Thinned, Tuffskin concealed blemishes.

Applied more thickly, it gave heft to breast or c.o.c.k.

A famous pianist had been said to extend his fingers this way, but anyone who understood music knew that had to be a wild lie.

"Now you do me," she said, "and by G.o.d you'd better get it right."

Her harshness had begun to amuse more than shame him, which was just as well. His hand held steady. He did his best to thin the Tuffskin and coat her lobe, concealing the pale green beneath flesh tones. Curiously, the more it reminded him of the lobes of girls he had l.u.s.ted after when he was whole, the greater the urge grew to kiss it.

He planted a light one.

Winnie drew back. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Kissing my date's friendship lobe."

"Don't you friendship me!" she retorted. "Let's see what's to eat. Ten minutes tops."

Bray visited the john first.

When he returned, Winnie had a variety of meats and cheeses laid out on the table, along with three types of juice. He lifted a Jonathan from the fruit bowl, alternating bites of mozzarella and apple and feeling how weird it was to have a fake lobe moving to match his concealed stuffed lobebag on the left.

He'd give anything, he thought, to have it be real, to have this prom be his abandoned prom nine years before.

Between bites, he tried to filter his breath through his hand. The stench of death made eating an iffy proposition. Winnie, a thin shapely woman of fierce determination, chowed down oblivious of the smell. Her eyes darted between the wall clock and the sheaf of papers.

Bray grabbed another apple. One bite in, his date announced that it was garage time and headed back through the house. He tossed the apple in the trash.

Winnie's instincts were unerring. At the end of the hall was the door to the garage, a standard three-car structure with a couple of cars and some boxes stacked against a side wall.

"Which one is least likely to have belonged to Fronemeyer?" she asked. "We don't want to rouse suspicions in the parking lot."

"This one's got to be his." Bray pointed to a newer foreign jobbie whose license plate frame read PAINTERS DO IT WITH ACRYLICRITY. A parking pa.s.s hung from its inside mirror.

"Good guess. We'll take the other." She started to open the pa.s.senger door. "What are you doing?"

"Holding the door for you." Winnie looked creamy and scrumptious.

"Get the heck over to the other side of the car. And get serious, will you? There are three dead people inside that house. And we're on a mission to turn things around in this c.o.c.keyed world."

"Okay, okay, I'll drive."

"That's right. You drive, I ride, I do the thinking, you follow orders. It's that simple."

Sliding in beside her, Brayton nit-nit-nitted the garage door open.

In this light, Winnie almost looked like Bonnie Dolan, the date he had disgraced through his cowardice. Maybe if he pretended as hard as he could, he might save himself and counterbalance the misery he had put the Dolans and his parents through so many years before.

He leaned toward her.

"Watch it!" she said.

"Fine." He smiled. "But before this evening's over, I bet you're going to want to kiss me."

"Bet away. Dream on. Hit the road."

Brayton did.

All three.

Their babysitter had finked out on them, so they had her daughter Pill to contend with.

Even so, Trilby Donner thought that having the three of them, her and her spouses Bix and Brest, chaperone the prom was a swell idea.

In public Brest displayed much love for Bix, even as she spoke privately to Trilby of dumping him in favor of an all-girl threesome with Delia Gaskin. But Trilby felt that if only they could do more together as a triple and as a family, if they made the effort to identify common threads in their lives and intertwine them to gain tensile strength, their marriage was still salvageable.

That's why she insisted so vehemently that they take Pill with them. It was, she felt a great idea, despite her embarra.s.sment when Bix pa.s.sed a bribe to Elwood Dunsmore and the lynx-eyed student inside the door checking pa.s.ses. Hush-hush, no need to let anyone know an eight-year-old was on the grounds, she would be mouse-quiet in the faculty lounge and out of sight as the slasher stalks.

Dunsmore, a coffee-skinned shop teacher with a bristle mustache and a bulbous friendship lobe, winked, okay'd his fingers, and folded the bills into his coat pocket. "That's called hush money," he told the junior, who nodded and said, "Yeah, we learned about that stuff in Mr. Versailles' cla.s.s in the lesser vices."

