Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire (17 page)

“What do we do?” Zac asked.

Callahan huffed out a breath.

“If we can’t go back, the only other direction is forward,” he said.

“You mean go in
further
?”

“Skynet’s trying to punch this tunnel into the camp, right?” Callahan said. “Then sooner or later, it has to open up the far end. If we can get up there, maybe we can find a way to crack it open ahead of them and get out.”

“We’re sure not using the tunnel with that T-700 back there,” Kyle warned.

“I know,” Callahan said. “That means we’ll have to go that way.” He pointed downward. “There’s empty space down there—you can feel the air flow. Maybe we can travel underneath the tunnel and find a way back up some place where the machine back there can’t see us.”

“And if we can’t?” Zac asked.

“Then we won’t be any worse off than we are now,” Kyle said. “I’m game.”

Zac sighed. “Me too.”

“Okay,” Callahan said. “Any idea how we get down there without bringing the whole metal nest down on top of us?”

“We could wait until the next group is marching by,” Zac suggested. “Their footsteps should cover any noise we make.”

Ten minutes later, as the Terminators again went marching back toward the front of the tunnel, the three of them slipped down the angled piles of debris into the darkness. Distantly, Kyle wondered what they would find down there.

Or whether any of Connor’s people would ever find them.

Barnes and Williams had been trudging through the forest for over an hour, and Barnes was starting to regret he’d ever agreed to go on this little nature hike, when they found the bridge.

“What do you think?” Williams murmured as they crouched in the undergrowth about thirty meters away.

Barnes eyed the structure through the branches, wishing he’d thought to grab a pair of binoculars before leaving San Francisco.

“Looks solid enough,” he murmured back. “I suppose someone
could
have crossed on it.”

“Mm,” Williams said. “Pretty hard to tell how solid a bridge is without trying it.”

“Go ahead,” Barnes offered. “I’ll wait here.”

Williams grunted. “Funny. What do you want to do?”

Barnes looked around. Aside from the bridge, there was nothing here but more forest, the same as the stuff they’d already tromped through. No people, no buildings—no Terminators.

“I guess we could look around a little,” he said doubtfully. “See if we can find some trace of this visitor Preston’s so hot to bring in. Or just call it a bust and go back.”

“Can’t say I’m overly thrilled by either option,” Williams said. “But you’re right. You want to flip a coin—?”

“Shh!” Barnes hissed, snapping his head around to the left. Something had rustled over there, loudly enough to be audible over the noise of the river churning through the deep gorge beneath the bridge.

Williams froze, her Mossberg already pointing that direction. Barnes kept his eyes moving, sweeping the area where the sound had come from, while also keeping an eye on their flanks. A nice, loud rustling in the bushes was the oldest trick in the book...

The noise came again. This time Barnes spotted its source: a small rippling in the branches of a thorn bush forty meters away.

“If that’s a Terminator, it’s awfully small,” Williams said softly.

“Aerostats and hydrobots aren’t exactly huge,” Barnes reminded her. It would be just like Skynet to have seeded the forests with some new kind of ground-hugging nasty that they hadn’t run into before. “Stay here—I’ll check it out.” Watching the rippling bush and the ones right beside it, searching for the glint of metal, he started to rise from his crouch.

“Freeze,” a quiet voice ordered from behind him. “Don’t turn around.”

Barnes hissed a curse. And he’d been
watching
for this trick, too,
damn
it. “Easy, friend,” he soothed.

“What makes you think I’m your friend?” the voice countered. “Who are you?”

“Barnes, she’s Williams. You from the town back there?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Your friendly approach to strangers,” Barnes growled. “They say hello with hunting arrows.”

“So you’re not from Baker’s Hollow, either,” the man said. “What are you doing here?”

“We were heading home when we spotted the smoke from the town,” Williams said. “You may have heard our helo coming in early this morning. What’s your name?”

“Where’s home?” the man asked, ignoring the question.

“At the moment, San Francisco,” Williams said. She twitched her left arm, jiggling her red armband. “We’re with the Resistance.”

“Yes, I already saw the armbands,” the man said. “If you’re Resistance, I assume you listen to John Connor?”

