C.22

July, Present Day—Friday Night

Kern County, California

It had taken hours of travel along back roads, farm roads, ranch roads, and unpaved trails through government lands and private properties, but now, as the sun began dipping below the western horizon, they parked on the sloping side of the two-lane road facing the sign that read Scott’s Shooting Range.

It was, Danny concluded, perfect. Only a few miles from the Ávila home, Scott’s was where Alex had taught Danny to shoot, where he’d taught Linda to shoot during their engagement, before she’d joined the Sheriff’s Department.

From here they could see the main office, a house-size single-story building with a bagged-ice vending machine, a cola machine, and a gravel parking lot. Behind and to the right was a row of wooden shooting stands facing an earthen berm, a backstop for bullets, a hundred or more yards away.

But that wasn’t all there was to this range, as Danny and Linda both knew. The business had several such setups and a skeet range. Most important, it featured a set of crude, roofless buildings something like a Hollywood back lot. Each building was equipped with swing-out silhouettes of human figures—bank robbers, hostages, terrorists, children, cops, dogs. Recreational shooting leagues used Scott’s for their competitions, and at least three movies had scenes filmed here in the last three years.

From their position, they could see that the parking lot was almost empty—only an SUV, a smallish Japanese pickup, and an aging white minivan remained. “That’s good,” Linda said. “Another hour and I’ll bet they’ll all be out of there.”

“Do you suppose they leave a guard at night?”

She shook her head. “I know they don’t. There’ve been some incidents of vandalism out here, and Mr. Scott keeps saying that repairs are still less expensive than a security guard.”

“Mmm.”

“I’m going to find some spot a mile or two up to park until nightfall.”

“Mmm.”

“You’re sleepy, aren’t you?”

“Afraid so.”

“Go ahead, get a nap.”

“Mmm.”

“Danny, time to wake up.”

Danny’s eyes opened. For a moment, he was suspicious that Linda was playing a joke, but the truck’s surroundings were different, and it was full night. Linda had the truck’s cab light on.

He stretched. “How long did I sleep?”

“Couple of hours.”

Danny, do you hear me?

He stopped in midstretch. “Welcome back,” he whispered.

What are you up to?

“Hold on.” He glanced sideways at Linda.

She was looking at him. She withdrew just a little. “He’s back, isn’t he? The other you.”

“How can you tell?”

“You always get this look in your eyes. A guarded look.”

Hi, Linda.

“Linda, Daniel says hi. Daniel, it’s the day before … before Judgment Day.” Danny was able to keep the immensity of that fact from crashing down on him, from distracting him. “Linda’s been driving on back roads all day to avoid Scowl. I’ve been designing an upload I want to transmit to Skynet through Scowl. We’re at a shooting range we’re going to booby-trap during the night. If everything goes right, we’ll lure Scowl to us tomorrow, run him around on the range to give me time to upload the package, and then we’ll terminate the son of a bitch.”

Without getting yourselves killed, I hope.

“What do you mean, you hope? You know.”

I know … from my personal timeline. But there’s ample evidence that the future isn’t set in stone, and neither is the past. The past has been changed, therefore it can be changed … and therefore you can get your ass killed, and I’ll wink out of existence, and this conversation will never have happened.

“Oh.”

So don’t get cocky under the assumption that you’re immortal at this stage of your life just because I’m alive years from now.

“Got it.”

“What was the ‘Oh’? You didn’t sound happy.”

He shook his head and switched off the dome light. “You don’t want to know.”

“Oh.”

*   *   *

Amply equipped with flashlights and camp lanterns, they prowled around the shooting range. Linda sketched the layout of Silhouette City, the concentration of buildings featuring swing-out and pop-up targets. She sat down with Danny in the building set up like a convenience store.

She put down the sketch between them and inverted it so that the words were right-side-up to Danny. “Okay,” she said. “This place grids out into nine squares, three by three. One, upper left, is Jungle Out There—plywood cutouts representing trees, lots of trees. Two is One-Stop Robbery Shop, where we are now. Three is Domestic Disturbanceville, a single-family dwelling.

