this is what happened
Sarah Connor came at the world like this:
Step 1. Is John safe? YES or NO. If YES, keep alert. If NO, make John safe.
Step 2. Is the information I just received anything to do with John, the future, or stopping Judgment Day? YES or NO. If YES, proceed. If NO, discard.
Step 3. Do I have time for this shit? YES or NO. If YES, proceed. If NO, discard.
Therefore, there were certain human events requiring imagination and empathy that Sarah Connor couldn't afford to give a shit about. Earthquakes in Pakistan, tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, heat waves in Europe, landslides in Venezuela. She knew of these things, of course, and sometimes felt her heart give a sickening lurch at the pictures of devastation on the television, but with a death toll of six billion riding on her every choice and movement, there wasn't much room in her head for 32 dead kids at Virginia Tech. That heart lurch never really made it all the way to speech or tears, but to be honest, that was the way Sarah liked it.
Even though TV was one of the many, many things on the List of Shit Sarah Connor Doesn't Have Time For, it was always on somewhere in the house. Background static. White noise. Sarah's ears automatically tuned in for words like "FBI", "military", "technology", "nuclear" and "robot", but tuned out for stuff like, "Jerry, Jerry!" or "book club." Somewhere in the middle, she reserved some space for words like, "murder" and "disturbance", and a corner of her brain took sloppy notes.
She was at the kitchen table making a wish-list of ordnance and going over the blueprints of the SWAT armoury from which she was planning to steal it, when the first report came in from one of those tiny Polynesian island nations. Later, when she mentioned the Sky News bulletin to John, Sarah couldn't even remember what it was called. Tivo? Toolvo? Something. There was a blurry coastguard video replete with gunshots and muffled screaming, nine-tenths of it pointed at the ground and the water. A newbie travel reporter, unceremoniously yanked from snorkelling in Fiji into a Serious News Gig, breathlessly yammered about 'carnage'. That was as much as Sarah's brain-notes recalled.
Cameron said, "Tuvalu is an independent nation of the Commonwealth made up of three reef islands and six atolls, located at 8° 31′ 0″ south and 179° 13′ 0″ east. It has less than 12,000 people who survive mainly on foreign aid. I remotely downloaded the whole of Wikipedia. It's useful, but some of the information is erroneous."
Sarah, her head full of flashbangs and Heckler & Koch UMPs, said, "Shut up."
John went to investigate, Cameron trailing after him, the ace up his sleeve, his faithful shadow. Sarah watched them go until she Didn't Have Time For It anymore.
This is what happened in Tuvalu:
Tomasi Leupena, a 43-year-old subsistence fisherman with three children, had been attacked by a 16-foot great white shark approximately 50 feet offshore from the atoll island of Vaiputu. His son managed to pull him back onto their skiff, but Leupena died of massive haemorrhaging before three minutes were up, his torso shredded in two places. Two days later, according to custom, his body had been laid out at the family home, when Leupena had stood up and approached his 11-year-old niece, Asenate. Accounts differ, but all agree that the worldwide events which followed began with the manual decapitation of an 11-year-old girl by a 43-year-old man who had been believed dead for two days.
Leupena then attacked anyone who came near him, and several people who did not, including the coastguard who chose to shoot at him from the water. By the time of his own decapitation by gunshot, Leupena had killed his entire family, the neighbouring family, a 19-year old American Peace Corps volunteer called Amelia Proust who had taken an early admission because she was studying agriculture, and a 26-year-old Australian Red Cross worker, James Bell, whose corpse was repatriated to Darwin the following day.
When John told this to Sarah, rolling his eyes at the voodoo bullshit rumours, she processed steps one to three and said, "Do your homework."
This is what happened in Australia:
The corpse of James Bell arrived in Darwin. Less than a day later, James Bell killed two morgue workers, a beat cop and ate the face of a police sergeant before his decapitation by shotgun. The stumbling nightmare of flesh and gore was recorded by Channel Seven news and broadcast around the world. And when the beat cop killed the priest, his former partner, his aunt, and a reporter at his own wake, all live on television, and then a US government helicopter flyover of Tuvalu revealed that there was nothing left on any island but inexplicably roving corpses and mutilated dead animals, that's when Sarah Connor finally reached Step 4: This Is Important Too.
