It was like lightening -appearing from a point several feet above the above the road. At first it was one streak but a few seconds passed and the lightening turned into a brilliant blue bubble that crackled and pulsed. Occasionally sparks would leave the bubble, hitting parked cars and sign posts but it was late at night so the rouge lightening caused no real damage. Eventually the bubble faded to reveal a young girl of sixteen, who was hiding her naked body by crouching on the floor. When the crackling finally seized and the lightening disappeared completely it left a huge crater in the road with the young girl in the middle. For a moment the girl seemed shaken and didn't move but slowly she collected the courage to stand up and survey her surroundings. The first thing she should have been aware of was her nakedness but, besides her weak attempts to shield her bare skin from the cold, she made very little signs of noticing. Her eyes were wide, her mouth ajar and she was staring at the scenery around her -turning slowly to take in each building, the green palm trees and polished cars. It was all so clean and undisturbed. Nothing like the harsh and decaying world Allison Young had grown up in.
A wolf-whistle from behind made Allison's heart jump. Before the street had been so quiet, but after hearing the whistle, Allison felt the street had suddenly come to life with the sounds of chatter and whooping. Allison spun on her feet to see a group of seven or eight figures walking in her direction. They were too far away to make out any features, or to tell which of them were male and which of them were female but she was still close enough for them to see she was completely naked. Instantly she remembered what John Connor had told her before she departed. She had to find clothes then track his past self down. He'd made her memorize an address and then warned her of all the things she could and couldn't do but he had never really explained why she was being send almost twenty years into the past.
Her military training finally kicked in and Alison turned to sprint into the nearest alleyway. She was fast, she'd always been fast, and it didn't take long for her to hide her exposed flesh in the shadows of the towering buildings around her.
She listened to the voices of the teenagers for what felt like forever and only came out of the shadows when she was sure they had gone. Her current mission was to track down some clothes and, looking around the suburban street, Allison was sure the only way to get clothes would be to break into someone's house. She didn't like the idea of entering another person's home and taking what didn't belong to her. It was immoral and not to mention totally against the law in this time but it was better than running around naked for the rest of the night and, when she looked at the bigger pictures, stealing a set of clothes from someone really wasn't a big deal. Finding a house wasn't a case of stalking a house and finding out who lived inside so she could find the perfect clothes in house that promised the least possibility of being jailed. It really was just smashing and crawling through the first window of the first house she came to.
She hit the glass glittered floor of a sitting room hard but was not phased by the sharp pain in her side. After just a few seconds she looked up at the room she'd landed in, it was large and full of expensive things. Every object around her was more beautiful than anything Allison had ever owned. The sofas were made of brown leather and a large part of the room was taken up by a marble fireplace. When Alison walked across the carpet her feet sank into the comfortable thread and it was nothing compared to the shrapnel covered flooring Alison was used to. She walked to the laundry room, having no desire to entire the same room the owners of the house slept in she planned to just steal some of the dirty laundry and run, and turned the light on. The room was neat, with a washing machine and dryer in it, clothes sat in piles on a table and in a blue basket next to the washing machine. Instantly, Allison moved to the piles of clothes on the table and she began to hunt through the clothing. The first item of women's clothing she came to was a pair of jeans and a pink top. The jeans fitted her but the shirt was at least two sizes too big for her, but it would have to do, Allison needed to get out of the house before the guilt of breaking into someone's home made her put the clothes back.
She made for the door, intending to leave through the window she came in, but then stopped in her tracks because the light from the room next door suddenly flickered to life. Allison's heart stopped. She'd been caught. Meaning she'd be taken into jail and charged with trespassing and thieving. She would be convicted and her mission to track down John Connor would be severely delayed. Or, even worse still, she'd go out there and find the innocent owner of the house with a gun in their hands -likely they'd never used such a weapon and then someone would get hurt.
Allison hadn't moved but she could hear someone edging closer to the door to the room. Every time the floor creaked from the weight of the person's feet she felt the seconds she had left to act disappear. Until she was sure the person was standing in the doorway and she did the first thing her military trained mind thought of -she spun on her heels and dived to a tool box she'd noticed earlier. The box was stashed under the table; Allison pulled the lid open and grabbed the first object she could. When she stood back up she saw she was holding a long screwdriver with a red handle. The house owner was standing in front of her now, wide-eyed with a shotgun in his hands.
"Don't move." The man warned in a husky voice.
He was middle-aged, overweight and was balding. The little hair he did have on his head and greyed and his face was strongly creased. Allison would have guessed he was around fifty. She held the screwdriver high, knowing she would never actually use it as a weapon and would, in fact, rather be shot than stab him with the tool but she could at least pretend to be threatening. Perhaps then she could get to John Connor as fast as possible.
