He was still moving. Oh, God, he was still moving. She watched as he clawed his way upright and smashed into the plastic screen around the ice, smearing it with oozes of blood and flaky black skin—and then the plastic slumped with him, as if it were tired of holding him back.

He slithered over the barrier and crawled onto the ice. Hockey players veered off to one side of the rink, like birds wheeling. The man crawled, or slid, another foot or two.

The ice bubbled. He was still burning.

She realized that her hands had gone to her mouth, turned to bury her face in Jim’s chest. His arm went around her. She could feel him shaking.

Somebody on the P.A. yelled, “Be calm, everybody please stay calm, there’s no cause for alarm, stay in your seats.” Nobody listened. Jim tugged her back down the tunnel, forced her into a run. She heard the rumble of feet behind her.

They attained the safety of the bathroom alcove as a wave of people erupted from the tunnel, shoving, screaming, blind with panic. A young black man fell only a few feet away, curled into a ball. Robby couldn’t see the kicks that hit him, only the blood. He crawled toward them, far enough that she could grab his hand and pull him into the relative peace of the alcove.

“Jesus Christ,” Jim kept saying, over and over, like a prayer. “Jesus Christ.”

The black man, sitting at Robby’s feet with blood streaming down his face, said, “Man, I hope somebody got that on tape.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

Martin

Martin was having a dream about chickens when suddenly, without any warning at all, one of them blew up with a BANG that sounded as big as the world. He jerked upright in his leather chair, blinked, and saw the massive shadow of Agent Jennings standing in the doorway. The door was just swinging back from its impact with the wall.

“Agent Carling,” Jennings said urgently. “Ma’am, you’d better come see this, now.”

Carling had been napping as well, but her eyes were clear and her movements precise when she got up to follow him. There were fabric wrinkles on her cheek where it had pressed against her suit sleeve. As he stood up, Martin realized he had one hell of a crick in his neck.

Jennings had a hockey game on TV—at least, it looked like a hockey game, a big ring of ice, plastic walls to protect the crowd from flying pucks and sticks, a huge crowd of people. Only the people were emptying out in a stampeding frenzy. The hockey players circled at the far end of the rink, swooping in confused Brownian motion near the goal. A knot of uniformed security stood on the ice to one side, near the wall, around—