C.19

August 2029

The Grottoes

With both fists, Mike pounded the desk beside Daniel’s bed, taking out her frustration on its ancient metal construction. “Out,” she said. “Everybody out.” Her glare, its effect little diminished by her tears, swept across everyone in the room and those visible in the observation chamber.

Lake hesitated, then turned and left, saying nothing, her spine stiff. Kyla, Mark, and others followed, all but Daniel, who lay, eyes closed and head cocked as if listening, and John and Kate. John stood and moved into the bedroom. It was cooler in here.

Mike glared at him, but did not repeat her demand. When the outer door had rotated closed on the last of the medics, she turned again to the man on the bed. “Danny, tell her this. It’s important. Tell her, ‘I know things about you I couldn’t know. Because you didn’t tell anyone.’ Are you telling her?”

“Yes.”

“Tell her, ‘When you were sixteen, you were almost raped by your cousin ’Tonio. It was your word against his. He was never charged. That’s one reason you let Alex talk you into joining the Sheriff’s Department, the reason you never told Alex.’ Are you telling her?”

“Yes.”

“What’s she saying?”

“She’s not saying anything. She’s not pointing the gun at me. I think she’s scared.”

Mike laughed. It was a brittle noise. “Tell her, ‘The scar on your lower back isn’t from falling on a tin can lid. It’s from when you and your brother Pete were sword fighting with machetes when you were thirteen. You made up the tin-can story so your mother wouldn’t complain about you being a tomboy.’ Are you telling her?”

“Shut up! Shut up!”

Mike leaned back from Daniel’s sudden vehemence. The pain she was feeling was obvious to John from the strain in her voice, the strain on her face. “Are you saying that, or is she saying that?”

Daniel’s eyes opened. “She’s saying that, but it’s upsetting him. Sorry. Whenever Danny gets emotional, whatever he says, sometimes whatever he’s hearing spills out of my mouth.” He was reddening, his expression one of distress.

“It’s okay. Calm down. Tell her, ‘Pete knows about the lie, but he doesn’t know that you never confessed in church for lying to Mama about it. You never confessed because it happened the same summer you decided to leave the Church. And we are talking to you from the future, and the bombs are coming, and if you don’t do something about it, everything and everyone you ever cared about might die forever.’ Are you telling her?”

Daniel’s eyes closed. “We’re telling her. I … I…” Daniel stretched out with his left hand, as if reaching to someone before him. Then his arm fell; his head lolled to the side.

July, Present Day—Thursday Night

Ávila Property

Danny swayed. He was suddenly dizzy and felt as though a giant hypodermic needle were being yanked from his brain tissue. Only his hands on the bedroom wall kept him from falling.

“Hello?” he whispered, but he knew that Mike and Daniel were gone. However, the feeling of his connection with them was not severed. He still distantly felt Daniel.

He chanced another look over his shoulder. Linda stood frozen behind him, her gun in one hand, handcuffs in the other, her flashlight now on the bed. Her face was frozen, eyes wide.

“There,” Danny said. “That was proof, wasn’t it? How would I know that?”

“I don’t … I don’t…”

“Come on, Linda. Was it proof, or wasn’t it? We don’t have time to push-start your brain.”

The goad finally penetrated her shock. She looked as though someone had just dashed a glass full of ice water in her face. “All of that is something members of my family might have told you. At the wedding or after. Except the part about my not confessing, and about leaving the Church. Nobody knows that.”

“Well?”

“So it’s proof. Partial proof.”

“So let’s go where I can give you more substantial proof.”

“I don’t have a car here. I took a taxi to a spot about a mile from the house and hiked in.”

“I have a truck.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Stop being a deputy for a moment. Let’s go.”

She finally relented. She shoved her handcuffs into a back pocket, picked up Alex’s briefcase, opened it and withdrew a holster from it. She holstered the Glock and fiddled with her belt to situate the holster on it. “Partial proof doesn’t put the Colt in your hands.”

“That’s fine. I just want us out of here.”

*   *   *

They moved down the stairs, into the kitchen and to the back door. Danny adjusted the strap of the soft-side briefcase that hung at his hip—finally he had his laptop again. At this point, it was as important to him as a firearm, and he was more proficient with it. More dangerous.

As Danny reached for the door handle, the house rattled and there was a tremendous crash from the front entryway.

Danny knew what the crash was—Scowl, arriving late but not too late to kill both of them. In something like slow motion, he saw Linda drawing the Glock, spinning to cover the door from the kitchen into the entryway.

She’s not in my future. Maybe she would die right now, gunned down or crushed by Scowl. The Terminator had to be accelerating along the entryway toward them, certain of their positions because of its infrared imaging.

