C.21

July, Present Day—Friday Afternoon

Tehachapi, California

The burgundy van drove past the front window, left to right, pulling into a streetside parking space that would give its driver a view of the entire face of the restaurant.

Danny scrambled to his feet. He closed and unplugged his laptop, slipping it into his soft-side briefcase, slinging the case’s strap over his shoulder. He reassured himself with a pat on its side that the Colt was still inside it as well. Too rattled to move normally, he skidded to a stop at Linda’s side.

She shook her head at him and hung up. “Still no luck.”

“Scowl’s here.”

“What?”

“Outside. In front. It can see the front door from there.”

“Okay, okay.” Her eyes darted back and forth as she formulated a plan. “You go out the back. I go out the front. Scowl isn’t looking for me, right? I get the pickup going, pull around back, pick you up, and we make a run for it.”

“That’s half a good plan. But it leaves Scowl in a fully functional van. Our truck might be able to outrace it, might not. It probably can’t outrace whatever weapons Scowl’s got with it.” Danny looked around. “Okay, try this. You go out the front door, like you said, get the pickup going.” As he spoke, he pulled off his cap and sunglasses, put them on her. “Pull it around to the far corner from where he’s parked.” Keeping his back to the restaurant’s tables and patrons, he pulled the holstered handgun from his briefcase and handed Linda the briefcase itself. “I’m going to see what I can do about keeping him from chasing us.”

“No, I’ll do that—”

“The instant it sees me, it’s going to act. So you’re the only one who can get the pickup running and out of his line of fire, right?”

She sighed. “Right.”

“So go. You’ll hear a gunshot or two, then I’ll come running and we’ll tear out of here.”

She kissed him. There was no romance in it, just haste. “I hate this.”

“I’ll try to make it up to you while we’re shacking up in the mountains for the next twenty years.”

“You’d better.” She turned and headed for the front door.

Danny tucked the Colt under his shirt and headed for the back door. He was thankful it was a simple exit, not an emergency exit with an “Alarm Will Sound” sign on it. He moved out onto the restaurant’s rear sidewalk and moved to the corner around which the van was parked.

It was still there when he peeked. He drew back. There was nothing in the line of fire between him and the van—good for him now, good for Scowl if the robot detected him here.

He pulled the handgun from its holster, stuffed the holster into the top of his jeans, flipped the weapon’s safety from green to red. He took a couple of quick breaths and spun around the corner, weapon in both hands in the modified Weaver stance Alex had taught him, and aimed straight at the face of a large middle-aged white woman who had materialized there while his back was turned.

She screamed. He swore, then took two steps to the right, getting her out of his line of fire but giving up the coverage of the corner of the building.

Danny fired, once, twice, three times at the van’s rear tires. But nothing happened—neither tire deflated.

He stood there for a moment, confused. Owing to Alex’s training, he was a good shot. He’d been firing at stationary targets at fairly close range, and he knew that he had to have hit them.

Then it dawned on him: The van had been modified to military specifications to carry Scowl’s weight. Those tires were solid, not air-filled.

The van’s windowless rear doors flew open, revealing the vehicle’s third seat, Scowl half-visible above it, the chain gun in its hands. The door interiors were crusted with dried brown fluid.

Danny froze for a split second. If he moved back to the cover of the corner of the building, he would draw Scowl’s fire across the woman who still stood there shrieking.

Danny continued out from the building, across the narrow paved lane that gave diners access to the rear parking lot, and dove behind a parked car as Scowl opened fire.

Scowl’s chain gun sounded like the world’s largest blender trying to puree a Chrysler. The car Danny huddled behind and the car ahead of it shook as their front ends began to disintegrate.

Danny peered under the car. He could see the legs of the screaming woman as she finally jolted into motion and ran around behind the restaurant. He heard a metallic crash and saw Scowl’s tracks land on the pavement three cars ahead of him. The Terminator must have shoved itself through the van’s rear seat. Now Scowl navigated around the intervening cars, coming straight at Danny.

Danny stood, fired off two quick shots. There was virtually no chance that he could disable Scowl with this weapon, but if he did nothing, the robot would simply roll up beside him and riddle him with depleted uranium rounds.

Danny’s bullets created sparks as they ricocheted from Scowl’s hardened chassis. Scowl adjusted its aim, traversing toward Danny—

The pickup truck roared out from the other side of the restaurant and crashed into Scowl, crushing the robot into the body of the black sports car it stood beside. Danny saw the chain gun go flying, saw Linda bang her head on the truck’s steering wheel from the sudden stop.

The sports car was crushed. Scowl and the pickup were not. The Terminator, folded over backward by the impact, straightened up and brought both its hands down on the truck’s hood. One crumpled the metal of the hood as it gripped. The other slid closer to Linda before biting into the hood. Foot by foot, Scowl began to climb along the hood toward the cab.