This is what happened then:
Darwin went to hell pretty quickly. The U.S authorities closed the borders, the ports and the skies three days later. It had been two days after a furious New York Times editorial demanded they do it, and one day too late. When John told Sarah the sheer amount of bodies that were brought home to the States every single day, she didn't believe it at first. On that third day alone, there had been two tourists killed in an diving accident off the coast of Spain, four soldiers blown up by IEDs in Iraq, an elderly retiree mugged in Mexico, an ex-pat dead from some tropical disease, three college students killed in a Vietnamese bus crash, some low-level Florida statesman who died on top of his mistress in Puerto Rico, a hiker who had been mauled to death by a bear just over the Canadian border near Maine, and, as it turned out, the body of Amelia Proust. She just happened to be the niece of Arthur Proust, governor of Missouri, which could explain why her repatriation had skipped the usual consular report to the Department of State and the four to ten day waiting period.
Daddy wanted his little girl home, and he got her, about ten hours before she pulled the head off the family Labrador, the arms off her little brother, and tore Daddy's throat open.
This all became a matter of public record, of course, for the month or so that public record continued to be available.
FEMA, HRT and the army descended on Jefferson City, Missouri, erected a cordon around the town that sealed off ten miles in all directions, and for probably the first time in history, Missouri got to be that place that was bright red in the centre of maps on the evening news. Shipment after shipment of fencing wire and posts were brought in from St. Louis, and the guard towers from the Potosi Correctional Centre were "relocated" to the four corners of the cordon. This, of course, led to a PCC mass-breakout a few days later, but by then, nobody cared enough to hunt them down.
It took FEMA, HRT and the army two days to lock the town down tight. That was just long enough for unemployed farm worker Tobias Clay to have driven all the way to his mother's house in Chicago, right after that weird, ugly little girl bit him on the arm at the arcade in Jefferson City.
This is what happened to John, Sarah and Cameron:
John didn't know who had originally come up with the name "Necros", but as far as he was concerned, it was a pretty styling way to name the things that were presently eating Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Arkansas and Kentucky for fleshy breakfast. Chicago was only accessible by helicopter now, Frankfurt had practically burned to the ground, and John spent three hours glued to CNN as the breathless reports rolled in. He cleaned and oiled a Benelli M3 Super 90 shotgun while watching, the familiar rhythms soothing to him. It had open rifle sights, but no laser pointer. It didn't matter. With buckshot, the M3 had a scatter pattern practically like an upended pyramid; anything standing in front of it was going to be blown away, laser or no laser. John didn't need to watch his hands, but he did need to watch the television.
Rationally, he knew he was watching the news, but he couldn't help feeling like he was in a Regal with his feet up, chewing popcorn and watching a summer flick about the world unravelling. John only ever expected to see the world end one, singular, devastating way. He hadn't figured on an end that came with rotting corpses shambling around. He didn't know how to re-author the story of How It All Went Down, and the news wasn't helping, despite its loving close-ups of rapidly-spreading carnage. Skynet destroyed the world. Not fucking zombies.
Cameron had been gone for four days. She left in the middle of the night without saying anything, but when John got up, he had found a note on the table that read: I'll be back.
At first, John was almost relieved at her absence. It was back to him and Sarah, the way it had always been, the way he thought it always would be. Cameron had come along and slid into both of their lives, sometimes prickly, sometimes useful, sometimes endearingly clueless, sometimes deadly, sometimes infuriating. But always there. Having her away soon became an unbalanced feeling, like he'd gone out without putting on a shoe. When they had raided the SWAT armoury (something much more easily undertaken since every SWAT team in the country was deployed), Sarah had noticed him unconsciously check for her over his shoulder.
"Don't rely on her, John," she had said, heaving a case of Stingers into the jeep. "We can use her, for now. But don't ever, ever start needing her." Something strange had crossed her face. "It."
Cameron had left on a Thursday. It was Tuesday midday when she returned, driving a rickety furniture van with Pinnacle Moving Services, Fort Smith on the side. She pulled up outside the house and honked. It was uncharacteristic enough to bring both Sarah and John to the front yard, Sarah with a P229 tucked into the back of her jeans.
Sarah tilted her head and watched narrowly as Cameron climbed down from the cab. John took a few steps forward.
"Arkansas?" he asked. "I thought the borders were closed."
"Not for me."
Sarah nodded slightly. "Were you seen? Stopped?"
Cameron switched her gaze to Sarah, unblinking. "Once. Highway patrolman."
Sarah's shoulders stiffened. John decided not to ask, but Sarah did it for him. "Did you kill him?"
