Slaughterhouse High

But she-and all of them, this happy band of hackers and hewers-resisted those darts. In the shaping of communal grave-clouts were they caught up, weaving it, shuttled, hack by flurried hack, upon a loom of common cause.

Righteous was their wrath and beautiful.

She would tell all of this joy to her dad.

Her sister Jenna too, whose prom would be a cakewalk after this.

Through a turmoil of bodies, slapping and smacking in earnest-by God, the dance only hinted at it-Tweed saw her means of ingress. She seized it, rode it in, war whoops in her throat, her hand coming down, no choice really in what prize she would slice off, all of it a matter of fate and luck.

Like a coelacanth's mouth still moist from feeding, a meaty flesh-hole wuttered up at her. Its wet, red, ragged regret ovaled out to yield a slice of organ.

Slash! She held it against the blade as she pulled out, a nub of gore trapped between thumb and steel. Ms. Foddereau's butchery class paid off in spades.

"I got a nipple!" Dex screamed. "I got a nipple!"

Tweed became Dex's magnet, retiring with him upstage. Behind them, the pounding and battering of bodies kept up. In another moment, the killer would be reduced to bone, and soon that would be divvied up as well.

Tweed tugged at Dex's sleeve. "Look," she said. "Our teachers are up to their elbows in it too."

The air was misty with blood. But the spray was fine enough, atomized even, that they clearly saw Nurse Gaskin sail in; Claude Versailles, whose outsized body belied the deftness of his killer cuts; Ms. Brindisi, Miss Phipps, Mr. Buttweiler, and the others.

Tweed billowed with pride in Corundum High.

Out of a night of trauma, they were pulling together. Students and faculty alike.

For all the hell they had endured, a special bond would unite them forever, a bond as tight and conjoining as the mad janitor's futtered body was loose and undergoing disjointure.

Tweed gripped her bloody prize and smiled at Dex, who beamed back at her and held up the ruddy whorl of his catch.

Something jinged like a spun quarter at her feet. She looked down. "A key," she said.

It was gold and thick and angled. The word YALE gleamed upon it.

"The key to the padlock on the front door is my guess," said Dex. He bent to pick it up. "The one he took from the sheriff."

Tweed touched it in Dex's hand. Hard planes. The key was wet from the janitor's futtering, warm from his pocket.

She slid a finger along its length. She kept sliding, clasped Dex's hand, palm to palm, the key to their salvation trapped between.

Then she lost herself in her boyfriend's eyes.

24. The Mouths of Babes

Friday, October twenty-sixth.

Jonquil Brindisi, her long legs crossed, sat in Claude's generous futon chair, sipping a banana daiquiri as she listened to Futzy Buttweiler and Delia Gaskin hold forth from the couch.

Futzy had called them all together, the major players who had survived the prom. They needed some sort of closure, he said, and he was right.

A lot of changes had come down.

Claude had divorced his wives and swiftly remarried. His new mates? The couple Jonquil herself had lusted after until the state of their earlobes had cooled her passions.

The three of them sat now in clunky dining room chairs, listening and nodding.

Lovey-dovey motherfuckers.

Futzy had replaced his pair of hellions with Adora Phipps. While they insisted a third would surely come along any day now, Jonquil doubted they were looking in any serious way.

And no secret to anyone and not a scandal to the unbigoted, Delia Gaskin, while maintaining the fiction of a separate residence, was deep in lust with Bix Donner's widows, Trilby and Brest, their threesome a virtual marriage.

Trilby's little whistleblower knelt alone on the living room carpet. Pill busied herself with a deck of cards, some weird sorting exercise whose rules only an eight-year-old could divine.

Near Pill sat Tweed and her kid sister Jenna, crosslegged on pillows. They bookended a chipper Dexter Poindexter, who had replaced a slaughtered bank clerk at First National soon after the prom.

"Now that the media brouhaha has died down," continued Futzy, Adora's loving eyes on him, "I thought a nice quiet evening of putting the pieces together would benefit us all."

Claude nodded and spoke. "A final look at things, one last breath and benediction before we move on with our lives. Is that what you mean?"

Jonquil, bemused, said nothing.

What a load of crap this was. Were they a bunch of fucking wimps? She could take on such a night again easily. Truth be told, she missed it already. The terror, the hunt, the futtering of the crazy janitor whose bones she had wanted to leap but had ended up breaking instead.

Might it somehow happen again?

She thrilled at the thought.

"Yes," said Nurse Gaskin. "Victims of major traumas tend to obsess about them. We should look on this retelling as a ritual signpost, a mark of punctuation on the way to healing."