Trial By Fire

facing this direction may imply that it’s not interested in Baker’s Hollow, but is waiting for something to happen over on that side of the river.”

“Like what?” Preston asked.

“How should I know?” Oxley growled. “You want to go ask it, be my guest. But it’s definitely not standing there because it’s afraid of the river. Even if it was worried about the depth or the current, the ford’s right there in front of it.”

Belatedly it struck him. Of course. “It’s not waiting for something,” Preston said. “It’s waiting for someone. Someone who’s trying to get to Baker’s Hollow.”

“Someone trying to get here?”

“Why else guard the ford?” Preston replied.

“But who in the world would want to come here?” Oxley protested. “Who out there even knows Baker’s Hollow still exists?”

“I don’t know.” Preston nodded toward the Terminator. “And from the looks of things, odds are we never will.”

Oxley sighed. “You’re probably right. Poor devil.”

Preston nodded. Poor devil indeed.

But right now, he had more urgent things on his mind than some random migrant who might be wandering this way.

“Let’s assume for a minute it gets whoever it’s here for,” he said. “Will it just leave? Or would it decide to take out the town as long as it’s here anyway?”

“For starters, T-700s don’t decide anything,” Oxley said. “They’re wholly controlled by Skynet, and I have no idea what that means now that the lab is gone.”

Despite the seriousness of the situation, Preston had to smile at that. Gone. Like the massive explosion that had rattled buildings in Baker’s Hollow and lit up the entire sky to the southeast qualified as just being gone. Sometimes Oxley showed an awesome flair for understatement.

“Where would the next nearest Skynet center be?”

“San Francisco was the nearest command hub,” Oxley said. “But if Connor was right about that one being gone, I don’t know what’s left. There might be another hub in Missouri, or there might not be anything until the east coast.”

“Could something that distance away even get a signal this far?”

“Oh, sure,” Oxley said. “Shortwave would do just fine. Never fear—Skynet’s in complete control of any Terminators it’s got left out here.” He grimaced. “And will continue that control straight through a massacre of Baker’s Hollow, should it decide to go that route.”

“So what do we do?” Preston asked.

Oxley shrugged. “We wait.”

Preston peered out into the darkness.

“And meanwhile let whoever’s out there walk into a trap?”

“I know,” Oxley said heavily. “But the only other option is to try to take out the T-700 ourselves. That’s not easy to do.”

“So I’m told,” Preston said, eyeing the unmoving machine. So it had finally come. The confrontation he’d been afraid of ever since the fires of Judgment Day died away and the first rumors of killing machines began to drift up to their little refuge in the mountains.

Their town’s isolation had protected it for a long time. But the reprieve was over. Skynet had found them, and every man, woman, and child in his care was now in deadly danger.

Including his own daughter.

“You haven’t asked the obvious question,” Oxley said carefully.

“You mean whether or not you and your friends might be the reason for this visit?” Preston suggested.

“That’s the one.” Oxley hesitated. “Do you want us to leave?”

“Depends,” Preston said with a shrug. “You think your presence in town would hurt us, or help us?”

Oxley snorted. “Even asking such a question presupposes we were more than just cogs in Skynet’s giant machine. Unfortunately, we weren’t. As a matter of fact, if Skynet thinks of us at all it’s probably as deserters. Or whatever term it uses for humans who drop off its grid.”

“Most likely the same term it uses for all the rest of us,” Preston said grimly. “Dead men walking.”

Oxley sighed. “Sounds about right.”

Preston nodded, watching the other out of the corner of his eye. Oxley had always been vague as to what exactly he and the other two scientists had been doing down in that big underground lab. Lajard and Valentine had been even more tight-lipped than Oxley, saying only that they had been part of Skynet’s vast contingent of human labor.

But that had never rung exactly true to Preston. All three of them had the kind of high-class scientific credentials that should have lifted them well above the general mass of humanity they had described as being down there. Had Skynet put them to work doing something else? Some job they were too afraid or too ashamed to admit to?

Or maybe Skynet simply didn’t care about high-class scientific credentials. Maybe to it, all human slave labor was created equal.

“Well, whatever we end up doing, we’re not doing it tonight,” Preston decided. “Let’s go sleep on it. Maybe by morning we’ll have thought up some better options.”

“Maybe,” Oxley said. “You might want to post a guard here, though. Just in case.”

“I already have,” Preston said. Though what a lone guard could do against a T-700 he couldn’t guess. Probably little more than be the first of them to die. “Let’s get back to town.”

It was after midnight, and Blair was trudging her sixth weary and leg-aching walk around the perimeter of their camp when she heard a sound that chilled her even more than the cold desert air.

The sound of a distant Hunter-Killer.

She froze in her tracks, her right hand dropping to the grip of her holstered Desert Eagle, her head turning slowly back and forth as she tried to locate the noise. Somewhere to the northeast, she decided.

She was staring in that direction, trying to figure out whether it was coming closer, when something grabbed her ankle.

Reflexively, she tried to jerk away. But the grip was too solid. Snatching out her gun, she looked down.

To find that one of the broken pieces of a T-700—a crushed skull, partial torso, and one arm—had inexplicably come back to life. The skull was half turned upward toward her, its red eyes glowing angrily, the bent fingers tightening around her ankle.

“Damn,” she snarled. Lining up the muzzle on the damaged skull, she squeezed the trigger.

The big gun bucked in her hand, the thunder of the shot slamming across her face and ears. The Terminator ignored the attack, its cold hand continuing to tighten its grip. Clenching her teeth, Blair fired two more rounds into the skull. This time, the machine’s grip slackened, and the glowing eyes faded once again to emptiness. Quickly, she worked her ankle free, then looked up again.

And caught her breath.

All around her, the desert was in motion. The scattered fragments of Terminators were on the move, crawling and clawing and hunching themselves across the sand like grotesque metal caterpillars. Their eyes, which had been blank and dead all afternoon, were once again spots of glowing red. As the echoes of her shots faded away, she could hear the faint clink of metal on metal as other scattered pieces began to magnetically reassemble themselves into some semblance of the once proud killing machines.

And all of those broken, deadly, grotesque things were heading straight for her.

CHAPTER SIX

Blair filled her lungs.