Preston and Halverson gathered up their guns and packs while the two guards pulled chairs over to the big window and sat down, their rifles cradled in their arms.
“We’ll be back soon,” Jik promised as Preston and the remaining townspeople filed out the door. “I suggest you take the opportunity to get some rest.”
He paused in the doorway.
“And if you think you can come up with a better story,” he added, “you might want to do that, too.”
A moment later he was gone.
“What now?” Blair asked quietly.
Barnes gave a long, measuring look at the two guards.
“We wait,” he told her. “For now.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Kyle had taken over point from Callahan, and had led them slogging through the underground ruins for another hour, when he rounded a particularly large slab of concrete and saw a light in the distance.
It wasn’t much of a light, no more than a sliver of hazy yellowish glow, more oozing than actually shining, coming from the ceiling fifty meters ahead.
But in that first minute Kyle didn’t care what kind of light it was. It was
They’d found the Terminators’ tunnel again.
Which meant that they’d found the Terminators.
There was a rattle of gravel as Callahan and Zac came up alongside him.
“That the tunnel?” Zac whispered.
“Probably,” Callahan said. “Okay. Extra quiet from here on.”
Keeping extra quiet turned out to be easier than Kyle had expected. The light, dim though it was, gave enough illumination to show them a little of the uneven ground they were crawling across. They covered the fifty meters more quickly, and more quietly, than most of the previous several hours’ worth of travel.
From the positioning of the light when Kyle first spotted it, he had guessed the opening was only a meter or two above the level of their floor. What he hadn’t known was that the passageway made a sharp dip halfway along their path before leveling off at a new, lower level. When they reached the light, it turned out to be over three meters above the floor, nearly a meter out of reach.
The good news was that the opening was similar to the one they’d used to escape the tunnel all those hours ago: a gap between the tunnel floor and the wall of debris beside it. Like the other opening, this one also had an angled field of broken masonry below it, tricky but not impossible to climb.
The bad news was that the opening was far too narrow for even Zac to get through.
For a minute they stood together looking up at it, listening to the rhythmic footsteps as the Terminators continued their endless march back and forth to the tunnel face. The marching seemed to go on for longer than it had before, and Kyle wondered uneasily if Skynet had thrown more T-700s into the project. Implying that the breakout was indeed imminent.
Finally, the muffled thudding faded away. Callahan waited another few seconds, then drew the other two in for a close-huddle conference.
“Thoughts?”
“I think we’re near the front of the tunnel,” Zac whispered.
“How do you know?” Kyle asked.
“Because those Terminators were going both directions,” Zac said. “One group coming up empty-handed, the other passing them with their loads.”
“Ah.” Kyle hadn’t detected the difference in direction himself. But Zac had shown several times already that he had the best hearing of the group.
“Sounds like they’re gone,” Zac went on. “Let me climb up and see if I can see anything.”
He started to step away. Callahan, still holding onto his sleeve, pulled him back.
“I’ll go,” he said firmly. “I’m a better climber, and that slope looks tricky.”
The slope was every bit as difficult as Callahan had anticipated, and even with Kyle and Zac standing on either side to brace his arms and legs there were times where he nearly slid back. But finally he was there. Carefully taking hold of the edge of the tunnel floor, he pulled himself up and peered through the opening.
He held the pose for about half a minute. Then, easing himself back onto the debris, he climbed back down.
“We’re at the front, all right,” he told them when they were huddled together again. “There’s a stack of eight bags along the wall that look like satchel charges.”
“They’re not right at the tunnel face?” Kyle asked.
“No, about three meters back,” Callahan said. “There’s still a bunch of debris right at the face, so I’m guessing they’ll still be lugging and hand digging for a while longer.”
“Where’s the light coming from?” Zac asked.
“There are a bunch of small holes in the ceiling,” Callahan said “The light’s pretty diffuse, so I’m guessing it’s sifting in through another layer of broken concrete.”
Kyle grimaced. He’d been hoping the light meant another big crack in the tunnel ceiling. They might have used an opening like that to get out, or at least to signal the rest of the Resistance people up there.
“So that’s a dead end,” he said.
“Don’t worry, we’ll figure out something,” Callahan said. “At least we’ll have some light if we can get up there.”
“How are we going to do that?” Zac asked.
“Not sure,” Callahan conceded. “The wall beside the gap is a single slab of reinforced concrete—you can see the rebar sticking out. There’s no way we’re going to move it.”
“What about the tunnel floor?” Kyle asked.
“Well, it’s not too thick, and I didn’t see any rebar,” Callahan said. “Probably used to be a roof or a wall that didn’t need to hold up a lot of weight.”
“A non-load-bearing wall,” Kyle supplied, remembering Orozco talking about things like that while they poked around some of the ruined buildings back in Los Angeles.
“Right,” Callahan said. “On the other hand, it’s getting stomped on by T-700s all day, so it can’t be
“Sounds good,” Zac said. “I’ll take first shift.”
“That’s okay,” Callahan said, digging into his pocket. “We can start with my knife. When we wear it down we’ll shift to Reese’s, then we’ll just have to use whatever else we can find.”
“Wait a second,” Kyle said suddenly. “This won’t work.”
“Sure it will,” Callahan assured him. “It’ll take awhile, but—”
“No, I mean we can’t do it,” Kyle said. “The Terminators will see the hole get bigger each time they go by.”
There was a brief silence.
“You’re right,” Callahan muttered. “Damn.”
“So what do we do?” Zac asked anxiously. “It’ll take forever to go back to the other hole.”
“No point in doing that anyway,” Callahan said heavily. “The Terminators are bound to still be watching the conduit. I suppose we could try backtracking and see if there’s an opening we missed.”
“There wasn’t anything,” Kyle asked, peering up. The underside of the tunnel floor was hard to see in the reflected light coming from the opening. But even so—
“Probably not,” Callahan agreed heavily. “But it’s all we’ve got.”
“Maybe not,” Kyle said, pointing at the ceiling. “Is that a crack up there?”
The others looked up.
