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.