Maybe what she’d seen wasn’t so strange, after all. Couldn’t you summon one of these cars with your phone? Just tell it where you were and it would come and get you? And didn’t the Smitherses walk to work in the morning? Maybe one of them needed the car and didn’t want to have to go home and get it.

Yes, that was probably what happened. They—

Well, there goes another one.

A yellow Arrival, five doors up the other way—Lillian didn’t know their names, they never acknowledged her when she saw them walk by and she said hello—was doing the same thing. Backing onto the street and heading off.

Over the next couple of minutes, she saw five cars without passengers head down Gilbert Street.

What a world, she thought. The changes she’d seen in her lifetime. Could she have imagined, when she was a little girl, that one day cars would drive themselves? That all you’d have to do to get someplace would be to say a few words to your Chevy or your Ford or your DeSoto—oops, dating myself there, she thought—and before you knew it, you were at your destination. She’d been afraid to ride in an Arrival until her son persuaded her it was perfectly safe. The little car—a special one equipped with a police radio and lots of other equipment—had taken them all over the island one day. She’d been nervous at first, but by the time the car had brought them home, she thought it was the greatest thing since the invention of the heating pad.

So all over town, she surmised, people were telling their cars to haul ass and come pick them up. No more waiting around for a strange taxi. It was nothing short of amaz—

What in the Sam Hill was that?

An awful noise from the west end of the street. A distant tree partially obstructed her view, so she leaned forward slightly to see around it. She was trying to think what the sound reminded her of. Like dropping a sack of potatoes off a tall building.

But a sack of potatoes didn’t scream.

There was an Arrival coming down the street. Well, duh, she thought. Like, what else would it be? A white one, but with splotches of something on the sloped hood.

Red splotches.

The car was moving swiftly, above the posted speed limit, Lillian was certain. That seemed odd, considering these cars were programmed to obey all the rules.

As the car got closer, those red splotches became more vivid.

Could they be . . . blood?

Had the car hit a pedestrian? That seemed unthinkable, and looking up the street, she was relieved that she did not see anyone stumbling about, or lying on the pavement.

Aloud, she said to herself, “I wonder what—”

And then the white Arrival drove past her house.