He rose, the shock flooding him.
He wanted someone, anyone, to comfort him. Winnie. She would do. Her arms came about him, and he realized him.
Frantically, they embraced, grappling for elusive assurance, finding it and craving more.
Dumb, he thought.
He and Winnie had laid themselves wide open for attack.
They would die here. At any moment the mad slasher would leap out and cut them to ribbons. But even as he let his mind career about in panic, Bray held Winnie in a numb, shocked embrace, his body as calm as a grave.
Deadened. Dead. One way or another, they were as good as dead already. They would become victims. Or they would be accused and convicted of tonight’s killings.
The cards were stacked against them.
Winnie tensed. A soft cry issued from her. Her head lifted as she seemed to sniff something new and terrible, a sharp miasma of misery on the cloying air.
“What?” Bray thought he said.
But Winnie’s head was angled back, frozen in attentiveness like the snapshot of a mustang, its mane tossed about, its nostrils flaring wide from the scent of a predator on the wind.
21. Aerated and Tumbled Dry
Two things awakened Peach.
A warm slap of fluid across her cheeks.
And Bowser’s screams.
Aches sang all over her body. Her knees and elbows, her thighs and back, her now-unshod feet, and every part of her head. All of it felt as if she had been drubbed unmercifully. Her hands lay like two comatose crabs, trapped and numb beneath the weight of her torso.
Peach opened her eyes, one puffy eyelid like a nagging fear in her peripheral vision. Shiny snips of tin, like crimped moons, lay scattered about a blunt iron base. Washes of blood coated the dull gray metal.
A low ominous hum came from above.
The machine shop. Elwood Dunsmore’s preserve, where humiliation of the inept held sway. Peach hated it.
Fluid spattered her face like gobs of hawked spit. Some of it landed on her lips and splashed into her mouth, salty and rude.
Bowser’s screams redoubled.
Peach looked up.
Like a piston frozen in an upthrust position, a silver square plattered Bowser above the blunt iron base. His head hung down, bent back at the neck, hair askew. His shoulders angled awkwardly as he lay upon his bound hands, the white coat of his tux scored and scuffed with dirt.
Off the other side of the square, his legs hung dumbly asplay, the bottoms of his trousers puffed up like wads of bloody gauze, dripping, drinking, o’erspilling.
Peach saw janitor overalls rising from odd shoes, powder blue and dressy. A woman’s hand grasped a red knob in a cross of knobs and eased it down.
Nurse Gaskin!
How could it be Nurse Gaskin?
Her eyes were taut, intense, narrowed to an insane point.
Again the hidden drill bit into Peach’s new boyfriend, a spew of screamed denial issuing from his lips. Blood shot out from above, swatted her brow, forced her eyelids shut.
She opened them, the sting of blood prompting tears. Wimpy old nurse lady, mateless, over the hill. When they had spoken of her at all, it had been with sneers or innuendo. Now she’d gone over the edge.
A skilled hand reversed the cross of knobs, dropped to tug Bowser a few inches farther on, then found again a red knob. She was punching buttonholes deep into Bowser’s body, working her way toward his head as if she were making a human cribbage board.
And Peach was next.
She wanted to cry out, to scream for help.
But all sound had drained from her. Her body, an empty gourd, shook and shivered. Like a sudden blush below, her bladder released. The warmth became clammy and chill. The odor of undiluted urine invaded her nostrils.
Above, a new gush of blood fountained. A spurt of Bowser’s heartpump rained again across Peach’s face.
Bray felt like a mule tugged along by some crazed prospector, as twists and turns of backway were carved out of nothingness by the womanshape that impelled him on.
Winnie’s instincts were up.
Since they’d left the restroom victim, Bray had lost his sense of direction. For all he knew, they had reached China.
Winnie’s step did not falter.
“Are we getting closer?” he called out.
Her hand raised to wave him silent. Then he abruptly ran into her halted body. He clutched her as if he had meant to.
“Oaf,” she said. “Listen.”
Bray couldn’t hear anything but his own heart and the settling of ancient dust. Then he made it out: The faint whine of a buzzsaw, a gnat at his left ear.
Winnie said, “This way,” and again they were off, like Alice and the Red Queen trying furiously to stay in place.
He concentrated on staying near the receding rustle of Winnie’s dress. His eyes struggled to keep it in view.
Oddly, there in the oppressive confines of the backways they swept through, Bray’s thoughts turned less to the danger they were in and the corpses they had seen, than to Jonquil Brindisi.
It was almost as if the obscure grayness in front of them were a moving projection screen.
Upon it he saw the thick-lipped looker, the flaming redheaded instructress of the greater vices, sizing him up, sizing them both up, from their first meeting.
There she stood at the mike, keeping the kids from panicking. Her strength thrilled him, turned him on, setting off flares of worry at the thought of her accusatory finger suddenly pointed in their direction.
Generous breasts, earlobes to die for, a hot steely look in her eyes: He craved it all, the promise, speaking perhaps only in his mind, that this woman would be the perfect complement to his and Winnie’s love.
They stopped again.
The whine was louder.
Winnie’s mouth touched his ear. “We’ve got him!” The triumph, the high flush of arousal in her voice thrilled him. Then she took off again, hurtling faster, a great bird of prey swooping down the obscure passageway, drawing him along in her wake.
He loved Winnie. He loved her determination, her naivete, her shape and smell, the totality of her. If they survived this night, their life together would be glorious.
Another halt. This time, he nearly knocked her off her feet.
The high whine came louder still, edged this time with a scream, a piercing girl-sound. Then that was choked off and the whine ceased.
Dead silence descended upon the backways.
Winnie swore.
