Slaughterhouse High Part 31

The least they could do was to arm themselves with real cleavers, not the futtering ones, sharp but small, that hung from everyone's belt.

"Kyla, I'm scared," whined Patrice. It had become an annoying mantra, as if admitting her fear could ward off the thing that frightened her.

Kyla's cowardly lover didn't even expect an answer. But Fido, who had settled into a litany of rea.s.surance, piped up: "We'll be fine, honey lamb. He won't get us."

Kyla understood they were both stressed to the max. But so was she.

And she didn't like how it felt when the three of them were under pressure. If indeed they survived the night, she thought there was a good chance their relations.h.i.+p wouldn't.

Kyla held open the gla.s.s door to the butchery wing, nose-wrinkling whiffs of gore lifting off the tile and wood as they pa.s.sed. She followed after Patrice and Fido.

The stench of slaughter raised her hackles.

Curiously, it comforted her as well.

Very few students were roaming these blood-encrusted halls. Kyla guessed it was because butchery, the favorite subject of few, was far too near the night's events.

Patrice, on the other hand, loved it.

As did she.

The two of them had in fact first met, first touched eyes, over the b.l.o.o.d.y spews of a lopped chicken head. Their love, such as it was, had grown out of the slaughter of pigs and lambs and wide-eyed cattle, neck slice, abrupt collapse of unsteady legs. They had a history here, she and Patrice Menuci.

"I don't like this," said Fido.

Maybe, thought Kyla, Fido were best to have remained a fantasy. The reality was beginning to wear thin.

"It's okay, baby," Patrice simpered back. "We'll get us some steel and hole up somewhere until they rescue us."

"In here," Kyla said.

Over many years, mists of gore, especially during finals week, had turned the grout between the tiles from tan to rust. Ditto the hinges of the doors. This door's pattern of bloodspray was nearly invisible, so much a part of the woodgrain had it become.

They slipped through.

A wall of cutlery winked at them from behind Miss Smiling-b.i.t.c.h Foddereau's chopping block. On the pegboard, chalked outlines surrounded each tool.

There were missing knives. But then a few knives had always been missing, gone astray over years of instruction and never replaced.

"Take two each," said Kyla.

She reached her heavy arms upward for her favorite hackers and hewers, huffing from the exertion. Kyla loved the heft of them, their shaped grips and perfect balance.

Fido and Patrice obeyed, laying hands on the pegboard as if it were a prayer wall and they were penitents. They came away clutching the handles of honed steel.

"What now?" Patrice asked.

She held two long carving knives, severed leg ends of a gleaming insect.

Fido had found a pair of meat cleavers.

Kyla looked at Fido and Patrice. Bedroom longings rose in her at the s.e.xtuple threat of violence that filled their fists.

In the meaty air, soft wafts of l.u.s.t blew past her nostrils.

If this be life, thought Kyla, let it last forever.

Outside the band room door, Trilby hugged her little girl. Delia Gaskin had taken Brest inside to view Bix's body. Soon she would come out for Trilby.

Pill had stopped talking altogether.

Trilby thought she had seen Pill at her most frightened. But her father's death, announced so vividly at the bandstand by Delia, had driven her deeper into herself. She had shut down, drawn in tighter, her skin almost bloodless, near as white as meringue.

"It's okay, Pill," she said.

But it wasn't.

The door opened.

Delia and Brest emerged arm in arm. Brest's eyes were moist. She gave Trilby a dour look.

It seemed out of place, since Brest had, many years before, confided having fallen out of love with their husband. But even withered feelings of affection tend to sink their hooks deep into one's heart, early and enduring.

"Pill?" The girl clung to her, trying to bury herself in her mother's body. "Stay with Brest now. I need to leave you for just a little while."

Pill's fingernails deepened uncomfortably, crab claws at Trilby's back. The child moaned.

It was unbearable.

Trilby wanted to embrace her always. But she needed to see Bix in death's grip, needed the grim closure it would provide.

Brest knelt and tried to pry their daughter free. Pill's moan became a whine, then a keening.

"There, there," Trilby soothed.

Pill was a sight. A shattered child who couldn't bear, for one second, the denial of her mother's embrace.

But at last, the three of them overcame her resistance, and like a magnet giving up one steel surface for another, she lunged for Brest, almost knocking her over with the zeal of her need.

Brest awkwardly patted Pill's back, starting several times to speak but saying nothing.

Delia prompted Trilby to rise. How kind and full of caring she is, Trilby thought.

Inside the band room, the air was rank with warring odors of death.