Cameron looked away then, refusing to meet their eyes. It was a very human gesture, one she had learned at school after countless teachers had questioned her constant stare. When John once asked her about it, Cameron had replied that when she read disapproval in a human, she looked away to avert their displeasure, that avoiding eye-contact was a signal of non-combativeness in many cultures, including the animal kingdom, she had ascertained that it lowered the hostility of angry adults, and didn't John want her to act more human anyway?
Sarah loathed it.
From the inside of the parked truck came a low banging sound. John pointed. "What's in there?" he asked suspiciously.
This is what happened later:
They drove two hours out of LA into Joshua Tree National Park. Sarah pushed them further off-road, swinging the old furniture truck deep into the desert. Late November, late afternoon, and they were the only people in sight.
Sarah left the truck idling and jumped down, stretching. John followed. Cameron went around the back and John heard the groan of rusted hinges. Although he was pretty sure what he'd see, he still held his breath as he walked back there, his boots scuffing in the dust. When he doors swung open, John gagged and Sarah recoiled. Cameron merely tilted her head.
The back of the furniture truck contained eleven corpses, bound hand and foot, except they were not still, nor, as the red afternoon light suddenly hit them, did they remain silent. They struggled against their bonds, growling, hacking, spitting, bleeding. Cameron had piled them atop each other like cords of wood, but in the long journey from Arkansas, they had splayed and rolled across the trailer's interior, rotting tissue smearing the walls and floor. Most of them were still recognisable as male or female adults, but a small foot sticking out from the mass of flesh meant there was at least one child in the stinking pile. The smell was unbelievable; the coppery smell of blood mixed with the bloated, flabby smell of unwashed dead skin. The noise was inhuman, a guttural, feral moaning.
John reeled away, a hand over his mouth, bent over and retching into the dry desert air. Strings of bile looped from his mouth, splattered his boots. Sarah stepped after him and rested a hand gently on the small of his back, the way she had done when he was very small. She didn't speak, and John realised with a sudden hard, bright stab of hatred that she had known what was in the truck all along. Of course she had. She was Sarah Connor. She always knew.
"Their bodily functions don't work," Cameron said. "None of their organs function. They've lost all intellectual capacity, but their motor skills appear intact, and in some cases are heightened. I have no data for this scenario."
"Nobody does," Sarah said. "Or haven't you been listening to the fucking news?"
"No," Cameron replied, expressionless. "I was retrieving the research like you asked. You and John were supposed to be listening to the fucking news."
John spat to clear his mouth. Sarah bent to him. "John? Are you all right?"
John pushed himself up, resting his hands on his knees. The sharp taste of bile bit him on the back of the throat, and his breath was hot and acrid. He shook his hair out of his eyes. "I'm fine," he said stiffly, and stood.
Sarah met his eyes and read his anger. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you," she said, "but I decided-"
"Oh, go to hell, Mom!" John snapped, turning away. "You've been preparing me for six billion deaths since I was two years old and you thought you had to protect me from reconnaissance?"
"...I decided," she continued, as if he hadn't spoken, "that we couldn't risk you with this." Sarah pointed at Cameron, who had swung herself up on the truck bed and was effortlessly rolling a snarling, thrashing, six-foot dead man away with her foot. "We need to know what we're up against, but there's no point taking unnecessary risks. She can't get infected. You can. And don't ever tell me to go to hell again."
John opened his mouth to argue and then closed it, wondering if at any point in his much-vaunted Heroic Future he would ever get to tell his mother what to do. He doubted it.
Sarah turned back to the truck idling in the dust. The clear, reddish sky was starting to darken at the edges, and by her reckoning they had less than forty-five minutes of good light left.
"Show us," she said.
Cameron nodded.
Ten minutes later, John and Sarah watched from safely atop the truck, John with his Benelli loosely at his side, Sarah bare-handed.
"They can still move missing any body part but the head," Cameron said, booting a heaving, frothing mass of what-probably-used-to-be-an-Arkansan-farmer's-wife in the midsection, sending it sprawling in the dust. "Watch."
She took off, running, and the used-to-be-a-farmer's wife heaved itself out of the dirt and followed like a German Shepherd after a fleeing cat. John noted that a lack of general coordination was made up for by a frightening, flailing speed. It drooled as it floundered after Cameron, apparently unable to tell, or uncaring, that its target's living tissue housed a metal endoskeleton that probably wouldn't make good eating. Despite the glaring bad taste and the mind-numbing weirdness that was watching a zombie chase a robot through the desert, John actually snickered at the mental picture.
