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trying to defuse the situation.
    I saw Scotty’s body tense. His hands curled into fists. The veins in his arms stood out. I wondered, in that eons-long millisecond that always precedes a disaster, what it would feel like to have my nose broken, and whether the mask would give me any protection at all. Tears watered my eyes.
    â€˜Stupid old bastard!’ he raged. ‘It’s just so fucking stupid …’
    Heather was no longer looking at us. I heard her say ‘Guys’ in a tentative voice and I interrupted her, blurting at Scotty, ‘Don’t you have a cell phone surgically implanted in that thick skull of yours?’
    He strode away, flapping his arms and fuming, ‘Stupid stupid stupid …’ and then Heather screamed, ‘Will you two shut up and look!’
    She was pointing to the farthest shore. I didn’t want to look. I could tell from her expression that it was something awful, and I’d seen enough horror for one day. But I looked anyway, and my instincts were right.
    I shouldn’t have looked.
    Across the sound, along the manicured yards hemmed by seawalls, and the marshy, grassy undeveloped tracts, an unbroken line of people was advancing on the water. It was like the Normandy invasion in reverse, and the towers of smoke rising from Fort Walton Beach contributed to the effect. Thousands of people, an uncountable horde of people, literally stampeded for the water. They were screaming as if in pain, and trampling one another, and colliding drunkenly with tree trunks and dock posts and moored boats. They seemed totally possessed by a mindless need to be in the water, and nothing, or no one, would stop them. They climbed over those who had fallen. They leapt from seawalls and docks. Some of them fell when they landed in shallow water, and they didn’t seem able to get up. Still, they dragged themselves toward deeper water.
    And something else – something I still can’t explain.
    The people were on fire.
    Their bodies gave off plumes of black smoke as they ran blindly for the beach. They held their arms away from their sides as if even casual contact with another surface produced agonising pain. A mental snapshot formed, of a photograph taken during the Vietnam War of a naked Vietnamese girl who had just been burned during a napalm strike on her village. She was running, and crying, and holding her arms away from her body to escape the pain. This was the same only repeated ten thousand times over, and I could neither explain nor understand how such a thing was possible. A contact toxin that produced a burning sensation, yes. Many chemical warfare agents were capable of producing that exact effect. But a toxin that created a biochemical response in the body so energetic that it literally combusted the tissue? No. Not in this world. It was the stuff of science fiction.
    When the people reached the water they hurled themselves beneath the surface and scrambled for the deeper parts, out in the channel. The water sizzled around them and gave off bubbling clouds of smoke. I could follow their paths by watching individual trails of smoke move toward us. They were still a good thousand metres north of our island when the smoke trails gradually dissipated. As if they had cooled. Or something.
    None of the people resurfaced.
    I heard Heather sobbing. No. It was Scotty who was crying. Heather was holding him as if he were a baby, and he had his face buried in her shoulder. I went over to them, and without any conscious declaration of intent I put my arm around the both of them, and it was OK. We stood there that way, for a very long time, and watched the people on the mainland drive themselves into the water and vanish.
    As the sun began to inch toward the western horizon, the afternoon cooled, and the world grew quieter still.
    We didn’t know what to do.
In the evening
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    It was a hot night.
    My clothes had never dried, and the shorts clung to my thighs,