He very nearly made it, too.

He was just reaching up for the door when the Arrival drove itself into the back of him, pinning his legs to the side of the fire engine and creating a symphony of broken bones and crushed steel.

“Oh my,” said Kyle.

The paramedic, who’d glanced over his shoulder and seen what had happened to his friend, might have thought he’d been spared, but now two other Arrivals had started moving and were in pursuit.

The Arrival that had pinned the firefighter to the truck had managed to lodge itself under the frame. When the driver and the two remaining members of the crew jumped out to rescue their friend, they could see that when the sloped, front end of the Arrival struck him, it carried his legs right under the fire engine with it. The man, who already appeared to be dead, had collapsed onto the hood of the car.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” the driver yelled.

The second paramedic in the ambulance leapt out, but by the time she was halfway to the fire engine, yet another Arrival had dispatched itself in her direction. She spun around and started running back, putting every ounce of speed into it as she could. She jumped back into the ambulance half a second before the Arrival broadsided the vehicle with a thunderous crash.

Her partner was still trying to outrun the two Arrivals that had taken off after him. He ran for the ditch on the other side of the road, and up the other side. The first Arrival maintained the pursuit, nose-diving into the ditch and staying there, its wheels spinning in the grass. It would have, under any other circumstance, been comical. The Arrivals were proving themselves, immediately, to be nasty little sons of bitches, but they weren’t four-wheel-drive Jeeps.

The second Arrival hit the brakes before going into the ditch, taking a second to survey the scene. The paramedic had come up the other side of the ditch and scurried behind a tree for cover.

“Yeah, come and get me, motherfucker!”

The second Arrival, uninterested in taking up the challenge, cranked its wheels hard left and spun around, leaving the disabled Arrival in the ditch to continue spinning its wheels in frustration.

Brandon Kyle watched in awe.

The virus had gone beyond expectations. The Arrivals had gone way beyond reckless. In fact, they’d moved beyond aggressive.

They’d become predatory.

The Arrivals were going after those emergency workers. The Arrivals were hunting them down.

And they weren’t done yet.