About fifty feet out, Cameron stopped, pivoted, took aim, and blasted the fast-closing Necro's left arm off. Blood sprayed in all directions, and the severed limb thumped into the dirt with a flabby, wet, punching sound.
The Necro didn't slow down for a second.
John stopped snickering.
Cameron took aim again.
Thirty seconds later, watching the howling, blood-covered, now-legless creature drag itself by one arm after an expressionless Cameron, John didn't think he'd ever laugh again. When Cameron finally aimed directly between its eyes, John looked away. He still heard the soft patter of brains and bones on the rocks, though. Then the quiet.
Sarah watched carefully, eyes like flints. "John," she said. "There are ten left. It's your turn."
This is what happened in the next week:
Los Angeles imploded. Nobody knew how Necros got to California, but most people were past caring about the details. It was hard to care why you were fleeing for your life when you were too busy doing it. The hoarding and looting had already started when they came back from Joshua Tree; Sarah counted at least seven Safeways with their windows caved in, and, more ominously, three gun shops.
She and John hadn't been in LA when the riots happened in '92, and Sarah had no desire to stick around while a repeat performance got underway, complete with a healthy dose of supernatural death waiting around every corner. She made tentative plans to get out, but until they were finalised, she had Cameron board up the house. When the power went out on the third day, they made do.
At night, she made John let them out and board the door back up behind them, and she and Cameron cruised the blocks surrounding their house, Sarah at the wheel, Cameron riding shotgun with a literal shotgun. Sarah lost count of how many Necros they dispatched between them, because she stopped counting at two hundred. On the horizon, she could see fires. On the streets, there were nothing but corpses and crows. With a battery-powered short wave in the Jeep, they listened to news reports in a dozen different languages, Cameron translating softly as they drove. China was finished, Canada had gone under – in Ontario's case, almost literally sinking into the ground after a series of huge explosions had rocked the interior. Australia's major coastal cities were finished, but there was some hope for the smaller townships in the middle of nowhere. In Eastern Europe, there was nothing left at all. News from the east coast of the US was sparse, but when, on the eleventh day, it was clear that New York no longer contained anything living, Sarah realised that she had spent fifteen years trying to save a world that would soon cease to exist. She cried all night.
This is what happened after that:
The desert, as it always had, became their initial refuge. Lots of John's childhood memories were the colour of burnt sienna, washed with prickly bushes and harsh sunlight, tasting of gunmetal and C4. It wasn't a normal childhood. He didn't recall this part, but as they drove into an endless sea of dirt and rocks, Sarah told him that when he was four, they had spent a year doing nothing at all but setting up caches around California, New Mexico, Utah and Nevada. There were a dozen stolen caravans and RV's sitting atop a dozen buried weapons chests in a dozen different identical middle-of-nowhere locations, and Sarah knew every single one without a map. Sometimes, John was still surprised by what his mother could do.
Cameron said very little on the two-day drive. She said very little at all lately. John suspected that since Cameron's primary purpose was to avert Judgement Day, and here she was in the middle of one she couldn't control, had no information about, couldn't understand, and could find no scientific, logical, robotic, explanation for, she was probably frying a circuit or two.
When John asked about it, Cameron had simply replied, "This never happened to the world in the future I was built in."
They looted canned food, gas, ammunition and camping supplies in pretty much every small town along the way, picking their cautious way among corpses, avoiding the few remaining cognizant people they saw. Sarah called it looting; John called it finding, Cameron said it was appropriating for practical purposes.
After a week in the desert, Sarah changed her mind, the open spaces making her nervous, and they hit the road again. When they reached the Sierra Nevadas, they headed deep into the mountains. There was a cabin, Sarah explained. It was better than the desert, because you didn't have to work so hard to find water.
John asked her why she had made so many places to escape to. Two or three would have been enough; she had created twelve.
"John," she replied, "you can never have too many backup plans."
Those words ran around John's head for three weeks before he realised what the answer was.
This is what happened in the mountains:
John grabbed Sarah, who was chopping wood, a shotgun propped against the nearby wall. None of them went anywhere without a shotgun since Sarah had had to blow off the head of a dead park ranger who stumbled up the snowy logging road a week earlier. When they went back to bury him a few hours later, the corpse was gone, and a blood-smeared black bear, rotting from the mouth, charged them from the trees. John shot it in the head three times. They set it on fire before leaving.
They found Cameron by the creek. She was sitting with her feet in the freezing water. This late in the year, it was almost, but not quite, iced over.
