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 couple-scum bitch and bastard, by any measure-might in other circumstances 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 penis emblooded and his lobemeat throbbing beneath his ear, stabbed Mute and paused the flogger.
Hugging eight forty-five. He should have turned the damned clock to the wall!
Fifteen minutes to Tweed’s phone call if she had been spared. She would make her way back from her assigned spot, passing 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 penis 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 sophomore history class 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 damned fucking okay with Matthew, they were such slimy shits 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 vagina.
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 charts-heavy on the ’bones and light on the rests-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 classmates’ 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 Principal Buttweiler’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 shimmering beneath them, held them back. Festus had it in him, assuming he survived next year’s prom, to make it big as a drummer.
Jiminy Jones nodded an okay at the principal, 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 reassemble it. Herself? Or its inheritor?
Dex’s hand held the envelope. His features were strained.
Damn the rules, she thought. It was insane-her dad more right than she had given him credit for-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.