Slaughterhouse High

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.