deep into Pelf’s thumb. Blood welled bitter upon her lips.

Pelf winced. “I’m betting that Fido goes into the prom with his eyes open and scavenging. Jesus, honey, that hurts.”

Mia reseated her jaw and hit the nerves, again, again.

Bonn, having stripped off his lobebag, now fumbled at the drawstrings of Mia’s.

Pelf seethed upon a savage in-breath. He lifted his wife’s hand toward his face so that her fingers claimed the dangle of his lobebag, a taut tug and rustle as it shimmied down and off.

For as long as their dalliance lasted, all thoughts of Mia’s son, and what might happen to him at the prom and beyond, quite deserted her.

Peyton “Futzy” Buttweiler, for thirty years the principal of Corundum High, sat alone in his office.

The rolltop desk, his bookshelves, the stark paneling that covered the office walls, were all a dark delicious rosewood. This place was Futzy’s arena of shame. So it had been for twenty years, since his daughter’s prom.

That year, Kitty’s final year of high school, Futzy had refused all knowledge of who the victims would be. The handful of teachers in the know had displayed nothing but impenetrable pokerfaces.

Futzy had had them dismissed or transferred, the image of Kitty, slain and futtered, burning into his brain.

Propped on his desk blotter, Kitty’s senior picture was framed in fake-gold. The velvet fuzz at its back bore a shine from frequent handling.

Funny how, when her portrait lay facedown in his desk drawer, Futzy’s office hummed with academic concerns. But as soon as he raised it into view, this place became a sanctuary of guilt, a quiet confessional, all of his administrative woes momentarily set aside.

It wasn’t the dark dress, angled tastefully between shoulders and cleavage, that caught his attention. Neither was it her matching lobebag, the firmness of her young flesh, nor the sweet innocence of that hope-filled gaze into a future she would never live.

No, it was the knockout impact of the whole, the way it brought back a world of promise taken from him in one vicious night. Kitty had been its linchpin, her natural vibrancy infusing him and his wives, Freia and Keech, with what had seemed a deep and abiding commitment to their marriage.

When Kitty and her date were carried lifeless to the Ice Ghoul at the center of the gym, Futzy had borne for hours the sight of her slain body.

At midnight, the cleavers had come out.

Futzy Buttweiler sat among the chaperones a destroyed man, watching in disbelief the mayhem.

When he came home that night, it felt as if their house were kept together with spit and baling wire. Worse, his gradual drift away from Freia and Keech-long unsuspected beneath their shared happiness in Kitty-made itself plain.

Two weeks later, they left him.

His new wives Futzy had found lurking outside the bereavement clinic waiting to snag some guilt-eyed masochist. They had pounced, Futzy had let them pounce, and from that moment his house had become an abattoir of love.

Drive to school.

Bark admonitions and orders over the PA system.

Preside at assemblies where he would introduce a speaker and sit there despising the wretched rabble.

Cuff, swat, batter, and smack the foul little shits sent to his office for misbehavior.

The weary round had been enough to satisfy. That and a properly distant commiseration every year with the dead promgoers’ parents, a perfunctory few phone calls between the slaughter and the futtering.

As he listened to their sobs, their quavering pride in son or daughter, he wondered if they felt one-tenth of the agony he, in renewal, felt every time he made such a call.

He would go home, post-prom, and let his wives rip into him, savage pain doled out, pain that often involved neither lobes nor gens.

But this year was different.

The Ice Ghoul had somehow fit perfectly into the underseas theme of Kitty’s prom. For hours, the creature of tin foil, mesh, and papier-mache had towered over the slain couple. Icicles thrust into his little girl’s eyes had capped the hidden mayhem of her death.

Year after year, in deference to Futzy’s feelings, prom planners had shied away from the Ice Ghoul as a centerpiece, even as the tradition of using him to scare the vinegar out of incoming Corundum High kids caught hold.

But the world had darkened.

Devolving breeds of senior had turned more cruel.

Futzy peered into Kitty’s eyes. Innocence. Kindness. Nothing like that existed any more at Corundum High.

This year, over Brest Donner’s objections, the student committee had in defiance chosen the Ice Ghoul. They had even appropriated an area of the cool room, among ineptly butchered haunches of beef and pork, Lily Foddereau’s senior projects, to store ice sculptures of the monster for a late-evening contest.

The little shits were not going to get away with this outrage. They would pay in spades for this nose-thumbing.

Futzy had shone no upset. He had remained a miracle of calm. At tonight’s prom, he planned to continue in that vein, at least at first.

“Am I doing the right thing, sweetheart?” he asked his daughter’s portrait. “Is Daddy on the right track?”

Typhoons of assent raged in his head, as they did whenever he posed the question. Over Kitty’s permed helmet of auburn hair, from the strands of which peered a baby-soft right earlobe, a diffuse halo of light shone.

Yes, he would sour their evening.

Soon, though not soon enough, they would wish they had kept their Ice Ghoul as nothing more than a joke to frighten wide-eyed tenth graders with.

Futzy recalled Kitty’s mothers, a rising duet of wincing squeals as he whipped them, the joyous anger that billowed inside him as he meted out their begged-for punishment. Hen scratchings. The nertz of a gnat at the ear. Nothing compared to the rage now astir in him, a rage he thought had dissipated in the years since Kitty’s death, but which, it was now clear, had only lay dormant, waiting for its main chance.

He gripped the knot of his tie. Too loose. He tightened it.

This, thought Futzy, was going to be one humdinger of an evening.

Rhythming behind the wheel of her high-tuned piece of crap, Altoona tooled down the main drag of Corundum, Kansas.

The radio blasted slap’n’smack, tweedling her ears straight down to the lobes. Ballsy Pink Lady rockers scalloped out come-need there. Inside her leather pants, their voices tweedled her gens.

Zipper teeth, sewn along Altoona’s labia at Easter and bunched up now like a slumped toddler’s jacket, spit fire across her vulval gap.

She prided herself in being able to sing and sway and pummel the steering wheel with rhythmic slams of her right palm, even as she obeyed every damned traffic law on the books.

Sheriff Blackburn passed Altoona going the other way. In response to her cheery wave, he glared and made an abrupt turn-it-down gesture.

Huh. Blackburn.

He was cool though. It didn’t tear her. For reasons beyond her ken, Blackburn had chosen to play a stern-daddy role. But inside, he was a good and fair humper of his mother.

Not like some of the geekoids she and Pimlico had had to teach how to behave.

Chub jokes and female-threesome innuendoes rolled off their backs. The Mathers twins, for instance. Less than head lice they’d been in their attempts to draw verbal razors across the girls’ brains.

But as soon as she and Pim heard how Ig and Opie Mathers had bullied Nils Fancher, they invoked their November pact, secured the testimony of reliable witnesses, tracked the slugnuts down, told them what was about to happen and why, and flogged the living shit out of them to within a hair’s breadth of what the law allowed.

Ig and Opie’s flesh had sizzled beneath a white-hot brand, high flutes of pain issuing from split lips as U for Unkind seared deep into their foreheads.

It had been nothing like the violence normal people dole out to remind one another that life is cool, that they’re alive, and that they have “a whipped kind of love to share,” as the Pink Ladies so righteously belted out on the radio.

Altoona sang along.

Nearly too late, she spied the street sign. She turned wide on a screeech -what the hell, nothing coming her way.

Pimlico’s house was five down on the right, where Stardust Place teed in. She roared into the driveway, jerked up hard on the brake, and killed the engine.

The sound of her black leather skirt shifting over the seat was covered by a vigorous shake of trees outside the car. That and the blare of a TV inside Pim’s house turned the night as crisp and alive as cathedral air.

On the umpteenth ring, one of Pim’s moms came to the door. It was the scraggly one, whose hair reminded Altoona of tossed straw.

“Oh yeah, right,” she said, “come in.”

She was thin and naked, fresh welts raised across her belly. Dark puffy bags slung beneath her eyes-not the morning hangover ones that fade with coffee, fresh air, and locomotion, but the sort that endure and define. A hastily pulled-up lobebag hid her lefty.

In the vestibule, the straw-haired mom angled her head back as if readying a sneeze. Her mouth widened. ” Pimmie! Your date’s here! ” A wasted gaze at Altoona. “She’ll be down.”

“Thanks.”

Pim’s pop shouted from the TV room, ” here! ” Nola was already on the move. “I’m coming fast as I can, buttfuck,” she mumbled, casting an all-men-are-scum look toward Altoona.

Pim yelled, “Be right down!”

“ going?” Again the man’s voice, apparently to Pim’s other mom.

Altoona had never met her girlfriend’s father. All she knew about him was that he cared not the whit of a shit about his daughters.

From the TV room, Pim’s kid sisters made gross-out sounds. Altoona recognized the political spot. Oink-oinks blared from a hefty porker. Its throat caught on something. Then a blurt of spew hit an empty trough, replay, replay, replay. The camera jittered through a series of ugly jumpcuts as a stern DoleMoreCrap announcer intoned Fenny Boyle’s sins.

And it was only primary season.

Things were certain to heat up, the vitriol eating away at an already frayed political fabric, from now to November, Jesus God!

Onscreen, Fenny Boyle’s digital clone, as convincing as technology could make him, knelt and (the kids fake-wretched again) bobbed, coming up with a dripping grin of brownish gunk and saying, “Mmmmm, tastes great!!!”

Passing it off as true wasn’t as important as convincing voters it was a plausible scenario- that was what the game was about.

Pim’s other mom burst into view, naked as well but with fewer welts. She pumped Altoona’s hand, her lobes right out there in plain sight. “How ya doin’?”

As urbane as Altoona prided herself in being, she was always startled to see Britt Franken’s left lobe exposed like that, wet with recent chewing.

But she liked Britt a lot.

There was plenty of heart behind her hard-edged exterior, and no room for bullshit.

Not waiting for Altoona’s reply, Britt opened the hall closet, her reach stretching the blue-veined backs of her thighs and lifting her right foot off the carpet. When she turned, two items were squat-towered in her hands, a yearbook and a dated Futterware container, the orange-lidded kind that had been popular when Pim and Altoona were in grade school.

“ For shit’s sake, Britt, you gotta see this! ” More a command than a suggestion.

“ In a minute, you smelly heap of sewage,” said Britt, her last phrase dropped way low and delivered with a grin in Altoona’s direction.

Britt’s hands worked at the lid.

“He loved me then. Kent Bodeen and Mimsie Chesk were chosen our year, pretty much nothing-people nobody in the class gave a damn about, so it worked out pretty well. The Frankenburger in there,” Britt indicated the TV room, “kept looking over at them once they were draped out for all to see. He kept talking strategy, talking about the hunks of flesh he’d go after. His hands, when he wasn’t fondling me, drifted to his cleaver. ‘Just slice off something good,’ I told him, ‘something our kids can be proud of.’ And when midnight struck, my fella dove straight in and got us some upper lip and the tip of, I’m not fooling now no not a bit, Mimsie’s left earlobe.”

Sure enough, as the lid drew back, a hefty lobe, shrunken in the process of being preserved and capped at the stump like a rabbit’s foot, lay there in all its glory. It may or may not have been a lefty. But right or left, the possibility that he had slashed through to hack off a dead student’s lobebag, claimed the coveted tip, and not kept it himself, spoke volumes about their puppy love.

“Wow!” said Altoona.

Britt nodded. “Don’t it just beat all?”

Upstairs a door slammed.

“ Hey, little miss fat fuck, my lefty’s throbbing and my whip hand’s getting real itchy. ” Deadly warning.

“ All right, all right. Gotta go. You two chickies have a swell time.” She shrugged at the blood-smeared yearbook in her hands, resealed the Futterware, replaced both items in the closet, and buttocked off out of sight.

“Pretty sorry excuse, ain’t she?”

Altoona turned to her descending date.

The pain having at last subsided in her crotch, Pim’s sexy slink was back. She wore fishnet stockings, a tight black killer dress that ended a hand’s breadth above her knees, and a face whose frail wounded wince burned deep in Altoona’s heart.

“Your mom’s not all that bad.”

Scrunch about the eyes: “Give me a break.” A cleaver dangled beside the Futterware on Pim’s hip.

“Uh, sure, sweets,” said Altoona.

“On second thought, give me a hug.”

Leather brushed against leather as Pim cozied into her arms and angled up, engulfing in sweet lip-warmth Altoona’s friendship lobe.

People said the lobes weren’t connected. But she’d be damned if, every time her girlfriend’s mouth closed on her right lobe, she didn’t feel heat tingle in the left.

“You’re walking just fine, hon.”

Pim shrugged. “I took longer to heal than you, I guess. Last night helped.”

Altoona remembered wet slides of niobium cathedraling at either side of her mouth as she softly dug for the love nub between. “Yum. You were okay a week ago, from what I could see.”

“Yeah, possibly. But I didn’t want to tear anything before Cabrille checked me out one last time.”

Altoona laughed. “She was really coming on to us.”

“Again!” Eyes wide for emphasis.

“Right.”

“Cabrille’s good. You can tell when she touches you, when she slips the needle in and explains how to clean the piercings and put on the Polysporin. But man, the way she looked at us that night…”

“Yeah, it was pretty sick.”

Altoona had held Pim, comforted her, wiping drops of sweat from her brow, and knowing as the woman proceeded upward-left right, left right, like a saleswoman threading bootlace-that she would be next.

Cabrille, thirty miles away in Topeka, showed, even that night, a glimmer of interest beyond professionalism. But years and a life (Altoona suspected) too weird to contemplate had put the bag-breasted, crow-footed piercer beyond the reach of desire.

Besides, she was a woman, and a female threesome was illegal, not to mention yucky even to contemplate.

“She must’ve thought we were pervies.”

“Yeah,” Altoona said, “or potential ones.”

“Some folks don’t listen,” said Pim, taking Altoona’s hand and leading her out into the cool quiet night. “I told her about Condor and Blayne, how we thought their mouths were way cool when they showed up all swollen and pus-y from Christmas break.”

“ They sure took a razzing.”

“Kids and teachers both.” Pimlico opened the passenger door. “But folks changed their tune when everything healed up and Blayne started to work his zipper, slow and idle, right there in history class.”

Altoona settled behind the wheel. “He kissed me, you know.”

“The heck he did.” Pim peered over to test her. “Oh bullshit! You’re such a bullshitter!”

“He did! ”

“Yeah, right.” She slid closer. “Was it like this?” Pim’s feisty bod overlaid hers, her fingers up under Altoona’s lobes, her lips coming down to pillow against her mouth.

Pim broke the kiss, smiling, her right hand drifting down to grope Altoona’s leather-mounded left breast.

“More metal in it,” said Altoona. “More tentative, but real sexy. We were between classes.”

“The fuck he kissed you. Did he really?”

“You’ll see.” She fired up the rattletrap, giving it extra pedal to make to vroom. “I wanted to surprise you. They’re in a receptive mood. I got ’em horny for the big fourway.”

“ Both of ’em? Oh bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!” She hit the seat with the flat of her hand. “Come on Altoona, I don’t like it when you tease.”

“It’s not a tease. We set it up. During the search for the dead couple, in the costume shop behind the stage. All you’ve gotta do is bring along your enthusiasm and your killer bod.”

Pim countered with a renewed volley of bullshits, but it was clear she was starting to buy in. Altoona hoped Blayne had been able to persuade Condor, and that what both she and Pim longed for might begin tonight.

She flashed again upon their piercer, on Cabrille’s calculated ramblings about the delights of female threesomes. No, they weren’t pervies by that standard, but Altoona guessed more than a few prudish eyebrows would be raised-and the law brought thundering down-were word to leak that a foursome was in the offing amongst those who had bought big-time into the zipper craze.

Well fuck ’em, she thought, zooming backward into the street from the driveway. Love was love, whatever shape it took. Praise be to God for a world that could produce Pimlico, and praise abounding for the possibility of digging their talons into two super guys like Condor Plasch and Blayne Coom, brilliant, weird, dark, brooding sons of their mamas’ most bizarre and urgent dreams.

“Hang on, hon,” Altoona said. She pushed on into the promise of night, her brain radiant with possibility.

5. High School Secured

There was a split focus in the cabinet room: the video screen that covered an entire wall, and President Hargill Windfucker’s asinine comments.

Although the Shite House video feed was and would remain private, famed sportscaster Blennuth Ponger had, this year, been shanghaied into the role of TV announcer. Ponger’s laconic delivery betrayed his feeling that he was clearly out of his league.

“Here come the seniors.”

Long silence.

“Our saucy little Home Ec teacher, behind the wheel of her killer car, is just a mile from Choke Cherry High.”

Long silence.

“Right here, beneath this scrawled number, a big black fifty-seven, will the chosen couple meet their destined fate.”

That sort of thing.

President Windfucker filled in Ponger’s long stretches of silence with “Cute couple o’ kids” or “That Home Ec gal’s out for bear, isn’t she?”

Whenever Cholly Bork voiced these inanities, angling the strings so that the presidential head shifted thoughtfully, the twelve cabinet officers turned from the screen and toward Gilly Windfucker to murmur and mutter ” Very cute” or “She sure is, Mister President.”

They sounded like churchgoers mumbling the phrases of a litany. They looked like spectators at a tennis match.

In her shiny red sports car, Karn Flentrop preened for the camera. Her hair was perfectly coiffed, her nails long and pearl-sheened as the steering wheel rotated this way and that. She came to a stop, yanked up on the handbrake, and slid her sultry legs out of the car, taking the elevator to the backways as she patted her perm.

“Her moment of glory,” mused Windfucker.

“Glory indeed, Mister President.”

Camera switch. The young victim, a fresh-faced boy with much promise and no future, was helping his date out of the car, swish of a prom dress, her hand lifted like a swan’s neck to his. The shot of them as they crossed the parking lot and entered the school wasn’t the clearest, but it was critical not to arouse their suspicions.

Gilly Windfucker noted, “That gal would have made somebody a wonderful mom. Nice lobes on her, she’s packing quite a pair.”

“It’s a crying shame, sir.” “She’s a gem.” “Her young man could be in pictures.” “They make us proud to be Americans.”

As the doomed couple passed through locker-lined hallways to the gymnasium, Blennuth Ponger launched into the usual canned bios. In the upper right part of the screen, an inset series of stills and home videos tracked their childhoods, first steps, pony rides, birthday parties, theme park vacations.

“It kinda reddens the lobes, dunnit, watching them kids grow up, knowing what we’re gonna see in a while, getting caught up in the anticipation?”