Now Pill was being difficult.

"Why the long face, honey? I'll come in to check on you every half hour," Trilby a.s.sured.

The child kept her head bent, her pre-adolescent earlobes forlorn in their naked innocence. In three or four years, when p.u.b.erty struck, her baby Pill would need to be fitted for a lobebag.

"You've got your books, Gigi the goat, and a nice plush chair. There's pear juice in the mini-fridge whenever you want it."

Whiny voice, yet thank G.o.d no tears: "But I want you, Mommy."

Brest and Bix stood by the door.

Trilby sensed them behind her, impatience and loverly interest intermingled. Later, in bed, she had no doubt they would use the delay caused by Pill's whining as an excuse to vent their pent-up affection toward her. And she would do her best to counter with her worn riding crop.

"You'll be a big girl, won't you?" she asked. "You'll take care of yourself?"

Pill nodded, hugging her stuffed goat.

"That's my girl. Now remember, if you hear footsteps, what do you do before the people come in?"

The corners of Pill's mouth flexed. "I miss Puff," she said. Puff was her kitty.

"What do you do?" repeated Trilby.

Pill looked glum. "Hide in the coat closet."

"That's right. In your little corner of pillows. Leave a tiny crack for air, and when you're sure they're gone, it's okay to come out again."

The faculty lounge was brightly lit and off-limits for the slaughter. Pill would, as Trilby had instructed her, keep her hands off the paper cutter and out of the supply drawer. Leaving her here would be perfectly safe.

"That's my girl," Bix offered.

Brest, beside him, said nothing.

Trilby kissed her index fingers and touched them to Pill's lobes. "Give your mommy a hug, honey."

Thick wool from Gigi the goat tickled Trilby's neck as her daughter's slip of a body moored against her and the b.u.t.terfly mouth she so loved closed about the maternal tip of her friendship lobe.

Gerber Waddell arrived in his beat-up truck and his best coveralls.

As he crossed the parking lot and entered the school building, early promgoers gave him a wide berth. The teacher who sat at the front table, Mr. Dunsmore, and the short line of students being checked in ignored him.

Pond sc.u.m.

Oughta be snuffed, all of them.

Gerber went without ceremony to the supply closet near the band room. He used his ring of keys to let himself in.

It was close in here, the lone pull-bulb dim and dusty with age. Shelf upon shelf of tools and duct tape and extension cords in impossible orange tangles pa.s.sed beneath his gaze.

Gerber paused.

Why am I here? he wondered. There was a reason I came in here.

Letting his fingers rise before him like so many pale stalagmites, he pointed them toward the school entrance and with great effort traced his steps until they were back where they had begun.

Oh yeah. Tin snips. An axe. An ice pick. A graduated, pan-piped pouch of screwdrivers.

He loaded his utility belt with these items, repeating their names over and over in a whisper until they dangled there.

Flag. Gotta do the flag.

d.a.m.ned students didn't appreciate the work involved in the flag task. Mornings, they shot spitwads at him while the pulley at the top gave the odd groan and the parallel cords sang in high slaps against the flagpole and the heavy furls of the flag moved, jerk by jerk, into the sky like a huge slumbering dinosaur head roused from sleep.

Gotta take it down.

Night time comin' on.

Later, there would be blood to clean up, lots of blood.

And stray body parts from the futtering, flung into ill-lit corners of the gym.

But the night was still young, and plenty of mayhem simmered across the brainscape of Corundum High's head janitor.

Gerber Waddell locked the closet. He paused outside in the hall to remember again where he was headed.

Some gussied-up young snotwads swished by, wide-eyed and agiggle. They made a joke at his expense, but Gerber paid them no never-mind.

Flag. f.u.c.kin' Ol' Glory. f.u.c.kin' flag.

Yep.

