When the lobebags dropped to the table and the slow rip of opening zippers circled about the conference room, generous holes had irised open in the table directly above their laps.

Busy indeed were the hands of the nation's caretakers, left ones above the tabletop stroking their s.e.xlobes, right ones below.

Even the President's left arm clacked against the edge of the table as though he were grasping something stiff below. But no gens did Gilly Windf.u.c.ker sport.

Onscreen, a school bell sounded.

The cameras tracked, as best they could, the doomed couple's walk to the science cla.s.sroom. That bold black number 57 again came into view.

They seated themselves beneath it.

The girl's date had been a quarter off-camera as he took his place. But she tugged him over by the padded shoulder of his suit, a loving gesture which he shook off, then accepted.

"I'm a little nervous," he said, by way of apology, and she said, "I know."

Just above their heads was a metal plate that seemed to be screwed into the wall and painted in place. But earlier footage had shown the viewers how it would abruptly open, footage replayed in slo-mo. A stunning stand-in enacted the role of the slasher, her arm coming in with a wavy-bladed dagger against the throats of a pair of doped-up vagrants.

"Those two young people," said Cholly Bork, "make my bosom swell with patriotic zeal." Gasps edged the presidential voice, though Bork's hands were engaged in manipulating Gilly Windf.u.c.ker's limbs and mouth only.

"My bosom too, Mister President," intoned those in attendance.

w.i.l.l.y w.a.n.ker, as usual, said nothing. But his eyes were trained on the kids, his hands on his swollen tiller, and his mind on the crew of thugs that would, at his nod, burst through the cabinet room door.

Their final check of the walkie-talkies was nearly complete.

The woman who led them had gone down the line from one black-clad conspirator to the next. Each voice spoke clearly through the equipment she held to her ear.

No betraying squawks.

Top-of-the-line contraband.

"Hold on," she said, looking at the last man. "I'm getting sine wave distortion."

Then she realized the sound was outside, not in the equipment. Spotlights splashed the window thick with opacity. The drone of a helicopter whirlygigged down from above.

An electronic bullhorn snapped on: "WE'VE GOT YOU SURROUNDED."

Terror flooded her. Her eyes darted about the bas.e.m.e.nt.

Who was looking away?

Who wasn't surprised?

But the light was too dim to make such a judgment, and most of her soldiers were already pulling on ski masks and drawing knives.

Then the door burst open and a choke of armed men in helmets and padded gear swarmed in, ganging up to drag down her people, tearing off ski masks, yanking heads back by hanks of hair, opening wide red grins in exposed necks.

Blood gushed onto concrete. Black fountains glistened in the silver night, turning the close air foul.

Then they attacked her, one young thug's boot slipping in blood but at once recovering. A young hotheaded soldier wrenched her down from where she stood. His foul-mouthed companion tore her lobebag off. Then three men rushed in to grab at her clothing, wrenching it apart like savages, her skin slick with sweat as the black fabric took on hole after hole and stretched into nothing.

"Teach the b.i.t.c.h a lesson," someone snarled, and that lesson, and many others, began to be most vigorously taught.

Butch rose for his solo in "Gettin' Off."

Back arched, trumpet lofted, a lick of hair swept across his brow, he made that horn wail, a weave of cool crisp notes bolting out like cliff beneath the frantic paws of a coyote.

Odd how his mind shuttled among chords while his fingers flurried out melodies above them. Yet somehow it always sounded new, some fresh-whelped beast that burst, sharp-clawed and yowling, out of the bra.s.s bell on rolling sweeps of pa.s.sion.

The solo was flawless.

This was Butch's farewell gig, his last time through most of the charts, and he had no slasher worries to cramp his playing. Notes ripped aside like calendar days in a convict's cell.

But when he sat down and the saxes took the melody from him, the applause was tepid.

He knew why.

Zinc, Butch's date and fellow trumpeter, was a tender who had chosen a white ball on the stage in a.s.sembly a week before. They had gone steady for two years, but that didn't matter.

Zinc had lucked out.

Therefore, Butch had lucked out.

His cla.s.smates hadn't.

It was that simple. In their heads they knew he was cool. But their hearts screamed wimp, and he would carry to his grave the disgrace of having escaped the risk of slaughter.

Worse than that: Butch himself felt no less resentful toward the others whose dates were exempt tenders. Toward Ig and Stan and Lida Sue, even these, his friends.

They would be herded, the saved ones, into the girls' gym while their cla.s.smates faced real terror.

Somehow, Butch vowed, he would endure the summer months, thinking only of Gryder College and his future there and beyond. There, before this night's shame caught up with him, he would stake out a brunt of friends, hoping they'd be steadfast under the communal pressure to shun him.

He pictured the trampoline in the girls' gym. When he had muttered something about trying it out tonight, the grown-ups standing nearby during the band's first break threw him looks of disapproval.

f.u.c.k 'em, he thought. They had pa.s.sed their test of courage centuries ago, the test he would be known forever to have weaseled out of.

Zinc leaned in to him at an eight-bar rest. "Super solo," he said.

Butch nodded.

(THREE-two-three-four).