Barnes snorted. “All the time.”

“Good,” the man said. “What was in his last broadcast?”

Barnes frowned. Connor’s last broadcast had been over a week ago, before the attack on Skynet Central. He had no idea what Connor had said in that message, and it was clear from Williams’s silence that she didn’t either.

“I don’t know,” he told their captor. “We don’t have time to listen to every broadcast. Who does?”

There was a short pause.

“Skynet does, for one,” he said. Oddly enough, the tension level in his voice had actually gone down. “That’s a point in your favor, actually.”

“Wait a minute,” Barnes said, frowning. “You think we’re
Skynet
? What, we don’t look human enough for you?”

“You look very human,” the man said grimly. “But that isn’t a defining quality anymore.” He murmured some sort of curse under his breath. “Unfortunately, aside from cutting you open, I don’t know any way to prove you’re who you claim.”

The skin on the back of Barnes’s neck began to tingle.

“Let’s not do anything drastic,” he said carefully. “There’s got to be some way we can prove ourselves.”

“While we’re thinking, how about telling us your name?” Williams suggested.

There was a short pause.

“Call me Jik,” the man said.

“You a pilot?” Williams asked.

“No,” Jik said. “Why?”

“
Jik
sounds like a pilot’s call sign,” Williams said. “Who’s your friend out there?”

“My friend?” Jik asked. “Oh. This.” The distant bush rustled again. “Some rope tied to a small branch. Simple but effective. If you spotted smoke in Baker’s Hollow, what are you doing way out here?”

“Hunting a Terminator,” Barnes told him. “It headed up this side of the river, and we wanted to see where it went. Or whether it just gave up and went away.”

“Oh, it didn’t go away,” Jik said sourly. “It’s somewhere to the south, I think—I caught a couple of glimpses of it while I was trying to get to the ford.”

“So
you’re
the one it’s hunting?” Williams asked.

“So it would seem,” Jik said. “And be advised that there are
two
T-700s on this side of the river, not just one. I shot the other one earlier, during all the gunfire. But I only had one round left, and that wasn’t enough to kill it.”

Barnes felt a cautious stirring of hope.

“You only had one shot?”

“But I got its weapon away from it before it recovered,” Jik said, an edge of warning in his voice. “In case you were thinking I’m bluffing back here.”

“No, of course not,” Barnes said. “Those G11s are heavy, aren’t they?”

“Heavy enough,” Jik agreed. “But I’m sure I’d be able to get off a couple of rounds before my biceps gave out.”

“What did you mean, looks aren’t a defining quality anymore?” Williams asked.

“I mean that Skynet’s come up with something new,” Jik said grimly. “A human heart and organs wrapped up inside metal.”

Williams inhaled sharply. “You mean
Marcus
?”

“Was that its name?”

“
His
name,” Williams corrected harshly. “
His
name was Marcus Wright.”

“Well, its name isn’t Marcus Wright anymore,” Jik told her. “I killed it. Or destroyed it, however you want to put—”

“Wait a second,” Barnes interrupted. “
You
killed it?”

“I just said that,” Jik said.

“Yeah,” Barnes muttered.

Only that was impossible. He’d seen Marcus Wright die himself, and it hadn’t been at the hands of anyone named Jik.

“When and where’d this happen?”

“Back in the forest, a couple of days ago,” Jik told him. “Why? Was it a pet or something?”

Barnes looked at Williams. She was looking back at him, her face gone suddenly pale.

“It wasn’t Marcus,” she breathed. “My God. There were
two
of them?”

“What do you mean, two of them?” Jik demanded.

“She means the one you killed wasn’t the one we called Marcus,” Barnes told him. He eased his head to the side, just far enough to see Jik out of the corner of his eye. The man was a little taller and thinner than Barnes, with sunken cheeks, unkempt brown hair, and a scraggly beard.

And he was indeed hefting a Terminator G11.

“Look, can we maybe point the gun somewhere else—?” Barnes began.

And then, right at the edge of Barnes’s vision, the dark metal skull and glowing red eyes of a T-700 appeared from behind a tree.

