Brest awkwardly patted Pill’s back, starting several times to speak but saying nothing.
Delia prompted Trilby to rise. How kind and full of caring she is, Trilby thought.
Inside the band room, the air was rank with warring odors of death.
Bix’s bowels had emptied. The night before, Brest had made spaghetti. From years of marriage, Trilby knew how spaghetti altered Bix’s bathroom smells. That smell now infused the band room, stenchy, homey, strangely comforting yet out of place.
Her eyes fixed on his corpse.
Bix lay there like a tosser-and-turner in a mattress ad. He had grown a little chubby around the waist as Pill advanced beyond toddlerdom.
His frilled shirt was wrenched out of his cummerbund. Trilby could see his navel and the wiry black hairs that surrounded it. The skin at his paunch did not move.
One never noticed a motion so perpetual until it ceased.
No inhale at all. No exhale.
It was maddening.
It terrified her.
Her breath caught, refusing to release. She raised a hand to her mouth.
Delia Gaskin hugged her from the side. “You okay?” she asked.
Trilby nodded. She suffered Delia’s embrace, leaning on her for support.
Bix’s face was an outrage.
His skull was broken and bashed. The skin at his exposed ear had shifted, a fallen fracture of shale. Blood spilled from that fracture.
His nose, crushed-the bone snapped upward at an obscene angle-sat atop a deep spewed gash, the punch of a steel fist having left moist wrinkles in the crater-edges of his flesh.
His skin had been rent asunder, as if the killer had wanted to see the man beneath the face, the secret Bix that Trilby had always suspected was there. But all that showed was inert muscle and bone.
Trilby felt faint.
But she could not tear her eyes away.
The next thing she knew, she was sitting on the edge of one of the band room’s rising levels, something sharp and bitter broken under her nose. She reared back and felt Delia’s arms supporting her.
“Steady, now,” the nurse said.
“I’m okay,” she tried to say.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Her face seized up in a cry. On the inhale, she smelled her husband’s corpse behind her. Then the tears subsided.
Delia offered her a tissue.
Trilby blew her nose and daubed the edges of her eyes. “You’re so kind,” she said. Poor lonely woman. Poor Delia.
Brest had been after her to start an affair with Delia. She had heart. Depth of character. She really cared, not just in a nursely way. It was more genuine than that.
Society called same-sex threesomes perverse.
What did society know of such things?
It wouldn’t be perverse, not in the least. It would feel good and natural.
Now was hardly the time for it, but Trilby felt the nub inside her, the pull she hadn’t quite felt before, the feeling Brest had, with far too much zeal, urged upon her.
Its eventuality lay before her.
“Help me out the door?” she said, her words faint.
“Of course,” came Delia’s concerned voice.
And the nurse’s firm grip, surprisingly strong in one so trim and feminine, came about Trilby.
She rose to her feet.
19. At the Mercy of the Ice Ghoul
Life was such a bitch, Sandy thought as she followed Cobra and Rocky along the second floor corridor.
Things had been thrown topsy-turvy.
There were rules. If you obeyed them, everything went fine for you. Yet, somehow-
(Just one crazy. Keep reminding yourself. It’s one wacked-out maniac.)
– the rules had been thrown out the window. No rule book at all.
Waiting in the boys’ locker room, Sandy and Rocky had thought themselves immune. Designated slashers never laid a finger on potential prom royalty. But now? Sandy shuddered. They hadn’t been safe at all. Flann and Brandy had bitten it in the refrigeration room. Rival nominees. Then an exempt tender had been killed, for the love of Christ. No one was safe from the rogue janitor.
It put her entire world in doubt.
Striding alongside Rocky, Cobra reached back an index finger, hooked it into her cleavage, and pulled Sandy forward as though she were wearing a harness.
“Come on, bitch, keep up,” he said, nearly pulling her off her pumps. “The Ice Ghoul’ll getcha if you don’t.”
Cobra chuckled, digging the weirdness around them. The turn of events had confusedly torqued Rocky. Her too. But their new boyfriend seemed to be getting way the heck into it.
Crazy strength.
When Peach jilted him, they had waifed the poor dejected creep in. Then the killings began to multiply, the world tilt into Cobra’s sullen territory. Now Mister Bigshot Heel-Clicking Hood was steering the threesome wherever he liked.
Did that concern her?
She had no idea.
Nothing made sense but survival and Sandy’s mind could only hold to that one overriding idea. There’d be time later to sort out their lives.
Twice they had counterclockwised the vast square that was the second floor hallway. Twice they had passed the same damned lockers and clocks, the same damned classrooms where she had been forced to endure Home Ec and Art and Algebra and Spanish and the ill-named “teachers” who had inflicted all of that boring crap on her.
Visions of hell.
Sandy guessed that Cobra’s strategy, if he had one, was to keep going, to stay within the maundering crowd and steer clear of doorways.
He released her and lit up a cigarette, never stopping, moving forward in a confident stride.
“Hey,” said Rocky, “you can’t smoke in here.”
“What’re they gonna do?” Cobra asked with a sneer. “Kill me?”
“No, but they might expel you.”
Cobra, bemused, flashed Sandy a look of exasperation. “I’ll take my chances, jocko.”
Rocky pointed. “There’s Mr. Buttweiler’s office.”
“I’m acquainted with it,” said Cobra.
Some kids shuffled through the principal’s door, their chosen place of refuge. Had he left it unlocked? Or had the janitor’s key opened it as a lure?
“Our next set of corpses.”
“Come on, Cobra,” said Sandy. “Don’t joke about it.”
“Who’s joking? Those dweebs are dead.”
Bloodslicks stained the tile floor outside Futzy’s office. Drippings from the zippermouths. Sandy had been royally grossed out by what the killer had done-not to mention what the zipheads themselves had done-to their bodies.
