His hand felt only cold air.

Darkness or not, he could see quite clearly. His hand reached straight through the foot.

And then, because this was Kent State, and because every student knew this was  the parking lot, Benjamin Howe realized what he was seeing.

He got into the car, started it carefully, and backed up. There was no sound of dragging, no sound of flesh and bone crushing under the tires. When he’d backed up far enough, there was only the sight of a body bleeding on the pavement. A guy about Benjamin’s age, wearing ratty jeans and a T-shirt.

There was another body not far off. A woman’s. A third corpse farther along, and a fourth in the middle of the road out of the lot. He cranked the wheel hard, hopped over the curb onto the grass, and kept driving.

When Benjamin Howe got back to his apartment, Cathy Weiss was still there. She thought that he treated her coldly at first, but he seemed glad to see her.

Back on campus, more bodies were appearing. At 11:30 the village of My Lai materialized in the football practice field beside the Taylor Hall parking lot — the village was close to Kent State in spirit, if not geography.

This materialization was observed by chemistry grad student Rebecca Kendall, who’d been awake 36 hours studying for exams. The sight of the phantom village terrified her... not because she thought it was a ghost, but because she thought it was a hallucination. The prospect of her mind breaking down filled her with fear, cold and pure. Her brain was all she had — no friends, no easy social graces, no Playboy bunny face and flesh, just her brain. And now her brain saw a ragged clutter of huts and butchered bodies out in the middle of a football field.