I’d walked through the heavy drizzle, and made it through the gates and into the school building. I’d gone down two corridors, and hadn’t yet been strangled, coshed or vamped. I was standing in front of my locker, ready to retrieve the PE kit I’d stuffed in there, still damp and grimy from the week before. My locker was number 526. It was at the end of the row. The two lockers next to mine – 525, and the one next to that, 524 – had always been vacant. I guess it was a cordon sanitaire, a quarantine zone, to make sure nobody caught whatever it was I had. Well, now someone was in the zone. Close enough to catch it… I could tell, even from the side, that she was a stunner. Her features had a calm, almost grave perfection, brilliantly counterpointed by the fact that she was more pierced than Saint Sebastian. Ears, nose and eyebrow I could see: the rest was speculation, although I was prepared to put real money down on her tongue. She was tall in a way that hovered just on the right side of gangly.