Monday, his lover would be fair game for flogging again and Butch planned a glorious one to celebrate their escape. When Zinc had been among the tenders lotteried free of danger a week ago in a.s.sembly (kids called them promstiffers), Zinc's mom and dad had embarra.s.sed them both with a grand feast in thanksgiving. Grown-ups, face it, were gross and alien. They had no clue nor were they like to get one any time soon.

(SEVEN-two-three-four).

Tonight, Zinc displayed what had proven to be his and Butch's salvation: that thin-wristed, thin-lobed, smooth-skinned look of the unrecently flogged, which diminished him, which shrank him inward, making him look simultaneously h.o.a.ry and tabula-rastic.

(da-da-da DWEE!

And Butch's b.i.t.c.hin' countermelody soared above the 'bones.

8. Unclosable Wounds.

"They're on to us," muttered Bray.

Block by block on the drive from Fronemeyer's house, Bray's fear had grown. Now, as they stood at the refreshment table, it felt as if it surely must blare.

"Get a grip," Winnie replied.

Though the paper plate he held was st.u.r.dy, not the thin pitiful bendy kind that buckles or lulls under the least weight, his hand trembled. He transferred cheese cubes to the plate, orange and pale yellow ones with frilled toothpicks, then a fistful of wheat crackers.

Across the food, a senior girl with hard eyes and perky lobes stared at him, then shifted her glare onto the cheerleader bubblehead chatterbox with whom she had entered the gym.

"We're not blending," Bray agonized.

"Stick with the program."

Behind her smile, Winnie was miffed.

By the program, Bray knew she meant the plan she had laid out on the way over, the cover story the fuzzy-lipped teacher at the entrance table had swallowed without question.

Yes, Winnie had told Old Fuzzy Lip, they were correspondence students, had driven a fair stretch to celebrate their graduation from Corundum High. And yes, much obliged to accept one of a small stack of generic packets and wait out the stalking in the girls' gym with the tenders. He hadn't even checked their names, the pinned pa.s.ses enough verification for him, and a frantic press of young people close behind.

But dumb luck could only hold for so long.

Winnie guided them away from the refreshments toward a darker patch of gym, not too close to the kids yet not so distant that they stuck out.

"This is right," she said, through a steam-heat shimmer of music. "I can feel it."

Sapphires, dark and gleaming, drifted across her face. It amazed him. Winnie was in her element here. She really believed they would pull it off, that tonight they would save the world.

"We're going to have our heads handed to us." He bit into sharp cheddar, wishing for apples to augment.

"You are a coward, aren't you?"

"Hey, never beaten, never flayed."

Between them and the Ice Ghoul, a few brave early couples danced, close and clingy. Many more were bleachered and bunched, plates and cups in hand, nibbling, sipping, and trading sick jokes.

A couple of chaperones circled the sculpted figure, a tall man and a shapely woman. Teachers, Bray guessed. Their shoes moved in and out of a rolling blanket of fog.

"The killer's nearby," said Winnie. "I can feel it."

"Our hero."

"He saved our lives."

"Three murders. So far. That's quite the humanitarian walking among us. I can't wait to shake his hand."

Tugging at his right lobe, the tall man nodded to the shapely woman without shifting his gaze from the rampant red Ice Ghoul. She broke off, her eyes suddenly on Bray and Winnie, and headed their way.

"I can see you're determined to be difficult, no matter howa""

"Save it," he broke in. "I believe we're about to have company." He made a point of not glancing at the approaching woman, hoping she'd veer off.

Winnie said, "I'll do the talking."

But the woman charged in. "Pardon my social inept.i.tude," she said, pumping Bray's hand. "Excuse my nosiness, but I can always spot grads-by-mail a mile away. You are . . . ?"

She stared right into him, a bold beautiful face with thick rich lips and lobes that sang.

"I, um, Brayton is the name," he said, out before he could warn himself to mumble something or to make up a name.

He was a goner, and Winnie would be dragged down too, just as, years before, Bonnie Dolan had fallen with him when they'd jumped the prom.

But the woman seized on his name, a snag in her head as she mulled.

"Brayton, Brayton," she said, an internal Rolodex flipping, then, "of course, Brayton Con-something, Connors, no Conyers! I had you last fall. Miss Brindisi? The Greater Vices, Pride, Anger, and l.u.s.t?"

"Of course," he said. "A wonderful cla.s.s."

"And you must be our other student from Coffinville, Bray's co-worker, Raven Barnes." She shook Winnie's hand.

"That's right," said Winnie, matching the woman's brazen stance.

For one of society's outcasts, Bray thought, Winnie was admirably feisty.

"I'm pleased to welcome you both. I always find more in common with correspondents than with the youngsters."

"We have more focus," prompted Winnie. "We know what we want."

"Precisely." The woman's face lit up. "Say what you will about the merits of the annual prom kill, it does tend to distract the teenage mind from the task of learning. But get beyond that, venture out into the world for a spell, and well by golly, experience gives a correspondent a much clearer perspective on lifea"not to mention the legal exemption for returning students."

He chuckled. "No slasher."

"Not for you two."

"We'd submit to it if we had to," he a.s.sured.