Slaughterhouse High

These two had been lovers, of which the world was owed proof. Not to zip them together simply wouldn't do. They required the same treatment as the boys, to be racked up there, hanging over the big iron bar by their parts.

Visions of cooked chicken arose, one leg snapped aside to reach meat. Dig a knee into the small of the back, grasp the right thigh with both arms, and lever it sharply up, using every ounce of strength-that was the way to proceed.

Something snapped, a dull pop, a thigh bone dislocated. Discoloration bruised the stretched flesh, a major vein broken by exertion.

But it allowed sufficient access.

The girl's zipper pull slipped over its first tooth and drew up nicely.

An obedient little mechanism.

Her left leg bent back more easily than her right.

There was only one slight vulval snag, halfway up. But backtracking a few zip-teeth set things right again.

Jesus, the lifting! It deepened one's respect for the poor joes who load haunches of beef onto meat trucks.

At last the females were up, slid onto the bar next to the dead boys but not touching them. Propriety had to be maintained.

Heads down. Blood would have dripped from them if there'd been any left.

The stocky one-it felt wrong to call this dead thing Altoona-threatened the balance. But the other girl's oddly angled, disjointed thighs tipped sufficiently in the opposing direction to steady them on the clothesrack.

As the rack rumbled toward the passageway, the foursome swayed like commuters on a subway car.

It would be good to position them where the others would discover them.

Raise a few hackles.

Make the little shits shit their britches, get the blood pumping, their adrenalin flowing, divide and conquer them.

Perhaps at some point, the hunger would be satisfied.

But there were plenty of worthy victims out there, the evening was still young, and after all, wasn't prom night made for love?

*****

Peach felt sexy and free.

And her own damned woman at last.

As she and Cobra, him with his back turned, had risen from their waiting spot, Bowser smiled, blew her a kiss, and left with Fido.

That had been enough to jazz her.

Almost before the echo of the find-the-dead-folks alarm was finished, Peach blurted out that they were through. In spite of Cobra's stunned disbelief, she held her ground, taking his abuse and riding out his little-boy tempest, knowing in her heart that what she was doing was right.

Now, having sauntered brazenly up to Bowser and his increasingly okay date Fido, Peach Popkin was suddenly on top of a world she hadn't known could exist.

Blue, red, and orange lights maundered high in the gym, catching balloons and streamers up by the rafters. Wherever her gaze fell, young gods and goddesses looked back, disbelief and elation in their eyes.

Peach had worried that Cobra would make a scene. But he didn't. Sandy and Rocky, of all people, had caught his attention. He even ignored his gang members, almost as if they had split up too.

"Yeah, well you're cute too," said Peach. "You're both cute. Isn't it neat?"

Fido's clownish look made her laugh.

Bowser said, "You mean surviving? Yep. Too bad about Pesky and Flense, but I guess someone had to bite it."

"No, silly," she said, "I meant isn't it neat that we feel so good together? I love your lobes. Do you love my lobes?"

They averred that they did, very much.

"Do you think you two could, I don't know, futter me a nipple or something? I'd love you forever."

"I'll bet Bowser could," Fido said. There was a hint of fear in his voice.

But he was wiry. Peach recalled his supple way of threading the hallways between classes, a skim past the lowing herds without touching them, almost balletic in his grace.

Fido was a mercurial sort. Come futtering time, he would slip past a flurry of cuts and rends as the senior class tore into the sacrificed girls. Beneath it all, his butcher knife would zip in, copping a prize Peach would cherish for years to come.

"I'll bet both," she said, moving in to plant a lush kiss on Fido's friendship lobe. In doing so, her breasts splayed shamelessly against the poor boy's suit front. Peach heard him gasp.

"Would you crop us if we did?" he said.

"Hmmm, neat idea," cracked Bowser. He mock-leered at her, but he was one excited boy, as his tented crotch made clear.

"Sure I would," said Peach.

Cobra'd always been the one to crop, to whip, to slap and smack. It did neat things to her head to imagine doling it out instead.

"I'd crop you both with such love, your flesh would throb for days and days."

Cobra's violence had been so ugly and mean. While that had had its appeal, what Peach felt now seemed so much more limitless and pure.

"And you know what?"

"What?" asked Fido.

"Sometimes,"-she brought their heads near her mouth, Fido's friendship lobe on her right, Bowser's bagged sexlobe on her left-"sometimes, I'll want the two of you to crop me!"

Her hands cupped their napes where a barber's razor had edged off stubble. Dry fear-sweat mixed there with some sort of yummy fruity cologne.