Someone slow-scanned, high across the auditorium’s stage-right wall, the motto painted in large gold letters: “The strength of a nation lies in the regimentation of its youth.”
No one said much.
Faces were drawn.
Young shoulders slumped forlornly.
Mr. Buttweiler and Miss Phipps sat side by side on the edge of the stage. They had no plan. Dex had been speaking from some wishful place in his head. But no one, certainly not Tweed, seemed in any mood to ding him for it.
The principal’s spindly legs rhythmed at random, shoe heels nearly knocking against the stage front. Hands clasped earnestly in his lap, he leaned to say something to Miss Phipps.
She nodded.
Grimacing, he began to rise.
But when he was halfway up, Tweed’s attention shot to the right.
Onstage, someone was emerging from between hanging dark curtains.
Hands, arms, chest.
Objects gleamed from his fists-
It was Gerber Waddell!
– shiny objects, a thin one, a thick one.
The janitor’s face was shrouded in washes of death, the deaths he had brought about.
Futzy stood in shock, a hand at one pocket. His head hung dumbly, as if he’d just been told his best friend had died.
Tweed’s brain teemed.
It’s the slasher, said one part of her mind. Run!
But voices, high and fast and full of anger, were rising all about her. Another part of her mind latched onto them, found resonance with that feeling, and rose with them.
Dex shouted beside her, his face as red as a newborn robin cheeping for worms.
Sounds were issuing too from her.
The air was full of movement. Flutterings. Hard young bodies rushing forward.
Across the black floor of the stage staggered the head janitor, a dumb slow feeb of a slasher. Tweed wondered how he had surprised or bested anyone.
Futzy stood transfixed. Then his hand was fumbling in his pocket and he pulled out a gun, the great unequalizer, death-power packed in a fistful of metal. With a deafening blow, Futzy punched the air before him.
The feeb’s left shoulder yanked back. A man and woman entered from the wings behind him.
Far from stopping Tweed and the others, the gunshot drove them into a greater frenzy. Down the aisles they teemed, surging up the stairs in a rush of bodies.
Tweed watched the couple-odd correspondence student types-seize the janitor and wrest the ice pick from him. The man drove it into his neck and left it there.
Jonquil Brindisi came onstage.
Then Tweed swept into a surge of prom fabric that rushed past the principal, rudely thrusting Futzy Buttweiler aside like flotsam in a stream. The steel gleam of futtering cleavers winked in every hand, her own hand, Dex’s too, their long knives absurdly left at their seats.
But that was okay.
One cut, one slice among the hundreds now sweeping in, would be enough.
The stage thundered as a choke of bodies came in all about. Despite the collisions, one purpose thrived. One thirst that kept the bodies honed in on the falling janitor, the hacked man whose denim suit shredded off in tufts of cloth and flesh.
In they dove, young birdbodies, a sharp hack and away, circling to swoop down for more.
Deep-hued as barbecue sauce, Gerber’s blood splashed suits and dresses. Tweed’s dress. She grew high and giddy, gaiety and rage intermingled in the sounds she made.
A man lay stripped before her, more exposed as each moment passed, bits of cloth, flesh, and organs filling the air like blood-tinged chokes of cottonwood.
She breathed meat.
She breathed madness.
Their victim’s mind, sick and vicious even under attack, unspooled itself in death, flinging out darts of vileness.
But she-and all of them, this happy band of hackers and hewers-resisted those darts. In the shaping of communal grave-clouts were they caught up, weaving it, shuttled, hack by flurried hack, upon a loom of common cause.
Righteous was their wrath and beautiful.
She would tell all of this joy to her dad.
Her sister Jenna too, whose prom would be a cakewalk after this.
Through a turmoil of bodies, slapping and smacking in earnest-by God, the dance only hinted at it-Tweed saw her means of ingress. She seized it, rode it in, war whoops in her throat, her hand coming down, no choice really in what prize she would slice off, all of it a matter of fate and luck.
Like a coelacanth’s mouth still moist from feeding, a meaty flesh-hole wuttered up at her. Its wet, red, ragged regret ovaled out to yield a slice of organ.
Slash! She held it against the blade as she pulled out, a nub of gore trapped between thumb and steel. Ms. Foddereau’s butchery class paid off in spades.
“I got a nipple!” Dex screamed. “I got a nipple!”
Tweed became Dex’s magnet, retiring with him upstage. Behind them, the pounding and battering of bodies kept up. In another moment, the killer would be reduced to bone, and soon that would be divvied up as well.
Tweed tugged at Dex’s sleeve. “Look,” she said. “Our teachers are up to their elbows in it too.”
The air was misty with blood. But the spray was fine enough, atomized even, that they clearly saw Nurse Gaskin sail in; Claude Versailles, whose outsized body belied the deftness of his killer cuts; Ms. Brindisi, Miss Phipps, Mr. Buttweiler, and the others.
Tweed billowed with pride in Corundum High.
Out of a night of trauma, they were pulling together. Students and faculty alike.
For all the hell they had endured, a special bond would unite them forever, a bond as tight and conjoining as the mad janitor’s futtered body was loose and undergoing disjointure.
Tweed gripped her bloody prize and smiled at Dex, who beamed back at her and held up the ruddy whorl of his catch.
Something jinged like a spun quarter at her feet. She looked down. “A key,” she said.
It was gold and thick and angled. The word YALE gleamed upon it.
“The key to the padlock on the front door is my guess,” said Dex. He bent to pick it up. “The one he took from the sheriff.”
Tweed touched it in Dex’s hand. Hard planes. The key was wet from the janitor’s futtering, warm from his pocket.
She slid a finger along its length. She kept sliding, clasped Dex’s hand, palm to palm, the key to their salvation trapped between.
Then she lost herself in her boyfriend’s eyes.
24. The Mouths of Babes
Friday, October twenty-sixth.
Jonquil Brindisi, her long legs crossed, sat in Claude’s generous futon chair, sipping a banana daiquiri as she listened to Futzy Buttweiler and Delia Gaskin hold forth from the couch.
Futzy had called them all together, the major players who had survived the prom. They needed some sort of closure, he said, and he was right.
A lot of changes had come down.
Claude had divorced his wives and swiftly remarried. His new mates? The couple Jonquil herself had lusted after until the state of their earlobes had cooled her passions.
The three of them sat now in clunky dining room chairs, listening and nodding.
Lovey-dovey motherfuckers.
Futzy had replaced his pair of hellions with Adora Phipps. While they insisted a third would surely come along any day now, Jonquil doubted they were looking in any serious way.
And no secret to anyone and not a scandal to the unbigoted, Delia Gaskin, while maintaining the fiction of a separate residence, was deep in lust with Bix Donner’s widows, Trilby and Brest, their threesome a virtual marriage.
Trilby’s little whistleblower knelt alone on the living room carpet. Pill busied herself with a deck of cards, some weird sorting exercise whose rules only an eight-year-old could divine.
Near Pill sat Tweed and her kid sister Jenna, crosslegged on pillows. They bookended a chipper Dexter Poindexter, who had replaced a slaughtered bank clerk at First National soon after the prom.