Slaughterhouse High Part 15

Thank G.o.d for Notorious, he thought, realizing the addictive purpose it served even as he craved the hit.

Thank G.o.d there were folks rotten enough to fry in public each year, not just for the s.e.xual thrill it provideda"considerable, certainlya"but also to divert the minds of anxious moms and dads across the nation.

Removing the towel, Matthew strapped on his Private Flogger, molded like a slug to his back, and turned it to Warmup. It sensed the contours of his muscles and their firmness, reminding him of heating pads applied to stiff necks as a boy.

Grabbing a Futterware container of coconut-oil on his nightstand, he made a nest out of his pillows and zapped on the TV.

National coverage of prom night. An East Coast map smattered with sporadic dots of early returns. At this point, the commentary consisted mainly of glib history and idle chatter.

Another station, a local Topeka business channel, scream-gabbled a pitch to survivors, showing a slashed red X simultaneously crossing out a cartoon picnicker and a box on an org-chart, urging its viewers to Call This Number Now!

Then Matthew found the channel he wanted.

Boggs Fleester, hair gray and combed back in perfect coif, sprang into his bedroom not two feet from the foot of the bed.

"Over my shoulder," he said in measured tones, "you can see the electric chair in which our two reprobates will fry."

Fleester wasn't really in the execution room. You could tell that. Soon, the distinguished newsman would fade. The electric chair and its surround would surge out of a flat background into vivid holographic prominence.

As Fleester's voice jauntily recounted the couples' rampage upon a Rhode Island school bus of elementary kids, Matthew glared feverishly at the clock. Come on, he thought. Stuck at twenty-five past eight. Get the d.a.m.ned show on the road.

Tweed, a vision in pink chiffon, beamed at the front door. "Good night."

She was dancing now, fearful at Corundum High, slow and close and clinging to Dex, or giving and getting blows in a frenzied bout of slap'n'smack prior to dispersal twenty minutes away, the slash achieved by nine.

She might, his pride and joy might . . . no, shut it out.

Fleester wrapped up and faded. The music took on intensity. The grim cell moved forward, the chair growing greater both wide and tall, like the Christmas tree in The Nutcracker.

Off to the left, an inset bubble hovered, inside it the executioner beside her dials and the two men chosen to pleasure her, naked except for the obligatory lobebags the FCC and common decency insisted upon.

Matthew sobbed.

A cell door opened on the right. In were marched the twosome, stripped, pa.s.sive, doped up, and resigned.

Gritting his teeth, Matthew turned his Flogger to Low. The first lash fell with a pain that stung and diverted. He oiled his bare left lobe and his gens until the flesh flushed and stiffened. To the suggestiveness of the music he surrendered himself.

The aroma coming from the TV had a sufficient dankness about it to be convincing.

A sizzle of fire flared across Matthew's right shoulder, Cam's favorite place to flog him.

His darling wife Cam had birthed Tweed into the world, then Jenna, and loved them both dearly. Now she was gone, Arly with her, in that awful accident.

Soon Tweed would . . . no!

Matthew's hand fumbled as he notched it up, wincing at the increase in depth and frequency.

The couple were strapped in, the woman belted upside down, mouth to groin, groin to mouth. The executioner, her nipples hidden by two rotating male scalps, began to play with the dials.

They writhed as Matthew focused desperately on his own arousal. Uncensored black and white projections danced over their skin.

Funny, how the image of naked lovelobes posed no problem if they were grainy and contorted on curves of flesh. Yet the couple's lobes were crudely bagged. And the executioner's, bared now for action, had been expertly cubed out.

The condemned couplea"sc.u.m b.i.t.c.h and b.a.s.t.a.r.d, by any measurea"might in other circ.u.mstances have enjoyed the pain. But it was one thing to choose to have a lover inflict torment in measured doses within established limits. It was quite another to endure punishment, that would only worsen unto death, from that grim-faced invasive third called The State.

Matthew's arousal was progressing well. A lovely commonality of pull and tug, complementary and compelling, had arisen between his hands.

But the executioner's tinny voice, catching rhythm from another realm, threw a grit of grain into the turning cogs. Tweed at the door. "Good night." A vision in pink, her smile. Dex too so full of promise, his hands thrust to the cuffs into his tux pockets.

