Slaughterhouse High

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."