'Gawd, you look queer, Ross.'
Tommy smiled. 'When did you come out of the treetops, Bomba?'
Dawson lurched forward with his fists up, and for a moment Carrie felt stark terror. In her keyed-up state, she came within an ace of picking George up and throwing him across the lobby. Then she realized it was an old game, often played, well-loved.
The two of them sparred in a growing circle. Then George, who had been tagged twice in the ribs, began to gobble and yell:- 'Kill them Congs! Get them Gooks! Pongee sticks! Tiger cages!' and Tommy collapsed his guard, laughing.
'Don't let it bother you,' Frieda said, tilting her letteropener nose and strolling over. 'If they kill each other, I'll dance with you.'
'They look too stupid to kill,' Carrie ventured. 'Like dinosaurs.' And when Frieda grinned, she felt something very old and rusty loosen inside her. A warmth came with At. Relief. Ease.
'Where'd you buy your dress?' Frieda asked. 'I love it.'
'I made it.'
'Made it?' Frieda's eyes opened in unaffected surprise. 'No shit!'
Carrie felt herself blushing furiously. 'Yes I did. I ... I like to sew. I got the material at John's in Andover. The pattern is really quite easy.'
'Come on,' George said to all of them in general. 'Band's gonna start.' He rolled his eyes and went through a limber, satiric buck-and-wing. 'Vibes, vibes, vibes. Us Gooks love them big Fender viyyybrations.'
When they went in, George was doing impressions of Flash Bobby Pickett and mugging. Carrie was telling Freida about her dress, and Tommy was grinning, hands stuffed in his pockets. Spoiled the lines of his dinner jacket Sue would be telling him, but f**k it, it seems to be working. So far it was working fine.
He and George and Frieda had less than two hours to live.
From The Shadow Exploded (p. 132):
The White Commission's stand on the trigger of the whole affair - two buckets of pig blood on a beam over the stage - seems to be overly weak and vacillating, even in light of the scant concrete proof. If one chooses to believe the hearsay evidence of Nolan's immediate circle of friends (and to be brutally frank, they do not seem intelligent enough to lie convincingly), then Nolan took this part of the conspiracy entirely out of Christine Hargensen's hands and acted on his own initiative ...
He didn't talk when he drove; he liked to drive. The operation gave him a feeling of power that nothing could rival, not even f**king.
The road unrolled before them in photographic blacks and whites, and the speedometer trembled just past seventy. He came from what the social workers called a broken home; his father had taken off after the failure of a badly managed gas-station venture when Billy was twelve, and his mother had four boyfriends at last count. Brucie was in greatest favour right now. He was a Seagram's 7 man. She was turning into one ugly bag, too.
But the car: the car fed him power and glory from its own mystic lines of force. It made him someone to be reckoned with, someone with mana. It was not by accident that he had done most of his balling in the back seat. The car was his slave and his god. It gave, and it could take away. Billy had used it to take away many times. On long, sleepless nights when his mother and Brucie were fighting, Billy made popcorn and went out cruising for stray dogs. Some mornings he let the car roll, engine dead, into the garage he had constructed behind the house with its front bumper dripping.
She knew his habits well enough by now and did not bother making conversation that would simply be ignored anyway. She sat beside him with one leg curled under her, gnawing a knuckle. The fights of the cars streaking past them on 302 gleamed softly in her hair, streaking it silver.
He wondered how long she would last. Maybe not long after tonight. Somehow it had all led to this, even the early part, and when it was done the glue that had held them together would be thin and might dissolve, leaving them to wonder how it could have been in the first place. He thought she would start to look less like a goddess and more like the typical society bitch again, and that would make him want to belt her around a little. Or maybe a lot. Rub her nose in it.
They breasted the Brickyard Hill and there was the high school below them, the parking lot filled with plump, glistening daddies' cars. He felt the familiar gorge of disgust and hate rise in his throat. We'll give them something
(a night to remember)
all right. We can do that.
The classroom wings were dark and silent and deserted; the lobby was lit with a standard yellow glow, and the bank of glass that was the gymnasium's east side glowed with a soft, orangey light that was ethereal, almost ghostly. Again the bitter taste, and the urge to throw rocks.
'I see the lights, I see the party fights,' he murmured.
'Huh?' She turned to him, startled out of her own thoughts.
'Nothing.' He touched the nape of her neck. 'I think I'm gonna let you pull the string.'
Billy did it by himself, because he knew perfectly well that he could trust nobody else. That had been a hard lesson, much harder than the ones they taught you in school, but he had learned it well. The boys who had gone with him to Henty's place the night before had not even known what he wanted the blood for. They probably suspected Chris was involved, but they could not even be sure of that.
He drove to the school minutes after Thursday night had become Friday morning and cruised by twice to make sure it was deserted and neither of Chamberlain's two police cars was in the area.
He drove into the parking lot with his lights off and swung around in back of the building. Further back, the football field glimmered beneath a thin membrane of ground fog.
He opened the trunk and unlocked the ice chest. The blood had frozen solid, but that was all right. It would have the next twenty-four hours to thaw.
He put the buckets on the ground, then got a number of tools from his kit. He stuck them in his back pocket and grabbed a brown bag from the seat. Screws clinked inside.