Danny reached over to the stove and turned the four top burners fully on. Blue flame burst into life there. Danny grabbed at the drapes hanging before the kitchen window, and yanked—

Scowl crashed fully into the kitchen, holding a submachine gun in its hands. Too wide to fit through the doorway normally, its treads smashed through the jamb at about calf height on either side.

It opened fire, spraying rounds into the stovetop, attacking the brightest heat source. The suppressor kept the shots from punishing Danny’s ears, but Linda’s handgun boomed once, twice, three times, each shot in the confined space acting like a slap to Danny’s ears. Dazzled by the gunfire, Danny couldn’t see what effect her bullets were having on the robot.

Danny yanked the drapes free of their curtain rod and swung the cloth over Scowl and the stove. The lower end ignited almost instantly; the upper end settled across Scowl’s head and chest. Danny saw the barrel of the submachine gun swing toward Linda and he shouted the beginnings of a warning, but she was already diving behind the kitchen table. Scowl’s gunfire sprayed across the tabletop and under its surface, across the back wall of the kitchen; Linda grabbed the table leg nearest her and yanked up, toppling the piece of furniture, putting its heavy wood surface between her and the incoming rounds.

Scowl’s upper body spun around as it took a 360-degree sensor check. The motion wrapped the drape around its torso and head. Flame crawled all over the drapes, blanketing the robot’s body in fire.

Danny ducked between the stove and the Terminator, felt the heat of the fire on his shoulder, and was suddenly in the entryway, dashing toward the front door. As he reached the wreckage of the door, he shouted, “I’m Danny Ávila. Come get me!”

It was a suicidal tactic, but there was only one thought in his brain—get Scowl away from Linda. If it was here to kill him, if he could lead it far enough away, it might not kill her.

As he spilled out onto the porch, he chanced a look behind him. Scowl, still flaming, had reversed into the entryway and spun. It was raising the barrel of the submachine gun. Danny stuck out an arm and rebounded off one of the wooden porch columns, deflecting himself rightward along the porch, and he heard the weapon fire again, heard a burst of rounds hammer into the interior walls of the entryway.

Seconds. He was going to be dead in seconds.

He vaulted over the railing on the side of the porch, landed hard on the dirt beyond, and sprawled onto his face and hands. His briefcase hit the ground with him. He wasn’t too worried about the computer in it; the laptop was a mil-spec machine, built to military specifications of ruggedness and durability.

There was light and motion to his left. He glanced over, toward the highway. He could see the headlights of cars and trucks passing along Highway 58, and closer, headlights approaching from the access road.

*   *   *

If it could have felt anything, Scowl would have felt growing irritation. Its visual sensors, both those in the human visual range and the infrared registers, were at reduced efficiency and its primary target was proving unusually difficult to terminate.

Scowl reached up to tear the burning drapes from its torso. The action cost it a few seconds of time but restored its visual acuity to normal.

It looked along the exit route its target had taken. Its target was either out of sight or had changed its configuration. The most obvious light and heat source in the vicinity, not including the remnants of the drapes, was an incoming vehicle. Its headlights were trained on Scowl, and/or the front of the Ávila property and it was approaching at a rate that caused Scowl’s threat register to climb precipitously.

Scowl aimed the MP5-N and fired at the driver’s position.

The weapon clicked and did not expend any rounds. Scowl concluded that it was malfunctioning or had run out of ammunition. It had additional ammunition in its van, but a round trip to the site it had left the van would take five minutes plus or minus twelve seconds.

The likelihood that Daniel Ávila was the operator of that vehicle, given its current position and speed, was only thirty-eight percent. However, Scowl’s secondary orders mandated that all humans who observed its activities or hindered it had to be terminated. Ávila or not, Scowl had to eliminate this threat.

Scowl accelerated toward the front door and the porch.

*   *   *

Scrambling on all fours back toward the cover represented by the side of the house, Danny saw the Sheriff’s Department car enter the patch of earth where the Ávilas parked and slew to the right, facing its driver’s-side window toward the house.

Even as it began its turn, Scowl, accelerating all the way, rolled out through the front door and came off the porch like a robotic long jumper, hurtling through the air straight into the driver’s door, crushing it in to the depth of two or three feet.

The impact caused the car’s front end to slew farther right. Danny saw the vehicle tilt, then roll onto the driver’s side, roof, passenger side—and continue rolling until it was on its wheels once more. Scowl was still jammed in the driver’s-side door.

Danny got onto his feet. His legs trembled. He heard pounding steps behind him, glanced back to see Linda rounding the back corner of the house.

There were minor explosions from inside the car—gunshots, and, then, just as Linda reached Danny, a scream. “Oh, God,” she said. “Fitch—” She started forward, but Danny grabbed her arm.

