"It's freezing in here. Hold my hand?"

"It feels real weird, mister, escaping this way. Almost like you're betraying your friends or something."

Zinc, the smallish second trumpeter, spoke to Bray in the dim obscurity of the girls' gym, half-hearted hallspill providing the only light.

Winnie stood far off, waving her hands and flapping her lips to convince a cl.u.s.ter of young girls about G.o.d-knows-what.

"It's nothing you could have prevented," said Bray in an attempt to comfort the kid.

Zinc shook his head, eighteen looking fifteen, his height a paltry five feet. "Doesn't matter. That Russian guy, the scientist with the bushy eyebrows, you know who I mean . . . he says people can control their fate, that there's a psychic link between your deepest desires and what actually happens to you."

"I don't believe that for a second."

"That's what he says."

"People say all sorts of wrongheaded things."

The other trumpeter, the defiant-looking one, was resting his elbows on the trampoline pads in the center of the gym. His knuckles thudded an off-rhythm against the thick springs.

He had been clipped and curt when, on their way here, Winnie had offered a compliment on his playing. Now his restless drumming stopped and he strode over to them.

"Hey, Zinc," he said, "let's try it out."

"You don't mean jumping on the tramp?" The kid was incredulous.

Sarcastic: "No, I mean lobesucking. Come on, it'll be a blast." The taller boy, a lick of hair sickled over his forehead, pointedly ignored Bray. Grown-up, over-the-hill has-been, Bray could almost hear him thinking.

"Don't, Butch. You'll break your neck."

"Well, jeez, at least spot me. Come on, man. Sailing on up into the darkness? It'll get your juices flowing."

Balancing on one foot, he wrenched a shoe off and tossed it down thock fwap-fwap-fwap.

Its mate quickly followed.

"Is he always like this?" asked Bray.

"Only when something's eating him. The prom, you know. Going away to school next year."

The charcoal blur hoisted himself up onto the edge of the trampoline, then hop-rolled onto its yield of canvas.

"Let's spot him."

They skated across the smooth gym floor, a sensation like a layer of ice beneath the soles of their shoes. Other kids were coming in from all directions, and Winnie, turning her head, joined him.

"Couple o' converts?" Bray asked about the girls she had been talking to.

"Discontent is everywhere," said Winnie, "a micron or two beneath the skin. What's with your musician friend?"

The trumpeter had found the discolored center of the canvas. He staggered at first, then eased into a gentle bounce.

"Who knows? Maybe he wants to die."

"Hey, you guys," Butch shouted on the uplift. "It's all a crock. (Sproing!) stop it, and we ought to."

Worked up already to nearly ten-fifteen feet, change falling out of his pockets and spinning on the canvas below, Butch stiffed up suddenly, knees bearing the brunt, arms shot out to the sides for balance. He bent and swept the coins off, metal clatters as they waterfalled through the springs, pinging and rolling across the floor.

"Zinc, come on, man," he said.

Then Zinc monkeyed up.

Bray steadied Zinc on the pads, and Butch helped him over the crisscross of springs. His shoes whip-rolled toward Bray, then fell floorward in twin thuds. "I can't believe I'm doing this." Standing, he linked hands with his lover and began a slow seesaw. "Woe, woe, woe!" he said, one at each bounce.

Bray glanced at Winnie. She looked sharp-eyed and stunning, a heartmelt.

"Kids," she commented in awe and disgust.

The seesaw diminished to nothing. The boys bounced now in synch and rising, white cuffs and clasped hands, their moonish faces alight with thrill, their arms angling out on the downfall, then snapping down flat like collapsed umbrella struts as they shot skyward once more.

A drifting horde of seniors, some of them tender, others not, rectangled all about, shouting encouragement and holding their hands up to offer instant rebuff against a bad fall.

Butch and Zinc were ill-lit as they pizza-doughed the canvas and it rebounded them upward. But on the rise, they slipped into even greater obscurity, a sleeve of blackness enveloping them, then releasing them on the downfall.

There was no ceiling visible. Just the one Bray sensed up there, climbing ropes strung up way high like dreams of vines, no limits to how daring the trumpeters might get.

Vanish.

Re-emerge swiftly downward, a plunge through squid ink into the dim ocean below.

Then arrow upward again, squeals of delight rocketing from their mouths.

Bray fancied he heard a noise up above, a metal strut adjusting to chill or weight.

Down again they shot, but Bray kept his eyes above, a dark shift in blackness he a.s.sumed he had to be imagining.

Up they rose.

But suddenly there oofed, above, an expulsion of breath, a blow to the belly, and one boy came down empty-handed, a look of terror smeared across his face.

It was the monkey-looking kid, too distraught to keep himself from an upward bounce as lofty as the previous one. Then he too, with a high choking sound, stuck up there.

Swift whickers of pain fell from above. More mechanical sounds, black on black, loud creaks, a spider dandling its web about trapped flies.

