He still had, under his clothing, the fake padding that made him look a good fifty pounds heavier. Once he’d started running, he was feeling it get in the way of his movements, and on top of that, it was hot. He wanted to duck in between a couple of houses, remove his sport jacket, strip off his shirt, rip off the padding, and stuff it into a trash can somewhere. But he was worried he might still be seen, and his Ben Stapleton identity needed to be preserved.
A purple Arrival — it looked like a grape exposed to massive doses of radiation — was approaching, most likely heading for the community center. Reinforcements, Kyle guessed. He ran between some houses and crouched behind a shrub and watched the car pass. Instead of heading back to the road, he checked the map app on his phone and determined it made sense to keep cutting between houses to reach the rendezvous point.
He worked his way through a few backyards, ducking through swing sets, navigating his way around decks covered with wicker furniture, crawling over several rows of low, white picket fences.
At one point, a woman shouted out a window, “What are you doing out there, mister?”
He shouted back, “Getting away from those damn cars! Stay inside!”
“What the hell are you talking about?” she asked.
She’d know soon enough.
In a little over twenty minutes, he was at the town center. Any other day, it would have been a lovely, tranquil place to spend some time, do some shopping, stop and have a drink.
Garrett’s business district consisted of a town common — a tree-filled park with a central gazebo — boxed in with four streets lined with coffee shops and restaurants and countless gift shops selling the usual kitsch: mini lobster traps, tiny ceramic lighthouses, toy rubber sharks, lifesaver key chains.
A dozen people — many of them obvious tourists decked out in Garrett Island ball caps, lobster-themed T-shirts, and ridiculous cargo shorts with pockets big enough for a week’s provisions — were huddled on the raised gazebo, screaming as five Arrivals drove in a continuous circle around them, ripping up grass and dirt with every pass.
Those who’d been sitting at tables in any of the sidewalk cafés had fled, many of them now visible in the storefront windows, watching the show. At least another ten Arrivals were patrolling the streets, moving slowly, ready to pounce on anyone who dared cross their path.
There were gunshots.
Across the common, a man with a pistol in his hand ran from the cover of a small shop, fired wildly at an Arrival driving past — with no apparent effect — then ran back into the building before the car had a chance to change course and teach him a lesson.
Farther down the street, a woman holding a shotgun blasted out the windshield of a maroon Arrival as it sped past. When the car screeched to a halt and started to reverse, the woman scurried into a narrow alley.
It was the fucking Wild West, Kyle thought.
Who knew so many people here would have guns? Wasn’t Garrett Island the heartland of liberal America? Would Lisa Carver have thought for a moment that she could get everyone in a town in Texas to give up their pickup trucks in exchange for her pipsqueak cars? No. She picked Garrett Island not only because it was isolated, but because she knew it was off the East Coast, populated with liberal-leaning, gun-control-loving, freedom-of-choice-advocating folks who were happy to do their part for road safety, and the environment, by giving up gas-guzzling vehicles they might actually have enjoyed driving, in return for battery-powered self-navigating oversized shopping carts. These were the kind of people just begging to pay a carbon tax.
And yet, behind that lefty, latte-loving exterior, many of these folks were packing heat.
In addition to the sounds of shots, there were screams. But one woman’s cries of anguish could be heard over all others. Kyle spotted her on the raised patio of a wine bar, pointing out to the street, her arm following the path of one of the cars.
“My baby!” she cried. “It’s got my baby!”
Kyle scanned the cars doing laps around the common. A yellow one had a child’s safety seat in the back and, in it, a child — it went by too quickly for Kyle to be able to tell whether it was a boy or a girl — who looked no more than three or four. The child was patting his arms up and down on the padded shelf of the seat and appeared to be wailing.
“Jesus,” Kyle said under his breath. “Jesus.”
The kid will be okay, he told himself. As long as the car just keeps wandering around, what could happen to the child? The youngster was safer in the car than outside.
Right?
At some point, someone would be able to rescue the kid. So, okay, the child would be hungry by that time. There’d probably be a load in the kid’s pants. Briefly traumatized. But that was survivable. Kyle didn’t need to worry himself about—
The Arrival with the child on board began to swerve sharply. The wheels turned hard left, then hard right, then left again. It was going down the street like a sidewinder snake moving at high speed.
As the car made another pass, weaving wildly the entire way, Kyle caught a better glimpse of the sole passenger.
A little boy. His head was bouncing from side to side in sync with the car’s movements. And his crying appeared to be more frantic now than on the last lap. What the hell was the car doing?
Kyle knew.
The car was toying with him.
“Shit,” he said. A few more laps and the kid would end up with — what did they call it? — shaken baby syndrome.
He glanced at his watch. Derek should be to the harbor by now, waiting. He needed to get to the other side of the common, which he figured could be done by taking a circuitous route behind the stores.
“Stop it!” the woman screamed at the car. “Stop shaking him!”
Out of nowhere, a young man with shoulder-length, scraggly black hair, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, ran into the street with a metal chair from one of the restaurant patios. He stood in the car’s weaving path, and when it was no more than thirty feet away, he tossed the metal chair directly at it, then leapt out of the way.
Despite the Arrival’s inherent skills at accident avoidance, it was not able to swerve in time and ran over the chair, which instantly became caught in the vehicle’s undercarriage. The chair sparked as it was dragged across the pavement. The car, its right front wheel now suspended several inches off the road, came to a wobbly halt.
“Yes! Yes!” the woman cried, watching with her palms welded to her cheeks.
The baby still had to be freed. A second man from the same restaurant patio ran out with another metal chair and used it to smash the front side window of the car, but not before yelling at the child to close his eyes.
The kid closed his eyes.
Once the glass had crumbled, the long-haired guy — thinner and more agile — crawled through the opening, reached between the front seats to the back, and released the little boy from his safety seat. He handed him through the open window to the other man, who rushed the baby back to the arms of the weeping mother.
It was, Brandon Kyle had to admit to himself, an amazing thing to watch.
“That was something,” he said under his breath.
As he slipped into an alley between two storefronts that would lead him closer to the harbor, he wanted to believe he was only seconds from attempting to save that boy himself.
I’d have thought of something.
I’d have acted.
I’m not a monster.
But in the end, well, it wasn’t necessary. Others stepped up. And good for them, whoever they were.
Kyle’s conscience was clear.
Up ahead, he saw boats.