Robert Devereaux
SLAUGHTERHOUSE HIGH
PART ONE
1. Special Delivery
Sheriff Dewey Blackburn had a soft spot in his heart for the week leading up to prom night.
He never told anyone, though.
Wouldn’t have been professional.
As Blackburn cruised the streets of Corundum, Kansas, scanning parks and sidewalks for ne’er-do-wells, he felt mighty glad that his hand gripped the tiller of the law, keeping the more deranged impulses of the citizenry in check. Corundum was a thriving town, not so small as to bore one to tears, yet not so large as to lose its charm.
In the back seat, his charges shifted.
The woman released a low moan. The prom gown into which she had been tucked—a waste of fabric, to Blackburn’s way of thinking—whispered and crinkled like Christmas wrapping paper. She had been a real scrapper in the holding tank, resisting the needle with every ounce of strength.
Not so her male counterpart, some aimless drifter who stank of sewage until Blackburn’s junior deputies washed, coiffed, cologned, and tuxedo’d him. Obligingly had he hazed toward his fate, a sheen of resignation smoothed over his eyes. The blunt, ragged remnants of his earlobes betrayed the shame of his past: ducking out on his prom (“promjumping,” kids called it these days), being arrested and ostracized, having his lobes crudely docked before being thrust out to fend on his own.
Along the trim-lawned street, gawkers gawked from picture windows. Blackburn idled by, casual fingers guiding the steering wheel, an elbow bent at his rolled-down window, siren quiet. But folks knew he would be out and about. This neighborhood burst at the seams with teachers, and a squad car with a drugged-out, dressed-up couple in the back and a plastic trough cinched to its top meant only one thing on prom night.
The sheriff hung a right.
A left.
Down the way, a porchlight blazed. The house’s big black digits matched the address on his clipboard. Blackburn angled into the driveway and killed the cruiser.
Art teacher’s residence.
Plenty of strange rumors circulated about Zane Fronemeyer and his wives. The man coaxed perverse paintings out of his students at Corundum High. Scuttlebutt had it he had entered the teaching profession for the sole purpose of being chosen. It had taken years, but the sick bastard’s wish had finally come true.
Blackburn got out.
The doped-up couple had at least an hour of grog on the meter, but they’d be checking out long before that timer popped.
The sheriff strode up the walkway, highly tuned to the neighborhood geeks and gawkers.
He raised a warning finger to the threesome on the lawn across the street. They ducked back into their house, two scrawny joes and a fat she-bitch, all three buck-nekkid except for their lobebags. Them and their fellow rubberneckers would keep their traps shut. They always did, on account of the heap of penitentiary time they’d face if word leaked early which teacher had been chosen.
One ring. Two heartbeats. The door swung back.
“Zane Fronemeyer?”
“You’re looking at him.” Fucker smiled in oil. Behind him, like a matched pair of aproned bowling pins, huddled his wives, their left lobes decently bagged, their right ones chewed up more than most folks would consider proper. “You brought me a couple o’ good ones, I hope.”
Christ, what a creep, thought Blackburn. “Here’s the paperwork,” he said. “Help me with the trough.”
Fronemeyer passed the bulging packet to his creamier-skinned spouse and followed Blackburn to the squad car. The sheriff reached up and slipped the knots. In the old days, the steel troughs had been gut busters. These new plastic jobbies with their squat fat legs were a hell of a lot easier on the back.
Hefting the front end, Fronemeyer led the way into his house. “Sheriff,” he said, “this here’s Camille. That’s Hedda.”
The sheriff nodded without registering which wife was which, so badly did he want this part of his prom night duties over.
In the front hall, the art teacher sported a matched set of stuffed parents, upon whom an inept fluxidermist hadn’t bothered to make his sex-ready alterations at all subtle. What had been done to them was strictly against the law, but the statute was so honored in the breach that Blackburn would be laughed out of court if he tried to call these three on it.
Fronemeyer led the way to the basement steps. The air cooled as they descended.
Tweed Megrim, eighteen, naked, and brimming with anticipation straight down to her tippytoes, stepped through tickling bursts of bubbles into a steamy-hot bath.
With a wince she withdrew her big toe, then slipped it all the way in. The rest of her in an abundance of glory swiftly followed.
As the water rose to embrace her, visions of Dexter Poindexter danced in Tweed’s head. At this very moment, just a few blocks away, Dex was stepping into his tub too.
No, wait.
Showers were Dex’s preferred mode of bathing. He was standing beneath the punishing blast of a shower, yes that was it, his eyes shut, his mouth open against the downpour. She pictured Dex’s sweet head angled right, his left earlobe buttoned cutely at the base of his ear, looking (this all in her imagination of course) like a fat blunt thumb bereft of nail and bone.
Tweed gasped.
Don’t go there. In the bathroom, both her lobes were naked, as were his. On the right the friendship lobe, kissable, touchable, and viewable in public. And on the left? The secret, naughty lobe that her classmates cracked jokes about by their gym lockers.
Funny how it was okay for it to be unbagged when you were alone. And it was okay for little kids’ lobes to be exposed until they grew breasts or their voices lowered.
But otherwise, only wedded twos or threes in the dim-lit privacy of their bedrooms were allowed to fondle that concealed length of flesh. Only there could it be pinched and licked and sucked so that their love partner gasped with surprise and delight, going all gooshy in the down-there place.
A devilish grin widened upon her face.
Everyone thought pretty little Tweed Megrim so innocent. Such a goody-goody.
They were right, of course. Plenty of girls at school, from all reports, were supremely slutty (Peach Popkin came to mind). And it was true that she, Tweed, had only thought exciting thoughts. Never had she dared act upon them.
Until tonight.
She had decided. To get Dex’s motor running, she had even hinted.
If he futtered off a choice bit of flesh for her—a nose tip, a lobe, half a nipple, something like that—if he emerged from the frenzied crowd with his miniature cleaver dripping and a special prize clutched in his hand, why then, in the dark quiet of his parents’ car, she would let him touch her lovelobe through her lobebag. Maybe she would even let him brush his nose against it.
Or rub his…
By God, she gasped, floating up through the bubbles and exposing the tips of her nipples.
…rub his bagged lovelobe against hers.
Tweed panted and laughed.
Enough of that. She felt light-headed. It wouldn’t do to get herself all worked up so early in the evening.
She forced herself to concentrate on the pink-sequined dress that waited on a hanger in her bedroom. On the matching lobebag clipped to the hanger. And on her soft pastel pumps.
Her dad had spared no expense in decking her out.
Why should he? There was only one prom night in anyone’s life. Well, okay, if you didn’t count teachers, principals, janitors, school nurses, and such. They had one every year.
But they were grown-ups. Odd old folks whose generation didn’t matter worth a hoot.
Nope. Tonight belonged to the kids.
She and Dex would survive. They hadn’t been chosen to fall beneath the slasher’s knife. Some other couple had.