Slaughterhouse High

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.