Bix's bowels had emptied. The night before, Brest had made spaghetti. From years of marriage, Trilby knew how spaghetti altered Bix's bathroom smells. That smell now infused the band room, stenchy, homey, strangely comforting yet out of place.

Her eyes fixed on his corpse.

Bix lay there like a t.o.s.s.e.r-and-turner in a mattress ad. He had grown a little chubby around the waist as Pill advanced beyond toddlerdom.

His frilled s.h.i.+rt was wrenched out of his c.u.mmerbund. Trilby could see his navel and the wiry black hairs that surrounded it. The skin at his paunch did not move.

One never noticed a motion so perpetual until it ceased.

No inhale at all. No exhale.

It was maddening.

It terrified her.

Her breath caught, refusing to release. She raised a hand to her mouth.

Delia Gaskin hugged her from the side. "You okay?" she asked.

Trilby nodded. She suffered Delia's embrace, leaning on her for support.

Bix's face was an outrage.

His skull was broken and bashed. The skin at his exposed ear had s.h.i.+fted, a fallen fracture of shale. Blood spilled from that fracture.

His nose, crusheda"the bone snapped upward at an obscene anglea"sat atop a deep spewed gash, the punch of a steel fist having left moist wrinkles in the crater-edges of his flesh.

His skin had been rent asunder, as if the killer had wanted to see the man beneath the face, the secret Bix that Trilby had always suspected was there. But all that showed was inert muscle and bone.

Trilby felt faint.

But she could not tear her eyes away.

The next thing she knew, she was sitting on the edge of one of the band room's rising levels, something sharp and bitter broken under her nose. She reared back and felt Delia's arms supporting her.

"Steady, now," the nurse said.

"I'm okay," she tried to say.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Her face seized up in a cry. On the inhale, she smelled her husband's corpse behind her. Then the tears subsided.

Delia offered her a tissue.

Trilby blew her nose and daubed the edges of her eyes. "You're so kind," she said. Poor lonely woman. Poor Delia.

Brest had been after her to start an affair with Delia. She had heart. Depth of character. She really cared, not just in a nursely way. It was more genuine than that.

Society called same-s.e.x threesomes perverse.

What did society know of such things?

It wouldn't be perverse, not in the least. It would feel good and natural.

Now was hardly the time for it, but Trilby felt the nub inside her, the pull she hadn't quite felt before, the feeling Brest had, with far too much zeal, urged upon her.

Its eventuality lay before her.

"Help me out the door?" she said, her words faint.

"Of course," came Delia's concerned voice.

And the nurse's firm grip, surprisingly strong in one so trim and feminine, came about Trilby.

She rose to her feet.

19. At the Mercy of the Ice Ghoul.

Life was such a b.i.t.c.h, Sandy thought as she followed Cobra and Rocky along the second floor corridor.

Things had been thrown topsy-turvy.

There were rules. If you obeyed them, everything went fine for you. Yet, somehowa"

(Just one crazy. Keep reminding yourself. It's one wacked-out maniac.) a"the rules had been thrown out the window. No rule book at all.

Waiting in the boys' locker room, Sandy and Rocky had thought themselves immune. Designated slashers never laid a finger on potential prom royalty. But now? Sandy shuddered. They hadn't been safe at all. Flann and Brandy had bitten it in the refrigeration room. Rival nominees. Then an exempt tender had been killed, for the love of Christ. No one was safe from the rogue janitor.

It put her entire world in doubt.

Striding alongside Rocky, Cobra reached back an index finger, hooked it into her cleavage, and pulled Sandy forward as though she were wearing a harness.

"Come on, b.i.t.c.h, keep up," he said, nearly pulling her off her pumps. "The Ice Ghoul'll getcha if you don't."

Cobra chuckled, digging the weirdness around them. The turn of events had confusedly torqued Rocky. Her too. But their new boyfriend seemed to be getting way the heck into it.

Crazy strength.

When Peach jilted him, they had waifed the poor dejected creep in. Then the killings began to multiply, the world tilt into Cobra's sullen territory. Now Mister Bigshot Heel-Clicking Hood was steering the threesome wherever he liked.

Did that concern her?

She had no idea.

Nothing made sense but survival and Sandy's mind could only hold to that one overriding idea. There'd be time later to sort out their lives.

Twice they had counterclockwised the vast square that was the second floor hallway. Twice they had pa.s.sed the same d.a.m.ned lockers and clocks, the same d.a.m.ned cla.s.srooms where she had been forced to endure Home Ec and Art and Algebra and Spanish and the ill-named "teachers" who had inflicted all of that boring c.r.a.p on her.