Chapter 9
WHEN THE ROOM had been dark and silent for almost a half hour, Steve Lewis nudged Karl Schultz. "Time to make a break for home," he said.
The two boys eased themselves out from under the bed noiselessly, hardly daring to breathe. There was no chance of their waking the girls. Both were sleeping the dead sleep that follows sexual fulfillment. Barbara Jensen was lying spread-eagled on the bed, bathed in moonlight from the window on one side of the room. Her nightgown was rumpled up around her hips. One buxom breast had slipped out of the bodice. The boys stared at her in lecherous hunger.
"I can reach out and touch it," Steve said shakily.
"Don't look," Karl said. "It's enough to drive a guy crazy. Let's get out of here."
Steve sighed forlornly. "Yeah." He tiptoed over to a chair. "First I got to get these." He picked up he imagine panties Barbara had been wearing and jammed them into his pants pocket. "Now we got two souvenirs to show the guys."
The corridor was dimly lit and silent. The floor creaked as they hurried to the staircase, but not enough to wake the sleeping girls. When they reached the basement, Karl breathed a sigh of relief. "Home free," he said.
"Not quite!" a harsh voice rang out of the cavernous gloom of the dark cellar.
Lights erupted in the boys' faces, blinding them. When their eyes had accommodated to the glaring brightness, they found themselves surrounded by a score of girls. They were the same girls who had thronged into Sonia Fisher's room, and they still carried their paddles.
A tall, strapping girl with masculine features was in charge. "We've been waiting for this for a long time, fellows," she said. "Thought you were pretty smart, didn't you, coming over here through the conduits? Well, we were way ahead of you. We've had the exit at this end booby trapped since the beginning of the term, strung up with threads."
Steve remembered breaking through a maze that he had believed was a tangled spider web.
"We check it out every night so we can tell if we have any uninvited visitors in the dorm," the girl went on. "Tonight we hit pay dirt. So, all we had to do was wait for you to come back this way."
Steve looked around nervously at the ring of female faces. Girls had never inspired any other emotion than lust in his mind in the past. These girls were different. Their faces were set in identical, toothy smiles. Not warm, feminine smiles, but cunning, wolfish smiles.
The boy tried to conceal his mounting fear. "The fact is, girls, my pal and I were exploring the heating tunnels, and we got lost. We wandered into your dorm by mistake."
The girls laughed shrewishly. "Oh sure!" the stocky one said. "So while you were here, you decided to play Peeping Tom, and maybe take back a few souvenirs to show the boys, right?"
"Souvenirs?" Steve said innocently.
The husky girl pointed to his stuffed pockets. "What do you have there, friends?"
"Hankderchiefs, that's all." He backed away as she moved deliberately toward him. Two girls moved in behind him on each side and grabbed his arms.
"Hey!" he protested, struggling to break free, but they held him securely. Steve had always regarded females, even grown ones, as his physical inferiors. He was stunned by the strength of these little girls holding him.
The masculine one, who was obviously their leader, pulled the two pairs of panties out of his pockets and held them aloft. "Look at these, girls!" she shouted. "We caught them with their pants down, so to speak!"
The mob hooted and jeered. Their comments were very unsettling to the boys.
"Let's give it to them good!"
"The blonde one is mine. He's cute."
"He's too chubby. I like the tall, husky one."
In theory this should be the answer to a hard-up guy's prayer, Steve thought. Here they were, surrounded by a bevy of sexy females. The ones who were holding him were pressed in all around him. Their breasts were pressing against his arms. Their legs were soft and warm against his thighs and buttocks. Only it didn't make him feel hot at all. All he felt was an ominous, icy chill.
"What are you going to do to us?" Karl asked. Four girls were holding him, too. "Turn us in to your dean?"
The question triggered still louder peals of girlish laughter. "Oh no, you don't get off that easily, chum." The leader stroked her granite jaw thoughtfully. "Turnabout is fair play, they say, so for starters we'll give you a taste of your own game."
