No sense taking any chances.
Slowly, slowly, slowly...
He was at the bumper of a front-row Arrival.
Don’t touch.
The sensors would surely pick him up if he came into actual contact with a car. He squinted through the moist air, saw this Arrival was flanked by two others. He decided to go right, slip in between them.
They were sitting closely together — no more than a foot and a half apart, but still enough room for Archie to work his way through if he went sideways.
Archie inched his way along, careful not to brush up against any part of the cars.
Oh, shit.
The outside, door-mounted mirrors. The one on the right side of one car was lined up with the one on the left side of the other, maybe six inches, tops, of air between them.
Archie wondered, why put mirrors on these cars? No one sitting in them would have any reason to look into them! Or maybe they weren’t mirrors at all, but housings for the cameras that kept track of everything that was going on around the vehicles.
Whatever. He had to get past them. Could he duck under? Or should he slip back out and go around another way?
Slip out, start again, then—
Archie felt something cool on his face.
A breeze.
A slight wind was coming up. Under any other circumstance, that’d be just fine. But this breeze was blowing away the fog.
Archie was running out of time.
So he bent at the knees, executing a kind of sideways limbo position, and worked his way under the pair of mirrors without touching them. Given how the cars were arranged, he’d have to do this maneuver three more times.
As the fog dissipated, the cars came into sharper focus.
If he could see them...
The Arrivals, in unison, made soft whirring noises.
Coming to life.
Getting ready.
The cars began to inch together, eliminating the gaps between them. Archie felt his legs getting squeezed.
“Shit shit shit shit.”
He decided that touching the cars now presented no greater risk. In fact, if he was to save his legs from being crushed, he was going to have to hop up onto the cars. He put one hand on the roof of the car to his right, and his other on the car to his left, and hoisted himself up just as the two cars melded together with a resounding crunch. He rolled onto the roof of one car and sat there, trying to figure out what his next move would be.
Running for the fence was no longer an option.
The question now was, could he make it back to the loading dock? It was only a few feet to the concrete steps.
I can do it. I won’t end up like Nick.
Archie sat, motionless, atop the car. Let them drop their guard, he thought. Let them think he was going to sit there, wait things out.
And then he moved.
Onto his feet. Onto the hood.
He leapt off it like it was one of those springboards they had in the school gym. He went airborne off the front of the car in the first row, landing six feet from the bottom of the steps to the loading dock.
He reached out, grabbed the iron railing that ran down the side of the steps, and used it to propel himself up to the third step, a millisecond before an Arrival rammed the bottom of the short stairway and ripped the railing from its moorings.
But by then, Archie was on the loading dock level, and out of reach. The Arrivals sat there, evidently accepting they were all back to square one. The one that had crashed into the stairs returned to the formation.
Archie, catching his breath, tore off the butcher’s coat and tossed it onto the ground.
“Come on, guys. Can’t you cut me some slack?”
He heard something. A growling sound. Oh man, are the cars actually starting to sound like wolves, too? It took a moment for him to realize the noise was not coming from the cars.
It was coming from his stomach.
Archie wondered if any of that meat back there was cooked.
Thirty-Five
Bruce put the Caddy into reverse, threw his right arm over the seat, and turned around to see out the back window. He locked eyes, for a second, with the man in the back seat.
“Where are we going?” Brandon Kyle asked. He touched his hand to his jacket, a signal that he was ready to take out the gun again if he needed it.
“The mall,” Bruce said.
“No, wait,” Kyle said. “Hang on.”
Katie, sitting up front in the passenger seat, said, “That was the deal. We take you to the ferry. So we’re here. Why don’t you get out and leave us the fuck alone?”
Smoke continued to billow out of the front end of the ferry where the flaming Arrivals had leapt aboard. Before the clouds had completely obscured the view into the ferry deck, Bruce and Katie and Kyle had caught a glimpse of what looked like military vehicles, jeeps mostly. Whatever help had been dispatched was now unable to disembark. At least a hundred people who’d managed to get to the dock, hoping to board and escape to the mainland, had scattered.
While Kyle decided what order to give next, Bruce found a driveway to back into, conducted his maneuver with speed and efficiency, and had the Cadillac heading in the direction from which they’d come.
Bruce tromped on the accelerator and the huge car lumbered forward.
“The airport,” Kyle said. “There’s an island airport, right?”
Bruce nodded. “Yup. Small one.”
“They got helicopters there?” Kyle asked. “I heard something about the cars blocking the runway, but a helicopter could get around that problem.”
“You know how to fly a helicopter?” Bruce asked.
“No, I don’t know how to fly a helicopter,” Kyle sneered sarcastically. “But I can probably find someone who does.”
“Sure,” Katie said. “Turn on the charm. Who wouldn’t want to help you?”
“Katie,” Bruce said, his voice laced with caution. But she either didn’t pick up on his warning not to provoke Kyle, or didn’t care.
“I’m gonna ask you again,” Katie said. “Did you have something to do with this? I mean, you’re scared shitless about being caught here.”
Kyle ignored here. “Take me to the airport,” he said to the back of Bruce’s head.
Bruce turned to Katie and said, “I know, roughly, where the airport is, but I’m not sure of the fastest route. You want to grab the map from the glove compartment?” He angled his head so his voice would be cast back toward Kyle. “Sorry, they didn’t exactly have GPS when they built this beast.”
Katie looked at Bruce as though he’d committed treason. “We’re really going to help this asshole?”
Bruce, calmly, said, “Look in the glove compartment, Katie, and see what you can find.”
She let out a sigh and pressed the button on the glove compartment door. The panel swung downward, revealing its contents. The map book was there, as Bruce had said it would be, along with a few other things Katie had seen when he’d popped open the compartment back at his house to grab the garage door remote. It was there, of course, as well as a micro cloth, and a can of window cleaner spray.
“You see it?” Bruce asked.
There was something in his voice, Katie realized. He didn’t ask if she saw the map. He asked if she saw it.
The window cleaner.
“Yeah,” she said. “I see it.”
She grabbed hold of the map book, and as she took it out of the glove box, she brought out the window cleaner, too, tucking it down into the corner of the bench seat.