Warming the mouthpiece with her hand, Tweed set it into the horn, tried for saliva she seemed not to have, bobbled a few notes, licked her lips and the rim of the mouthpiece cup, woodshedded the opening riff for “I’ll Be Around,” opened the spit valve, and shook out not a drop.
She was scared out of her wits. Half the band was a wreck pretending not to be. They would try to lose themselves in the charts, and maybe they would succeed.
But maybe they’d just have to wait for the prom kill to be over before they would find any kind of groove tonight.
Jiminy Jones glanced this way and that.
The lights at play in his thinning hair lent him weirdly shifting coronas. He held the light-tipped baton tight in one chubby hand.
A last look at the score, smiles darting into the band, a “Hi there Dex, easy on the triplets,” his bowtie blue-sequined like his suitcoat edging, like his lobebag, his head raised to the air like a bull sensing slaughter as the eight o’clock bell sounded, the lights clicked precisely into place, and Jiminy Jones’ baton came down upon the first terrified note of the evening.
7. Violence, Sweet Violence
Willy Wanker, President Gilly Windfucker’s Secretary of Cultural Impoverishment, had slipped his lobebag off and was idly stroking his sexlobe as he watched the video feed.
In this, he was no different from any other cabinet member around the conference table. Even the President’s lobebag lay limp on the polished tabletop, his slim wooden hand chop-cutting the air below his left ear in a semblance of stroking.
His manufacturers had made him a majestic sexlobe. Its bold presence suggested great power, though the general public would only be privy to its implied heft when bagged. They had even stained it with cedar blush, though they must have known-the protocol long established and drooled over in the media-that prom night was the only time it came into view and then only for members of the cabinet and their staff.
Up until tonight.
Wanker kept his counsel.
Close to the chest was his nature, a mode of being accepted by the others. But it also helped him keep confidential his role on the Committee to Assassinate the President, which issued periodic updates, under strictest wraps and with the utmost anonymity, to the press.
Secretary Wanker had served on that committee in many past administrations, but this one posed a special challenge.
Would clipping Gilly Windfucker’s strings and snapping his limbs for kindling, duly videotaped for the national archives of course, do the trick? Or would they need to murder Cholly Bork as well? Kill the brains or simply the brainless twit of a figurehead?
In committee, Wanker had argued long and with great gusto that it was their patriotic duty to do them failing to do so would surely throw the government into a Constitutional crisis from which it might never emerge unscathed. And his arguments, lo these many months, had eaten their way toward persuasion.
As to when the assassination would occur, Wanker had been convincing on that front as well. This very private moment in a president’s tenure, the annual viewing of a hand-picked high-school slaughter, would at last be made public.
By god, thought Wanker with a wicked grin, I’ll go down in history.
This, in part, fueled his lobestrokes, as the roomful of suited men, and one pants-suited woman, watched Karn Flentrop sharpen her blade in the machine shop and sashay through dusty backways that had hosted scores of slashers before her.
When the lobebags dropped to the table and the slow rip of opening zippers circled about the conference room, generous holes had irised open in the table directly above their laps.
Busy indeed were the hands of the nation’s caretakers, left ones above the tabletop stroking their sexlobes, right ones below.
Even the President’s left arm clacked against the edge of the table as though he were grasping something stiff below. But no gens did Gilly Windfucker sport.
Onscreen, a school bell sounded.
The cameras tracked, as best they could, the doomed couple’s walk to the science classroom. That bold black number 57 again came into view.
They seated themselves beneath it.
The girl’s date had been a quarter off-camera as he took his place. But she tugged him over by the padded shoulder of his suit, a loving gesture which he shook off, then accepted.
“I’m a little nervous,” he said, by way of apology, and she said, “I know.”
Just above their heads was a metal plate that seemed to be screwed into the wall and painted in place. But earlier footage had shown the viewers how it would abruptly open, footage replayed in slo-mo. A stunning stand-in enacted the role of the slasher, her arm coming in with a wavy-bladed dagger against the throats of a pair of doped-up vagrants.
“Those two young people,” said Cholly Bork, “make my bosom swell with patriotic zeal.” Gasps edged the presidential voice, though Bork’s hands were engaged in manipulating Gilly Windfucker’s limbs and mouth only.
“My bosom too, Mister President,” intoned those in attendance.
Willy Wanker, as usual, said nothing. But his eyes were trained on the kids, his hands on his swollen tiller, and his mind on the crew of thugs that would, at his nod, burst through the cabinet room door.
Their final check of the walkie-talkies was nearly complete.
The woman who led them had gone down the line from one black-clad conspirator to the next. Each voice spoke clearly through the equipment she held to her ear.
No betraying squawks.
Top-of-the-line contraband.
“Hold on,” she said, looking at the last man. “I’m getting sine wave distortion.”
Then she realized the sound was outside, not in the equipment. Spotlights splashed the window thick with opacity. The drone of a helicopter whirlygigged down from above.
An electronic bullhorn snapped on: “WE’VE GOT YOU SURROUNDED.”
Terror flooded her. Her eyes darted about the basement.
Who was looking away?
Who wasn’t surprised?
But the light was too dim to make such a judgment, and most of her soldiers were already pulling on ski masks and drawing knives.
Then the door burst open and a choke of armed men in helmets and padded gear swarmed in, ganging up to drag down her people, tearing off ski masks, yanking heads back by hanks of hair, opening wide red grins in exposed necks.
Blood gushed onto concrete. Black fountains glistened in the silver night, turning the close air foul.
Then they attacked her, one young thug’s boot slipping in blood but at once recovering. A young hotheaded soldier wrenched her down from where she stood. His foul-mouthed companion tore her lobebag off. Then three men rushed in to grab at her clothing, wrenching it apart like savages, her skin slick with sweat as the black fabric took on hole after hole and stretched into nothing.
“Teach the bitch a lesson,” someone snarled, and that lesson, and many others, began to be most vigorously taught.
Butch rose for his solo in “Gettin’ Off.”
Back arched, trumpet lofted, a lick of hair swept across his brow, he made that horn wail, a weave of cool