“It does, Mister President.”

There was a hushed shuffle of chair legs upon the carpet as the twelve followed the President’s lead and started to stroke their sexlobes through their lobebags.

They kept it up, turning their attention more intently toward the doomed pair and the tight fox who taught Home Ec. And thus did the presidential party slither down into the muck and goo of their private fantasies about this boy, this girl, and the buff teacher with murder in her eye and an itchy knife hand, compelling players in a national drama.

Weight against his left side.

That was the impression that first seeped in, that and the stench of death. The weight was warm and inert, in contrast to the cramped chill that wracked the rest of him.

The deadweight pressed down, then lifted free as cool air rushed in. His head was spinning. On every inhale, death smells rushed in to nauseate him and ride the next breath out.

He tested his eyelids. They cautioned open, lashes stuck, then free.

A vague notion of pipes swam high overhead. Crisscrosses of unpainted lumber. And blocking some harsh halo of light, the slumped form of a woman, dressed in finery, sitting on the side of whatever rough-edged coffin they had been jammed into.

“What…,” he tried, but only a modulated moan emerged.

The woman’s head turned, partially uncovering a lightbulb. Its harshness delivered her profile, but with too sharp an edge to afford him a clear view of much beyond her dyed friendship lobe, some futile protest against the way things were.

He raised his fingers and wiped his eyes.

“You’re awake.”

His white stiff cuff came into view, as did the gold cross-gleam of cufflink backs and a coat arm’s abrupt edge.

Accompanying the woman’s words was a sudden certainty about where he was, memories of abduction and jail, a king’s feast of food and a shower. Of submission to soap and scissors and being dressed.

And then the needle.

“But we’re not—”

“Someone saved us,” she said, standing up, one hand on the trough. “Saved us and did him in.”

Working himself unsteadily to a sitting position, he followed the woman’s gaze.

A bloated couch, stained crimson, cradled a dead man, the buffed hilt of a knife slanting up from his chest as if it had burst a huge balloon filled with raspberry jam.

The odor said otherwise, of course, mingled aromas of blurted heartpumps and the release of bladder and bowel.

“Poor boob ran into trouble,” he said.

Rising, he spotted the dog.

“He deserved it,” said the woman. “Christ, where’s your head? He would’ve killed us. That axe lying on the floor was meant for us.”

He nodded. “We got caught. Then he got caught.”

“Damn deputy at the jailhouse nearly lost his nuts to my knee. If he hadn’t had backup, I’d’ve gotten away.”

“You from Topeka?” he asked.

“Kansas City. They surprised us at dawn.”

“I thought I’d be safe behind the library. I wasn’t. Do you think anyone’s upstairs?”

“Doubtful,” she said.

As the puffiness lifted from his head, he noticed her lobebag. His own state-provided bag knocked at the neck skin below his cropped lefty. He groped it, smooth cloth that no doubt matched his tux, and at the top, elastic and probably some kind of adhesive to clamp it lightly to the stub.

“Any idea how we lucked out?” he asked.

“My brain was real hazy, but I heard somebody say something, or thought I did. And I saw the killer’s arm come up with a tightly gripped knife. A shirt of dark blue. Maybe denim.”

Fear rushed through him. “You don’t think he’s upstairs?”

She laughed. “If he were, I’d shake his hand.”

“He’s probably a maniac. Maybe he’s a black sheep wasting his entire family, and he’s sitting upstairs right now at the kitchen table eating a sandwich.” His voice fell to a whisper. “Maybe he’s stopped chewing on account of now he can hear our voices and realizes we’re not dead.”

“You don’t get it, do you? What we have here is one of the anti-slasher crowd who’s decided to make a point: Kill the school’s designated slasher. Crash the prom. Then, when no couple is slaughtered, reveal the deed and deal another blow to a savage system of sacrifice. What we’ve got to do is support him. We need to go to the prom, hang out through the time allotted for the killing and the search, and reveal ourselves once nobody’s killed and our guy stands up and gives his speech.”

She’s joking, he thought.

Then it occurred to him that she was serious.

“Are you crazy?” he asked. “Even if you’re right, we’d become martyrs along with the killer.”

“I don’t think so. We’d be national heroes. There might be a trial. But we’d be too hot to convict, and we’re certainly not accomplices to his crime. Then there’d be speaking and signing tours—”

“Signing what?”

“Our book of course. I’m Winnie Hauser, by the way.” A hand shot out. His rose and he let Winnie shake it. “The barbarity of prom night would be over and there’d’ve been created a link between housed and homeless that maybe just might get people’s attention.”

“You are crazy.”

“There’d be food and warmth, showers and a fresh change of clothes every day dependably. The anti’s would see to it. We would be their poster children. And when the power shifted, we’d be in an ideal spot to make sure things were done right.”

He considered.

Then he shook his head, the dummy lobebag tapping stupidly at his neck. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to take this dead guy’s cash, a closetful of clothes, and as much food as I can cram into his car, and head south, to Fort Lauderdale maybe. Give up your stupid dreams, that’s my advice, before you get killed.”

She tacked upon him. “If I’m wrong about our savior, they’ll think Notorious. And while… hey wait…”

Shit. She’d noticed.

“Come over here. Into the light.”

He didn’t move.

Winnie grabbed his arm. Yanking him toward the bulb, she turned his head and stared at his right ear.

He avoided her eyes, knowing what she saw.

Not the smooth stub of normal folks, but the imperfect tuck, like the knot atop an orange, of a dodger.

“You’re a promjumper,” she said. Contempt there. His silence confirmed it. “You grew up among them, attended their schools, enjoyed every advantage… and then you ran!”

“Spare me the litany,” he said, pulling away. “I chickened out, okay? I paid and paid plenty.”

Pursuit, capture, and two savage lobectomies raced through his memory.

Winnie approached him.

Softer: “What’s your name?”

“Brayton. Kittridge.”

“Well, Brayton Kittridge,” her hands were warm on his neck, “this is your chance, don’t you see, to make things right again. You come with me, confront the demons of the prom, and you can redeem the past. But if you shy away, I promise you, when they track us down and torture us and we find ourselves strapped in on Notorious, I’m gonna fix you with such a glare of hatred as we burn, that it’ll put their physical torments to shame.

“And I can do it, too!”

Poor feisty woman. Winnie thought she could read him and fix him-fix ordinary folks too, no doubt-as easily as she might mend a broken toy.

But he had been there.

Unlike Winnie, who had been brought up among the proudly rejected and knew nothing of the ones who rejected her, he understood their vile little hearts, the beast she expected to confront and best in one night.

Without him, she would do something dangerous, maybe even try to attend the dance unchaperoned.

“I… I guess you’re right,” he said, noting the attractive combination of strength and naivete in Winnie’s eyes. “We’ll give it a try. Oh but what about these?” He fingered his right stub and her pale-green friendship lobe, liking the way hers felt.

“I’m betting there’s a supply of Tuffskin somewhere in the house, give you some heft and cover my coloring,” she said. “It’s not ideal. But what with the subdued lighting at the dance, and given that we’ll try to avoid others until the moment of revelation, it just might work. Come on, Brayton, let’s look for it.”

“Call me Bray,” he said.

She huffed and grabbed his hand and yanked him stairward. He followed, admiring her thigh-swish and ankle-turn as they climbed the steps.

In the kitchen, the air cleared of death stench. But there were whiffs of gore that didn’t vanish even when he closed the cellar door, and a quick search of the house brought them face to face with the teacher’s wives.

“I think,” said Bray, staring down at the fresh corpses, “we ought to consider revising our opinion of our savior.”

“Poor things,” said Winnie. “But sometimes pawns must be sacrificed for the greater good. He had to kill the teacher. Maybe these two put up a struggle.”

“Does it look like they struggled? Phew, it’s amazing how quickly dead folks start to stink. Besides which, why didn’t he just truss them up? Why didn’t he lock that guy down there in a closet or something, roped many times over as tight as a mummy so he had no way to escape?”

“Beats me.” She picked up a packet from the end table. Its contents started to spill out the open end, but Winnie caught them in time. “Instructions for the designated slasher.”

“I think the wacko family member theory is starting to make a lot of sense. Either it’s totally coincidental our couch guy was murdered tonight, or his being chosen as slasher finally drove, I don’t know, maybe his son over the edge.”

Ignoring him, Winnie leafed through the documents.

“I bet the killer’s hundreds of miles away by now.”

Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.

“He won’t be anywhere near the prom.”

Winnie glared at him. “Either way,” she said, “no couple will be sacrificed tonight. So either we’ll back what our savior has to say; or, if he doesn’t show, we’ll step forward to put our best spin on the student slaughter that wasn’t.”

End of discussion.

“While you’ve been standing there flapping your lips,” she went on, “I discovered some things: The dead guy’s name is Fronemeyer. An art teacher. Ah. Here’s a map of the town. They’ve even circled the school for us, thoughtful of them. Corundum High.”

No surprise. The deputies’s shoulder patches had had “Corundum, Kansas” sewn into them.

“Here are the intended victims’ names. Tweed Megrim and… Dexter Poindexter. Jeepers, what a name. And where they’ll be sitting during the stalking phase. Now, while I find the Tuffskin, you use the phone book-there can’t be too many Fronemeyers-and the map to figure out where we are in relation to the high school. Also, call the parents of these two kids and tell them their targeted darlings are safe.”

That seemed pointless. “I don’t think we—”

“Just do it,” Winnie said. “The more committed anti-slasher folks we can count on coming out of this, the better. If I have to plant terror in the hearts of hundreds of complacent mommies and daddies, so be it.”

She headed off.

It was a relief to regain the kitchen, away from the sight of neck slashes and the spills of blood that idled down the slain wives’ bodies.

In a cabinet above the wall phone, Bray found the white pages. Thin. One Fronemeyer. Moonglow Street, so short its name ran its length, no more than four miles from school.

Finding the numbers for the Megrims and the Poindexters was just as easy. But mustering the will to dial them was another matter.

Winnie returned with a tub of Tuffskin in her hand, a prize from her rummage through bathroom cabinets. She carried as well a thick wad of bills and a set of keys on a chain, both of which she stuffed into Bray’s pants pockets. “Well?”

Bray pointed to the map. “We’re here. Over here’s Corundum High. It’s seven ten now. Apply the Tuffskin, let the stuff seal, hit the road at seven thirty, and we should be right on time.”

“Did you call them?”

“Not exactly, I—”

“Wimp!” She grabbed the pad and punched in a number. Six rings. “That’s right,” muttered Winnie, “catch some fast food and go bowling while your son dies.”

She hung up and punched in the other number, her index finger moving with strength and purpose. Ring one, ring two, ring three, followed by a click, and a singing voice, to which she began to say something, stopping when she realized it was a recording.

She drummed on the counter, then, “Yeah, hi, listen up. You don’t know me, but your daughter Tweed and her date were chosen as tonight’s prom victims. I have reason to believe they’ll be spared. Trust me, this is not a hoax. You’ll learn about it later this evening, but really now… don’t you think you should have done more to stop this outrage before it went this far?”

Winnie hung up. “That oughta jolt someone’s complacency.”

“You were unnecessarily cruel.”

“Tell it to the judge, Mister Promjumper.” She pried the lid off the tub and dipped a hand into the soft goo. “Turn your head left.” It burned going on, but Bray felt it harden and penetrate his skin as she kneaded and shaped it.

Thinned, Tuffskin concealed blemishes.

Applied more thickly, it gave heft to breast or cock.

A famous pianist had been said to extend his fingers this way, but anyone who understood music knew that had to be a wild lie.

“Now you do me,” she said, “and by God you’d better get it right.”

Her harshness had begun to amuse more than shame him, which was just as well. His hand held steady. He did his best to thin the Tuffskin and coat her lobe, concealing the pale green beneath flesh tones. Curiously, the more it reminded him of the lobes of girls he had lusted after when he was whole, the greater the urge grew to kiss it.

He planted a light one.

Winnie drew back. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Kissing my date’s friendship lobe.”

“Don’t you friendship me!” she retorted. “Let’s see what’s to eat. Ten minutes tops.”

Bray visited the john first.

When he returned, Winnie had a variety of meats and cheeses laid out on the table, along with three types of juice. He lifted a Jonathan from the fruit bowl, alternating bites of mozzarella and apple and feeling how weird it was to have a fake lobe moving to match his concealed stuffed lobebag on the left.

He’d give anything, he thought, to have it be real, to have this prom be his abandoned prom nine years before.

Between bites, he tried to filter his breath through his hand. The stench of death made eating an iffy proposition. Winnie, a thin shapely woman of fierce determination, chowed down oblivious of the smell. Her eyes darted between the wall clock and the sheaf of papers.

Bray grabbed another apple. One bite in, his date announced that it was garage time and headed back through the house. He tossed the apple in the trash.

Winnie’s instincts were unerring. At the end of the hall was the door to the garage, a standard three-car structure with a couple of cars and some boxes stacked against a side wall.

“Which one is least likely to have belonged to Fronemeyer?” she asked. “We don’t want to rouse suspicions in the parking lot.”

“This one’s got to be his.” Bray pointed to a newer foreign jobbie whose license plate frame read PAINTERS DO IT WITH ACRYLICRITY. A parking pass hung from its inside mirror.

“Good guess. We’ll take the other.” She started to open the passenger door. “What are you doing?”

“Holding the door for you.” Winnie looked creamy and scrumptious.

“Get the heck over to the other side of the car. And get serious, will you? There are three dead people inside that house. And we’re on a mission to turn things around in this cockeyed world.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll drive.”

“That’s right. You drive, I ride, I do the thinking, you follow orders. It’s that simple.”

Sliding in beside her, Brayton nit-nit-nitted the garage door open.

In this light, Winnie almost looked like Bonnie Dolan, the date he had disgraced through his cowardice. Maybe if he pretended as hard as he could, he might save himself and counterbalance the misery he had put the Dolans and his parents through so many years before.

He leaned toward her.

“Watch it!” she said.

“Fine.” He smiled. “But before this evening’s over, I bet you’re going to want to kiss me.”

“Bet away. Dream on. Hit the road.”

Brayton did.

All three.

Their babysitter had finked out on them, so they had her daughter Pill to contend with.

Even so, Trilby Donner thought that having the three of them, her and her spouses Bix and Brest, chaperone the prom was a swell idea.

In public Brest displayed much love for Bix, even as she spoke privately to Trilby of dumping him in favor of an all-girl threesome with Delia Gaskin. But Trilby felt that if only they could do more together as a triple and as a family, if they made the effort to identify common threads in their lives and intertwine them to gain tensile strength, their marriage was still salvageable.

That’s why she insisted so vehemently that they take Pill with them. It was, she felt a great idea, despite her embarrassment when Bix passed a bribe to Elwood Dunsmore and the lynx-eyed student inside the door checking passes. Hush-hush, no need to let anyone know an eight-year-old was on the grounds, she would be mouse-quiet in the faculty lounge and out of sight as the slasher stalks.

Dunsmore, a coffee-skinned shop teacher with a bristle mustache and a bulbous friendship lobe, winked, okay’d his fingers, and folded the bills into his coat pocket. “That’s called hush money,” he told the junior, who nodded and said, “Yeah, we learned about that stuff in Mr. Versailles’ class in the lesser vices.”

Now Pill was being difficult.

“Why the long face, honey? I’ll come in to check on you every half hour,” Trilby assured.

The child kept her head bent, her pre-adolescent earlobes forlorn in their naked innocence. In three or four years, when puberty struck, her baby Pill would need to be fitted for a lobebag.

“You’ve got your books, Gigi the goat, and a nice plush chair. There’s pear juice in the mini-fridge whenever you want it.”

Whiny voice, yet thank God no tears: “But I want you, Mommy.”

Brest and Bix stood by the door.

Trilby sensed them behind her, impatience and loverly interest intermingled. Later, in bed, she had no doubt they would use the delay caused by Pill’s whining as an excuse to vent their pent-up affection toward her. And she would do her best to counter with her worn riding crop.

“You’ll be a big girl, won’t you?” she asked. “You’ll take care of yourself?”

Pill nodded, hugging her stuffed goat.

“That’s my girl. Now remember, if you hear footsteps, what do you do before the people come in?”

The corners of Pill’s mouth flexed. “I miss Puff,” she said. Puff was her kitty.

“What do you do?” repeated Trilby.

Pill looked glum. “Hide in the coat closet.”

“That’s right. In your little corner of pillows. Leave a tiny crack for air, and when you’re sure they’re gone, it’s okay to come out again.”

The faculty lounge was brightly lit and off-limits for the slaughter. Pill would, as Trilby had instructed her, keep her hands off the paper cutter and out of the supply drawer. Leaving her here would be perfectly safe.

“That’s my girl,” Bix offered.

Brest, beside him, said nothing.

Trilby kissed her index fingers and touched them to Pill’s lobes. “Give your mommy a hug, honey.”

Thick wool from Gigi the goat tickled Trilby’s neck as her daughter’s slip of a body moored against her and the butterfly mouth she so loved closed about the maternal tip of her friendship lobe.

Gerber Waddell arrived in his beat-up truck and his best coveralls.

As he crossed the parking lot and entered the school building, early promgoers gave him a wide berth. The teacher who sat at the front table, Mr. Dunsmore, and the short line of students being checked in ignored him.

Pond scum.

Oughta be snuffed, all of them.

Gerber went without ceremony to the supply closet near the band room. He used his ring of keys to let himself in.

It was close in here, the lone pull-bulb dim and dusty with age. Shelf upon shelf of tools and duct tape and extension cords in impossible orange tangles passed beneath his gaze.

Gerber paused.

Why am I here? he wondered. There was a reason I came in here.

Letting his fingers rise before him like so many pale stalagmites, he pointed them toward the school entrance and with great effort traced his steps until they were back where they had begun.

Oh yeah. Tin snips. An axe. An ice pick. A graduated, pan-piped pouch of screwdrivers.

He loaded his utility belt with these items, repeating their names over and over in a whisper until they dangled there.

Flag. Gotta do the flag.

Damned students didn’t appreciate the work involved in the flag task. Mornings, they shot spitwads at him while the pulley at the top gave the odd groan and the parallel cords sang in high slaps against the flagpole and the heavy furls of the flag moved, jerk by jerk, into the sky like a huge slumbering dinosaur head roused from sleep.

Gotta take it down.

Night time comin’ on.

Later, there would be blood to clean up, lots of blood.

And stray body parts from the futtering, flung into ill-lit corners of the gym.