“He’s already dead,” Danny said. “We’ve got to go—”

“We don’t know that—”

Gasoline spilling from the rear of the car ignited. Flames sprang up beneath the cruiser’s rear. Danny saw Scowl struggle, held in place for the moment by the door and frame metal that had folded over its body in the collision and roll.

“I do know.” Danny hauled her back away from the corner, out of sight of Scowl and the car. His push sent her staggering toward the back of the house. “Listen to me. If that car burns, if it blows up, it’s only going to slow Scowl down. We’ve got to get to my truck and on the road, fast, or we’re dead like Fitch. Believe me.”

She read his eyes, then nodded. She handed him the black briefcase she still carried and spared one last miserable glance back in the direction of the car.

Flames were illuminating the interior of the Ávila house, and more were brightening the parking area. Daniel heard a whoomp as they sprang up more strongly from the car. “Come on. We keep the house between us and it until we get to the orange trees, then we cut across to the Tremonts’. The flames may give us the cover we need to get that far.” Not waiting for a response, he ran, and Linda ran after him.

August 2029

The Grottoes

“Daniel? Danny?” Mike leaned over him and her tears dripped from her chin onto his face. She seized his wrist. After a few moments, relief, scant relief, settled across her features. “He’s still alive. I think he passed out.”

John felt the tension within him ebbing just a bit. He didn’t answer her immediately, though; with the portion of his mind devoted to calculation, to tactics, to sorting out facts, he was trying to hammer the last few minutes’ worth of conversation into a shape he could recognize. Finally, he said, “You are Linda Ávila.”

She shot him a look that seemed both angry and vulnerable. “Yeah.”

“Why haven’t you mentioned that little detail?”

She tried to pin him with a forbidding glare, but didn’t have it in her. She gave him a “who knows?” shrug. “I never lied to you, John. I just left some things out. My whole name is Michaela Linda Herrera Ávila. I went by Michaela when I was growing up, but when I got to high school, I had this teenage need to be someone different, so I started calling myself by my middle name. And when I married Alex, I became Linda Ávila.”

“And…” John frowned, adding up ages, dates. “Mark is Daniel’s son?”

She nodded.

“Does Daniel know?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Dammit, John—”

“Mike, I wouldn’t pry into matters that had been dead for decades—if they really had been dead for decades. But I need to know everything I can if I’m going to help keep Daniel alive. Not just at this end. Jesus, what happens if he gets killed back on Judgment Day? It’s just not the time to keep secrets.”

She drew a long, shuddery breath while deciding, then nodded. “You remember how it was when you and Kate found us?”

“Sure. Your little commune under the dam. Half California highway patrol and half university scientists. Feeding yourselves with hydroponic gardens and spending what little free time you had playing around with high-order mathematics … stuff that really came in handy when we had to decipher the Continuum Transporter. Mark was, what, six?”

“Yeah. Then we got folded up into your group and I met Danny again.” She leaned back and ran her fingers through her hair. “He didn’t remember me and he was as crazy as a bug. What was I supposed to say? ‘We used to be in love. It’s time for you to love me again. Here’s your son. His name is Mark.’ I didn’t want my little boy looking up to a crazy man, taking him as a role model. What would Mark have grown up to be? And I didn’t want anything from Daniel that I had to get by asking for it because he didn’t know to give it.”

John wanted to ask, Good lord, woman, what have your pride and your inflexibility on this matter cost you? But he didn’t. “Does Mark know?”

She nodded. “I told him when he turned eighteen. By then he was old enough to appreciate Daniel for his good points and mature enough not to rely on him … or to hate him for stuff that was outside his control.”

“Why did you start calling yourself Mike again?”

She swallowed. “I was with a bunch of peace officers in those early days. They remembered all the APBs out on Danny Ávila, especially the one about him killing a sheriff’s deputy. Some of them weren’t going to believe he was innocent until they’d had the chance to get the truth out of him themselves. They might remember Linda Ávila, too—widow of one deputy, sister-in-law of and maybe conspirator with a suspected killer … John, it was just time to become someone different.” She reached up to touch a strand of hair that had escaped her ponytail and swayed into her face. “I guess it helped that hair bleach kind of went into short supply.”

John snorted, then finally circled in on the question whose answer he dreaded most. “Mike, what happened to Danny back then?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. We got separated … And because I don’t know what happened then, I have no idea what’s going to happen now.” She heaved a misery-laced sigh. “Prophecy really bites when you only get little scenes of the future.”

She was startled by his sudden, harsh, knowing laughter.

July, Present Day—Friday Predawn

Kern County, California

Danny snapped to wakefulness, too warm and shrouded in darkness. Then he felt Linda’s arm across his chest, the warmth of her alongside him … and the irregular rigidness of the pickup bed beneath his back, barely cushioned by the new sleeping bag the two of them were lying atop.

