There has to be a way.
Nick shouted, “Ha! Fuck you, asshole!”
The woman with the little girl shot him a look that said even though they were all at great personal risk, there was no call for that kind of language.
“Yeah, dumbass! I’m talking to you!” Nick slapped his thighs and laughed. “Not so smart, after all!”
Nick leapt onto the down escalator and started climbing. He put enough speed into it that he was able to gain two steps for every one that the escalator dropped. He got to within five steps of the top, able to look the car right in the headlight, and held his position by running in place.
He didn’t have to be an engineering major to figure out that the car was stumped. Its sloping hood was a good two feet below the top of the elevator railing. If the Arrival had had a ramp and could mount the escalator, its wheels would straddle the rubber railing and sit on the metal structure that encased the moving stairway.
But there was no ramp.
“What are ya gonna do now, huh?” Nick taunted.
At one point, he stuck two index fingers into his mouth, pulled, and waggled his tongue at the machine.
The car stared at Nick.
Several other Arrivals were gathered behind the red one, sitting there. But then they started to move back, creating a gap behind the red Arrival.
“Giving up?” Nick said. “Going home? Heading back to the tin can factory?”
With space behind it to maneuver, the red Arrival backed up, turned around, and gently backed its rear bumper up to the top of the escalator.
Nick blinked.
The car’s aerodynamic wedge shape meant that the back was roughly level with the top of the escalator structure. Nick, distracted by what the car was up to, had descended several steps. He ran back up and did his best to stay in place, climbing nonstop. He wanted to see what they might be planning.
A blue Arrival was lining up with the front of the red one, their noses almost kissing. Another car had lined behind the blue Arrival, and another one after it, and so on, until there were at least a dozen of the small cars touching end to end.
The blue Arrival started to move forward, driving up, and onto, the hood of the red one.
“What the hell?” Nick said.
The Arrivals didn’t need a ramp. They had turned one of their own into one. The blue car rode up the sloped hood of the red one. Metal and plastic snapped and shattered. The red Arrival sank several inches, its tires nearly flattened.
Nick’s mouth hung open. “Can’t work,” he said. “It cannot work.”
He figured, once the front tires of the blue Arrival reached the red car’s front windshield, it would be game over. The weight of the car would collapse the glass, the blue Arrival’s front end would drop into the passenger chamber of the red one, and that would be it.
Panting, he held his position, watching.
The blue Arrival’s tires lined up with the pillars on either side of the windshield glass. The pillars bent slightly, but did not give way.
The blue Arrival’s front wheels were now on the roof of the red Arrival. All it had to do was drive the rest of the way over the car and off the back end and plant its wheels on the metal housing of the escalator.
If the first car could do it...
The blue Arrival’s front wheels had reached the trunk. With a small burst of power, it shot forward, making a rough transition from the car below it to the gleaming silver metal that flanked the perpetually moving black handgrips.
The car now straddled the moving stairway.
“Shit!” Nick said, and dropped as the blue Arrival drove right over him.
He glanced up at the passing undercarriage, his disbelieving eyes watching as the car raced down the slope and flew off as it reached the bottom, the front end tipping down and crashing into the mall’s lower level.
People screamed and scattered.
While the blue Arrival had suffered extensive front-end damage, it was still operable. It drove a few yards away from the escalator and made a wide circle.
The descending escalator was delivering Nick closer to the lower level with each passing second. He heard more crunching of steel and plastic and looked upward in time to see another Arrival crawl over the red one. The car whizzed over his head. He felt the breeze as it passed.
This second Arrival sustained damage similar to the blue one, but it, too, was still moving, and turning around.
“No no no no,” Nick said as another Arrival rolled past overhead.
Nick, scrambling crab-like up the steps on his feet and hands just to stay in one place, suddenly realized the seriousness of his situation.
He couldn’t let the escalator drop him off at the bottom. The Arrivals were waiting for him.
And he couldn’t go to the top, because that’s where all the Arrivals were coming from.
He had to go up this down escalator until these fucking cars were gone.
And who knew how long that was going to be?
Where was that goddamn emergency button? Weren’t there big red buttons at the tops and bottoms of escalators to make them stop? He couldn’t see any from his position, and he’d be putting himself at huge risk to poke his head out at either end to find one.
“Help!” he shouted. “Help me!”
But all the shoppers who’d been watching the action from down below were gone. They’d all run into the backs of stores or down hallways to bathrooms to hide out.
Nick had never been much of a swimmer, which was a pretty funny way when you lived on an island with miles and miles of beaches. Whenever he went to pool parties, he was embarrassed that he didn’t know how to do laps. Could never slice through the water the way the other kids did.
All he could do was jump in and tread water.
And even that, he couldn’t do for very long. A minute, maybe. Two tops.
Well, this right here, this fucking nightmare on the escalator, this was treading water.
And Nick had a bad feeling he was going to have to do it for a lot longer than two minutes if he wanted to stay alive.
Twenty-Three
Katie steered the lumbering Caddy to the other side of the road, the left wheels running onto the gravel shoulder, in a bid to stay out of the approaching Arrival’s path. The little silver car had moved into their lane and a head-on crash was imminent before Katie cranked the wheel.
But then the Arrival changed course.
“It’s still coming at us,” said Bruce, at the passenger end of the huge bench seat.
“I can see that!” Katie shouted.
“Fake it out,” Bruce said.
“What?”
“Like you’re going one way, but then the—”
Katie figured it out before Bruce could finish the explanation. Riding half on pavement, half on gravelly shoulder, Katie twitched the wheel to the right, as if she intended to get all four wheels back onto asphalt. In the next millisecond, the Arrival adjusted its heading more toward the middle of the road.
And that was when Katie aimed for the ditch.
She jerked the wheel to the left, and the left side of the car dropped off the edge of the shoulder and into the tall grass, tipping on a thirty-degree angle.
“Jesus!” Bruce said, planting his palms onto the dash in front of him.
The Arrival whizzed past them in the other direction. If Bruce had been foolish enough to stick his arm out the window, he’d have been able to touch it. And if Katie had been hanging off the landing skids of a helicopter, her grip wouldn’t have been any stronger than the one she had now on that steering wheel.
She felt the car being dragged farther into the ditch, but she fought it, turning the wheel back to the right and planting her foot down harder on the gas. The back end kicked and fishtailed before it found purchase, and the Caddy was launched back onto the pavement, the rear tires squealing.