Sheriff Blackburn watched the flag rise, giving it a smart salute as the head janitor watusi'd beside the white flagpole, the ling ling ling of the pulls slapping metal.

This night flag, designed by an artist of his grandparents' generation, had gradually replaced the day version, unofficially and then by an act of Congress. When it was first introduced, some had called it sacrilege. But most folks honored truth when they saw it: Fifty gloom-white skulls on a field of blue, b.l.o.o.d.y furrows alternating with flayed flesh, the skulls like Honest Abe looking drawn and haggard in his last photos, the flayings like s.e.xual lashes gone mad, the whole a vivid rendering of the nation's dark side, the nation dubbed the Demented States of America scarcely twenty years before by an otherwise forgettable pop musician. The moniker had stuck, gone into common parlance, and was used more often than the original nowa"except by the President, though he too lapsed at times into the vernacular.

"Hi there," said Gerber Waddell, ducking and nodding at the sheriff from the flagpole.

Poor halfwit always said, Hi there.

Irritating.

"Looking good, Gerber."

The janitor mumbled his thanks, a catch in his throat as he figure-eighted the twin cord about its stay and yanked it tight. Benign feeb. Gone nutso years back at a corporate picnic the day after prom night. Killed one more than the law and custom allowed. But some judicious brain slicing had redeemed what could be redeemed, and Gerber Waddell, with the aid of his guardians the Bleaks, had become once more a productive member of society.

"Take care now, hear?"

"Thank you, Mister Sheriff." Gerber nodded politely, a grin on his face. Then he picked up the triangulated day flag, did a one-eighty, and headed for the school entrance.

Young couples were cascading now through the double doors, bottlenecked at the table Blackburn had just left. He had entrusted a padlock to the bristle-lipped shop teacher, Elwood Dunsmorea"the final padlock that would be snapped on right at the stroke of eight, no more students allowed in after that, no more anybody. The only keys were in the packet he had left with Zane Fronemeyer and on the ring of metal hanging from the sheriff's belt.

A limousine drew up to disgorge another young couple, fear and antic.i.p.ation on their faces.

Blackburn clucked and shook his head. Waste of money, as far as he was concerned. Most people made do with their own vehicles, parking in the lot on his left. But there were always some, too extravagant for their own d.a.m.n good, who saw fit to hire fancy-dan automobiles, hoping to impress their dimbulb cla.s.smates with a display of gold-plated rungs up life's ladders.

Yeah, he remembered the kind from his own high school days. One of that crowd had reached his last red-gold rung a tad early, on prom night. The sheriff had a dried piece of pancreas at home to prove it.

Blackburn crossed the gra.s.s on his left and found the sidewalk. From his right fist swayed three padlocks.

Kids with flashlights, sketched shadows in the darkness, waved cars in off the street and left or right along a gauntlet of volunteers who handled the parking proper. Overhead, a pallid moon drifted in and out of pewter-gray clouds.

Pa.s.sing the iron-barred windows of several cla.s.srooms, Blackburn rounded the corner of the building and headed for the gym's emergency exit door. When one lock's hasp slid snugly into place there, its firm snap sealed off the exit as a means of escape. There would be no promjumpers on his watch, at least not the kind that signed in and slipped out.

High exuberant shouts erupted in the parking lot at the sheriff's back. He thought of his son and two daughters, how in two short years Blitz, a soph.o.m.ore, would drive or be driven into this very parking lot for her prom. Yesterday, a slight injury in gym cla.s.s had brought Daddy to school, where he received a.s.surances from Nurse Gaskin and a handshake from Princ.i.p.al b.u.t.tweiler. The whole encounter had given Blackburn a chill.

But they said it built character, this prom ordeal. And he had survived it, him and his wives.

"h.e.l.lo, Sheriff!" Kids pa.s.sed by, crossing the lot, a hint of challenge in their voices, but respect too.

He raised a hand to them. "Be careful now, you hear? Don't go catching any stray knives!"

"We won't!" But they well might. Only a few teachers, and the princ.i.p.al of course, knew which couple would die tonight.