Danny heard Linda grind the truck’s gears and the pickup lurched backward. Scowl held on, riding the truck’s nose, an obscene parody of a hood ornament. Danny charged forward as the truck went out of sight on the other side of the sandwich shop.

He rounded the building’s corner in time to see Linda spin the wheel. The truck arced back into a parking space along the front of the restaurant and stopped, its nose pointed toward the street. Scowl heaved itself up, making another handhold two feet closer to Linda. Danny raced toward the truck.

Linda accelerated forward just as Danny reached the side of its bed. He threw himself over the side, onto the tarpaulin stretched across the bed, and nearly slid off the rear, but his feet caught against the tailgate.

The truck lurched as it bumped over the curb between parking lot and street. Linda sent it into a too-tight rightward turn to avoid oncoming traffic from the left; cars coming from that side honked, skidded.

Danny, caught off-guard by the motion, rolled toward the truck’s left side. He felt the rows of crated supplies shift under his back, then he fetched up against the metal side of the truck bed. Flailing around with his free hand, he gripped a loop of the nylon cable he’d used to tie the tarpaulin down across the truck bed. Finally he was able to haul himself upright.

Scowl was still on the hood of the truck, one hand gripping the gap where the hood nearly met the windshield. It drew itself up toward Linda, raising its free arm.

Danny managed to half-kneel, half-stand so that he could see over the truck’s cab. “Hey, Terminator!” he shouted. “I’m Danny Ávila. I’m the one you’re looking for.”

Scowl did freeze in its forward progress. It looked up at Danny.

Danny didn’t mistake the delay for hesitation. He knew the robot was capturing a visual image of his face and comparing it to an internal image, or perhaps transmitting the scan to Skynet for confirmation. It wouldn’t take long, a second or two.

He switched the Colt’s safety to green and tucked the weapon into the back of his pants. He could almost feel his brother Alex snarling at him—“Don’t ever do that, it’s a sure way to sustain a spine injury.” But now wasn’t the time to listen to advice from a brother dead two years.

He yanked up the forward edge of the tarpaulin, tearing it free from the cords holding it down, and scrabbled in the tops of the nearest cardboard boxes for something to use as a weapon. Maybe they’d loaded the explosives here. But, no, there was nothing but fishing tackle, MREs and freeze-dried camp foods, the crowbar, a portable grill.

Scowl’s hand came down hard on the forward edge of the top of the cab. The Terminator hauled itself up so that it lay across the hood and windshield, and another lunge would put its other hand on the cab’s near edge.

Linda swerved, an effort to throw Scowl free, but the robot held tight, bending and crushing the metal of the truck’s top under its fingers.

And there it was, the idea Danny needed. He grabbed the crowbar. “When I say stop, stop!” he shouted, loud as he could, and hoped that Linda had heard him, hoped that she understood his words were for her, not Scowl. He managed to get both feet down on the truck bed, between the two rows of boxes, where he and Linda had slept last night.

Scowl’s free hand reached up, came down.

Danny, as familiar as any human alive with the way Terminators moved, the way they chose to interpret and implement their orders, swung the crowbar, positioning it under Scowl’s descending forearm. When the Terminator’s hand clutched the rear edge of the cab, the crowbar was pinned beneath its wrist.

Scowl released its grip with its other hand and swung that arm up high. One more lunge forward and its fist would come down on Danny’s head, pulping it beyond recognition.

Danny, legs braced, yanked up on the crowbar with both hands. “Stop stop stop!” he shouted.

Danny’s leverage twisted Scowl’s forward hand free of its grip on the cab. Linda hit the brakes. Suddenly Scowl was hurtling away from him, sliding forward across the truck hood and scoring paint from it in half-a-dozen grooves, and then the Terminator was off the truck, rolling out of control across the highway pavement.

“Go!” Danny hammered with the crowbar on the truck cab to emphasize his words.

Linda hit the accelerator again, nearly pitching Danny back across the tarpaulin. Linda swerved, avoiding Scowl as it rolled to a stop, avoiding even the hand it reached up to try to snare the truck’s wheel well.

Danny watched as Scowl pushed itself upright on its tracks. The robot was already diminished with distance as it stared after Danny and Linda, then turned around and zipped back the way it had come, oblivious to the stares of drivers in Linda’s wake.

Danny dropped the crowbar back into the box and took a half-dozen deep breaths. When he sat on the right-hand stack of boxes, he could see Linda’s eyes in the rearview mirror. He gave her a smile of reassurance he did not really feel.

