“Set the gun aside. Raise your hands.”

That’s what she did.

TWENTY-THREE

The line of limos completely choked West 54th Street, extended back onto Seventh Avenue and then all the way up to 56th Street. Stretches, town cars, the occasional privately owned Mercedes or Tesla.

Crowds pushed against barricades manned by tolerantly amused NYPD pulling down some welcome overtime pay. Satellite trucks had been parked right on the sidewalk across from the Bow Tie Ziegfeld Theater, which all by themselves doubled the congestion.

It was not an uncommon situation. This was not New York’s first big movie premiere. But even New York could not be jaded about this much star power. Every A-list actor, director, and producer was here, all of Hollywood royalty, for the premiere of the year’s biggest-budget flick Fast, Fast, Dead, starring, among several actual human stars, a computer-generated Marilyn Monroe that was supposed to be so indistinguishable from the long-dead real thing that there’d been some speculation about whether the program might be up for an Oscar nomination.

Lystra Reid had managed an invitation for herself and a plus one. The plus one was at least ten years her junior, but this was a Hollywood crowd, and if the relatively unknown but reputed to be fabulously rich woman wanted a young, black, not terribly attractive boy toy who had clearly been on the wrong end of either a bar fight or a car accident, hey, who cared, really? The country had bigger problems.

“We’re toward the back,” Lystra said, guiding Bug Man in.

Despite the rocketing pain of his broken teeth and the split, swollen lips, Bug Man was enthralled. Obviously Lystra was up to something horrific, but in the meantime Bug Man played Spot the Star. Seeing a very familiar face, he said, “Man, I ufed to cruff on her when I wa’ a little ki’ looking a’ Harry Potter,” he said.

“Watching what?”

“Harry … Never mind.” Lystra Reid was not big on popular culture, Bug Man had decided. And talking was painful and difficult, though he was adjusting to the lack of front teeth.

“I’ tha’ Gwynneff?” Bug Man asked, but of course Lystra was paying no attention. And the star-dense crowd was not looking at Bug Man. They were hailing old friends and talking to the roving camera crews still pushing through packed-in A-listers.

The jocularity was strained. There was not a person in the room so oblivious to all that had happened in the world that they were not nervous. Some celebrities who had initially agreed to attend had suddenly discovered that they had headaches and would need to skip the proceedings. But the ideal of “the show must go on” and the lure of cameras had kept numbers high enough to prevent organizers from canceling.

“Time to send a text,” Lystra said. And when Bug Man failed to cease craning his neck to locate a particular buxom TV star, she said more pointedly, “This is going to go bad in a few minutes. So stay close to me.” She laid a hand gently on his swollen cheek. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you. And don’t forget: you wouldn’t want anything to happen to me.”

She thumbed in a text that went to the closest cell-phone tower, from there to a satellite, and from that satellite to a touch screen almost ten thousand miles away and very far to the south.

She almost blew the timing. Another minute or two and the cameras would have turned off their lights and been hustled from the theater by security people and public relations folk.

Lystra wanted cameras. All the cameras.

The first person to cry out in a startled voice that carried even over the hubbub was a big man with a big voice who said, “I see bugs!”

Ten seconds later, another voice, female, screamed.

“Oh my God, it’s like, it’s like that thing in Sweden!” Lystra herself cried helpfully. “That’s what they said. Bugs! That’s what happened there! Oh my God, we’re all going mad!”

“Aaaaaahhhh!” a man cried, and then more, and more, and all at once everyone in the theater seemed to realize what was happening. And what was coming.

A well-liked hunk known for starring in superhero movies started laughing and then tried to shove his entire hand into his mouth. Bug Man stared in disbelief. It was one thing knowing that something could theoretically happen. It was a whole different thing when a Marvel superhero was trying to gag himself right in front of you.

“And now we exit,” Lystra said. She smiled at Bug Man. She was enjoying his amazement. She’d been right to bring him along. It would be fun to have someone to share it all with afterward. “See, this is why I’ve savored, yeah, a few of these events in person: video doesn’t do it justice. The edge of panic. Yeah. The wild look in people’s eyes.”

The panic was like a herd of wildebeest smelling a lion. In a heartbeat hundreds of people surged toward the exits. A woman in an evening gown went down. She tried to stand, but someone tromped on the hem of her dress and she fell again.

Lystra and Bug Man barely made it out the door without being trampled, and she laughed as she was jostled and laughed as she was pushed hard against a door and laughed still as she spilled out onto 54th Street into the glare of lights.

They ran to get ahead of the flood, raced to get behind the cameras to watch as long as Lystra could without endangering herself too much.

A bloody Broadway star was shouting nonsense syllables. A famously beautiful actor was tearing her dress off while her director crawled on all fours making a sound like a sheep. Hollywood’s favorite dad was playing with his hair, twining his fingers through it and laughing hysterically.