Slaughterhouse High Part 22

Then his tongue resumed, a wet rouse where their lips conjoined, perfect union, his head giving her its ardency as he rhythmed there.

She glanced at Pim, who was getting off in that special way of hers. Pim looked like a soft pink dream without clothing. And her squirmsa"as Condor, intimately lip-zipped, lapped hera"seemed to say, Robe me in all the world's wonders, wash me in sunlight, let perfect ecstasy swallow me up.

Altoona stretched her right hand toward her girlfriend and Pim seized it in that sweet grip.

Life radiated upon her oval face.

This moment felt like a pinnacle of bliss, which surely it was. Yet it was the beginning of something even greater.

Oh, Jesus.

Her kneeling boy-lover, with his lashable back, killer tush, and steely smile, swept her up into a yummy rhythm. Her joy began to rise again. "That," she said to Blayne. "Yes, that."

Pim's right hand was stroking Condor's hair. "Honey, he's so good," she said to Altoona, almost as if her new boyfriend wasn't there, almost as if he were a trained monkey that couldn't understand. "His mouth is so f.u.c.king incredi . . . mmmm . . . oh, yeah!"

Altoona winced. She nodded, unable to speak one word as the tremors seized her. Her hips swayed as Blayne's head moved in perfect harmony. Their blent love surged upward.

Then a hand appeared on Pim's head, grasping her hair and yanking back so hard that her neck made a snapping sound. A blade came across the arched skin, opened up a red blurt-and-spill down the curve of her body and a cascade of blood onto Condor's side-turned head.

A face emerged.

It came toward her.

Blayne struggled below, panic in his eye.

The hand came in rough and scrabbly at her head, her hair, hanks yanked back, a crude tug that wrenched a neck muscle.

Just as the face registered with her, the name rus.h.i.+ng in, a tautness bloomed in her throat, too fast for her hands to avert it, then a hot outgush along her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and belly, cooling as it came, and no-breath, nothing, nothingness closed upon her.

13. Unearned Sighs of Relief.

Kyla followed Patrice into the gym.

For maybe ten token minutes, they had half-heartedly searched for their cla.s.smates' corpses. To h.e.l.l with school spirit. Then they headed back to the gym to wait for the bodies to be found and brought in.

A bridge had been crossed.

Kyla saw it in the teachers' faces and in the way the chaperones looked at everybody.

Though the grown-ups remained aloof, a new bond, a bond of adulthood, had begun to form between them and the returning survivors.

Mostly, Kyla didn't feel grown up.

But an essential part of her did.

On the bandstand, riding above soft cymbal brus.h.i.+ngs and steady ba.s.s drum thumps, Jiminy Jones noodled ineptly on his downturned muted trumpet. He had one of those bulb-mutes in, the kind that laced his playing with silvery silken regret and caresses that zinged straight to the heart.

"Oh, Kyla," whined Patrice.

Kyla followed her lover's eyes.

She wasn't looking at Pesky and Flense, their bodies lying there like broken dolls beneath the Ice Ghoul's triumphant leer. Nor was she wasting time on the princ.i.p.al, who stood by Miss Phipps holding his speech notes, pale and really upset about something.

No.

Patrice's eyes were trained on Fido Jenner. One hand was stuck in his pants pocket. In the other, he held a paper cup.

Bowser stood beside him.

They were grinning.

Why? Because that slim tramp Peach, Cobra's girla"or from the look of it, Cobra's ex-girla"was talking them up, fondling their friends.h.i.+p lobes, hipping and breasting and just generally slinking outrageously before them.

"He's breaking my heart," Patrice went on.

"You can't push the river, sweetie," Kyla said, trying to be as gentle as she could. "If it wants to flow toward us, it will. Besides, he'd have to break up with Bowser, if we were to have a prayer."

Or she and Patrice would have to break up, but Kyla didn't mention that.

Petulant: "Bowser McPhee isn't worthy of Fido. He never has been. And he never will be. It looks to me like Peach is doing one heck of a job pus.h.i.+ng her river."

Kyla stopped feeding her whining girlfriend. She was feeling jubilant as all get-out. There they were, numbered among the survivors!

Too bad about Pesky.

Too bad about Flense.

But the important thing was that she and Patrice had made it. They were alive and free, a rush of exhilaration coursing through her.

Odd, how you could be shackled and never know it till someone took a sledgehammer to your bonds and set you free.

"I could use some food."

"Get some for me too, okay?" Patrice said, dole-eyed above sultry trumpet sorrow. "I don't want to go near him."

"Sure."

Kyla headed off.

Patrice was a tad bit irritating. Kyla had heard that all sorts of splits and new pairings, and sometimes the beginning of threesomes, were often precipitated by surviving the kill.

That was what Fido seemed to be engaged in.

And Peach's scuzzy boyfriend, Cobra, was hip-deep in conversation witha"of all peoplea"Sandy Gunderloy and Rocky Stark. He was staring at the cheerleader's b.r.e.a.s.t.s, pretending he wasn't upset at Peach's having deserted him.