But the night was still young, and plenty of mayhem simmered across the brainscape of Corundum High’s head janitor.

Gerber Waddell locked the closet. He paused outside in the hall to remember again where he was headed.

Some gussied-up young snotwads swished by, wide-eyed and agiggle. They made a joke at his expense, but Gerber paid them no never-mind.

Flag. Fuckin’ Ol’ Glory. Fuckin’ flag.

Yep.

Sheriff Blackburn watched the flag rise, giving it a smart salute as the head janitor watusi’d beside the white flagpole, the ling ling ling of the pulls slapping metal.

This night flag, designed by an artist of his grandparents’ generation, had gradually replaced the day version, unofficially and then by an act of Congress. When it was first introduced, some had called it sacrilege. But most folks honored truth when they saw it: Fifty gloom-white skulls on a field of blue, bloody furrows alternating with flayed flesh, the skulls like Honest Abe looking drawn and haggard in his last photos, the flayings like sexual lashes gone mad, the whole a vivid rendering of the nation’s dark side, the nation dubbed the Demented States of America scarcely twenty years before by an otherwise forgettable pop musician. The moniker had stuck, gone into common parlance, and was used more often than the original now-except by the President, though he too lapsed at times into the vernacular.

“Hi there,” said Gerber Waddell, ducking and nodding at the sheriff from the flagpole.

Poor halfwit always said, Hi there.

Irritating.

“Looking good, Gerber.”

The janitor mumbled his thanks, a catch in his throat as he figure-eighted the twin cord about its stay and yanked it tight. Benign feeb. Gone nutso years back at a corporate picnic the day after prom night. Killed one more than the law and custom allowed. But some judicious brain slicing had redeemed what could be redeemed, and Gerber Waddell, with the aid of his guardians the Bleaks, had become once more a productive member of society.

“Take care now, hear?”

“Thank you, Mister Sheriff.” Gerber nodded politely, a grin on his face. Then he picked up the triangulated day flag, did a one-eighty, and headed for the school entrance.

Young couples were cascading now through the double doors, bottlenecked at the table Blackburn had just left. He had entrusted a padlock to the bristle-lipped shop teacher, Elwood Dunsmore-the final padlock that would be snapped on right at the stroke of eight, no more students allowed in after that, no more anybody. The only keys were in the packet he had left with Zane Fronemeyer and on the ring of metal hanging from the sheriff’s belt.

A limousine drew up to disgorge another young couple, fear and anticipation on their faces.

Blackburn clucked and shook his head. Waste of money, as far as he was concerned. Most people made do with their own vehicles, parking in the lot on his left. But there were always some, too extravagant for their own damn good, who saw fit to hire fancy-dan automobiles, hoping to impress their dimbulb classmates with a display of gold-plated rungs up life’s ladders.

Yeah, he remembered the kind from his own high school days. One of that crowd had reached his last red-gold rung a tad early, on prom night. The sheriff had a dried piece of pancreas at home to prove it.

Blackburn crossed the grass on his left and found the sidewalk. From his right fist swayed three padlocks.

Kids with flashlights, sketched shadows in the darkness, waved cars in off the street and left or right along a gauntlet of volunteers who handled the parking proper. Overhead, a pallid moon drifted in and out of pewter-gray clouds.

Passing the iron-barred windows of several classrooms, Blackburn rounded the corner of the building and headed for the gym’s emergency exit door. When one lock’s hasp slid snugly into place there, its firm snap sealed off the exit as a means of escape. There would be no promjumpers on his watch, at least not the kind that signed in and slipped out.

High exuberant shouts erupted in the parking lot at the sheriff’s back. He thought of his son and two daughters, how in two short years Blitz, a sophomore, would drive or be driven into this very parking lot for her prom. Yesterday, a slight injury in gym class had brought Daddy to school, where he received assurances from Nurse Gaskin and a handshake from Principal Buttweiler. The whole encounter had given Blackburn a chill.

But they said it built character, this prom ordeal. And he had survived it, him and his wives.

“Hello, Sheriff!” Kids passed by, crossing the lot, a hint of challenge in their voices, but respect too.

He raised a hand to them. “Be careful now, you hear? Don’t go catching any stray knives!”

“We won’t!” But they well might. Only a few teachers, and the principal of course, knew which couple would die tonight.

Two padlocks remained.

Blackburn hummed as he rounded the building’s next corner, low bristly shrubs keeping him clear of the wall. The back entrance was used only by driver ed kids and those who lived north of the school. It yielded to his efforts, a sturdy door now made impassable.

Nobody here. He started to feel creepy in spite of himself. Whistle a happy tune.

Right.

He resumed his walk around the building. On the east side was an emergency exit from the band room, hidden in moon shadows. The floods on this side hadn’t been flicked on!

Damn that dimwit janitor.

Every year for the last three, the sheriff had chewed Gerber out about this, making up some crap about ordinances, safety regulations. But the truth was, Blackburn would somehow always manage to spook himself by the time he got around to the back of the school on prom night.

No houses. Just some weeds and a fence, a lazy stream bubbling along behind it.

Detaching the flashlight from his utility belt, Blackburn trained it on the door. The padlock fell from his hands and clattered on the concrete. Then it was up again, a cool inverted U of metal sliding against metal, a solid steel snap that sealed off the school’s east exit. Yes. How easy it was to feel satisfied by a simple sound.

Now to complete his journey around the school perimeter, get the hell out of here, and lambaste that dweeb janitor.

Someone touched him on the shoulder. The boy in him yelped. His skin bristled with fear as he whirled and went for his gun. Foolish gesture, on hold and relaxing even as he touched the gun butt.

Blackburn saw who it was. “Jesus Christ, don’t you ever do that to me again!”

“Sorry, Sheriff.”

“Creepy enough out here as it is.” His hand returned to his side. “So, we meet again.”

“Sheriff, I need your help.” Oddly cool.

“You don’t sound quite—”

His instincts flared. Then the dark arm rose, as though detached from its body’s stasis, swiftly curving about and impossibly long.

A grimace betrayed the usually complacent face before him, exertion abruptly concentrated.

But before Blackburn could raise his hands to ward off whatever it was, the wind whipped up in the restless branches above him and an impossible weight snuffed all awareness swiftly out.

6. Limos, Volvos, and Jalopies

Dexter Poindexter’s coupe eased through the night. Its headlights knifed through the darkness, which swept behind him and grew whole again.

Dex finally felt like a grown-up. A man in charge of his own decisions. Protective of his wife-to-be. On his way unshackled.

Starting in the fall of his junior year, there had been inklings, stirrings of adulthood: his voice growing deeper and more confident; the soft brillo’ing of his pubic hair; an obligatory stint as a zit farmer; the wary way adults had of staring at you, prunish joes and biddy-janes whose youth had long gone sour and who tottered, a whole heap of ’em, on the lip of the grave.

But tonight was different.

Tonight Dex sat behind the wheel of his car, Tweed by his side. Upon the tips of her earlobes and no doubt between her breasts, she had dabbed a scent that drove him wild.

Once they had enjoyed and survived the prom, wedded bliss would be theirs. A third would come along to complete them-male or female, it didn’t much matter.

Then a couple of jobs to sustain them, and some kids underfoot in there somewhere.

But what if they had been chosen?

“It’s a beautiful night,” Tweed said.

“The best,” he said.

What if the designated slasher were staring at their photos right now, laying plans to be right behind where they were seated, removing screws in advance so that he could pop out in an instant and draw his blade across Dex’s throat? My God, he would die gasping for a breath that never came, even as he watched Tweed suffer the same fate. In the slasher’s eyes would shine a bead of hatred, its gleam the last thing Dex saw as his vision faded.

Grown-ups hate kids, thought Dex. They envy us our youth. They love to snuff two of us every year. And I’ll be just like them, now that I’m nearly a man.

But he quickly nixed that thought, letting righteous rage at the adult world again assert itself.

They would not touch his Tweedie-bird.

They would not harm a hair on her head.

Nor would they hurt Dex. He had been working on his reflexes, visualizing alone in his basement against the wall where Mom and Dad couldn’t make fun of him. There, he pictured over and over the abrupt appearance of the slasher. Dex would push Tweed out of harm’s way, then seize the knife arm of the emerging teacher, even if it proved to be gum-chewing Coach Frink of the gorilla arms and the dumb blunt brow and the beady eyes, even that musclebound dolt-and with his miniature cleaver sever the man’s jugular.

In his imaginings, Dex effortlessly disarmed the bastard, saw him struggle in his death throes, threw an arm around Tweed, and said, “We got him, honey. He’s dying and we’re free.”

Now, in the car, Tweed nestled closer and put a hand on his right arm. “I love you, Dex.”

“I love you too.”

And he did. He loved Tweed with his entire heart. “His spleen ’n’ liver too,” as the song had it. “We’re going to have a great time tonight, you and me and all of us. This prom’s gonna kick some serious butt.”

“No question,” she said, laying her head against his arm. “It’s such a dreamy night.”

His instincts were honed. No need to fret. Just live each harrowing moment for all it was worth. Screw up his nerves and be on high alert during the twenty minutes’ ordeal, as the seniors hurried off to their designated spots, sat beneath big black numbers, and waited.

Afterward, the survivors would return elated and relieved to the gym, eaten up with curiosity. Which couple, they’d be wondering, would shortly be laid in the lap of the Ice Ghoul to be hacked and futtered at midnight?

It wouldn’t be him and Tweed.

The odds favored them.

Then Dex’s confidence hit the inevitable speed bump.

The odds favored everyone.

“I see it!” screamed Pim.

Altoona clucked. “’Course you see it, dummy. ’Swhere it’s been for a billion years.”

“Yeah, I know. But it’s the free.”

“So?” Altoona stopped behind some car whose left blinker was flashing. She checked her watch. Twenty minutes before the doors closed, and three blocks to the parking lot. “It ain’t like it’s an exam or nothin’, Pim, so don’t crap your knickers, okay? It’s more like, in fact it’s precisely like, two luckless fuckers are forced to cash in their chips and the rest of us are allowed to breathe again finally. Who’s in that rustbucket ahead of us?”

Pim craned forward. “Oh jeez!”

“What?”

Pim giggled and clapped her black-mitted hands. “One’s the loser babe from butchery who almost lost a thumb.”

“Hairy-lobed Lulu?”

“Yeah. And look. Good old Futzy stuck her with that triple-bellied bozo with the corduroy pants who hangs over his lunch like pigs over a trough. The kid nobody in their right mind ever sits with.” Pim glowered with ratlike malice. “I sincerely hope they’re not the chosen ones, cuz no one I know would want to rush in and futter them. Too many goddamn cooties.”

“Couple o’ friggin’ losers,” said Altoona. “You wonder how they live with themselves. ’Course, if anybody had bullied either of these twits, we’d’ve held the bullies down and branded ’em. So go figure. Leave losers alone? Hey, we tolerate that. Cause ’em grief? We flog you to beat the band.”

“Cuz we understand how it feels. The being mocked, I mean.”

“Right.”

Clouds scudded behind the school building as they approached the lot. Jacketed students directed with flashlights. Altoona saw Tweed Megrim’s kid sister, Jenna, a peppery little junior, splitting cars off this way and that.

“Jesus fuck, it’s the prom!” screamed Pim, jiggling fit to burst out of her dress.

What a love bunny, thought Altoona.

And what interesting times lay ahead later tonight, when they bared their nether parts for those yummy zippermouths, Condor and Blayne.

Altoona’s lobes peppered and zinged like a string of pinched Christmas lights.

At the punchbowl, Jonquil Brindisi, teacher of the greater vices, ladled orange glop into the outheld cup of Claude Versailles, teacher of the lesser vices.

Jiminy Jones, ignored in a bow tie, roved on the risers, setting out thick binders of charts on the dance band’s unsteady black stands. Poor sad Jiminy. Such a humorless stub of a fellow, short, bristle-browed, full of gray bland business grit in faculty meetings. His demeanor had surely had the effect of turning off potential mates, as now they turned off Jonquil.

Artificial fog drifted across the floor from that towering effrontery in the center of the gym, the Ice Ghoul.

“Thank you,” said Claude. He took a sip of punch. “And yes, Jonquil, I concur. This year’s crop of seniors showed execrable taste in choosing as the centerpiece of their prom the hoary old Ice Ghoul. He’s not only a slap-in-the-face to a fine principal, our poor dear Futzy chum. But as much as, to the adolescents who while away a mere four years here the Ice Ghoul seems a source of endless merriment, to those of us logging our third decade and counting, he’s dull, dull, dull.”

Jonquil smiled. Wordy bugger, hair starting to thin. But Claude was tall, arguably handsome, all-in-all a not inconsiderably sexy man. “Maybe they took your lessons in Sloth to heart.”

“Indeed,” said Claude, licking orange foam from his upper lip. His suit was bright yellow with bold black stitching, his lobebag the same. “The Ice Ghoul this class. A particularly vicious bunch this year, perhaps?”

“I try, Claude, I try.”

Knock off a few years, ungray a few streaks at the temples, plunk him in a singles bar, and Jonquil would jump him in an instant. A pity she had stricken colleagues from her list of possible playmates. Pity too that the bar fodder, men and women both, came nowhere near Claude’s quality and allure.

“In my lessons on Rage,” she noted, “a full six weeks we dig and delve into that fine and unjustly maligned passion, I do my best to instill a love of the vicious.”

“One would think it natural.”

“One would think so.”

Across the gym, Jonquil saw Adora Phipps nod her tight-bunned head and excuse herself from an early gaggle of seniors. She headed their way, young but dressed in a spiffed-up version of the granny clothes that marked her off as one of the oddest of the odd.

To Claude: “But men and women are vicious in so predictable and plastic a way, and they’re no better as kids. In class, I work myself up-you know how I get-but they stare back, as dull as a crusted plate, these hormone-pumped wonders. Take Notorious, for example. Sure it’s sexy to see someone fry on TV.”

Miss Phipps nodded to them, listening as she poured herself some refreshment. A wormy seam, as she leaned, ran up the back of her stocking from fat-heeled black shoes. When she straightened, the seam was abruptly hidden, her long severe frock falling to cover it.

“Watching someone fry,” continued Jonquil, “invariably gets me off.”

“Me too,” said Claude. He waved to Miss Phipps, who gave him a fuck-off nod and stared over her cup at Jonquil in mid-peroration.

“My point, though, is that smell they give us!” Cluck of the tongue, roll of the eyes.

“Surely you don’t want the real thing?”

“Of near the amazing smell of a corpse. For heaven’s sake, if you’re going to get people off, you really shouldn’t cheat the most critical sense of all with cheap cosmetic substitutes. For all the distaste TV viewers claim, there’s nothing like the aroma of victims, freshly butchered or fried, to bypass the veneer of civilization and go straight for the beast in the brain-nothing like it to snag one’s lust and turn it positively ravenous.”

Jiminy Jones bobbled a low sour blat out of his trumpet.

“I wonder,” said Adora Phipps, taking another sip.

“Don’t wonder,” Jonquil said. “Believe it.”

The lobebag Miss Phipps wore had that second-generation feel to it, as if it had been rummaged out of her grandmother’s hope chest.

Her right lobe, thank goodness, was bare. A year ago, Jonquil and Ms. Foddereau had taken the English teacher aside, hoping to persuade her out of repression’s past in that regard at least, and the resumption of school in September had seen Miss Phipps abandon the antiquated right bag that the rest of Demented States society had trashed so decisively in the mid-sixties.

Claude said in annoyance, “Where’s Gerber Waddell when you need him?”

She followed his gaze to the wetness plashing down the papier-mache and chicken-wire face of the Ice Ghoul.

The creature half-knelt, half-crouched. It was daunting in its crudeness but so overdone as to be laughable: buttocks doughy and split apart, a thick spearhead erection beribboned and far too huge, bright red everywhere except where brush had missed newsprint.

Its musclebound arms lofted skyward-the knife, the torch, an obvious parody of the Statue of Liberty-and its massive head was bent to peer triumphantly at the dead couple soon to be laid before it.

Jonquil’s gaze returned to the splash of drops, slow but predictable, that hit the concave crimp in its brow, sorrowed along its cheek, and dripped down the muscled chest before it passed out of view.

“Rained all night, didn’t it?” she said.

“It woke me up,” agreed Miss Phipps.

Jonquil took in the seething gush of dry-ice fog issuing from vents cut in the figure’s broad pedestal.

“Yes it rained,” said Claude. “But Futzy had the roof redone just last year. I told him-past experience ought to be trusted!-not to switch to Flashpoint amp; Sons based on bid alone. He ignored me. Now this.”

“You think there’s standing water up there? Perhaps a puddle?” Jonquil pictured a dark mirror of water rippled with night breezes, spread wide over ineptly tarred swatches of roof.

“More like a lagoon!” he answered. “As my favorite bumpersticker puts it, ‘Life’s a bitch, and then she whelps.’ On this of all nights, the roof has chosen to fail. Water is trickling along crossbeams and onto the runways of the slasher’s typically dry modes of access up there. Should he or she have an occasion to employ them tonight, he or she will be in for a case, at the very least, of wet knee. Early onset of gout, arthritis, or chilblains is not out of the question. Where the devil is our esteemed head janitor?”

Another of Claude’s rhetorical questions.

Maybe he would go in search of the janitor. Or he might stoically wait for him to wander in. More likely, he would gnaw on this new peeve all evening, spinning elaborate rhetorical flourishes to feed his upset. None of it would diminish him in Jonquil’s sight.

At the far door, a threesome strode in: Brest Donner, arm in arm with her man Bix, and Trilby, their third, bringing up the rear.

“Brest!” Jonquil called out, waving her toward the refreshment table when she got her attention.

Clusters of early seniors looked up too. But with the lights on full and the dance band only beginning to assemble, it felt not yet as though the prom had quite begun.

More kids, lights gone low and colorful, the front entrance padlocked shut, a cymbal whisk as the first notes of an old classic sounded: such signals would mark the real start of the evening, when these dressy stragglers on strews of sawdust would shift from out-of-place to right-at-home.

Brest tugged Bix along and Trilby followed after. Here, thought Jonquil, is a marriage in trouble.

Out of the madhouse at last and on the road, thought Condor Plasch. His buddy Blayne had one fucked-up family. “You have one fucked-up family, Blayne-O,” he said.

“The shit they don’t eat, they are.” Stoic, dark, an anodyne for Condor’s worldly woes, Blayne glanced out the passenger side and dug idly into a coat pocket.

