“What do you do?” repeated Trilby.
Pill looked glum. “Hide in the coat closet.”
“That’s right. In your little corner of pillows. Leave a tiny crack for air, and when you’re sure they’re gone, it’s okay to come out again.”
The faculty lounge was brightly lit and off-limits for the slaughter. Pill would, as Trilby had instructed her, keep her hands off the paper cutter and out of the supply drawer. Leaving her here would be perfectly safe.
“That’s my girl,” Bix offered.
Brest, beside him, said nothing.
Trilby kissed her index fingers and touched them to Pill’s lobes. “Give your mommy a hug, honey.”
Thick wool from Gigi the goat tickled Trilby’s neck as her daughter’s slip of a body moored against her and the butterfly mouth she so loved closed about the maternal tip of her friendship lobe.
Gerber Waddell arrived in his beat-up truck and his best coveralls.
As he crossed the parking lot and entered the school building, early promgoers gave him a wide berth. The teacher who sat at the front table, Mr. Dunsmore, and the short line of students being checked in ignored him.
Pond scum.
Oughta be snuffed, all of them.
Gerber went without ceremony to the supply closet near the band room. He used his ring of keys to let himself in.
It was close in here, the lone pull-bulb dim and dusty with age. Shelf upon shelf of tools and duct tape and extension cords in impossible orange tangles passed beneath his gaze.
Gerber paused.
Why am I here? he wondered. There was a reason I came in here.
Letting his fingers rise before him like so many pale stalagmites, he pointed them toward the school entrance and with great effort traced his steps until they were back where they had begun.
Oh yeah. Tin snips. An axe. An ice pick. A graduated, pan-piped pouch of screwdrivers.
He loaded his utility belt with these items, repeating their names over and over in a whisper until they dangled there.
Flag. Gotta do the flag.
Damned students didn’t appreciate the work involved in the flag task. Mornings, they shot spitwads at him while the pulley at the top gave the odd groan and the parallel cords sang in high slaps against the flagpole and the heavy furls of the flag moved, jerk by jerk, into the sky like a huge slumbering dinosaur head roused from sleep.
Gotta take it down.
Night time comin’ on.
Later, there would be blood to clean up, lots of blood.
And stray body parts from the futtering, flung into ill-lit corners of the gym.
But the night was still young, and plenty of mayhem simmered across the brainscape of Corundum High’s head janitor.
Gerber Waddell locked the closet. He paused outside in the hall to remember again where he was headed.
Some gussied-up young snotwads swished by, wide-eyed and agiggle. They made a joke at his expense, but Gerber paid them no never-mind.
Flag. Fuckin’ Ol’ Glory. Fuckin’ flag.
Yep.
Sheriff Blackburn watched the flag rise, giving it a smart salute as the head janitor watusi’d beside the white flagpole, the ling ling ling of the pulls slapping metal.
This night flag, designed by an artist of his grandparents’ generation, had gradually replaced the day version, unofficially and then by an act of Congress. When it was first introduced, some had called it sacrilege. But most folks honored truth when they saw it: Fifty gloom-white skulls on a field of blue, bloody furrows alternating with flayed flesh, the skulls like Honest Abe looking drawn and haggard in his last photos, the flayings like sexual lashes gone mad, the whole a vivid rendering of the nation’s dark side, the nation dubbed the Demented States of America scarcely twenty years before by an otherwise forgettable pop musician. The moniker had stuck, gone into common parlance, and was used more often than the original now-except by the President, though he too lapsed at times into the vernacular.
“Hi there,” said Gerber Waddell, ducking and nodding at the sheriff from the flagpole.
Poor halfwit always said, Hi there.
Irritating.
“Looking good, Gerber.”
The janitor mumbled his thanks, a catch in his throat as he figure-eighted the twin cord about its stay and yanked it tight. Benign feeb. Gone nutso years back at a corporate picnic the day after prom night. Killed one more than the law and custom allowed. But some judicious brain slicing had redeemed what could be redeemed, and Gerber Waddell, with the aid of his guardians the Bleaks, had become once more a productive member of society.
“Take care now, hear?”
“Thank you, Mister Sheriff.” Gerber nodded politely, a grin on his face. Then he picked up the triangulated day flag, did a one-eighty, and headed for the school entrance.
Young couples were cascading now through the double doors, bottlenecked at the table Blackburn had just left. He had entrusted a padlock to the bristle-lipped shop teacher, Elwood Dunsmore-the final padlock that would be snapped on right at the stroke of eight, no more students allowed in after that, no more anybody. The only keys were in the packet he had left with Zane Fronemeyer and on the ring of metal hanging from the sheriff’s belt.
A limousine drew up to disgorge another young couple, fear and anticipation on their faces.
Blackburn clucked and shook his head. Waste of money, as far as he was concerned. Most people made do with their own vehicles, parking in the lot on his left. But there were always some, too extravagant for their own damn good, who saw fit to hire fancy-dan automobiles, hoping to impress their dimbulb classmates with a display of gold-plated rungs up life’s ladders.
Yeah, he remembered the kind from his own high school days. One of that crowd had reached his last red-gold rung a tad early, on prom night. The sheriff had a dried piece of pancreas at home to prove it.
Blackburn crossed the grass on his left and found the sidewalk. From his right fist swayed three padlocks.
Kids with flashlights, sketched shadows in the darkness, waved cars in off the street and left or right along a gauntlet of volunteers who handled the parking proper. Overhead, a pallid moon drifted in and out of pewter- gray clouds.
Passing the iron-barred windows of several classrooms, Blackburn rounded the corner of the building and headed for the gym’s emergency exit door. When one lock’s hasp slid snugly into place there, its firm snap sealed off the exit as a means of escape. There would be no promjumpers on his watch, at least not the kind that signed in and slipped out.
High exuberant shouts erupted in the parking lot at the sheriff’s back. He thought of his son and two daughters, how in two short years Blitz, a sophomore, would drive or be driven into this very parking lot for her prom. Yesterday, a slight injury in gym class had brought Daddy to school, where he received assurances from Nurse Gaskin and a handshake from Principal Buttweiler. The whole encounter had given Blackburn a chill.
But they said it built character, this prom ordeal. And he had survived it, him and his wives.
“Hello, Sheriff!” Kids passed by, crossing the lot, a hint of challenge in their voices, but respect too.
He raised a hand to them. “Be careful now, you hear? Don’t go catching any stray knives!”
“We won’t!” But they well might. Only a few teachers, and the principal of course, knew which couple would die tonight.
Two padlocks remained.
