The shelf teetered.
“Shit!” Archie screamed, suddenly broadening his stance so as not to lose his balance. The shelf had tilted about six inches for half a second before settling back to its original position. Archie noticed that while the shelf he stood atop seemed to be a hundred feet long, it was actually built in sections. The one he was standing on was no more than twenty feet in length. The upshot of all that was, the Arrivals didn’t have to knock down a shelf that was the length of the entire aisle. They only had to knock down a part of it.
He looked down and saw other Arrivals positioning themselves in the aisle, side by side, but angled, as if parking on a street where you turn in, nose to the curb. They wouldn’t have a lot of room to build up speed, but if they synchronized themselves — and Archie had no illusions about their ability to do that — and rammed the shelf at the same time...
Archie thought his best plan, for now, was to move to another part of the shelf, but before he could, the cars barreled into the shelving unit’s vertical supports.
The shelf teetered a second time.
Archie cried out as he fell onto the top of the shelf, throwing out his arms to keep from landing on his face.
Half the cars would strike the shelf, and as they backed up to get ready to take another run at it, the remaining cars would ram the shelf. That way, even as the fronts of the cars crumpled, they maintained momentum, the shelf coming closer to toppling with each hit.
Archie found himself scrambling, crab-like, keeping his body low so he was ready each time the formerly level surface beneath him teetered. It was like that carnival fun house he and Katie went into on a family trip to South Carolina, with its shifting floors, rotating tunnels, walls of mirrors.
That was fun. This was not.
Skids loaded with merchandise fell to the floor. Another couple of hits and the whole thing was going to go over.
He was going to have to jump.
Every time the huge shelf leaned over, the aisle effectively narrowed. If he was going to leap, he’d have to time it just right.
The cars, continuing to work with a single, purposeful, networked mind, rammed the shelves one last time.
The shelf started to fall over.
Archie jumped.
He was hoping to reach the top of the shelves across the aisle, essentially hop from one surface to the next. But he didn’t push off with enough speed, and ended up on a collision course with the shelf one below the top.
Archie’s chest slammed into a cardboard crate filled with boxes of Tide detergent. His fingers dug into a partly opened seam in the clear plastic that encased the crate like a sausage casing. He managed to hang on, his legs dangling. His right foot found purchase and Archie shot himself upward.
But his troubles weren’t over. The weight of the toppled shelf was slowly pushing over the one he was on now.
“Oh man,” he said.
He’d have to make another jump. And maybe another one after that. The shelves had been turned into a set of towering dominos.
Archie leapt across another aisle, scrambled again to the top, felt it tilting beneath him. He didn’t know that he could ride this wave across the entire Discount Bonanza. He needed to jump off.
So when the next shelf toppled, Archie doubled back instead of going forward. The structures that had come down weren’t going to be moving anymore, so Archie worked his way into them, dropping his way through what were now empty spaces where crated goods used to be.
The overturned shelves also, ironically, offered greater protection from the Arrivals than he’d had before. He figured they could see him through the crisscross of metal bracing and shattered crates, but there was no way they could get at him this time.
Through the metal web of shelving, Archie could see, along a far wall, the meat department, with low, open refrigerated units filled with steaks and ground beef and chicken and sausage. Just beyond them was a wall of windows that looked into where all the butchering was done. There was a set of swing doors made of shiny aluminum. Archie believed if he could make it that far, the cars wouldn’t be able to get at him. And he further believed that back there, somewhere, would be a loading dock that led to the outside world.
He crept his way through the collapsed shelving until he reached open space in front of the meat department. One quick sprint would get him to the door.
Archie looked one way and then the other. He could hear tires squeaking. They were coming, but he couldn’t see any of them.
Archie was going for it.
He broke out into the open. An Arrival came turning out the end of an aisle so quickly two wheels briefly left the floor. It sped toward him.
It never had a chance. Archie bolted past the meat display, slammed into the double doors with such force that they swung inward as far as their hinges would allow and bounced back, nearly slapping Archie in the face.
That was when he tripped over the dead guy.
He’d stumbled over a heavyset man, sprawled out on his back, arms outstretched, his legs a mangled, bloody mess. He was wearing a large, white apron and a Discount Bonanza nametag that read stan.
Maybe Stan had been out in the main part of the store when he’d been struck by an Arrival. It would have taken a couple of people to drag him back this far, but when it was clear Stan was a goner, they’d abandoned him.
Archie threw up.
He dropped to his knees and vomited no more than two feet away from the dead butcher, and suddenly felt shame that he hadn’t managed to get farther away. Hadn’t the man suffered enough? Did he really deserve, even in death, to have puddled puke inches from his head?
Archie struggled to his feet and looked for a way out, threading his way through several sides of beef hanging from hooks.
And there it was. A loading dock.
Next to the large garage door was a huge red button. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what it was for. Archie slammed his palm onto the button and the door began to rise with a great, metallic rattle.
Archie felt sunshine on his face, fresh air fill his lungs. He stepped out onto the raised platform that trucks backed up to when making deliveries.
“Fucknuts,” Archie said.
Out in the parking lot, just beyond the loading bay, sat half a dozen Arrivals, all looking his way, like a welcoming committee.
Thirty-One
“Are you sure?” Brandon Kyle asked, sitting in the middle of the sprawling back seat of Bruce’s Cadillac, his legs straddling the driveshaft hump. “It wouldn’t take that long to go to take a side trip to the ferry. Then you could be on your way to get this young lady’s brother.”
Bruce, behind the wheel, could only take quick glances at the hitchhiker they’d picked up, but Katie had turned sideways on the front bench seat so she could engage with Kyle.
“What’d you say your name was again?” Katie asked.
“Ben,” he said. “Ben Stapleton.”
“So, Mr. Stapleton, we get that you want to get to the ferry, but we gotta find my brother first, and then if there’s anything we can do for you after that, well...”
At this point, she looked at Bruce. This was, after all, his car.
“Katie’s right,” Bruce said. “We’re not exactly running a taxi service. Let’s see how things go. If we run into any more of those little sons of bitches, that could change our plans, too.”
“Don’t seem to be too many of them out here,” Kyle observed. “In the center of town, that’s where they’re gathered.”
“You were there?” Bruce asked.
“I was,” Kyle said with mock dismay. “Horrible, just horrible.”