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heading at three o’clock, eighteen minutes and an eternity ago. Tom McCourt hurried to keep up. He really was a very short man. “Tell me,” he said, “do you often talk nonsense?”
    “Sure,” Clay said. “Just ask my wife.”
     
    5
    “Where are we going?” Tom asked. “I was headed for the T.” He pointed to a green-painted kiosk about a block ahead. A small crowd of people were milling there. “Now I’m not sure being underground is such a hot idea.”
    “Me, either,” Clay said. “I’ve got a room at a place called the Atlantic Avenue Inn, about five blocks further up.”
    Tom brightened. “I think I know it. On Louden, actually, just off Atlantic.”
    “Right. Let’s go there. We can check the TV And I want to call my wife.”
    “On the room phone.”
    “The room phone, check. I don’t even have a cell phone.”
    “I have one, but I left it home. It’s broken. Rafe—my cat—knocked it off the counter. I was meaning to buy a new one this very day, but… listen. Mr. Riddell—”
    “Clay.”
    “Clay, then. Are you sure the phone in your room will be safe?”
    Clay stopped. He hadn’t even considered this idea. But if the landlines weren’t okay, what would be? He was about to say this to Tom when a sudden brawl broke out at the T station up ahead. There were cries of panic, screams, and more of that wild babbling—he recognized it for what it was now, the signature scribble of madness. The little knot of people that had been milling around the gray stone pillbox and the steps going below-ground broke up. A few of them ran into the street, two with their arms around each other, snatching looks back over their shoulders as they went. More—most—ran into the park, all in different directions, which sort of broke Clay’s heart. He felt better somehow about the two with their arms around each other.
    Still at the T station and on their feet were two men and two women.
    Clay was pretty sure it was they who had emerged from the station and driven off the rest. As Clay and Tom stood watching from half a block away, these remaining four fell to fighting with each other. This brawl had the hysterical, killing viciousness he had already seen, but no discernible pattern. It wasn’t three against one, or two against two, and it certainly wasn’t the boys against the girls; in fact, one of the “girls” was a woman who looked to be in her middle sixties, with a stocky body and a no-nonsense haircut that made Clay think of several women teachers he’d known who were nearing retirement.
    They fought with feet and fists and nails and teeth, grunting and shouting and circling the bodies of maybe half a dozen people who had already been knocked unconscious, or perhaps killed. One of the men stumbled over an outstretched leg and went to his knees. The younger of the two women dropped on top of him. The man on his knees swept something up from the pavement at the head of the stairs—Clay saw with no surprise whatever that it was a cell phone—and slammed it into the side of the woman’s face. The cell phone shattered, tearing the woman’s cheek open and showering a freshet of blood onto the shoulder of her light jacket, but her scream was of rage rather than pain. She grabbed the kneeling man’s ears like a pair of jughandles, dropped her own knees into his lap, and shoved him backwards into the gloom of the T’s stairwell. They went out of sight locked together and thrashing like cats in heat.
    “Come on,” Tom murmured, twitching Clay’s shirt with an odd delicacy. “Come on. Other side of the street. Come on.”
    Clay allowed himself to be led across Boylston Street. He assumed that either Tom McCourt was watching where they were going or he was lucky, because they got to the other side okay. They stopped again in front of Colonial Books (Best of the Old, Best of the New), watching as the unlikely victor of the T station battle went striding into the park in the direction of the burning