Some of the girls don't have helmets on. Their hair is streaming back behind their heads as they run. They all pass some construction sites where people run over to pick new stones and bricks. No paving stones in Chicago. A guy is going past a Rolls Royce. He plants one foot ahead of him. Stops, pivots like a shortstop bringing his arm down in a big arch. His club takes out the windshield. Someone else opens the back door, rips out the phone or something, and leaves. Middle-aged people looking out from the lobby of the hotel and standing in furs on the street are visibly upset.

Now the police are zooming in to take a stand at Division Street. The crowd charges forward to get there first before the police can set up. But the police are ready, and they move in on the running crowd as it enters the intersection. Tear gas is fired.

The Weathermen have been divided. Some made it through and they are now circling back north to join the rest of the group...

I leave to find where the Weathermen have gone. It isn't easy. Their line of march is only about half a block long, and they move so fast that by the time you find them they're either on top of you or gone again.

I find them going north on Astor Street back up toward Lincoln Park. They seem to have been travelling in S-type patterns, constantly changing their direction to avoid the police...

Buckshot zings into the trees over the heads of the kids.

Two or three policemen step out front and level their pistols at the crowd. Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam. They empty their guns at the kids. Several people go down. But they are not lift; they're ducking. It takes about half a minute for the Weathermen to realize that those were blanks. But by then they are retreating. They have no guns.

A girl is lying in the intersection. She has been shot through the leg with a real pistol bullet. A boy has been shot in his shoulder and the side of his body. The police have a lot of people they grabbed pinned up against patrol cars.

Police come charging down their middle in a V. The group is split, running up two different streets. Several more shots are fired. I am toward the back of the group when two cars of plainclothes policemen come roaring up from behind. They leap out of their cars before they have even stopped and start grabbing people.

There is an alley to my right. It is the only way out. Half a dozen of us take off down the alley as fast as we can with the cops chasing us. Police come pouring into the area behind us. I am running.

I spin my head and my glasses go flying off. I think. "There go my glasses." I can't see, but I don't even slow down. The police are a few steps behind us. Some of the girls, who aren't as fast, are getting caught.

The alley becomes dark, and all I see is the light at the end of it down on North Avenue. As I run, I am dreaming. There is something I can remember, somewhere where this whole piece of terror happened to me before. I remember, yes, it happened, running away from two boys who tried to hold me up with a razor blade one night in Harlem. I'm not aware of my legs lifting or my arms pumping or any part of running. I can't see. I am floating through a blur.

As I'm coming to the end of the alley all I can see is the flashing blue lights of police cars in front of me. All I can hear is the high tweet of police whistles being blown all around me. The police are coming at us from the other end of the alley, too.

Then, as we approach them, there comes an empty lot, on our left. There is a wire fence as high as my chest. I and one or two other kids, put our hands on it, and throw ourselves over.

Now I am running across the lot, stepping on things I can't see, surrounded again by police whistles and flashing blue lights moving parallel to us in the street.