"What are you doing?" John asked.
"I saw a girl on television do this," Cameron replied. "She looked happy. I don't understand the attraction, but then, I have very little sensation in my feet."
Sarah rolled her eyes.
John crouched on the creek bank next to Cameron.
"Listen very carefully," he said.
Cameron gazed at him. "I don't have levels of listening. I'm either within audio range or I'm not."
"Whatever, just … answer all my questions truthfully, okay?"
"I always do."
Sarah settled on a stump, curious, letting John have his head.
John took a deep breath and muttered something to himself. Sarah saw him cross his fingers behind his back.
"Cameron, is there anything about Judgement Day you haven't told us?"
The Terminator shook her head. "No. I've given you all the information I have access to."
John leaned forward. "Cameron, are you carrying any other data that you don't have access to?"
Cameron blinked. Sarah looked at the intense expression on John's face and found herself holding her breath.
"Yes," Cameron said finally. "There are encrypted files."
"Containing what?" Sarah demanded.
Cameron looked at her, almost sympathetically. "They're encrypted. I don't have access. Maybe you need to listen very carefully."
"Mom, Mom," John interrupted, as Sarah rose threateningly from her perch, "just wait. Wait." His voice was pitched high with excitement. "Cameron," he asked, "how do I access the files?"
The Terminator gazed at him steadily. "There is a password which unlocks un-encryption. I don't know what it is, but my chip will."
John rocked back on his heels and glared at her, torn between elation and fury. "And you never mentioned this why?"
Maddeningly impassive as always, Cameron replied, "You never asked."
This is what happened after that:
They had to go back to civilisation, all the way west to San Francisco. John needed a Radio Shack and about forty million other things he was never going to find in Sierra County, and Sarah, shell-shocked and trying not to hope, agreed to take the risk.
It was a long drive, punctuated by an incredible, blaring, terrifying nothingness. Nothing on the radio. Nothing on the short-wave. Nothing by the roads. Nothing, nothing but emptiness, and the ever-present, stumbling, slavering Necros falling about in every town they passed. Once, John thought he heard a gunshot in the distance, and that was the only unnatural sound for the entire day.
San Francisco was like a bleak, burning nightmare. When they reached the inner city, Sarah couldn't decide between blasting through at top speed with the windows up, or crawling at walking speed with an armed Cameron on the roof, so they traded off depending on the width of the street. At the first outlet mall, Sarah wouldn't let John go in, so he gave Cameron a list, and he and Sarah sat atop the Jeep, periodically firing at flitting shapes in the distance. After a while, Sarah realised the zombies were attracted by the gunfire, so she switched to a scoped rifle with a silencer, and picked them off long-range. She and John didn't speak.
When Cameron came back balancing two boxes bigger than she was, Sarah decided that the rest of California could get fucked and they were going to spend the night in the penthouse at the InterContinental. She figured that if the world was going to hell, they might as well spend some time first class. They sent Cameron in to clear out the building, and set traps on the stairwells and fire escape before they locked themselves in.
Three hours later, darkness falling outside, Sarah sat at the window listening to the humming rattle of the portable generator John had hooked up, watching her son. He was bent over the motionless Terminator, who lay on the bed with her scalp flipped up, eyes dead. It was cold in the room, but that wasn't why Sarah shivered.
John narrowed his eyes and carefully removed the chip, cradling it, carrying all that Cameron was in the palm of his hand. Sarah crossed the room, having to resist the wild urge to snatch it from him and fling it out the window, stomp it, burn it, crush it beneath her heels. In this new world, though, Cameron was a tool, and a useful one. As long as the robot protected her son, there was a chance they would both live long enough to see … what?
What?
That was the question which had put new shadows under eyes and kept her awake, burning, at four in the morning.
John did something with the chip that she didn't follow too well, and suddenly there were images flickering on the flat-screen monitor. John smiled to himself, and Sarah smiled to see it.
John typed something, and the whittled-together pile of processors at his feet began to hum and smoke. "Shit," he muttered softly, and Sarah knew it wasn't the moment to reprimand him. He looked up at her apologetically. "She's … it's burning through them faster than I thought."
Sarah nodded her understanding.
John's fingers flew over the keyboard, opening windows, tracing paths, finding, uncovering, discarding data, files, images, faster than Sarah could keep track of, tongue stuck between his teeth, eyes flicking anxiously to the smoking cables at his feet. Finally, after what seemed an age, his face lit up.