“The next row starts with four, First National Hostage Supply, the bank interior. Then five, the big open plaza in the middle with only pop-up targets, there’s no sign on that one—”

“Gopherville,” Danny said.

Linda snorted. “Gopherville.”

“I have many happy teenaged memories of Gopherville.”

“Six is Booze & Grease, the bar and grille. Then, the third row, left to right, we have seven, the Gray Stripe Hotel, set up like a jail or prison block; eight, Wreck Farm, the drug laboratory; and nine, the open area with the civilian car and the police cruiser, License Land.”

Danny looked over the sketch. He pointed to spots outside the convenience store and the bank. “And here and here we have the two observation towers. Kind of like World War Two guard towers. They look down into everything, and this one,” he tapped the tower beside the convenience store, “is where the computer that handles the timing of the swing-out targets is set up.”

Linda shook her head. “It’s not that big an area. Maybe the size of a small city block. We need to lead Scowl around in that for how long?”

“If everything goes magnificently well, two or three minutes. If Skynet’s closed down some of my back doors, meaning the program has to do some searching and probing, I don’t know. Four, five minutes? Six?”

“I don’t see how we can pull it off. If what you’ve told me is correct, Scowl’s never going to be fooled by swing-out targets. You said it has infrared imaging. So it’s only going to chase after the warm targets. You think we can keep it from killing us for six minutes when the best cover we can find is the plywood walls of these building mockups?”

“No, certainly not. So we’ll give it lots of targets it will react to. We’re going to put a road flare on each target we want to really attract its attention, and set it up so the flare lights off before the target swings out. It probably means taking a servo from one swing-out target and putting it on another, so that with each target, Servo Number 1 pops the top of the flare, and then a few seconds later Servo Number 2 swings the target out.”

“I hope you bought a lot of flares.”

“I bought a lot of flares. I thought I was buying several years’ worth. Anyway, Scowl will have to look closely at each target, switching between the normal human visual spectrum and infrared imaging, or just put a bunch of ammunition into the target, to be sure it’s not a human.”

She frowned. “I kind of suspect it’ll do the second one.”

“Me, too. In which case we might be able to run it dry of ammunition. Force it to use its hands.”

“Oh, good. I’d much prefer to die that way.”

Danny laughed. “What do you think, Daniel?”

It could work. The early Terminators were pretty unsophisticated.

“Oh, that’s damning with faint praise.”

Sorry.

July, Present Day—Friday Night

Tehachapi, California

It was full dark by the time Ryan White reached the highest part of the mountain foothills west of Tehachapi and began the last part of the drive to home. Not in the best of moods, he glared at the dashboard, where the heat indicator for his normally reliable Chevy pickup was creeping up toward the red zone.

It wasn’t the truck that had put him in the bad mood, but all the driving he’d done today. His errand to Bakersfield, a long-overdue trip to visit his mother, had meant he’d had to do a lot of traveling back and forth along a highway that was increasingly nasty and ill-maintained the closer he got to his mother’s home. But now it was done.

He was a star, Ryan was. He hadn’t done better than middle-of-the-road scores in college, but he’d been a standout running back with the university’s prestigious football team. Three years with the San Diego Chargers had followed, before he’d blown out his right knee for the last time and had to retire from his chosen sport.

But he wasn’t stupid. He’d invested his money, not blown it on grossly expensive sports cars or cocaine. Now he was one of Tehachapi’s favorite sons, a man of wealth, of means—he owned a chain of hamburger stands, two used-car lots, and convenience stores in Tehachapi and Mojave. So now, still under thirty years of age, he was big, strong, good-looking, increasingly wealthy, unmarried and staying so very successfully without lacking female companionship. His one bum knee was the only downside in his life.

He was still a couple of miles from home when a vehicle in the oncoming lane passed him, then immediately screeched into a controlled spin and accelerated in pursuit of him.

“Shit.” Ryan glanced into the rearview mirror. His glimpse at the vehicle as it had passed was of a big, dark van. Had it been a police cruiser, he’d know what to expect, but this could be anything—drugged-up gangbangers far from home, a celebrity stalker reduced to hunting someone with as reduced a level of fame as Ryan enjoyed, anything. Ryan pressed the accelerator down. Better to be pulled over by cops for speeding than loaded up for delivery to a morgue.

