The bullet hit Santa Claus beneath the left eye.

It shattered his skull, blew a large exit wound from the rear of that vessel, and drove a bright red spatter pattern across the pale satin of his throne like some sort of twisted abstract painting. Worse still, the ballistic energy unleashed an upper-body spasm that shook his hat comically askew, and it slipped off his face and caught on his ear and hung there like a large red sock.

The four-year-old girl sitting in his lap stared not so much in horror but in fascination. She understood that this was “different” but had no larger context against which to compare it. She had no acquaintance yet with the concept of horror and the human fear of seeing the body’s vaults penetrated and eviscerated, but she picked up immediately on the appropriate response from her mother, who grabbed her and started screaming as the hundreds of others clustered around Santa’s throne began to do the same.

It was like combat, except the food wasn’t as good.

It was… shopping… in a mall… on the day after Thanksgiving, the blackest of black Fridays.

Ray Cruz decided that he would never take an IQ test again, for the results, after he had agreed to this adventure, would prove suicidally depressing.

He shook his head, even as someone in the crowd jostled his shoulder. That person was outbound down the corridor called Colorado-after the river, not the state-while he was inbound. His fault? Maybe, maybe not, and courteous as ever, he shot a look to his victim, issued a tiny smile of contrition, noted that it was a she and that she was under twenty and concluded that he did not register as a carbon-based life form, and turned back to what lay ahead.