Vic Rudolph shut his eyes. The glare that had erupted across his vision a moment ago had not subsided. It burned his eyes if he let it in, so he shut it out instead.
He felt squirming bodies lying on top of him, and the squeals and shouts of young women. Their words overlapped frantically, so Vic couldn't make out what the women were saying. Vic, accustomed to darkness and silence and utter solitude, felt overwhelmed by it all.
Slowly, bit by bit, Vic let his eyes crack open. Letting the light filter into his eyes this way, he was at last able to open them all the way without being utterly blinded by the light. It took a while; he hadn't seen natural sunlight in over four years. But he got them open, and when he was able to see again, Vic was amazed by what he saw.
A dozen or so teenage girls were milling all around him dressed in skanky matching outfits that he recognized, after a few seconds, as cheerleading uniforms. Since when are there cheerleaders in prison? he thought to himself. But then Vic took in the rest of the scene. He wasn't in prison, not anymore... or at least, not in any prison he'd ever been in before, and he'd been in several over the course of his liftime. Rather than the high cement walls of an exercise yard, Vic found himself in what looked to be an athletic field, probably at a high school or college. No, a high school, judging from the age of the girls around him. Vic himself was lying in the grass in a small heap of bodies. Several of the girls around him--to put it mildly--were freaking out. And just as the scene seemed to start to calm down, one or two of the girls would come over to Vic and the cheerleaders who were piled on top of them and reach out a hand to help the downed cheerleaders to their feet, but as soon as two girls touched hands the one on her feet would start screaming all over again. It was chaos.
Vic liked chaos. In chaos it was harder for people to notice him.
Slowly, while the girls continued to flip out hysterically, Vic began to scoot away from the tangle of bodies still huddled on the ground. Once he was free of the mess, Vic began to push himself up to a sitting position, then to his feet...
...but the second he caught sight of his clothing, he collapsed back down to the ground. What the fuck? Vic caught sight of his bare legs and midriff, of his miniskirt, of the tiny sleeveless top he was wearing. He was dressed in the same slutty outfits as the cheerleaders, though the uniforms fit them a lot better than they did Vic. Was that why these bitches were having spasms? Were they terrified by the ugly, unshaven, middle-aged man who was dressed in one of their uniforms? But no... no, he realized to his utter shock. None of the cheerleaders were looking at him. Not a single one. It was like he wasn't even there.
Vic didn't get it. None of this made sense. But he wasn't going to shoot a gift horse in the mouth, or whatever the expression was. This was the first time in years that he hadn't been surrounded by prison walls and armed guards. It wouldn't be long before someone spotted him. So cheerleading uniform be fucked; he was making a break for it.
Once he was to his feet and striding away from the cheerleaders, though, he heard a woman's voice bark in his direction. Vic turned and saw a woman looking right at him. She was a fat, horse-faced, middle-aged cow wearing a whistle. She looked like the coach of these girls. Vic guessed from her appearance that the woman was a dyke; she had probably only joined the team so she could ogle the girls in the locker room. He knew it was what he would do if he were a chick and a dyke.
"Amy," the woman said, walking over to him, "don't leave. You looked like you fell pretty hard." She rubbed the back of her neck. "I don't know what's going on. These girls aren't making any sense. But I'm not letting you go until I've had a chance to check you out.
'Check you out.' Vic snorted. Yeah, he bet she wanted to 'check these girls out'. But despite his amusement, the implications of the woman's words hadn't been lost on Vic. The woman had called him "Amy", and she hadn't noticed anything strange about a grown man wearing a teenager's cheerleading uniform. Putting the pieces together, Vic realized that, was fucked up as it was, this dyke thought Vic was a girl named Amy. And judging by the other cheerleaders' nonchalance toward him, Vic guessed the other girls thought he was a chick, too.
Weird.
Vic didn't dare make a break for it now. Too many eyes were on him. And even if he did look like a teenage girl instead of an escaped felon--well, to everyone except Vic himself, anyway, who definitely still saw his male body--he didn't want to draw any undue attention to himself. So he strolled back over to the girls and took advantage of the eye candy. It had been way too long since he'd gotten to see any good T & A.
