“Arms first?” Halverson called.
“Arms first,” Jik confirmed. “And then we’ll see.”
“See what?”
Jik grimaced. What he knew, and the townspeople didn’t, was that this was the moment of truth. If their ensnared T-700 and the one he, Barnes, and Williams had tangled with across the river were the only two machines Skynet had out here, that second Terminator should even now be charging to the rescue, trying to get here before Jik and Halverson reduced its compatriot to rubble. Two Terminators working together were always more effective than one alone, even if one or both of them were damaged.
But if Skynet still had other resources available or close at hand, it would be foolish to waste the other T-700 in an attempt to save this one. In that case, the other Terminator would remain hidden and out of range as it waited for the reinforcements.
And Terminator reinforcements would be bad. Very bad.
“See what?” Halverson repeated. “Then we’ll see,” Jik said, “which part of it we want to destroy next.”
Connor had warned Preston that the last remaining Terminator would probably show up before there were any warning sounds of gunfire from Connor’s own position north of town. Sure enough, Preston’s team had barely gotten themselves prepared when the bushes across the river parted and the dark figure of a T-700 strode into view and headed for the ford.
It was not, Preston noted, nearly as fearsome a sight as he remembered it from earlier that day. The fingers of its right hand were bent and twisted where Williams’s shotgun slug and the Terminator’s own exploding gun had damaged it. Its left shoulder also looked a little odd, and Preston wondered if it had been damaged by the fall into the ravine during the later fight with Connor and Williams. The limb might even have broken off and had to be magnetically reattached. There were some serious dents on its torso, as well, where Williams’s shotgun blasts had nailed it at close range.
But the Terminator’s legs, at least, were working just fine. The machine reached the edge of the swirling water and strode in, leaning against the current to keep from being knocked over.
Preston shot a quick look to his left. Three meters away, Hope was standing straight and ready beside her own covering tree, her arrow nocked, a look of nervousness tinged with determination on her face. To Preston’s right, Half-pint Swan also stood ready.
Preston turned back to the river, gripping the heavy rope noose in his hands, making sure the rest of the rope trailing from it was free of any entanglements in the undergrowth around him. The Terminator was nearly to the trap now...
It reached the position, then continued past it. Preston hissed viciously between his teeth, wondering what they were going to do now.
And then, the Terminator jerked to a halt, nearly pitching forward onto its face. Apparently, Preston had been slightly off in his estimation of where the bear trap was actually positioned.
But Connor and Halverson were using bear traps against their Terminator, too. With the two T-700s linked via short-range radio telemetry, that meant this one already knew how to deal with bear traps. It didn’t waste any time trying to pull out the chain, but simply leaned over at the waist and reached its metal arms into the whitewater to get a grip on the trap’s jaws and pry them apart.
And as its eyes shifted downward, Preston leaped out of cover and raced toward it, holding the noose straight out in front of him.
Even with its eyes turned away and the roar of the water in its auditory sensors the Terminator must have sensed Preston’s approach. It looked up as he neared the river, its glowing red eyes staring, its useless teeth clenched, its skeletal face an image out of human nightmares.
But there was no turning back now. With the Terminator’s leg trapped, its body hunched over as its fingers tried to pry the bear trap open, and its head turned upward, the machine was at this moment the most unmoving it was ever likely to be. Baring his own teeth in defiance, Preston picked up his pace.
The Terminator was still glaring cold death at him when Preston heard a sharp double twang from behind and to either side of him.
And the twin red glows of death abruptly vanished as a pair of arrows jammed themselves into the machine’s eyes.
Terminators didn’t scream, in pain or rage or anything else. Nor did they get angry. The machine merely jerked back with the double impact, then straightened up, abandoning the task of freeing its leg, and grabbed at the aluminum shafts sticking out of its skull.
It had succeeded in pulling out one of the arrows and snapping off the other when Preston reached it. Jumping into the frigid water, he threw the noose over the machine’s head, gave a quick tug on the rope to tighten the loop around its neck, then leaped backward again out of the Terminator’s reach.
“Go!” he shouted.
For a single, awful second nothing happened. The Terminator’s hands reached toward the noose, fumbling for a grip—
And then the trailing rope snapped upward toward the sturdy branch it was looped over as the men behind Preston hauled on the loose end. The noose twitched out of the Terminator’s groping fingers and closed solidly around its neck.
Preston looked behind him as the two big men hidden in the tree leaned backward, one of them above the other, and fell toward the ground.
And as they did so, the rope wrapped around their waists snapped taut, their combined weight pulling upward on the Terminator’s neck, stretching the deadly machine between the bear trap around its leg and the noose around its neck.
Instantly, the machine abandoned the noose now snugged too tightly around its neck to be gripped and shifted its attention to the rope itself. But its damaged right hand was unable to get enough grip for it to simply tear the rope apart.
It was still trying when Chris, Dowder, and Pappas came running up and opened fire with their shotguns and Barnes’s long sniper rifle. Twenty seconds later, its arms severed from its shoulders, the Terminator was helpless.
Five minutes after that, it was dead.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Not too close together,” Preston warned as Half-pint started to set one of the Terminator’s legs down beside the other. “Magnetic reattachment, remember?”
“Oh. Right.” Half-pint took a couple of long steps farther to the side and set down the leg.
Preston looked over the scattering of Terminator pieces spread out on the riverbank. It was an impressive array, all right. Rather like a live-action version of the exploded-machine diagrams from his auto mechanic days.
“So what do we do with all of it?” Half-pint asked.
A movement caught Preston’s eye, and he looked over to see Connor and Halverson coming through the trees, their team lugging pieces of their own wrecked Terminator.
“I think we’re about to find out,” he said.
“Excellent job, Mayor,” Connor said as he and the others arrived at the riverside and dumped their fragments of Terminator onto the grass. “Clean sweep. And the fact that Skynet sent in yours to try to rescue ours means it hasn’t got any other resources in the area. Good news all around.”
“Doesn’t mean it won’t put together another group and send them in,” Halverson warned.
“Life is uncertain,” Connor conceded. “But at the very least we’ve bought ourselves some time. And it’s still possible that Skynet will decide you’re not worth the effort of rooting out. That certainly seems to have been its assessment up until now.”
“Except that things have changed,” Halverson pointed out. “For one thing, we’ve just wrecked four of its Terminators. For another,
“Nothing we can do about the first,” Connor said. “As to the second, I won’t be here for long.”