"Here! Mom, here! Look!"
Sarah leaned over his shoulder, her heart beating faster. "Is it where she said it would be?"
John nodded. "Dead on." He frowned. "But there's a two-word password." Something popped and crackled on the floor, and John started. "Mom, we've got, like, thirty seconds max! That wire-up's gonna short out so bad it'll probably bust the generator as well."
Sarah pressed her hands to her head. "Think, John," she said quickly, her tones low. "You programmed her. What passwords would you use now?"
John hunched over the keyboard, grinding his teeth. On the carpet, something caught fire, and he blanched, his breath coming faster. "Dammit!"
Sarah put her hand on the small of his back, and his eyes closed. When he opened them, he typed two words.
The screen glowed gently, softly, and Sarah heard a click, right before the pile of wiring at John's feet exploded into flame, shorting the generator.
Sarah pulled the fire extinguisher off the wall and damped the fire, her heart in her mouth. John sat in the darkness, his expression unreadable.
Sarah finally asked him. "Did you get it?"
"Yes," John said, from the gloom, his voice choked up.
Sarah moved to him, put her hands on his face, felt the tears. "What was the password?"
The answer made her throat hurt.
"No fate."
When Cameron woke up, she immediately sought out John. "You did it," she said. "I have an entirely new sub-section." She fell quiet for a minute, scanning, and then said, "Oh, I see."
Sarah, who did not see, parked herself on the bed, ready to pop Cameron in the face, broken fingers be damned.
"See what?" she demanded. "In plain English, tin miss."
John smiled. "Mom," he said. "Whatever you've taught me, John Connor post-Judgement Day knows as well. You can never have too many backup plans."
This is what happened after they found out the backup plan:
They argued about it for two days, holed up in the InterContinental, eating stale minibar potato chips and almonds, getting on each other's last nerve.
The back-up plan was this: In another bank vault in San Diego, there was a second time machine. That was it. That was all. No other information, no clues, no nothing. Just that a second piece of equipment had been lying in wait, in pieces, for several years, in several different safety deposit boxes.
The one thing they agreed upon was that it should be used to access the future, for no other reason than to discover what was ahead for them, for the world. They couldn't be the only people left alive; there were military installations all over the country, humming with independent power sources, flooded with technology, that were designed for exactly this kind of worldwide emergency. Designed with exactly the kind of technology that could still, one day, prompt Judgement Day. Whether it was worse than the bleak emptiness and rotting world they now faced was the question. And who should go was the deal-breaker.
Sarah maintained that only Cameron should go, figuring that if she didn't come back, at least she and John would still be together, still have a fighting chance.
John maintained that all three of them should go, as they had before, and all the space-time continuum arguments in the world would not change his mind.
In the end, he had screamed at her, "There has to be a time when I start being right! There has to be a time when everything I've learned means I'm ready to make decisions! There HAS to be, or else what's the point?"
He stormed off, leaving a furious Sarah quivering on the sofa and an impassive Cameron sitting neatly in the window seat.
"Logically and statistically," Cameron said, "he's right."
Sarah told her to get fucked. Then she called a sulky John back and said they'd do it his way.
It meant more driving. That was okay with Sarah, for a change. She kind of wanted to put off a trip to post-nuclear America for as long as she could. But when they got to San Diego, it was almost funny how little time it took to change their world again.
Sarah and John didn't let go of each other's hands the whole time.
This is what happened in 2027:
When they landed, buck naked, in a frozen, burning ring of glass and sand, the first thing John managed to make his mind understand was that he was cold. Colder than he'd ever been in his life. He pushed himself, trembling, up to his knees, covering himself with his hands.
The second thing his mind understood was that Judgement Day had happened after all. They were in a field, somewhere not too far away from a city, or where a city had once been. John was not too far gone to recognise the tiles buried in the burnt sand and dirt underneath him; they were the bank vault's floor.
But San Diego was gone, and dark, roiling clouds covered the sky in all directions. In the distance, John thought he saw dim light glint off something metallic high in the clouds. He remembered "Uncle Bob's" stories about H-Ks, and suddenly his stomach lurched.
Behind him, he heard Sarah give a great, gasping rattle as she righted herself. Cameron made no sound, except to say, "I think they were expecting us."
And John looked up into the barrel of a gun.
This is what happened after that:
Swathed in a grey military blanket and nothing else, John shivered and stumbled his way down the installation hallway, Sarah bound and gagged at his back. She screamed muffled curses, fought, kicked, twisted in the grasp of the three men holding her, seemingly uncaring about the rifle muzzle pressed into her spine.