The creep was miffed though, powerful miffed. Kyla could tell.

Cl.u.s.ters of kids stood around jabbering about the dead girls. Kyla skirted their conversations, the perfect eavesdropper, not being asked to join in, of course. That never happened.

The long table of food drew nearer. This was a special night. A binge was definitely in order. The cold cuts called to her in all their splendor.

Kyla glanced back.

Poor Mr. b.u.t.tweiler hadn't moved a muscle. He stood by the bandstand, Miss Phipps talking at him. Something was definitely bothering their princ.i.p.al. Something besides his dead daughter.

He just stood there staring at the Ice Ghoul and at the b.l.o.o.d.y couple splayed before it.

Kyla wondered what special h.e.l.l he was in that could bring such a low, mean, sorrowful look to his face.

Each kill affirmed the rightness.

And the righteousness.

There'd been a concern that conscience might get in the way. Antiquated, wrongheaded conceit.

Come right down to it, these were acts of love, acts that helped heal wounds.

Killing the compromised punkf.u.c.ks in the costume shop had been a joy. The bloodrush down torsos, the crimson that painted b.r.e.a.s.t.s, bore a certain savage grace.

Consumed by the heat of perverse l.u.s.t, the writhing wantons had, in an instant, flopped dead and cold.

This Pimlico and her Altoona may have jerked about like severed frogslegs as they died. It was impossible to tell, what with their blood-splashed guyf.u.c.ks struggling to unzip their mouths from the girls' v.u.l.v.as as the knifeblade opened the throat of one, then the other.

Then, peace reigned everywhere.

Bright, red, wet, and full of love in the costume shop's pure lighta"such was the calm, a calm more like a cathedral than a high school.

The corpses could have been left the way they were. But it offended one's aesthetics.

Far better to unzip them, despite the sticky blood-bother. Things went smoother, now that the struggles had ceased.

Death simplified matters.

Stick the boys together first. Lined up, rolled out, facing each other, the d.a.m.ned zippers didn't match up, both pulls located on the right lower lip.

Slide one boy around.

Slick leather made the pivot easy, Condor's chin to Blayne's nose and vice versa, the two of them stretched out thin as rolled dough oozed over with burbles of cherry liqueur.

Clots between the zipper teeth made the going tough. But at last, twice over, an upper lip was successfully joined to a lower.

Touching. An insufferably cute kissing pair of b.l.o.o.d.y punkf.u.c.k lowlife losers.

Then a rack of Beefeater costumes was wheeled free of the crammed congestion. Bulky red and black uniforms harrumphed to the floor, moth-musty padded stuff that three years before had strutted and sung, beneath the baton of Jiminy Jones, in a failed attempt at light opera.

The dead zip-mouths were heavy little f.u.c.ks. But eventually they made it over the thick metal bar, Blayne's nape creased and deeply lined from the weight of his corpse, the abrupt angle of his back-bent head, the wide open smile opened in his neck, the lipstrain of his best bud's zipped body pulling down on the other side.

They looked uncomfortable indeed.

Their skin might give, before anyone found them.

Then again, it might not.

Time for the naked girls, flops of meat and bone that had once tantalized. There was no attraction here now. But the light falling harsh on lifeless, blood-splashed skin carried a certain charm. It touched memories. It soothed them. It gave a.s.surance that this act was not only just but that love's revenge demanded it.

The girls proved more difficult to get right.

Dragging Pim on top of Altoona was easy, one dead face skull-smacking the other.

But managing the zippers was hard.

All that leg flesh. Thighs. The gleam of matched niobium between the a.n.u.ses was the only part visible, that and the zipper pulls.

No room to maneuver there. None.

These two had been lovers, of which the world was owed proof. Not to zip them together simply wouldn't do. They required the same treatment as the boys, to be racked up there, hanging over the big iron bar by their parts.

Visions of cooked chicken arose, one leg snapped aside to reach meat. Dig a knee into the small of the back, grasp the right thigh with both arms, and lever it sharply up, using every ounce of strengtha"that was the way to proceed.

Something snapped, a dull pop, a thigh bone dislocated. Discoloration bruised the stretched flesh, a major vein broken by exertion.

But it allowed sufficient access.

The girl's zipper pull slipped over its first tooth and drew up nicely.

An obedient little mechanism.

Her left leg bent back more easily than her right.

There was only one slight v.u.l.v.al snag, halfway up. But backtracking a few zip-teeth set things right again.

Jesus, the lifting! It deepened one's respect for the poor joes who load haunches of beef onto meat trucks.

At last the females were up, slid onto the bar next to the dead boys but not touching them. Propriety had to be maintained.

Heads down. Blood would have dripped from them if there'd been any left.

The stocky onea"it felt wrong to call this dead thing Altoonaa"threatened the balance. But the other girl's oddly angled, disjointed thighs tipped sufficiently in the opposing direction to steady them on the clothesrack.

As the rack rumbled toward the pa.s.sageway, the foursome swayed like commuters on a subway car.

It would be good to position them where the others would discover them.