Lillian did not glance back.
She pushed.
But her hands, wet with perspiration, slipped, and the chair began to roll back at the same moment the Arrival, with only one wheel on the ramp, worked its way forward.
The car’s front bumper rammed the back of Lillian’s chair, hitting the wheels, and knocking her out of it. Instinctively, she threw her arms ahead of her to break her fall. She yelped in pain as her hands scraped against the boards.
She began to pull herself toward the top of the ramp while the Arrival fought with the empty wheelchair. Still struggling with only one wheel on the ramp, the car tried to push the chair, which had now toppled over onto its side, out of its way.
The chair collapsed, one of its wheels disappearing beneath the car. As the Arrival tried another burst of speed, it rode up on top of the chair, and the one wheel that had contact with the ramp was now also in the air, spinning.
The Arrival gunned its electric motor, the two front wheels rotating madly. But for all its efforts, it wasn’t getting anywhere. The more its motor whirred, the more the car actually appeared to be frustrated. Angry, almost.
Now Lillian had the time she needed to drag herself to the top of the ramp and onto the porch. The door was several feet away. She believed she was out of immediate danger, but knew she’d feel even safer once she was inside the house.
Instead of dragging herself, she now rolled, as she might have if she were on fire, although more slowly. She got to the screen door, wedged her fingers into the gap at the bottom, and swung it open.
That was when she heard: “Mom!”
She looked through the vertical posts of the porch railing and there, on the sidewalk, jumping off a bicycle, was her son.
“Mom!” Joe Bridgeman cried again.
The Arrival’s weight had now crushed the wheelchair, and its right wheel was back on the ramp. But instead of pushing forward, it reversed and got back onto the driveway, pointing itself toward the street.
There was now a new target.
“Look out!” Lillian screamed, her voice hoarse and weak.
Joe hardly needed the warning. He could see the Arrival had him in its sights. He thought, briefly, that he needed a red cape to wave before its electronic eyes. The car was a bull waiting to charge.
Joe took out his gun from the holster strapped around his waist and aimed it at the car. But what the hell were you supposed to say to a driverless car when it was getting ready to attack? Freeze? Drop it? Wheels up? Put it in park?
Joe settled on, “Don’t even think about it.”
The car did think about it, but not for long. Like a runner blasting out of the starting blocks, it came toward him.
Joe fired.
With people, you aimed for body mass. If someone was coming at you, gun or knife in hand, you didn’t aim for a leg or an arm. The chances of making that kind of shot were remote. You aimed for the body.
So Joe was not going to aim for a tire. Even if he were that good an aim, the car would probably keep on coming, riding on the flat.
Joe aimed for the center of the car. Right below the windshield, dead center. Maybe, just maybe, he’d disable some of the electronics built into the dashboard.
His first shot went right where he wanted it to, but the car kept coming. He fired one more round, shattering the Arrival’s windshield, before leaping into a flower garden that ran up alongside the driveway. The car whipped by. As he hit the dirt, crushing some begonias, he spun around and got off two more shots, one going into the side door and one through the rear windshield.
The car got halfway into the street before it stopped.
Slowly, Joe got to his feet and approached the Arrival from what would be, in a normal car with a normal driver, the blind spot. As he got closer, he noticed the blood trail the car had left behind in its path.
“Oh, shit,” Joe said, understanding that while his mother had managed to avoid getting killed by the Arrival, someone else had not been so fortunate.
The car’s dash was sparking and crackling. One of Joe’s shots had, indeed, clipped some circuitry. The evidence suggested the car was dead.
Joe ran back up the driveway, jumped over the mangled wheelchair on the ramp, and knelt down next to his mother sprawled out on the porch.
“You okay?” he asked breathlessly.
“Nice shootin’,” Lillian said.
Twenty-Six
“Who were you talking to?” Sandra asked Albert Ruskin, having cornered him in the men’s room of the community center. She’d backed him up to the wall, next to a urinal, her face no more than six inches from his. She was practically daring him to push her out of his way.
I was a biker babe back in the day, you motherfucker, she thought. You’re lucky I don’t have a tire iron in my hand.
“None of your business,” he said, although his voice lacked confidence.
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Sandra said. “Everything that’s going on right now is my business. Me and the rest of the people on this island. We didn’t just turn our cars over to you. We’ve turned over our lives. That fireman who got crushed? I was too far away to see who it was. But I’m willing to bet if I don’t know him personally, I’ve sat next to him at the coffee shop, been in line with him at the Safeway getting groceries. He probably helped put out the grass fire on our street last year. So ‘none of your business’ is not going to fucking cut it.”
Droplets of sweat appeared on Ruskin’s forehead.
“I got two kids out there, somewhere, and I can’t raise them,” she said, holding up the bloody phone she had taken from Lisa Carver. “I’m scared to death for them. I want to know what’s made those cars lose their minds, and I want to know what you’re doing to make them stop.”
Ruskin forced a swallow, his Adam’s apple a marble moving below the skin of his leathery neck.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking Sandra in the eye.
“You don’t know what?”
“I don’t know how to stop them and neither do our tech people. That’s who I was talking to. It’s happening all over. Arrivals all over the country have gone haywire. It’s just... it’s just a whole lot worse here, on the island, since there are so many.”
“Do they know how it happened?” Sandra asked.
Ruskin broke eye contact. “No. Not... definitely. There are theories.”
“And what’s yours?”
He looked down. “A virus. A ransomware attack, maybe.”
“How would someone do that?”
Ruskin raised his hands, palms out, to shoulder level. “Can you give me a little space here?”
Sandra took half a step back.
“The security protocols are changed daily,” he said.
“Okay,” Sandra said. “So what does that mean?”
“It means anyone wanting access to the system would need to know the protocols for that specific day. And it was Lisa — Ms. Carver — who changed them, who inputted them.”
“Isn’t that kind of weird?”
“What do you mean?”
“The head of the company doing a task like that? I mean, wouldn’t that be a job for someone in your security or tech division? That’s like asking the head of General Motors to be the guy who turns out the lights in the plant every night.”
“She didn’t trust anyone else to do it,” he said. “Not after what happened with the Gandalf. Lisa was worried about retaliation.”
“Why? Because she was actually responsible?”
Ruskin shook his head, dismissing the question. “What matters is there were people who believed she was, and she had to protect herself. She didn’t trust anyone else to make the changes but herself.”