C.2

“Go, go, go, go!” Kate shouted. She switched her attention from the pair of men wheeling oversize file cabinets into the truck bed to the trio maneuvering a pallet-jack loaded with a large silk-screen frame. “That’s your last item. Don’t go back for more. Get the pallet-jack into the back.” She walked deeper into the warehouse, addressing the next group in line. “What’s that? Film? Negatives. Load it.” She shouted further into the building, projecting to be heard through the open doorways, “Everyone else, drop what you’re carrying. Bug out!”

John ignored her, trusting her to arrange the immediate evacuation of all personnel in the building. He kept his attention on his field phone and the digital countdown he’d set in the upper right of the screen. It was down to twenty-nine seconds. “Daniel, bring up the Humvee, now.” Men and women were rushing past him, loading into the back of the truck. He heard the truck’s engine firing up, an asthmatic rattle demonstrating just how old and fragile the machinery really was. “All scout units except Hell-Hounds, make for your rendezvous points. Hell-Hounds, give me an update.” Now it was nineteen seconds.

*   *   *

Ten and Earl caught occasional glimpses of the Terminator as it charged directly toward Eosphor Technologies. The machine ran across streets and parking lots, smashing effortlessly through cyclone fences. Moving like a track champion, it leaped over low obstacles such as dead cars and cinder-block walls. The two Hell-Hounds steadily lost ground to the machine, which could run at two or three times their speed in a flat straightaway and was comparatively even faster in broken terrain such as this.

The Terminator reached the middle of a four-lane street that crossed at nearly right angles to its path. There was a sound like a ball bearing hitting a hubcap at the speed of sound, and the T-800 fell on its rear end. The crack from Kyla’s sniper rifle followed a split-second later.

The Terminator was up in an instant. The second shot hadn’t damaged it enough to alter its running pace; still, it held a hand up over its face as if shielding its eyes from the sun.

Ten, running a block back across the rubble of a fast-food place that now spilled across its parking lot, grinned. The machine was protecting its skull and remaining eye. They’d hurt it. It was always good to hurt a Terminator. If they could just get within hand-to-hand range without getting killed, the devices packed in the top of Ten’s field pack would do more than hurt it.

Kyla’s rifle spoke again, noises like distant trees suddenly being broken in half. Three times bell-like noises of her bullet impacts rang from the Terminator’s torso; finally the machine slowed, its head swiveling in a ten-degree arc as it sought to discover Kyla’s hiding place.

Earl, panting, came up alongside Ten and leaned across the hood of a U.S. Postal System delivery truck. There were human bones and patches of USPS uniform in the front seat. Earl still held his RPG. “Taking my shot,” he said, his voice hoarse.

Ten had to marvel. Earl Duncan was well past sixty, the oldest member of the Hell-Hounds, and still in good enough shape to keep up with the others in urban operations. “Go for it.”

Earl fired, and Ten watched in a dispassionate sort of fascination as the explosive head leaped from the disposable weapon. The Terminator disappeared in a ball of fire and smoke, then reappeared several yards ahead, rolling to a stop against the remains of a filling station on the far side of the street. The ruins shielded it from further fire by Kyla.

The robot was up in a moment, but it had suffered further damage. A connector at the heel of its right leg, performing the same function as the Achilles tendon, had come free. Now the Terminator’s right foot was loose, no longer under control of the computerized algorithms that simulated human movement.

The Terminator turned toward the filling station and smashed its way in through the surviving glass of its front window. Ten and Earl hurried after it. A moment later, the robot smashed out through the back door of the station; Ten could no longer see it, but could hear its newly awkward steps.

Now they’d forced it to move within cover to avoid more .50-caliber rounds and RPG warheads. They were wearing it down. But they couldn’t count on wearing it down fast enough.

*   *   *

John saw the not-too-distant fireball of the Hell-Hounds’ second RPG attack. Beside him, the last of the Operation Starling workers piled into the back of Transport 4. As Lieutenant Tom Carter, the aging officer who was one of John’s primary technical experts, hauled the tailgate up, John kicked it, slamming it into place, and waved at the driver’s-side mirror. “Go!”

The truck pulled out and immediately turned rightward, bumping its way across the ruined parking lot. John could hear its grinding engine and, now rising over it, the healthier roar of his personal transport, a Humvee that had been new when Judgment Day had occurred.

Kate stepped up beside him, shouldering her field pack. “I think we made it.”

“I think—oh, damn.” As the truck lumbered out of view, it revealed the figure standing at the far end of the parking lot: a Terminator, its clothes and false skin burned away, only one of its eye sockets glowing red.

John froze. The image of the gleaming skeleton of one of the murder machines always froze his stomach with fear, no matter how many times he’d seen it, no matter how good he’d become at concealing that fear.

Right now, he knew, the robot’s threat assessment and targeting priority software would be evaluating the truck, him and Kate, even the oncoming Humvee, which was still out of sight but audible. The truck was the obvious target; so far as the Terminator could evaluate, its unknown cargo could conceivably do considerable damage to Skynet resources.

The Terminator ignored the truck. Limping, its right foot dragging, it began a slow, methodical trot straight toward John and Kate.

John swore. “It’s recognized us.” John Connor and Kate Brewster, supreme leaders of the Human Resistance on this continent, were much more valuable targets than a truck full of unknown materials. By now, the Terminator would have transmitted to Skynet the fact that they were here, and Skynet resources in the area would be converging on this site.

Kate grabbed her lapel mike and keyed it. “Daniel, bring the Humvee around to the front door. North side.”

Daniel’s voice in her headphone speakers was, as ever, low and melodious, the tones of a twentieth-century disk jockey on a classical music station. “I read. Fifteen seconds.”

John turned and ran with Kate back into the building’s interior. “Tell the Hounds to run for it.”