Riley pulled her math book away from John and stared down at the equations on the pages. The pair had been spending a lot of time together lately, so much time that Riley had been forced to do her homework with John by her side.
"It's impossible! It doesn't add up." Riley exclaimed in frustration as she threw the book down on the table.
John couldn't be much help to her. He could hack anything and he understood robotics better than most engineers but when it came to math he was absolutely pathetic. Cameron was good at math, he could have easily asked her to help them with Riley's homework but Cameron and Riley had a very strained relationship. At first John couldn't understand the difficult relationship the pair had, of course Cameron being an anti-social machine didn't help, but the pair had seemed to clash from day one. After their trip to Mexico, John had suspected Riley of being more than what she appeared and found himself wondering more often everyday if she knew what Cameron really was.. He wanted to say he trusted Riley completely but some of the things she did made him feel less and less like John Baum. She'd put herself between John and a machine, she'd ignored the waiter in Mexico when he'd uttered John's real name and then smashed his camera when the man had tried to bribe John, but most of all, whenever she stood in the same room as Cameron, Riley looked close to tears and everything about her changed completely. Around Riley, he felt like John Connor, which was unwise and dangerous and if his mother ever knew what John suspected she would have them shipped off to a new state before John could even say goodbye to Riley. And that was just how his mother would react; he wouldn't allow himself to image how Cameron would react.
"Maybe you copied it down wrong." John suggested. He couldn't help with the equations but he could at least make her feel better about not figuring it out.
"Are you saying I'm stupid?" She said with a smile on her face.
John smiled back at her and took the book off the table.
"No." He told her confidently
"Well I must be stupid if I can't even copy down one simple sum." Riley pressed the topic.
John looked at the equation again. Just like before, all John saw on the paper was a collection of numbers and symbols that didn't work together.
"Just…tell your teacher you took the wrong book home or something." John said.
Riley didn't reply at first but just tilting her head and gave him a look that suggested she wasn't impressed with his excuse.
"Or I could tell him my dog ate it." She suggested in a sarcastically upbeat voice.
John shook his head and laughed, there was no way he was going to win against Riley and the homework. So he just accepted defeat and moved away from the dining table. He poured two glasses of orange juice and handed one to Riley before slouching against the kitchen counter. Riley took a sip of her juice and spoke;
"Where's your mum?" She asked, apparently giving up on her homework as well.
John's mother had left early this morning with Cameron. There had been a lot of strange murders in San Francisco. Two Jenny Quinn's had been murdered in the last week. Both Cameron and Derek had no idea who she was but John's mum had insisted on checking it out anyway, there was two other Jenny Quinn's alive in San Francisco, as far as John was aware, so his mum had driven up to protect them.
"She took Cameron shopping." He lied. Even as he spoke he was conscious of the sharp intake of breath Riley took at the mention of Cameron's name.
John edged closer to the table with a newly formed smile on his face. He placed the glass on the table and crouched down till he was almost at Riley's height.
"They'll be gone most of the day." He said as he brushed his fingers against her cheek and through her blonde hair and secretly trying to make the smile return to her face.
Acting illogically and completely on impulse, he pulled her lips to his. The kiss started off soft, John took her bottom lip between his and Riley put her hands on his chest. He could feel her smiling against his lips and then pulled away - to his great dismay.
"I'm supposed to be doing my homework." She said with a smile.
John groaned but didn't believe that Riley would actually return to her homework. And he was right. She stood up and took his hand in hers, then she directed him to the living room and, with an unexpected force, pushed John down on the couch.
She dropped her body on top of his, straddling his hips and practically smashing her lips against his. At first John's whole body was rigid and resistance. His mind kept asking if this was what he really wanted, if Riley was what he really wanted because, at the end of the day, he knew that he would always care about Cameron, a cyborg, more, but he hardly had time to care before his body reacted to her touch and blinded him to all emotions. He put his hands against her thighs and gradually dragged them up until they were holding her hips. His tongue brushed against her lips, there was a brief moment of anticipation but then John parted his lips to allow Riley access to his mouth. She massaged his tongue with her own and raked her fingernails through his hair. Without meaning to, and certainly without thinking about his actions John moaned loudly and repositioned his hands to brush against her jaw line and tangle in her hair. It was hard for him to consider Riley anything more than a friend but it was better than admitting he was actually attracted to a machine. He knew he was a terrible for leading Riley on and he felt bad for kissing her even if that wasn't made completely clear at that point in time.
