Disclaimer: I don't own Terminator.

Chapter Seven

Sarah's Decision

West Island Police Station: May 14th (14:55), 1984

"You can't stop it!" Reese yelled at the camera, his expression wild and fierce looking. "It'll wade through you all reach down her throat, and pull her fucking heart out! We'll all die! It'll kill us all!"

The screen black as the doctor finally managed to switch it off, too late to shield Sarah from the soldier's grim prophecy.

"Sorry," Doctor Silberman said apologetically to Sarah, as the young woman stared at the now-black screen. Her face was ghostly pale, and her arms were crossed over chest defensively, her hands clenched into fists. She could feel her short nails digging tiny crescent marks into her palms, and was almost grateful for the tiny stinging sensation. It helped anchor her to reality. Even if her current reality was completely different to the reality she had lived in only the day before.

"It's fine," she told the criminal psychologist in a flat tone of voice. "So, what's the verdict then? Is he crazy or am the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary?"

Traxler smirked at her sarcastic suggestion, while Silberman shrugged, a faint smirk of satisfaction and excitement tugging at the sides of his lips.

"In technical terminology?" he asked. "The guy's a complete lunatic. Only thing that came out of his mouth that I believe is that he was a soldier. I'd say the PTSD was too much for him to cope with, made him suffer a, admittedly fascinatingly intricate, mental breakdown. Paranoid schizophrenia, I'd stake my life on it."

'Actually, it sounds like we're all staking all of our lives on this. The lives of everyone in entire world, in fact' that irritating voice in the back of Sarah's mind that kept playing devil's advocate for Reese, whispered to her. She looked at Lieutenant Vukovich, needing more evidence before she could relax and accept that the world wasn't destined to end in thirteen years.

"And the guy who attacked me?" she asked him, expression even and guarded. "How could he get up after being shot in the chest?"

He grabbed something from behind his desk, then handed her a heavily padded chest protector that weighed a ton. "Sarah, this is body armour," he explained to her. She bit back the urge to snap that she knew what it was.

"Our TAC guys wear it. It'll stop a 12 gauges round. This other individual must've had one on under his coat." Vukovich's voice was filled with calm confidence in his own words.

Sarah wanted, more than anything, for the detective to be right. Maybe it was cruel, to hope that Reese was insane. He had saved her life, after all. But, on a grander scale, Sarah would much prefer for one man who's first name she didn't even know to be insane, than for him to be right and the world to be on the verge of destruction.

The consequences of him being right were too horrific to think about. Her mind cringed away from thoughts of the apocalyptic future that Reese had described to her. It was too awful to wrap her head around. She wanted him to be crazy. The world needed him to be crazy.

"But what about him punching through the windshield?" she asked, putting down the body armour and chewing the side of her thumb distractedly.

Traxler, perched on top of a filing cabinet, gave a casual shrug. "Probably on PCP, broke every bone in his hand and won't feel it for hours. There was this guy once that..."

Vukovich cut him off with a gesture and sat beside the stressed young girl on the small sofa.

"Sarah, everything is going to be fine," he assured her gently, wrapping an arm around her shoulders in a paternal manner. If it had been a normal day, the delicate way he treated her would've earned him a slap and a lecture on gender equality. But then again, if it were a normal day, Sarah wouldn't have been in this situation in the first place.

"Why don't you stretch out here and close your eyes for a bit," he urged her. "You've been up for ages, a bit of sleep will do you good. While you're resting, Ed and I'll get to work linking up with the Marshalls so they can organize a safehouse with guards for you to stay in until we've caught this guy."

"What, like WitSec?" Sarah demanded, eyes going wide with alarm. "I'm not going into WitSec! I have a life! Nana-"

"Shh, just take a breath," Vukovich urged her. "It's not Witness Protection. Not yet, at least. We don't think it's necessary to go that far. But there is a dangerous man out there looking for you, and we have a responsibility to keep you safe until we've caught him. Unfortunately, part of that means that, for the next while, you need to be put in a safehouse. Just temporarily."

"I suppose that I haven't got much choice, do I?" Sarah remarked bitterly. She pressed the heel of her palm to her forehead, rubbing at the location of the pounding in her head. "I was supposed to chaperone the competition at the YMCA this afternoon," she murmured to herself. "God help me."

Vukovich gave her another sympathetic smile, patting her gently on the shoulder as he stood up again. Traxler and Silberman, Sarah realized for the first time, had already left.

"Go ahead and rest," Vukovich urged her. "You're safe here. There're thirty cops in this building."

"Fine," Sarah sighed, laying her head down on the armrest and shutting her eyes as he closed the door quietly behind him.

Vukovich paused after closing the door, frowning at the ground with a troubled air. His calm, confident demeanour had disappeared once Sarah was no longer able to see him. Despite the automatic desire to dismiss Reese's claims, part of him thought they shouldn't have dismissed him as crazy so quickly.

Hal had dealt with a lot of crazies in his time on the force. The look in Reese's eyes, that of pure, raw desperation, wasn't something that came from delusions.