There was a jagged bit of gray in the blackness over his head. It swayed and seemed impossible for him to focus on. It took him a moment to realize he was looking at a tear in the tarpaulin they’d stretched over the pickup bed, and that morning was beginning to dawn beyond it.

“Are you awake?” Linda whispered.

“Uh-huh.” He flexed experimentally. His back was sore, probably both from last night’s exertions at the family house and from lying on the truck bed.

She continued in a more normal tone, “We need to figure out what to do today.”

“Sure.” He didn’t feel like doing anything today, or ever again. The image—fabricated in his own mind, since he hadn’t seen any of it—of his mother dying under the guns of the Terminator he’d helped to create hovered just in front of him, and he felt as though two tons of sandbags were pinning him in place.

“Well?”

“Nothing’s coming to mind.”

“Are your future voices there?”

“No. Still gone.”

“So we’re going to have to figure it out for ourselves. Let’s start with the truck. It’ll have been reported stolen by now. We’re going to have to replace it with something else.”

He sighed, reluctant to be dragged out of his depression. “Mark said that we might find another pickup, something that looked similar, and just swap license plates.”

“Yeah, that’s something perps do all the time.”

“Welcome to perp-hood, Linda.”

She snorted. “Mark is one of them?”

“Yeah. Mark Herrera. He was advising me on weapons and tactics.”

“Huh. I have an uncle named Mark Herrera, in Texas. My favorite uncle. Do you suppose—”

“No, this was a young guy. A young guy in the future, and his family’s from California. Couldn’t be your uncle.”

“Oh.” She was silent for a moment. She rolled onto her back, and Danny saw a bit of blue light flare from her wrist as she pressed the button for the backlight on her wristwatch. “We can get to Tehachapi or Mojave before it’s light and pull a switch on the license plates.”

“Let’s do that, I guess.”

“And then what, Danny? What do we do in the day and a half before the world ends?”

The misery in her voice pulled him forcibly out of the well of self-pity in which he’d been trying to drown. He rolled over and held her for long, silent moments. Then he said, “I guess we try to set things up so that we, and our family and friends, ride out what’s going to come. The pickup’s full of supplies, that’ll give us a head start, though I’d like to get some things I couldn’t manage yesterday. Like explosives. We need to call everyone we care about, try to persuade them to head up into the mountains, out into the country, anywhere they can survive.”

“And what about Skynet? Is there any way at all we could prevent it from taking over?”

Danny frowned, considering. He’d been operating under the assumption that there wasn’t, that the future was immutable. It took him a moment to recognize that this was because he’d been talking to voices he believed to come from that future. If they told him that his future was their past, then there wasn’t much he could do about it … or so he’d been reasoning.

But maybe he could change something. If he did, though, the voices would never come to be. The people they represented would go away, either eliminated entirely or changed to something that wouldn’t recognize him. In a sense, he’d be killing them, his friends.

Kill friends of today by not trying, or kill friends of tomorrow by trying and succeeding. The only blameless path was to try and fail, and that just didn’t make sense.

“There are some things I hadn’t completed when I left Edwards,” he finally said. “The most important one was programming a back door into the controls of the satellite that provides power to the Continuum Transporter. In the work I was doing earlier, I wasn’t making headway in figuring out how to turn over complete control from Skynet to the Resistance. So I’d started work on setting things up so that the Resistance could add power receiver locations to the satellite’s database of authorized recipients. That means if their Continuum Transporter gets destroyed, they might be able to fabricate another one … and get power to it. Fabricating a new one is nearly impossible for them, but getting that amount of power is definitely impossible unless I can do this.”

“That’s nice, but it has nothing to do with preventing the catastrophe now.”

“Yeah. But if I get online, I can try to finish that back door and the relevant coding … and also send some e-mail to bigwigs at Edwards. I’d need to write as much of this as possible beforehand, then get to a library with Internet access, or to an Internet café, or onto Edwards itself, and upload it all as fast as possible.”

“Not Edwards.” Linda’s voice was firm. “If you’re detected, you’re stuck on base when the big boom comes. Right there where Skynet can arrange for you to die. That’s not an answer.”

“So we’ll try one of the safer approaches and hope that the net isn’t so screwed up that I can’t get data through.” Grudgingly, he released her, then began to squirm under the tarpaulin toward the tailgate. “Guess we’d better go. Daylight’s wasting.”

He squeezed up through the gap between tailgate and tarpaulin into a predawn sky. They were parked on a rutted trail partway up one of the low mountain slopes near the town of Tehachapi, and from here, to the south, he could see what looked like an endless sea of wind turbines.

Things could be worse, he supposed. He was facing the end of the world and hunted by everyone with a gun within a hundred miles, but he was with the woman he loved, and she knew this county as though a satellite map were imprinted on her brain.