Archie grabbed him once again. “Are you shitting me? Come on!”

Pamela was plowing full speed into the store, knocking tables out of the way, running over racks as they fell in her path.

“Fuck!” Archie said.

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—