Slaughterhouse High

An ancient laundry basket on wheels, its canvas sides bulging with huge mounds of soiled towels and sheets, awaited the laundry chute's next disgorging.

"Will you two shut the fuck up?"

She said it loud if laconically, knowing they would blow her off. But some things just got said cuz they needed saying. Maybe a failed warning would be sufficient to ward off the killer.

Maybe not.

Probably not.

Then something clanged overhead.

It put a halt to her companions' silly little dance of death. It raised the hairs on the back of Kyla's neck, blasting prickly heat straight up into her backbrain.

"What was that?" Patrice wondered aloud.

A rumble began like distant muffled timpani, as the clang reversed itself. Some sliding door wrenched up, then juddered decisively shut, almost the confident slice of a guillotine blade falling home into its groove.

The rumble bumbled about above, growing louder, the beat of it coming faster and more violent.

Kyla couldn't fix on it. Then her ears peeled the sound from its echo. She focused on the dark downdrop that gaped before her.

Fido and Patrice gazed about wildly. A brandish of knifes angled out to ward off any attacker.

Before Kyla could warn them, even as words took shape in her confused brain, she saw the thing tumble into view, a dark furball in the darkness, coming quick, separating itself from the chute and leaping free.

Was it a huge black spider rolled into a ball, ready to spear out its legs and scuttle murderously toward them, stinger out, its dark dangle of limbs silently going dandle-dandle-dandle?

The thing bounced once on the heaped laundry, leaving a blotch of gore across the white expanse. Then it smacked the concrete by Fido's feet. The crack of a bat upon a skull. Splintered bone. It rolled furiously, flop-flop, hair-face-hair-face.

Bowser McPhee, Fido's ex-boyfriend.

His skin was gray verging on blue, bruised, upsplashed with blood to the jowls.

The neck had been sheered through in one clean sharp slice.

Kyla wondered why Fido's screams sounded so high. Then she realized all three of them had merged their screams, a braid of terror tightly stranded together.

She froze. The head before her, with its baleful blinkless stare, held her in thrall.

If the killer happened to appear now, Kyla realized, she would be as helpless and doomed as a deer startled into dumbness on a dark highway, creamed by the rig that pinned it to the night with its high beams.

22. A Proliferation of Deaths

Dex and Tweed huddled together on the band room floor against a ten-foot-tall gray-painted door. A fan of such doors swept off in either direction. Theirs housed sax cases, the others timpani, trombones, tubas, every band member's weapon of choice.

They couldn't be sure, of course, that the storage space behind one of those doors hadn't been emptied out before anyone arrived, an easy point of access for the killer.

One level down, the lone dim bulb atop its stand feebled light into the room. At its base was a dried pool of blood, hastily mopped, from the death of Bix Donner, the husband of Tweed's tenth grade bio teacher.

Dex had thought the rogue slasher would not return to the scene of his crime.

He wasn't so sure any more.

The crazy bastard's preternatural vision, Dex was starting to fear, had them in his sights. The slow cold hand of paranoia slid its fingers along his spine and dug its nails into his brain.

Yet perhaps the cause of his rising panic was not paranoia at all, but survival instinct.

"Poor Mr. Donner," Tweed whispered, breaking the silence like a shout.

Dex raised a finger to his lips. At her ear: "Keep an eye out. He could rush us from anywhere. If you even think a shadow moved, let me know. Don't assume you're imagining it, okay?"

Tweed nodded.

She mouthed something soundless. Dex thought it was "I love you," though the weak light made it impossible to be sure.

The bulb flickered as if a moth flitted back and forth over it. Then it went out. Blackness rushed in to surround them.

One squat upper window glowed with enfeebled moonlight that shot down head-high to carve a far sliver out of one wall.

We're sitting ducks, thought Dex, we've got to get away from these doors.

He took Tweed's hand and helped her up, the rustle of her dress concealing perhaps the groan of a tall gray door's hinges.

Dex felt a breeze. The passing of someone's body before them? At any moment, Tweed would cry out from a lethal wound. Or a knife blade would violate him, pricking out the heart of his life.

"Hold me," said Tweed.

Dex gave her a quick fierce hug, then said, "Come on."

Holding Tweed's hand, Dex slid his right shoe along the platform. He was no longer certain of the four-inch drop to the next level, where the trumpets and French horns sat.

It wouldn't do to trip and tumble. They'd be dead in an instant.

Tweed said, "Not so fast!" Panic at being dragged along in the darkness. She bumped him, then regained her balance.