“It’s…”
She covered the mike and spoke briefly to Mr. Versailles, then back, as distraught as Peach had ever seen anyone.
“It’s the janitor. We were in the band room, me and Bix Donner.”
On Peach’s right, a high hoot sounded from a woman holding a little girl. The woman raised a hand to her mouth. Brest Donner, Peach’s biology teacher, gripped her fiercely in her arms.
Oh yeah, Ms. Donner’s wife.
“I…” The nurse brushed off Jonquil Brindisi’s hand.
The stains on her dress sickened Peach.
She pictured Ms. Donner’s husband-this Bix guy the nurse was yammering on and on about, who had helped Mr. Dunsmore cut down the sheriff’s body-being stabbed by the feeb janitor, blood from the wounds spraying upward to splash Nurse Gaskin’s dress.
“I yelled at Gerber,” she said. “I tried to stop him. He just kept coming at Bix. Then he swung the lampstand up and slammed it down—”
The nurse covered her mouth, her eyes hot with tears.
In an instant, Ms. Brindisi was beside her again, speaking words Peach couldn’t hear.
Nurse Gaskin nodded.
A final thought occurred to her.
She dipped again to the mike: “Trilby? Brest? I’m sorry.”
She almost seemed to regret her own survival.
“I’ve always treated the poor man well. We all have. Gerber couldn’t help what he was, and what he’s become again. He vanished through the band room doors into the backways. I…”
Her hand fumbled for a tissue in her right pocket.
That’s when the lights went out.
There was a loud noise, like a big switch being thrown ker-chunk.
The image of Ms. Brindisi and the nurse hung in a ghostly afterglow, then wiped away to black.
Peach, fear ballooning in her like a sudden burst of fever, found Bowser’s waist and clung to him.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
Peach saw the janitor coming at her from all directions, that benign wisp of a grin cracking open to reveal madness, bloodlust, a rapacious urge to kill.
A voice began, booming from the PA system.
At first, she thought it was the janitor’s. But the fear that quavered in the words and their deeper pitch identified the dead sheriff, speaking no doubt under duress.
“Boys and girls,” said Sheriff Blackburn’s voice, “the front entrance to the school is open. You must not stay in the gym. If you stay here, you will die. I repeat—”
But the voice repeated nothing.
Peach could almost see him looking up from a scripted text, looking up to see a sudden blade come sweeping in. A rushed shoved grunt of impalement had been caught on the tape, chilling in how nearby it sounded.
Faintly, over a renewed sweep of crowd noise, Peach heard Ms. Brindisi.
“Stay where you are!”
But that was futile advice.
Peach wanted out of there that instant, and every one of her classmates wanted the same.
The babble surged.
The bodies moved her, shoved her, precisely where they all wanted to go. Screams lanced through the panic. A few seniors went down in the crush. Or maybe Gerber Waddell had swept in to slaughter them. Who could say? Peach only knew she had to escape, and fast.
The opening to the dim hallway loomed before her. She shoved the kid in front of her, Sorry on her lips. But she wasn’t sorry at all. Nor were those in back who propelled her forward.
Above the melee, loud and distorted, a sad gentle singer from the fifties sighed, “I’m Mister Blue, wah-o-wah-ooh.” Interspersed, Gerber Waddell’s familiar chirp stole in, sharp and piercing: “Hi there, hi there.”
“Oh my god, he’s got me,” shouted some frightened boy. The janitor strode among them, cutting, slashing, killing whatever got in his way.
Peach squeezed through the dim rectangular archway. A crush of bodies threatened to snap her ribs, so great was the pressure on all sides. But she made it to the corridor, holding miraculously to the back of Bowser’s suitcoat.
The air cooled.
The flow of students carried her as swiftly as before, but with less threat of violence.
They would escape.
She knew they would.
She and Bowser, they’d be all right, no matter who else fell to the killer loose in the school.
The corridor still lit with its dim lights, the crowd rushed and shuffled toward freedom.
But screams arose from those who reached the front entrance first. Word rippled back, even as they pressed on, of fresh corpses awaiting them there.
Peach and Bowser rounded the corner.
Miss Phipps and the principal, ashen-faced, stood beside a grotesque clothesrack they had just wheeled in. It bore four broken bodies.
Elwood Dunsmore, the shop teacher, his face blasted and blackened by a smashed blowtorch, lay propped against the padlocked doors.
And impaled on the upraised knife-arm of a sculpted Ice Ghoul, dripping blood and water down the cold crystal of its body, were the corpses of Brandy Crowe and Flann Beckwith. A fresh icicle jutted from each eye, crazy antennae in a mad game of Cootie.
Frenzy surged in Peach.
And in the crowd.
Bowser’s face looked ready to explode. “We’ve gotta get out of here,” he yelled. Peach could hardly hear him through the din.
She grabbed his hand and together they raced off through fractures in the crowd.
Everybody had been set off, ping-pong balls and mousetraps.
Rude slams and brushes buffeted her, like the best of slap’n’smack dancing, only far more hectic and nowhere near as fun.
They would break free, she and Bowser.
There had to be a way out.
And they’d find it, her classmates be damned.
A mad scurry filled every glance she threw.
They were all out for survival, thought Peach. And not one of them would survive.
PART FOUR. Catching the Ice Ghoul
Most people have ears, but few have judgment; tickle those ears, and depend upon it, you will catch their judgments, such as they are.
Trust not one night’s ice.
18. Fear and Weapons
In the spiffy outfits the State had given them for their delivery into Zane Fronemeyer’s hands, Bray felt-as they explored Corundum High’s backways-like a prince with his princess passing through the scullery, the cramped living quarters of the poor.
Winnie’s gown snagged on a nail and ripped.
The backways were ill-lit and dank, choked with spiderwebs and the threat of rats. The air was close and confining, hot enough to make Bray wish his tux were made of lighter stuff.
“Where are we?” asked Winnie.
“Let’s see,” Bray said, moving toward the next dim lightbulb, waist-high on his right.
Randomly placed along the walls, the bulbs were of minimal wattage. They glowed rather than shone. That and faint copying made the map barely readable, even when it was held inches from the light.
The designated slasher clearly needed a tiny flashlight. Bray supposed that whoever had killed Fronemeyer had taken one from the packet.
Why hadn’t he taken the map? Perhaps he was already acquainted with the backways, a slasher from years past.
“I think we’re beyond the auditorium. We’ve dipped under the corridor on the east. That way,” Bray gestured right, “is the band room. See how it curves off?”
“I’ll take your word for it. What’s over there?”
“Cafeteria, I think. Can’t tell though if it’s the dining area or the kitchen.”
Truth was, they could be completely turned around. Disorientation crowded all about and may already have claimed them. An adventure that had begun with confidence, as they slipped through a panel by the auditorium, now felt full of uncertainty and trepidation.