Slaughterhouse High

Futzy nodded. "You and your wife stay close by. Provide moral support. With your help, we'll survive this."

The eager old couple grinned, their lobes long sucked dry of juice and withered with age. Oldsters were usually a royal pain, their rutted thought patterns blocking the crosscut blasts of creativity. Not these two. An engaging insanity lit their limpid eyes.

Futzy rose again to the mike.

He had cobbled together a plan. Was it any good? He had no idea. Sometimes it sufficed, at least for a time, just to have one.

He summarized it for the senior class.

Then he turned the mike over to Jonquil Brindisi and headed, Adora Phipps at his heels, toward his office.

*****

Tweed suddenly wanted very badly to be home under her comforter. She didn't feel at all like a grown-up. She felt like a sniveling little kid in need of serious daddying.

Through mercurochrome swirls of light were carried the bloody corpses of Butch and Zinc, the two trumpeters who would trumpet no more. Broken necks, torn eye sockets, deep ripped slashes across their chests. Zinc had been a tender, exempt from all violence, a fortunate white-ball plucker who had struggled to suppress a smile as he walked off the auditorium stage a week ago Thursday. That made his death unspeakably worse.

The wrestlers carrying them laid them before the Ice Ghoul. There was room beside the pair of slain girls. Sheriff Blackburn's body swayed from its rope at one edge of the sacrificial platter.

The principal tried to calm everyone. But it was hard to process his words.

Tweed's father had reason to fret. The phones had been dead. Maybe he would call the cops. Maybe they'd break in any moment now to rescue them. Her knees felt weak. now. But the nightmare continued.

Wherever her eyes alighted, looks of panic punched through a restless mill of classmates.

Her boyfriend shivered audibly.

"Oh, Dex, I'm scared."

"You're telling me," he said, admitting his own terror.

The killer's malevolence lay everywhere, eye and hand full of power. Dex's sax strap. Tweed had a sudden fear that it might be yanked up at any moment. His neck would snap. She gripped it, wrenched it over his head, and flung it into the churning crowd.

"Hey, what're you-?"

Tweed hugged Dex fiercely. His balance went haywire. But he steadied himself and hugged her too, his warm sweet head tucked alongside hers. "I love you, Dex."

"It's okay. We'll get through this." His words were an echo of Mr. Buttweiler's. "We'll stay here like Futzy says and we'll be safe. He and the teachers'll figure something out."

"Whoever's doing this is gonna kill us all."

"No he won't."

"He will. I know it." It wasn't over yet. Not by a longshot.

"Don't work yourself up," said Dex. "You're spooking me now. It'll be okay. You'll see." His hands comforted Tweed at her waist.

Everyone had so bunched toward the front that the gym felt suddenly packed, dense with fear and restlessness. Towering above, the Ice Ghoul, its face set in chill triumph, seemed to see many more bodies strewn before it. It lusted after broken bones, torn limbs, futtered flesh-far more sacrifices than had been laid before it.

Knife raised high.

Crude cock viciously erect.

Knees and bent legs. Feet like a runner's poised at the starting block. Buttocks splayed over one heel.

Its hunger was limitless, its cruel red maw only now beginning to be filled. Tweed hugged Dex closer. She wanted to turn away from those dark eyes, but they held her in their sway, made her look, made her shudder.

*****

Trilby feared she would pass out when rumor came, then was confirmed, that the slain girls had been found in the faculty lounge. Brest held her. A wash of sound rushed through her brain, white noise before a swoon.

"But Pill is in there," she said. "We've got to-"

"Come on," said Brest. "Bix, you stay here."

"I'd better go with you."

"No, Futzy's gonna need your help," insisted Brest. "Me and Trilby'll be careful."

Trilby had resisted fainting, the gymnasium taking on its painful reality around her. She followed Brest past the refreshment table to the entrance.

The corridor shone with a feeble light full of shadows and menace. That didn't matter. Nothing mattered but finding her way to Pill. Trilby prayed her daughter hadn't been killed.

Or maimed.

Or kidnapped.

At a run, they passed by the array of phones, a wall of glassed-in trophies, the entrance doors secured with the lock Elwood Dunsmore had snapped shut. The faculty lounge at the far corner of the building seemed miles away.

"Pill? Honey?"

Trilby shouted the words. Fear gave them a sharp edge. She worried it would terrorize Pill further.

The cherry-stained door of the lounge hung ajar, but no reply came.

Brest shoved the door wide open.

Trilby rushed past.

Spatters of blood by the paper cutter. On the floor. On the-Oh, my God!-on and running down the splintered wood of the coat closet.

"Pill?" A sob choked her. "Pill? It's Mommy."

Brest grabbed the knob, silver smeared with streaks of blood.