“One last hurdle, we head west.”

No comment from Blayne.

Condor wove from street to street out of the housing development. His tongue barbell knocked against the inside edge of his zipper mouth. He pictured lightning jags over wet enamel. “Yep, that’s where we be headed. Put in our time tonight, pack up, ride way the fuck over to San Fran, where the funny papers are sayin’ all good zipheads congregate.” Blayne nodded but said nothing. “What’s up, my good bud?”

Blayne stared over: “Me and Altoona did the lip thing today.” He fetched out a kerchief, blue and white checked, rubberbanded at the middle and pulled into rabbit ears at the top.

“She just another sneerfuck privately pining to kiss metal?”

Blayne reared back. “Get real. This is Altoona you’re talking about.”

“So did she spill? Whether her and Pim did it, I mean.”

“She implied.” Blayne unbanded the kerchief. “Real strong.”

“They’ve been walking funny since Easter.”

Once, thought Condor, those two chicks had been a stone-cold drag. Couple o’ wannabes.

Lately, they’d started getting interesting.

First, Pim had sidled up to him outside the cafeteria and brazenly requested their piercer’s phone number. That had been followed by obsessive stares and all, capped by rumors of what she and Altoona had done over Easter.

“Not too raunchy in the visual way neither, them two,” said Condor. “Cute lobes, big swellers beneath their sweaters, killer curves that narrow down into a tight clench below.”

Blayne dropped a compliment: “They’d be hot and finger-rocking good in the sack.”

“But wait up,” said Condor. “We had to go through whole heaping gobs of pain when we had our way them girls’d let that shit be perpetrated on them you-know-where. I can still smell that cream-white oval pan with the red drool and spit, me goggle-eyed over it with my wuttering head on wobbly like I was fit to pass out. And I can feel the crimp of that skin-punch as my blood sprayed out over Cabrille’s fist.”

Condor signaled a turn.

“And those were my lips! You think I’d let anyone do that to my gens?”

Blayne shrugged. “Believe what you want. I think they did it. Anyway, we get to find out tonight.”

Yeah, right. “What’s with the pills?”

“Some heady stuff,” Blayne replied. “Brain revealers, Altoona calls ’em. While they were in Topeka, before they drove to Cabrille’s parlor, they met this guy in a bar whose brother used the university labs in Lawrence to make it pure. No shit, no cut, no speed. Just a smooth high hit.”

Condor’s stomach flexed. “I dunno. Last time, my gut took a turn, loops of no-no-no and a quick uncatchable ralph or two, floors to mop in a dead-dog stupor the next morning, and pain, pain, pain. So I’m gonna beg off.”

“That was Cobra’s street-scam crap, cut six ways from Sunday with baby powder and strychnine, more’n likely. This stuff’s the genuine article. Altoona says she and Pim took hits, got naked, it went on forever. She told me, get this, she told me her pussy tingled like a fizzing sizzling hot tub and that her sexlobe felt like it had swelled up and stretched out near three feet long and that soft wet hot invisible slave-tongues were lapping and sucking every goddamn cubic inch of it, hour after hour of yummy sexy shit, and I ain’t lyin’.”

“Altoona said that?”

“In so many words.”

What the fuck.

He and Blayne had gotten into black candles a year before. They had written bleak poetry to the loneliness, sharing the verses before they engaged in yet one more bout of fruitless suck and flay.

They had stood by one another in Kansas City twice while a well-paid felony-risker had taken a tattoo needle to their underaged skin.

And they had gone together through the pain of zipper installation, a Christmas break Condor would never forget, the unending stairstep of hurt across his mouth and back again, the blood, the swelling, somehow managing to coax Blayne through the same.

The other kids’ taunts thereafter were as nothing. They were as the bip-bip-bip of the zipper handle against his right chinflesh as he walked, a tickle soon become custom.

Now his buddy and lover (the one kid in the world who likewise had his ear attuned to the suck-tunnel of emptiness, who grokked that the probability of truly sharing anything with anyone anywhere ever was zip zero zilch) held forth a pill to pixie-dust the next several hours away.

Prom shit would unfold its truth, the lows lower, the highs higher.

And possibly in there, he and Blayne would get to gawk at two stripped chicks, blend flesh, Pim’s unbagged sexlobe inside his mouth, her letting out little girlish gasps as his steel barbell brushed her forbidden lobe and his greedy fingers parted her zipper-teeth below and snugged their way into her moist hot clench.

“Well okay, give it here,” he said. “Will we make it to the lot before buzz-time?”

“Five minutes after gulpdown, it kicks in.”

“Works for me.”

The pale yellow pill lay bitter on Condor’s tongue. It took two hard swallows. Even then, the damned thing stuck in his throatpipe. But its bitter taste finally melted away, and Condor asked Blayne where they were supposed to do the girls.

“In the costume shop, during the search for the stiffs. She and Pim’ll be pilling out too. Oughta be dropping it right about now.”

Four minutes later, when Condor steered into the parking lot entrance, he felt a giggle bubble up out of his gut. “Oh jeez.” It was a wavelet, yep, and he could see huge waves, shiny blue, way far out but edging closer.

“Yeah, I know,” said Blayne. “But keep it tamped down till we get past Tweed’s tight little kid sister and flash our passes at ol’ Dunsmore. Once we’re past the front table and into the gym, we can giggle as much as we freakin’ feel like it, ’midst the dimness and death-terror and the whole dad-blamed fucked-up mess of a world.”

“Blayne?” Condor said.

“Yeah?” The dark blue niobium in Blayne’s puffy lips gleamed like a blueberry blintz.

“Tonight,” he laughed, then bottled it up and jammed in a stopper. “I have a super-strong feeling that we’re going to have the best goddamn time of our whole entire friggin’ motherfuckin’ lives!”

“Could be, buddy. Could be.”

“Blayne?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you, Blayne.”

The smile vanished. “Yeah. Love.”

Blayne looked out the windshield. “Come on, my man, she’s waving you on. Don’t blow it.”

Zane Fronemeyer’d been a warmup. Offing him and his wives had simply swept obtrusive clutter into the dustbin, which made for clearer lines of action ahead.

But they were peripheral victims.

Sheriff Blackburn, revived to offer up his voice for capture on tape, had given a foretaste of the main event. He, after all, had made the ultimate sacrifice in the school building, and roping him into place had led to a perfect and tasty omniscience.

But even Blackburn was mere prologue.

Now, to watch them arrive, to peer from the heart of concealment, an architectural honeycomb entwined above, beneath, around, and through the school proper-this sanctioned voyeurism drew now together.

It pointed the way toward healing.

How natural it was to identify with this building, a caretaker of the young and a presider over their slaughter. But tonight, this place of brick and mortar seethed with resentment at the pinch and crimp of the law.

One couple and no more?

Too strict.

Healing demanded free rein, and tonight that demand would be met.

Beyond a shelf of trophies, the seated shop teacher’s hair shone. Opposite him, kids spiffed in tuxedo satins or fluffed in corsaged ball gowns flashed their pinned-on passes to the teacher and his junior helper and accepted the sealed envelope that bore their names.

At their waists dangled the mini-cleavers awarded them by Lily Foddereau upon successful completion of butchery class, these and the cloudy pastel-lidded Futterware containers.

But above the finery, between each dazzling lobebag and its companion earlobe on the right, their fresh-scrubbed faces wore the same devilish looks that mischievized the hallways, day in, day out. Mayhem directed outward, sex thoughts abuzz inside, as their jaws vacantly snapped gum.

Cobra passed by with Peach Popkin, owning her with a few fingers at the neck, his eyes dead with hatred.

Fido Jenner and Bowser McPhee hove next into view, Bowser’s eager eyes glued to Peach’s twitch of a rump.

Then the huge bulk of Kyla Gorg and Patrice Menuci, an item since eighth grade, blocked out the twosome waiting behind.

It didn’t matter who they were, some of them victims, some victimizers. Every one of them had the play of holes on the brain. Mouth hole over lobe, pussy hole over prick, shove it in, yank it out.

Diversion from deadmarch.

Ah but tonight, how pleasing it would be to taste their fear, see it unclench, seize it right back up, and dole out death-enough to free their minds, those that survived, enough to salve the wounds that every prom night reopened, heal them at last, and find release.

When Kyla and Patrice were gone, a white limo drove away outside. Rocky Stark waved to it, and Sandy Gunderloy tugged at his sleeve. He turned, grinned at the shop teacher, and offered his hand.

Top jock.

Head cheerleader.

The momentary flash of a fuck. Imaginary. But every damned bitch-bastard in school flashed likewise whenever these two walked by.

Tonight’s places of slaughter had been firmed up. But Jesus Fucking God it’d be such a pleasure to trash Rocky Stark and Sandy Gunderloy, even if meant veering off-plan in order to do it.

They were finalists for prom king and queen, as indeed were Brandy Crowe and Flann Beckwith. Most prom nights, that brought immunity. Broad, fearless grins.

Not tonight.

In a pig’s eye were they safe tonight.

Time to move on. Doors would be locked soon. Lights would dim. Music would play.

The sort of music the little shits danced to.

The sort of music they faced.

Jenna Megrim waved another car left.

The breeze against Jenna’s face was cool but not chilly. Armed with instructions and flashlights, she and the other volunteers had fanned out across the parking lot to direct arriving seniors.

Her father would be home, stepping out of the shower and preparing to sit before the tube.

Gravel scrunched at her back, a low motor, as some parent’s car moved off down the blacktop, guided by the next flashlight-wielding junior. Moonlight caught its bumpersticker: “Have you kissed your child’s friendship lobe today?”

Jenna had thought she might be bored. But simply knowing that the designated slasher was roaming the secret byways right now thrilled her.

The slasher knew!

It might be her Spanish teacher, Senora Westmore. Or Lily Foddereau. Or that handsome choir director with the killer eyes and the thick tanned lobes.

Whoever it was knew where the doomed couple would be sitting and who they were.

Even now, as she signaled them on, this pair of tuxedo’d boys blowing kisses at her might, in a little while, be lying, gutted open, at the base of the towering fiend she had helped construct.

Jenna knew she should feel frightened.

But she didn’t.

Not even for Dex and her sister. They’d be safe. And her own prom night was an entire year away.

Besides, maybe she’d be a finalist for prom queen. Sure, she wasn’t the best looking girl in the junior class. She wasn’t claiming she was.

But Rocky Stark had flirted with her once, a smile and a smart slap across the face. As flirts go, it wasn’t much. But it was enough of one that Sandy-who had let it be known that their twosome would be looking for male completion only-felt compelled to give Jenna a public dressing-down.

Even if a nomination wasn’t in the cards, her birthdate would make her a tender on prom night. For three days on either side of one’s birthdate each month (in Jenna’s case, the twenty-third), any sort of physical harm was strictly forbidden.

Well, okay, except for about to give anybody a free ride from birth. Still, she had a fifty-fifty chance of being sent by lottery to the girl’s gym, thereby escaping all possibility of slaughter.

If that were true, Pish Balthasar, the brainy beauty with the smoky eyes and a growing interest in her, would almost surely want to be her date.

Horn blips from the street.

Dexter drove, Tweed in mid-wave beside him.

Jenna’s coat rustled as her arm shot up. She waved them on, blowing a kiss.

Dex stopped, roll down. “Don’t let the Ice Ghoul get you!”

Roll up as Jenna’s big sister said, “And have a good time at—” The window cut Tweed off, but Jenna saw her lips form Pumper’s house.

“I will,” she yelled, “and you keep away from the Ice Ghoul too!” Tweed looked grand in pink, and Dex would make a darling brother-in-law.

It wouldn’t be long now.

Another quarter hour, and Mrs. Gosler or one of her husbands would drive Jenna and Pumper home for a sleepover. Jenna waved at Pumper across the lot, fingers captured by her flashlight beams, and Pumper waved back.

Later in Pumper’s bedroom, they would listen, mock shock on their faces, to the Goslers watching the electrocution on Notorious. All the while, the two girls would keep the radio low, listening intently to the Midwest returns, heaving sighs of relief and bursting into giggles as Corundum High’s victims were announced and it became clear that their older siblings had been spared.

Another car arced in.

An increase in frantic frowns meant the eight o’clock deadline must be drawing near.

Stay on the ball, Jenna told herself.

She had to concentrate, these last minutes, lest her fumbling lose someone their lobes.

Where before had been free highway, cars clogged in backup. Tough times ahead. Behind her, the ten minute bell sounded.

A wrench in her gut.

Get it on, she thought, relax the wrist, stay alert, give Tweed’s classmates every fair chance.

Over driveway and blacktop, Jenna’s fragile cone of light moved in deadly earnest.

Tweed walked arm in arm with Dex to the band room. In the empty hallways, her dress rustled an unbearable rustle.

Silent lockers serried by.

In her free hand she held the sealed envelope Wattle Murch’s brother Daub had given Dex at the front table. It had grown sticky with palm-sweat.

The band room door wasn’t locked.

They ventured in.

No one there.

A dim bulb on a lamp pole with a pullchain struggled to throw light over the wooden risers where the French horn section sat. Dark shadows choked the rest of the fan-shaped room, and Tweed had to trust to sense memory to know when to step up and when not.

“You see okay?” asked Dex. He had reached the cache of saxophones in back, set midway in the tall gray doors angled polygonally about the outer edge of the room.

He fumbled out his key.

“Yes, if I don’t look at the lightbulb.”

Tweed threaded through a tangled forest of stands, shoving the black nuisances aside. She touched the leather thong of her key, unpursed it, and felt for the right orientation.

The trombone closet unlocked.

Musty odor inside always, like the inside of a ventriloquist’s dummy’s mouth. There stood her trombone case.

Tweed hesitated, an irrational fear gripping her that someone was hiding a few feet inside the closet. She and Dex had once knocked on its back wall. Knowing that the slasher’s secret byways wrapped around the band room, they had heard then the hollow reverb and wondered if this very panel had ever afforded him entry for the kill.

Eight years past, a couple had been butchered by Mr. Dunsmore right where the trombone players sat. Just yesterday, Tweed had emptied her spit valve upon a painted-over blood patch.

But fear was absurd.

It wasn’t yet time for the kill, nor was it likely that she and Dex had been assigned to sit in the band room. Still, this might be the place again. Preparations may have been underway before they had interrupted them.

Something touched the back of her hand. A sound strained in her throat.

“Hey, it’s okay, it’s just me.” Dex squeezed her hand.

“Don’t scare me like that,” she said.

“Sorry,” he said. “Here.” He lay down his alto sax case and snapped it open, flan flan, right-angling the lid. “I’ll put the envelope in my case. Get your axe and let’s go. Mr. Jones will start worrying about us.”

Swooping her instrument out of the closet, Tweed walked cautiously with Dex to the band room door, breathing easier when it had swung-to behind them.

Rather than circle back past the front table to get to the gym, they continued counterclockwise along the first floor corridor.

On the left, science labs gloomed by, site of the hillside creep and the polar creep in geology, memorable goads-to-learning, and the place as well where chem, bio, and physics had been crammed into their skulls.

On the right, thick glass doors to the barn and the slaughterhouse areas made a valiant effort to hold in the stench. Not so long ago, that area of the school had terrified Tweed, despite the gradual progression from primary school petting zoo, to junior high’s dissection of frogs and pig embryos, to high school’s more demanding course of instruction in slaughter, rendering, meat-packing, tanning, butchery, and taxidermy. But now these skills were old hat. She felt as if part of her life was over. She would miss the down-to-earth Lily Foddereau, her loamy wisdom, her steady hand, her lethal axe-blade.

They turned left at the water fountain.

Far ahead, by the gym door nearest the front of the school, a clump of seniors congregated, the boys high-fiving and lobe-tugging as though they were wearing jeans and jerseys and topsiders, not tuxes and ruffed shirts.

No reason not to go in. They were waiting, it seemed, for the lights and the music to draw them out of the hallway.

That’s us, she thought.

“My God, Tweed, look at it!” said Dex as they reached the entrance to the gym.

She paused beside him, her eyes at once drawn to the Ice Ghoul. Even with the lights not yet low, he seemed suddenly larger and more menacing. Fog swirled about him from pedestal vents, a low white roll of guile and menace.

“Jenna told me over dinner that they’d filled in detail.” The vast gymnasium seemed to swallow her voice.

“Yeah I know. You mentioned it,” Dex said. “Some brushwielder, some real sicko, understands what high school is all about. That face really captures the feeling.”

It made her shiver. She wondered, once they survived the stalking, whether it would seem less horrific. “Why’s it… oh look, Dex, the roof must be leaking.”

“Too bad,” he said. “But when the lights change, it’ll look like just another effect.”

A voice called to them from the bandstand, off to the right. Festus Targer at his drumset softened a cymbal and twirled a brush at them. The bass drum thumped.

Farther along the same top riser, Butch and Zinc were de-belling low furious arpeggios from their down-directed trumpets. They were seniors, a couple in the throes of breaking up on account of being college-bound in different directions, Butch to the east coast, Zinc to the west.

Zinc had the blush-pink look of a tender, unflogged for days, and it was clear, had been clear since last week’s lottery, that Butch felt guilty piggybacking his salvation on his lover’s monthly reprieve from beatings and the luck of the draw. Some students resented those who escaped the slasher’s knife that way, but Butch was much harsher on himself than were any of Tweed’s friends.

Tweed took her seat on the middle riser. Dex sat below and to the left, next to Wyche Fowler, ego insufferable, but man could he blow Dex out of the water on the sax.

Tweed snapped open the case and threaded her horn together. Colored lights toggled at random. As she sprayed mist along the length of her cold-creamed slide, Tweed glanced up and saw, at the far end of the gym, Gerber Waddell by the light bank struggling to recall, with his genial feeble half-mind, the precise combination intended for this part of prom night.

“Where the fuck’s Buttweiler?” Bongo asked in her right ear, an unruly low F struggling to speak at the end of his arm.

“Um.” Tweed looked around. No sign of their principal. Not at the punch bowl where the other chaperones clustered. Not at the longer stretch of table near the janitor, where the seniors would pig out and glug down.

A blue vision crossed the gym on a diagonal.

Nurse Gaskin.

She stopped on the sawdust to stare up at the Ice Ghoul bore continuing toward the other chaperones.

Tweed and Dex had a crush on Delia Gaskin. If only she weren’t so old.

“I don’t see him yet,” said Tweed. “Maybe he’s doing paperwork in his office.”

