Yet perhaps the cause of his rising panic was not paranoia at all, but survival instinct.

"Poor Mr. Donner," Tweed whispered, breaking the silence like a shout.

Dex raised a finger to his lips. At her ear: "Keep an eye out. He could rush us from anywhere. If you even think a shadow moved, let me know. Don't a.s.sume you're imagining it, okay?"

Tweed nodded.

She mouthed something soundless. Dex thought it was "I love you," though the weak light made it impossible to be sure.

The bulb flickered as if a moth flitted back and forth over it. Then it went out. Blackness rushed in to surround them.

One squat upper window glowed with enfeebled moonlight that shot down head-high to carve a far sliver out of one wall.

We're sitting ducks, thought Dex, we've got to get away from these doors.

He took Tweed's hand and helped her up, the rustle of her dress concealing perhaps the groan of a tall gray door's hinges.

Dex felt a breeze. The pa.s.sing of someone's body before them? At any moment, Tweed would cry out from a lethal wound. Or a knife blade would violate him, p.r.i.c.king out the heart of his life.

"Hold me," said Tweed.

Dex gave her a quick fierce hug, then said, "Come on."

Holding Tweed's hand, Dex slid his right shoe along the platform. He was no longer certain of the four-inch drop to the next level, where the trumpets and French horns sat.

It wouldn't do to trip and tumble. They'd be dead in an instant.

Tweed said, "Not so fast!" Panic at being dragged along in the darkness. She b.u.mped him, then regained her balance.

"Another level now, watch your step," he said. "Clarinet section. Okay, we're off the risers. Past the piano. I can make out the band room door, coming up on the blackboard now."

He felt along it. Soon the door.

The killer's eyes burrowed into their backs. He would never let them escape.

But what if he were right outside the door, waiting for them in the hallway?

Tweed tugged him to a halt. "Dex, I heard something. Out there."

And the band room door opened, gray on black. A figure slipped through. The door hissed closed behind it. Dex rushed whoever it was, grappling with the shape, his fists darting out, trying to stun their attacker, to get the upper hand.

No resistance. A woman's voice shouted out, "Hey, wait . . . whata"?"

"Miss Phipps!" said Tweed.

Adora Phipps, Dex thought. She's safe. But he felt down her wrists just in case.

Empty hands.

"I'm sorry," he said. "It's us. Me and Tweed. We thought you werea""

"I'm not. But I'll be d.a.m.ned if I know who is. Listen we're trying to round everyone up, get them back to the gym. It's the safest place, and Mr. b.u.t.tweiler's got a plan. Come with?"

Dex nodded.

"You bet," said Tweed relieved.

"Ditto," said Dex, realizing his nod had failed to register.

"Good, let's go."

After groping about for it, the door made a vertical gray line. Then that line gaped into a rectangle wide enough for them to pa.s.s through one at a time.

Jonquil Brindisi walked as if she had been thoroughly oiled, her lubricious limbs animated by sheer desire. She loved the mayhem, the chaos, loved them to distraction.

Once Gerber Waddell was found, she would join in the futtering. But if she found him first, she planned to f.u.c.k the simple dweeb, feeling his lovely violence invade her as she tied him down and rode him.

Just imagining it made her gasp.

She had already dragged Claude into a supply closet after Elwood Dunsmore had been found torch-faced by the entranceway and Futzy'd rolled in the mutilated zippermouths. Claude kept up his but-I'm-married routine until she yanked his fly open and filled her throat close to choking.

Then his pretzel of words, the syntactically convoluted bulls.h.i.t he had made a part of himself, turned into barnyard grunts and oh-yeahs and suck-me-darlin's. She had left him panting, his organ still thick despite its hot spew. He tasted like pea soup pureed with pearl onions.

Thus, Jonquil had mused, do the greater vices ever overwhelm the lesser.

Now she was on Gerber's trail.

More precisely, she was up for whatever the fates delivered. She craved the killer. And she felt that the strength of her craving ought to be enough to draw him out.

Until now, Gerber had been a s.e.xless dolt of muscles and nods, thinning hair and stupid grins. Who would ever have guessed at the dynamo of hatred which had clearly simmered inside him for years, exploding at last into this amazing orgy of bloodletting?

Swimming upstream of the fleeing students, Jonquil had heard talk of terrible screams and the whining of buzzsaws. Up ahead, she saw the closed cla.s.sroom door.

No noise came from the machine shop. But a bright light inside cut through wires of opaque gla.s.s in the lower half of the door, throwing sprays of dark diamonds across the corridor.

Something had gone on here. She sensed it. Perhaps her demented janitor awaited her, crouched to kill but ready for seduction if she played him right.

Jonquil grasped the doork.n.o.b and moved boldly inside, into the full light of the shop. Bulks of machinery stood gleaming and silent everywhere.

Tensed to repel attack, she took in Brayton and Raven standing by the far wall. Their soiled prom clothes had been torn. Their faces were forlorn and bereft, their eyes unable to stray from what they beheld.

Then she strode toward them. A large lathe moved out of her way, and there before hera"wafts of deathstench turning the air moist and oozy and charged with s.e.xual energya"were a pair of mauled, mutilated kids.

