July 2003 Los Angeles
The Triumph Bonneville motorcycle pounded through the desert night on U.S. 395.
The bike was battered, well used, and loaded with front and rear saddlebags and packs: bedroll, tent, clothing. Survival gear for a man out camping. Or, for a man on the run. From himself.
It was late and although John Connor was aware of the vast city glow in the sky behind him, he didn't look back. He couldn't look back. It was the same dream that had haunted him every night for half of his life. He knew that if he turned and looked over his shoulder Los Angeles would be gone in a blinding flash. He would see nothing but the aftereffects of a five-or ten-megaton thermonuclear sky burst; a city buster, the mushroom cloud roiling and boiling like some insane storm higher into the sky than even the Concorde jet could fly. Flames reaching to heaven, or to hell. People screaming, people on fire, people running to escape a fate that was impossible for them to escape, for any of them to escape.
Christ. On nights like these, even staying awake and moving, he could not block out the horrible nightmares he had since the T-1000 tried to kill him and his mother when he was thirteen. For the next decade or so, he dreaded the night, dreaded the visions of a world gone insane, dreaded the day on which Skynet powered up and took control of the world. Judgment Day. The day of atonement for all human sins, he'd been told by a crazy old preacher on the Sonoran Desert, maybe eight years ago.
Connor was old for his age. By the time he was in his mid twenties, he had seen too much, had gone through too much trauma for him to have turned out so-called normal. At five feet eleven he was built like a soccer player, lean muscle mass, fine features, dark serious eyes beneath medium-cropped dark hair covered now by a black motorcycle helmet. In jeans, long-sleeved shirt, and old brown suede jacket, he was just an anonymous traveler in the middle of the night.
Going nowhere since August 29, 1997, came and went without Judgment Day. Without the global thermonuclear war that Skynet should have waged on its own.
A war after which John Connor would have emerged as the leader of the human resistance. The man who was supposed to save the world. The man on whom the hope for the survival of humans depended.
But the war never came.
John Connor did not become a hero. Instead he drifted. One town to another. One job after the other. Through the night, on his motorcycle, or in isolated campgrounds, alone with his endless nightmares. No friends. No purpose.
He didn't have to close his eyes to see what the future would have been like. He could see himself, older, grizzled, battle-scarred, and weary. Bodies lying everywhere, many of them reduced to skeletons because of the heat; flesh and muscle and soft tissues completelyjburned away.
It was night, like now, only bonfires burned all around him. His troops were gathered, tired, frightened, yet determined. They wore dirty, tattered uniforms, their eyes glistened with reflections from the flames.
They'd brought down a flying war machine. Hunter-Killers, they were called. How he knew this he could not determine, but he knew it nonetheless.
They were celebrating their meager victory. John strode through the troops, climbed up onto what remained of the H-K, and raised a fist. It was a war cry. A rally. Behind him some soldiers raised a horribly dirty, battered American flag.
The soldiers rose.
Connor turned to face his... wife.
The hot sun beating on John Connor's back felt good, as did the heft of the eleven-pound sledgehammer he swung. After last night any physical labor was welcome. Labor meant life.
Pergo Contractors were demolishing a two-square-block section of old buildings and what had once been a courthouse or a brick school at the edge of Watts. Dozens of day laborers, John included, were hired from the hall to be paid in cash every afternoon when they got off.
It was mindless labor, hard physical work that blotted out his dreams?but only just. Still, when he stopped to take a drink of water, or to wipe the sweat from his forehead, he looked toward the city center to make sure that Los Angeles still survived. That the buildings still stood, that Judgment Day never happened.
Which left him what, he wondered. The bombs didn't fall because the T-1000 had failed to kill him. Had failed to stop the death of Miles Bennet Dyson. Had failed to prevent the bankruptcy of Cyberdyne Systems. The computers didn't take control.
And Connor had become?nothing. Driving into work this morning he had passed through sections of the city that seemed to be nothing more than endless boulevards of strip malls, car dealerships, fast-food joints, billboards. Then slums where transients lived under bridges, in cardboard boxes, their meals gathered from Dumpsters, their clothing discards; throw-aways, them and their meager possessions.
There were others like him somewhere in the city. Probably around the world. People who were supposed to have survived Judgment Day; people who should have become freedom fighters: the resistance led by John Connor. So what were they doing now? Were they having the same nightmares? Having the same impossible time fitting in.
A woman in a car beside him was talking on her cell phone propped under her chin while putting on makeup and driving. Safe, or so she thought, in her own little air-conditioned cocoon.
The kids in their car, the bass speakers booming across the street
The motorcycle cop who gave him the once-over before turning away and driving off with a total lack of interest John Connor was a cipher. A zero. A nonentity.
None of them, not the woman, nor the kids, nor the cop, held any significance for him, though he knew that they should. Intellectually he knew that he could not continue his We as a drifter. He needed a purpose. And if it wasn't as leader of the resistance movement in some future world, then so be it
His responsibility was to himself, here and now. He no longer had his mother to look after. He'd never known his biological father?the mystery man supposedly back from the future?who had come back to save Sarah Connor from death so that she could give birth to John. In fact, the only father he'd ever known, and that was only for a very brief time in his life, was a T-800. The Terminator who'd come back to save the young John Connor from another machine sent by Skynet.
The criminal psychiatrists had thought that John's mother was crazy. He knew how they would classify him if he let himself be known. Like mother like son. Lock him away.
That night Connor had a variation of the dream, which just lately was becoming so real that he was starting to have a hard time distinguishing what was imaginary and what wasn't
He was sitting on a bridge, looking down at the swirling water, a beer in his hand. Jump or not The decision kept flickering in and out of focus for him.
Lean forward. Just a little, until his center of gravity was not behind him, but forward, out over the void.
He dropped the beer bottle instead, and as he watched it fall toward the water he was transported to the future, to the dream within a dream. A landscape of bodies and skeletons; of Hunter-Killer machines in the air, of tens of hundreds, tens of thousands of robot warriors, their metal bodies gleaming in the light from hundreds of fires, as they sought out human beings, killing them with laser cannons. Burning, searing flesh.
This time the battle was fought along a coastline somewhere. In the distance John could see the burned and burning hulks of oceangoing freighters.
Nothing was safe.
The entire world was on fire.
Connor suddenly awoke in a cold sweat and sat up. He raised his hands and watched how they shook.
He was falling apart Disintegrating. The waiting was
driving him crazy. Something was about to happen. Something important
After he'd collected his pay, he'd stopped for some beer and a few groceries and then had set up camp in a trash-filled vacant lot a few blocks from work. He'd started a campfire and after he'd eaten, had fallen into a deep sleep in which he had been transported to the future and the past and the present all in a jumbled mess.
He got out of his sleeping bag, walked a few feet away, and urinated on a pile of trash, an angry animal marking its territory.
For a long time he stood stock still, listening to the sounds of the city: a siren somewhere in the distance, a car alarm in the next block, a single gunshot that he was able to identify as a 9mm semiautomatic pistoL
He turned and stared at his campsite and his motorcycle. He could not stay here. Something, some inner
