Pim toyed with his zipper pull, there where his smile came to an acute angle that pointed to his friendship lobe.
“Take Pim’s clothes off, I’ll show you.” He had already unzipped Altoona. Now he eased the leather skirt down over her ample hips. She did thigh sways to help out, kicking her pumps off on the thread-wisped floor.
Her leather vest hung open.
His hot hands smoothed over her tummy, her spine, went through her private hair and down her butt slit, caught at lace briefs and eased them off and away.
“We gonna dress ’em up?” Condor asked. He was slower in stripping Altoona’s girlfriend, but Pim’s succulent body finally came full naked into the costume shop’s gaudy light.
“No, stupid.”
“Aw, come on, guys,” said Pim. “Dress us up.”
Blayne leaned over and kissed Altoona’s lips. He caressed her sexlobe with one hand and pinched a nipple with the other.
She seized up in that hot frenzied way as if someone had dropped an ice cube down the back of her dress. She didn’t mind a bit.
Blayne broke the kiss and said, “I have a better idea than playing dress-up. You’re gonna like it.”
He knelt before Altoona, using her leather skirt to cushion his knees. Angling his neck to the right, he lined up his lips with her labia.
Condor caught on and did likewise with Pim.
It was a gas, watching Condor and Pim fumble their zippers together, even as she and Blayne did the same. It was like being tickled in lots of yummy places while trying to zip two sleeping bags together with greased fingers.
Blayne slid his zipper pull, the one along his lower lip, into the starter at the base of her right labia. Altoona made a try at hers, joining it with his upper lip starter, but he began to tongue her and that threw her off.
“Wait,” she said. “If you keep doing that, I’ll never get this in.”
He held off.
Then she had it.
It didn’t catch on any skin along the way, but glided up as his glided down on the right, making an intimate seal between them.
Everything felt fine and warm and good.
Then his tongue resumed, a wet rouse where their lips conjoined, perfect union, his head giving her its ardency as he rhythmed there.
She glanced at Pim, who was getting off in that special way of hers. Pim looked like a soft pink dream without clothing. And her squirms-as Condor, intimately lip-zipped, lapped her-seemed to say, Robe me in all the world’s wonders, wash me in sunlight, let perfect ecstasy swallow me up.
Altoona stretched her right hand toward her girlfriend and Pim seized it in that sweet grip.
Life radiated upon her oval face.
This moment felt like a pinnacle of bliss, which surely it was. Yet it was the beginning of something even greater.
Oh, Jesus.
Her kneeling boy-lover, with his lashable back, killer tush, and steely smile, swept her up into a yummy rhythm. Her joy began to rise again. “That,” she said to Blayne. “Yes, that.”
Pim’s right hand was stroking Condor’s hair. “Honey, he’s so good,” she said to Altoona, almost as if her new boyfriend wasn’t there, almost as if he were a trained monkey that couldn’t understand. “His mouth is so fucking incredi… mmmm… oh, yeah!”
Altoona winced. She nodded, unable to speak one word as the tremors seized her. Her hips swayed as Blayne’s head moved in perfect harmony. Their blent love surged upward.
Then a hand appeared on Pim’s head, grasping her hair and yanking back so hard that her neck made a snapping sound. A blade came across the arched skin, opened up a red blurt-and-spill down the curve of her body and a cascade of blood onto Condor’s side-turned head.
A face emerged.
It came toward her.
Blayne struggled below, panic in his eye.
The hand came in rough and scrabbly at her head, her hair, hanks yanked back, a crude tug that wrenched a neck muscle.
Just as the face registered with her, the name rushing in, a tautness bloomed in her throat, too fast for her hands to avert it, then a hot outgush along her breasts and belly, cooling as it came, and no-breath, nothing, nothingness closed upon her.
13. Unearned Sighs of Relief
Kyla followed Patrice into the gym.
For maybe ten token minutes, they had half-heartedly searched for their classmates’ corpses. To hell with school spirit. Then they headed back to the gym to wait for the bodies to be found and brought in.
A bridge had been crossed.
Kyla saw it in the teachers’ faces and in the way the chaperones looked at everybody.
Though the grown-ups remained aloof, a new bond, a bond of adulthood, had begun to form between them and the returning survivors.
Mostly, Kyla didn’t feel grown up.
But an essential part of her did.
On the bandstand, riding above soft cymbal brushings and steady bass drum thumps, Jiminy Jones noodled ineptly on his downturned muted trumpet. He had one of those bulb-mutes in, the kind that laced his playing with silvery silken regret and caresses that zinged straight to the heart.
“Oh, Kyla,” whined Patrice.
Kyla followed her lover’s eyes.
She wasn’t looking at Pesky and Flense, their bodies lying there like broken dolls beneath the Ice Ghoul’s triumphant leer. Nor was she wasting time on the principal, who stood by Miss Phipps holding his speech notes, pale and really upset about something.
No.
Patrice’s eyes were trained on Fido Jenner. One hand was stuck in his pants pocket. In the other, he held a paper cup.
Bowser stood beside him.
They were grinning.
Why? Because that slim tramp Peach, Cobra’s girl-or from the look of it, Cobra’s ex -girl-was talking them up, fondling their friendship lobes, hipping and breasting and just generally slinking outrageously before them.
“He’s breaking my heart,” Patrice went on.
“You can’t push the river, sweetie,” Kyla said, trying to be as gentle as she could. “If it wants to flow toward us, it will. Besides, he’d have to break up with Bowser, if we were to have a prayer.”
Or she and Patrice would have to break up, but Kyla didn’t mention that.
Petulant: “Bowser McPhee isn’t worthy of Fido. He never has been. And he never will be. It looks to me like Peach is doing one heck of a job pushing her river.”
Kyla stopped feeding her whining girlfriend. She was feeling jubilant as all get-out. There they were, numbered among the survivors!
Too bad about Pesky.
Too bad about Flense.
But the important thing was that she and Patrice had made it. They were alive and free, a rush of
