the glint of what had to be bone.
'Mike!' she shrieked, scuttling behind the counter toward the kitchen door.
The T-101's orders were to keep a low profile, but this was now impossible. It had also been ordered not to terminate humans without permission. It would probably be best to remove this human from this location. 'Perhaps you'd better show me this place,' the Terminator said, starting forward.
The kitchen door burst open and a middle-aged Hispanic man came through holding an enormous knife. 'Hey!' he shouted as Maria cowered behind him.
'You leave her alone!' Then he, too, saw/smelled the stranger and his jaw dropped.
The Terminator reacted as it always did to a threat. Grasping the man's knife arm, it threw him across the diner. Mike went through the windows and landed in the parking lot with bone-jarring thud.
'Don't hurt him!' Maria cried as the Terminator turned to follow his victim through the window. 'I'll show you where it is!'
The Terminator looked at the man lying in the parking lot and estimated his probable condition. Several large bones were broken; from the position of the body, the pelvis and the right thighbone at the very least. The man wouldn't be calling for help anytime soon, possibly never. It had no intention of hurting the human any further; it had, after all, been ordered not to terminate anyone. Its intention had been to move the body inside, out of sight. But if leaving him alone would gain the female's cooperation, it decided it would do so.
'Let's go,' it said.
'Just the one guy up behind the rocks,' John said at last, taking another scan around the stretch of arroyo bottom beneath them. There was no danger of a flash flood at this season, and the hardy weeds that colonized the sand of the seasonal riverbed were dead and brown.
Dieter didn't look very concerned. 'I'd expect at least one,' he said.
Moving with surprising grace for a man so large, he pushed himself backward to where he wouldn't stand out on the horizon, then stood and walked down the steep side of the hill. John looked over his shoulder at von Rossbach with a slightly annoyed glance, took one last look through the binoculars at the gunrunners, then followed him.
'Well, I don't like it,' he said.
'I'm not crazy about it myself,' Dieter said. 'But it's not unreasonable. They don't know us, and I might have gotten their name and my friend's name from a dozen different places and just put them together in a lucky guess.'
John shoved the binoculars back in their case. 'So we're just gonna walk in there knowing there's a guy with a gun on us?'
Dieter lowered his sunglasses and looked at him over the top. 'I thought maybe you could get into a good position yourself and hold a gun on their guy.'
'Now you're talkin',' John said with a grin, visibly relieved.
The Terminator pulled behind a stand of shrubby growth and stopped the pickup.
Maria, her eyes streaming from the stench as much as from fear, pulled her hands away from her face and looked around.
'This isn't it,' she said. 'It's about a mile that way.' Her voice was high-pitched and shaking. The man beside her turned his head to look at her and nodded once.
Deep inside the black of his sunglasses she thought she saw a glint of red light and she sobbed convulsively.
It glanced at the crude map the woman had drawn, then briefly accessed a military satellite and confirmed its accuracy. The gully was considerably less than a mile away, but humans were notoriously inaccurate.
The Terminator got out of the truck.
Maria whimpered and cowered in her seat. She wanted to throw open the door and run, but feared that he might shoot her, and that fear paralyzed her. In her mind she saw Mike lying on the cracked tarmac of the parking lot. She thought he was dead, but she couldn't be sure, and her impulse had been to give him a chance by luring this man away. But now she was here, alone.
She jumped with a gasp and turned toward the sound when he opened the toolbox in the back of the truck. 'Oh, no,' she whispered, her mouth dry and her throat tight with tears.
This was it, the end. He was going to kill her. Maria fully expected him to slam the lid on the toolbox and stand there with a rifle in his hands. Instead, the truck rocked as he jumped down and footsteps crunched around to her side of the car.
She didn't turn, but sat panting and light-headed, her mind filling with headlines about innocent middle-aged women murdered for no reason and left in the desert for the coyotes to eat.
It opened the door and grasped the woman's clothing, pulling her stumbling from her seat. Then it shoved her toward the back of the truck. 'Get up,' it said.
Maria scrambled to obey, lifting her leg as high as she could and grabbing the frame with clumsy fingers. She was simply too short and too frightened to manage it and began to sob frantically. 'I can't,' she said at last, hanging her head. 'I just can't.'
The Terminator confirmed her analysis. It picked her up under the arms, lifting her as if she were a five- year-old, and deposited her, kneeling, on the truck bed.
Then it followed her up. It moved to the toolbox. 'Get in,' it said.
Marie froze, staring up at him, then glancing at the large silver box he wanted her to enter. 'No,' she whispered. 'Please, no. If you let me go I promise not to tell anyone, I swear! Please let me go, please.'
It relayed a quick report to Alissa, then asked tor permission to terminate this human.
Alissa relayed his position and the position of the gully to the team in the Blackhawk, then considered its request.
*No,* she said at last. *Perhaps afterward, but not now. She might prove useful.
Lock her up and get into position, the others are on their way.*
'Get in,' it said to Maria.
Maria saw the long silver box as a coffin, but decided that being alive in a coffin was better than being dead in a ditch, so she reluctantly put her foot over the edge, then knelt, looking appealingly up at the strange and horrible man. As she leaned forward he slammed the lid, whacking her painfully on her head and back.
At her cry of pain he said, 'Keep quiet and live.'
She knelt silently for a few minutes, panting in terror. He didn't move and she pictured him standing there, waiting for her to give him an excuse to kill her. It seemed as though the air was already almost gone; she wanted to beat on the lid and beg to be let out. But then he'd kill her.
Biting her lip, she told herself that she was imagining that she was smothering.
Then she heard him thread a lock through the staple and snap it shut.
Maria couldn't help it; she began to weep in earnest, pleading with him, even as she felt him leap down from the truck, making the bed shake, and heard his footsteps move away.
'Don't leave me!' she screamed.
Instantly the truck rocked as the Terminator climbed back onto it. It struck the lid with something and she felt the metal give, the sudden inward bump digging into her back.
'Be quiet!' it said.
Maria held her breath and after a moment the man went away. She squirmed around so as to be as comfortable as possible. She didn't think she was ever going to see her family again.
Letting out her breath in a sob, she began to pray.
The two Sector agents looked at each other. There was absolutely nothing in von Rossbach's files to indicate that he would do this sort of thing. Why he would kidnap and brutalize a fat, middle-aged woman, they couldn't imagine, yet they'd seen it with their own eyes. Agent McGill checked in with the project pilot, asking how to proceed.