"I don't get it," Steve said tensely.
"You came over here to steal our pants, lads, so now it's our turn to steal your pants. What do you say, girls?"
The applause was unanimous.
"No!" the boys howled as tittering, hysterical females closed in around them. Eager fingers pulled at their belts and trousers. They tried to kick out with their feet, but they were hemmed in too tightly. Steve felt his feet being lifted off the floor, and, in mortification, he saw his trousers and undershorts being whisked over his feet. The girls squealed and clapped, shouting vulgarities that made his ears burn.
"I told you the blonde one was cute. Look at him."
"Poo! Who wants cute? The dark one's got what it takes."
Steve tensed as teasing hands explored his nakedness brazenly. In lewd fantasies, he had dreamed of femine hands touching him, but not as a part of a puglic exhibition. It was humiliating. Still, his body chemistry was more powerful than his humiliation, and the weak flesh responded promptly to the caresses. Poor Karl was in the same plight.
The girls were delighted.
"Oh, they're both adorable!" a hot-eyed redhead said. Her breasts were sharp points in her cotton sweater. She ran her hands sensuously down over her flanks, shaping her skirt to her round thighs.
"Down, girls!" the masculine girl said roughly. "They're beginning to enjoy this." She slapped her paddle smartly against her thigh. "Let's line up!"
Steve's heart flipped in his chest. They were going to make them run the gantlet, as they had done to Sonia Fisher! He still had a vivid image of Sonia's bruised, inflamed backside. Just the thought of it sent knives of vicarious pain through his gut. The girls lined up in two rows, pushing and jostling each other excitedly. Their eyes were unnaturally bright. Their bodies moved restlessly, breasts straining against their blouses and sweaters, the muscles of their thighs tense beneath their skirts and tight stretch pants. One pretty, blonde girl wore a form-fitting black leotard. He could see her tumescent nipples thrusting out of the tight cotton and the tremor of a pulse low in her belly. It dawned on him, with horror, that she was in a state of high sexual excitement.
Ahead of him, he saw Karl shoved down on his hands and knees. The boy's bare backside, plump and pale, trembled in the glare of the overhead light. He winced as two wooden paddles flashed down, smashing the flesh with a sound that made his knees dissolve into jelly. Karl screamed and bucked like a bronco with a burr under its saddle. With his buttocks glowing like neon lights, he scrambled through the gantlet and was obscured by a welter of swinging paddles.
Steve bleated in terror as he was hurled down on his hands and knees. He looked up wildly into the leering faces hovering over him. They weren't girls' faces. They were the faces of fiends. Their banshee wailing deafened him. Then the deluge of paddles eclipsed sight and sound, and there was nothing else in the world except pain.
It tore though his body like a cruel corkscrew, mangling his organs. His buttocks felt as if they were being roasted in a nuclear oven. His agonized flesh seemed to be splitting in a dozen places. The paddles splattered against thighs, hips, back. Twice he collapsed under the weight of his pain, but each time his surrender only spurred his tormentors to greater ferocity. His tortured body floundered up and plunged down the line.
A tiny brunette hit him with such force that her paddle shattered. In a fury, she drove her pointed shoe up between his thighs. The torture was too great to endure. Steve collapsed and fainted. They milled around him like snarling hyenas, beating him about the head and shoulders, until their leader interceded.
"That's it kids!" she shouted, pushing them back. "We don't want to kill him."
Meanwhile, Karl had navigated the torturous gantlet and was getting to his feet. Momentarily, he was ignored, as the girls were distracted by Steve's collapse. Dazed and crazed by pain and terror, he looked around in panic. Beyond the penumbra of the light he could see the stairs vaguely. Skirting the mob, he broke for them.
"Look out, one of them's getting away!" a plump blonde screamed.
"Get him!" the leader roared. "If he gets upstairs and makes a ruckus, we'll have the faculty on our necks." She raced to intercept him.
