He’d thought he’d have to spread the rumor a half-dozen more times but, nope, it wasn’t necessary. The stories buzzed like locusts. One bomber, a dozen. Machine-guns. Al Qaeda. ISIS. Pakistan. Syria.

‘What’re we going to do? How do we get out?’

March shouted, ‘There’s only one way I know about. The front entrance. They don’t have emergency exits, I heard.’

‘No exits? Didn’t they think something like this could happen?’

‘We’re going to be trapped here!’

March waved his arm. ‘No, we’re not. Let’s go!’

The crowd was now moving in the general direction of the park entrance. What had started as a cluster of a hundred was swelling to three, four, five times that number. March walked with them for a ways, then stepped off the path into the bushes and let skittish cattle continue their quickening drive to what they hoped was safety.

CHAPTER 45

What’s going on? Dance wondered.

She and O’Neil were back at the Global Adventure entrance, having heard reports that for some reason hundreds – no, thousands of park guests were moving in this direction. The agent and detective were outside the entrance turnstiles and fence.

The patrons clustering on the other side, waiting to exit, were edgy, anxious. Some exchanged harsh words. A shoving match or two broke out when people cut into the line ahead of the others to leave. The crush could have been relieved if the wide gate was functioning but the unsub’s steamy Chevy still blocked it.

Dance thought of the Liverpool fans clustering outside Hillsborough Stadium, the disaster her father had told her about.

Twenty-five years ago. I still have nightmares …

O’Neil and Dance walked up to the head of park security and Sergeant Ralston.

Dance asked, ‘What is all this?’

Both Herb Southern and Ralston were on their phones. Ralston said, ‘Jesus.’ Whatever he’d learned was very troubling.

Southern disconnected.

‘There’s panicking inside. A couple guests beat up one of my security guards. I don’t know why.’

Ralston hung up too. ‘Okay, this is a problem. We’re getting calls from everybody – the Sheriff’s Office, media, FBI, Homeland. Reports terrorists’re in the park. Machine-guns. Suicide vests. Fucking rumors but nine one one’s flooded, circuits’re almost overloaded.’

Dance muttered, ‘He’s doing it.’

‘Your perp?’

She nodded.

O’Neil said, ‘All it took was him telling a few people the rumor, one news report, a few blog posts, and it’s spread like fire.’

‘It’s what he does. He starts panics. And he’s real good at it.’

O’Neil said, ‘He’s going to try to get out this way, thinking we can’t check everybody.’

‘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 to the crowd. ‘You’re safe. You can stay in the park. Don’t push. Don’t push!’

Everyone ignored him.

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 patrons. ‘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 people from inside the park joined the other exiting patrons in bottlenecks between two gift shops, which jutted into the entrance walkway. Every face seemed terrified.

At the turnstiles serious fights were starting to break out and there were more and more instances of people shoving others aside and jumping the barriers, 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. 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 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.’

‘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 PA 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 far edge of the property … Oh, Jesus … Look!’

A wave of a thousand, two thousand people was now charging the exit.

‘Get back, it’s all right!’ the security head yelled to them. Pointless, as before.

Parents had abandoned strollers and were carrying their screaming children. The people waiting at the turnstiles turned back and saw the tide approaching.

The screams rose and those behind the patrons in front began scrabbling over the others to get to the turnstiles. Some began running through the broken gate, climbing over the unsub’s Chevy. One man fell on his back and lay still.

Dance, O’Neil and Southern ran forward, holding their palms up to stanch the flow of human bodies, shouting that there was no attack.

But the crowd had no rational mind. Safety, escape – those were the only things that mattered.

A creature … not human …

‘They’re going to be crushed,’ Dance said.

O’Neil: ‘The gate. We have to get it open. Now!’

He, Ralston and a half-dozen park workers ran to the unsub’s car and, by using pure muscle, pulled it back – five feet, ten, twenty. They then grabbed the gate and swung it open. It screeched on the concrete.

O’Neil leaped aside as the tide, twenty bodies wide, swarmed through the open space. Others continued to push through or leap over the turnstiles.

A mother, holding a young child of about four, staggered through the gate, then turned toward an empty part of the parking lot and stumbled in that direction. Dance noticed that her arm was badly broken. She got about ten steps toward a bench, then eased her daughter to the asphalt and collapsed. Dance ran to help.

She had just gotten to the woman when there was a shattering of glass and dozens of people leaped onto the sidewalk. They’d broken a large window of one of the gift shops and were fleeing out of the park through the gap. This herd soon swelled to several hundred.

They were bearing down on Dance, the woman and her child. Even though they were out of the park, panic had seized them and they were sprinting madly.

‘Get up!’ Dance cried to the groggy mother, scooping up the child by the waist. The crowd was forty feet away, thirty.

The woman suddenly gripped Dance’s collar. Unbalanced by her awkward crouch, the agent fell backward. She landed hard, still clasping the child. Stunned, she looked up to see a wall of a hundred patrons stampeding directly for them. To judge from their feral eyes, not a single one even saw them, let alone had any intention of turning aside.