Thanks for the kind reviews and staying tuned.

Author's note: I do not own the characters, the space-time continuum, etc.

Summary: The story begins six years after the events of 219: Today Is the Day. Sarah ditched Derek and Cameron and kept John hidden in the lighthouse with Charley Dixon. She felt that Jesse's treason was Derek's and that Riley's murder was an omen. A storm gathers and in the eye of the storm stands a girl from the future, Cameron. Space and time have been stretched between John and her. She will travel with unexpected companions on an unexpected journey to find her way back.

CROSSING LINES

PART ONE
THE FOUR CORNERS

CHAPTER THREE
WHICH IS MOSTLY ABOUT HOW THE WORLD ENDS

"You chopped the guy's head off?" blurted Derek. On the backseats the German shepherd kept his eyes closed but still raised a suspicious ear to investigate the sudden noise.

Cameron had her feet stuck outside the passenger's window. The air gushing inside the car was ruffling her ash blond hair all around her face and shoulders. She swiveled a bit in her seat and looked at him with sham innocent eyes. "He came at me yelling in Spanish with his pants down," she said. "It startled me."

Derek chuckled and took the freeway exit on the right, slowing the truck down the gentle curve.

"This is not the good way," pointed out Cameron. They were southbound to Los Angeles.

"I know but some of us need to eat and take a piss. I'm talking about the mammalian residents in the car."

Cameron turned her gaze back to the blurry landscape and wiggled her toes in the wind. They drove deeper into the countryside until they reached Elkton, Oregon. Derek parked the truck in the parking lot of a nearby Denny's. He donned a fresh shirt Cameron had brought back from his cabin and put on big sunglasses and the "Seattle Mariners" cap she had taken from the dead boy back at the nightclub. He was pretty sure his face had popped up in the precincts' database by now and he did not relish the idea of being flagged between two mouthfuls of scrambled eggs.

Derek stepped out of the car with stiff legs and winced slightly at the pain in his lower belly. He opened the back door for Cano to bolt out of the backseats. He was now sprinting and making sharp turns around the parked cars, taking a piss at the occasional poles and chrome-plated rims. Derek went around to the passenger's side where Cameron still sat, staring unblinking at the sun from the opened window. "You coming or not?" he asked.

"I am no mammalian," she answered, spanning her toes into some kind of tiny flesh fan.

"Well I'm going in. Suit yourself."

She came anyway.

Derek muzzled Cano before entering the diner. The place was half-empty and they found a well-placed booth near the back exit and facing the whole room. Cano came to sit stoically by his side. The waitress arrived in a fuss of pink fabric and Derek ordered coffee, eggs and bacon, and yes, some extra bacon would be nice, too, it's for the dog and of course ma'am, he will behave. And a coffee for my lovely wife, sure thing.

A small television screen was propped on a telescopic arm screwed to the wall above the counter. It displayed the charcoal remains of a cabin in the woods. His cabin. The reporter, a black-haired woman with a stern face, ducked under the yellow tape to show three black, human-shaped plastic bags. Derek was famished and he devoured his breakfast with the chic of a starving bear.

"So." He wiped the remnants of eggs off his beard. "You know you burned down a solid ton of tuna cans and a dozen bags of brown rice."

"Did I?"

"Yes, I was stacking up food for – you know – when the nukes go down."

"You chose a good spot," she said, "this part of the coast was not flooded and remained radiation-free after Judgment Day."

He took a big gulp of coffee and belched quietly. "I know, Kyle and I lived there for a bit. Shit…"

"What is it?"

"We camped there in 2012, maybe 2013. We saw a deer up there. Anyway, it was a long time ago but here it's like two years in the past. I'm getting headaches from this."

Cameron remained silent and took a sip from her cup. She took a lap, really, like some kind of cat or a nutjob that had forgotten how to drink and somehow had escaped the psych ward, thought Derek. She had a strange look on her face, too, and it unsettled him. On the television screen the reporter was showing a fourth, separate plastic bag the size of a watermelon.

"You enjoyed beheading the poor dude, right?" asked Derek.

"No," she lied. She did not mention that she'd made a strike on the takeout boxes with the head as a bowling ball: ten points!

"I'm not buying it," said Derek, "you have that… you know." He made vague circles with his forefinger. "Glow."

"Like a summer glow?"

"No, the kind of glow you have when you're drenched in sweat after having sex."

"I don't know about that," she lied.

"Well, cutting off heads makes you glow and it creeps me out, is all."

"Then perhaps I should kill you to end your misery," she quipped.

Derek brandished his fork like a spear and Cameron dodged a propelled bit of egg yolk. "New rules," he said. "No decapitation when I'm around. I'm starting to remember bits of that night at the club and I don't like it."

She cocked an inquisitive eyebrow.

"The first guy you hit… I didn't know a human body could stay up on its feet so long after losing its head. Like chickens that run around the barn after you chop their heads off. But he was not running, he just stood there like a bloody modern art fountain."

"Humans are full of surprises," she said. "And full of blood."

