The car now straddled the moving stairway.

“Shit!” Nick said, and dropped as the blue Arrival drove right over him.

He glanced up at the passing undercarriage, his disbelieving eyes watching as the car raced down the slope and flew off as it reached the bottom, the front end tipping down and crashing into the mall’s lower level.

People screamed and scattered.

While the blue Arrival had suffered extensive front-end damage, it was still operable. It drove a few yards away from the escalator and made a wide circle.

The descending escalator was delivering Nick closer to the lower level with each passing second. He heard more crunching of steel and plastic and looked upward in time to see another Arrival crawl over the red one. The car whizzed over his head. He felt the breeze as it passed.

This second Arrival sustained damage similar to the blue one, but it, too, was still moving, and turning around.

“No no no no,” Nick said as another Arrival rolled past overhead.

Nick, scrambling crab-like up the steps on his feet and hands just to stay in one place, suddenly realized the seriousness of his situation.

He couldn’t let the escalator drop him off at the bottom. The Arrivals were waiting for him.

And he couldn’t go to the top, because that’s where all the Arrivals were coming from.

He had to go up this down escalator until these fucking cars were gone.

And who knew how long that was going to be?

Where was that goddamn emergency button? Weren’t there big red buttons at the tops and bottoms of escalators to make them stop? He couldn’t see any from his position, and he’d be putting himself at huge risk to poke his head out at either end to find one.

“Help!” he shouted. “Help me!”

But all the shoppers who’d been watching the action from down below were gone. They’d all run into the backs of stores or down hallways to bathrooms to hide out.

Nick had never been much of a swimmer, which was a pretty funny way when you lived on an island with miles and miles of beaches. Whenever he went to pool parties, he was embarrassed that he didn’t know how to do laps. Could never slice through the water the way the other kids did.

All he could do was jump in and tread water.

And even that, he couldn’t do for very long. A minute, maybe. Two tops.

Well, this right here, this fucking nightmare on the escalator, this was treading water.

And Nick had a bad feeling he was going to have to do it for a lot longer than two minutes if he wanted to stay alive.

Twenty-Three

Katie steered the lumbering Caddy to the other side of the road, the left wheels running onto the gravel shoulder, in a bid to stay out of the approaching Arrival’s path. The little silver car had moved into their lane and a head-on crash was imminent before Katie cranked the wheel.