Cameron walked behind. She had no blanket, nor did she need one. Her skin goose-pimpled in response to the cold air, not because she felt the cold but because it was programmed to. She was not bound. There would have been no point; if she had decided not to accompany them, there would have been nothing anyone could do.
The soldiers who arrested them answered no questions, did not speak, did not identify themselves. They merely held out the blankets, pointed their rifles, and indicated a direction.
John didn't know how long they stumbled through the greyness, but if you had asked, he could have told you the exact number of human skulls under his feet.
So this was his Future.
They were propelled unceremoniously underground, pushed along the hallway and led into a small, dank room. There were three low bunks lining the walls, each with a pair of grey track pants, a grey sweatshirt and a pair of what looked like ski boots, mysteriously correct in size.
Sarah garbled something at Cameron through piece of rotting fabric taped into her mouth, and Cameron, who apparently spoke 'Gag', undid her bonds. John collapsed, gasping, onto one of the bunks, clutching the blanket around him.
The first thing Sarah did was to ascertain John's safety. The second thing Sarah did was to pull on the clothes and shoes. The third thing Sarah did was to minutely examine every single inch of the room; every wrinkle in the floor, every pipe, every access point, the crack under the door, anything and everything looking for some leverage. The fourth thing Sarah did was to not say, "I told you so," and that is why John loved his mother more than anybody in the world, and he didn't care if that made him a mama's boy.
The fifth thing she did was to instruct Cameron to break the door down, to which Cameron informed her that the door was made of the same kind of metal she was, and it was therefore an impossibility, but she could at least tell Sarah that this was not a Skynet facility; they were being held by their 'own' people.
After several hours, John and Sarah both slept.
They were woken by the same noise, and, gratifyingly, reacted the same way. They shot to opposite ends of the room and flung themselves at the shape in the doorway. The shape grunted and sat down hard, buried under the flailing of feet and fists. Sarah's fingers closed around a gun grip, and she swung it wide and back again, cracking the shape's skull good.
The shape slumped the ground, inert, and Sarah scrambled to her feet. Without looking to see if Cameron was following, she held out her hand to John.
"Come on, John, we gotta go. Move."
John was sitting on the ground, as inert as their intruder, white-faced and staring.
Sarah tugged at his hand. "John, come ON!"
"Mom…"
"John, we've got about a sixty second window before-"
"Mom!"
"…someone comes looking for that guy, and we'd better-"
"MOM! You look at that guy! Look!"
Sarah looked down, squinted in the gloom, and felt her knees buckle. "Oh God," she said. "John."
This is what happened right after that:
When 35-year-old John Connor regained consciousness, which, since he was knocked out frequently, only took him about 90 seconds, he was met by a young version of his own face staring back at him, and behind that, his mother.
For everything that he had planned for this day, for the sequence of events that he knew had to play out, for the words and questions that he knew were coming from his 15-year-old self, the one thing he had forgotten was that he would burst into tears, and that his mother would wrap her arms around him.
When he sent all three of them back to 2008, about an hour later, 35-year-old John Connor looked 45, and he didn't talk to anyone for a few days after that.
This is what happened when he sent them back:
It was a wild ride, one from which Sarah and John were mute with exhaustion and despair. 2027 John had not given them good news. 2027 John had told them that Judgement Day was less than five weeks away from their time, courtesy of experimental technology at NORAD that was even now being rolled out to Help Deal With The Problem. He also told them that there was nothing they could do about it. He told them all about Crystal Peak, an abandoned Cold War era government bunker in northern California, ironically not far from their cabin in the Sierra-Nevadas. He took John aside, and, apologising, burned the door access codes into the flesh of his right inner arm. John understood that only living flesh could time travel, but that didn't stop it hurting like all hell.
2027 John was frustratingly unforthcoming with answers; he gently explained that too much from him would change too much about them, which would change too much about him and everything around him, and that way lay madness. Cameron understood, and merely ascertained certain facts – how many days they had (34), the precise point of origin (everywhere simultaneously), the best place to begin the quick, desperate hunt for survivors to build up John's future army (Los Angeles).
John asked questions about the way they were brought to him so secretly, so roughly. 2027 John explained that he had issued orders that the soldiers were not to speak. It was a matter of preserving the continuum as best he could figure. 2008 John didn't get it – messing with the past could change the future, but as far as he was concerned, all messing with the present could do was change the present.
