Raising his head, Connor stared at his face in the mirror. Both of them were used, beaten up, slightly cracked. Lifting his hands, he wiped at the beads of liquid on his skin. Kate came up behind him.
“Do you want to talk about him, John? You haven’t said anything about him.” He looked over at her. “About Kyle.”
Turning, he nodded toward the doorway.
“He’s out there, somewhere. Alone, I would imagine. And Skynet is hunting him.” He toweled off his face. She was with him, but he was still alone. His gaze met hers.
“This isn’t the future my mother told me about.”
Moving to a nearby desk, he sat down and activated the laptop in front of him. The portable drive that had been given to him by the Russian general protruded from one side. Pulling up a chair, Kate sat down beside him. She didn’t have to look at the screen to know what he was studying so intently. They had discussed it earlier.
“What about the signal? Have the tech people come to any conclusions?”
He shook his head, irritated not at her but at the uncertainty that surrounded what he was viewing.
“No one knows if it’ll work. I don’t know about this, Kate. It doesn’t seem like the sort of backdoor vulnerability Skynet would overlook. Still, if it goes back to the original programming....” His voice trailed away momentarily. “I’ll know more when I get the chance to test it out. In the field. For real.”
She put a comforting arm across his shoulders.
“Why don’t we start out with something small. Something we know. I’ll have our people capture a Hydrobot.” She nodded to her left. “They’re always patrolling the river outside the base perimeter. We’ll bring one in for testing.”
He considered, then nodded his approval.
“Yes, but we have to be careful. We can’t risk Skynet learning that we’ve found this code. If it does, it’ll take immediate steps to close off the vulnerability. Whatever we test this on, we have to destroy.” He went silent, looking past the laptop. An old picture rested there, carefully positioned upright. Reaching out, he picked up the photo of his mother.
“What is it, John?”
“Something’s changed. Something I can’t put my finger on. And in this future, I don’t know that we can win this war.”
“If you saved us once, in another future, then you can save us in this one.”
Doubt colored his response. “This signal has to work. It may be the only way to save Kyle—my father. We’re outnumbered by machines working around the clock. They never have to pause, they never have to pull back and regroup, they never rest. We don’t have a lot of time, Kate. Either we win this and win it soon, or it’s over. For all of us. Kyle won’t be alive for me to send him back to my mother.”
She drew him closer. “Then we fight to the end. We fight for what’s to come.” Leaning over, she kissed him on the cheek. “We fight for the future.” Smiling, she reached out, took his hand, and placed it on her stomach. “We fight for our future.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Not only was there nothing in San Francisco like the country he was presently traversing, there was nothing like it in any of Marcus Wright’s memories. It might well be a fit landscape of hell, he thought to himself as he strode numbly onward. If it was heaven, then the priests and pastors he had briefly known as a child were even further off the mark than he had always suspected.
What place in either afterlife the wreckage of a crashed 747 occupied was a physical and philosophical conundrum he couldn’t even begin to fathom. The metal hulk was empty, deserted, giving no sign anyone had ever been in it or near it. Striding past, he wondered if this piece of limbo had been raised up exclusively for him. Since regaining consciousness (or whatever it was that he was experiencing) he had not seen any indication that the space he was presently exploring was home to so much as another human being.
Much later, his foot kicked aside something that caught the subdued sunlight. It was a shard of reflective red plastic. Kneeling, he wiped away the sand that half buried it. For his efforts he was rewarded with the sight of a highway reflector. Brushing away more sand and grit exposed pavement and a yellow dividing line. Incongruous though it might be in the complete absence of any vehicles, it did provide him with something he had so far been lacking.
A direction.
More hours of walking found him gaining instead of losing strength. That made no sense, but since nothing else seemed to make any sense he saw no reason to question the contradiction. He accepted it just as he accepted the sight of the nearly obliterated hillside sign that was just intact enough to proclaim “HOLLYWOOD.” From his vantage point he had a good portion of the city spread out before him.
Or rather, what had been the city.
Like the metropolis it had once been, the ruins stretched out as far as he could see, the promontory of the Palos Verdes Peninsula looming like a buff shadow in the distance. Of life there were still no signs. In the entire vast vista of destruction, not even the dust moved.
It took him a while to work his way downtown. There he hoped to find potable water, though so far all he had encountered was wreckage and devastation in close-up, from obliterated storefronts to the dinosaurian hulks of cars and trucks, some of which had crumbling skeletons slumped at the wheels.
Something moved in the distance, walking. Though several hundred yards away, there was no mistaking the human shape of the lone figure. Disbelief gave way to a ray of hope. Cupping one hand to his mouth, he yelled.
“Hey!”
The figure turned toward him. It was humanoid—but not human. No human could have supported the oversized machine gun it started to aim. As a shell-shocked Wright gaped at it dumbly, a grim-faced youth appeared as if from nowhere and slammed into him.
They tumbled together behind a heavy forklift as a hail of heavy-caliber shells tore into the pavement where Wright had been standing a moment earlier. How they missed him he could not understand. Rising to the fore, half-forgotten instincts took over. Rolling deeper into cover, he found himself face to face with the teen. When the boy spoke, he did not sound young.
“Come with me if you want to live.”
More slugs ripped the air around the forklift as the figure that had trained its weapon on Wright started toward them. Red eyes flickered; scanning, seeking, looking to exterminate. The teen led Wright back around the corner of one crumbling structure. They were out of sight of their attacker and out of range. For the moment.
Facing his young companion, Wright jerked his head back in the direction from which they had come.
“What the hell is...?”
Despite the difference in their ages and the disparity in size, the teen did not hesitate. His open hand clamped across Wright’s mouth, shutting off the older man’s query. In an earlier time and place the blatant physical imposition would have caused Wright to rip the youth’s head clean off. Under the present circumstances, however, he was too confused to do more than accept the gesture.
Pointing in the direction of the bipedal creature that had fired at them, the teen then gestured at his own ear. Only when Wright nodded that he understood did the youth lower his hand from the stranger’s mouth.
Time passed: not much of it, and all of it fraught with tension. Advancing toward them, their pursuer was barely visible, and inclined its head in their direction. The muzzle of its rapid-fire weapon rose. That was when the teen slammed his arm down on something metallic protruding from the side of the building against which he and Wright had been pressed.
The wire that looped around the stalker’s right foot was not thick, but it was unbreakable. Machine and machine gun were turned upside-down as the contracting cable yanked it completely off the ground. Frustrated but not disoriented, it struggled violently at this unexpected interruption of its pursuit.