Slaughterhouse High Part 25

She found other reasons to wonder.

There was something strange about Flense's body. The solid white of her gown was now wet with blood. It hadn't been so when they carried her in. An inner wound only now soaking through? Jonquil didn't think so.

"You have pa.s.sed a very important stage in your life, a stage that . . . ." Futzy paused.

A blotch suddenly bloomed on Flense's right breast, a bright red blotch completely separate from the ribside Jonquil had been looking at.

The blood wasn't coming from inside Flense at all.

From Pesky? Not a chance. Her corpse faced another way.

Jonquil looked up, noting moisture on the Ice Ghoul's cheek, a drop at the tip of its beakish nose. Leaks in the roof, Claude had guessed. She watched the drop elongate and detach. A spangle of rain. She fancied she could see the spatter hit Flense and widen the red blotch.

A neuron fired in Jonquil's brain.

Not water. Not water at all.

"My friends," said Futzy, departing from his text, "I have to admit to some confusion. Sheriff Blackburn should have been here by now."

That was true, thought Jonquil. Futzy had made no big deal about it, which was perhaps why she hadn't noticed it before. Ordinarily, the sheriff would remove the padlock from the gym's outer door and slip in. By now, he should have been standing by the bandstand, ready to spout his drivel about the community, their new role in it, all that grown-up c.r.a.p.

"What gives?" Claude came up beside her.

"I don't know."

"But there's something far worse," said Futzy, "than the sheriff's absence."

"Oh my," Claude murmured, "our beloved leader's about to lose it."

"With good reason, I'm afraid," she said. Through a sea of bobbing heads, near chaperone corner, she noticed the strange couple, Brayton and his date. They had this look, a look that bespoke knowledge.

Interesting.

Something more than bloodl.u.s.t wriggled its sensuous way through Jonquil. She felt, in that tip-tilted gym, as if they were all standing on the deck of a vast ship. Below them, a boiler stoked with ragea"more rage than Jonquil had felt in yearsa"was poised to explode.

Futzy's halting words, the blood dripping from above, the odd couple whose presence somehow tied it all togethera"these things caressed her so violently, she teetered on the brink of jumping her snooty colleague's bones right there on the dance floor.

On Flense's chest, fingers of blood stretched to grope the dead girl's breast, a clotted palm moist upon her nipple.

"The slain pair you have brought in . . . ," said Futzy.

Oh my G.o.d, Jonquil thought. Sometimes you knew, by the way someone began, how they'd end.

And he did. "The slain pair you have brought in," he repeated, "are not those who were slated to die."

There was a beat before the sound began.

Then it was suddenly there, like waves of ants scurrying underfoot at the destruction of their anthill.

Jonquil herself gave a sharp ah, her hand to her mouth. She saw Brayton squint and grab his date's arm. Raven had gone white, but the starch hadn't left her face, that stubborn grit Jonquil had found so alluring when they met.

"Pescadera Carbone and her escort are not the designated victims. I . . ."

"Great," said Claude over the tumult. "Just when the school needs a true leader, our beloved Futzy crumbles."

Then the tenders whose birth timing and the luck of the draw had spared came deadmarching into the gym with their dates. A couple of wrestlers carried the corpses of Butch and Zinc.

"Oh my G.o.d." This over the mike. "Sheriff Blackburn should be . . . does anyone know where the sheriff is?"

A second dead couple, one of them a tender.

Jonquil felt her knees buckle at the sight. She clung to Claude's arm, moved in, wanting so badly to kiss him.

But he reared back. "Wait now," came his objection.

Then she heard the sound above, like a diver leaving a springboard. She looked up and saw the falling body.

Impressions through colored light. Something unraveling. A sandbag. Stocky like their missing sheriff. It was Sheriff Blackburn, his eyes bugged out in disbelief, thin glistening erections of zoom. It made not an ounce of sense.

Then he hit the end of the rope, a groan and hold above, and the glistening erections shot from his eyes.

What were they?

One smashed on the floor and skittered like a scattering of hockey pucks. Ice, thought Jonquil. Icicles. But the other hurtled through the air, a javelin, straight toward Jiminy Jones.

If instinct hadn't made him wince and try to sidestep it, the icicle would have whisked past him. As it was, he flinched into its path, took it full in the right eye, and reared back like a catcher's mitt on the rebound.

Without a sound of protest, he fell backward. His trumpet dropped from his hands. A clatter of crumpled bra.s.s rang out where it fell. The dying bandleader twitched on the risers.

