Like seagulls to a handful of bread crusts, he thought, and the crazy image broke his paralysis. He gripped the wheel, took his foot off the brake and shoved it down on the accelerator.

The Escort leapt backward, faster than he had expected. He hit the brake again, and the bald man atop the hatchback window cried out and fell away. Sam heard him land in a heap, right on the concrete behind the car.

Oh shit.

The realization came to him even as new arrivals continued bunching up around the vehicle.

He couldn’t back up again—not with someone lying on the ground back there. None of these people were actually responsible for what they were doing right now. It went without saying: absolutely none of this was their fault.

If you kill one of them, it’s murder. Plain and simple.

Even as Sam watched for the bald man to get back on his feet, a younger man appeared at the rear bumper, pounding on the sloping hatchback window.

Sam turned and studied the space ahead of the car. While the kid with the ripped-open cheek was still on the hood, there was nobody actually in front of the vehicle.

He considered the space between the car’s front end and the house: a distance of twenty feet.

Behind him, the hatchback window finally cracked and spiderwebbed—the safety glass stayed intact like the windshield, but the whole thing sagged in its frame.

The vehicle was rocking and swaying now. There were people bunched up at both sides, their faces pressed to the glass, their screams drowning one another out. Sam had never experienced claustrophobia before, but he imagined this was what it felt like.

Right against the driver’s side window, the red-haired man with the beard suddenly spoke:

“Kill you.”

The words were more hissed than shouted; they were just loud enough to discern under the screams.

Startled, Sam turned and looked into the man’s eyes. He saw nothing in them but dumb, animal rage. The face of some dimwitted, starving predator.

“Kill you,” the man hissed again.

“Fuck you,” Sam said, and dropped the selector into drive.

He took his foot off the brake pedal, cut the wheel all the way left, and stepped on the gas.

The Escort shot forward and to the left, in a tight arc. The people pressing against it were momentarily yanked off balance, pulled along with it, and then they were gone, falling away in a chorus of furious screaming. The kid on the windshield was instantly thrown sideways by the centrifugal force of the turn. He made a frantic grab for purchase, his fingers scrabbling over the right-side windshield wiper, and then he was gone too, tumbling away off the hood.