Slaughterhouse High

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.