Dark Futures

can.'

WEST OF ROSARIO, ARGENTINA

JUNE 1994

Willard Parnell was waiting for them at the Retiro bus station in Buenos Aires. He helped them with their luggage, and they got in his orange Jeep Cherokee. Soon they were cruising out of the city, heading for the Tejada estancia. It was all quick, neat and efficient. No one had looked at them suspiciously on the bus or at the station. It still seemed like no one had recognized them since they crossed the Mexican border and started working their way south.

John sat in the back of the Cherokee, while his mother talked to Willard in the front. Through the Cherokee's tinted windows, John watched the Pampas roll by, mile after mile  of pasturelands,  seemingly  endless.  They headed towards Cordoba on Ruta Nacional 9, then turned south after 100 miles or so, passing through more grain and cattle country, stretched out under a cold, clear winter sky.

Sarah was lost in her thoughts, and Willard kept quiet for a long time. Then he said, 'You must have had lots of problems getting this far.'

Willard was a tall, redheaded man in his twenties, one of Raoul Tejada's most trusted operators: a cattleman, cook, courier-a streetfighter when needed. He loved vehicles and aircraft. Clearly he enjoyed driving the gutsy Cherokee, keeping the accelerator down and overtaking the occasional vehicles that they met.

'A few,' Sarah said grudgingly.

'Your ID work out fine?'

'Sure,' she said. John and Sarah were traveling under false names. According to their passports and other papers, they were internationalistas, originally from the U.S., who'd lived in various parts of Central and South America for the past eight years. That much was almost true, for they'd seldom stayed in the U.S. for long if they could help it. Sarah was supposedly a nurse named Deborah Lawes. John was used to being David Lawes, though his identity was no secret from the Tejadas and their people.

'So, what, other problems, then?' Willard gave a knowing chuckle, as though he could guess what troubles they'd been through. But he didn't know anything.

Physically, it had been tough, especially with Sarah's bad leg. They'd used an assortment of trains, buses, choppers and cars—some hired, some borrowed, some stolen. Whenever possible, they'd relied on their contacts, particularly the Salcedas' network.

'Only what you'd expect,' Sarah said. 'We holed up with Enrique and Yolanda for a few days about three weeks ago. They got us on a chopper ride to Mexico after that. Since then, we've hardly stopped moving. It took a full week just getting from Panama to Colombia.' She glanced behind her. 'John was great. He hasn't complained, all the way through.'

'Hey, thanks, Mom,' John said, embarrassed by the praise, but grinning all the same. 'You've been pretty cool, too.'

'It's not easy doing this when you don't want to be recognized,' she said. When necessary, they'd hiked their way south, covering some long distances on foot before they got to Bogota. Mostly, they'd traveled overnight, trying to nurse themselves in the daylight hours.

'Anyway,' Willard said, 'it's good to see you guys back. Raoul can do with another pair of hands, just now. Or two pairs, if it comes that, right, John?'

'Yeah, sure,' John said.

'Business is good, Sarah—you know what I mean?' Willard made a pistol shape with his right hand, taking it off the steering wheel. He squeezed back an imaginary trigger a couple of times, laughing. 'Kapow!'

'I'm glad Raoul's doing well,' Sarah said non-commitally. 'I'm looking forward to seeing him. Gabriela, too.'

'Don't worry, you'll get a hero's welcome. That was pretty cool what you did back in L.A. What happened to the big guy that was with you, the one on CNN?'

'He had to go away,' Sarah said.

'Yeah?' Willard gave her a sideways look, just to let her know he'd asked a fair question and she was jerking him around. But then he shrugged. 'All right, keep your secrets. I'm just asking.'

'I'll tell you about it later,' Sarah said. 'But you won't believe me—that's the trouble.'

'No? You might be surprised what I'd believe.'

'In that case, you've been hanging around with Raoul too much.'

'Could be. Raoul's ideas are kind of infectious. Anyway, forget it. I did some good business before picking you guys up-I dropped off a consignment to a big customer back in Buenos Aires. Better still, Raoul's made some contacts in Croatia. Things are looking up round here.'

Raoul and Gabriela Tejada ran a huge cattle estate, but their sideline was selling firearms, imported from the U.S. Most of the business was legitimate, but they also provided guns to customers who didn't like legal formalities, mainly private security firms. John wasn't sure he liked that, but he'd grown up with guns and other weapons. For as long as he could remember, he'd been hanging out in helicopters over the hills and jungles of Central America, or in compounds with underground weapons caches—or actually getting down and dirty with the guerrilla fighters in Nicaragua and El Salvador. It was something they'd had to do, part of their training for Judgment Day.

'Anyway,' Willard said, 'we'll look after you. You're in safe hands now.'

'Thanks. Just a long, hot shower would really help.'

'Yeah, I expect we can manage that.'

The good thing was that the Tejadas' estancia was pretty neat—luxurious compared to most places John had lived. They were going back to civilization.

Sarah tried to avoid any more conversation, looking out the window, away from Willard. After a few more attempts to get her to talk, he left her alone. 'Sorry, Willard,' she said. 'I'm tired.' But John could tell that it wasn't just that. She was thinking. Something was bothering her, maybe lots of things.

She hadn't sounded too happy about Raoul's gunrunning to Croatia. The trouble was, they'd had to join up with whatever groups would accept them, and give them the kind of experience they'd need to face the nuclear winter and Skynet's machines. They couldn't be too choosy. From time to time, they'd found themselves hanging out with different groups who had totally different aims. As he'd gotten older, John had figured out that the American mercenaries who'd befriended Sarah in Nicaragua had nothing in common with the El Salvadoran compas they'd stayed with for months when he was five or six, learning how to melt away from a military attack.

He still didn't understand the politics behind it all, and didn't care about socialism and capitalism and all that stuff; he'd work it out when he grew up. Maybe his mom didn't understand it either, or not all of it. But all those people did actually have one thing in common. They had skills to pass on, skills that might come in handy when Skynet was in control, and humans were forced to fight back or be exterminated.

But hadn't they stopped that from happening, back in L.A., when they took out Cyberdyne? So what good were all those cool skills now?

That was assuming they'd succeeded when they blew up Cyberdyne, actually stopped its research. That Oscar Cruz guy had sounded pretty confident that Cyberdyne

wasn't finished yet. And there was still that other Terminator arm, left behind at the steel mill. John and Sarah had talked about it for the last few weeks, wondering how much it would help the Cyberdyne researchers follow Miles Dyson's work, if they ever got hold of it.

After a while, Parnell tried once more to talk to Sarah about the raid on Cyberdyne, but she gave the shortest answers she could, mostly just 'Yes' or 'No.' She'd entered a new zone, John guessed, trying to work it all out. Then she said, 'Willard?'

'Yeah?'

'You must think I'm crazy, like everyone else does.'

'Maybe.' He changed lanes to the left, to pass an empty cattle truck. 'But maybe you know something the rest of us don't. Jesus, Sarah, who knows what that government of yours is up to? If you say that this company-'

'Cyberdyne.'

'If you say it had a defense contract to make killer robots, or whatever, how can I argue with you?' He pulled back into the right lane. 'We all know they're hiding things from us. What about those aliens they've got in