Slaughterhouse High

Futterware and cleavers swaying in tandem, they headed for the hall, which was already choked with kids on the move. This was the beginning of an unencumbered life together for her-and-Dex-and-whomever.

And it felt wonderful!

Robert Devereaux

Slaughterhouse High

PART THREE. The Game Changes

The future smells of blood and leather, of godlessness and incessant whipping. Our grandchildren would be well advised to come into the world with extremely thick skin on their backs.

– Heinrich Heine

When you skin your customers, it's a good idea to leave a little skin behind to regenerate, so you can skin them again.

– Nikita Khrushchev

Robert Devereaux

Slaughterhouse High

12. Zipped Lips and the True Meaning of Fear

Condor had been flying on whatever beautiful shit he had swallowed in the car.

He'd been letting the dance music unfold new eternities inside him. Earing the fear, eying the terror that flaked skin from familiar faces, as old mush-jowled Futzy dispersed 'em all, skelter and yon.

He felt heaven come stairstepping closer as they shuk-shuk-shuk ed upward and the handrail, with its hacked worn inked germ-infested splendor, gave them guidance toward a way-the-fuck-up-there staggeringly simplistically functional classroom where once, two years before, Mr. Fink had tossed chalk bits like an outfielder zinging third base to get some kid's attention.

Blayne, darkly brooding all night, had grown darker still, muttering bunches of creepy shit as they sat there alone under the chalkboard behind Mr. Fink's desk.

They had named each possible teacher, looking for a slasher. Their yammering faces oozed out of floor tiles or from the shadows beneath the desk, or they fell from the chalk tray overhead.

Zane Fronemeyer, conjured by an unrelievedly morbid commentary from Blayne, had misted up from a fallen eraser, an oblong devilcake dusted with snow, to menace them with a paintbox of horrors.

Condor had convinced him.

It was Fronemeyer.

Their wacko art teacher!

Then the bell clamored like a floodlight all ablaze. No light shone, yet all was light.

Brilliantly limned with light ineffable was this place of salvation. An industrial strength vacuum cleaner of light. A beam of elation. A cockjacking, lobesucking epiphany of hot white jangling lumens.

"We made it!" exclaimed Condor, the drugs surging high in him.

"Yep and it was tough to make," said Blayne. Beneath his continuing brood, an imp peered out from those wide amazing eyes.

"We're continually making it, aren't we?"

"The windows, the wastebasket. It's a dull make." Blayne's face turned nasty and smug. "But there's a more interesting make waiting for us out there."

The girls.

"Yeah!" said Condor.

Blayne had lipped Altoona.

Or so he had said in the car.

All night, Condor's radiant head had waggled between death-dread and the black-laced duo they had avoided talking to, relying instead on odd across-gym anticipatory stares and bizarre but weirdly neat circlings, so close they could touch but pretending to ignore one another instead-all of it a buildup to survival and the costume shop.

"I am one primed monkey!" said Condor.

"One prime mate!" Blayne corrected.

"Ugh. Squirrelly, real squirrelly." Balls of ticked fur opened up and skittered across the room.

"Squarely so."

"Double ugh, " said Condor. "Let's go get 'em."

He got to his feet and gave one last look at the last place of instruction he'd ever have to be in. The classroom was a fist relaxed into an open palm, reluctant to release him but not all that unfriendly, despite the years of mind-wounds it had inflicted.

In the corridor, puffs and creases of student body flurried by, relieved, hunting, hunting.

Fuck the hunt. live game.

A flutter of wings brushed against his face, as two chiffoned quail went birding by: Contusa and Calibrianna, caught up in an unending web of in-turned chatterboxing.

Down the stairs, down the stairs, down the stairs.

A mewling slight spewed like a spitwad from Capper McGee's twist of a mouth as he bounded past them up the stairs. They gave one another fuck-the-silly-bastard looks and wiped McGee's hurl off like so much fartwind.

Condor loved the building's dark dead funk at this time of night.

The place was dying. It was yielding them up. And in the bowels of this bowel of a fuckin' school, behind the scenes, some blood-splashed teacher was right now crimsoning a sink.

As they hit the first floor and headed left toward the auditorium, Condor stopped.

"Hey, watch it!" Blayne bumped him. "What? A glass wall? What?"

"I just had a terrible thought." Condor saw the girls splayed wide, huge fingers punched deep into their bodies, prying then open like so many crabshells. "What if he got them?"

"Leapin' Christ, Condor," said Blayne. "Then they'd be dead, we'd be ess-oh-ell, and I'd be so pissed, I'd toilet-paper the turdsucking slasher's front yard for a whole freaking year. Now keep moving, will ya? They're waiting for us."

Condor moved.

Humiliation clamped about his head.

Damn it, Blayne was deep, Blayne was smart.