Apocalypse Now Now Read Free Page A

in and take their places at the back left. The Form is like the personification of inherited privilege. They carry themselves like wealthy Bond villains and think along the same lines. They’re not interested in money in the way the Nice Time Kids are. They’re interested in keeping themselves entertained by beating up everything and everyone that has the audacity to challenge them.
    The Nice Time Kids, or the NTK as they’re more commonly known, take their places at the back right. If you distilled all the cruelty, all the hormonal surges, all the bad ideas and warrantless arrogance of adolescence into a single obscene organism, it’d be the NTK. They’re messy to a point way past the simple apathetic neglect of the rest of us. They wear their messiness like a badge; missing buttons, torn collars and cuffs, shoes scuffed and filled with holes, all ham-handedly proclaiming their affiliation. The rest of us are in between trying to figure out what the situationbetween the gangs is. Has there been a truce? Will sanity prevail? Will peace, goodwill and huge porn profit margins smile upon the Spider?
    Anwar Davids, his uneven crew cut showing patches of his scalp in the artificial light, turns his head and smiles. The school holds its breath. Slowly he brings his hand up, widens his smile and draws his thumb across his throat, and then points straight at the solid figure of Denton de Jaager.
    Denton extends his large, chubby hand to look uninterestedly at his nails and then leans back and yawns. A shiver of acknowledgement runs through the masses. At least everybody knows what’s happening.
    The tension is broken as our headmaster, the Bearded One, ascends to the lectern. He raises his hand for silence even though nobody is talking. He rubs his mousy brown beard and begins to speak.
    ‘Welcome back from ahhh what I umm hope was a stimulating weekend.’ There are titters. Judging from some of the glassy eyes staring blankly forward it’s more likely that it was a stimulant weekend courtesy of the NTK.
    ‘Ahh, it’s unfortunate to start like this but, umm, the police inform me that another body has been found on the mountain.’ There’s a collective intake of breath. ‘We have, ermmm, asked a representative of the police force to, umm, speak to you this morning.’
    A small, balding man sporting both an impressive handlebar moustache and an ugly burgundy suit strides onto the stage and pushes his John Lennon sunglasses onto his forehead.
    ‘Good morning, I’m Mr Beeld, a criminologist working on the Mountain Killer case. I know this is rather traumatic for everybody, but it’s important to remember that, worldwide, more people are killed by falling coconuts and defective toasters than by knife-wielding serial killers.’ He gives us a smile that’s meant tobe reassuring. ‘Of course, we must take the necessary precautions and awareness is the number-one weapon in the fight against crime.
    ‘What we know is that either the victim knew the killer or the killer is very good at what he does. He used some kind of serrated blade to cut her throat and then carve the bloody likeness of an eye into her forehead. As you may already know, the eye is the calling card of the so-called “Mountain Killer”, a serial killer already responsible for the deaths of twelve people in the Cape Town area.
    ‘The all-seeing eye is of particular occult significance,’ Beeld continues. ‘It represents spiritual sight and transcendental vision. The fact that it is used as a calling card means that this could be the work of a cult, or of an individual with an interest in occult lore. Serial killers generally show a lack of empathy and a superiority complex, often with delusions of grandeur. There is a pathological need for control. And murder, of course, is the ultimate form of control.
    ‘If you have seen anything suspicious, please report it to your local police station immediately.’
    ‘I heard that it was Jody Fuller,’ Kyle