The execution on TV was suddenly nothing but sound and fury. Matthew, his p.e.n.i.s emblooded and his lobemeat throbbing beneath his ear, stabbed Mute and paused the flogger.

Hugging eight forty-five. He should have turned the d.a.m.ned clock to the wall!

Fifteen minutes to Tweed's phone call if she had been spared. She would make her way back from her a.s.signed spot, pa.s.sing pay phones, banks of them throughout the building.

He had given her plenty of quarters. More than she needed. He was surprised Tweed hadn't jingled as she left the house.

Matthew rose from the bed. He paced, still erect below, his stiffness a bother. He circled the projection. With the sound off, it seemed unreal.

How could people act the way these two had?

So many children so remorselessly used.

A sheen of floor dirt coated the wrinkles of the woman's soles where her feet hung, knee-bent, above the man's shoulders. He was gripping the arms of the chair, his p.e.n.i.s limp upon her cheek.

They had died an hour ago of course. Maybe more. East Coasters were already sated on this couple's prolonged miseries. West Coasters were still awaiting the arrival of dates.

Even the executioner, in her holographic bubble writhing under eager tongues, was in reality on her way home. Maybe she was even concerned with her kid brother's welfare that night at school.

Eight fifty.

This was unbearable.

Year after year, he had taught the prom kill in his soph.o.m.ore history cla.s.s as though it were nothing, accepted practice, forgetting the agony he himself had gone through at eighteen.

But it had torqued him, way back then.

It had turned him moody and morose as he turned fifteen. More adult, his folks had said. Until in college, junior year, he had lightened up, discovered song buried in the depths of his wounded heart, and let joy burst from his mouth.

Now, heaven help him, he had delivered his daughter into that same maw.

Even now, she might be . . .

He cut off the thought, a wash of fever at his brow.

Ten more minutes. Give it ten.

She would call. It would be okay. He could breathe easier then.

He thumbed the Flogger, nearly losing his balance as a laser lash seared across his back.

Settling once more into his nest on the bed, Matthew punched up the sound and dug his eyes deep into the couple with the images crawling across their skin.

His flesh and hers hissed beneath a languid electrocution. But that was d.a.m.ned f.u.c.king okay with Matthew, they were such slimy s.h.i.+ts and good only at the end of their lives (the woman's urine now caught the man full in the face, blinking to avert it) for keeping legions of distraught moms and dads from going insane.

Matthew's fingers scooped up fresh dollops of coconut oil and slathered them on. His penile and lobate tissue responded anew.

Upon the woman's inverted back, a helmeted slitted dome of flesh eased past the thin lips of a blush-lobed lady. Across the man's hairy thigh, twitching beneath a surge, somebody's hand worked a digitally enhanced earlobe deep inside a gaping v.a.g.i.n.a.

Matthew regained the rhythm.

It lived in the pounding of the music, in the agony of voices, in the faint aroma of roast pork that seeped out of his system (a prelude to the char to come), and in the interwoven throbs of incessantly moving flesh.

He caught that rhythm. He rode it, honed by years of viewing, years of coaxing himself, and being coaxed so by caring lovers, toward the twin consummation of lobe and lingam.

On his way.

9. By the Book.

Tweed's chops were just about blown.

The dance band's frantic swing through non-stop chartsa"heavy on the 'bones and light on the restsa"had been more grueling this year than last.

Even the slow numbers felt manic.

Bongo by her side, grabbing at catch-breaths, had been his typical goofball self.

But Dex, Dol, Estlin, and a half-dozen other seniors had acted like square pegs in round holes, hurtling along familiar routes of sound toward two unlucky cla.s.smates' moment of truth.

Tweed had been relieved to see Mr. Versailles filling in as chaperone. It meant he wasn't this year's slasher.

But the bristling boxes of riding crops that appeared beside the stage made Tweed shudder, not because she hadn't delivered and received their bare-backed pleasures a time or two in her young life. No, but because when they were dispersed, it would mean that Princ.i.p.al b.u.t.tweiler's opening remarks were done and that the moment had arrived to go where the envelope directed, waiting there and cowering.

"The prunes are hot for blood," Bongo cupped into her right ear as she counted.

Glancing into chaperone corner, Tweed saw Mr. and Mrs. Borgstrom edged now on their chairs, in their seventies and shriveled, the adoptive mom and pop of a junior boy whose hair was black and whose ways were sullen and sulky. Their jaws had notches, discolored jags that marked each year they had been married, a practice fallen away in the fifties.