An unidentifiable male, headless, lay akimbo upon the tile floor. His off-white tuxedo was as pinkish red as bleeding gums. His chest looked as if it had, from neck to navel, once sprouted teeth, all of them yanked out now. Gaping holes pooled there, crimson fleshcups that made Jonquil swoon.

But it was the female that truly got Jonquil off, what with its s.l.u.tty red-frilled frock and the sizzling-as-hot-blacktop body, no mistaking it, of Peach Popkin, whose face alone would have made identification problematic.

The Popkin girl had been caught in a swan dive, her arms extended, her bare back arched up into a U upon the platform that housed the table saw. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s met the table's smooth surface at nipplepoint, their tips pushed flat beneath her blanched aureoles.

Beyond the blade, the girl's strawberry blond hair, streaked a deep red, wisped forward. Her coiffure had been mussed from the killer's having pressed her forehead forward into the gray blur of a spinning blade.

At rest now, the blade stuck deep, through skin and skullbone, parting the halves of her brain. Though sprays of gore had spattered her flesh, most of it had shot across the room like spoutings from a dying whale's blowhole.

The scene was breathtaking.

"We can explain," came Brayton's voice, a warmth to it that moistened Jonquil further.

"Oh no you can't," she said, not accusing but filled with the wonder she felt.

"We were in the backways," said Raven. "We saw the killer come out of here. He had the boy's head by the hair. He got away."

"Marvelous," said Jonquil. The woman before her was one succulent saucy wench. Then it struck her. "How did you break into the backways? Only the slasher's supposed to know the combination, him and the janitor."

"Should we tell her?" Brayton asked.

Raven made a face. "What choice?"

He shrugged. "Zane Fronemeyer was chosen to be your school's slasher. He's dead. The janitor axed him in his bas.e.m.e.nt. Fronemeyer's wives are dead too."

Jonquil shuddered. "Zane was a sc.u.msucking zit from the word go. He wanted to suck my sc.u.m. He kept nagging, long after I made it clear he was less than zero in my book. Camille and Hedda deserved better. But the question remains: How do you two know all this?"

Brayton tried to speak, then gave up.

"Let's show her," his date said. She raised her hand to her left ear.

Brayton did likewise.

Christ! In the presence of death, these two s.e.xy people, thought Jonquil, are about to expose their s.e.xlobes to me. They're as turned on by all this as I am.

Ripples of come-need treadled through her loins. The right word, the right look, would set her off without a touch.

Their lobebags fell away.

And there, in all their glory . . . .

But Raven's exposed lobe was dyed a G.o.dawful green, some ridiculous protest among the homeless-by-choice. And Brayton yanked and peeled and his s.e.xlobe, his friendship lobe too, came away in his hands like some spent Cyrano's nose putty.

The crude puckers of flesh which punctuated the question marks of his ears meant but one thing.

"You and Raven . . . you'rea""

He nodded.

"My name's Winnie," the woman said.

"They took us off the streets, drugged us, delivered us to Fronemeyer. But Gerber Waddell killed him before he could kill us."

This changed everything.

A couple of freaks.

From the look of his severed lobes, Brayton was a promjumper. No way would Jonquil deign to suck on the vestigial stump of anyone's s.e.xlobe, least of all some joker who had dodged his prom. Why, blowing a f.u.c.king eunuch would be about as frustrating and far more humiliating.

Jonquil sublimated her l.u.s.t and grew cool.

"You've got no business being here," she said. "I ought to have you, I will have you arrested."

Brayton raised his hands. "Hey nowa""

"We're your best chance of catching the killer. You need access to the backways, and we've got it."

The feisty little s.l.u.t was right.

Jonquil still had the hots for Gerber Waddell. If she expected to f.u.c.k him before he was futtered, that could only happen by playing along with these two.

She deflated and stood down. "I give," she said. "The backways it is. Let's find him."

"This way," said Brayton, putting his lobebag back on. He punched a tiny keypad over the panel they stood before.

Winnie entered first, a soiled doll returned to the dingy package it had arrived in.

Jonquil went next, loving all over again the musk Brayton wore as she pa.s.sed him and regretting what she'd learned about him. He'd have made an irresistible bedmate.

Brayton trailed after her.

The panel slid shut as the musty backways swallowed them up. Fired up at the prospect of finding the janitor, Jonquil moved between the homeless pair as though she were a convict and they her jailers.

Sandy glanced about nervously.

The larger stairwells, wide and step-scuffed at the four corners of the school, always teemed with students between cla.s.ses.

But halfway along the east, north, and west sides of the school were less-frequented stairs, shut off at top and bottom by steel safety doors. The lights burned harsh here, throwing hard-edged shadows across pink-tiled walls.

The stairwell, which stank of Lysol, was a place of loneliness and crushed cigarette b.u.t.ts.

Rocky was squatting against one wall.

Beside him stood Cobra, his knee bent and one cleated heel stuck to the wall like a magnet. His back bent, he puffed on a coffin nail.

Sandy feared the lulls, those times when the three of them were here alone. Rushes of kids would come by from above and below, the bars of the steel doors clanging and releasing, latches raucously catching as they swung shut. Then for a time, no one. Ominous stillness. All a-fidget, she would long for the next wave of promgoers, her friends, Rocky's friends.

Or total geeks, it didn't matter.

Anyone to suggest safety in numbers.