“Yeah, or in the bafroom.” Dimbulb Bongo. Still some years of growing to do, and he was nobody’s genius.

“Tweed.” Dex caught her eye, his neckband a shiny black against the white tux. He glanced at the nurse, then back at Tweed.

Tweed nodded, resigned.

The lights took on harsh red and green casts. At the far door, fluff and fine lines of clothing began to drift in.

Warming the mouthpiece with her hand, Tweed set it into the horn, tried for saliva she seemed not to have, bobbled a few notes, licked her lips and the rim of the mouthpiece cup, woodshedded the opening riff for “I’ll Be Around,” opened the spit valve, and shook out not a drop.

She was scared out of her wits. Half the band was a wreck pretending not to be. They would try to lose themselves in the charts, and maybe they would succeed.

But maybe they’d just have to wait for the prom kill to be over before they would find any kind of groove tonight.

Jiminy Jones glanced this way and that.

The lights at play in his thinning hair lent him weirdly shifting coronas. He held the light-tipped baton tight in one chubby hand.

A last look at the score, smiles darting into the band, a “Hi there Dex, easy on the triplets,” his bowtie blue-sequined like his suitcoat edging, like his lobebag, his head raised to the air like a bull sensing slaughter as the eight o’clock bell sounded, the lights clicked precisely into place, and Jiminy Jones’ baton came down upon the first terrified note of the evening.

7. Violence, Sweet Violence

Willy Wanker, President Gilly Windfucker’s Secretary of Cultural Impoverishment, had slipped his lobebag off and was idly stroking his sexlobe as he watched the video feed.

In this, he was no different from any other cabinet member around the conference table. Even the President’s lobebag lay limp on the polished tabletop, his slim wooden hand chop-cutting the air below his left ear in a semblance of stroking.

His manufacturers had made him a majestic sexlobe. Its bold presence suggested great power, though the general public would only be privy to its implied heft when bagged. They had even stained it with cedar blush, though they must have known-the protocol long established and drooled over in the media-that prom night was the only time it came into view and then only for members of the cabinet and their staff.

Up until tonight.

Wanker kept his counsel.

Close to the chest was his nature, a mode of being accepted by the others. But it also helped him keep confidential his role on the Committee to Assassinate the President, which issued periodic updates, under strictest wraps and with the utmost anonymity, to the press.

Secretary Wanker had served on that committee in many past administrations, but this one posed a special challenge.

Would clipping Gilly Windfucker’s strings and snapping his limbs for kindling, duly videotaped for the national archives of course, do the trick? Or would they need to murder Cholly Bork as well? Kill the brains or simply the brainless twit of a figurehead?

In committee, Wanker had argued long and with great gusto that it was their patriotic duty to do them failing to do so would surely throw the government into a Constitutional crisis from which it might never emerge unscathed. And his arguments, lo these many months, had eaten their way toward persuasion.

As to when the assassination would occur, Wanker had been convincing on that front as well. This very private moment in a president’s tenure, the annual viewing of a hand-picked high-school slaughter, would at last be made public.

By god, thought Wanker with a wicked grin, I’ll go down in history.

This, in part, fueled his lobestrokes, as the roomful of suited men, and one pants-suited woman, watched Karn Flentrop sharpen her blade in the machine shop and sashay through dusty backways that had hosted scores of slashers before her.

When the lobebags dropped to the table and the slow rip of opening zippers circled about the conference room, generous holes had irised open in the table directly above their laps.

Busy indeed were the hands of the nation’s caretakers, left ones above the tabletop stroking their sexlobes, right ones below.

Even the President’s left arm clacked against the edge of the table as though he were grasping something stiff below. But no gens did Gilly Windfucker sport.

Onscreen, a school bell sounded.

The cameras tracked, as best they could, the doomed couple’s walk to the science classroom. That bold black number 57 again came into view.

They seated themselves beneath it.

The girl’s date had been a quarter off-camera as he took his place. But she tugged him over by the padded shoulder of his suit, a loving gesture which he shook off, then accepted.

“I’m a little nervous,” he said, by way of apology, and she said, “I know.”

Just above their heads was a metal plate that seemed to be screwed into the wall and painted in place. But earlier footage had shown the viewers how it would abruptly open, footage replayed in slo-mo. A stunning stand-in enacted the role of the slasher, her arm coming in with a wavy-bladed dagger against the throats of a pair of doped-up vagrants.

“Those two young people,” said Cholly Bork, “make my bosom swell with patriotic zeal.” Gasps edged the presidential voice, though Bork’s hands were engaged in manipulating Gilly Windfucker’s limbs and mouth only.

“My bosom too, Mister President,” intoned those in attendance.

Willy Wanker, as usual, said nothing. But his eyes were trained on the kids, his hands on his swollen tiller, and his mind on the crew of thugs that would, at his nod, burst through the cabinet room door.

Their final check of the walkie-talkies was nearly complete.

The woman who led them had gone down the line from one black-clad conspirator to the next. Each voice spoke clearly through the equipment she held to her ear.

No betraying squawks.

Top-of-the-line contraband.

“Hold on,” she said, looking at the last man. “I’m getting sine wave distortion.”

Then she realized the sound was outside, not in the equipment. Spotlights splashed the window thick with opacity. The drone of a helicopter whirlygigged down from above.

An electronic bullhorn snapped on: “WE’VE GOT YOU SURROUNDED.”

Terror flooded her. Her eyes darted about the basement.

Who was looking away?

Who wasn’t surprised?

But the light was too dim to make such a judgment, and most of her soldiers were already pulling on ski masks and drawing knives.

Then the door burst open and a choke of armed men in helmets and padded gear swarmed in, ganging up to drag down her people, tearing off ski masks, yanking heads back by hanks of hair, opening wide red grins in exposed necks.

Blood gushed onto concrete. Black fountains glistened in the silver night, turning the close air foul.

Then they attacked her, one young thug’s boot slipping in blood but at once recovering. A young hotheaded soldier wrenched her down from where she stood. His foul-mouthed companion tore her lobebag off. Then three men rushed in to grab at her clothing, wrenching it apart like savages, her skin slick with sweat as the black fabric took on hole after hole and stretched into nothing.

“Teach the bitch a lesson,” someone snarled, and that lesson, and many others, began to be most vigorously taught.

Butch rose for his solo in “Gettin’ Off.”

Back arched, trumpet lofted, a lick of hair swept across his brow, he made that horn wail, a weave of cool crisp notes bolting out like cliff beneath the frantic paws of a coyote.

Odd how his mind shuttled among chords while his fingers flurried out melodies above them. Yet somehow it always sounded new, some fresh-whelped beast that burst, sharp-clawed and yowling, out of the brass bell on rolling sweeps of passion.

The solo was flawless.

This was Butch’s farewell gig, his last time through most of the charts, and he had no slasher worries to cramp his playing. Notes ripped aside like calendar days in a convict’s cell.

But when he sat down and the saxes took the melody from him, the applause was tepid.

He knew why.

Zinc, Butch’s date and fellow trumpeter, was a tender who had chosen a white ball on the stage in assembly a week before. They had gone steady for two years, but that didn’t matter.

Zinc had lucked out.

Therefore, Butch had lucked out.

His classmates hadn’t.

It was that simple. In their heads they knew he was cool. But their hearts screamed wimp, and he would carry to his grave the disgrace of having escaped the risk of slaughter.

Worse than that: Butch himself felt no less resentful toward the others whose dates were exempt tenders. Toward Ig and Stan and Lida Sue, even these, his friends.

They would be herded, the saved ones, into the girls’ gym while their classmates faced real terror.

Somehow, Butch vowed, he would endure the summer months, thinking only of Gryder College and his future there and beyond. There, before this night’s shame caught up with him, he would stake out a brunt of friends, hoping they’d be steadfast under the communal pressure to shun him.

He pictured the trampoline in the girls’ gym. When he had muttered something about trying it out tonight, the grown-ups standing nearby during the band’s first break threw him looks of disapproval.

Fuck ’em, he thought. They had passed their test of courage centuries ago, the test he would be known forever to have weaseled out of.

Zinc leaned in to him at an eight-bar rest. “Super solo,” he said.

Butch nodded.

(THREE-two-three-four)

Monday, his lover would be fair game for flogging again and Butch planned a glorious one to celebrate their escape. When Zinc had been among the tenders lotteried free of danger a week ago in assembly (kids called them promstiffers), Zinc’s mom and dad had embarrassed them both with a grand feast in thanksgiving. Grown-ups, face it, were gross and alien. They had no clue nor were they like to get one any time soon.

(SEVEN-two-three-four)

Tonight, Zinc displayed what had proven to be his and Butch’s salvation: that thin-wristed, thin-lobed, smooth-skinned look of the unrecently flogged, which diminished him, which shrank him inward, making him look simultaneously hoary and tabula-rastic.

(da-da-da DWEE!

And Butch’s bitchin’ countermelody soared above the ’bones.

8. Unclosable Wounds

“They’re on to us,” muttered Bray.

Block by block on the drive from Fronemeyer’s house, Bray’s fear had grown. Now, as they stood at the refreshment table, it felt as if it surely must blare.

“Get a grip,” Winnie replied.

Though the paper plate he held was sturdy, not the thin pitiful bendy kind that buckles or lulls under the least weight, his hand trembled. He transferred cheese cubes to the plate, orange and pale yellow ones with frilled toothpicks, then a fistful of wheat crackers.

Across the food, a senior girl with hard eyes and perky lobes stared at him, then shifted her glare onto the cheerleader bubblehead chatterbox with whom she had entered the gym.

“We’re not blending,” Bray agonized.

“Stick with the program.”

Behind her smile, Winnie was miffed.

By the program, Bray knew she meant the plan she had laid out on the way over, the cover story the fuzzy-lipped teacher at the entrance table had swallowed without question.

Yes, Winnie had told Old Fuzzy Lip, they were correspondence students, had driven a fair stretch to celebrate their graduation from Corundum High. And yes, much obliged to accept one of a small stack of generic packets and wait out the stalking in the girls’ gym with the tenders. He hadn’t even checked their names, the pinned passes enough verification for him, and a frantic press of young people close behind.

But dumb luck could only hold for so long.

Winnie guided them away from the refreshments toward a darker patch of gym, not too close to the kids yet not so distant that they stuck out.

“This is right,” she said, through a steam-heat shimmer of music. “I can feel it.”

Sapphires, dark and gleaming, drifted across her face. It amazed him. Winnie was in her element here. She really believed they would pull it off, that tonight they would save the world.

“We’re going to have our heads handed to us.” He bit into sharp cheddar, wishing for apples to augment.

“You are a coward, aren’t you?”

“Hey, never beaten, never flayed.”

Between them and the Ice Ghoul, a few brave early couples danced, close and clingy. Many more were bleachered and bunched, plates and cups in hand, nibbling, sipping, and trading sick jokes.

A couple of chaperones circled the sculpted figure, a tall man and a shapely woman. Teachers, Bray guessed. Their shoes moved in and out of a rolling blanket of fog.

“The killer’s nearby,” said Winnie. “I can feel it.”

“Our hero.”

“He saved our lives.”

“Three murders. So far. That’s quite the humanitarian walking among us. I can’t wait to shake his hand.”

Tugging at his right lobe, the tall man nodded to the shapely woman without shifting his gaze from the rampant red Ice Ghoul. She broke off, her eyes suddenly on Bray and Winnie, and headed their way.

“I can see you’re determined to be difficult, no matter how—”

“Save it,” he broke in. “I believe we’re about to have company.” He made a point of not glancing at the approaching woman, hoping she’d veer off.

Winnie said, “I’ll do the talking.”

But the woman charged in. “Pardon my social ineptitude,” she said, pumping Bray’s hand. “Excuse my nosiness, but I can always spot grads-by-mail a mile away. You are…?”

She stared right into him, a bold beautiful face with thick rich lips and lobes that sang.

“I, um, Brayton is the name,” he said, out before he could warn himself to mumble something or to make up a name.

He was a goner, and Winnie would be dragged down too, just as, years before, Bonnie Dolan had fallen with him when they’d jumped the prom.

But the woman seized on his name, a snag in her head as she mulled.

“Brayton, Brayton,” she said, an internal Rolodex flipping, then, “of course, Brayton Con-something, Connors, no Conyers! I had you last fall. Miss Brindisi? The Greater Vices, Pride, Anger, and Lust?”

“Of course,” he said. “A wonderful class.”

“And you must be our other student from Coffinville, Bray’s co-worker, Raven Barnes.” She shook Winnie’s hand.

“That’s right,” said Winnie, matching the woman’s brazen stance.

For one of society’s outcasts, Bray thought, Winnie was admirably feisty.

“I’m pleased to welcome you both. I always find more in common with correspondents than with the youngsters.”

“We have more focus,” prompted Winnie. “We know what we want.”

“Precisely.” The woman’s face lit up. “Say what you will about the merits of the annual prom kill, it does tend to distract the teenage mind from the task of learning. But get beyond that, venture out into the world for a spell, and well by golly, experience gives a correspondent a much clearer perspective on life-not to mention the legal exemption for returning students.”

He chuckled. “No slasher.”

“Not for you two.”

“We’d submit to it if we had to,” he assured.

Miss Brindisi moved in to confide, her right breast against Bray’s sleeve: “It’s for the young.” Her smile overwhelmed. “They need it.”

Bray nodded. “I understand.”

“It’s good for them. It toughens the fiber. And it’s one hell of a tonic for us post-teens as well, to witness it.”

“Yes.” His lip corners felt as if they would crack. The woman’s lobes looked delectable. “I’m sure it is.”

“Well,” she said, almost as if they’d shared a dance. “Brayton, Raven, I’ll leave you to it. Stop by and say hello, after all the excitement dies down.”

“We will,” said Winnie.

“Several of your teachers are here tonight, and I know they’d love to meet you.”

Bray waved. “We’ll be around.”

“Enjoy yourselves.” She eased off. “And eat up!”

A whirl and she was away, heading back toward the tall man.

“Lion of God be praised,” muttered Bray.

“Amen,” said Winnie, turning her smile to him.

“Let’s hope the real Bray and Raven aren’t here.”

“Are you kidding? Coffinville’s at the southern end of the state. I’ve seen maybe four other older couples. A school this size probably has, oh, I’d guess thirty or forty grads-by-mail each year. They rarely show up on prom night.”

“Only the vultures,” he said. “The ghouls.”

“Yeah, the ones I’ve seen seem pretty seedy. I say we avoid ’em. There’s more virtue in the prom-jumping coward and his societally challenged date than in any hundred of those folks.”

“We’ll open their eyes,” said Bray, scanning for them.

“Damned straight we will.”

“Or die trying.”

“Will you quit harping on death? Nobody’s gonna die. Not tonight and maybe at no other prom ever again.”

The layout of the gym was different than it had been at Bray’s school. Bigger too. But the hard knot that was high school had tied itself tight in his stomach.

The feeling was the same.

Stifled growls of pent-up fury.

Naked fear.

“We’ll see,” he said and endured her seethed volley, comforted-even as she had her verbal way with him-at having Winnie by his side.

The fear was delicious.

Thick as oil paint gobbed on with a palette knife.

It rose out of the kids Jonquil passed on the dance floor. It fell in waves from the bleachers, rich and blunt and thrilling beside the music’s brassy panic. Claude, captivated by the wicked red ogre towering at the center of the gym, had moved not at all.

“And the purveyor of lesser vices,” she said, “having made the mistake of calling the Ice Ghoul dull, found that he could no longer tear his eyes away, forever ensnared in its charms.”

Claude smiled at her. “Oh, hello. So who were they, the correspondents who have somehow managed not to look as unsavory as they’ve got, most certainly, to be?”

Jonquil touched his arm. “Our secret, okay? I don’t have the slightest idea. The young man’s name is Brayton, I’m fairly sure. The woman went along with my offer of Raven, so you can call her that if the need arises.”

“Crashers,” he said, bored. “Passes real?”

“Pretty convincing if not. Elwood would’ve caught an obvious fake at the door.”

Claude gestured upward. “You know, in the right mood, and with a certain sinister fall of shadows across its body, this monstrous mound of kitsch has an undeniably creepy allure.”

Moisture continued to drip down the sides of the Ice Ghoul’s head.

“Does it stack up against the one in seventy-six?”

“This one easily outstrips the other,” he said. “It’s bigger. More height, more bulk, more menace. I get the uncanny feeling that it’s aware of the outrage perpetrated against Futzy. Speaking of which, where is our illustrious leader hiding himself? Doesn’t he realize we’re all starting to extend the gossip about him?”

Mister Weight-of-the-World Principal.

Old Futzy would be in his element tonight, the focus of punishment, wallowing in misery. A fitting climax to weeks of increased student floggings, his admission of impotence after the prom committee announced the Ice Ghoul as its centerpiece at the dance.

“In his office is my guess. He’ll slip in under low lights, keep himself apart from the kids, maybe even from us, until the ceremonies.”

“A prom he’ll never forget,” said Claude.

“Yes. Expect new bylaws next year. No more Ice Ghoul at the prom as long as he’s in charge.”

Claude nodded. “The one in seventy-six was appalling, but only after Futzy’s daughter and her date lay dead before it. The teacher who slashed them worked out a transfer. He’d really gone to town that night.”

Jonquil thought back. “Let’s see. I was all of fifteen then. My prom took place two years after that in seventy-eight.” Someone, after the bodies had been retrieved, had arranged Quill and Dane arm-in-arm, their staved heads angled together, against the hard concavity of a black angel’s sorrowing embrace. The deaths of her dearest friends had given Jonquil a backbone of steel.

“So are we going to blow the whistle on these two?”

“Let’s not,” she said.

“By which I take it, the left lobe of one or both of our crashers-the genitalia as well?-are at risk of being loved, for lack of a better word, by a certain sexy, horny instructress of my near acquaintance.”

“Cruel, cutting, and unkind,” she demurred, “and quite possibly true.”

“I minored in the study of Jonquils.”

“Who knows? The night’s young. Survivors grow unusually festive at these things, and the spirit’s infectious. Let me observe them, maybe have a little fun with them. We’ve seen really ugly souls buy prom passes from correspondents in the past. There’s nothing new about that.”

“It provides an additional pinch of terror.”

“Which is all to the good,” she said. “Let ’em hover at the periphery, add atmosphere, then throw ’em out after the futtering’s done and the padlocks have come off. But what is new is this: These two don’t strike me as your typical bogus grads-by-mail. There’s something different about them.”

