A burly figure lofted into moonlight.
The Ice Ghoul.
Or what had been left of it and retrievable from the theater prop room.
His head and half of his chest topped a tall pair of stepladders, his height half what it had been last May, but his angle of menace caught to perfection.
Between the shoulders of two of the heedless automatons that carried her, Delia saw Jonquil Brindisi and Claude Versailles standing beside the homeless pair who had, in the wake of prom night, become media darlings.
“Mr. Versailles, Ms. Brindisi!” she cried. “Help me!”
The planes of Jonquil Brindisi’s face were as cold and smooth as sheared ice. It was clear she took umbrage at Delia’s direct address.
Her chiseled slip of a nose flared. Her eyes glowered.
“Strip her,” she commanded, rasping the order in offended tones. “Tie her up.”
Hands mauled her, lowered her.
They ripped her garments, the blouse collar choking her until it tore free.
Cool air kissed her naked breasts, working its way through young rough hands and arms.
Her hips, her thighs, her legs twisted as though machine-caught in the mob’s rip of skirt fabric, pantyhose, and frilly crotchless silken panties.
They exposed her, somehow never letting go their grip on her limbs, giving her no chance to escape.
A cool thick clamp snapped about one ankle, about the other. The press of bodies concealed them from view. But the same sensation gripped her wrists, and then she saw the rope. It was thick. Shiny new. Thin sharp bristles randomly porcupined from the twisted wheaten cable.
Rope-ties were tugged and tightened.
Were they trying to quarter her?
Delia guessed not. But the muscles of her thighs strained like whipped sails and the ball sockets at her shoulders threatened to dislocate.
At last, the hands that had held her lifted away. Night air touched her everywhere.
If she failed to tense her neck muscles, her head flopped back onto nothing.
She was stretched taut. Relentless pulls on her arms and legs came from four thick, angled, toddler-high posts sunk in the ground and notched to secure the rope. The moon illumined the flesh-shelf her body made.
By name she appealed to them. The students, Dex, Tweed, Jenna. Pye Pringle, a wispy junior who hung around Jenna and whom Delia, two days prior, had patched up in the nurse’s office.
Pye looked away.
Then the principal stepped in. “All right,” he said, his face harsh and rough, “peel it off.”
They wouldn’t.
That was her first thought.
Then it was too late for any thought at all.
They surged in. The urgency of their mass move puffed a night chill across her naked body.
“Wait, no!” she said.
But the air filled with shouting.
Crudely wielded scalpels carpeted up layers of skin, as fingernails dug into the soft yield of her flesh and tore it away, patch by patch.
Agony sheeted her limbs.
Ankles, calves, thighs, then her arms, caught fire and turned to flameless torches.
Up hip, down torso, at her navel, the flames spread and met. The shock to Delia’s system suspended her between screaming and blacking out.
Then they slid the blades beneath the skin on her face, peeling upward from the neck, over chin and cheek, pulling at her eyelids so severely that the inflamed lids were almost torn off before they plipped back down on her eyes.
Clots of hair, as had happened below, came up in impatient hands. Her body became a living suit of ravagement.
Black dots danced amid red. Delia’s tears stung like acid as they runneled down her temples.
Her tormentors backed off. The night breeze rippled razors, thin and multitudinous, along the neural skintorch Delia had become. She willed herself, despite the steady eruption of pain, to escape into oblivion.
But oblivion refused her.
Then she heard a familiar sound, multiplied a hundred times, again, again.
Rustles of burst-open plastic wrap.
The restless sound of many fingers finding their careful way around metal.
Out of the hubbub of mob noise, one word seeped through over and over on hushed, hissed esses.
Syringe.
When Delia’s tears cleared, she took in the surround of bodies.
The poised hands.
Chest-high about the moonlit circle, there shimmered, like ice, thin silver down-stabs of frozen rain.
“Slowly,” the principal said. “Carefully. Stay away from the vital organs. We want this to last.”
Then they began to needle her.
Dex stood arm in arm with Tweed, detached from the melee of torture.
If a press of bodies obscured his view, he let it. So did Tweed.
They were ageless, he thought. An aggrieved couple watching justice meted out but not fired up with bloodlust.
He felt excited and jazzed, of course.
What self-respecting American wouldn’t?
But more than that, Dex felt pity.
This was one twisted woman. A betrayer, a violator, the executioner of young folks who did not deserve to die.
Oddly enough, she was also his savior.
And Tweed’s.
Futzy Buttweiler, in a moment of rare candor, had confided to them that Zane Fronemeyer’s packet held his name and Tweed’s that night.
A chill had coursed through him.
For all his bluster, Dex would have been no match for Mr. Fronemeyer. He would have suffered the fatal wound. Then he’d have seen Tweed fall beneath the knife blade, feeling the life ebb from him as she, in agony, struggled and died.
They felt relief.
And guilt.
Their slaughter would have fallen into the normal course of events, a sacrifice sad but accepted.
But the slaughter of Tweed’s dad, of the sheriff, Jiminy Jones, the Fronemeyers, and all those kids? Those killings were perverse. They cut across the grain of all that was right and proper in American society.
Nurse Gaskin’s deserved death would punctuate these atrocities. The media would, as ever, find renewed closure and new reasons to fret about whatever turned their fret-brains on and made their subscription rates rise.
But her death would not undo her atrocities, not even when the dead woman did her stint, the following spring, as a pinata.
Tweed had said as much, and Dex agreed.
Maybe that was what growing up was all about.
You got to see how ragged-edged life was, and how tidy the stories about life were.
It was a comfort, to confuse one for the other. But it was also a comfort, and a sanity, to know the difference and quietly accept it.
Dex gave his wife a squeeze.
“I love you,” he said.
“What did you say?” she shouted over the melee.
“I said I love you!”
Tweed’s eyes twinkled. She gave him a kiss, then turned her gaze again toward the staked and sought-after murderess before them.
Jenna had been one of the first students to sink a needle into Nurse Gaskin.
She had chosen a spot on the right arm, where the nurse’s strained biceps ramped along above her elbow.
Jenna thrust it in deep enough that when she released it and stepped back, it only angled down a little and stayed stuck there. But she left an inch or so out, so that those who came later, the kids without a syringe of their own, could shove hers in deeper.
That was the considerate thing to do.
Share the vengeance.
Some kids slid under her and put theirs in from below. Those didn’t stay stuck, of course. Gravity wouldn’t allow it.
So some of them shoved it in again along her sides as they regained their feet.
Others circled around for another stab into buttock or back, the blood from earlier puncture wounds anointing them as dry-ice mist curled about them.
“Cripes,” some kid said. “Nursie’s a fuckin’ pin cushion, ain’t she?”