Trial By Fire

Only that was impossible. He’d seen Marcus Wright die himself, and it hadn’t been at the hands of anyone named Jik.

“When and where’d this happen?”

“Back in the forest, a couple of days ago,” Jik told him. “Why? Was it a pet or something?”

Barnes looked at Williams. She was looking back at him, her face gone suddenly pale.

“It wasn’t Marcus,” she breathed. “My God. There were two of them?”

“What do you mean, two of them?” Jik demanded.

“She means the one you killed wasn’t the one we called Marcus,” Barnes told him. He eased his head to the side, just far enough to see Jik out of the corner of his eye. The man was a little taller and thinner than Barnes, with sunken cheeks, unkempt brown hair, and a scraggly beard.

And he was indeed hefting a Terminator G11.

“Look, can we maybe point the gun somewhere else—?” Barnes began.

And then, right at the edge of Barnes’s vision, the dark metal skull and glowing red eyes of a T-700 appeared from behind a tree.

“Behind you!” Barnes snapped, leaping to his feet and spinning his 542 around toward the Terminator. He caught a glimpse of Jik raising his own weapon—

Barnes’s rifle was barely halfway to target when a burst of fire from the G11 blasted in his ear. Reflexively, he winced back, his body tensing in anticipation of pain from torn muscle and shattered bone.

But the impact and pain didn’t come... and it was only as Barnes took a second look at Jik’s face that he realized the man’s eyes weren’t focused on him and Williams. He was looking at something beyond them, over their shoulders.

Oh, hell.

And then, the barrel of Barnes’s assault rifle arrived on target, and there was no more time for thought or worry or wondering how close the Terminator was that was coming up behind him. He squeezed the trigger, firing a round into the T-700’s torso that staggered the machine back. A quick flick of his thumb shifted the weapon to three-shot mode, and he fired again. The multiple rounds slammed into the metal chest, this time nearly knocking the T-700 off its feet. Williams was shouting something as Barnes fired another burst, her words lost in the racket of his own fire and the chatter from Jik’s weapon. A third burst from the 542 spun the T-700 halfway around, and Barnes finally had enough breathing space to throw a quick look behind him.

The second Terminator hadn’t been hiding behind a tree like the one Barnes was shooting at. From its current position at the edge of the gorge, he concluded it had been waiting out of sight below ground level, probably hanging onto the nearly sheer side of the drop-off to the river. It had no doubt climbed up the bank while the three of them were talking, concealing itself in the tall grasses that lined both sides of the gorge.

Only now, the steady hammering from Jik’s G11 was threatening to knock it back over the edge and into the rushing water ten meters below.

But only until Jik’s gun ran dry. The instant that happened, the machine would get its balance back, and the beleaguered humans would be caught in the middle of a pincer.

Unless Barnes could take out his target first.

He turned back around, to find that Williams had left her position and was heading off in a curved path toward Barnes’s target.

Barnes fired again, staggering the Terminator with another three-shot burst. It was essentially the same tactic they’d used back at the ford, with Barnes covering Williams while she got close enough to use her shotgun to its best advantage.

On the plus side, this time the Terminator didn’t have a weapon of its own. On the minus side, there wasn’t a nice convenient river separating them.

Which meant that if Williams got too close the Terminator could simply reach out and snap her neck.

Barnes flipped his rifle back to single-shot, spacing out his blasts, keeping the machine off-balance while he waited for Williams to get in range.

And then, Jik’s chattering gun went silent.

Cursing, Barnes threw another look over his shoulder. With the hail of lead no longer battering it, the other T-700 steadied itself and straightened back to its full height. Its eyes seemed to take them all in...

“Williams!” Barnes snapped.

“I know!” Williams shouted back. There was the boom of a shotgun— “Go—I’ve got this one.”

Barnes spun around, swinging the 542 toward his new target. The T-700 was already on the move, striding through the grass and dead leaves toward them.

And then, as Barnes lined up his sights on the Terminator’s torso, the machine gave a sudden jerk, its stride faltering, its body and limbs weaving around as if it was drunk.

And as it turned its head to the side Barnes saw that an arrow had unexpectedly sprouted in the back of the machine’s neck.

Dead center in the Terminator’s partially exposed motor cortex.

Behind Barnes, Jik’s machinegun opened fire again with a new magazine.

“No!” Barnes shouted to him, jabbing a finger back toward Blair’s target. “I’ve got this one.”

He glanced back long enough to confirm that Jik had understood. Then, breaking into a full-bore sprint, he charged straight toward the staggering Terminator.

Painfully aware of the terrible risk he was taking.

With that arrow buried in its motor cortex, the T-700’s tracking and balance systems were temporarily shot to hell. But the control chip was already rerouting its systems around the damage, and if the machine recovered before Barnes reached it, he would be in the worst and possibly the very last fight of his life.

The T-700 was groping for the arrow now. The skeletal hand found it, snapped off half of the shaft.

And leaping into the air, Barnes rotated his body ninety degrees forward and slammed feet-first into the Terminator’s torso.

The machine fell backward, slamming onto its back with enough impact to drive what was left of the arrow even farther into its skull. Barnes jumped back to his feet, lined up his 542 on the metal forehead, and fired.

The Terminator jerked as the bullet slammed into the thick alloy. Barnes fired again and again, each round bending or breaking another section of metal.

On his fourth shot, the glowing eyes finally faded into the darkness of death.

For another couple of seconds Barnes stared down at the dead Terminator, his throbbing ears vaguely aware of the gunfire still going on behind him. He’d already seen Terminators play possum once on this trip, and he had no interest in being suckered a second time.

But the eyes stayed dark. Breathing heavily, he lifted his gaze to the far side of the gorge.

Preston and his daughter were standing there, Preston with his rifle ready, Hope with another arrow in her bowstring. Preston gestured toward the Terminator lying in the grass, and Barnes gave him a thumbs up.

And then, the gunfire behind him stopped.

He turned. Williams and Jik were standing more or less where he’d left them, only with Williams now peering over what seemed to be a ridge or bump in the ground.

“You get it?” he called.

“No,” Williams replied. “It fell into the ravine.”

Barnes frowned. There was a ravine back there? He hadn’t even noticed it through all the trees and brush.

“Can you see it?”

Williams looked back and forth, then shook her head.

“No.”

“What’s the terrain like?”

“Very steep,” Jik responded, “with bushes, trees, and dead logs. We’d need a belaying rope to get down there.”

Barnes pursed his lips. In general, it was a bad idea to leave a Terminator alive and loose if there was any chance at all of killing it.

But heading into unfamiliar territory after one while tied to the end of a rope was even more dangerous.

“Skip it,” he called. “Time to head back.”