“A new mix of body parts, Jonquil dear?”

“Never discount it, Claude. People don’t couple enough in my opinion-which is the right opinion. They don’t inflict enough violence. And when they do, there’s no creativity, no spirit of inventiveness to it.”

“My wives yammer on the same way, at least about indulging in the crude fluidities of sex,” he said. “Your take on cruelty is, I hasten to admit, entirely your own-and a vast part of what draws me to you as a friend. That and your lobes of course.”

“Kidder.” She knuckled his shoulder, enough to make him wince. “But beyond that, they’re out for something, and I can’t tell what. They seem wholesome and apart, somehow. Here in body, yes, but headwise elsewhere. I’m determined to tease out their little secret before the night is over.”

“May the Ice Ghoul watch over you,” he said, patting the rough red rump of the beast.

“And you, Claude.”

“More cheese!” he demanded, heading off into the music toward the chaperones’ corner, swirling up wisps of dry-ice fog as he went, not bothering to see if she followed.

Futzy Buttweiler sat alone in his spacious office, an ache of loneliness echoing inside him with each muffled thump of the bass drum. Below him lay the gym and its vague layers of sculpted sound. As he stared through muted darkness, Futzy fingered the cache of confiscation strewn across his desk.

A bolas from one ferret-eyed defier whose spine had nearly cracked beneath the payback of its stones.

Cattle prods, thumbscrews, portable planers and sanders, the paraphernalia of torture lifted from the parental bedroom.

Pornocrap that would have raised Jonquil Brindisi’s ire, so inept were its staged bloodlettings, so low and lackadaisical its standards for cruelty. These sorry tapes dulled a wondrous world of hurt into the turn of a fast buck.

Futzy had left the lights off.

Parallel slats of moonglow fell in cream slants across the carpet before his desk. Welts of moonlight that recalled to mind the flaying he had endured beneath his wives’ fury, lacking only the wounds and the cutting words.

But inside his head, words came, redirected words as he redirected daily the abuse he got at home.

A victim there, a victimizer here.

They were all scum, thought Futzy. School culture artificially divided the student body into good kids and bad kids. A false divide. He saw that now.

It hadn’t all been flogging and flaying, his exercise of discipline here.

Yet not one student, not one beneficiary of his many kindnesses, had objected to an affront so egregious and humiliating as the Ice Ghoul’s return to Corundum High’s senior prom.

Futzy forced himself to his feet.

His anger at them was greater than he had thought possible.

The walk to the barred window seemed beyond bearing, so wild and dense with passion the night made the air. Ordinarily, daylight contained his savagery in this office, giving it sanction and a blessing.

But tonight, lunacy edged everything.

Below, in the parking lot, vehicles gleamed.

This was his last chance at them.

He imagined the little shits revving up after midnight, backing out, tracing light-swept trails across blacktop, moving out into traffic, removing themselves and their pointless lives forever from his grasp.

Ah, but what if night went and morning came, and still the cars stayed?

What if something unspeakable swept through the school and fixed them there forever?

What if no key found its way to any padlock? And the air, this same air, grew still, stale, not moved by convection, by the bustle of bodies, by a riding crop descending, nor by the monotonously multiplied insuck and expulsion of air from young lungs?

Conceivable.

More than conceivable.

Matthew Megrim, Tweed’s dad, found himself unsettled in the extreme tonight.

His bath seemed to last forever. Yet every check of the sweep-second-hand clock propped on the sink counter surprised him. Surely he had been idling here a good year, contemplating the polderesque rise and fall of his belly from the surrounding water.

Come-ons for Notorious, a week of teasers, had replayed in his mind. Endless views of the condemned duo mingled somehow with memories of his first wives, Cam and Arly, as they had been before they had drowned. Their fluxidermed corpses, the stuffed shells-of-themselves which duly graced his vestibule, came nowhere near those memories.

This parade of souls occasionally parted to allow him glimpses of his history class-folds of batter endlessly turned, the same damned desks, students seated according to chart, slated to pass through this year-end terror he so despised and tonight feared with a fear that had no limit.

Above all, his daughter Tweed recurred in his thoughts a thousand times. Again and again, her parting smile and “Good night” blessed his inner vision.

She would be killed. Jenna would comfort him in his grief. Then, next year, they would kill her and he’d go out of his mind.

Why hadn’t he thrown himself wholeheartedly into the anti-slasher cause? He could have contributed more, done with less, “come out” as Krantor Berryman had done two years before, shared the spite and scorn with him, yes, but perhaps set more protests snowballing.

Too late now.

Too late for Tweed anyway.

He got out of the bathtub, vowing something decisive come Monday, some way to keep Jenna from having to run the gauntlet next year.

A milling hallway of seniors whipped up in his mind, dressed in tux and gown finery, massed in a forward hurtling plane. Ahead lay a brick wall, but only one of the bricks was real: one couple creamed, the rest bursting through illusions of brick, thinking afterward that maybe it hadn’t been so bad, that it was something all kids ought to go through.

Jesus, his mind was snapping.

Matthew bent to peer into an unsteamed wedge of mirror. His calm eyes amazed him, not a hint of agitation.

He cupped his earlobes, then gripped them tight. Nothing sexual. Not yet. He remembered his childhood years, the comfort that surrounded and enclosed them. All of it a mad delusion that firm ground and not the thinnest of high wires lay between the wobbled balance-and-step of life, and certain death below.

He wrapped a towel around his waist and went out into the hallway. Entering his bedroom, he closed the door after him, feeling more cocoon-like that way. That was the way his parents had watched the show, and it was the way, shut off from their daughters, that Matthew and his wives had watched it.

Thank God for Notorious, he thought, realizing the addictive purpose it served even as he craved the hit.

Thank God there were folks rotten enough to fry in public each year, not just for the sexual thrill it provided-considerable, certainly-but also to divert the minds of anxious moms and dads across the nation.

Removing the towel, Matthew strapped on his Private Flogger, molded like a slug to his back, and turned it to Warmup. It sensed the contours of his muscles and their firmness, reminding him of heating pads applied to stiff necks as a boy.

Grabbing a Futterware container of coconut-oil on his nightstand, he made a nest out of his pillows and zapped on the TV.

National coverage of prom night. An East Coast map smattered with sporadic dots of early returns. At this point, the commentary consisted mainly of glib history and idle chatter.

Another station, a local Topeka business channel, scream-gabbled a pitch to survivors, showing a slashed red X simultaneously crossing out a cartoon picnicker and a box on an org-chart, urging its viewers to Call This Number Now!

Then Matthew found the channel he wanted.

Boggs Fleester, hair gray and combed back in perfect coif, sprang into his bedroom not two feet from the foot of the bed.

“Over my shoulder,” he said in measured tones, “you can see the electric chair in which our two reprobates will fry.”

Fleester wasn’t really in the execution room. You could tell that. Soon, the distinguished newsman would fade. The electric chair and its surround would surge out of a flat background into vivid holographic prominence.

As Fleester’s voice jauntily recounted the couples’ rampage upon a Rhode Island school bus of elementary kids, Matthew glared feverishly at the clock. Come on, he thought. Stuck at twenty-five past eight. Get the damned show on the road.

Tweed, a vision in pink chiffon, beamed at the front door. “Good night.”

She was dancing now, fearful at Corundum High, slow and close and clinging to Dex, or giving and getting blows in a frenzied bout of slap’n’smack prior to dispersal twenty minutes away, the slash achieved by nine.

She might, his pride and joy might… no, shut it out.

Fleester wrapped up and faded. The music took on intensity. The grim cell moved forward, the chair growing greater both wide and tall, like the Christmas tree in The Nutcracker.

Off to the left, an inset bubble hovered, inside it the executioner beside her dials and the two men chosen to pleasure her, naked except for the obligatory lobebags the FCC and common decency insisted upon.

Matthew sobbed.

A cell door opened on the right. In were marched the twosome, stripped, passive, doped up, and resigned.

Gritting his teeth, Matthew turned his Flogger to Low. The first lash fell with a pain that stung and diverted. He oiled his bare left lobe and his gens until the flesh flushed and stiffened. To the suggestiveness of the music he surrendered himself.

The aroma coming from the TV had a sufficient dankness about it to be convincing.

A sizzle of fire flared across Matthew’s right shoulder, Cam’s favorite place to flog him.

His darling wife Cam had birthed Tweed into the world, then Jenna, and loved them both dearly. Now she was gone, Arly with her, in that awful accident.

Soon Tweed would… no!

Matthew’s hand fumbled as he notched it up, wincing at the increase in depth and frequency.

The couple were strapped in, the woman belted upside down, mouth to groin, groin to mouth. The executioner, her nipples hidden by two rotating male scalps, began to play with the dials.

They writhed as Matthew focused desperately on his own arousal. Uncensored black and white projections danced over their skin.

Funny, how the image of naked lovelobes posed no problem if they were grainy and contorted on curves of flesh. Yet the couple’s lobes were crudely bagged. And the executioner’s, bared now for action, had been expertly cubed out.

The condemned couple-scum bitch and bastard, by any measure-might in other circumstances have enjoyed the pain. But it was one thing to choose to have a lover inflict torment in measured doses within established limits. It was quite another to endure punishment, that would only worsen unto death, from that grim-faced invasive third called The State.

Matthew’s arousal was progressing well. A lovely commonality of pull and tug, complementary and compelling, had arisen between his hands.

But the executioner’s tinny voice, catching rhythm from another realm, threw a grit of grain into the turning cogs. Tweed at the door. “Good night.” A vision in pink, her smile. Dex too so full of promise, his hands thrust to the cuffs into his tux pockets.

The execution on TV was suddenly nothing but sound and fury. Matthew, his penis emblooded and his lobemeat throbbing beneath his ear, stabbed Mute and paused the flogger.

Hugging eight forty-five. He should have turned the damned clock to the wall!

Fifteen minutes to Tweed’s phone call if she had been spared. She would make her way back from her assigned spot, passing pay phones, banks of them throughout the building.

He had given her plenty of quarters. More than she needed. He was surprised Tweed hadn’t jingled as she left the house.

Matthew rose from the bed. He paced, still erect below, his stiffness a bother. He circled the projection. With the sound off, it seemed unreal.

How could people act the way these two had?

So many children so remorselessly used.

A sheen of floor dirt coated the wrinkles of the woman’s soles where her feet hung, knee-bent, above the man’s shoulders. He was gripping the arms of the chair, his penis limp upon her cheek.

They had died an hour ago of course. Maybe more. East Coasters were already sated on this couple’s prolonged miseries. West Coasters were still awaiting the arrival of dates.

Even the executioner, in her holographic bubble writhing under eager tongues, was in reality on her way home. Maybe she was even concerned with her kid brother’s welfare that night at school.

Eight fifty.

This was unbearable.

Year after year, he had taught the prom kill in his sophomore history class as though it were nothing, accepted practice, forgetting the agony he himself had gone through at eighteen.

But it had torqued him, way back then.

It had turned him moody and morose as he turned fifteen. More adult, his folks had said. Until in college, junior year, he had lightened up, discovered song buried in the depths of his wounded heart, and let joy burst from his mouth.

Now, heaven help him, he had delivered his daughter into that same maw.

Even now, she might be…

He cut off the thought, a wash of fever at his brow.

Ten more minutes. Give it ten.

She would call. It would be okay. He could breathe easier then.

He thumbed the Flogger, nearly losing his balance as a laser lash seared across his back.

Settling once more into his nest on the bed, Matthew punched up the sound and dug his eyes deep into the couple with the images crawling across their skin.

His flesh and hers hissed beneath a languid electrocution. But that was damned fucking okay with Matthew, they were such slimy shits and good only at the end of their lives (the woman’s urine now caught the man full in the face, blinking to avert it) for keeping legions of distraught moms and dads from going insane.

Matthew’s fingers scooped up fresh dollops of coconut oil and slathered them on. His penile and lobate tissue responded anew.

Upon the woman’s inverted back, a helmeted slitted dome of flesh eased past the thin lips of a blush-lobed lady. Across the man’s hairy thigh, twitching beneath a surge, somebody’s hand worked a digitally enhanced earlobe deep inside a gaping vagina.

Matthew regained the rhythm.

It lived in the pounding of the music, in the agony of voices, in the faint aroma of roast pork that seeped out of his system (a prelude to the char to come), and in the interwoven throbs of incessantly moving flesh.

He caught that rhythm. He rode it, honed by years of viewing, years of coaxing himself, and being coaxed so by caring lovers, toward the twin consummation of lobe and lingam.

On his way.

9. By the Book

Tweed’s chops were just about blown.

The dance band’s frantic swing through non-stop charts-heavy on the ’bones and light on the rests-had been more grueling this year than last.

Even the slow numbers felt manic.

Bongo by her side, grabbing at catch-breaths, had been his typical goofball self.

But Dex, Dol, Estlin, and a half-dozen other seniors had acted like square pegs in round holes, hurtling along familiar routes of sound toward two unlucky classmates’ moment of truth.

Tweed had been relieved to see Mr. Versailles filling in as chaperone. It meant he wasn’t this year’s slasher.

But the bristling boxes of riding crops that appeared beside the stage made Tweed shudder, not because she hadn’t delivered and received their bare-backed pleasures a time or two in her young life. No, but because when they were dispersed, it would mean that Principal Buttweiler’s opening remarks were done and that the moment had arrived to go where the envelope directed, waiting there and cowering.

“The prunes are hot for blood,” Bongo cupped into her right ear as she counted.

Glancing into chaperone corner, Tweed saw Mr. and Mrs. Borgstrom edged now on their chairs, in their seventies and shriveled, the adoptive mom and pop of a junior boy whose hair was black and whose ways were sullen and sulky. Their jaws had notches, discolored jags that marked each year they had been married, a practice fallen away in the fifties.

Then the count clicked over in her brain and her horn rose to join in the final verse of “Lobe Town Blues,” a dirge filled with quirky delights and a chance for each section to show off.

Festus Targer, his cymbal shimmering beneath them, held them back. Festus had it in him, assuming he survived next year’s prom, to make it big as a drummer.

Jiminy Jones nodded an okay at the principal, who was chatting, hands in his coat pockets, with Nurse Gaskin among the chaperones. Mr. Jones’ pudgy fingers brought the band to a skillful close, his satisfied smile’s peculiar clash with her fears reminding Tweed how remote his age made him from the coming sacrifice.

The applause seemed heartfelt. Jiminy bowed, waved a section at a time to its feet, then the full ensemble.

Tweed put the trombone, sectioned, back into its case. She wondered who would next reassemble it. Herself? Or its inheritor?

Dex’s hand held the envelope. His features were strained.

Damn the rules, she thought. It was insane-her dad more right than she had given him credit for-that people as whole and good as Dexter Poindexter fell each year under the red blade of the slasher. He had promised her father protection he couldn’t possibly deliver, but she vowed that she would fight to save Dex too, if it came to that.

Passivity and paralysis were not her style.

Nor his.

Tweed took Dex’s hand.

They shared a nervous embrace.

“Ready?” he asked.

“There’s gonna be one dead teacher,” said Tweed, “if he even tries to hurt you.”

Dex smiled. “We’ll waste him.”

Principal Buttweiler stood off to the left on a floor scattered with shags of sawdust.

His hands were crossed straight-arm below his belt, a slim packet of index cards down-angled in one hand. His nods and smiles were more perfunctory than usual, rotating lights turning his strained face blue, then orange, then a sickly shade of yellow.

The poor man had been dealt a savage blow. But Tweed’s sympathy did nothing to dampen the chill she felt as his eyes fell upon her and Dex, deep and unmistakable (or was she just on edge?), the message they shouted: “You two are the ones. Tonight we’re going to see you bleed, mourn you, futter you, use the stoppage of your young hearts to remember this night by.”

Dex drew her along into the light-shade-light of their horded classmates, come down now, all of them, from the bleachers. They huddled close to the mike where Jiminy Jones had announced each number and where the principal stood, adjusting the mikestand upward.

Nurse Gaskin felt Bix Donner’s needy eyes bore into the back of her head. It was hard, wanting to engage this absurd man’s spouses in conversation, but knowing that any attempt she made would be interpreted by Bix as encouragement.

When Futzy approached her, Delia had squinted so as to pretend harsh lights were her reason for rotating the axis of their conversation. But in fact it had been to put Mister Pinhead Asshole out of eyeshot.

Now Futzy was knuckling the mike head.

The principal wore his humiliation with dignity. Futzy’s lobes reminded her of those of his slain daughter Kitty, Delia’s lost heartthrob two decades before.

“Is this on?” he said. “Can everyone hear me?”

The man had class. He didn’t even look at them as he asked the question, striking a pose for the ages. They were pieces of shit-he knew it and so did she-and a deserved flush was about to take place. He would flush ’em all, as would she, if that were possible.

“It’s a momentous night, isn’t it, boys and girls?” he began. “In the petting-zoo portion of your time here, we pampered you. While you cut open frogs and pig embryos, we did the same to your brains. We felt along runnels of thought and redirected rivers. And now, poised to leave this slaughterhouse, you, or rather a token couple from those here gathered, shall be sacrificed.”

Delia surveyed the faces, mapped memories of a broken arm, prankish debaggings, sneers, jeers, the flow of a dispensatory river of pills and liquids, the probings of countless needles beneath baby-smooth and zit-infested skin-all of it recalling to mind what this graduating class meant to her.

She had been their nurse, seen their health impaired, and healed them.

“You and you. And you.” He pointed to three seniors close to Delia. “Distribute these riding crops. This is not a new tool, surely, to many of you. It symbolizes the pain I and my staff have taught you to inflict and endure. With care, these crops will last many years. You have found a first love at this school-or, in some cases, the school has had to find one for you, pairing you for an evening—”

An amused ripple moved through the seniors.

“—and soon, the two of you will engage in a search for a third.

“It is customary for your principal to extend his heartfelt wishes at this point, his hopes that you and your love find the threesome you deserve.”

Clever man, Kitty’s father was. Futzy’s tone teetered between making and denying them the wish he had spoken of.

The man’s hurt ran deep.

It touched a cold place in Delia.

“Take your time, rummage long and leisurely through the mate-heap roiling before you in the ensuing years. Choose wisely, both in what you do, and in whom you do it with. Most people settle, mindwise, for pretty meager fare. Don’t you be one of them.”

Yes, she thought, and some never get chosen.

Annoyance and botheration sounded in Delia’s ear: “I love this moment.”

“What?”

