Slaughterhouse High

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."