of their mamas’ most bizarre and urgent dreams.
“Hang on, hon,” Altoona said. She pushed on into the promise of night, her brain radiant with possibility.
5. High School Secured
There was a split focus in the cabinet room: the video screen that covered an entire wall, and President Hargill Windfucker’s asinine comments.
Although the Shite House video feed was and would remain private, famed sportscaster Blennuth Ponger had, this year, been shanghaied into the role of TV announcer. Ponger’s laconic delivery betrayed his feeling that he was clearly out of his league.
“Here come the seniors.”
Long silence.
“Our saucy little Home Ec teacher, behind the wheel of her killer car, is just a mile from Choke Cherry High.”
Long silence.
“Right here, beneath this scrawled number, a big black fifty-seven, will the chosen couple meet their destined fate.”
That sort of thing.
President Windfucker filled in Ponger’s long stretches of silence with “Cute couple o’ kids” or “That Home Ec gal’s out for bear, isn’t she?”
Whenever Cholly Bork voiced these inanities, angling the strings so that the presidential head shifted thoughtfully, the twelve cabinet officers turned from the screen and toward Gilly Windfucker to murmur and mutter ” Very cute” or “She sure is, Mister President.”
They sounded like churchgoers mumbling the phrases of a litany. They looked like spectators at a tennis match.
In her shiny red sports car, Karn Flentrop preened for the camera. Her hair was perfectly coiffed, her nails long and pearl-sheened as the steering wheel rotated this way and that. She came to a stop, yanked up on the handbrake, and slid her sultry legs out of the car, taking the elevator to the backways as she patted her perm.
“Her moment of glory,” mused Windfucker.
“Glory indeed, Mister President.”
Camera switch. The young victim, a fresh-faced boy with much promise and no future, was helping his date out of the car, swish of a prom dress, her hand lifted like a swan’s neck to his. The shot of them as they crossed the parking lot and entered the school wasn’t the clearest, but it was critical not to arouse their suspicions.
Gilly Windfucker noted, “That gal would have made somebody a wonderful mom. Nice lobes on her, she’s packing quite a pair.”
“It’s a crying shame, sir.” “She’s a gem.” “Her young man could be in pictures.” “They make us proud to be Americans.”
As the doomed couple passed through locker-lined hallways to the gymnasium, Blennuth Ponger launched into the usual canned bios. In the upper right part of the screen, an inset series of stills and home videos tracked their childhoods, first steps, pony rides, birthday parties, theme park vacations.
“It kinda reddens the lobes, dunnit, watching them kids grow up, knowing what we’re gonna see in a while, getting caught up in the anticipation?”
“It does, Mister President.”
There was a hushed shuffle of chair legs upon the carpet as the twelve followed the President’s lead and started to stroke their sexlobes through their lobebags.
They kept it up, turning their attention more intently toward the doomed pair and the tight fox who taught Home Ec. And thus did the presidential party slither down into the muck and goo of their private fantasies about this boy, this girl, and the buff teacher with murder in her eye and an itchy knife hand, compelling players in a national drama.
Weight against his left side.
That was the impression that first seeped in, that and the stench of death. The weight was warm and inert, in contrast to the cramped chill that wracked the rest of him.
The deadweight pressed down, then lifted free as cool air rushed in. His head was spinning. On every inhale, death smells rushed in to nauseate him and ride the next breath out.
He tested his eyelids. They cautioned open, lashes stuck, then free.
A vague notion of pipes swam high overhead. Crisscrosses of unpainted lumber. And blocking some harsh halo of light, the slumped form of a woman, dressed in finery, sitting on the side of whatever rough-edged coffin they had been jammed into.
“What…,” he tried, but only a modulated moan emerged.
The woman’s head turned, partially uncovering a lightbulb. Its harshness delivered her profile, but with too sharp an edge to afford him a clear view of much beyond her dyed friendship lobe, some futile protest against the way things were.
He raised his fingers and wiped his eyes.
“You’re awake.”
His white stiff cuff came into view, as did the gold cross-gleam of cufflink backs and a coat arm’s abrupt edge.
Accompanying the woman’s words was a sudden certainty about where he was, memories of abduction and jail, a king’s feast of food and a shower. Of submission to soap and scissors and being dressed.
And then the needle.
“But we’re not—”
“Someone saved us,” she said, standing up, one hand on the trough. “Saved us and did him in.”
Working himself unsteadily to a sitting position, he followed the woman’s gaze.
A bloated couch, stained crimson, cradled a dead man, the buffed hilt of a knife slanting up from his chest as if it had burst a huge balloon filled with raspberry jam.
The odor said otherwise, of course, mingled aromas of blurted heartpumps and the release of bladder and bowel.
“Poor boob ran into trouble,” he said.
Rising, he spotted the dog.
“He deserved it,” said the woman. “Christ, where’s your head? He would’ve killed us. That axe lying on the floor was meant for us.”
He nodded. “We got caught. Then he got caught.”
“Damn deputy at the jailhouse nearly lost his nuts to my knee. If he hadn’t had backup, I’d’ve gotten away.”
“You from Topeka?” he asked.
“Kansas City. They surprised us at dawn.”
“I thought I’d be safe behind the library. I wasn’t. Do you think anyone’s upstairs?”
“Doubtful,” she said.
As the puffiness lifted from his head, he noticed her lobebag. His own state-provided bag knocked at the neck skin below his cropped lefty. He groped it, smooth cloth that no doubt matched his tux, and at the top, elastic and probably some kind of adhesive to clamp it lightly to the stub.
“Any idea how we lucked out?” he asked.
“My brain was real hazy, but I heard somebody say something, or thought I did. And I saw the killer’s arm come up with a tightly gripped knife. A shirt of dark blue. Maybe denim.”
Fear rushed through him. “You don’t think he’s upstairs?”