Karl saw she was going to reach the stairs before he did. There was only one thing to do. He lowered his head like a bull and rammed head-on into her belly. Her eyes bulged, and her lungs deflated like twin balloons. He slammed her hard into the wall, where she cracked her head and slid to the floor, unconscious. The boy took the steps two at a time, well ahead of the yelling females behind him.
He reached the first floor and escaped into the hall. At the far end was a set of heavy doors leading to the outside. The girls' excited voices assailed his ears, but the words did not make any lucid impression in his panic.
"Stop, you fool!"
"Don't go outside!"
"They turn the dogs loose after midnight!"
Karl reached the heavy doors, slammed down the release bar and flung them wide open. The sweet, summer night air was exhilarating in his nostrils. Moonlight flooded the spacious lawns and gardens. He ran along a cinder path as fast as his legs would carry him. Once he glanced back across his shoulder and saw that his pursuers had given up the chase. Still he did not slow down. In the distance he could see the high iron fence, with the sharp pickets silhouetted against the starry sky. He knew there were trees growing along the fence. He would climb one of them and drop over the fence onto the campus of Tudor East.
He was still a long way from the fence when he heard the dogs commence to bark. It was an angry, ominous sound that made the short hairs on the base of his neck bristle. The barking was closer now, converging on him from all sides. Lungs bursting, he ran faster. Only one hundred yards to go to the fence. His goal was a big, shaggy maple tree, straight ahead.
Out of the corners of his eyes, he saw the beast break out of some foliage to his right. It had a dark, sleek body, and its eyes and fangs gleamed savagely in the moonlight. Stark terror made his legs give way, and he fell to his knees screaming, throwing his arms up defensively. The huge Doberman hit him explosively. Its powerful jaws crushed his left elbow as if it had been caught in a steel mangle. The boy was flung onto his back, his screams of agony echoing across the quiet campus. The dog straddled him, tearing at his other arm to get at his throat. In horror, Karl saw his bicep slashed open from shoulder to elbow, muscles and tendons bared all the way down to the white bone.
Other dogs came bounding out of the shadows, jaws slavering, to join the carnage. He felt their steel-muscled bodies press in all around him. A jagged vice clamped on his throat, and his vision was obliterated by a hot, thick gusher of blood. Pain, fear, consciousness faded into peaceful blackness, the way a scene is wiped off a movie screen.
The watchmen came up and called off the dogs. They covered the bloody remains with a canvas sheet and phoned for the police and the coroner.
Down in the cellar of the dorm, the girls helped Steve Lewis to his feet and shoved him frantically toward the tunnel leading back to Tudor East.
"Get back and keep your mouth shut," they warned him. "If they find out what really happened, it means dismissal for all of us. You understand?"
He nodded dumbly and staggered into the conduit. By the time news of Karl's death reached the boys' school, Steve was safely in bed.
The girls changed quickly into their pajamas and nightgowns and were in their beds when the dean and local police roused the whole dorm for questioning. The interrogation ended without the authorities' learning a single fact to explain what a naked boy was doing on the grounds of Tudor West.
"Only way I can figure it," the police chief said to the dean, "is that this crazy kid got over the fence somehow and was on his way to the girls' dorm when the dogs got him. You know how it is with these young fellows with hot blood. He got it into his head that he had to have a girl and nothing was going to stop him."
The girls' dean shuddered. "We've had incidents like this in the past. Panty raids and that kind of thing, but nothing like this. How horrible! The poor boy knew we have guard dogs prowling the grounds after midnight. He must have been out of his mind, indeed."
The chief grunted. "It's this plague madness that's getting to everybody, ma'am. I'm afraid to think what will happen next."
At the hospital, nurse Jane Tyler was exhausted when her relief arrived at two a.m. She was relieved by Ann Baxter, a stout, motherly woman in her late fifties.
Mrs. Baxter was concerned about the younger woman's going home alone at this hour. "It's a jungle out there, Jane," she warned her. "Law and order have broken down. Drunks and perverts are waiting in every alley and doorway. As old and fat as I am, I had some pretty close calls."
