The Cadillac came screaming down the street, its V8 engine roaring like a gravelly jet engine, slowing as it rolled past the Montrose house on its whitewall tires. As it went by, Sandra and Kyle and Katie—and Archie, watching through the window—could see that the driver’s side of the car was totally smashed in, starting at the back of the front wheel well, and about a foot beyond the door.

From behind the wheel, a bloody and bruised Bruce surveyed the scene in the Montrose driveway. Bruce only needed a couple of seconds to assess what was happening.

Kyle said, “Him.”

Bruce gunned the engine, speeding up as he headed toward the end of the street. But before he got there, he cranked the wheel hard, as though intending to make a U-turn. The car, however, was too big, and the street too narrow, to execute such a maneuver.

It was, everyone soon realized, not Bruce’s intention to stay on the road.

By the time he had the car facing in the other direction, he was on the front yard of a house five down from the Montrose residence. And then Bruce floored it. The car’s back tires kicked up sod and dirt as the beast lunged forward.

“Oh, shit,” Sandra said, realizing what it was Bruce intended to do. She screamed at Katie, “Get ready!” Then Sandra ran toward the street, careful not to be standing between the Arrival and the approaching car.

Kyle fired off a wild shot as the Cadillac blasted through picket fences and hedgerows set up to mark property lines. Bits of wood and foliage scattered across the massive hood before blowing off. The car continued to growl forward as Kyle took another shot, this one spiderwebbing the windshield on the passenger side.

Bruce didn’t even flinch.

The huge chrome grille was full of silver teeth, chowing down on splinters of wood and shrubbery.

Before Kyle could get off a third shot, the corner of the front bumper barely clipped him, sending him, and his gun, flying.

Gracie, sensing an imminent threat, slipped herself into reverse and started to roll back, releasing her pinioning of Katie. Sandra’s daughter nearly collapsed, but, realizing she had less than a second to seek cover, hobbled frantically around the corner of the house, not five feet away, to safety.

Bruce, in the last millisecond before impact, gave the wheel a slight turn to the left so he’d be lined up with the side of the Arrival as it tried to get away.

And then he hit it.

It was like a thunderclap. An ear-splitting sound of metal hitting metal, metal ripping metal. And under that, the wild cackling of Bruce behind the wheel, shouting, “Not so funny when it happens to you, is it?”