Dewy-eyed Watt MacQuarrie, standing before a map of the nation, had just swiveled his head toward prankster Tuck Winter, a dumb weather jock whose smug mannerisms Delia hated.
Tuck Winter clearly had aspirations beyond weatherboy. Tonight, he wore a somber face. His left earlobe sported a staid lobebag, unlike the flamboyant ones fans of his weather report were forever sending in.
“Thanks, Watt,” he began. “The RepellingCant primary took a nasty turn today, as Carty boosters released a videotape in which Bork Berenson kneels to—”
Delia tuned the sucker out. She left the bedroom door open, in case a sound-snippet lashed in to tantalize.
But as she shrugged into a dressy outfit, not her perennial school-nurse whites, she caught only snippets of the odd report. Plans for the next day’s corporate picnics, where the deadwood would be picked off to make way for the previous night’s grads. The uptick in stocks tied to mortuaries and crematoria. And some dull editorial on back-biting and finger-pointing among members of the Committee to Assassinate the President.
Commercial music blared.
Delia snugged a blue chiffon bag up about her left lobe. The bow that concealed its elastic tickled her lower helix.
She examined herself in the mirror above her dresser. Dark hair, short and styled. Skin pale and smooth.
A quick rummage through her gym bag. Yep, everything in its place.
The TV audio shifted into the languid unwinding of a saxophone melody.
Delia rushed out to watch.
Resentment toward the rules that dictated who could serve as a designated slasher routinely seethed in her head. Now, that resentment was augmented by the excitement these controversial new perfume ads produced in her.
The eye of the camera caressed the bare sleek cocoa back of a model. As her provocative voice pressed all sorts of sensual buttons, her delicate fingers toyed with a drawstring. The top of the model’s lobebag loosened.
She coyly smiled.
Abruptly, the lobebag fell free, a daring stretch of skin coming into view. And as the uncovered tip threatened to hit the eye, the camera cut to a sea anemone provocatively waving its tentacles.
Killer.
Delia’s mouth watered and her rage grew.
The fuckwits at the FCC had threatened to pull the plug on this daring ad campaign.
At Corundum High, an equally arbitrary and infuriating imposition of authority dictated that teachers alone —no staff, no principals, and never a school nurse—could off the prom couple.
As far as Delia was concerned, the airwaves belonged to everyone and should be entirely free. Lobesucking orgies on TV ought to be, if demand required, the order of the day.
And all adult employees of a high school ought to have an equal chance at being chosen.
Indeed, it was her opinion that passion and zeal should favor those who would put fire and fury into the kill. Delia had vast stores of rage in need of release, both from the student ridicule she had to endure each day and from the painful memories of a love dismembered.
Perhaps tonight would be different.
Things might work out for her.
Maybe Bix would bite it big-time. Brest and Trilby would love her. And she would see the nastiest students sprawled dead upon the Ice Ghoul’s lap, ready for a well-deserved futtering at midnight.
Or perhaps the night held greater wonders than Delia dared imagine.
Somewhere in America’s heartland, deep in an urban pustule, a cadre of anti-slasher terrorists, clad in black, slinked along back alleys to gather in the basement of an abandoned elementary school building.
Their leader, lit by moonlight streaming through a caked window, peeled off her ski mask and tucked it into her belt.
Emboldened, her co-conspirators unmasked too.
Eyes flashed from face to face. Great fear dwelt in them. Pride and excitement. The black-clad crew numbered seven, a spinoff from an above-ground anti-slasher organization the government begrudgingly tolerated.
“Let’s review the plan,” she said. “You and you will detain Sheriff Boltz once he has locked down the school. Gag him, secure his arms, hurry him into the passageways, sedate him, then give me the word.”
“What if he puts up a fight?”
She paused, then steeled herself. “Years of talk have gone nowhere. They’ve shrugged off our protests and petitions.” She laughed. “Listen to me. You guys have it memorized.”
Eyes on fire, she addressed the questioner: “Use any means necessary. That’s why I chose the two of you for this mission. Minimize his pain, but don’t hesitate to inflict it. If you have to, waste him. We cannot afford to raise an alarm. The syringe will make him docile but its effects are not instantaneous.”
She glanced up into the moonlight, her face tense. Had she heard something?
No.
“You three take the east wing of the school. By now, each of us has burned into our brains a map of the backways. Me and my hubbies will handle the west wing. With luck, we’ll be there before the slasher and catch him coming off the elevator from the underground garage. They’ve secured the garage with a punch code, alarms after the third wrong sequence, so that’s out. Other questions?”
She scanned them, her jet-black mop of hair clinging to her scalp.
“I’m proud of you all. Our kids are at stake, their lives yes but also their minds. They will not be inured to violence; we and folks like us will see to that. With luck and the grace of a reasonable God, we will end this horror in our generation. There I go again!
“One last check of the walkie talkies.”
They tugged them from their belts.
Dexter Poindexter’s senses had never been more attuned to his surroundings.
The coupe’s interior swirled with seeped-in aromas: cheeseburger wrappings, gym sweat, whiffs of adolescent horniness. Gleams of moonlight shot knife-sharp across the dashboard. The plastic steering wheel slid cool and stippled through his fingers.
A twelve-year stint of classes had come to an end, the last exam passed, the last cafeteria meal chowed down, the last homeroom roster called.
Tonight was the culmination of so many months of attending school that Dex’s memory knew nothing else.
True, summer vacations had supplied breathers that, at their best, stretched to eternity-beaches and boat houses and waterskiing on upstate lakes.
But every September, new looseleaf notebooks were purchased, their pungent faux-leather smell beguiling the nose. Book covers were bought as well, Corundum High’s colors, a fierce-eyed gray-and-green ram surrounded by ornate shields scrawled with latinate sayings.
Strange as it seemed, the terror Dex felt about school’s not resuming in the fall seemed far more heart- stopping than tonight’s slim chance at being hacked to death.
No matter whose life ended at the tip of the slasher’s blade, he and Tweed would be touched by the killing. Worse if two of their best buds, or particularly bright-futured seniors, bought it.
But they had been steeled for that.
The victims’ names, engraved in proud italic, would be added to the gold plaque in the display case at Corundum High’s entranceway, their lives lauded in the newspaper and in local churches the morning after.
And life would go on.
Familiar streets peeled away, the same houses he passed whenever he drove to Tweed’s place, rang her doorbell, and gave a “Hello, sir” to her dad, Mr. Megrim, Dex’s eleventh-grade history teacher.
Tonight, house fronts glistened with street light. Clusters of people peered from windows or lingered on