The sound of the doorbell echoed through the house. John managed to tell Riley to "ignore it" whilst concentrating on her body against his and her tongue in his mouth. But whoever was at the door did not accept John ignoring them. Again the doorbell rang and again John ignored it. Then there was knocking and chapping at the letterbox until finally John groaned and asked Riley to move off of him so he could tell whoever was at the door to go away. Whoever was at the door was making a repetitive dull banging on the door now, John waited just behind the door for several seconds. Normally unusual knocking wouldn't be something to worry about, but for John it meant pulling a 9mm from the drawer in the table beside the door and putting it in his belt, behind his back.
He took an intake of breath and reassured himself that it couldn't possibly be a Terminator before finally pulled the door open. At first he thought there was no one there. When he looked out he saw nothing but the front garden but then he heard a whimper from below and looked down at the floor.
John had seen a lot of things, things normal people couldn't even imagine but what he found on the floor in front of his door shocked John. It was Cameron, wearing an overlarge pink shirt and a pair of stone-washed jeans. She was bare foot and slumped against the wall outside the front door. Crimson blood stained the majority of her shirt and she was holding her right shoulder. She rolled her head and moaned repeatedly. If John hadn't heard her knocking he would have thought she was unconscious. A logical mind would have thought the situation through and considered the fact that Cameron was a cyborg and therefore could not be dying in front of him but instead John panicked and instantly did what his mother had trained him to do.
"Oh…God." He pulled her through the threshold and closed the door behind him. Once the public world had been taken out of the equation John pulled Cameron's bleeding body into his arms and carried her upstairs.
"What's going on?" Riley's voice asked from somewhere behind John.
He didn't turn to look at her but could guess that Riley was somewhere at the bottom of the stairs.
"Riley you need to go home." He told her with his eyes on Cameron's wound.
"No. I'll go call an ambulance." Riley asked, completely ignoring John.
"I said go!" John shouted. Even if he believed Riley knew more than she let on he could not let her become part of this side of his life.
He didn't hear her go; his mind was completely focused on Cameron's bleeding body. How his day could go from two extremes in such a short time was impossible to guess at, it was simply something he had to accept.
He kicked the door of Cameron's bedroom open and put her body on the perfectly made bed. Cameron's room was spotless, probably because she spent very little time in it and it was only there for show. The room had flowery walls and a small single bed, as well as a large wooden wardrobe. Besides that the room was almost completely bare.
Cameron's body shuttered violently against the bed and she made a very human moan of pain. John was starting to panic, he wasn't trained in medicine but surely that shouldn't have made any difference to this situation. John considered the possibility of a disturbance that had been created in her chip during a fight causing the human reaction.
Despite these thoughts of reason, John still pulled a large case of weapons from under Cameron's bed and hunted for a knife. He ripped the knife across the sleeve of her shirt and pulled the material away to reveal a bullet wound.
"John…" Cameron uttered in a barely audible voice.
John paid little attention to it; he was concentrated on the wound. There was too much blood, a lot more than he would have expected from Cameron's cyborg body. He tried to clear some of the blood with the sleeve he'd just ripped off of her shirt but when he did this she screamed and writhed so much that John had to hold her down against the bed.
"Shh…calm down." He tried to calm her but with little avail.
He held her shoulder and examined the wound. It was definitely a bullet hole, there was no arguing with that but everything about the wound was completely human. No metal. Was it possible that this girl wasn't Cameron? She had to be human, therefore she needed a hospital, there was nothing John could do for her here. But what if she was actually machine and was just hiding it really well? He had about thirty seconds to decide.
Of course, John decided to take the possibly-human-Cameron to the hospital, he couldn't let a human being die under the possibility that it might mean a few people finding out about the Machines. When he ran into the emergency room with Cameron's bleeding, dying body in his arms a group of Doctor's and nurses were by his side almost immediately.
A Doctor and two nurses took her away on a stretcher -proclaiming the she needed surgery now or she was going to die- whilst a third nurse stayed behind to get John's details. But John could do very little, he couldn't give away his true identity and, because he and Cameron were both fugitives, they had no insurance. John told the nurse he had no idea who she was and that he'd found her bleeding out on the street. He hoped that her critical situation meant they would act now and then try and track down her real family and insurance details later because between now and then he could figure out a way of breaking her out and putting her into hiding.
A greater concern than insurance was the possibility of the surgeons finding an endo-skeleton under her skin instead of bones. But an hour passed and John frantically paced the distance of the waiting room over and over again but didn't hear any panicked voices talking about robots and metal. Which should have put his mind at ease but instead just brought up more questions. If the girl in the surgery room wasn't metal then who the hell was she?
He should leave, he knew staying in the hospital would only create more questions but even when he tried to leave Definitely-Human-Cameron he only got as far as the farthest end of the car park before the guilt of leaving the girl set in. She sought him out when she was hurt, it was clearly a great trouble to her, it had nearly cost her, her life (John didn't want to think that she still could pay for her life) he couldn't just walk away and leave her in this mess. And then maybe a T-888 was on her back, John had never even considered the possibility before he sat down on the bench at the side of the car park and really thought about it. The whole situation was too much, John groaned in frustration and did the only thing he was sure would make some difference, he phoned his mum.
