The mob moved on. They poured through Faneuil Hall, and some cows were set loose from their pens, and someone overturned a produce cart and lit it on fire in front of its owner, who dropped to his knees and pulled his hair out of his bleeding scalp by the roots. Up ahead, a sudden burst of gunfire, several pistols fired above the crowd, and then a desperate shout: “We are plainclothes police officers! Cease and desist at once.”

More warning shots and then the crowd started shouting back.

“Kill the cops! Kill the cops!”

“Kill the scabs!”

“Kill the cops!”

“Kill the scabs!”

“Kill the cops!”

“Back off or we will shoot to kill! Back off!”

They must have meant it because Luther felt the surge change direction and he was spun in place and the swarm moved back the way it had come. More shots fired. Another cart lit afire, the yellow and red reflecting off the bronze cobblestone and the red brick, Luther catching his own shadow moving through the colors along with all the other shadows. Shrieking that filled the sky. A crack of bone, a sharp scream, a thunderclap of plate glass, fire alarms ringing so consistently that Luther barely heard them anymore.

And then the rain came, a fat pouring of it, clattering and hissing, steaming off bare heads. At first Luther held out hope it would thin the crowd, but if anything it brought more of them. Luther was buffeted along within the hive as it destroyed ten more storefronts, three restaurants, rushed through a boxing match at Beech Hall and beat the fighters senseless. Beat the audience, too.

Along Washington Street, the major department stores—Filene’s, White’s, Chandler’s, and Jordan Marsh—had loaded up for bear. The guys guarding Jordan Marsh saw them coming from two blocks away and stepped off the sidewalk with pistols and shotguns. They didn’t even wait for a debate. They set themselves in the middle of Washington Street, fifteen of them at least, and fired. The hive went into a crouch and then took another couple of steps forward, but the Jordan Marsh men charged them, guns booming and chucking, and the surge reversed again. Luther heard terror screams and the Jordan Marsh men kept firing and the hive ran all the way back to Scollay Square.

Which was an uncaged zoo by now. Everyone drunk and howling up at the raindrops. Dazed burlesque girls stripped of their tassels wandering around with bare chests. Overturned touring cars and bonfires along the sidewalk. Headstones ripped from the Old Granary Burying Ground and propped up against walls and fences. Two people fucking on top of an overturned Model T. Two men in a bare-knuckle boxing match in the middle of Tremont Street while the bettors formed a ring around them and the blood and rain-streaked glass crunched under their feet. Four soldiers dragged an unconscious sailor to the bumper of one of the flipped cars and pissed on him as the crowd cheered. A woman appeared in an upper window and screamed for help. The crowd cheered her, too, before a hand clamped over her face and wrenched her back from the window. The crowd cheered some more.