All good. Mostly good – problem was, this guy Richard Stanton Keller, supposedly a self-help genius, was a bit boring.

Ardel whispered, ‘Three names. That’s a tip-off. Lot of words in his name. Lots of words in his book.’

Lots of words coming out of his mouth.

Sally nodded.

Keller was leaning forward to the microphone, before the audience of a good four hundred or so fans. He read and read and read.

Tomorrow Is the New Today.

Catchy. But it didn’t make a lot of sense. Because when you hit tomorrow, it becomes today but then it’s the old today and you have to look at tomorrow, which is the new today.

Like time-travel movies, which she also didn’t enjoy.

She’d’ve preferred somebody who wrote fun and talked fun, like Janet Evanovich or John Gilstrap, but there were worse ways to spend an hour after digesting a very small – too small – portion of chips and one marg. Still, it was a pleasant venue for a book reading. The building was up on stilts and you could peer down and see, thirty or forty feet below, craggy rocks on which energetic waves were presently committing explosive suicide.

She tried to concentrate.

‘I’ll tell you a story. About my oldest son going away to college.’

Don’t believe a word of it, Ardel thought.

‘This is true, it really happened.’

Not a single word.

He started telling the story of his son doing something bad or the author doing something bad or the author’s wife, the boy’s mother, doing something bad because they’d been living for today and not tomorrow, which really was today. Hm. Did that mean—

Suddenly a loud bang, from somewhere outside the hall. Nearby.

Everyone looked toward the lobby. The author fell silent.

Now screams from outside too. Then another bang louder, closer.

That wasn’t a backfire. Cars didn’t backfire any more. Definitely a shot. Ardel knew it was a gunshot. She’d been to a range a couple of times when her husband was alive. She hadn’t wanted to fire a gun, so she’d just sat back and watched the fanatics shiver with excitement over the weapons and talk shop.

Another shot – closer yet.

The manager hurried to a fire door, which he pushed open. A fast look out. He stepped back in fast.

‘Listen! There’s a guy with a gun. Outside. Coming this way!’ He pulled the door shut but it swung open, thanks to the taped-down locks.

People were rising to their feet.

Another shot, two more. More screams from outside.

‘Jesus Lord,’ Ardel whispered.

‘Ardie, what’s going on?’

One man was on his feet, a big guy. Former military, it seemed. He, too, looked out. ‘There he is! He’s coming this way. He’s got an automatic!’

Cries of ‘No!’, ‘Jesus!’, ‘Call nine one one!’

Several people ran for the emergency exit. ‘No, not that way!’ someone called. ‘He’s out there. I think he’s shooting people outside.’

‘Get back!’

A brilliant security light came on. No! Ardel thought. All the easier to see his target.

The author didn’t say, ‘Stay calm,’ or anything else. He leaped up and pushed some attendees out of the way, running for the lobby. A dozen people raced after him. They jammed the doorway. One woman screamed and fell back, clutching a horribly twisted arm.

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.

‘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 as his leg bone snapped. 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 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 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 PA – it wasn’t the author’s: 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 Ardel 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 of 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 rebar steel rods.

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 in particular. And tried to use her good arm to scrabble in the other direction. She’d take her chance with the gunman.

But she had no say in the matter, no say at all. The writhing mass pressed closer and closer to the windows, where some people were hesitating and others pushing the reluctant ones down and climbing on their backs or chests or bellies to launch themselves into the questionable safety of the stony shoreline below.

‘No, no, no!’ Ardel gasped, as the cluster around her mounted the fallen bodies and made it to the sill. She couldn’t look down, couldn’t steady herself, couldn’t even find a safe place to land, if there was such a place.

‘Stop it!’ she shouted to the crowd.

But then she was tumbling through space, curiously grateful, in those two or three seconds of free fall, to be out of the constrictor grasp of the surging crowd.

Then a jarring, breath-wrenching thud.

But she wasn’t badly injured. She’d landed on top of the man who’d jumped just before her. He lay, unconscious, on the outcrop of rock, the right side of his face torn open, jaw and cheek and arm shattered. She’d even landed more or less on her feet, and slid back on her butt, avoiding what would have been a catastrophic, torturous collision of her shattered shoulder and the cracked rock.

A massive spray of pungent salt water flared over Ardel and those around her, sprawled and sitting and crawling on the stone, cold as ice.

Screams from the victims, roaring from the water.

She rose, unsteadily, looking around, clutching her shoulder.

By now the police would be swarming the hall, and the gunman shot or arrested. She’d just stay here and—

‘Ah!’ Ardel barked a scream as one of the falling patrons landed directly behind her, propelling her off the rock. She stumbled forward and fell into the raging water.

A wave was now receding, pulling her in the undertow, fast, away from the shore.