“That’s pretty damn close to true,” Sergeant Ralston muttered.

Herb Southern walked to the turnstiles, on the other side of which a crowd thirty- or forty-deep jostled to get out. “There’s no emergency!” he shouted. “You’re safe. You can stay in the park. Don’t push. Don’t push!”

No one, it seemed, could even hear him over the shouted voices of the mob.

Dance asked, “What’s the procedure, if it were a terror attack?”

“Lockdown. Get everybody off the rides and have them wait where security tells them. We have designated places of cover from gunmen and bad weather, fire.”

“Evacuation?”

“Not a mass evacuation,” Southern said, staring at the growing sea of bodies trying to get the hell out of the place. “Ma’am, today’s a slow day but we’ve still got thirteen thousand souls in the park at this moment. If they all head out together—well, you can imagine.”

The crowd was swelling as more people from the inside of the park made their way toward the exits; they jammed into a bottleneck between two gift shops, which jutted into the entrance walkway. Every face seemed terrified.

Dance and O’Neil ran forward and helped people climb the turnstiles, holding young children as their parents clambered to safety, then handing off the kids. They tried to tell people it wasn’t a terror attack but not a single one paid them any attention.

At the turnstiles serious fights were starting to break out and there were more and more instances of people shoving others aside and jumping turnstiles, which led to more panic. The crowd was now fifty- or sixty-deep. And growing. One woman screamed as she was jammed against a fence. Her wrist had broken, Dance guessed. Two guards got to her and managed to calm that cluster of patrons. But as soon as they did, another fight broke out, more pushing, more screams. Dance watched two other patrons fall. They were trampled before guards got them to their feet. The park workers’ faces were as alarmed as their guests’.

Dance said, “It’s on the borderline of manageable. We’ll be okay as long as nothing more sets them—”

From the distance came a half-dozen gunshots.

“Hell,” she muttered.

Then, over the loudspeaker: “Emergency evacuation. All guests. There are terrorists in the park. Suicide bomber in the park. This is not a drill. Everyone evacuate immediately!”

“That’s not procedure!” Southern snapped, his face in shock.

“All guests, this is an emergency. Evacuate at once. There is a suicide bomber in the park.”

Dance grimaced. “It’s him. He got into the security command post somehow.”

O’Neil snapped: “Get a team there now!”

Ralston lifted his radio, made a call.

The security man was on his phone. “Derek, what’s going on?… Is he in the CP?… Okay, find out. Cut the power to the P.A. system.”

“Evacuate! Evacuate immediately. We have shooting victims! If you’ve been wounded, seek cover immediately. Medical teams are on the way!”

Southern explained to Dance and O’Neil, “We’ve got a network of underground tunnels—where our security office is. We take sick guests out that way, pickpockets, people’re drunk. It’s the command post too. He’s in there. He’s going to try to get out through the tunnels. There’s an exit to a parking lot on the western edge of the property… Oh, Jesus… Look!”