Slaughterhouse High

Behind her, a sequoia to a sapling, Patrice hugged Fido to her and hurried along, her eyes impossibly large with fright.

They had left most of the kids by the front entrance, where a futile attempt was underway to ram open the heavily reinforced doors.

Ranks of peach-colored lockers marched by on either side, any one of them ready to explode into violence. Kyla kept them moving down the center of this gauntlet, their ultimate destination Lily Foddereau's butchery wing in the back part of the school.

The least they could do was to arm themselves with real cleavers, not the futtering ones, sharp but small, that hung from everyone's belt.

"Kyla, I'm scared," whined Patrice. It had become an annoying mantra, as if admitting her fear could ward off the thing that frightened her.

Kyla's cowardly lover didn't even expect an answer. But Fido, who had settled into a litany of reassurance, piped up: "We'll be fine, honey lamb. He won't get us."

Kyla understood they were both stressed to the max. But so was she.

And she didn't like how it felt when the three of them were under pressure. If indeed they survived the night, she thought there was a good chance their relationship wouldn't.

Kyla held open the glass door to the butchery wing, nose-wrinkling whiffs of gore lifting off the tile and wood as they passed. She followed after Patrice and Fido.

The stench of slaughter raised her hackles.

Curiously, it comforted her as well.

Very few students were roaming these blood-encrusted halls. Kyla guessed it was because butchery, the favorite subject of few, was far too near the night's events.

Patrice, on the other hand, loved it.

As did she.

The two of them had in fact first met, first touched eyes, over the bloody spews of a lopped chicken head. Their love, such as it was, had grown out of the slaughter of pigs and lambs and wide-eyed cattle, neck slice, abrupt collapse of unsteady legs. They had a history here, she and Patrice Menuci.

"I don't like this," said Fido.

Maybe, thought Kyla, Fido were best to have remained a fantasy. The reality was beginning to wear thin.

"It's okay, baby," Patrice simpered back. "We'll get us some steel and hole up somewhere until they rescue us."

"In here," Kyla said.

Over many years, mists of gore, especially during finals week, had turned the grout between the tiles from tan to rust. Ditto the hinges of the doors. This door's pattern of bloodspray was nearly invisible, so much a part of the woodgrain had it become.

They slipped through.

A wall of cutlery winked at them from behind Miss Smiling-Bitch Foddereau's chopping block. On the pegboard, chalked outlines surrounded each tool.

There were missing knives. But then a few knives had always been missing, gone astray over years of instruction and never replaced.

"Take two each," said Kyla.

She reached her heavy arms upward for her favorite hackers and hewers, huffing from the exertion. Kyla loved the heft of them, their shaped grips and perfect balance.

Fido and Patrice obeyed, laying hands on the pegboard as if it were a prayer wall and they were penitents. They came away clutching the handles of honed steel.

"What now?" Patrice asked.

She held two long carving knives, severed leg ends of a gleaming insect.

Fido had found a pair of meat cleavers.

Kyla looked at Fido and Patrice. Bedroom longings rose in her at the sextuple threat of violence that filled their fists.

In the meaty air, soft wafts of lust blew past her nostrils.

If this be life, thought Kyla, let it last forever.

*****

Outside the band room door, Trilby hugged her little girl. Delia Gaskin had taken Brest inside to view Bix's body. Soon she would come out for Trilby.

Pill had stopped talking altogether.

Trilby thought she had seen Pill at her most frightened. But her father's death, announced so vividly at the bandstand by Delia, had driven her deeper into herself. She had shut down, drawn in tighter, her skin almost bloodless, near as white as meringue.

"It's okay, Pill," she said.

But it wasn't.

The door opened.

Delia and Brest emerged arm in arm. Brest's eyes were moist. She gave Trilby a dour look.

It seemed out of place, since Brest had, many years before, confided having fallen out of love with their husband. But even withered feelings of affection tend to sink their hooks deep into one's heart, early and enduring.

"Pill?" The girl clung to her, trying to bury herself in her mother's body. "Stay with Brest now. I need to leave you for just a little while."

Pill's fingernails deepened uncomfortably, crab claws at Trilby's back. The child moaned.

It was unbearable.

Trilby wanted to embrace her always. But she needed to see Bix in death's grip, needed the grim closure it would provide.

Brest knelt and tried to pry their daughter free. Pill's moan became a whine, then a keening.

"There, there," Trilby soothed.

Pill was a sight. A shattered child who couldn't bear, for one second, the denial of her mother's embrace.