Trial By Fire

halfway down and then ground to a halt, the tips of his scuffed shoes still visible.

Jik stared at the man’s unmoving feet, his breath coming in little gasps of relief and bitter shame. His knees fluttered and gave way, and he dropped into a crouch amid the soft matting of dirt and pine needles, his stomach churning and wanting to be sick.

He’d just killed a man.

Minutes passed. Jik never knew afterward how many. Enough that his knees hurt when he finally straightened up again.

He’d killed a man. Not deliberately, really. Certainly in the belief that he was acting in self-defense. But the fact was that a human being was now dead, and Jik had done it, and there was nothing he could do to change that.

All he could do now was give the man a decent burial. That was what made men different, a Resistance fighter in LA had once told him. Terminators left their fallen on the streets. Human beings buried theirs.

Sliding the .44 back into its holster, he walked tiredly over to the dead man. The human had landed flat on his back, his arms flung over his head as if he was trying to surrender. His chest was soaked with blood, and Jik could see the ends of a couple of broken ribs sticking out.

If the man’s chest was a nightmare, his face was even more so. There was a long jagged scar trailing out from beneath his right eye, and the entire left side of his face was a splotchy, sickly white, as if he’d been burned by acid.

Maybe he’d absorbed a massive dose of radiation during the hell of Judgment Day, though how he could be walking around after a jolt like that was a mystery. Still, radiation poisoning might explain the insanity of his trying to chase down and kill a perfect stranger.

And then, Jik spotted a glint of metal protruding from the gaping wound.

He leaned closer, his heart suddenly starting to pound again. He hadn’t imagined it: the broken rib ends weren’t made of bone. They were made of metal.

What the hell?

He snatched out the Smith & Wesson again, pointing it at the body as he knelt beside it. Gingerly, he pulled back the layer of skin and peered into the wound.

There was a heart in there, all right, or at least there had been before the .44 slug had torn through it. He could see a pair of lungs, part of a stomach, and what seemed to be a somewhat truncated circulatory system. There were blood vessels going upward from the heart, which implied there was a human brain tucked into the skull behind those staring eyes.

Or maybe not. The T-600s got along just fine with computer chips for brains, and there was no reason he knew of why this thing couldn’t do so as well. The skin seemed real, too.

But between the skin and the organs, everything else was metal. Metal ribs, metal plating behind the ribs, metal spine, metal shoulder blades.

Jik had been right the first time. The thing chasing him through the mountains had indeed been a Terminator. Some chilling hybrid of man and machine, straight from the back porch of hell.

He looked up at the darkening sky. He was still a couple of days out from the little mountainside town of Baker’s Hollow that was his goal, the town where his uncle had once lived and where Jik had spent a couple of weeks each summer when he was a boy. If the town still existed—if Skynet hadn’t already found it and destroyed it—maybe someone would remember him and let him stay.

He looked at his watch, then slid off his backpack and pulled out the precious radio he’d lugged all the way from Los Angeles. It was nearly time for John Connor’s nightly broadcast to the world, and there was no way that Jik was going to miss that.

The message tonight was brief.

“This is John Connor, speaking for the Resistance. We’ve won a major battle, struck a vital blow for humanity against the machines. I can report now that Skynet Central, the enemy’s big San Francisco hub, has been utterly destroyed, as have large numbers of Terminators.

“But this victory has come at a horrendous cost. Now, more than ever, we need you. Come to us—look for our symbol—and join us. Humanity will win. I promise you that. All of you who are listening to my voice, you are part of us. You are the Resistance. Stay safe, keep fighting, and survive.

“This is John Connor, for the Resistance, signing off.”

Jik waited a moment, then shut off the radio and stowed it away in his pack, his eyes drifting once again to the abomination lying in the leaves and twigs beside him. The difference between humanity and the Terminators, the words whispered through his mind, is that humans bury their dead.

Ten minutes later he was on the move again, picking his way through the growing darkness, hoping to find someplace hidden or at least a little more defensible where he could spend the night. The body he left covered by a thin layer of dirt, stones, and leaves.

Maybe the saying was right. But the dead man back there wasn’t one of theirs.

Not anymore.

CHAPTER TWO

The T-600 was in bad shape.

Really bad shape. One leg was completely gone, the other had been twisted and then mashed flat, and the minigun still gripped in its hand was long since empty and useless. Its eyes still glowed their malevolent red, but there was nothing to speak of behind the glow, not since the Skynet Central command structure that had once controlled it had been reduced to slag. The T-600 was more pitiful now than actually dangerous.

Barnes shot it anyway.

He watched with grim satisfaction as the light in the machine’s eyes faded to darkness.

“For my brother,” he muttered.

Not that the T-600 cared. Or would have even if it had been functional.

We bury our dead, the old defiant Resistance claim ran accusingly through Barnes’s mind. We bury our dead.

There was a burst of gunfire to his left, and Barnes looked up from the empty Terminator eyes. Kyle Reese was over there, and even at this distance Barnes could see the grim set to the kid’s jaw as he blew away another of the crippled Terminators. As Barnes watched, Reese stepped over to another twitching machine and fired a half- dozen rounds into it.

Shaking his head, Barnes swung the barrel of his SIG 542 assault rifle up onto his shoulder. Glancing around at the rest of the clean-up team scattered across the half-slagged debris field, he headed toward Reese.

The kid had just unloaded another third of a magazine when Barnes reached him.

“Hey! Reese!” he called.

Reese paused in his work. “Yes?”

Barnes gestured down at the twisted mass of metal at the kid’s feet.

“You think that’s the one who got Connor?” he asked.

“What?”

“Or that one?” Barnes asked, pointing back at the last Terminator Reese had blown apart. “Or that one over there?”

“No, of course not,” Reese said, a wave of anger and pain flickering across his face.

“Then stop taking this personally,” Barnes said firmly. “Stop taking them personally. They’re machines, nothing more. Skynet’s your enemy the way a thunderstorm or earthquake is your enemy. It isn’t taking this personally. You can’t, either.”

For a moment Reese just glared up at him. Then, reluctantly, he lowered his eyes.

“I know,” he said.

“Then act like it,” Barnes growled. He pointed again at the Terminator at Reese’s feet. “One or two rounds into the skull is all you need. More than that and you’re just wasting ammo.”