"John?" Her voice asked after the third ring.
John quickly told her the date then quickly explained the situation; "Mum, I need your help. This girl-" He was very clear not to tell her mum the girl looked exactly like Cameron. "-she turned up at the house with a bullet through her shoulder. I don't know what to do!"
"Calm down. What have you done so far?"
"I didn't know what to do." John gushed. He knew his mother would be furious when she heard what he'd done. "She was dying, she needed surgery so I…I took her to the hospital.
Silence.
"Mum?" John asked after several seconds of quiet.
"Where are you now?" She finally asked.
"I'm outside, on a bench. Why?" John furrowed his eyebrows.
"Go home, John."
"What?" John suddenly sounded angry. "No, I can't leave her. What's she going to do on her own? She almost died because of me! Getting to me!"
"And you think she'd want you to endanger your life for her?" His mum also sounded angry.
"I'm not endangering my life. There's no metal here."
"It's likely she's a resistance fighter, the hospital is not going to be pleased when she wakes up and they found out she literally doesn't exist."
"I'm not leaving."
Again silence.
"Mum, come home please. I need you."
"You wouldn't need me if you just stopped acting like a child!" His mother sounded furious."
"I did what I thought was right! She was dying."
"Just get out of there now." She sounded furious now.
John didn't speak for a while. He needed his mum to calm down a little before he spoke again;
"Can you come home please?"
"Sure. There's only one Jenny Quinn left and I'm sure she'd be safer there than here. It's getting late so I reckon we could get home by tomorrow."
John thanked her then hung up without saying goodbye. He had more important things on his mind.
After giving himself a long-winded pep talk, John walked through the Emergency room doors again.
"Hi. There was a girl brought in here about an hour and a half ago with a bullet through her shoulder, I was just wondering how she was."
"Are you family?" The woman behind the reception desk asked.
"No." John replied. "I don't even know her I just found her on the street and brought her in."
"Do you know her name?" The woman continued.
"No. I don't know anything about her."
"Do you know which shoulder it is?" She asked sarcastically.
"Right." John replied, refusing to let her sarcasm bother him.
The woman gave him a look that could have easily been mistaken for annoyance then picked up the receiver of an old fashioned phone and punched in a few numbers.
"I've got a boy here asking about a Jane Doe with a bullet hole in her right shoulder."
Whoever was on the other end must have been giving the receptionist a long and detailed reply because; besides the occasional "Hmm mhh" The receptionist was quiet for at least five minutes.
"Okay. Thank you." she put the phone down and addressed John. "They got the bullet out and she's in a stable condition, they want to keep her in for a few days."
John sighed.
"But as far as we are aware she has no family or next-of-kin. We're going to keep her overnight and in the morning, if no one has claimed her, the police will be called and a missing person will be issued."
She was stable. That was good. And definitely not metal. He left the hospital and returned to the house -but by this time it was well past midnight. When John walked through the front door his immediate thought was that the house was still empty but when he went into the kitchen he found his uncle sitting at the dinner table and scoffing down leftover macaroni cheese.
"Where've you been?" Derek asked between mouthfuls.
At first John considered telling his uncle the truth and easing his mind a little. He planned to tell him everything, not just that he'd foolishly taken a stranger to the hospital but that that stranger also looked exactly like Cameron but then he thought better of himself. His mother had reacted bad and he couldn't deal with another lecture.
"Out." Was all he said in a typical teenager manner.
"With your girlfriend?" Derek continued.
Derek thought he had been out with Riley. It was the perfect cover, so John just nodded his head and let Derek believe it was true and then tomorrow, when his mother returned and he would try and persuade her to break the human-Cameron out of hospital he would have to face the consequences of his lies. All he had left to that night was bid his uncle goodnight and go to bed.
Lying in the bedroom that was decorated for a seven year old, John finally took the time to really think about the events of the day. It had been ridiculous and panic-stricken and only he could go from making out with one girl to rushing another to the hospital in less than ten minutes. Sometimes he felt he had two lives. One for John Baum -where he was a normal teenager who spent too much time with his girlfriend and wasted an unreal amount of time hanging about in food courts and in parking lots. And one for John Connor -the future leader of the resistance. In this life he was frequently attacked by cyborgs and random girls turn up on his doorstep with bullets through their shoulders. But the girl who turned up tonight wasn't random. She was Cameron in human form. John couldn't explain it but hoped that maybe Cameron, the real Cameron, would help him out when she returned later that day.
So this is my first fanfiction. I'm still unsure about the story so please, please review and tell me what you think.
