“Rape?” the first deputy said. He unbuttoned his holster and pulled out his revolver. “OK, you in there. Enough hide and seek. Come out of there or I’ll blow you out,” he shouted at Shiu.
I ran down the rest of the steps. The crowd, at least in the front dozen or so rows, could see that what was happening was not part of the show, and some of the spectators were getting caught up in the chase.
“There he goes behind that center support,” someone yelled.
“Go in after him,” someone else advised the cops.
Diana and Kirk were standing at the press table, straining to see what was happening in the scaffolding. One of the TV crews turned on its lights and between them and the deputies’ flashlights, Shiu was finding it difficult to hide.
The cop with the gun now steadied it on one of the scaffold supports and yelled, “Last chance. Come out or I fire!”
“Jesus, Fred, don’t shoot toward the crowd,” the other deputy said.
Fred stood back and fired a shot into the air. “The next one comes in there,” he yelled at Shiu.
Shiu gave a squeal of fright and clambered toward the front of the stage, finally reaching the edge of the scaffold. As he hung over the ten-foot drop, he turned to see the deputy, illuminated by the TV lights, leveling the gun. Shiu leaped off the scaffold, landing on both feet on the press table, which collapsed with a wrenching crack.
Diana, Kirk, and Fraser jumped back to avoid the splintered table and its contents. Now two TV crews were in action, and as they backtracked to try to get their cameras on Shiu, their lights flashed wildly around—compounding the confusion.
Like a paratrooper hitting the ground, Shiu rolled away from the table, jumped to his feet, wildly looked about and took off for the walkway. He bumped against me as he ran toward the rear of the stage, then shot past the deputy with the gun and the bandsmen between him and the exit.
Up on the stage, Liz and Sister Song were watching over the edge and when Shiu landed on the table, the singer screamed, “He’s getting away! Grab him!”
The spectators in the front rows took up the cry. “There he goes. Stop him!” someone shouted. “Rapist! Get him!” a man bellowed. The crowd began pushing forward.
The flimsy slat fence separating the crowd from the stage bellied in, cracked, and slapped to the ground. In a moment, the entire area was filled with pushing, shoving, and yelling spectators, some trying to chase Shiu and others just trying to get out of the way. In the middle and rear of the audience, people could be heard shouting, “What’s wrong? What’s happening?” and suddenly the whole hillside seemed to be heaving and seething, like a lake hit by a wind squall.
I pulled myself up on the first cross support of the scaffold and above the crowd saw Shiu’s white helmet bobbing among the cops and other pursuers at the rear of the stage. Then it disappeared into the dark.
As the deputies, the band members, the audience, and the TV crews floundered around the buses and cars in the field back of the stage area, I caught what might have been a gleam of the helmet again at the rise of a hill about fifty yards back.
The stage was surrounded by people trying to go in different directions. I tried to find a deputy to tell him that I thought Shiu might have taken off over the hill, but after a few minutes saw it was fruitless and pushed my way back to the press area. I found Diana and Kirk trying to retrieve the typewriter and the papers that had been scattered by Shiu’s descent and trampled by the audience breakout.
“Christ’s sake, forget that,” I said. “Bright, get your ass down to those phones at the entrance and call Grace. Tell her we’ve got a big-ass story out here and hold the phone open.” Kirk, wide-eyed, nodded and began pushing his way toward the phones.
I turned to Diana. “I’ve got what happened up top, so I can dictate the lead. But the story will need stuff like the crowd size and the background on the concert, and I need a fill from you on that. We also need stuff from the cops and from Turg, so try to get that and bring it down to the phones.”
Diana responded like a veteran. Leafing through her notebook, she quickly gave me the information I needed for a halfway coherent story and then headed toward the rear area where the crowd was still milling around looking for Shiu.
I started for the phones. I noticed in the parking field that a number of people had given up on the concert and were starting toward their cars. I was about halfway between the stage and the row of telephones, stumbling in the dim light, when a motor sound that definitely did not come from a car began just over the hill beyond the stage. It swelled, a roaring interspersed with an accelerating clacking sound, and as I looked toward the source, a massive shape rose over the ridge line.
Because I could make the connection between Shiu and the CR&P’s helicopter, I knew immediately what was ascending over the farm. But to the spooked, pot-befuddled crowd milling around below, the machine was a frightening apparition, and new yells and screams rose from the area of the stage and the hillside in front.
The dark shape lumbered upward to clear the hill, and a line of blinking red and blue lights went on along its huge length. At an altitude of about fifty feet, the copter began moving slowly forward toward the concert grounds, passing over the stage. The microphones had been left open and suddenly the engine sound was amplified to a thunderous level. That did it; the helicopter picked up speed and roared off into the night, but behind it was a mob in total panic.
I could hear cars smashing into each other in the parking area, and behind me a motor was kicked to life. I looked back to see the Fuggers’ garish bus jerking to a start and heading toward the entrance. I was only about thirty feet from the telephones, where Kirk Bright had his head bent inside one of the three-sided enclosures—with the receiver to his ear.
The Fuggers’ bus, gaining speed as it passed me, hit a rut and lurched to the left, heading directly for the telephone bank.
I shouted, “Look out, Kirk!” and saw the young reporter jump back reflexively as the bus crunched into the row of telephones, snapping off the metal standards just above the ground. The bus rolled on about twenty feet and stopped.
Kirk stood where the phone bank had been, staring alternately at the bus, the telephone receiver, and its dangling cord. It was neatly amputated at the point where the cord had been attached to the box.
“You OK?” I asked as I ran the last few feet.
Bright looked stricken. “Oh my gosh, Mr. Wartovsky, what are we going to do now? That was my last fifteen cents.”
CHAPTER 15
The crowd was in full flight as I guided the stunned Kirk back toward the stage. The fences all around the concert grounds had been trampled down as the audience stampeded toward the parking field. We fought our way back to the rear of the stage, where we found Diana talking with a deputy in one of the sheriff’s squad cars, and Liz was sitting above the crowd on the stairs.
The Baraboo and Post Partum Repression buses were still parked behind the stage. Sister Song, wrapped in a blanket and looking calmer, was sitting on a chair next to her band’s bus with a deputy, notebook in hand, squatted down, and the musicians clustered around her. A couple of Turg’s guards were trying to keep wandering members of the audience away from the buses. The old man himself was sitting on the ground, holding a bloody handkerchief to the side of his head.
Diana came over to us. “They’re calling for ambulances and more police. There’s some people hurt out there,” she said, waving to the rapidly emptying hillside where the audience had been.
“I’ve been trying to talk to the deputies, but I think they’re panicked worse than the crowd… I just heard that deputy say on the radio that it was all started by a naked little man in a space helmet who got away in some kind of flying cigar. He keeps referring to the singer as ‘the Sister.’”