Robert Devereaux - Slaughterhouse High

The axe looked tricky, a sharp thing that might fall in a scuffle. Go for the bold move, came the thought. A left-handed grip on the axe handle. Done!

Zane clenched tighter to counter.

The knife flew up and over. It caught on something hard in his chest, then slipped past to stab deep.

A Greek mask frowned upon his face: a bunched brow, anguished eyes, lips fizzling like a limp balloon, all of it in motion. Flares of life flashing by tried to stick and hold. But something vital had been skewered.

Zane collapsed, a house of cards falling inward. The axehead hung abruptly left, his fingers releasing their grip on the handle. The axe clattered to the floor. Then Zane, drifting downward, took to the tattered couch.

“Why—” he wheezed.

“Call it payback.”

A glimpse aside into obscurity. The cellar smelled like meat and sewage. You would think the homeless would catch on. But they were as dumb as Thanksgiving turkeys.

Zane had just snuffed two more here.

Close to fifteen thousand nationwide bought the farm every year, if the networks told the truth.

Fifteen thousand more in prom couples.

A chill took hold, then burgeoning heat.

The blade angled from Zane’s chest, the stir of a gelatinous stew. Its grim handle gristled in strained grip, curving and turning as the killer carved.

It wouldn’t do to risk the possibility of revival. Zane would pay the price, as his spouses had done.

And the payments would continue, multiplying toward midnight, until healing took hold and love thrilled the heart once more.

Upstairs waited the packet. Keys, maps, agendas, the naming of the couple.

Not that this last was more than a curiosity.

One couple alone would not suffice.

Nothing near.

Still, they were names to bear in mind if ruin threatened and they fell to hand.

Fronemeyer’s wristwatch, upside-down and spattered, read 6:20. Time to move on. The worn cushions soaked up his blood. But the stairs beckoned.

Music rose out of memory’s ashes, slap’n’smack mixed with terrified slow-shuffling embraces on the dance floor.

Moving on, feeling high, sailing toward fated waters.

Tonight would be beautiful indeed.

Whap-whap-whap, went the blades of the chopper, off-camera.

On a wall-sized screen at the far end of the Cabinet Room, toy houses on winding streets drifted past far below. Inset on the lower left, a woman with a mission waved to her husbands and drove off in a late-model car.

This year, a school in a suburb of Dallas had been chosen for the high mucky-mucks’ delectation.

The designated slasher?

Karn Flentrop, a Home Ec teacher with killer gams, a clench-fisted upjut of breasts, taut and tantalizing lobes, and the perkiest bloodlust in her every glance.

For the camera’s benefit, Ms. Flentrop’s threesome had lingered over a love-hug in their living room.

Hunched, head turned, glued to the tube as he had been for hours sat Willy Wanker, the Secretary of Cultural Impoverishment.

Wanker seldom spoke in meetings, nor did anyone interact with him. His preferred mode of communication consisted of an unending stream of pontifications e-mailed out to all and sundry.

The Secretary of War, a chubby boozer named Barnaby Sloper, he of the bullet head and outsized belly, cracked a joke and wangled his bulk into a chair. Cabinet appointees on either side of him gave polite chuckles.

Then the door opened and a Shite House lackey with a red face and a rumpled suitcoat bellowed, “President Hargill Windfucker.”

All rose to acknowledge their commander in chief. As Cholly Bork tiptoed Windfucker through the door and across the carpet, the elected marionette’s limbs lightly clacked like hanging beads parted by a sylph’s hand. The Vice President and his entourage followed.

“Be seated, gentlemen. And lady,” said the President in Bork’s voice, his hands magnanimous, his back angled in a ceremonial bow.

They took seats.

A raised finger, a twist of the neck. “Brief us, Mr. Hix.”

Chief of Staff Blathery Hix, a fat folder beneath one arm and a headset on his head, stood next to the President’s chair. “Top right, Mister President, coming into view, is Choke Cherry High. Built in the forties. Nicely run down, not enough money, fuck the kids. They lobbied hard this year for the privilege of a presidential viewing, hoping for funding in return. I gave them our usual empty promises.”

“Never commit when you can waffle, Hix.”

“Yes, sir. Activate tunnel cameras.” The helicopter view vanished. The screen jumped to a slow infrared glide through the secret backways of Choke Cherry High.

Delia Gaskin rinsed off the whipped suds she had worked up. Then she toweled dry and squeezed a dip of skin cream into her right hand. The cream went on smooth, circled along her cheekbones and sharped back and forth over her nose with one flexing palm.

Delia wore her thirty-eight years well. As one approached forty, one’s face tended to take on spots and blemishes. Nothing near as unsightly as the blotch-bursts of sexagenarians like Futzy Buttweiler. But the vibrancy of youth inevitably faded. That hadn’t yet happened to Delia, and for that she was grateful.

Skin care paid off.

Wigwag padded into the bathroom, gave a doleful double- wumpf in protest, and padded out, his message delivered.

The fur which rimmed the lop-ends of Wigwag’s ears bore toothmarks. Delia reminded herself to brush them out before leaving for the prom. It wouldn’t do to fuel, with the kindling of truth, student rumors of her peculiar ways.

In a distant room, a TV newscaster droned on unintelligibly.

Delia buried her face in a thick towel, not bothering to pull it off the rack. Before paper towels and blowers, restrooms had sported unending tugs of linen. The unrolling, eternally dreamy swatch of students passing through Corundum High reminded her of those endless linen strips. They passed along patterns of speech, class notes, cruelties, and rumors, one generation to the next.

Especially rumors.

But Delia wasn’t simply a pet lover.

She had a much more interesting life than anyone might suspect. Brest Donner, the tenth grade biology teacher, had stolen a moment with her in the infirmary yesterday.

Brest was a sweet armful.

Her lips had sucked at Delia’s friendship lobe, then brushed past her mouth to nuzzle and nip at the bagged left lobe, while Brest’s own stylish lobebag swayed a tantalizing few inches away.

Brest’s and Trilby’s marriage to Bix Donner was crumbling, she had confided. She thought it conceivable that they might whisk Trilby’s little girl away with them and go it alone.

If they were circumspect, a female threeway, despite its risk and illegality, might be in the offing.

Bix. Bothersome Bix. Two years before, he had hit on Delia at a faculty-staff retreat. Boorish lump. It never ceased to amaze one, the mates people chose.

The Donner family was slated to chaperone tonight. No doubt, beady-eyed Bix would laser-beam an unwanted glare of lust again and again across Delia’s body. That would make things more difficult by half.

But if she cut the sucker down early, she could scoop out some breathing room. Enough, perhaps, that she might manage to set aside the trauma of her own prom, two decades past, and ease into the evening’s festivities.