Someone asked stupidly, "Where are they?"

"Get the lights," Winnie called weakly, and it seemed to Bray that she thought she had shouted it.

Yes, I'll do that, he thought. I'll get the lights.

But all Bray could do was stare up into the blackness and listen to the bold shifting sounds, the creaking obscenity of movement and stretched rope, the shifts of some murderous shape about its work.

"They can't tender."

Others took up her word, the unfairness of it all and the shock in their voices.

In front of him, the trampoline canvas popped like a bedsheet snapped in a breeze.

Then again.

A wash of pops rained down, a sudden shower, foul-smelling.

Bray caught on his chest a slap of liquid, a spray against his face. And a second inundation fell from above as kids backed away.

Bray felt Winnie melt against him. "Jesus, Bray," an echo of her lost strength, "what's our guy doing?"

Above, there sounded a clattering as though a handful of drumsticks were being badly negotiated.

Then something fell, shattering: an icicle, its fragments skating across the darkened canvas, smashing hard, and skidding across the floor.

11. A Ritual Taken to Excess.

Sandy leaned against Rocky's back where he fidgeted on a long bench in the boys' locker room, ma.s.saging his neck and shoulders. She tried not to breathe smelly gymsuit odor but it couldn't be avoided.

"Is it time yet?" asked Rocky.

"No again, handsome."

Her man sat hunched over, hands clasped, as though he'd been benched for a foul.

He glanced at her and smiled. "We got those two dancers over a barrel, I can feel it."

"No contest, hon. Flann and Brandy, they're a couple of clothesracks. You and me, though, we do stuff. Kids cheer your tackles and your field goals. I give them a rise with my pompons and the occasional flash of my b.u.t.t."

Rocky had worn a clean white jockstrap to bed once. Now she pictured him, his killer teammates too, arrayed down the dim empty bench, big swells of d.i.c.k held in before them like whips of s.p.a.ckle, their b.u.t.tock muscles tight, the playful thwap of towels against bare bottoms.

"We'll do that throne s.h.i.t, huh?"

"That's right," she said. "They'll spotlight us. They'll give us a big bra.s.sy fanfare, robes, crowns, the whole shootin' match."

"And then the newspaper!"

"Uh huh." She nodded vigorously, relieved that the lesson had finally begun to sink into Rocky's thick skull. "Tonight, big grins to the peons, flashbulb pops, royal waves and armloads of roses. Monday morning, our picture will grace the front page of the Gazettea""

"Dead corporate grunts'll've stepped aside at their Sunday afternoon picnics."

"a"yes, and there you'll be, ready to take your pick of the jobs opened up by their deaths."

Rocky chuckled.

He rubbed his palms together, like she did when she smoothed hand cream on, but more briskly. "And then," he said, "we'll find a third to round us out."

"Yes. A nice man. Maybe some old guy with a good job and yummy lobes."

Sandy would stay home with the pup. Which pup she wasn't sure. But it had frizzy caramel-and-cream fur and a cute wet black nose. She could see the little yapper now. She would hire a landscaper to put in a perfect flower garden, then sit back and spend the money her husbands brought in.

"n.o.body from school though," said Rocky, parroting her.

"No one."

Her sights had been raised considerably since their nomination as prom royalty. It had put them safely beyond slaughter. That release from terror had given Sandy a far wider vision of the future, up from the confined sandbox of high school to the unending stretch of beach frontage that lay before them.

"They're all such children here," she said.

"They sure are."

Bending to him, Sandy pressed her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against his back and kissed his thick coconut-aroma'd hair.

Gaunt gray lockers aisled off parallel into the gloom, ending at yet another wall of them. Murmurs of other couples arrayed elsewhere back near the showers floated in dim stifles of air. Ghost-voices. Soon to be memories only.

"Is it time yet?"

"Not yet. Soon."

"I swear, I'm gonna cut you a big bleeding hunk of corpse."

"I'd like that, Rocky."

Bobbing knee. "You sure it's not time yet?"

The shrill bell had startled Pill. Gigi, her stuffed goat, huddled close then.

The bell was much louder than when she walked down the halls in the daytime to visit her biology teacher mommy, holding Daddy's hand.

Outside in the hallway, Pill heard heels and giggles. She had just enough time to rush into the coat closet, a nice non-squeaky door that let her leave half an inch and didn't swing open when she took her hand away. It smelled woody, but it was warm enough that cool air blew on her from the thin bright crack.

Two girls came in, noisy and excited. They were very happy to be here.

Pesky, the high-pitched chatterbox of the pair, kept squealing and jumping up and down, to judge from her leathery taps on the tile floor.

And Pill heard laughter in the calmer, lower voice of Flense. It sounded like her daddy when he was agreeing to something Mommy had said but was really patting himself on the back about how much brighter than her he was.