“Behind you!” Barnes snapped, leaping to his feet and spinning his 542 around toward the Terminator. He caught a glimpse of Jik raising his own weapon—

Barnes’s rifle was barely halfway to target when a burst of fire from the G11 blasted in his ear. Reflexively, he winced back, his body tensing in anticipation of pain from torn muscle and shattered bone.

But the impact and pain didn’t come... and it was only as Barnes took a second look at Jik’s face that he realized the man’s eyes weren’t focused on him and Williams. He was looking at something beyond them, over their shoulders.

Oh, hell
.

And then, the barrel of Barnes’s assault rifle arrived on target, and there was no more time for thought or worry or wondering how close the Terminator was that was coming up behind him. He squeezed the trigger, firing a round into the T-700’s torso that staggered the machine back. A quick flick of his thumb shifted the weapon to three-shot mode, and he fired again. The multiple rounds slammed into the metal chest, this time nearly knocking the T-700 off its feet. Williams was shouting something as Barnes fired another burst, her words lost in the racket of his own fire and the chatter from Jik’s weapon. A third burst from the 542 spun the T-700 halfway around, and Barnes finally had enough breathing space to throw a quick look behind him.

The second Terminator hadn’t been hiding behind a tree like the one Barnes was shooting at. From its current position at the edge of the gorge, he concluded it had been waiting out of sight below ground level, probably hanging onto the nearly sheer side of the drop-off to the river. It had no doubt climbed up the bank while the three of them were talking, concealing itself in the tall grasses that lined both sides of the gorge.

Only now, the steady hammering from Jik’s G11 was threatening to knock it back over the edge and into the rushing water ten meters below.

But only until Jik’s gun ran dry. The instant that happened, the machine would get its balance back, and the beleaguered humans would be caught in the middle of a pincer.

Unless Barnes could take out his target first.

He turned back around, to find that Williams had left her position and was heading off in a curved path toward Barnes’s target.

Barnes fired again, staggering the Terminator with another three-shot burst. It was essentially the same tactic they’d used back at the ford, with Barnes covering Williams while she got close enough to use her shotgun to its best advantage.

On the plus side, this time the Terminator didn’t have a weapon of its own. On the minus side, there wasn’t a nice convenient river separating them.

Which meant that if Williams got too close the Terminator could simply reach out and snap her neck.

Barnes flipped his rifle back to single-shot, spacing out his blasts, keeping the machine off-balance while he waited for Williams to get in range.

And then, Jik’s chattering gun went silent.

Cursing, Barnes threw another look over his shoulder. With the hail of lead no longer battering it, the other T-700 steadied itself and straightened back to its full height. Its eyes seemed to take them all in...

“Williams!” Barnes snapped.

“I know!” Williams shouted back. There was the boom of a shotgun— “Go—I’ve got this one.”

Barnes spun around, swinging the 542 toward his new target. The T-700 was already on the move, striding through the grass and dead leaves toward them.

And then, as Barnes lined up his sights on the Terminator’s torso, the machine gave a sudden jerk, its stride faltering, its body and limbs weaving around as if it was drunk.

And as it turned its head to the side Barnes saw that an arrow had unexpectedly sprouted in the back of the machine’s neck.

Dead center in the Terminator’s partially exposed motor cortex.

Behind Barnes, Jik’s machinegun opened fire again with a new magazine.

“No!” Barnes shouted to him, jabbing a finger back toward Blair’s target. “I’ve got this one.”

He glanced back long enough to confirm that Jik had understood. Then, breaking into a full-bore sprint, he charged straight toward the staggering Terminator.

Painfully aware of the terrible risk he was taking.

With that arrow buried in its motor cortex, the T-700’s tracking and balance systems were temporarily shot to hell. But the control chip was already rerouting its systems around the damage, and if the machine recovered before Barnes reached it, he would be in the worst and possibly the very last fight of his life.

The T-700 was groping for the arrow now. The skeletal hand found it, snapped off half of the shaft.

And leaping into the air, Barnes rotated his body ninety degrees forward and slammed feet-first into the Terminator’s torso.

The machine fell backward, slamming onto its back with enough impact to drive what was left of the arrow even farther into its skull. Barnes jumped back to his feet, lined up his 542 on the metal forehead, and fired.