Terminator Salvation - From the Ashes

moved it to a spot where she could keep a simultaneous eye on the door, both of the planes, and Wince.

Drawing her gun, she sat down on the mat, laying the weapon beside her. Nearly out of fuel, nearly out of spare parts, nearly out of ammo, nearly out of food. Life, she reflected, was definitely not looking good for the good guys. All the more reason to be glad this mess was in Connor’s hands, not hers.

She just hoped he could still find a trick or two up his sleeve.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

For Orozco, the day began as so many of them did: with a fight over food.

“But it’s mine,” Candace Tomlinson insisted, her plaintive five-year-old’s whine especially jarring coming from a seventeen-year-old’s mouth. “I found it. It’s mine.”

“But it was my stuff she found it in,” Sumae Chin, the twenty-two-year-old complainant snapped back.

“And where exactly was this private cache of yours?” Grimaldi asked, his eyes steady on Sumae as he stared at the two girls across his scarred office desk. “In your room?”

“She can’t just steal my stuff,” Sumae insisted, glaring at Candace.

“Where was the cache?” Grimaldi asked again, his voice going a few degrees sterner. “Sumae?”

Sumae sent Orozco a hooded look.

“In the lower storage room,” she said reluctantly. “Under some cracked drywall.”

Orozco sighed to himself. All the residents had their own rooms, as well as lockers Grimaldi’s men had lugged all the way from the remains of a high school, almost a mile away. In theory, everyone had all the room they needed for their personal items.

But too many of them had gone the squirrel route, hiding stuff around the building. Some did it because they didn’t want anyone else even knowing how much they’d managed to accumulate, while others were out-and-out paranoid about the Board swooping down someday and confiscating everybody’s private treasures.

The problem, of course, was that one battered can of processed lunchmeat looked pretty much like any other. Once it was outside anyone’s official storage, it was well-nigh impossible to establish ownership. Especially since—even after all this time—it was still possible to occasionally find food items everyone else had missed buried in the building’s rubble.

Which left Grimaldi with really only one possible ruling.

“I’m sorry, Sumae,” the chief said, his voice regretful but firm. “If you choose to hide items outside your designated areas—if the pickles Candace found were, in fact, yours to begin with—”

“But they were,” Sumae protested. “I told you where I’d—”

Grimaldi stopped her with an upraised hand.

“Even if they were yours to begin with, you forfeited all claims when you left the jar unattended outside your area. You know that. I’m sorry, but Candace owns them now.”

Sumae flashed the younger girl a look of pure hatred.

“Just wait,” she said, her voice low and menacing. “Someday you’ll drop something—”

“Sumae,” Grimaldi warned.

“—and I’ll be right there to pick it up,” Sumae finished.

“And if and when that happens, I suspect I’ll be seeing the two of you again,” Grimaldi said wearily. “You may return to your rooms or your work now. And you, Sumae, had best collect anything else you might have hidden around the building.”

Sumae held her glare on Candace for another heartbeat, then tried to transfer it to Grimaldi. But Grimaldi wasn’t sixteen, and he’d no doubt been glared at by experts. Sumae’s expression faltered as her glower bounced harmlessly off the stone that his face had become.

“Yes, sir,” she muttered, and slunk away out of the room. Candace triumphantly snatched up the dusty jar of pickles and followed.

“And so begins another glorious day in Moldavia Los Angeles,” Grimaldi said with a sigh.

“So it does,” Orozco agreed. He and Grimaldi had their differences, God knew, but Orozco had always respected Grimaldi’s insistence on handling these disputes personally, instead of hiding behind his desk and title and foisting the unpleasant duty off onto someone else. “Let’s hope things go uphill from here.”

“I don’t think they will,” Grimaldi said. “I talked to Evans and Kemper last night. They’re pretty sure they’ve seen your empty-revolver gang before.”

“Over on the far southern edge of the neighborhood,” Orozco said, nodding. “Yes, I got the same thing from Hamm.”

“Which means those kids were not, in fact, the new gang Nguyen and his buddies spotted on their way in yesterday afternoon,” Grimaldi said. “Which means that group is still out there, and we’re eventually going to run into each other.”

“I’ve already doubled the sentry shifts and put two of the fire teams on quick-response,” Orozco told him. “Unless you want to go out hunting, there’s not much more we can do.”

“We definitely don’t want to go looking for them,” Grimaldi said firmly. “The lower the profile we can keep, the better.”

“Agreed,” Orozco said. “Unfortunately, we’re about five years past the low profile stage.

Everyone for ten or twelve blocks around at least knows we’re here somewhere, even if they don’t know exactly which building we’re in. We have to assume our newcomers will try to pick up as much intel as they can on the territory they’re trying to move into.”

“Fortunately, everyone who knows we’re here also knows that everyone who’s tried taking us on has lost,” Grimaldi said. “Maybe they’ll be smart enough to learn from the mistakes of others.”

“We can hope,” Orozco agreed. “But in case they don’t—”

He broke off as the door was suddenly thrown open, and Mick the Binocular-Breaker ran into the room.

“Sentry signal,” he said, panting. “Four and one.”

“Damn,” Orozco snarled as he rose quickly from his chair. Four and one was a positive threat coming from the north. Ten to one it was Nguyen’s gang. “Chief—”

“I got it,” Grimaldi interrupted. He was on his feet, checking the chambers of the shotgun he kept under his desk. “Get to the entrance—I’ll roust the fire teams.”

Ninety seconds later Orozco was back at the archway. Kyle and Star were already there, Kyle with Orozco’s M16 gripped in his hands.

“They’re coming,” he reported tightly.

“I know,” Orozco said, stepping to the arms locker and pulling out their one true sniper rifle, a Remington 700 with a Leupold VX-1 scope “Are they visible?”

Kyle stepped beneath the archway, leaning cautiously out from behind the building’s broken facade.

“Not yet,” he said. “They may be on the other side of that broken truck three blocks up.”

“Take this,” Orozco said, taking the M16 from Kyle and handing him the Remington in exchange. “Go to the sniper nest.”

Kyle’s forehead creased uncertainly as he fingered the Remington.

“Evan’s a better shot than I am,” he said.

“Evan’s not here,” Orozco said. “You are. Get going.”

With a grimace, Kyle nodded and headed across the street, Star right on his heels.

Orozco waited until the two kids had disappeared into the sniper’s nest. Then, checking the M16’s clip and chamber, he settled in to wait for their visitors.

He had received one follow-up report from the sentry, and was waiting for a second, when they arrived.

In impressively sophisticated military fashion, too. The sentry had said there were ten of them, but only four came striding into Orozco’s view along the street, spaced far enough apart that they couldn’t be taken down in a quick four-shot. The other six weren’t visible, but Orozco suspected they could see him,