Kyle’s conscience was clear.
Up ahead, he saw boats.
Eighteen
There was another huge fwump as the Arrival carrying — no, imprisoning — Archie and Rory and Nick tossed one more Garrett Mall shopper onto the hood. A well-dressed, silver-haired woman in her early seventies rolled until she was facedown across the windshield, her face a mask of agony and horror.
A driver in a conventional car would have had to hit the brakes at this point, what with the view forward blocked. But the green Arrival had its own electronic eyes mounted all over the vehicle, and kept on moving.
Nick, up front, was close enough to the windshield to see the woman mouth: “Help me.”
“Make it stop!” Archie cried.
Nick shouted the name his father had given the vehicle: “Pamela! Pamela, stop!”
But Pamela wasn’t listening. Or if she was, she wasn’t interested in taking orders. She was too busy looking for other shoppers to mow down. The car’s detour into the mall hadn’t even lasted a minute yet, but people were already screaming and shouting, alerting others to find cover.
They were running into stores, diving behind kiosks. Shoppers already inside some retailers were foolishly running out, wondering what the hell was going on.
There wasn’t just one crazy Arrival to worry about.
Arrivals from the parking lot — presumably belonging to people now inside shopping — were now streaming into the massive building, motion sensors at the entrance kindly obliging and sliding open the glass doors with each approaching car.
When Pamela reached the end of the concourse it executed a wide, one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn that was enough to toss the woman off the hood and deliver her to the entrance of JC Penney.
Three stores ahead of where the Arrival was headed, out front of the Payless Shoes, an armed mall security guard took aim. Archie, looking ahead through the blood-smeared windshield, shouted, with no hope of being heard: “Don’t shoot us!”
The guard evidently saw them and aimed low for the car’s tires. But the bullet hit the floor, ricocheted wildly, and the Arrival kept on coming, straight for him.
The guard dived blindly into the shoe store, taking down a portable rack of marked-down sandals with him. The Arrival whizzed past, missing him by inches.
The boys, heading back in the direction from which they’d come, had their first glimpse of the other cars invading the mall.
“Oh, fuck, look what they’re doing,” Rory said.
The Arrivals were filing into the main concourse with orderly precision. First, they came in a straight line, like elephants in a trunk-to-tail formation. But then they broke apart and regrouped, side by side like a row of soldiers, barely an inch between them.
“We have to get out!” Nick said. “We have to—”
A phone started ringing.
“Whose is that?” Rory yelled.
Archie patted his thigh. He’d tucked his phone down into the front pocket of his jeans. “It’s me!”
He dug his hand in, pulled out the phone, and looked at the name on the screen.
lisa carver.
Who the hell was that? But so what, Archie figured. Even a wrong number, at this moment, might be helpful if whoever it was could call the cops. He steadied his thumb over the phone and prepared to accept the call.
CRASH.
“What the fuck!” Nick screamed.
Rory screamed, too, but without words. Just a primal cry of pure fear.
Archie got tossed sideways in his seat and lost his grip on the phone, which hit the floor and slid under the front seat. He looked around to see what they’d run into.
It turned out to be something that had run into them. The back side window was shattered.
“What was that?” Archie asked.
Nick said, “Some guy just threw a fire extinguisher!”
It struck Archie as pretty dumb to think you could stop one of these cars by doing that, but as it happened, an opportunity had presented itself. He shifted himself around until his back was on the seat, and his feet were in position to hit the glass, just as soon as Rory got out of the way.
“Watch out, Rory!” he said.
Rory scrambled into the front seat as Archie drove his feet, together, into the already shattered glass. The glass buckled outward, sprinkling the interior with a few shards. Archie brought his knees to his chest a second time, and pounded the glass again with the soles of his runners.
The entire pane shattered. Glass crystals showered the seat and the mall floor as the car continued to move toward one of the two banks of approaching cars.
“Yes!” Nick cried.
Archie scrambled back onto his knees, and extended the sleeve of his jacket over his hand, clearing bits of glass from the lower edge of the window. “When we get a chance, we jump.”
The approaching Arrivals had slowed, shifting slightly to create some space in the middle. Pamela was slowing, turning, and then stopping. The car was, it appeared, waiting for the other cars to come up alongside so it could be part of the larger formation.
Nick and Rory crawled over the front seat and crowded into the back with Archie, who said, “We’re heading straight in there.” The other boys looked. Their escape route turned out to be a Victoria’s Secret store.
“Now!” Archie said.
“Don’t leave now,” Pamela said. “The fun’s just starting.”
Archie tumbled out the window, landing on the floor on his back. “Shit!” he said. But he didn’t take long to dwell on the pain. Rory was about to drop onto him. Archie scrambled to his feet, moving toward the store in the process.
Rory got through the window without stumbling and ran as far as the entrance to the store, then stopped to make sure Nick got out safely.
Nick scrambled through, but instead of following, he ran around the back of the Arrival to the railing for a view down into the lower level of the mall.
“Come on!” Rory shouted at him.
But Nick stayed at the railing and pointed down. “There’s none of them down there!” he said.
It was true. Peering down into the lower level, people were standing about, looking upward, wondering what the hell was happening. The only way to reach the lower level was by a set of escalators only a short distance away.
“Down there!” Nick said. “It’s safe!”
But the Arrival they’d just escaped from clearly didn’t want Archie and Rory to join their friend. It turned its wheels sharply, as if getting ready to drive directly into Victoria’s Secret.
“Shit, man,” Archie said, grabbing Rory by the arm. “We can’t chance it. We go that way and the car’s gonna get us for sure. We gotta stay in here.”
But Nick was still waving them his way.
“No!” Archie shouted. “If you can make it to the escalator, go!”
The car started to advance.
“Come on!” Archie said, yanking Rory’s arm. The two of them started running into the store, dodging around displays of underwear on a table and countless racks of bras and panties and swimsuits. There was no one else in the store. Clearly, customers and staff who’d been here had managed to get out somehow, or had slipped into another, nearby retailer.
Running deeper into the store, they passed a mannequin decked out in seductive black lingerie, the fake woman’s hand posed provocatively on her hip. Rory paused his escape for half a second, his eyes feasting on the sight.
“Whoa,” he said.
Archie grabbed him once again. “Are you shitting me? Come on!”
Pamela was plowing full speed into the store, knocking tables out of the way, running over racks as they fell in her path.
“Fuck!” Archie said.