At his rope's end, the sheriff jinged this way and that, a naysaying puppet saying No! No! No! then oscillating into dead sways.

Amid the screams and shouts that surrounded them, Jonquil, helpless in Claude's capable arms, rang in with a triple o.r.g.a.s.m, wave upon wave of fear and l.u.s.t and anger informing it, full out.

15. b.u.t.tweiler in Charge.

Futzy felt baffled, befuddled.

Never in the history of Corundum High had things gone awry at the prom. Sure, one or two inept slasher-teachers had been killed by their intended victims. But that was a turnabout to be expected every so often.

What confronted the princ.i.p.al tonight was sheer madness.

He spoke above the hubbub. For a time, his personal problems took a back seat to this new urgency. His head felt as if it might explode, but somehow his words gathered authority.

"Students," he said. "Students."

They ignored him, churning like thick taffy.

"Students." Calm, persistent.

At the corner of Futzy's eye, Jiminy Jones's body twitched. Brest and Trilby, standing with Bix by the refreshments, rushed into the hallway and were gone. Futzy had heard a rumor that their daughter was holed up in the school. More than likely, they had gone to check on her.

A nub of crowd started to drift that way. Futzy couldn't have that.

"Students."

They were quieting. The sheriff's sway at rope's end had settled slow and easy, like a tire swing.

"You all need to get a grip on yourselves. Get a grip. Calm down and get a grip."

He repeated the phrase, trying to seize on their chattering minds.

"Get a grip. That's it. You can do it. Stay here. Stay right here in the gym. It's the safest place to be. The killer could be anywhere out there. There's safety in numbers."

Use fear to halt the ma.s.s exodus before it begins.

"I want you to spread calm. Not panic. There's no need for panic. Hold one another. a.s.sure one another. We're in control here."

Jesus, what a lie.

"Teachers and chaperones, please make your way to the bandstand. That's it. Steady as she goes. We're in control here. We'll figure out the best course of action and restore order, calm, peace, serenity. That's it. We're doing fine. Everything's under control."

Adora Phipps was standing close by.

Elwood Dunsmore sidled his way through the crowd on the right.

Jonquil Brindisi, clutching Claude Versailles' arm, wore a strange shiny-eyed smile as they approached.

"You folks are handling this just fine."

He raised one finger in a be-right-back gesture. Then he crouched at the edge of the riser.

The Borgstroms, the white-haired notched elders, had risen and were coming forward.

Nurse Gaskin hesitated, unsure whether faculty and chaperones meant her. Futzy motioned her over, blue dress, short dark hair, Kitty's age had she lived.

"Delia," he said to the nurse, "try to find Gerber so we can get the lights turned on full. Elwood, I want you and . . ." Brest Donner's husband Bix arrived on the left. "I want you and Bix to hack down the sheriff's body, if you will. Then toss a blanket or something over Jiminy Jones. Please."

"No problem, Futzy," said Elwood, his army brainwashing kicking in. Bix looked less certain. But he nodded and started to leave with the shop teacher.

"Oh, wait, Elwood." Almost let him get away. Chaos contrived sometimes to muddle the brain.

"Something else?"

"You don't have a key to the front padlock?"

"No, sir. Only the sheriff has that."

"Search him. I doubt you'll find it. How soon could you saw through the padlock? It's pretty thick."

Dunsmore grimaced. "h.e.l.l'd freeze over first. Maybe an acetylene torch. Get one from the shop, wheel it over, heat up the steel, lever a blast of oxygen at it, we ought to be through in two minutes. I'll need to have a look at the lock though. They've come up with a new tempered steel that resists just about everything."

"Try it anyway." Futzy dismissed him. "Jonquil, take over the mike. Talk about the vices in that winning way of yours. Harden them. Calm them. Make them ready for whatever might be coming down the pike."

"What about you?" Jonquil asked, a defiant little b.i.t.c.h as usual, forever implying inadequacies in him.

"I'll be back soon. I'm going to my officea""

"I'll go with you," Miss Phipps chimed in.

"a"try the phone there, call for help if the line's up, get my gun in any case. Claude, check the pay phones. Rumor has it they're dead, but I want to be sure. Be super cautious out there and return straight to the gym when you're done, give Jonquil some backup at the mike."

"How about us?" Mr. Borgstrom radiated a soft savage bloodl.u.s.t that was lovely to behold. "What can we do?"

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 cla.s.s.

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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 princ.i.p.al 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 cla.s.smates.

Her boyfriend shivered audibly.

"Oh, Dex, I'm scared."

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