Chapter 6: The Park

"Nobody runs," I said.

Three hundred people wanted to run.

I could feel it come up through the crowd behind me.

"If you run, you'll run into them. Stand still and listen to me."

The crabs were landing all over the south end of the park.

Some of them hit the grass and got up.

Some of them hit the paths and the old stone wall along Eastern Avenue, and those didn't get up so fast.

I looked, and I read them.

Most of the ones on the paths were red, with cracked shells and legs bent the wrong way.

They dragged themselves in circles and went nowhere.

The ones on the grass were green, and they were turning toward us, toward the smell of three hundred frightened people.

There were a dozen greens.

"Connor. You see the bus stop at the corner?"

"Yeah."

"Take the mother and the girl and the first ten people behind you, and walk to it. Walk."

He walked.

The crabs on the grass watched him go and didn't come.

"The red ones on the path won't hurt you," I told the next group. "Walk right past them. Don't kick them."

A man in a hard hat kicked one anyway.

It bit his boot through.

"I said don't kick them."

I moved the crowd along Eastern Avenue twenty people at a time.

Every time a green crab turned, I stopped the group in front of it and moved the group behind it.

It was the board on a bad Saturday night, only the beds were moving.

Halfway along the park, four greens came over the stone wall together.

They came at the middle of the crowd, where the old people were.

A siren whooped behind me, and Medic 19 jumped the curb onto the grass.

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