“This moment,” Bix repeated as she turned. “The fear absolutely sizzles. And the longer their faces are now, the more gleeful they’ll be the rest of the evening.”

“Hold this for a second?” She handed him her drink, an expectation in her tone, but not in her intent, that she would be right back.

“Sure.” He bobbled it but took it.

The fog had begun to thin. The dry ice was nearly evaporated.

“But enough advice from your shortly to be former principal,” said Futzy as Delia sauntered coolly away. “Open your envelopes now. No need to use the eraser end of a number two pencil. A finger will do nicely. Go at once to where the pink sheet tells you to be-on pain of death if the detection scanners find you elsewhere-and do not stir from that spot until the ringing of the second bell.”

The rapture on the faces of the Borgstroms, as Delia passed them, was an extraordinary sight to behold. Their jaw-notches positively glowed with anticipation.

Peach popped her gum. “Let’s go,” croaked Cobra, grabbing her wrist.

She jerked about into his tug, reluctant to leave the gym with its orange and blue and green lights, its glints of sequins and spangles. Even the buffed brown of the gym floor struck Peach as beautiful. But delay might mean death, and Cobra’s word- he thought so, anyway-was law.

In the glow of night light, the hallway was dim and spooky. The click-click of heels and the rustle of pastel dresses beside tuxedo’d boys made everything feel somehow like a movie set, one last masquerade before real life began.

“Where we headed?” she asked.

“Shut it,” Cobra snapped.

She did.

He hadn’t even shown her the envelope, the one the shop teacher had given them.

Cobra’s eyes were a flat gray. That, Peach was convinced, was how he saw the world-if his taste in clothes was any indication.

She had had sex with that weird old guy from Topeka just because she knew Cobra really wanted a coat he kept mentioning, and the fifty-dollar bills the guy peeled off into her hand would buy it.

But when Cobra came back from the store with the coat, it turned out to be the same old lousy leather as always, an uninspired black with three silver studs along the right sleeve. Hardly worth being flogged for. Hardly worth the taste of some grown-up’s dick.

A bunch of kids-most of them dorks, though Babs Nealy and Kinny Conner waved at her-hustled up the stairs by the glass doors to the butchery wing.

Cobra hurried her past the stairs, shoving a scrawny hawk-nosed nebbish out of the way. “Move it!” said Cobra, both to the hawk-nosed guy and to her. Peach gave the kid an apologetic look before Cobra yanked her onward.

That was another thing about Cobra: The violence he visited upon her always arose from smolders of hate. Rarely did he give her the kind of whap, poke, or pinch that signaled true love.

Cobra called that pop-song bullshit. She didn’t think so.

Peach watched Tweed Megrim and Dexter Poindexter go into the chem lab. Neat kids. A little unformed for her tastes, but sometimes maybe bland was better.

Twin inverted J’s of silver gleamed inside, tall thin spigots over sinks. Then Cobra strong-armed her past the labs.

“Did they stick us on the first floor?” she asked. She was afraid Cobra would try to bulldoze through the shoving mass of students on the stairs to their left.

Instead he dragged her, without reply, toward a darkened classroom set in the corner of the next turn. He yanked open the door and pushed her through.

Desks were shoved together in the center of the room in a logjam of fake-wood planes. Along the walls hung posterboard squares with a number scrawled in black felt-tip pen.

A couple of girls, Dixie Rathbone and Bliss somebody, slumped like stuffed scarecrows on the floor beneath the blackboard.

“Here,” Cobra said.

Peach saw their number and beneath it a dark arrow directed downward. Pillows had been placed on the floor, thin as a threadbare blanket but gentler on the butt than hard tile.

She settled in. Cobra humphed down by her side. From where they sat, Peach could see Dixie and Bliss. She wondered if they were the ones, if they’d be slaughtered without warning, if she and Cobra and the others arrayed around the classroom would witness the sacrifice. She wiggled fingers at them, but they didn’t move, almost as if they were dead already.

Commotion outside the door, raucous boy-talk. From the unclaimed numbers on the walls (she had overheard Bowser mention theirs), Peach guessed Bowser McPhee and his date Fido Jenner. A moment later, they walked in.

Peach had always thought Bowser was cute and little-boy brash and funny, a ferocious mismatch for Fido in her opinion. He had picked up a book she dropped once, then blushed and stammered like an idiot when she kissed his right lobe in thanks.

Now he and Fido started along the far wall, looking for their number.

“Over here,” Peach yelled to them.

Cobra smacked her for speaking.

“Thanks,” Bowser said. He and Fido collapsed ten feet to her left, beneath their sign.

“Hey weenie,” Cobra said, “shut the fuck up.”

“Come on, Cobra,” Bowser replied, clapping a hand on Fido’s knee. “Everybody’s up against it tonight. Lighten up, okay? It’s a free country.”

Cobra tensed beside her.

“Listen, doggie boy. Your fuckin’ free country’s got two things in it: your face and my fist. You say another word, they’re gonna fuckin’ connect. It’s gonna be one bloody mess of zits, skin, and flesh, you dig, scumwipe?”

She could see Bowser retreat inside his skin, though he glared iron pellets at Cobra. That took more guts than most kids had.

Too bad.

Peach knew, but never told anyone, that when it came right down to it, and without of his gang members around, Cobra would fold.

She had seen, alone late at night, the little boy in him. She knew Cobra was one scared coward hiding beneath layers of protective armor.

She also knew that she was just about ready to dump him.

The bell suddenly clanged. It sent a shock through her system.

Same damn bell signaled the end of one class and the beginning of the next. But in this context, it sounded three times as loud.

All talk ceased. A pall fell over the half dozen in-turned duos seated around the room.

Twenty minutes until the next bell, the one that meant find-the-dead-folks.

Those twenty minutes might be choke-thick with silence.

Or the shiv of a scream might slide into their heads from a nearby classroom, a scream both chilling and relieving.

Or the wall they leaned against might give way and a rough hand draw quick steel across their throats.

On the opposite wall, above two dorky girls in scared embrace, a large clock ticked.

Cobra’s hand slipped into hers where no one could see and gave it a private squeeze.

His terror met hers.

10. Defying Gravity

Dark delight.

The school understood perfectly.

Through the glass doors that led into its butchery wing waltzed Flann Beckwith and Brandy Crowe, high-toned worshipers of style, the best slap’n’smack dancers Corundum High had ever seen. Flann and Brandy were odds-on favorites for prom king and queen, despite the run Rocky and Sandy had given them.

Whoever assigned stations-many doubted its much touted randomness-had surely wanted to bring Flann and Brandy down a few pegs.

They’d be pegged down all right.

All the way down.

Though the hallway grate below the peephole muffled sound, Flann’s voice came through loud and clear. “Christ, what a stench! I thought for sure we’d smelled our last carcass at Monday’s final.”

Brandy flumphed, “Someone’s got it in for us.”

“It’ll seep into your dress. And my tux.”

“I hope they’ve given us blankets in there,” Brandy said. “Even a minute’ll get pretty cold.”

The taps on Flann’s spit-polished shoes came to an abrupt halt outside the refrigeration room. “Nothing we can do about it now. But before the night’s over, I’m complaining to somebody. After you, hon.”

Sickening.

Even here they moved with grace. Brandy twirled out of view, and Flann’s taps followed.

In this part of the school, the backways were tight and ill-lit. They stank of old oak, wet and rotting.

Motor hum from the refrigeration room masked sound from back here. But it also turned the couple, the dapper Flann and his redheaded Brandy with the cinnamon heart, into soundless mouths.

Fortunately, the hanging racks of butchered flesh and the ice sculptures provided ample concealment. Moreover, the large panel farthest from the couple’s designated spot had taken two drops of lubricant a half hour before.

Minimal slide, open, shut.

A chilled world stole away all warmth.

Man-sized Ice Ghouls waited here. Legions of them, opaque glassy shapes, sleek and muscled save for a fat howling ghoul who terrified by sheer bulk. Each one raised an icicle dagger, but the howling ghoul’s was thickest and most menacing.

Out through their massed numbers, cautious in movement, an ice pick rode tight aslant the killer’s torso.

Brandy sneezed.

These two had everything. Good looks. An unending stream of sycophants. A smoothness of manner and tone that erased all grief. Unlimited future prospects. Flann’s voice rode upon their assured arrogance. “You okay?”

It would be a pleasure to finish them.

“It’s nothing.” A sniff, a soft blow, one nostril, then the other. “At least we’re out of danger.”

“Somebody,” Flann insisted, “is gonna lose his job.”

“It’s okay. It’s only ten more minutes. No one ever touches a finalist. That’s the law.”

“They can’t do this to Flann Beckwith.”

“We’re fine,” said Brandy. “We’re all alone. Just us and nobody else. And you look real sexy. Sexy as money.”

“Really? You think so?”

Racks of crayola’d pork flesh serried by as the killer threaded through them.

Sides of meat hung near the doomed pair, a protective veil of butchered beef providing one last barrier if only they’d keep jabbering.

“I’ll tell you what I think.” Her prom dress rustled. The sounds of thick smooching and shared mmmm’s betrayed what they were up to. Then they abruptly stopped. “Did you hear something?” asked Brandy.

Caught breath, three haunches away.

“Hey, relax,” said Flann. “All I hear is my heart. And yours.”

“Mmmm, you’re warm.”

“You too.” There was a slight rustle, as of tinsel brushing against a glass ornament.

“Do you think we should?” Yield filled her voice.

“Who’s to know?” More rustling and Brandy’s vulnerable moan. “I’m going to suck my sweetie’s lovelobe.”

The killer stepped free of concealment.

Flann was stylishly hunched over, almost a choreographed flamenco pose. Brandy’s eyelids were closed, her chin nestled upon his left shoulder as he mouthed her lovelobe. From his right hand hung her silken lobebag, limp as a finger puppet.

A gleam of debutante eyes opening. Flann’s embroidered suit-back, a stretched target. The brutal drive of cloaked resentment.

Then came a pin-cushion zit of pierced felt, the ice pick’s keen tip driving through expensive cloth.

The body accepted puncture and impalement as though they were crude afterthoughts, the sudden flair of the ice pick handle stopping its forward hurtle in a pit of depressed serge.

Flann’s head pitched forward as three bodies sandwiched unbalanced against the wall. A shove at his suit helped unflesh the weapon.

Brandy’s eyes widened. Her mouth readied a scream.

Her boyfriend flailed about, arms whipping wide and ineffectual. The lovelobe his teeth had abruptly severed hung like a blood-engorged tick from his lips. Staggering like a drunk upended in a slippery room, he fell away, his skull making a loud smack against the white wall.

Screams now, muffled in the insulated room.

Screams wrapped in puffs of breath.

Brandy’s left hand rose to her maimed ear, blood gush vining down her frail wrist.

The ice pick lifted once. It pinned the girl’s right hand rising to resist, pinned it like a stuck butterfly against her left breast, and filled her heart with steel.

Her eyes held, even as they clouded with death. Healing lay in Brandy’s empty gaze. And in Flann’s. Those eyes begged to be icicled, as had Sheriff Blackburn’s.

Behind them through racks of meat waited the fat ghoul, an icicle dagger upraised at the end of his massive arm.

That would do fine.

But time pressed.

Do Queen Brandy first. Then her lover. Come out of the cold, regain warm passageways, again dare the fear of heights.

The next bit of payback would be a challenge and a thrill, courage and sheer strength tested to the limit. But close by awaited love and healing and an end to years of torment.

Through the motor hum and the meat racks, the leaden-footed dancers’ shoetops scuffed across the floor.

Gerber Waddell sat in his supply closet, the door closed, a dim lightbulb over his head.

Like a great ape after eating, Gerber settled cross-legged on the floor, scratching his belly through janitorial denim.

Thoughts struggled to pierce his rage.

Something not right was seeping through the school tonight. This weren’t your ordinary prom, no way, no how.

He was used to grisly thoughts on prom night.

Young bad flesh in rich clothing.

The anticipated smack.

That’s how Gerber always heard it in his head when they brought the victims in. Smack! An echo from the slash that few if any saw, ’cept for its aftermath, which he had to clean up lest it settle into the walls.

Couldn’t have it settling into the walls.

Had to make them pristine again.

Well tonight, he was hearing lots more oof too, feeling bad things transpire, almost as if he were right there and they were happening in front of him.

He had a feeling there’d be lots more cleanup than usual. Lots more walls to make pristine.

They didn’t pay him overtime neither.

He remembered the hospital geeks.

In particular he remembered good ol’ Gary the nose-picking nurse, who must’ve thought Gerber was some piece of meat that cared not a whit about the niceties of living. Nope, good ol’ Gary could just, privileged as you please, snuk a finger up into his nostril right in front of the sliced-up brain guy lying on the bed.

Gerber’s head had hurt after the operation. But otherwise, he hadn’t felt any different. He wanted to shove an ice pick up Gary’s nose, get a bloody booger on its tip, maybe take some of his brain out along with it.

His hand went to the utility belt: Axe head. Plastic pouch o’ screwdrivers. Empty place.

Gerber looked down.

No ice pick.

He sighed.

Always losing stuff. The Bleaks was always getting on him about that, about stuff being lost around the house.

Missus Bleak always pig-yammered at him out of her lipsticked oinker of a yap, till he’d had enough and cried in front of her like a big baby. But in his head she was taken apart, all that flab torn open so the blubber came spilling out on the rug and he weren’t about to clean might mind you, dance on it. Nor would he care a tinker’s damn about his boots, nope, he’d just make sure he didn’t slip on the grease and bang the back of his head where the surgeons had left the deep dimple.

Did they need him at the prom?

Probably so, but goddamn if he would go where they wanted him to go. Not with all the early unscheduled oof in his head, not with all the unruly visions of struggle warring up there.

He didn’t want to see nobody.

I better get up, he thought. Head off to the next place. Where was that? His feet would know, as they always sooner or later did.

It was quiet in the supply closet. Quiet and close and difficult to breathe. They oughta make these denim suits with air holes, not make a head janitor sweat.

Maybe they wrung ’em out, he thought. Maybe they grabbed ’em out of Missus Bleak’s bathroom clothes hamper. Maybe they fueled Corundum High with his sweat.

Gerber smiled.

Them teachers ain’t got nothin’ on me, he thought. Them shitty students, they pass through this place like a digested meal. Gerber, he repairs the walls and linings, frees up blockages, keeps the little shits moving through until they blat out the low-slung buttock end o’ things.

But there be rumblings in these walls more than usual. They angered him, and frightened him.

Never you mind that.

Nope, I won’t.

He got up, swirling with his palms on the concrete floor and shoving off, then letting his feet figure out where to take him next.

Kyla Gorg looked askance at her lover. “Hey come on, Patrice. The drawing’s random. Even if it wasn’t, and really some muckety-muck picks who’s to be killed and where, they wouldn’t be stupid enough to use the same location two years running.”

“Yeah maybe,” said Patrice, worrying a thin layer of chiffon between her pudgy fingers. “But there’s always a first time.”

“We’re safe as a snug bug in a rug here. So chill out, okay?” Kyla thought her date was such a chickenshit.

Generations had survived prom night.

They could too.

“It’s so creepy.” Patrice was scandalized. “I can’t believe they’d seat us here. Ugh, you can almost smell the blood.”

“Oh, stop it!”

Kyla surveyed the dim cold kitchen, a rare look at a place ordinarily out of bounds.

Two other couples were tucked like ungainly dolls amidst sink units and stoves and preparation tables, murmuring in a darkness lit only by one feeble fixture above the cash register.

The white sign that bore their number had seemed to float on the wall when she and Patrice came to it. In this precise spot, the year before, Melody Jinx and her date had waited and bled and died.

Surely the area had been scrubbed down. But the wall paint was ugly green anyway and what Kyla had touched felt, well, greasy.

Tell herself a million times it was only her imagination, she could still see blotches of gore all around them. Melody’s ghost, seeping through the walls and floor where Melody had eaten a cleaver, seemed to wrap them in cold mist.

Again Patrice’s worry-wart voice: “I wonder where he is.”

“Fido?”

“Of course Fido. Who else?”

“Fido’s never going to be ours,” Kyla said, with what seemed to her like grown-up resignation. “We have to face it, now that we’re graduating.”

“Don’t say that!”

“Come on, Patrice. Folks expect us to triple up with an overweight man, just like on Fat and Fed Up.”

“Ugh, I hate that show. And I hate overweight men.”

“You like me, don’t you?” Kyla asked.

“Sure I do.” A ghostly jellyfished hand came down on Kyla’s knee and orange-juiced there its assurance. “But thin old, wiry old Fido is who I want. He’s nice and cuddlable and cute and sweet and kind and scrumptious.”

“And out of reach.”

“We don’t know that. Not for sure. And the night is far from over.”

Kyla said nothing.

What was the use?

Give Patrice a last try at her dream, the one she’d first dared to voice in tenth grade.

It had been fun to moon over Fido in private, a secret passion they used to fuel their lovemaking. Kyla had often pictured him with them as her lover’s whip cut across his quivering flesh. Once-amazing experience-they had closed their eyes, stroking and sucking at one another, imagining it was him: Fido Jenner, split, blimped, making it with himself.

“I’ll bet Ms. Foddereau’s the slasher,” said Patrice.

Kyla pictured the teacher’s flat seamless face. Echoes of her dry humor. The old crone stood before a butcher block, working her bloody hands into an open pork belly.

“I’ll bet it is,” said Kyla.

That sly smile, that seemingly offhand remark about fat, the ripple of a chuckle it had set off in class the year before.

Kyla warmed to the idea. “Boy, if it is, I’d love to see her try to surprise us. I’d love to overpower the superior little bitch and wrench her chin up while you sever her trachea, slicing deep to the spine with that bone saw up there.” Among knives on the opposite wall, the bone saw gleamed.

“Yeah, bring her on!”

“We’ll filet the smile right off her friggin’ face,” Kyla said.

“Butcher, cleave thyself.”

The grimness silenced her, cutting short her glee. A teacher, probably right this moment, was ending two of her classmates’ lives.

Not many friends amongst them, but they were okay kids. The prospect of beholding a slain couple sobered Kyla, even as it touched some atavistic nub of delight inside her.

“Patrice?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s freezing in here. Hold my hand?”

“It feels real weird, mister, escaping this way. Almost like you’re betraying your friends or something.”

Zinc, the smallish second trumpeter, spoke to Bray in the dim obscurity of the girls’ gym, half-hearted hallspill providing the only light.