Traxler pressed himself off of the wall he'd been leaning against while waiting for his partner. He gave Vukovich an incredulous look when he saw the troubled look the dark-skinned man wore, realizing that his partner was actually considering Reese's claims.

"C'mon, Hal," he huffed. "The guy's a wacko, we all know it. Time travel? Killer robots wanting to assassinate the future founder of the resistance before she can give birth to the saviour of mankind? Guy watched too many sci-fi movies before he snapped."

He clasped his friend's arm. "The world's not gonna end, Hal," he insisted, encouragingly.

"I hope you're right," Vukovich replied darkly. "Otherwise we're all in a lot of trouble."

"He's a wacko, Hal," Traxler repeated, eyes wide with earnestness shining out of his face.

"I really hope that you're right."

The moment Lieutenant Vukovich was gone, Sarah's eyes snapped open again, and she swung herself back into a seated position. She then rested her chin on her hand and stared sightlessly at the opposite wall in thought.

The explanations that the two detectives had given her for the terminator's inhuman abilities were logical. They made sense. The idea of travelling through time was the plot of a science-fiction novel. It had no place in Sarah's regular, occasionally dull, life.

But no motive had been given for why she and those two other Sarah Connors had been targeted in the first place, or how he/it had disappeared so easily when the police had caught up to them after the chase.

Nor had anyone provided a reason for why Reese was fixated on her. Why would he tattoo an identification tattoo on his forearm, especially if he believed it was from his time as a prisoner?

Yes, people suffered from delusions and such. But his claims and story were so detailed. His conviction and the belief he had in what he was saying plain and clear.

And all of that wasn't even mentioning the name he claimed was her unborn son's. John. Sarah's father had been named Jonathan, and everybody had called him John. Although she had never planned on having children, she could definitely see herself naming her son for the father she had adored so much.

Sarah growled, realizing that she was thinking in circles. She jumped to her feet and began pacing the office, trying to decide what to do.

She supposed that she was asking the wrong question. Instead of asking did she believe Reese's story or not, she should be asking if she could afford to not believe him.

If Reese was telling the truth, then the world would suffer the worst catastrophe in history, in only thirteen years. Billions would die from the bombs alone, and that wasn't taking those who died in the aftermath from the degeneration of society and the subsequent War Against the Machines into account either.

But there was still over a decade left until then. A decade that Sarah could do one of two things during: Option One: she ignored it. Decided that Reese was a madman, put the events of the past day and a half behind her, and focused on living her life.

Then there was option two: she could try and stop it. Speak to Reese, learn more about what had caused the nuclear war. And, at the same time, she could be preparing. Readying herself and her unborn son for the worst-case scenario. Making sure that, if the worst came to the worst, she had supplies and plans in place to save them, and set up the Resistance so her child could save humanity.

She stopped pacing, swallowing heavily against the lump in her throat and running a hand through her hair. Putting it like that, she didn't really have much choice, did she? Sarah Connor had not been raised to be a coward.

As long as even the tiniest part of her considered Reese's story to be even remotely plausible, then Sarah had a duty as a human being to try with everything that she had in her to prevent that apocalypse. It seemed the height of narcissistic to consider herself and her unborn son as future leaders of humanity, but she had to. The consequences were too high for her to do anything less.

For a moment, panic overwhelmed her. She had no idea where to start. She'd need to become an expert in battle tactics and guerrilla warfare. And it would have to be guerrilla-style warfare, because outright assaults would probably get everyone slaughtered. She needed supplies, and to figure out where would be best to locate their bases and God knew what else.

'One thing at a time, Sarah' she recalled, summoning her dad's voice to comfort and anchor her. 'If a task is too big to do all at once, then split it into smaller ones and start with the first part.'

She nodded to herself, inhaling and exhaling deeply to calm herself down. Then she shoved away all thoughts of what to do to actually prepare for the apocalypse. The first thing she needed to do was deal with the terminator after her. All the plans in the world would do nothing if she was killed before even getting pregnant.

As much as she hated to admit that she couldn't do it alone, she knew that she needed Reese's help. He had experience fighting the machines, and knew far more than her about them. She'd need his help to defeat it. And they had to destroy it, because any other scenario ended up with them dead, which was unacceptable.

"Damn it," she grumbled under her breath, sitting down on the sofa again to try and think of a way to get Reese out of his legal mess. Unfortunately, his telling Silberman so much had done a lot of damage. Sarah could say that she didn't want to press charges, but that wouldn't change his diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, nor would it help with the charges of theft and unlawful possession of firearms.

"Fucking hell," she muttered, swearing again and rubbing circles into her forehead desperately.

She needed to get Reese and get them both out of there as quick as she could. They'd have her statement and information in the police databanks by now. Given everything Reese had told her, Sarah'd be shocked if the terminator couldn't hack into the network and figure out where she was. Once it did, it would come for her. And she doubted that the thirty police officers scattered throughout the station would even manage to delay it.