Jane knew how prone older females were to exaggerate their dangers of such encounters. like old maids looking under their beds at night, they visualized lecherous males lurking behind every bush and hedge.
She smiled pleasantly. "I'll be all right, Ann. Don't worry. I don't have far to go."
Mrs. Baxter shook her head disapprovingly. "It's not safe, a pretty young girl like you on these streets."
Jane laughed. "Right now I look like something the cat dragged in. No man would want any part of me."
That was the misstatement of the year, and Jane knew it. At twenty-five, Jane Tyler still possessed the looks and figure that had won her second place in the Miss America Pageant in her college days. If anything, her figure had ripened with maturity. Her breasts were bold and firm, and in her starched uniforms, she could get away without wearing a brassiere. She never wore a girdle, either. Although her hips and buttocks were plushly feminine, her flesh was firm, and even in the tightest skirts, her bottom did not jiggle embarrassingly as most female bottoms were prone to do.
She had rich, auburn hair and slanted green eyes, specked with gold. There was not a delectable part of Jane Tyler that any man was-likely to overlook.
In spite of her sex appeal, Jane was never afraid of walking the streets of Coaltown after dark. She was a courageous girl, and she had discovered that the type of males who annoy women furtively on the streets was singularly lacking in courage. A sharp reprimand or a loud threat to scream usually sent them running off with their tails between their legs. The metaphor made her smile, it was so apt!
One of the reasons the girl was so scornful of unwelcome sexual advances was her lack of interest in the subject of sex itself. Appearances to the contrary, she was not a woman with a high sex quotient. She preferred to believe that she could take it or leave it alone, but the truth was that Jane Tyler was frigid. No virgin, she had entered into several unsatisfactory affairs while she was away at nursing school in New York. During the last three years, she had abstained from sex, entirely. She was a neat, meticulous person whose apartment and person were always immaculate to the point of obsession. She regarded sex as a messy, untidy business.
On the night of the plague, she left the hospital by the main entrance and strode briskly down the dark street in the direction of her home. With distaste, she soon saw that Ann Baxter had not been exaggerating about the atmosphere of drunkenness and licentiousness that prevailed in Coaltown. An intoxicated man about forty-five staggered out' of a doorway and tried to put his arms around her.
"Get out of my way, you pig!" she shouted. "Or I'll have you thrown in jail and press charges. Think how your family will feel about that!" She punctuated it by jabbing a high heel into his instep. He jumped away, whimpering and holding, his injured foot. Jane walked on, smiling in satisfaction.
Two youths with peach-fuzz on their cheeks blocked her way, further along. She faced them with her hands clenched on her hips, face scowling.
"I'm a policewoman," she lied boldly. "My job is to run punks like you into the station house, but I'm feeling generous tonight. Now scat!" They did.
When she passed the small park in the town square, a skinny young man stepped out from behind a bush and exposed himself to her. Giggling, he made an indecent proposition.
Jane swung her heavy handbag in a wide arc and clobbered him in the most strategic spot. With a screech of pain, he collapsed on the grass. The girl walked on briskly. Rather than unsettling her, the harrowing incidents actually exhilarated her. She felt strong and confident, unassailable.
She was nearing her apartment house when it happened, just as she passed a dark stairwell leading down to a basement dwelling. Two men bounded out of the shadows behind her and grabbed her. One clamped a hand over her mouth. The other held her around the waist. Jane did not panic. She kicked back viciously and felt her heel dig into a shin. Opening her mouth, she sank her teeth into the stifling hand in the meaty flesh between the thumb and first finger. Its owner howled like a hurt cat The man behind her cursed in pain, but maintained his hold on her. Jane filled her lungs for a lusty scream circulated to scare off her attackers, but, before she could sing out, a heavy fist smashed into her solar plexus, paralyzing her lungs and vocal cords. Gasping for air, she was dragged down the stairs and pushed into an apartment