exhilaration coursing through her.
Odd, how you could be shackled and never know it till someone took a sledgehammer to your bonds and set you free.
“I could use some food.”
“Get some for me too, okay?” Patrice said, dole-eyed above sultry trumpet sorrow. “I don’t want to go near him.”
“Sure.”
Kyla headed off.
Patrice was a tad bit irritating. Kyla had heard that all sorts of splits and new pairings, and sometimes the beginning of threesomes, were often precipitated by surviving the kill.
That was what Fido seemed to be engaged in.
And Peach’s scuzzy boyfriend, Cobra, was hip-deep in conversation with-of all people-Sandy Gunderloy and Rocky Stark. He was staring at the cheerleader’s breasts, pretending he wasn’t upset at Peach’s having deserted him.
The creep was miffed though, powerful miffed. Kyla could tell.
Clusters of kids stood around jabbering about the dead girls. Kyla skirted their conversations, the perfect eavesdropper, not being asked to join in, of course. That never happened.
The long table of food drew nearer. This was a special night. A binge was definitely in order. The cold cuts called to her in all their splendor.
Kyla glanced back.
Poor Mr. Buttweiler hadn’t moved a muscle. He stood by the bandstand, Miss Phipps talking at him. Something was definitely bothering their principal. Something besides his dead daughter.
He just stood there staring at the Ice Ghoul and at the bloody couple splayed before it.
Kyla wondered what special hell he was in that could bring such a low, mean, sorrowful look to his face.
Each kill affirmed the rightness.
And the righteousness.
There’d been a concern that conscience might get in the way. Antiquated, wrongheaded conceit.
Come right down to it, these were acts of love, acts that helped heal wounds.
Killing the compromised punkfucks in the costume shop had been a joy. The bloodrush down torsos, the crimson that painted breasts, bore a certain savage grace.
Consumed by the heat of perverse lust, the writhing wantons had, in an instant, flopped dead and cold.
This Pimlico and her Altoona may have jerked about like severed frogslegs as they died. It was impossible to tell, what with their blood-splashed guyfucks struggling to unzip their mouths from the girls’ vulvas as the knifeblade opened the throat of one, then the other.
Then, peace reigned everywhere.
Bright, red, wet, and full of love in the costume shop’s pure light-such was the calm, a calm more like a cathedral than a high school.
The corpses could have been left the way they were. But it offended one’s aesthetics.
Far better to unzip them, despite the sticky blood-bother. Things went smoother, now that the struggles had ceased.
Death simplified matters.
Stick the boys together first. Lined up, rolled out, facing each other, the damned zippers didn’t match up, both pulls located on the right lower lip.
Slide one boy around.
Slick leather made the pivot easy, Condor’s chin to Blayne’s nose and vice versa, the two of them stretched out thin as rolled dough oozed over with burbles of cherry liqueur.
Clots between the zipper teeth made the going tough. But at last, twice over, an upper lip was successfully joined to a lower.
Touching. An insufferably cute kissing pair of bloody punkfuck lowlife losers.
Then a rack of Beefeater costumes was wheeled free of the crammed congestion. Bulky red and black uniforms harrumphed to the floor, moth-musty padded stuff that three years before had strutted and sung, beneath the baton of Jiminy Jones, in a failed attempt at light opera.
The dead zip-mouths were heavy little fucks. But eventually they made it over the thick metal bar, Blayne’s nape creased and deeply lined from the weight of his corpse, the abrupt angle of his back-bent head, the wide open smile opened in his neck, the lipstrain of his best bud’s zipped body pulling down on the other side.
They looked uncomfortable indeed.
Their skin might give, before anyone found them.
Then again, it might not.
Time for the naked girls, flops of meat and bone that had once tantalized. There was no attraction here now. But the light falling harsh on lifeless, blood-splashed skin carried a certain charm. It touched memories. It soothed them. It gave assurance that this act was not only just but that love’s revenge demanded it.
The girls proved more difficult to get right.
Dragging Pim on top of Altoona was easy, one dead face skull-smacking the other.
But managing the zippers was hard.
All that leg flesh. Thighs. The gleam of matched niobium between the anuses was the only part visible, that and the zipper pulls.
No room to maneuver there. None.
These two had been lovers, of which the world was owed proof. Not to zip them together simply wouldn’t do. They required the same treatment as the boys, to be racked up there, hanging over the big iron bar by their parts.
Visions of cooked chicken arose, one leg snapped aside to reach meat. Dig a knee into the small of the back, grasp the right thigh with both arms, and lever it sharply up, using every ounce of strength-that was the way to proceed.
Something snapped, a dull pop, a thigh bone dislocated. Discoloration bruised the stretched flesh, a major vein broken by exertion.
But it allowed sufficient access.
The girl’s zipper pull slipped over its first tooth and drew up nicely.
An obedient little mechanism.
Her left leg bent back more easily than her right.
There was only one slight vulval snag, halfway up. But backtracking a few zip-teeth set things right again.
Jesus, the lifting! It deepened one’s respect for the poor joes who load haunches of beef onto meat trucks.
At last the females were up, slid onto the bar next to the dead boys but not touching them. Propriety had to be maintained.
Heads down. Blood would have dripped from them if there’d been any left.
The stocky one-it felt wrong to call this dead thing Altoona-threatened the balance. But the other girl’s oddly angled, disjointed thighs tipped sufficiently in the opposing direction to steady them on the clothesrack.
As the rack rumbled toward the passageway, the foursome swayed like commuters on a subway car.
It would be good to position them where the others would discover them.
Raise a few hackles.
Make the little shits shit their britches, get the blood pumping, their adrenalin flowing, divide and conquer them.
Perhaps at some point, the hunger would be satisfied.
But there were plenty of worthy victims out there, the evening was still young, and after all, wasn’t prom night made for love?
