"Heads up!" came John's voice, faint down the stairs.
"Won't he try another entrance?" Dieter said.
"No, he knows John and I are here," Sarah said, with a bleakness that added years to the age her voice sounded. "And he… it… will figure that the highest
probability is to head straight for us. They're hard to stop."
They must be, if they can take half a dozen assault-rifle slugs in the belly, Dieter thought. Cautiously he peered over the top of the couch into the glare of the lights outside.
An arm came over the edge of the retaining wall at the lower end of the lawn, holding the pistol grip of a rifle in one hand — Galil or Kalishnikov, he couldn't tell which. No problem, nobody could control —
The rifle's muzzle began strobing red in the night, precise three-round bursts.
One by one the floodlights died, and darkness settled over the estancia buildings… darkness, and more silence than usual. Many of the creatures of the night had prudently shut up, when humans were hunting.
Or things that look human, Dieter thought, feeling the eeriness of that impossibly precise shooting clutch at his stomach. No time. Think about it later.
Sarah slipped goggles down over her eyes, handed him a pair; he donned them, adjusting the strap for his larger head. Israeli manufacture; not the latest model but solid electronics. The night turned a bright silvery green, and he could see the man —
The Terminator, he thought.
— climbing over the edge of the wall, coming forward with the assault rifle in one hand and an Uzi in the other, using both as if they were light pistols. Just as the figure in the tape from the police station had done, the one that killed seventeen armed men. The clothing across its middle was shredded, the fabric
wet with blood. Beneath the gore he thought he saw something shining.
"How are we going to stop it?" he shouted.
"Draw its fire!" Sarah snapped back.
I defer to your knowledge, he thought, and emptied the Glock at the looming figure marching toward them at a brisk walk.
The bullets struck; he could see them hit, punching holes in the leather coat. The face was his own, but it didn't even twitch — just turned toward him like a turret swiveling, weapons coming up. A nightmare, in which he tried to kill himself and couldn't. ,
He ducked, and automatic fire chewed at the thick stone of the window ledge; ricochets whined and howled into the house. Sarah thumbed the selector switch of her M-16 to full auto, popped up, and hosed the clip into the approaching thing. It fell back, staggered, flopped onto its back… and began to move again.
Dieter's mind gibbered as his hands went through the automatic motions of reloading — sixteen rounds in a Clock, and he had only the one spare magazine.
Perhaps if we pump enough lead into it, it will be too heavy to stand?
Then a sound came from the floor above them. BRACK! The Barrett rifle firing; firing a heavy machine-gun round with a slug the size of a man's thumb, designed for use against armored cars and military helicopters.
Dieter had turned to fire again, feeling like he was using a child's slingshot; he saw the massive form of the Terminator fly backward six feet and flop down.
BRACK. Another of the heavy bullets slammed into the thing's body; the Austrian felt his eyes going wide. He'd seen armored fighting vehicles blow up from less damage. BRACK. BRACK.
The body lay sprawled fifteen yards from the window, spread-eagled, weapons gone. Dieter suppressed an impulse to empty his pistol into it and then go for a bulldozer and a load of concrete. He forced himself to take deep slow breaths, the scent of cordite paradoxically soothing, an element of normality in this nightmare. There was blood welling from the ripped leather and flesh of the dead… machine, he decided. But not nearly enough blood, and no bone fragments or coils of red-purple intestine. Instead, once again, he could see a gleam of metal, and now a spark, as if something electronic were shorting out.
"Well…" he began, turning to Sarah. Her face relaxed as well. Then she looked over his shoulder, and her teeth showed in a snarl.
" Fuck this!" she shouted as he turned and saw the outstretched arms lift, the fingers flex, the face like a death-mask wax of his own rising to look at them again. One eye glowed red in the bloodied, shredded visage.
" Fuck this dicking around. I'm gonna terminate that fucker!"
Sarah was scrabbling at the floor where the rug had lain. Dieter watched incredulously as a section of floor came up; Sarah reached within, and the ripped cloth of her blouse showed a swell of flat female muscle as she lifted out the long tube within. It was fat—88mm—and flared at the end, with two handgrips.
And an optical sight along the left side; the woman heaved it onto her shoulder and snuggled the rest home as she aimed. The Terminator was on its feet again, coming toward them with the stolid unstoppable grace of an avalanche.
Dieter slid down with his back against the wall, flinging his gun arm over his eyes and opening his mouth so that the overpressure of the back-blast wouldn't—
THUD-WSSSSH!
—shred his eardrums. Heat scorched him again, and a feeling as if he'd been hit very hard with a kapok-filled sack all over his body. Firing a recoilless rifle inside a confined space, even a big confined space, wasn't a very good idea.
There wasn't any recoil because the projectile was balanced by a backward blast of hot, high-velocity gas. When he opened his eyes again, he saw Sarah tumbling over on her back, with the Carl Gustav launcher clattering away, and everything left standing in the big living room that hadn't already been overset flying as if a hurricane had struck. From the sound of it, the same thing was happening out in the kitchen, and there was a piteous whining from the puppy cowering under the cast-iron stove.
And out on the lawn… well, a Carl Gustav was supposed to destroy main battle tanks. The Terminator had taken the shaped-charge warhead right on its breastbone, and a huge globe of magenta fire flared in the night. When Dieter blinked away the afterimages, the torso and legs were lying in a shallow crater, juddering with a horrible semblance of life.
The skull, shoulder, and one arm of the Terminator were a little closer to the house. Most of the lower half of the face had been burned away, leaving a sooty residue on what looked like chromium steel alloy that had been burned bare and shiny in spots. There was enough that the eerie resemblance to his own face—
the one he saw shaving every morning—was still there, and it made him want to
scrub the flesh away with acid.
Then the eyes opened, and looked into his. They were dead, starred like broken marbles, but they saw him; the head moved, saw Sarah Connor. A jerk, and the arm moved, too, reaching out, clawing fingers where flesh shredded away from steel into the ground, pulling itself closer.
Dieter gave a cry of loathing and shot again and again, but the mutilated thing didn't so much as glance back at him.
BRACK!
He hadn't even noticed Sarah's son coming up behind him; some detached part of his mind told him that was a sign he was going into shock, a mental fugue state.
The heavy slug slammed the Terminator over on what was left of its back. John's slight teenage form swayed back with the recoil of the massive weapon; even then, Dieter could admire the boy's marksmanship, firing from the hip like that.