Winnie stood far off, waving her hands and flapping her lips to convince a cluster of young girls about God-knows-what.

“It’s nothing you could have prevented,” said Bray in an attempt to comfort the kid.

Zinc shook his head, eighteen looking fifteen, his height a paltry five feet. “Doesn’t matter. That Russian guy, the scientist with the bushy eyebrows, you know who I mean… he says people can control their fate, that there’s a psychic link between your deepest desires and what actually happens to you.”

“I don’t believe that for a second.”

“That’s what he says.”

“People say all sorts of wrongheaded things.”

The other trumpeter, the defiant-looking one, was resting his elbows on the trampoline pads in the center of the gym. His knuckles thudded an off-rhythm against the thick springs.

He had been clipped and curt when, on their way here, Winnie had offered a compliment on his playing. Now his restless drumming stopped and he strode over to them.

“Hey, Zinc,” he said, “let’s try it out.”

“You don’t mean jumping on the tramp?” The kid was incredulous.

Sarcastic: “No, I mean lobesucking. Come on, it’ll be a blast.” The taller boy, a lick of hair sickled over his forehead, pointedly ignored Bray. Grown-up, over-the-hill has-been, Bray could almost hear him thinking.

“Don’t, Butch. You’ll break your neck.”

“Well, jeez, at least spot me. Come on, man. Sailing on up into the darkness? It’ll get your juices flowing.”

Balancing on one foot, he wrenched a shoe off and tossed it down thock fwap-fwap-fwap.

Its mate quickly followed.

“Is he always like this?” asked Bray.

“Only when something’s eating him. The prom, you know. Going away to school next year.”

The charcoal blur hoisted himself up onto the edge of the trampoline, then hop-rolled onto its yield of canvas.

“Let’s spot him.”

They skated across the smooth gym floor, a sensation like a layer of ice beneath the soles of their shoes. Other kids were coming in from all directions, and Winnie, turning her head, joined him.

“Couple o’ converts?” Bray asked about the girls she had been talking to.

“Discontent is everywhere,” said Winnie, “a micron or two beneath the skin. What’s with your musician friend?”

The trumpeter had found the discolored center of the canvas. He staggered at first, then eased into a gentle bounce.

“Who knows? Maybe he wants to die.”

“Hey, you guys,” Butch shouted on the uplift. “It’s all a crock. ( Sproing!) stop it, and we ought to.”

Worked up already to nearly ten-fifteen feet, change falling out of his pockets and spinning on the canvas below, Butch stiffed up suddenly, knees bearing the brunt, arms shot out to the sides for balance. He bent and swept the coins off, metal clatters as they waterfalled through the springs, pinging and rolling across the floor.

“Zinc, come on, man,” he said.

Then Zinc monkeyed up.

Bray steadied Zinc on the pads, and Butch helped him over the crisscross of springs. His shoes whip-rolled toward Bray, then fell floorward in twin thuds. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.” Standing, he linked hands with his lover and began a slow seesaw. “Woe, woe, woe!” he said, one at each bounce.

Bray glanced at Winnie. She looked sharp-eyed and stunning, a heartmelt.

“Kids,” she commented in awe and disgust.

The seesaw diminished to nothing. The boys bounced now in synch and rising, white cuffs and clasped hands, their moonish faces alight with thrill, their arms angling out on the downfall, then snapping down flat like collapsed umbrella struts as they shot skyward once more.

A drifting horde of seniors, some of them tender, others not, rectangled all about, shouting encouragement and holding their hands up to offer instant rebuff against a bad fall.

Butch and Zinc were ill-lit as they pizza-doughed the canvas and it rebounded them upward. But on the rise, they slipped into even greater obscurity, a sleeve of blackness enveloping them, then releasing them on the downfall.

There was no ceiling visible. Just the one Bray sensed up there, climbing ropes strung up way high like dreams of vines, no limits to how daring the trumpeters might get.

Vanish.

Re-emerge swiftly downward, a plunge through squid ink into the dim ocean below.

Then arrow upward again, squeals of delight rocketing from their mouths.

Bray fancied he heard a noise up above, a metal strut adjusting to chill or weight.

Down again they shot, but Bray kept his eyes above, a dark shift in blackness he assumed he had to be imagining.

Up they rose.

But suddenly there oofed, above, an expulsion of breath, a blow to the belly, and one boy came down empty-handed, a look of terror smeared across his face.

It was the monkey-looking kid, too distraught to keep himself from an upward bounce as lofty as the previous one. Then he too, with a high choking sound, stuck up there.

Swift whickers of pain fell from above. More mechanical sounds, black on black, loud creaks, a spider dandling its web about trapped flies.

Someone asked stupidly, “Where are they?”

“Get the lights,” Winnie called weakly, and it seemed to Bray that she thought she had shouted it.

Yes, I’ll do that, he thought. I’ll get the lights.

But all Bray could do was stare up into the blackness and listen to the bold shifting sounds, the creaking obscenity of movement and stretched rope, the shifts of some murderous shape about its work.

“They can’t tender.”

Others took up her word, the unfairness of it all and the shock in their voices.

In front of him, the trampoline canvas popped like a bedsheet snapped in a breeze.

Then again.

A wash of pops rained down, a sudden shower, foul-smelling.

Bray caught on his chest a slap of liquid, a spray against his face. And a second inundation fell from above as kids backed away.

Bray felt Winnie melt against him. “Jesus, Bray,” an echo of her lost strength, “what’s our guy doing?”

Above, there sounded a clattering as though a handful of drumsticks were being badly negotiated.

Then something fell, shattering: an icicle, its fragments skating across the darkened canvas, smashing hard, and skidding across the floor.

11. A Ritual Taken to Excess

Sandy leaned against Rocky’s back where he fidgeted on a long bench in the boys’ locker room, massaging his neck and shoulders. She tried not to breathe smelly gymsuit odor but it couldn’t be avoided.

“Is it time yet?” asked Rocky.

“No again, handsome.”

Her man sat hunched over, hands clasped, as though he’d been benched for a foul.

He glanced at her and smiled. “We got those two dancers over a barrel, I can feel it.”

“No contest, hon. Flann and Brandy, they’re a couple of clothesracks. You and me, though, we do stuff. Kids cheer your tackles and your field goals. I give them a rise with my pompons and the occasional flash of my butt.”

Rocky had worn a clean white jockstrap to bed once. Now she pictured him, his killer teammates too, arrayed down the dim empty bench, big swells of dick held in before them like whips of spackle, their buttock muscles tight, the playful thwap of towels against bare bottoms.

“We’ll do that throne shit, huh?”

“That’s right,” she said. “They’ll spotlight us. They’ll give us a big brassy fanfare, robes, crowns, the whole shootin’ match.”

“And then the newspaper!”

“Uh huh.” She nodded vigorously, relieved that the lesson had finally begun to sink into Rocky’s thick skull. “Tonight, big grins to the peons, flashbulb pops, royal waves and armloads of roses. Monday morning, our picture will grace the front page of the Gazette —”

“Dead corporate grunts’ll’ve stepped aside at their Sunday afternoon picnics.”

“—yes, and there you’ll be, ready to take your pick of the jobs opened up by their deaths.”

Rocky chuckled.

He rubbed his palms together, like she did when she smoothed hand cream on, but more briskly. “And then,” he said, “we’ll find a third to round us out.”

“Yes. A nice man. Maybe some old guy with a good job and yummy lobes.”

Sandy would stay home with the pup. Which pup she wasn’t sure. But it had frizzy caramel-and-cream fur and a cute wet black nose. She could see the little yapper now. She would hire a landscaper to put in a perfect flower garden, then sit back and spend the money her husbands brought in.

“Nobody from school though,” said Rocky, parroting her.

“No one.”

Her sights had been raised considerably since their nomination as prom royalty. It had put them safely beyond slaughter. That release from terror had given Sandy a far wider vision of the future, up from the confined sandbox of high school to the unending stretch of beach frontage that lay before them.

“They’re all such children here,” she said.

“They sure are.”

Bending to him, Sandy pressed her breasts against his back and kissed his thick coconut-aroma’d hair.

Gaunt gray lockers aisled off parallel into the gloom, ending at yet another wall of them. Murmurs of other couples arrayed elsewhere back near the showers floated in dim stifles of air. Ghost-voices. Soon to be memories only.

“Is it time yet?”

“Not yet. Soon.”

“I swear, I’m gonna cut you a big bleeding hunk of corpse.”

“I’d like that, Rocky.”

Bobbing knee. “You sure it’s not time yet?”

The shrill bell had startled Pill. Gigi, her stuffed goat, huddled close then.

The bell was much louder than when she walked down the halls in the daytime to visit her biology teacher mommy, holding Daddy’s hand.

Outside in the hallway, Pill heard heels and giggles. She had just enough time to rush into the coat closet, a nice non-squeaky door that let her leave half an inch and didn’t swing open when she took her hand away. It smelled woody, but it was warm enough that cool air blew on her from the thin bright crack.

Two girls came in, noisy and excited. They were very happy to be here.

Pesky, the high-pitched chatterbox of the pair, kept squealing and jumping up and down, to judge from her leathery taps on the tile floor.

And Pill heard laughter in the calmer, lower voice of Flense. It sounded like her daddy when he was agreeing to something Mommy had said but was really patting himself on the back about how much brighter than her he was.

The squealer, the one named Pesky, skipped and danced around the room, hand-kissing stuff on the long counter and peeking into the mini-fridge. Pill caught glimpses of her: a shiny pink ribbon in shiny black hair, her creamy neck and lobe-flesh going by, the gleam of a pleased eye.

Pill was afraid one of them would fling open her closet door and she would get yelled at.

Flense called Pesky a teacher’s pet. ” you here cuz you kiss their big fat behinds all the time.”

“Yep. No blood’s gonna be spilled here. What the hey, they’re not gonna you-know-what where they eat,” said the other girl. “Well I guess, for form’s sake and so they don’t kill us ’n’ shit for disobeying the rules, we ought to sit on the couch, under our number.”

They quieted down and hugged a bunch. Among the rustle of dresses and the slaps and slurps and moans they gave out with, the deep-voiced one sometimes shushed the other and asked if she heard any screaming yet.

Pill hugged Gigi and pretend-whispered that these two were silly and a bother, and she hoped they would go back to the dance soon so she could curl up again in the stuffed chair and count the dots in the ceiling tiles.

Then a loud crack startled her. It sounded like a huge toaster popping bread.

The high-pitched one said, though not in reply to anything, “’Mjust askin’!” followed by “But you can’t-!” which was cut off by a thud.

Pill hunched up tight and held her breath.

A weak no from Flense gave way to sounds of running and the rattle of a locked door. Then a louder series of no’s pierced the air as she was struggled back across the room.

The hunching made Pill’s shoulders hurt. She felt light and funny in her head.

She had to keep breathing. Had to trap her whimpers inside.

Through the thrashing, Pill moved her right hand to the closet knob, grasped it, afraid it would creak. Then she froze her arm there. She had been ready to shut the door. But the noise gurgled away, and Gigi warned her not to.

Putting an eye to the crack, Pill saw a glove gripping a tiny pellet. The pellet was all swirly with mist. The gloved hand thrust it between the Flense girl’s lips, fingers jammed in, abruptly, in an ungentle way like her old daddy shoving a pill into their cat Puff’s pried-open jaws and forcing him to swallow.

Then the glove smacked Flense’s face and was gone, and Flense fell out of sight, oddly quiet as the struggle stopped. “Wait!” she said. “What did you-? Leave Pesky alone! Oh jeez, oh shit. Make it stop. Please make it stop.” She sounded like she had bad tummy-ache pain, like she wanted to throw up but couldn’t.

Someone fell like a sack of potatoes.

Dragging sounds outside.

Grunts of effort.

Pill was suddenly sure that the knocked-out Pesky was going to be shoved into the closet, and that the hurty man with the dark blue arms and the bloody workgloves was going to see her then and do really bad things to her.

Should she scream?

Could she get away if she darted out right now, clonked him with a chair or something, and broke down the door?

Then the shuffling sounds stopped.

The girl who’d been forced to swallow the misty pellet cried and moaned like wind in a lonely cave.

Pill could see the other one through the crack. Her skull knocked hard on the counter top. Then a shoof sounded, like some weird heavy car door closing in the distance, and the girl’s face bunched up and opened wide into a scream like Pill had never heard before.

Pill started to shiver. She no longer trusted her hand on the knob, but she didn’t dare move it.

“My fingers!” came the high scream.

Pill remembered her mother working at that same counter, squaring paper on a green grid and clumphing a curved blade sharply down.

Pesky’s face smeared out of the crack as she tried to tear away, but again she was grabbed, to judge from the violent waver in her voice, and the noise grew really loud and close. Pill’s fingers flared with pain as the crack shut and the closet door slammed and darkness struck her like a heavy fist.

Pill heard whimpering. When she realized it was her own, she made it go away. Outside, dulled to cotton by the closed door, the fierce fighting went on.

She backed up against warm wood, touching it with one hand and hugging Gigi to her chest with the other.

An angled corner, pillows, her little nest. She inched downward, the walls sliding up around her, soft comfort beneath her as beyond the black muffle the killing continued.

Go away, she prayed.

Go away, go away.

At the Shite House, one side of the split-screen showed the scrubbed teens sitting beneath the number 57, the other the Home Ec teacher poised to spring open the metal panel above them.

She’s closing in for the kill,” murmured the announcer.

Secretary Wanker suppressed a laugh.

Prom night always fired up the President and his cabinet. The slaughter of the young fueled a year of decisions and proved far more effective a teambuilding effort than any touchy-feely retreat with teams of fake-empathetic facilitators.

To be sure, the cabinet secretaries’ juices flowed free, and the naughtiness of their exposed lobes gave everyone that extra jolt.

But the real thrill lay in eavesdropping on two frightened kids thinking someone else had been chosen. And on a teacher who, for one evening of planned mayhem, dropped all pretense of caring for her snot-nosed charges.

It revived memories of their own proms even as it firmed up governmental resolve.

But tonight, thought Wanker, something new would be added to the mix.

As if that thought were a signal, the trap was sprung onscreen.

“There she goes!” screamed the announcer.

The blade flashed.

Out popped the Home Ec teacher. The wide-eyed boy sustained a lethal slash to the throat. His date, offering a feeble whine and a feint at struggle, joined him in death.

The beautiful brutality of it brought most of the cabinet over the top, though they were careful that their moans did not top in intensity those of President Windfucker.

Holding back his own release, Willy Wanker spoke softly into his lapel mike: “Now.”

The doors burst open.

Everybody turned in mid-spurt at the heavy tromping of boots, taking in a sudden rush of soldiers in camouflage, men and women not much more than high school age themselves, brandishing knives and grimacing with resolve.

The stern-faced suits who tried to protect the President lost fingers to the downslash and were shoved out of the way by the sheer force of numbers.

Cholly Bork took a stab to the neck. The crossbarred airplane control that animated Gilly Windfucker flew out of his hands, and the puppet leader collapsed. Beneath the pummeling, Bork went down, his arms flopping ineffectually this way as he tried to ward off the attack.

A crack crew lofted the inert president into the air. Snips at his strings. Snips where his limbs articulated. His arms and legs were passed on to two solders assigned to snap them over their knees. Others stomped on his head and torso, then tossed the bashed and broken parts into a waiting trash can for the bonfire Wanker had scheduled at midnight on the Shite House lawn.

All of this a trio of filmers filmed, cameras perched like parrots on their shoulders, eyepieces to their eyes, close enough but not too close to be caught up in the melee.

So as not to detract from the slaughters being carried out across the nation, the footage would be aired on late-night news. This would be a capper, not a distraction.

So the Committee to Assassinate the President had planned it, and so it would be.

Wanker was pleased with himself.

He was able then, at last, to relax into the ride of his orgasm, his huddled privacy set aside for a brief instant as he moved into the flow and gave all he had for his country.

“I think we’ve made it,” said Tweed, barely whispering. The darkened chem lab, with its odd stifle of odors and its solid workbenches, would suffer nothing louder.

Dex confided, “I think you’re right.”

“Did you hear screaming?”

“I might have.” He gestured in the same direction she had fancied muffled sounds coming from moments ago. “Off that way.”

“Yes, just ringings in my ear,” she said. “I thought I was only spooking myself.”

It might be, thought Tweed, nothing but a shared deception. Right this moment, the square grate above Dex might be kicked spangling across the classroom and the killing begin.

Or now. Or now.

But she felt a lifting in the lab, as if it and its ghostly pairs of seniors arrayed against the wall were being raised heavenward. Intuition, sure. But that was something she and her sister Jenna excelled in.

“I wonder who bit it,” Dex said.

“I love you, Dex.”

He looked into her eyes and smiled through a sadness, a good wish toward somebody now defunct. “Love ya, Tweed.”

“No, I mean more than ever.”

Relief flooded her body. Dex looked so good, so indescribably good, that she thought she might burst.

“I mean,” a laugh escaped, his eyes steady on hers, “I mean,” she said, putting her hands to the sides of his head, his earlobes warm between thumb and forefinger, “I mean I really sincerely truly love you, Dexter Poindexter.”

Then her lips pressed against his.

His hand touched her back.

A lip tingle, like spot-on trombone playing but a kajillion times more gratifying, softened her. She grew moist as if Dex were fondling her, her earlobes beating hot with passion.

Her fingertips found something smooth at his lapel. With a laugh, she broke the kiss.

“What?” he asked.

“You still have your sax strap on,” she replied.

“Makes me feel saxy.”

“Old joke.” Bubbles of joy effervesced in Tweed’s head.

“Besides,” said Dex, “I knew, one way or the other, that we were going to survive this. I just knew it.”

A bell shattered the silence, so loud and so sustained that gasps and shouts and a flurry of startled obscenities erupted in the classroom.

Tweed hugged Dex anew, taking his friendship lobe between thumb and forefinger as though it were a fat velvet button.

“Let’s go,” said Dex, helping her up. “Time to hunt for the victims.”

Whichever couple found the dead folks first won some silly prize. But Tweed didn’t care about that. She only cared that she and Dex were out of the woods-a murkier and more wicked place than she had imagined-and she told him so.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said. “But let’s get into the spirit of the thing anyway. We did it. We’re survivors!”

“I’ve got to call Dad first.”

Dex took her hand.

Futterware and cleavers swaying in tandem, they headed for the hall, which was already choked with kids on the move. This was the beginning of an unencumbered life together for her-and-Dex-and-whomever.

And it felt wonderful!