Sarah, almost white, asked him quietly about Reese. 2027 John had to tell her something he was dreading; that Reese had departed for 1984 a mere three days earlier, which meant she could not and never would see him.
The hour flew, and though 2008 John could not yet understand why time was a factor when you had a time machine, the freak-out of talking to himself, scarred, older, sadder, was enough to propel him willingly towards the past again, even knowing where he'd end up.
They left from a secret chamber, 2027 John alone on platform behind a long workbench, his eyes shadowed. Only Cameron could see that he was crying, although she didn't know why.
They landed unprepared, naked in the street in the middle of Sacramento, which was inconvenient, cold, and incredibly dangerous. Sarah immediately busted into the Wal-Mart across the street, which clothed them and provided them with baseball bats, but didn't solve the no-gun problem.
Cameron consulted a mental navigator and announced there was a gun store four streets over and down six blocks. They waited until dark to make the run, crouching and ducking, hearing the odd snuffling and occasional groan of a Necro.
They made the gun store in 45 minutes, which was about how long Sarah thought they needed to take to be optimally careful. John found himself reflecting on the surprising ease with which one became accustomed to corpses, even ones that walked and yowled and pulled each other's throats out. The store had been looted to within an inch of its life, of course, just as they had expected, and also just as they expected, there was a huge wall safe out in the back room that Cameron busted through in thirty seconds. It was full of beautiful, beautiful shotguns.
It was while she waiting for Cameron and John to load up that Sarah realised there was one question they had all forgotten to ask John in 2027: where was she?
It was four seconds after that realisation that a Necro took her down from behind, and the last things Sarah ever heard were shotgun blasts, her own jugular tearing open and the screams and screams and horrible, heartbroken screams of her fifteen-year-old son.
This is what happened after Sarah died:
John and Cameron took her body all the way up to Crystal Peak before they did anything else. John carried her himself, right down to the lowest floor, and then found a room. He busted the floor to pieces with a sledgehammer, dug a grave, buried his mother, and then sealed the room. If he was going to be saved, Sarah was going to be with him.
Then he and Cameron hit the road again, but this time they made a short trip to LA, because Cameron found a helicopter, which was mighty useful because the sound of it whop-whopping over the city brought survivors out in droves. Once they found a refuelling station, they ran a couple of groups up to the Peak, but after a few days they found it a better use of their time to arrange them into little divisions, give them guns and maps, and send them off in SUVs. Some of them never turned up, but those that did were unanimous in their praise of the blunt-spoken young girl and the softly-spoken, sad-eyed, arresting young man who had told them to come with him if they wanted to live.
Cameron was a lot of things, but she was no good with grief. She understood that John was hurting, but since she had no experience of actual hurting herself, her sympathy was strictly on paper. She did miss Sarah, in her own way, which was to say that she saw the tactical disadvantages of having one less able and skilled person around for practical purposes.
One week after her death, they had already sent three convoys of survivors towards Crystal Peak, and it hadn't been easy. These shell-shocked people could barely look after themselves, and when she told John that she didn't think they would make a very capable army and would most likely be a liability, since most of them would end up dead like Sarah anyway, he had screamed at her until the veins were popping out on the side of his neck and then he cried for a long, long time.
It was three weeks after that, when John and Cameron had been going door to door in Silverlake, calling, knocking, searching out hidden survivors, when John saw the picture on the wall. It was a ship being tossed in a stormy sea, impossibly small, impossibly afloat, overpowered by the huge waves bearing down upon it. He knew it, searched for the memory, and it came to him. It had hung on the wall in a motel in which they had stayed in El Paso when he was nine. He had loved the picture. Sarah had her own ideas.
John turned to Cameron.
"My mother said that boat deserved whatever it got for going out in the storm when it didn't have to. She said that boat had a port, a harbour somewhere, and if the captain was too stupid to know a safe haven when he saw it, if he went out there and risked the lives of his crew, he didn't deserve to be in charge."
Cameron looked at him, puzzled. "Your mother's dead," she said bluntly, "and she never saw that boat."
John stared at her for a moment, white-hot building to flash-point, and then pulled the picture off the wall, throwing it at her, wild. She ducked. It sailed over her head, smashing into the fireplace, bringing down the looping threads of glass stars that had been strung across the chimney.
Cameron said, "I did it again. I'm sorry."
John waved her away, his throat full. The codes burned on his arm, and the date on his watch said they only had six days left. It was time to keep moving.
THE END