went to the abandoned weapons and started collecting them. One of the knives in particular caught his eye, and he took a moment to heft it in his hand, feeling the weight nestle comfortably in his grip.
A couple of the teens, he had noticed, had held their knives like they really knew what they were doing. Carefully setting the weapon in the bag with the others, Kyle made a mental note to ask Orozco about that later. Orozco had already taught him how to shoot and make explosives. Maybe later Kyle could learn how to fight with a knife, too.
The sun was setting behind a line of drab, pink-edged clouds when Blair finally arrived at the new hangar where she and Yoshi had stashed their A-10s.
Considering the shape her plane had been in when she delivered it to Wince last night, she’d expected to find the place buzzing with activity. But the big open space was quiet and dark, with no hum of grinding wheels or flicker of welder fire.
“Hello?” she called softly into the darkness, stepping back to put her shoulder blades against the wall beside the door, her hand dropping to the grip of her Desert Eagle. “Anyone home?”
There was another moment of silence. Then, a shadow behind her A-10 shifted subtly and Wince’s familiar shock of white hair appeared around the tail.
“Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”
“You were expecting someone else?” Blair growled, looking around the otherwise deserted hangar. This was nor the level of security they were supposed to have around here.
“Yoshi, actually,” Wince said. “He’s been here all day, and I finally sent him back to the bunker to get some sleep. But you know how well he obeys that kind of order.”
“About as well as I do?”
“About that, yes,” Wince agreed. “But since you’re here and he isn’t, could you give me a hand?”
“What do you need?” Blair asked, keeping her grip on the Desert Eagle as she headed toward him. If there was someone back there holding a gun on the old man…
But she rounded the tail to find that Wince was indeed alone.
“I’m trying to get this attached without attracting attention,” he told her, pointing to a replacement armor plate lying beneath an open section of her A-10’s tail, a section completely surrounded by bullet holes. Those HKs last night had really done a job on her plane. “HKs have been buzzing the neighborhood all afternoon,” Wince continued, “and I’ve been afraid to fire up the welders.”
“So what are you going to use, duct tape?” Blair asked, eyeing the hole. It looked way too small for the plate Wince was planning to jam into it.
“Close,” Wince said with a grin as he pried the top off an unlabeled one-quart can. “I’m going to glue it in.”
Blair cocked her head.
“You’re kidding.”
“Well, temporarily, anyway,” he said. “Tomorrow when I don’t have to worry so much about stray light leaking out I’ll do a proper welding. But the glue should hold it together until then.”
“Okay,” Blair said, looking at all the other bullet holes on the tail as the scent of the adhesive curled her nose hairs. Wince’s inventory included some of the worst-smelling concoctions in all of creation. “Don’t you think you should take off all those other plates before you glue this one down?”
“By that I assume you mean I should take them off so that I can replace them?” Wince suggested as he selected a paintbrush and started to layer the glue onto the exposed section of fuselage. “I’d love to do just that.
“Problem is, we haven’t got anything to replace them with.”
Blair looked at the other damaged plates.
“Oh.”
“It’s worse than just ‘oh’,” Wince said grimly. “Another round like last night and you and Connor can say goodbye to any hope of continuing air support. My inventory of spare parts and armor is going fast, and as for jet fuel, we’re down to a single fill-up each.” He glanced over at her.
“Just between us, I’m starting to get a bit concerned.”
“Join the club,” Blair said. “I just hope we’ll find some useful stuff in that depot.”
“The Skynet staging area,” Wince said, nodding. “Yes, Yoshi told me about that. Sounds perfectly insane, if you ask me.”
“No argument there,” Blair agreed. “But it’s better than going out with a whimper. Besides, in theory all the Terminators will be out making trouble when Connor hits it.”
Wince snorted. “In theory. Right. Famous last words if I’ve ever heard ’em.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Blair said. “You ever hear that bumblebees can’t fly?”
“Unscientific urban legend,” Wince scoffed, studying his new layer of glue and reaching the brush in to touch up a few spots. “There’s not enough wing surface if the bumblebee functioned like a fixed-wing aircraft, but its wings actually work more like reverse-pitch semi-rotary helicopter blades. You get a lot more lift that way, obviously more than enough for a bumblebee to tootle along just fine.”
“That’s my point,” Blair said. “Skynet’s got its rules and logic, and if we play by them it’ll eventually grind us down. So we have to find new ways and new logic.”
“Such as hitting a staging area?”
“Exactly.”
Wince shook his head.
“I’m just a simple country mechanic. Okay, I think we’re ready. You get that end of the plate, and I’ll take this end.”
Lying on the floor, the plate had looked much bigger than its intended hole. Once held up to the gap, though, it turned out to be precisely the correct size.
“Now what?” Blair asked as she and Wince pressed it into place.
“We need to hold it here for a minimum of fifteen minutes,” Wince said. “I hope you didn’t have anything else you wanted to do just now.”
“I think I can spare a bit from my busy schedule,” Blair said. “Especially given that it’s
The minutes dragged slowly by. Blair pressed against her end of the plate, feeling the warmth of Wince’s shoulder nearby. The silence of the hangar and the city beyond it settled in around her, the smell of oil and metal and adhesive tingling at her nostrils. Her stomach grumbled once, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and the plate began to feel increasingly heavy as her arm and shoulder muscles started to fatigue.
On the theory that the glue must surely be ready to take some of the strain, she shifted to pressing against the plate with only one hand at a time. It seemed to help.
“Why ‘Hickabick’?” Wince asked suddenly.
Blair frowned sideways at him.
“What?”
“Your call sign,” Wince said. “I’ve wondered about it for months, only I never think about it when you’re actually around to ask.”
“It’s an acronym,” Blair told him. “HKBK—Hunter-Killer Butt Kicker. Throw in some vowels so you can actually pronounce it and it comes out Hickabick.”
“Cute,” Wince said. “A little mild, though, isn’t it? I mean, why not go with ‘Hunter-Killer Ass Kicker’? Let’s see—HKAK—Hikak. Works even better.”
Blair turned her eyes back to the plate, a hard lump forming in her throat.
“It’s already taken,” she said, trying to keep the old pain out of her voice. “A friend of mine had it. Pete Teague. He was killed by the HKs a month before I joined Connor’s group.”
“Oh,” Wince said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Blair said. “But like I said, that was his call sign. It’s—I can’t use it.”
“Because it’s his memorial?”
“Something like that,” Blair said. “Probably sounds silly.”
“No, not at all,” Wince assured her. “Thank you for sharing that.”