The van gained on him. Ryan swore. His pickup had a V8 engine and was in good tune. The van was obviously not something off a normal factory assembly line.

More possibilities for the van’s driver and passengers flashed through his mind. Groupies who’d just abandoned a rock band and decided to attach themselves to an ex-jock. Men with black sunglasses from Area 51 who assumed he’d seen something he wasn’t supposed to. Barefoot backwood cannibals who drove expensive late-model vans.

The van came up nearly to his rear bumper, then sideslipped into the oncoming traffic lane. As it crept up alongside, Ryan gripped his steering wheel tightly. He wasn’t going to be forced off the road and cooked by his own exploding pickup. Hell, his vehicle probably outweighed the other one. He’d force them off the road, watch them flip and roll. Adrenaline was jolting through him, giving him the strength and quickness it took to knock a 300-pound lineman on his ass.

The van came alongside and Ryan glanced left, through the van’s open passenger-side window at the driver.

The driver was … not human. It had a triangular head with a flat face; there were glowing red lights where its eyes should be. Its body was huge and bulky.

But it had its hands on the wheel at the ten o’clock and two o’clock positions, and it did nothing more than stare at Ryan … and then begin to decelerate.

Ryan stared at it, open-mouthed, until the van dropped back out of his direct sight. For all his speculation, he hadn’t really expected the driver to be something that weird.

He heard gravel grind under his right wheels. He looked forward just in time to realize that he was half off the road; it had curved leftward and he was still going straight, aimed unerringly for a Joshua tree …

He yanked the wheel to the left. His truck grazed the tree and he heard it clip his right-side mirror clean off the chassis. Then the wheel jerked under his hands and he was tilting, tilting …

*   *   *

Now Ryan’s knee hurt worse than ever.

He stood, most of his weight on his left leg, beside his truck as it lay on its right side in the sandy soil fifty yards from the highway. It hadn’t crumpled, it hadn’t caught fire, but by God it had rolled over, and he was an unhappy man.

It had taken four calls on his cell phone before he’d reached the local Sheriff’s Department, and now, half an hour after the wreck, he finally saw the lights of an oncoming cruiser. The vehicle slowed as it left the highway and crept along, bouncing a bit, as it navigated the desert soil to stop a few yards away.

Sergeant Harry Farland, with his long, dour face, climbed out of the driver’s seat and Ryan breathed out a sigh of relief. Even a well-off local hero like Ryan sometimes caught flak from peace officers because he was black, but he’d known Farland for years, and the man was not the type who offered that sort of trouble.

“Evenin’, Ryan,” Farland said, and looked solemnly at the front of the truck.

“Evenin’, Harry.” Ryan matched the peace officer’s drawling tone.

“Drunk?”

“Nope.”

“Just stupid?”

Ryan broke into a laugh. “Man, you will never believe what happened to me.”

“Hold it.” Farland pulled a notebook from a shirt pocket, flipped it open about halfway through. He glanced between it and the front bumper of Ryan’s truck.

“What is it?”

“What the hell are you doing driving a stolen truck, Ryan? You’ve got two lots full of trucks.”

“Stolen, my ass. This is my truck. You’ve seen me drive it a hundred times. Look, here’s my ‘Football players do it with leather balls’ bumper sticker.”

“Yeah, you’re right, it is.” Farland approached and bent to inspect the license plate. He looked away, considering. “Someone could have switched plates on you.”

“Look, I don’t give a shit about that right now. I know you’re not going to believe this, but a robot drove me off the road.”

“A robot.”

“That’s right, a robot.”

“What did this robot look like?”

There was something odd about Farland’s tone, something that caused worry to flutter in Ryan’s stomach.

There was no amusement, no condescension in Farland’s voice. In fact, he’d gone tense, almost rigid.

“Uh, I didn’t see all of it. Kind of a white, what do you call it, hull. Metal hands. Face like an upside-down triangle with red lights for eyes—”

Farland snapped into motion, returning to his cruiser. He reached in to grab his radio mike.

Ryan shut up. Something very bad was going on here, and he was suddenly glad that he was only on the outskirts of it.