Another shot from the direction of the lobby. Most of those who’d run that way returned to the main hall.

Ardel, crying, grabbed Sally’s hand and they tried to move away from the exit doors. But it was impossible. They were trapped in a sweating knot of people, muscle to muscle.

“Calm down! Get back!” Ardel cried, her voice choking. Sally was sobbing too, as were dozens of others around them.

“Where’re the police?”

“Get back, get off me…”

“Help me. My arm, I can’t feel my arm!”

Deafening screams, screams so loud they threatened to break eardrums. As the mass pressed back from the exit doors, several people stumbled—one elderly man went down under a column of feet. He screamed; his leg was clearly broken. Only through sheer strength, super­human strength, it seemed, did two young men, maybe grandsons, manage to pry apart the crowd and get the man to his feet. He was pale and soon went unconscious.

Two more shots, very close to the exit doors now.

The crowd surged away from the doors and toward the windows. Everyone was insane now, possessed with fury and panic. Slugging each other, trying to move back, thinking maybe, if anybody was thinking at all, that if they were not in the front line the bodies in front of them would take the bullets and the gunman would run out of ammunition or be shot by the police before he could kill more.

And the mass was moving relentlessly toward the only escape: windows.

Ardel heard a loud snap in her shoulder and her vision filled with yellow light, and pain, horrific pain, shot from her jaw to the base of her spine. A scream, lost amid the other screams. She couldn’t even turn to look. Her head was sandwiched between one man’s shoulder and another’s chest.

“Ardie!” Sally called.

But Ardel had no idea where her friend was.

The voice on the P.A.—it wasn’t the author; he was long gone—cried, “Get away from the door. He’s almost here!”

A series of crashes, breaking glass, behind her and the mob surged in that direction, Ardel with them. Not that she had any choice; her feet were off the ground. Finally she could turn her head and she saw attendees throwing chairs through the windows. Then: silhouettes of desperate people climbing to the window frames, some cutting hands and arms on jutting shards of glass. They hesitated, then jumped.

She recalled looking out the window earlier. It was three stories above the shoreline; you’d have to leap far out to hit the water, and even then it seemed there were rocks and concrete abutments just below the surface, some bristling with steel rods from an old pier foundation.

People were looking down and screaming, perhaps seeing their friends and family hit the rocks.

“No, I’m not jumping!” Ardel shouted to no one as the bodies pushed her closer to the window frames. And tried to use her good arm to scrabble in the other direction. She’d take her chances with the gunman.