The pink-clad waitress came back with the carafe. Her name tag said:

HELLO MY NAME IS MOLLY

"Can I get you guys anything else?" She refilled Derek's cup to the brim, then, "Oh, honey. You didn't even drink your coffee. Is everything alright?"

"She's alright… Molly," interjected Derek. "And we're gonna hit the road anyway."

"Where to?"

"Huh… Fresno."

"That's nice," she said politely, taking the lie at face value, and she was away in a rustle of pink.

Cameron took another lap at her coffee.

"Would you stop doing that?" asked Derek sharply.

"I'm blending in."

"You don't have to blend in," he said and made some kind of mystical gestures in front of her. "I know what's inside." He rose with wobbly knees. "I'm gonna take a piss. Pay the cashier."


John Connor moved the queen forward: she stopped right in front of a white pawn to threaten a bishop on the right and a knight on the left. The king was cornered on a black square between his rooks. The end was near, he could feel it. John sacrificed his black queen on the knight, forcing a pawn to claim his master piece. He still had two bishops on the far side. He always relied on bishops, he loved the way they could cross the entire board in deadly diagonals. In French they were called the fous, the madmen. It suited him. He moved his bishop – the one that could only step on black squares – to the side of the board. A white rook came to protect the king from the assault, pinning itself down on the spot, and John moved his own rook to the last, adverse row. The white king was trapped between his suffocating army of pawns and rooks. A message blinked on the screen:

CHECKMATE BLACK WINS

John had defeated the machine. He closed the lid of his laptop and leaned back into the passenger's seat.

"Having fun?" asked Sarah, checking the rear-view mirror.

"Not really," he said. He remembered fondly the time when he couldn't beat the machine. Of course, the machine was not a program on his computer, she was in the shape of a girl. A girl he had met a long time ago in the corridor of that hick town's high school in New Mexico.

"I was asking our guest," said Sarah.

Riley was slumped in the backseats. She had remained dead silent for more than two hours now. Of course they had broken the nose of the poor girl, put a black bag on her head and tossed her in the truck to God-knows-where. The desert? The ocean? She knew the Connors were paranoid folks and right now she was pretty sure she would end up digging her own grave somewhere between two cacti or being thrown in raging waters with dumbbells chained to her feet. John had given her some strong stuff and she was slowly emerging from the thick brain fog.

"Fuck you," she drooled.

"She's alive!" quipped Sarah. "Come on, John. You can remove the bag, now."

"Thank you," mumbled Riley but in her head she was going ohgosh ohgosh ohgosh.

John swiveled in his seat and removed the bag. Riley squinted her eyes at the sudden blinding light. The world outside the car came into focus and revealed a flat barren land made of infinite sand speckled with lonely, desiccated shrubs. They were on the turnpike, eastbound to another safe house they had prepped in the suburbs of Albuquerque, New Mexico. She did not know that, yet.

"Are you guys going to kill me?" she blurted out. "Because you have to believe me, you have to believe me! I'm not going to –"

"Calm down." John raised a hand to cut the ramble that was quickly growing into hysteria. "We're not gonna kill you. We just didn't want you to know where we were heading, is all."

Riley took a few short, shallow breaths, trying to smother the searing anguish spreading inside her stomach.

John leaned back into his seat and rummaged into the tactical backpack between his feet. "Here." He tossed her a small plastic bottle filled with water.

She quenched her thirst with a few big gulps.

"If we wanted you dead, you'd be dead already," said Sarah, steering the truck to overtake a semitrailer.

Riley wiped the water from her lips with her sleeve. "Fair enough."

"I'm the fairest of them all, ain't I." Sarah turned to John. "Contact Charley, see if he wants to stop or something. Wouldn't mind taking a piss in a proper bathroom too."

John took the little handheld transceiver from the glove box. He deployed the plastic antenna and turned the switch until it reached the right frequency. "King castles queenside," he said in the mouth-piece.

The voice came crackling after a few seconds with the code, "Rook checks king. Johnny-boy. You okay, son?"

"We okay. Mom wants to know if you wanna take a break."

"Would be a fine idea. Savannah's sleeping in the rear but I wager she wouldn't say no to waffles."

The girl had not made any kind of tantrum, not even the slightest comment when they had hit the road with a truckload of weapons and a strange woman dressed in half-torn clothes and a bag over her head.

"Okay. We take the next… mom, what's the next exit?"

"Wintersburg."

"Heard that?"

"I did, Johnny. See you in the world."

The communication went dead and John snorted. "Wintersburg's a hick town," he said.

"We've been in worst places," retorted Sarah.

He turned his gaze to the blurred, desolate landscape.

"I guess we have."


Dusk came like a migraine. Derek had taken his place back behind the wheel; the road kept him awake and prevented his mind from rummaging through dark places. Cano was still sleeping on the backseats, making soft dream noises, and for the sanity of his mind, Cameron had tucked her legs back into the compartment and closed the window. She was sitting still with her eyes closed, though, and it made him feel… edgy.

