Odd Thomas

the open atrium. Pressed one against the other, excited, eager, twitching and swaying, squirming like agitated spiders.
        A throng of bargain-hunting shoppers filled the first floor of the promenade, browsing from store to store, unaware of the audience of malevolent spirits that was watching them with such anticipation.
        My wonderful gift, my hateful gift, my terrifying gift led me along the promenade, farther south, faster, following the splash and tumble of the stream, in a frantic search for Simon Varner.
        Not hundreds of bodachs. Thousands. I'd never seen such a horde as this, never imagined I ever would. They were like a celebratory Roman mob in the Colosseum, watching with delight as the Christians made unanswered prayers, waiting for the lions, for blood on the sand.
        I had wondered why they had vanished from the streets. Here was the answer. Their hour had come.
        As I passed a bed-and-bath store, the hard chatter of automatic gunfire erupted from the promenade ahead of me.
        The first burst proved brief. For two seconds, three, after it ended, an impossible hush fell across the mall.
        Hundreds of shoppers appeared to freeze as one. Although surely the water in the stream continued to move, it seemed to spill along its course without sound. I would not have been surprised if my watch had confirmed a miraculous stoppage of time.
        One scream tore the silence, and at once a multitude answered it. The gun replied to the screamers with a longer death rattle than the first.
        Recklessly, I pushed southward along the promenade. Progress wasn't easy because the panicked shoppers were running north away from the gunfire. People ricocheted off me, but I stayed on my feet, pressing toward a third burst of gunfire.
        

CHAPTER 61
        
        I WILL NOT TELL EVERYTHING I SAW. I WILL NOT. Cannot. The dead deserve their dignity. The wounded, their privacy. Their loved ones, a little peace.
        More to the point, I know why soldiers, home from war, seldom tell their families about their exploits in more than general terms. We who survive must go on in the names of those who fall, but if we dwell too much on the vivid details of what we've witnessed of man's inhumanity to man, we simply can't go on. Perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.
        The panicked throng surged past me, and I found myself among a scattering of victims, all on the ground, dead and wounded, fewer than I expected, but too many. I saw the blond bartender from Green Moon Lanes in her work uniform… and three others. Maybe they had come to the mall for lunch before work.
        Whatever I am, I am not superhuman. I bleed. I suffer. This was more than I could handle. This was Malo Suerte Lake times ten.
         Cruelty has a human heart… terror the human form divine.
        Not Shakespeare. William Blake. Himself a piece of work.
        Scores of bodachs had descended from the upper level of the mall. They were crawling among the dead and wounded.
        Whether I could handle this or not, I had no choice but to make the effort. If I walked away, I might as well kill myself right here.
        The koi pond lay not far ahead. The man-made jungle surrounded it. I saw the bench on which Stormy and I had sat to eat cones of coconut cherry chocolate chunk.
        A man in a black jumpsuit, black ski mask. Big enough to be Simon Varner. Holding an assault rifle apparently modified for full - and illegal - automatic fire.
        A few people were hiding among the palm trees, huddled in the koi pond; but most had fled the open promenade for the specialty shops, desperately taking cover there, perhaps hoping to escape by the back doors. Through the windows - jewelry store, gift shop, art gallery, culinary shop - I could see them crowding after one another, still too visible.
        In this blood-jaded age that is as violent as video games, the cruel machine language increasingly in common use would refer to this as a target-rich environment.
        His back to me, Varner sprayed the fronts of those businesses with bullets. The windows of Burke & Bailey's dissolved, cascaded into the shop in a glittering deluge.
         We are destined to be together forever. We have a card that says so. We have matching birthmarks.
        Sixty feet from the crazy bastard, then fifty feet and closing, I discovered that I was gripping the