Maple brought the hot-box lid down, hard, on the backbone of the trapped vendor. Then he brought it down again. The lid was polished stainless steel and was heavy enough to do the job. Maple kept slamming it until he saw the spine give. The legs stopped kicking.

Arby Maple experienced profound satisfaction. His eyes fell on a decorative iron gate, standing permanently open alongside one edge of the park. The crossbar that slid into place to secure the gate was also of solid black iron with a nice hook at one end. Maple wrenched it out of its socket.

He didn't see the people running away from him. He didn't hear the screaming. His hatred would turn on them in a minute or so, but for now he had one thought only: he was going to wipe the floor with that smug son-of-a-bitch bartender.

AS SOON AS MAPLE LEFT the tavern, the young man strolled quickly up Main Street and took cover in the door of a souvenir shop. He was tentatively pleased when he saw the body of the cobbler seller go limp.

Maple wasn't through yet, though. He grabbed a hunk of metal from the fence and went back for the bar. Well, that wasn't unexpected. The man had already been irked by the bartender.

Maple emerged from the tavern with his iron bar dripping blood and matted with hair.

Stop now, stop now, the young man pleaded silently. Arby Maple rushed a crowd of onlookers and began bashing their heads in.

THE YOUNG MAN WALKED despondently through the parklike town, against the flow of security carts and interested visitors heading for the action. His subject was supposed to kill just the one guy. Instead the man was on some sort of rampage.

When he reached his car he started the engine, but paused to pull out his notebook. There were pages of unrelated scribbling inside, but in the middle was a carefully printed chart. At the top of the first column was the entry GUTX-ED-UT1. "ED" stood for Evaporative Distillation, the method used to create this particular batch. "UT" was for Utah, home state of the manufacturing lab, and "1" was the first sample from that lab. Carefully, with his treasured fine-tipped Mont Blanc pen, the young man recorded his findings in the results field.