“I don’t know. I don’t know whether to believe it. How could things have gone so . . .” He stared at the pavement, shaking his head. “This wasn’t . . . this wasn’t ever . . .”

“I don’t get it,” Sandra said. “Ransomware, that would shut everything down, right? But this is something else. The cars have gone crazy. They’re killing people. It’s like there’s a hundred Christines on the island. You must have some idea.”

Ruskin bit his lip, looked over to the Arrival with Lisa in it, then at the burning fire truck. “It . . . it has to be some kind of program malfunction.”

“You think?” Sandra said.

“Even . . . even a basic virus, it wouldn’t—shouldn’t—do something like this. A . . . basic virus might misinterpret commands. Make the wipers go when they shouldn’t, keep the car from starting up. Screw up its GPS. But this, what I’m seeing . . .” Ruskin took a breath. “What I’m seeing here, it’s like if a person’s DNA got altered. The car’s basic intent, it’s been turned upside down.”

“Basic intent?”

Ruskin took a couple of deep, head-clearing breaths.

“To protect,” Ruskin said. “Everything in an Arrival is designed to protect not just people in the car but people outside the car. It’s like everything got turned upside down.”

“They’re not just driving around recklessly,” Sandra said. “They’re deliberately mowing people down.”

More to himself than Sandra, Ruskin said, “Good God, what have we done?”

Sandra had had enough of this. “Give me your phone,” she said.

Ruskin blinked, as though startled by the request.

“No,” he said. “I’ve got calls I have to make. Right now.”

“I have to call my kids,” Sandra pleaded. “I don’t know if they have any idea—”

“No,” Ruskin said again, and pointed to the pack of journalists. “Ask one of them.”

The son of a bitch, she thought. She wasn’t going to try to wrestle his phone away from him. There’d be a landline in the community center she could use.

She headed straight for the administrative office, encountering no one along the way. Once there, she grabbed the receiver off a desk, put it to her ear, and was about to enter a number when she realized there was no dial tone. She figured she had to hit 9 for an outside line. Tried that.

Nothing.

Then it hit her.

The telephone pole and the wires leading to it were on fire.

“Shit,” she said out loud, slamming the receiver back down. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”

She ran from the building, intending to borrow a phone from one of the visiting journalists. But then, coming out the main entrance, she saw something she thought might prove helpful.

Stones.

The garden that lined the walkway was dotted with decorative stones, many of them about the size of a brick.