The Future War

Sarah looked toward the voice. Nobody here looked like a leader, but there was one guy a little beefier than the others.

These followers of macho legend probably looked up to that, so he might be the one to watch. As for what they wanted, she already knew that. They wanted to stomp her flat and take her stuff.

'It'd be polite to show us your face,' a woman said. She was a well-built amazon, probably topped out at six feet, and her arms rippled with muscle. It had been so long since she'd bathed that her skin glistened with her own natural grease; her hair was a matted rat's nest that might once have been blond. It was fortunate that the weather was cold; otherwise the smell would be…

Unimaginable. Dear, God, Sarah thought, discouraged. Help!

I've fallen into a bad biker movie and I can't get out. Mel Gibson, where are you when we need you?

Sarah always wore a helmet. For one reason, it made it less likely she'd be recognized by especially vigilant cops. For another, she'd long since outgrown the fantasy that the wind in your hair was the feeling of ultimate freedom. The wind in your hair twisted it into impenetrable thickets and filled it with road dirt.

And if you spun out without a helmet, you could say good-bye to your face.

She figured she'd have to talk to them; hell, maybe she could actually talk her way out of this. 'I don't want any trouble,' she said.

The big guy laughed. 'Hell, we figured that. If you wanted trouble, you would've just kept goin' straight.'

His crew all laughed.

Sarah figured they were here for one of two reasons; either they couldn't hack it with the main group and so were looking for easy pickings on the outskirts, or they'd been assigned here by whoever was in charge to pick up any strays. Either way it meant that they weren't as tough as they were pretending to be.

On the one hand, that meant that she could probably take most of them; on the other, it meant that the group ego was bruised and they'd feel they had something to prove.

She'd better try talking first.

Sarah raised her visor. 'So what's going on down there anyway?' She indicated the rally with a tip of her head.

As soon as she'd lifted the opaque visor, she sensed the disappointment in the males. Sarah knew she was way too long in the tooth for their taste. Sometimes she thought it a miracle that Dieter didn't find her so. But then Dieter didn't spend every day of his life getting a prostate massage from a motorcycle.

The group looked at one another and apparently decided they were bored enough to answer a few questions before the fun began.

'The supreme leader has decided that we should take over this part of the country,' the big, muscular one said, leaning on his handlebars. 'Get all the little farmers growing food for us in exchange for protection.'

Again Sarah knew the answer but decided to be a good sport.

'Protection from what?'

'From us!' the smallest of them shouted gleefully, and they all laughed uproariously.

Sarah didn't roll her eyes, but the urge was almost irresistible.

Then the amazon started her bike forward and began to slowly circle Sarah.

'Y'know what might be fun?' she asked, never taking her eyes off their captive. She licked her lips. 'Let's you and me fight.'

The boys went wild, whoo-whooing fit to burst their own eardrums. The amazon grinned, holding her clenched fists up like a victorious boxer. 'If you win, then you get to go, tax free. If I win… well, you won't need to worry about anything anymore if I win.' Howls of laughter greeted this sally.

Jeez! Is there a camera around here someplace? Sarah wondered. Or have I stumbled onto the Tribe of the Cliche Speakers?

The girl wasn't a problem; Sarah knew she could mop the floor with her, big as she was. The problem was that fighting her meant getting off the motorcycle, leaving her vulnerable when she finally stopped kicking the crap out of the…

Brainless slut-bitch? Sarah thought. Yeah, that has a satisfying sound.

However, before she'd left home, she and Dieter had come up with something that should intimidate the small and the stupid, and this was an excellent time to deploy it. She dug her hands into her pockets and flung the contents in either direction.

Packets of gray putty with a short length of cord sticking out of them went skittering across the ground, and in Sarah's upraised hand was a black plastic sunglasses case with a big red button on top.

'That's C-4,' she announced. 'It probably won't hurt you too badly unless you're right on top of one. But it'll tear the hell out of your tires. And asphalt makes pretty good shrapnel.' She let them think about that for a few seconds. 'Like I said, I don't want any trouble. In fact, I mean not to have any trouble. But I'm perfectly happy to make trouble for you.' She looked them all in the face. 'So just stay right where you are and maybe I won't push this button.'

Sarah turned her bike and glared at the men in front of her.

One of them moved aside, slowly, resentfully, and she drove through the gap and gunned it. She was almost 100 percent sure that they wouldn't come after her. And if they did, well, she could always use the thermite grenades.

On to Mexico, she thought, hoping she wouldn't run into any more world- conquering biker heroes. Because too many and I might just start agreeing with Skynet.

ALASKA

John flopped down into the battered desk chair and put his dirty, booted feet up on the gray metal desk. He whipped off his hat and sunglasses with a sigh and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

Since that cyber-controlled seal had scarred it, his nose sometimes ached when he wore sunglasses for any length of time. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

It had been his first real command, he now realized.

One hundred and seventy-one people, slaughtered in the first moments of the Terminators' attack. And of the seventy-nine left, more than half were wounded, twenty of them severely. Nothing like being thrown in at the deep end.

His throat tightened painfully as he thought of the smallest victims. The sight of those tiny, broken bodies kept flashing before his inner eye. Don't let it go, his mother had advised him about things like this. Keep it inside, channel it into anger.

Controlling your anger, using it, will make you strong. Mom would know. He swallowed painfully and gathered up a sheaf of reports from the resistance cells across the continent.

One bit of luck was that one of the women was a nurse practitioner, who had greeted his gift of a liter of alcohol as though it was worth its weight in diamonds. There had been seven men who'd been in the military who seemed to be shaking down to a decent working team by the time he'd left them. And the moms that were left had taken the children in hand in an almost magical way.

'We can't stay here,' John had said to the nurse when they'd patched up the worst of the wounds. 'I'm going to take the bike and search for a likely place.'

She'd nodded and waved him off as though said likely place would certainly be found. Though he'd thought at the time that a more unlikely place for a likely place would be hard to find.

Yet two miles down the road he'd found an almost invisible track leading to an abandoned lumber camp. The buildings had been log-built and so some of the walls were pretty sturdy. The roofs hadn't fared as well and only two buildings still had any.

They would probably leak like sieves, but they'd do for temporary shelter. There were even a couple of rusty woodstoves still in place. It was things like that that made John think God just might be on their side.

It would have to be temporary, though. Even two miles away from the slaughter site was much too close. Soon, if there was a relocation camp, Skynet would have them send out searchers.