*   *   *

Scowl rolled back along the highway shoulder toward the sandwich shop at its maximum land speed, in excess of 30 mph. There was no question of chasing the truck; it could not match that vehicle’s speed. There was also no question of forcing one of the many vehicles in the immediate vicinity to stop so that it could commandeer new transportation; none of them was equipped with the modified controls Scowl needed to drive. So the clear next step on its agenda was a return to its van and a resumption of the pursuit.

It transmitted to Skynet the current location, direction, and approximate speed of its prey, plus the fact that Scowl had been seen by civilians.

Skynet responded with a reiteration of Scowl’s primary goal, but rescinded considerations of staying out of sight.

A minute later, when Scowl rounded a street corner and came within sight of the sandwich shop, it determined that it had new secondary goals. A white patrol car of the county Sheriff’s Department was now positioned beside its van and a uniformed man was speaking with a cluster of nonuniformed humans. As soon as Scowl came within sight, those humans pointed at the Terminator, many of them offering noises Scowl interpreted as nonstandardized alarms.

The uniformed man spun, froze for a significant fraction of a second, and reached for its sidearm. Scowl continued its forward progress. Most of the humans uttering alarm noises scattered.

Scowl ran into the uniformed man and the three remaining humans. Its speed and mass hurled them all away from it. The impact was accompanied by cracking and crunching noises.

Only one of the humans, the uniformed one, seemed to be armed. Scowl diverted its path and rolled across that individual. By the time the robot’s treads left the human’s head, it was no longer issuing vocalizations, nor was it reaching for its weapon.

Scowl cleared that secondary goal from its roster and returned to its primary goal. Ignoring the other humans, both the injured ones and those who were fleeing, it moved around behind the van, shutting the bloodstained doors, then moved to the right side of the van and activated the wheelchair lifter. In a minute it would be back on the road, no more than a few miles behind its prey.

*   *   *

Once he was back in the cab of the truck, it took Danny a couple of minutes to get his breathing under control, to calm down to the point that his heart wasn’t pounding hard in his chest. “Thanks,” he said, then snorted with amusement. “Not a whole lot of meaning in that one word, I guess. Thanks for not letting me die back there.”

Linda was pale. She did not look at him; she was concentrating on the road ahead, on the rearview mirror. “No problem.”

“Linda, it’s only coming after me. If we separate, figure out somewhere we can meet—”

“No. I know that thing’s only a machine, but it killed Mama, killed all the hands, killed Pete Fitch. I’m going to see it destroyed. And I hope it transmits a picture of my face to its boss, Skynet, as it’s winking out.”

“Fair enough. You might want to put some more speed on. It’s sure to be after us soon.”

“Yeah.”

“If only we could predict when it was coming for us, had even a little bit of advance notice…” He saw his briefcase tucked in behind Linda’s seat. “Oh, man, I’m stupid.”

“No, you’re egotistical. Stupid has never been one of your faults.”

He hauled the bag onto his lap, slipped the notebook computer out of it. “Not this time. Stupid. Scowl’s a wireless network hub.”

“Come again?”

“It’s set up as a short-range wireless network hub so it can do a bunch of things. For instance, it receives transmissions from the camera and the instrumentation on its van and rebroadcasts them to receivers, like this computer, set up to pick them up.”

“Okay…” Linda put that together. “So you can see what the van’s camera sees.”

“When it’s within range. A couple of miles. But more importantly, Scowl’s set up to send data to and receive it from Skynet.”

“Except communications channels are all clogged up by the virus.”

“Except, except do you think Skynet’s going to allow the radio frequencies, the land lines it’s using for its own purposes, to be frozen up by the virus?”

“No, of course not.” She finally looked at him. “So you could use Scowl itself to send transmissions to Skynet.”

“Scowl’s my last available back door. So I need to modify that last package to send through Scowl.” He looked around. “Get off the road and behind something. If I know Scowl, it’s going to be coming up on our rear end at full speed. If it doesn’t spot us by the time it concludes that it must have reached our position, it will assume that we hid and are either still hiding or doubled back. So it’ll begin a new search pattern. We need someplace we can hole up for a few hours while I put together that last package … and then we need someplace we can keep it for at least a few minutes while I do the upload.”

“Keep it.” She sounded dubious. But she obligingly pulled off the road and onto a side trail leading up the slope of one of Tehachapi’s mountains. In moments they topped a low ridge and were out of sight of the road. “You’re talking about tying that thing to a chair while you pump radio waves at it?”

“No. I’m talking about getting it in a narrow, confined area where it’s certain we are, so it has to search for us.” When she pulled the truck to a stop, he got out. Together they walked back to the ridge, then went flat to watch the road below. “So it searches for us for several minutes, all while it stays within broadcast range of my computer and receives that last upload.”

“And then?”

“And then we destroy the son of a bitch.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Half again as fast as the surrounding traffic, Scowl’s van roared by on 58.

“I know just the place,” Linda said.

“That’s my girl.”