The two of them rounded the cashiers’ counter and slipped through an open doorway that led, presumably, to a stockroom. Once inside, Archie grabbed hold of the door and slammed it shut.
Rory had been moving so quickly he had to reach out and grab the post of a shelving unit to slow himself down.
“What are we gonna do?” he shouted.
“It can’t get through this,” Archie said, nodding at the door, which was less than three feet wide.
On the other side, they could hear the car crashing into things, trying to make its way to the back of the store.
“Yeah, well, we can’t stay in here forever!” Rory said.
“See if there’s another door,” Archie said.
“Another door?”
“Yeah, like to a service corridor.”
“A what?”
Archie sighed. “Didn’t you ever see Terminator?”
“Which one?”
“The good one. The second one. Judgment Day. Remember Arnie goes down that hallway out the back of the store? It’s all cement bricks and stuff?”
Rory nodded slowly. “I do. There really are secret hallways like that?”
“Could you just look?”
Archie was staying by the door, fighting the temptation to open it a crack to see what Pamela was up to. It was suddenly very quiet on the other side. Maybe Pamela had decided to rejoin her mechanical friends.
Archie said, “Hey, do you know anyone named Lisa Carver?”
“No! Why?”
“Before we got out of the car, someone with that name called my phone. There wasn’t time to answer. And my phone’s still in the car.”
“Well, that was dumb. But — hey, I found a door!” Rory’s voice was coming from behind a bank of shelves.
“Where are you?”
“Back here. Shit, it’s locked.”
“You can’t open it from this side?”
“What did I just say?” Rory snapped. “The door is fucking locked.”
Which meant, Archie thought, if they didn’t want to stay in this back room till the end of time, they had to go back out through the store. Maybe Nick had the right idea. Get to the bottom level, where it was safe. And hey, wasn’t there a food court down there? Would the New York Fries have the hot dogs going yet? It’d be like that fucking Dawn of the Dead movie, the one where they were all trapped in the mall, waiting for the zombie apocalypse.
Archie wondered which was worse. Zombies, or killer cars? At least with zombies, once they got you, they let you join the club. But with killer cars, once they drove over you, it was game over.
Archie put his ear to the door.
Nothing.
Slowly, he turned the door handle, opened it half an inch, and—
The door burst inward, knocking Archie back into a shelf, and down onto the floor. The front of the Arrival was too wide to make it through the door, but had hit the framing around it with enough force to open it.
Pamela had been quietly waiting.
“Archie!” shouted Rory when he saw Archie on the floor and the busted door.
“It’s okay,” Archie said. “She can’t fit in.”
Pamela backed up five feet, taking part of the jamb with her, then sped forward again. The wall around the door started to crumble.
Archie scrambled to his feet.
“You sure you can’t get that back door open?”
Rory said, “Maybe there’s a key in one of the drawers at the checkout.”
Archie shot him a look. “Well, then why don’t you go out there and take a look?”
Pamela backed up and shot forward again. More of the framing around the door gave way. The Arrival had now made its way into the stockroom, almost as far as the windshield. When Pamela tried ramming her way in a fourth time, she gained another foot.
“We should have gone with Nick!” Rory said.
Rory had no idea how wrong he was.
Nineteen
Katie, her hands still firmly gripping the Cadillac’s massive steering wheel at ten and two, glanced over at Bruce at the other end of the couch-like bench seat, and asked, “So how’d you end up with this land yacht? You buy it new?”
“Just how old do you think I am?” Bruce asked.
“Well, if this came out in fifty-nine, and you were, like, twenty or something, that’d make you — hang on...”
“You need a calculator? Kids today can’t figure out anything in their heads. Need to press a few buttons to know the answer to anything.”
“Bite me,” Katie said. “So if you were born in 1940, you’d be nineteen, so it’s possible. What year were you born?”
“Forty-one,” he said. “And no, I did not buy it new. What eighteen-year-old kid has the money to buy a goddamn Caddy off the dealer’s lot? Car like this would have been six, seven grand.”
Katie shot him a look. “Six grand? You can’t buy a basic Hyundai for six grand.”
“Well, it was a hell of a lot of money back then.” He pointed. “Let’s take the scenic route. Make a left.”
“That’s not the way to the mall.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll get to the mall and find your baby brother. But if we take Gull Road, we can skirt around the outside of town and come at the mall from the back side. It’s a country road, hardly anyone on it, and seeing as how this land yacht, as you call it, is not supposed to be out and about during this period of grand experimentation, it’s the most circumspect way to go.”
Katie shot him another look. “What did you used to do for a living?”
Bruce said, “I was a high school English teacher.”
“There’s a shocker. You’re good at using a big word when a small one would do the trick. Is that what drove you to drink? Having to deal with tons of teenagers every day?”
Bruce frowned at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, eyes forward. “That was kind of asshole-ish.”
Bruce shrugged it off. “Don’t worry about it.”
“No, really, that was shitty of me.”
“I think I’d have become a drunk no matter what,” Bruce said. “I was born with the inclination. Truth is, I liked teaching.”
Katie, taking the route Bruce had suggested, was soon driving out of the residential area and into undeveloped parts of Garrett Island, of which there were many. Elected officials who’d presided over the island had been careful not to let development get out of control, much to the disappointment of folks in the housing and real estate business who, given the opportunity, would have turned every square inch into a profit.
“So, like, you didn’t answer my question,” she said.
“What was the question?”
“How’d you end up with this car?”
“Oh,” he said, and his voice softened. “So, when I was about twenty, my dad bought this car. And yeah, he bought it new. All he ever wanted in life was a new Cadillac. He made an okay living. Owned a small chain of three grocery stores up in central Mass, but it wasn’t like he was a millionaire or anything. But then he sold the stores, getting ready for retirement, and he bought himself this Caddy.”
“Okay,” Katie said, watching the road ahead. Since leaving Bruce’s house, they hadn’t encountered a single Arrival. The roads were empty, except for the occasional squirrel racing across.
“God, how he loved this car. It was the icing on the cake of his career. It showed he had made it. He had a fucking Cadillac. He’d drive around town, the windows down, his elbow on the door, one hand on the wheel, sometime, doing that cool move where you rest your wrist on the top of the wheel?” He glanced over. “Don’t try that.”
Katie tightened her grip. “Don’t worry.”
Bruce smiled sadly. “He was so proud of this car. My mom, she called it his mistress for a while there. Said he loved this car more than he loved her, which of course, was nonsense.” He considered his last comment for a second. “Or maybe not. She never drove, so she never had any real appreciation for cars. But this car was dad’s baby. And I’m glad that, for at least a while, he had a chance to enjoy it.”