In particular he remembered good ol’ Gary the nose-picking nurse, who must’ve thought Gerber was some piece of meat that cared not a whit about the niceties of living. Nope, good ol’ Gary could just, privileged as you please, snuk a finger up into his nostril right in front of the sliced-up brain guy lying on the bed.
Gerber’s head had hurt after the operation. But otherwise, he hadn’t felt any different. He wanted to shove an ice pick up Gary’s nose, get a bloody booger on its tip, maybe take some of his brain out along with it.
His hand went to the utility belt: Axe head. Plastic pouch o’ screwdrivers. Empty place.
Gerber looked down.
No ice pick.
He sighed.
Always losing stuff. The Bleaks was always getting on him about that, about stuff being lost around the house.
Missus Bleak always pig-yammered at him out of her lipsticked oinker of a yap, till he’d had enough and cried in front of her like a big baby. But in his head she was taken apart, all that flab torn open so the blubber came spilling out on the rug and he weren’t about to clean might mind you, dance on it. Nor would he care a tinker’s damn about his boots, nope, he’d just make sure he didn’t slip on the grease and bang the back of his head where the surgeons had left the deep dimple.
Did they need him at the prom?
Probably so, but goddamn if he would go where they wanted him to go. Not with all the early unscheduled oof in his head, not with all the unruly visions of struggle warring up there.
He didn’t want to see nobody.
I better get up, he thought. Head off to the next place. Where was that? His feet would know, as they always sooner or later did.
It was quiet in the supply closet. Quiet and close and difficult to breathe. They oughta make these denim suits with air holes, not make a head janitor sweat.
Maybe they wrung ’em out, he thought. Maybe they grabbed ’em out of Missus Bleak’s bathroom clothes hamper. Maybe they fueled Corundum High with his sweat.
Gerber smiled.
Them teachers ain’t got nothin’ on me, he thought. Them shitty students, they pass through this place like a digested meal. Gerber, he repairs the walls and linings, frees up blockages, keeps the little shits moving through until they blat out the low-slung buttock end o’ things.
But there be rumblings in these walls more than usual. They angered him, and frightened him.
Never you mind that.
Nope, I won’t.
He got up, swirling with his palms on the concrete floor and shoving off, then letting his feet figure out where to take him next.
Kyla Gorg looked askance at her lover. “Hey come on, Patrice. The drawing’s random. Even if it wasn’t, and really some muckety-muck picks who’s to be killed and where, they wouldn’t be stupid enough to use the same location two years running.”
“Yeah maybe,” said Patrice, worrying a thin layer of chiffon between her pudgy fingers. “But there’s always a first time.”
“We’re safe as a snug bug in a rug here. So chill out, okay?” Kyla thought her date was such a chickenshit.
Generations had survived prom night.
They could too.
“It’s so creepy.” Patrice was scandalized. “I can’t believe they’d seat us here. Ugh, you can almost smell the blood.”
“Oh, stop it!”
Kyla surveyed the dim cold kitchen, a rare look at a place ordinarily out of bounds.
Two other couples were tucked like ungainly dolls amidst sink units and stoves and preparation tables, murmuring in a darkness lit only by one feeble fixture above the cash register.
The white sign that bore their number had seemed to float on the wall when she and Patrice came to it. In this precise spot, the year before, Melody Jinx and her date had waited and bled and died.
Surely the area had been scrubbed down. But the wall paint was ugly green anyway and what Kyla had touched felt, well, greasy.
Tell herself a million times it was only her imagination, she could still see blotches of gore all around them. Melody’s ghost, seeping through the walls and floor where Melody had eaten a cleaver, seemed to wrap them in cold mist.
Again Patrice’s worry-wart voice: “I wonder where he is.”
“Fido?”
“Of course Fido. Who else?”
“Fido’s never going to be ours,” Kyla said, with what seemed to her like grown-up resignation. “We have to face it, now that we’re graduating.”
“Don’t say that!”
“Come on, Patrice. Folks expect us to triple up with an overweight man, just like on Fat and Fed Up.”
“Ugh, I hate that show. And I hate overweight men.”
“You like me, don’t you?” Kyla asked.
“Sure I do.” A ghostly jellyfished hand came down on Kyla’s knee and orange-juiced there its assurance. “But thin old, wiry old Fido is who I want. He’s nice and cuddlable and cute and sweet and kind and scrumptious.”
“And out of reach.”
“We don’t know that. Not for sure. And the night is far from over.”
Kyla said nothing.
What was the use?
Give Patrice a last try at her dream, the one she’d first dared to voice in tenth grade.
It had been fun to moon over Fido in private, a secret passion they used to fuel their lovemaking. Kyla had often pictured him with them as her lover’s whip cut across his quivering flesh. Once-amazing experience-they had closed their eyes, stroking and sucking at one another, imagining it was him: Fido Jenner, split, blimped, making it with himself.
“I’ll bet Ms. Foddereau’s the slasher,” said Patrice.
Kyla pictured the teacher’s flat seamless face. Echoes of her dry humor. The old crone stood before a butcher block, working her bloody hands into an open pork belly.
“I’ll bet it is,” said Kyla.
That sly smile, that seemingly offhand remark about fat, the ripple of a chuckle it had set off in class the year before.
Kyla warmed to the idea. “Boy, if it is, I’d love to see her try to surprise us. I’d love to overpower the superior little bitch and wrench her chin up while you sever her trachea, slicing deep to the spine with that bone saw up there.” Among knives on the opposite wall, the bone saw gleamed.
“Yeah, bring her on!”
“We’ll filet the smile right off her friggin’ face,” Kyla said.
“Butcher, cleave thyself.”
The grimness silenced her, cutting short her glee. A teacher, probably right this moment, was ending two of her classmates’ lives.
Not many friends amongst them, but they were okay kids. The prospect of beholding a slain couple sobered Kyla, even as it touched some atavistic nub of delight inside her.
“Patrice?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s freezing in here. Hold my hand?”
