“Olsen’s dead.”
A longer pause.
“Proceed to ex-fil point. We’ll send pickup. How many survivors are there?”
Straightening, Connor regarded the new valley that had appeared where formerly there had been flat desert and a few low, scrub-covered hills. Still settling dust continued to obscure the view. The vast satellite array, the rest of the Skynet center, all the poor, pitiful human prisoners, every one of his comrades—dead and buried as the ages. Remembering that he was isolated only physically, he lifted the mike once again.
“One.”
The voice on the radio came back much subdued.
“Repeat—please.”
“One!” Connor snapped.
Perhaps surprisingly, nothing further was heard from the mike. After waiting to make sure the connection had been cut, Connor put it down, straightened, and started limping away from the chopper. Not because he had a destination in mind—he wasn’t even sure exactly where he was. Not because he feared a resurgence of the T-600 he had finally and definitively put down. He started walking because, if nothing else, he desired to put the scene of colossal devastation and destruction as far behind him as he possibly could.
If he was lucky, he mused as he trudged toward an increasingly stormy horizon, maybe he would find a lizard. In the world in which he now found himself, any companion not made of metal and circuitry was one to be cherished.
***
The storm brought darkness to the desert sooner that it would otherwise have arrived. Frequent flashes of lightning illuminated the scorched and shredded fragments of the day’s reckoning: bits of bone, limbs both human and metal that had been divorced from their owners’ bodies, pieces of machine that had served humans, pieces of machine that had been motivated by their own ruthless and uncompromising drive. Among the organic and metallic debris, nothing moved save clouds and bursts of torrential rain.
Even the birds and insects had fled.
Amid the destruction, a patch of mud stirred. Wormlike shapes emerged from the sodden earth and thrust skyward. Not snakes, not centipedes—human fingers. The fingers were attached to a hand, the hand to a wrist, the wrist to....
A shape arose, cloaked in mud and dripping fragments of debris. Eyes opened, vitreous but not glowing. Dazed by the reality of itself, arms at its sides, the figure tilted back its head to stare at the storming night. Driving rain lashed mud and dirt from face and ribs, limbs and torso. The shape was that of a man.
Naked and in shock, Marcus Wright parted his jaws wide and howled at the sky.
Shivering slightly, Wright wrapped his arms around his naked chest and lowered his gaze to the tormented earth on which he stood. Then he noticed the crashed chopper. Slowly, cautiously, he started toward it. Leaning into the ruined aircraft, a disoriented and bewildered Wright found himself gazing upon the dead body of one of the pilots, a bullet hole punched neatly through his helmet.
Wet, cold, confused, and very, very alone, he could only stand, stare—and wonder.
CHAPTER THREE
Connor thought he might have heard an owl, but it could just as easily have been ground sundered by distant lightning. His hearing wasn’t working too well and his vision was dimmed by exhaustion. He was tired and hungry, but at least dehydration hadn’t been a problem. As the storm had moved on, it had left in its wake dozens of desert pools overflowing with fresh water. He badly wanted to take a bath, but experience dictated otherwise.
In his present debilitated condition, confronting even a damaged Terminator could be dangerous. Encountering one while floating stark naked in fresh water would be fatal.
He didn’t know how the big chopper found him and he didn’t much care. Once he had established to his satisfaction that it was actually crewed by his own kind and was not a Skynet decoy, he hustled out from behind the rocks he had been using for cover and forced himself to travel the rest of the distance to the waiting vehicle on the run. By the time he reached the idling Chinook, someone inside had slung the door open.
Gazing inside, he found himself face to face with a pair of startled troopers. To their credit, they didn’t panic at his sudden appearance. Turning in his seat, the pilot looked back and noted the new arrival.
“RTB?” he asked, his voice indicating that he figured he already knew the survivor’s desired destination.
Connor surprised him.
“Take me to Command,” he snapped.
The pilot hesitated. “Sir?”
“Command. Now.”
Another moment’s hesitation, and then the man nodded.
“Roger—rerouting.”
They were in the air a long time. Improvising out of necessity and working with concentrated biofuels, bioengineers and airframe techs had improved the range of such transports. They had been forced to do so since countless airfields had been rendered untenable by the forces of Skynet.
Hitting heavy weather as soon as they crossed the coast, the storm made it impossible to see land in any direction. For all Connor knew there might have been an entire archipelago underneath the ’copter. If so, it was submerged beneath a steady succession of enormous swells the likes of which Connor had never encountered, not even in recordings of old weather broadcasts.
