Slaughterhouse High

"Another level now, watch your step," he said. "Clarinet section. Okay, we're off the risers. Past the piano. I can make out the band room door, coming up on the blackboard now."

He felt along it. Soon the door.

The killer's eyes burrowed into their backs. He would never let them escape.

But what if he were right outside the door, waiting for them in the hallway?

Tweed tugged him to a halt. "Dex, I heard something. Out there."

And the band room door opened, gray on black. A figure slipped through. The door hissed closed behind it. Dex rushed whoever it was, grappling with the shape, his fists darting out, trying to stun their attacker, to get the upper hand.

No resistance. A woman's voice shouted out, "Hey, wait… what-?"

"Miss Phipps!" said Tweed.

Adora Phipps, Dex thought. She's safe. But he felt down her wrists just in case.

Empty hands.

"I'm sorry," he said. "It's us. Me and Tweed. We thought you were-"

"I'm not. But I'll be damned if I know who is. Listen we're trying to round everyone up, get them back to the gym. It's the safest place, and Mr. Buttweiler's got a plan. Come with?"

Dex nodded.

"You bet," said Tweed relieved.

"Ditto," said Dex, realizing his nod had failed to register.

"Good, let's go."

After groping about for it, the door made a vertical gray line. Then that line gaped into a rectangle wide enough for them to pass through one at a time.

*****

Jonquil Brindisi walked as if she had been thoroughly oiled, her lubricious limbs animated by sheer desire. She loved the mayhem, the chaos, loved them to distraction.

Once Gerber Waddell was found, she would join in the futtering. But if she found him first, she planned to fuck the simple dweeb, feeling his lovely violence invade her as she tied him down and rode him.

Just imagining it made her gasp.

She had already dragged Claude into a supply closet after Elwood Dunsmore had been found torch-faced by the entranceway and Futzy'd rolled in the mutilated zippermouths. Claude kept up his but-I'm-married routine until she yanked his fly open and filled her throat close to choking.

Then his pretzel of words, the syntactically convoluted bullshit he had made a part of himself, turned into barnyard grunts and oh-yeahs and suck-me-darlin's. She had left him panting, his organ still thick despite its hot spew. He tasted like pea soup pureed with pearl onions.

Thus, Jonquil had mused, do the greater vices ever overwhelm the lesser.

Now she was on Gerber's trail.

More precisely, she was up for whatever the fates delivered. She craved the killer. And she felt that the strength of her craving ought to be enough to draw him out.

Until now, Gerber had been a sexless dolt of muscles and nods, thinning hair and stupid grins. Who would ever have guessed at the dynamo of hatred which had clearly simmered inside him for years, exploding at last into this amazing orgy of bloodletting?

Swimming upstream of the fleeing students, Jonquil had heard talk of terrible screams and the whining of buzzsaws. Up ahead, she saw the closed classroom door.

No noise came from the machine shop. But a bright light inside cut through wires of opaque glass in the lower half of the door, throwing sprays of dark diamonds across the corridor.

Something had gone on here. She sensed it. Perhaps her demented janitor awaited her, crouched to kill but ready for seduction if she played him right.

Jonquil grasped the doorknob and moved boldly inside, into the full light of the shop. Bulks of machinery stood gleaming and silent everywhere.

Tensed to repel attack, she took in Brayton and Raven standing by the far wall. Their soiled prom clothes had been torn. Their faces were forlorn and bereft, their eyes unable to stray from what they beheld.

Then she strode toward them. A large lathe moved out of her way, and there before her-wafts of deathstench turning the air moist and oozy and charged with sexual energy-were a pair of mauled, mutilated kids.

An unidentifiable male, headless, lay akimbo upon the tile floor. His off-white tuxedo was as pinkish red as bleeding gums. His chest looked as if it had, from neck to navel, once sprouted teeth, all of them yanked out now. Gaping holes pooled there, crimson fleshcups that made Jonquil swoon.

But it was the female that truly got Jonquil off, what with its slutty red-frilled frock and the sizzling-as-hot-blacktop body, no mistaking it, of Peach Popkin, whose face alone would have made identification problematic.

The Popkin girl had been caught in a swan dive, her arms extended, her bare back arched up into a U upon the platform that housed the table saw. Her breasts met the table's smooth surface at nipplepoint, their tips pushed flat beneath her blanched aureoles.

Beyond the blade, the girl's strawberry blond hair, streaked a deep red, wisped forward. Her coiffure had been mussed from the killer's having pressed her forehead forward into the gray blur of a spinning blade.