Fleeing to a prop closet upstage of the legs, Delia hid herself behind it.
The space was maddeningly shallow.
All it would take was one glance her way and the game would be up.
But the strange, soiled couple that emerged from the backways, and Jonquil Brindisi behind them, had eyes only for the denim-clad man making his slow entrance onto the stage.
From the first, as she and Dex explored the stairwells, Tweed had been bold in calling out to Gerber Waddell.
Reckless even.
She had known it, but her giddy state led her to take risks. And because they were brandishing some pretty mean cutlery, she felt safe.
Tweed could tell the wandering students were impressed by her and Dex’s role as deputies. They had picked up strays in the hall and in the first two stairwells they examined.
In the close confines of tile and steel and gum-encrusted steps, their shouts to the janitor doubled back upon them in weird echoes.
When they reached the east stairwell, they found an odd lot of sober kids outside the door. Another lot stood inside the stairwell, their eyes fastened upon a trio of corpses.
The old feeling of helplessness flooded into Tweed again. Suddenly she had no will to hold up her knives.
Her heart held not much fondness for Cobra, Rocky, or Sandy. But violent death levels all victims.
Somehow Dex rallied.
Somehow he said just what everybody needed to hear to start them on their way toward the auditorium. Something about the principal having a plan, though Tweed couldn’t recall Futzy saying anything planworthy in the gym.
Now they were sitting with their contingent of strays in the left front block of seats, as other unsuccessful troops straggled in emptyhanded.
Their flashlight beams did a feeble dance along the sloping aisles as they walked.
Someone slow-scanned, high across the auditorium’s stage-right wall, the motto painted in large gold letters: “The strength of a nation lies in the regimentation of its youth.”
No one said much.
Faces were drawn.
Young shoulders slumped forlornly.
Mr. Buttweiler and Miss Phipps sat side by side on the edge of the stage. They had no plan. Dex had been speaking from some wishful place in his head. But no one, certainly not Tweed, seemed in any mood to ding him for it.
The principal’s spindly legs rhythmed at random, shoe heels nearly knocking against the stage front. Hands clasped earnestly in his lap, he leaned to say something to Miss Phipps.
She nodded.
Grimacing, he began to rise.
But when he was halfway up, Tweed’s attention shot to the right.
Onstage, someone was emerging from between hanging dark curtains.
Hands, arms, chest.
Objects gleamed from his fists-
It was Gerber Waddell!
– shiny objects, a thin one, a thick one.
The janitor’s face was shrouded in washes of death, the deaths he had brought about.
Futzy stood in shock, a hand at one pocket. His head hung dumbly, as if he’d just been told his best friend had died.
Tweed’s brain teemed.
It’s the slasher, said one part of her mind. Run!
But voices, high and fast and full of anger, were rising all about her. Another part of her mind latched onto them, found resonance with that feeling, and rose with them.
Dex shouted beside her, his face as red as a newborn robin cheeping for worms.
Sounds were issuing too from her.
The air was full of movement. Flutterings. Hard young bodies rushing forward.
Across the black floor of the stage staggered the head janitor, a dumb slow feeb of a slasher. Tweed wondered how he had surprised or bested anyone.
Futzy stood transfixed. Then his hand was fumbling in his pocket and he pulled out a gun, the great unequalizer, death-power packed in a fistful of metal. With a deafening blow, Futzy punched the air before him.
The feeb’s left shoulder yanked back. A man and woman entered from the wings behind him.
Far from stopping Tweed and the others, the gunshot drove them into a greater frenzy. Down the aisles they teemed, surging up the stairs in a rush of bodies.
Tweed watched the couple-odd correspondence student types-seize the janitor and wrest the ice pick from him. The man drove it into his neck and left it there.
Jonquil Brindisi came onstage.
Then Tweed swept into a surge of prom fabric that rushed past the principal, rudely thrusting Futzy Buttweiler aside like flotsam in a stream. The steel gleam of futtering cleavers winked in every hand, her own hand, Dex’s too, their long knives absurdly left at their seats.
But that was okay.
One cut, one slice among the hundreds now sweeping in, would be enough.
The stage thundered as a choke of bodies came in all about. Despite the collisions, one purpose thrived. One thirst that kept the bodies honed in on the falling janitor, the hacked man whose denim suit shredded off in tufts of cloth and flesh.
In they dove, young birdbodies, a sharp hack and away, circling to swoop down for more.
Deep-hued as barbecue sauce, Gerber’s blood splashed suits and dresses. Tweed’s dress. She grew high and giddy, gaiety and rage intermingled in the sounds she made.
A man lay stripped before her, more exposed as each moment passed, bits of cloth, flesh, and organs filling the air like blood-tinged chokes of cottonwood.
She breathed meat.
She breathed madness.
Their victim’s mind, sick and vicious even under attack, unspooled itself in death, flinging out darts of vileness.
But she-and all of them, this happy band of hackers and hewers-resisted those darts. In the shaping of communal grave-clouts were they caught up, weaving it, shuttled, hack by flurried hack, upon a loom of common cause.
Righteous was their wrath and beautiful.
She would tell all of this joy to her dad.
Her sister Jenna too, whose prom would be a cakewalk after this.
Through a turmoil of bodies, slapping and smacking in earnest-by God, the dance only hinted at it-Tweed saw her means of ingress. She seized it, rode it in, war whoops in her throat, her hand coming down, no choice really in what prize she would slice off, all of it a matter of fate and luck.
Like a coelacanth’s mouth still moist from feeding, a meaty flesh-hole wuttered up at her. Its wet, red, ragged regret ovaled out to yield a slice of organ.
Slash! She held it against the blade as she pulled out, a nub of gore trapped between thumb and steel. Ms. Foddereau’s butchery class paid off in spades.
“I got a nipple!” Dex screamed. “I got a nipple!”
Tweed became Dex’s magnet, retiring with him upstage. Behind them, the pounding and battering of bodies kept up. In another moment, the killer would be reduced to bone, and soon that would be divvied up as well.