“Hell-Hounds, this is a scram order. This is about to be a hot zone.”

They passed through the wide doors opening out of the loading dock. Beyond was a dark chamber, echoing with gymnasium-like breadth and width, but no longer illuminated now that John’s workers had fled. He and Kate snapped on flashlights and he followed her lead across the concrete floor, now partially stripped of the long stands of equipment that had occupied it until the last few hours.

Behind them they heard clanking—the Terminator’s metal feet moving in an irregular fashion across the loading dock floor.

Gaining on them.

Kate and John skidded as they rounded a corner into the long hallway that led to the facility’s main entrance. It was perhaps fifty yards from where they were to the sliver of light that heralded the front doors, but now it looked like a mile. Behind them, metal rang and clattered as the Terminator crashed clean through a conveyor belt, not slowed, and continued to gain ground on them.

Halfway to the door, John hazarded a glance back. He could see nothing but the one red eye of the Terminator bobbing as the robot continued its awkward but tireless run. The thing obviously had lost any ranged weapons it might have had, but if it got its hands on either of them, that deficit would no longer matter.

His breath ragged, John surged ahead of Kate to hit the door. The protocols his units followed were that the designated exits out of any raided installation were to be unlocked, guarded until the bug-out command came, in order to give his people every opportunity for an escape, but sometimes mistakes were made.

Not this time. The ancient metal doors slammed open from his impact and he and Kate were suddenly in the light again.

But the clanking was so close behind them, so close …

The Humvee wasn’t immediately at hand. It was fifteen or twenty yards ahead of them, parked in the street, idling.

Unoccupied.

John didn’t have breath left to swear. He got a hand on Kate’s elbow, put the last of his energy into running—

The clang behind him seemed as loud and harsh as a train boxcar being dropped on the metal deck of a boat. Despite himself, John spun to look.

The Terminator was down on its face, its arms already under it to rise. Earl Duncan and Daniel Ávila flanked the door, holding something between them—a length of steel cable, held at about ankle height. Both looked off-balance; tripping the robot, given its great mass, had to have been a tremendous effort for them. And Ten Zimmerman, leaping from position beside Earl, was slapping something the size of an old-fashioned lunchbox onto the Terminator’s back …

The robot came up on its hands as though doing a push-up and lashed out with its left arm. The blow took Ten across the chest, hurling him yards backward.

“Scatter!” That was Earl, up to a full run toward Ten before the younger man even hit the pavement. Daniel lurched into motion, running the other way, waving John and Kate on their original course.

The Terminator spun around, a quick move to assess the new threat that endangered it. As it faced the open door into the building, the explosive charge Ten had affixed to its back went off.

To John, as close as he was, it looked as though his entire universe caught fire. There was nothing but flame and heat, bright light and impact. The explosion kicked him over backward and he scrambled away from it, blindly groping around for Kate. His shoulder blades hit something unyielding—the bumper of the Humvee.

Someone got hands under his arm and hauled him up. He could tell by touch that it was Kate. “Are you okay?” He could barely hear his own shout.

“What?”

“Can you see?”

“I can see.”

“Then you drive.” Unwilling to admit how much of the impact of the explosion he’d sustained, how much his eyes were dazzled, he groped his way around to the passenger-side door.

His sight was returning. Earl had Ten’s arm over his shoulder and was helping the younger man, who was conscious but looked shell-shocked, to the Humvee. Daniel Ávila, moving fast considering his age and weight, got to the driver’s side rear door and climbed in. “The T-800’s scrap,” Daniel shouted. “Blown in half at the spine. The top half was thrown back into the building.”

John climbed into the passenger seat. As his hearing returned, he heard ringing, not unusual for the blow he’d received. He shook his head and felt the first, predatory arrival of a massive headache. “I can’t believe you tripped a Terminator,” he shouted. “What’s next? You going to call it on the phone, ask ‘Have you got Prince Albert in a can?’”

Daniel grinned at him. He was a middle-aged Latino, his face framed by a neatly trimmed black beard. Unusual for a member of the Resistance in these lean and hungry times, he was substantially overweight, topping the scales at around 280 pounds. “You’re lucky we didn’t go with our first plan. Poking it in the eyes. Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk.”

The door behind him slammed; Ten and Earl were in place. Kate set the Humvee into motion, roaring away from the Eosphor Technologies building as fast as the vehicle’s aging acceleration would allow. “Storm drains,” she said. “Daniel, what’s our best path to a storm drain out of here?”

“Left at the street,” Daniel said. “Two blocks straight, then right and seven blocks more. That’ll bring you back to the highway and an entrance into the storm drain. The maps don’t say if you have to jump a curb or concrete barrier to get into it.”

“Whatever it takes,” Kate said.

John saw a bright red-and-yellow light in the passenger-side mirror, then heard the boom as the Eosphor building exploded. Daniel let out a howl, half scream and half war-cry, then added in a conversational tone, “The Tin Man’s power supply must have cooked off. Hey, look at that, look at that!”

John could see it in the mirror, the gray-and-black cloud ballooning up from the ruins of the building. For just a moment, where it swelled widest, the cloud took on the approximate shape of a human skull, the right eye-socket oversize, the mouth opening and widening. Then wind and distortion twisted the image beyond recognition and it was just a cloud again.

“I don’t believe in omens,” Earl said. “And I don’t believe in the face of the Madonna in the side of a refrigerator or a double pane of glass. That was just coincidence.”

“Sure it was,” Daniel said, but he looked troubled. “I just had the weirdest feeling that I’ve seen it before. That exact cloud.”

John turned around to give him a curious look. “You’d know, wouldn’t you? You’re the one with the memory to die for.”

Daniel flashed him a humorless smile, even white teeth surrounded by black beard. “Only back to a certain point, John.”