Terminator Salvation - From the Ashes

slowly enough that they weren’t throwing up any dust. Their noses were pointed outward from the warehouse, the kind of arrangement soldiers used when they had to bunk down for the night in enemy territory.

But HKs didn’t sleep. Skynet didn’t sleep.

Could Skynet somehow have missed the fact that Blair was still alive? Ridiculous, not with the Capistrano tower still functioning. Could it have decided it had spent enough of its precious resources for one night? That was at least possible. The honchos at Command were pretty sure that Skynet was still in the ramping-up stage, still building its fleet of HKs and its armies of tanks and Terminators.

But whatever the reason, all that mattered to Blair right now was that she seemed to be off the hook for the rest of the night.

The A-10 finished its turn, and Blair straightened the plane out again. Keeping one eye on the city in front of her and another on the view in her mirrors, she headed home.

CHAPTER

THREE

Orozco was at his usual night-guard post, sleeping with his back to a broken pillar beside the archway that led into the half-crumpled building known to its residents as Moldering Lost Ashes, when he was startled awake by the sound of an approaching aircraft.

He pried his eyes open, wincing at the grit that had worked its way beneath the lids. His hands, which had been cradling his M16A2 rifle in his lap, shifted automatically into a proper firing grip on the weapon.

The plane was coming closer. Muttering a prayer under his breath, Orozco rolled half over and got to his feet. He hefted the M16, made sure his holstered Beretta was secure at his side, and stepped cautiously through the archway and out into the street.

It was a plane, all right, a dark shadow cutting across the patches of stars as it headed westward maybe half a klick south of him. It was too dark for a recognizable silhouette, but from the sound of the engine he guessed it was one of the A-10 Warthogs that the Resistance forces in the area liked to use for air support.

Orozco felt his lips press together as a second silhouette shot across the stars close behind the first. Unfortunately, the Resistance probably wouldn’t be using this particular A-10 much longer.

The second shadow was one he did recognize: one of Skynet’s cursed Hunter- Killers, moving in for the kill.

The A-10’s engine pitch changed. Orozco frowned, trying to find it again against the dark sky.

And then, suddenly, there it was, bearing practically straight toward him.

Reflexively, he ducked as the A-10 shot past overhead, heading due north now with the Hunter-Killer right behind it. Probably making for the San Gabriel Mountains, Orozco decided. Maybe hoping to lose the HK among the slopes and valleys there.

But at this point, and from this distance, that was a pretty forlorn hope. Sure enough, a few seconds later there was a flash of reflected light and a rolling boom.

Closing his eyes, Orozco sent a prayer skyward for the dead pilot.

He opened his eyes again, frowning. The echoes of the explosion had faded, leaving the sound of a single aircraft drifting through the cold night air…and to his amazed disbelief, it was the sound of the A-10.

Shaking his head in admiration, Orozco let go of his M16 with his right hand and threw a salute in the fighter’s direction. He wasn’t very familiar with the A-10—it was an Air Force jet, and the Marines had always used Harriers and Cobras for their close-air support. But he was familiar with HKs, and any pilot who could take one down in single combat was worthy of admiration.

Turning away from the sound of the distant plane, he took a deep breath of the cold night air and let his eyes drift around the ruined street he’d called home for the past two years.

Los Angeles had been lucky, he mused, if such a word could be applied to any spot on the globe these days. The nuke that had hit the city had been a smaller one, or else had misfired enough to lower its yield a little.

More importantly, its actual target had apparently been the Camp Pendleton Marine Base south of the city. Together, those two factors had worked to leave more of the city standing than had been the case with some of the world’s other major metropolitan areas.

Paris, for one, was gone completely, at least as near as he’d been able to glean from the scattered Resistance reports he’d pulled in before his radio had finally died. New York and Chicago were in worse shape than L.A., and it sounded like everything for a hundred kilometers around D.C. had been turned to slag.

An empty can somewhere across the street rattled. Orozco swung the muzzle of his M16 in that direction, probing the darkness for movement. Most of the local gangs had learned to leave Moldering Lost Ashes alone— several of them learning the hard way. But you never knew when some loner would drift into the neighborhood and think he’d found easy pickings.

You also never knew when Skynet would decide it was this area’s turn to be cleansed of the humans that infested its shiny, brave new world.

But the time for that final battle apparently wasn’t tonight. The can across the street rattled again, and this time Orozco caught a glimpse of a large rat scurrying past and disappearing into the shadows. The rats, at least, had done all right for themselves in the post-Judgment Day world. So had the cockroaches.

Orozco knew eight recipes for rat and three for roaches. Some of the residents here knew even more. Some of those recipes were even pretty good.

Judgment Day. Sighing tiredly, Orozco continued his visual sweep of the street, the bitter irony digging under his skin like the ever-present dust dug beneath his eyelids.

A stupid name, “Judgment Day.” Someone in the Resistance had apparently coined it, and it had spread by radio and word of mouth until it was the universally accepted name for the destruction that Skynet had unleashed upon the world.

But there had been no true judgment to it. None at all. Good and evil, rich and poor, sinner and saint— everyone had suffered equally in the attack.

Unless perhaps the judgment aspect was in the way •death and life had been handed out. That the chosen had been the ones granted the quick death of nuclear holocaust, while the evil had been those consigned to this living hell of hunger and cold and darkness.

The good die young. The old saying echoed through his mind. He’d never believed that before.

Maybe it was time he did.

But tonight, at least, the darkness out there concealed no fresh horrors. Taking one last look around, Orozco went back inside.

He was heading to his sleeping mat when a pebble clattered softly across the ground at his feet.

His first impulse was to look upward, through the broken sections of flooring toward the building’s top floor, where the group’s lookouts were stationed. But a second later his brain caught up with him and he realized it couldn’t have come from one of them. The lookouts always dropped their pebbles onto metal plates, where the clatter would alert Orozco or one of the other watchmen.

The nearest such plate was a good twenty meters away, and impossible for the lookout to miss.

Which made the source of the pebble at his feet obvious.

He peered a few meters down the broken tiles and cracked walls of what had once been a luxurious apartment building lobby to the pair of sleeping mats tucked into a small alcove. Nine-year-old Star was half sitting up on her mat, her wide-open eyes gazing unblinkingly at Orozco, a taut questioning look on her face.

He gave the girl a reassuring smile and a thumb’s up. Her questioning look lingered another few seconds, as if she was wondering if there really was something wrong and Orozco was merely humoring her. But then she nodded, lay back down, and closed her eyes.

He watched her a moment, then shifted his gaze to the sixteen-year-old boy sleeping soundly on the mat beside her.

People at the Ashes wondered about the two kids. They didn’t wonder a lot, of course—with basic survival the top item on everyone’s list, no one had much time left to spend pondering anyone else’s oddities. Certainly