Then the count clicked over in her brain and her horn rose to join in the final verse of "Lobe Town Blues," a dirge filled with quirky delights and a chance for each section to show off.

Festus Targer, his cymbal s.h.i.+mmering beneath them, held them back. Festus had it in him, a.s.suming he survived next year's prom, to make it big as a drummer.

Jiminy Jones nodded an okay at the princ.i.p.al, who was chatting, hands in his coat pockets, with Nurse Gaskin among the chaperones. Mr. Jones' pudgy fingers brought the band to a skillful close, his satisfied smile's peculiar clash with her fears reminding Tweed how remote his age made him from the coming sacrifice.

The applause seemed heartfelt. Jiminy bowed, waved a section at a time to its feet, then the full ensemble.

Tweed put the trombone, sectioned, back into its case. She wondered who would next rea.s.semble it. Herself? Or its inheritor?

Dex's hand held the envelope. His features were strained.

d.a.m.n the rules, she thought. It was insanea"her dad more right than she had given him credit fora"that people as whole and good as Dexter Poindexter fell each year under the red blade of the slasher. He had promised her father protection he couldn't possibly deliver, but she vowed that she would fight to save Dex too, if it came to that.

Pa.s.sivity and paralysis were not her style.

Nor his.

Tweed took Dex's hand.

They shared a nervous embrace.

"Ready?" he asked.

"There's gonna be one dead teacher," said Tweed, "if he even tries to hurt you."

Dex smiled. "We'll waste him."

Princ.i.p.al b.u.t.tweiler stood off to the left on a floor scattered with s.h.a.gs of sawdust.

His hands were crossed straight-arm below his belt, a slim packet of index cards down-angled in one hand. His nods and smiles were more perfunctory than usual, rotating lights turning his strained face blue, then orange, then a sickly shade of yellow.

The poor man had been dealt a savage blow. But Tweed's sympathy did nothing to dampen the chill she felt as his eyes fell upon her and Dex, deep and unmistakable (or was she just on edge?), the message they shouted: "You two are the ones. Tonight we're going to see you bleed, mourn you, futter you, use the stoppage of your young hearts to remember this night by."

Dex drew her along into the light-shade-light of their horded cla.s.smates, come down now, all of them, from the bleachers. They huddled close to the mike where Jiminy Jones had announced each number and where the princ.i.p.al stood, adjusting the mikestand upward.

Nurse Gaskin felt Bix Donner's needy eyes bore into the back of her head. It was hard, wanting to engage this absurd man's spouses in conversation, but knowing that any attempt she made would be interpreted by Bix as encouragement.

When Futzy approached her, Delia had squinted so as to pretend harsh lights were her reason for rotating the axis of their conversation. But in fact it had been to put Mister Pinhead a.s.shole out of eyeshot.

Now Futzy was knuckling the mike head.

The princ.i.p.al wore his humiliation with dignity. Futzy's lobes reminded her of those of his slain daughter Kitty, Delia's lost heartthrob two decades before.

"Is this on?" he said. "Can everyone hear me?"

The man had cla.s.s. He didn't even look at them as he asked the question, striking a pose for the ages. They were pieces of s.h.i.+ta"he knew it and so did shea"and a deserved flush was about to take place. He would flush 'em all, as would she, if that were possible.

"It's a momentous night, isn't it, boys and girls?" he began. "In the petting-zoo portion of your time here, we pampered you. While you cut open frogs and pig embryos, we did the same to your brains. We felt along runnels of thought and redirected rivers. And now, poised to leave this slaughterhouse, you, or rather a token couple from those here gathered, shall be sacrificed."

Delia surveyed the faces, mapped memories of a broken arm, prankish debaggings, sneers, jeers, the flow of a dispensatory river of pills and liquids, the probings of countless needles beneath baby-smooth and zit-infested skina"all of it recalling to mind what this graduating cla.s.s meant to her.

She had been their nurse, seen their health impaired, and healed them.

"You and you. And you." He pointed to three seniors close to Delia. "Distribute these riding crops. This is not a new tool, surely, to many of you. It symbolizes the pain I and my staff have taught you to inflict and endure. With care, these crops will last many years. You have found a first love at this schoola"or, in some cases, the school has had to find one for you, pairing you for an eveninga""