At last the coach managed to calm the girls down, and one by one she got some information from them. She pretty much scoffed at what the girls had to say at first, but as one-by-one the girls said similar things, she began to look genuinely troubled.
Apparently Vic wasn't the only person who had switched bodies with these cheerleaders, or whatever the fuck had happened. It sounded like most of the team had been switched; only about a third of the girls claimed to still be in their original bodies. Among the girls there was apparently a businesswoman, a bus driver, a construction worker, a little boy. They had a freaking Village People reunion among their little group. One girl, who was still lying on the ground, and who at first had been crying and screaming her lungs out nonstop--so incessantly that Vic had wanted to smack the daylights out of her--was now just babbling and cooing. "Oh my God," said the businesswoman-turned-pom-pom-girl. "She's a baby!"
It was the last of the girls the coach interviewed who caught Vic's ear, though. He said--proudly, like it gave him some kind of fucking authority here--that his name was Alec Bartlett, and he was a police officer. Vic gaped at that. Alec Fucking Bartlett. Jeeze. Bartlett had been the cop who had arrested him five years ago, on the charge of murder one, and he had been one of the key witnesses at Vic's trial. Since then, Vic had been hanging out on death row, and four of his five years had been in soltary. And Bartlett was the bastard who was responsible. Vic scowled.
At last the coach turned to Vic. "What about you, Amy?" she asked. "Are you in there, or have you switched places with someone, too?"
"No, Ma'am," Vic said in the sweetest, girliest voice he could muster. "I'm still little old me, little old Amy."
The coach raised an eyebrow at that, and for a moment Vic wondered if he'd overdone it. But then she turned back to the other girls. "Anyone else? Speak now or forever hold your peace."
She looked over the team, and at first it looked like no one else had anything to say. But then one girl, a black chick, who had claimed a few minutes ago that her name was Janelle and she didn't know what the other girls were talking about, raised her hand. "I'm... I'm Mikey Madison. I didn't want to say anything before, but..." he shrugged. "Now I guess there's no reason not to."
The group was quiet for a moment. Then the smallest of the girls, the petite brunette on the edge of the group, the one who had claimed to be Alec Bartlett, stepped forward. "All right, people," he said in an imperious tone that sounded pretty weird coming from such a squeaky, girly, high-pitched voice, "I don't know what's happened here, but we're going to figure it out. The first step is to alert the authorities. They probably won't believe us, but if we go to police headquarters, I think I can convince them of who I am. Once I do, convincing them who you all are will be cake."
"Um," Vic said, raising his hand. "Those of us who didn't switch bodies or whatever. Can we go home?"
Bartlett blinked. "Um... yeah, I guess so," she said shrugging.
"Thank God," Vic said. "See you girls later. Good luck with your... hearing, or whatever." He waved a hand and added a chirpy, "Toodles!"
And with that Vic strode away from the cheerleaders, or the people who looked like the cheerleaders, anyway. The last thing he wanted was to listen to Bartlett's arrogant, newly-shrill voice. He was free from prison for the first time in more years than he wanted to think back on. He'd been given a second chance, a new lease on life, and he was going to use it to get revenge on the people who'd screwed him over. First on the list, Officer Alec Barlett, Cheeky Cheerleader. After that? The sky was the limit.
Vic had learned a lot in prison. This time he was going to get to everyone on his hit list. And this time he was going to get away with it. And if he had to do it as the living embodiment of jailbait, so be it. No one under the sun was going to suspect a cute, perky cheerleader of 'being a serial killer
He smiled. It was turning out to be a pretty good day.
Five miles outside town, Amy Johnson woke from her daze to find herelf dressed in an orange jumpsuit and staring at four bleak cement walls. Amy didn't know it now, but this was where she would be spending the few short remaining years of her natural life. No plea bargains, no insanity hearings, no frantic statements of her identity would save Amy from the drugged needle that awaited her. In trading lives with Amy, Vic Rudolph had traded her freedom, her life for his own. And if he'd ever thought about that, if he'd ever really pondered the price Amy would have to pay for his own crimes, Vic Rudolph simply would have smiled and said he was glad it wasn't him...