She did not react when he left the turnpike and drove a few miles inland to find what he considered to be a proper motel – by proper, Derek meant something with a neon-sign that was not missing any letter. He was running on fumes and needed to rest on something mattress-like. He parked the Dodge Ram and keyed off the ignition. He slouched back heavily in his seat and drummed the steering wheel with his thumbs.

"You sleeping or something?" he finally called out.

The German shepherd made a gruff noise. Minutes elapsed slowly before Cameron answered, "I don't sleep."

"Well, just do something, then. You look like a corpse and it creeps me out."

She kept her eyes shut. "It creeps you out when I'm glowing, it creeps you out when I'm not. Would you give the girl a break, already?"

You're no girl, he thought, but didn't say it. Another minute and she finally opened her eyes. She blinked a few times.

"We're not on the road," she stated.

"You're a regular Nancy Drew, ain't you?"

"Where are we?"

"Half an hour shy of San Francisco."

She made some kind of sigh. "It's like I'm traveling with two dogs," she said.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"I don't understand what you're barking and you can't follow a set of instructions for more than ten minutes. Why aren't we moving?"

"That's the problem when you travel with animals: we need to take breaks. And you were not moving, it was freaking me out."

"Humans are strange. They eat, they sleep, they wake up and do that all over again. And there is always something that freaks you out."

She was giving him a damn headache already. "Why do you talk so much?" She titled her head to the side. "You were always like 'yes' and 'no' and 'thank you for what-the-heck' and now you make long sentences. It confuses me."

She stared at him as if he was a pug that had suddenly developed the gift of speech.

"What were you doing anyway?" he asked.

"Listening to the flow of time."

"Again, the time thing. Would you fill me in, already?"

"You wouldn't get it."

"Try me."

"I mean, you cannot feel it. Back at the club, time stopped."

"For how long?"

"Two microseconds."

"Is that big?"

"Freaking big. And it happened before: when we jumped from 1999. When you and your men jumped back in 2007."

"So, someone jumped yesterday," he said. "Do I get this right? And don't look at me like that, I'm not that stupid."

"You got this right," she agreed. "But two microseconds mean jumpers. Plural."

"Friends of foes?"

"I don't know," she confessed.

"I do feel a bit kidnapped here," said Derek after a few minutes of pensive silence. "So are you gonna stuff me in the trunk and take the wheel or can we stop for the night?"

"We can stop for the night. You can help me with something."

"I can be useful to you?" he asked in mock awe. "Who would have thought?"

She made a faint smile. "Yes, who would have thought?"

"What kind of help do you need, anyway?"

"You'll see… then I will terminate you. I'm gonna pay for the room." She exited the car and strode toward the reception.

Derek made a sour laugh. God, that bitch creeps me out.

Cameron paid the clerk while Derek freed Cano from the backseats so he could relieve his bladder against a bottle-green sedan. The room was nice enough even though it was covered in some kind of blueish carpet from the floor to the plaster ceiling. It had a small table and two chairs in front of a large window and a king size bed. Derek crashed on it like a lump of meat while Cameron violated a vending machine: he had expressed a sudden urge for some form of food. She dropped the stuff on the white sheets just next to him: a small mountain of Funyuns, Snickers and Sprite cans. She had also fetched her Japanese sword and a small toolbox from the truck. She sat at the window and watched the vacant parking lot while he fed on the onion-flavored snacks and the Snickers, which he split fifty-fifty with Cano.

"Are you done?" she asked when he leaned back on the bed and belched loudly, sliding his hands behind his head.

His mind was hammering noes but he sighed and said, "Yes. Let's deal with whatever you need me to do."

She closed the thick curtains, stood up and came to him. She removed her top, taking her bra with it, revealing her small breast and small brown nipples. Then she took a silvery penknife out of her pocket and switched the blade open.

"Ready?" she asked.

You couldn't say that he was.


The Connors sat in silence in a secluded booth. The place was empty save for the young waitress, her cheeks covered with acne, watching her phone behind the counter and an old dude in cowboy boots. John hated cowboy boots. The floor was shiny and tiled with big, black and white squares, not unlike a disproportionate checkerboard. They had given Riley a fresh set of clothes and some baby wipes to clean her face and hands. There was still grime underneath her nails but it would not bring much attention. She also had a baseball cap to hide her dirty mane. Riley sat between Savannah and Charley, facing John and his mother on the other side of the Bakelite table. Savannah had just finished her waffles.

"So," said Sarah with an ominous tone, "let's talk."

"In front of Savannah?" asked Riley, glancing at the girl by her side. "She's still a bit young."

Sarah cocked an eyebrow. "You know her?"

"Heard you over the walkie-talkie. And of course I know Savannah Connor."

"Don't speak that name here," hissed Sarah. "The name is Gage for now." Riley nodded her understanding. Then, "You said you were from 2031," she stated.

"I am."

"What were you back there? Military? Tech-Com?"

"No," she confessed, "just a random face in a crowd of random people. But the war chief came to find me. I mean John. I worked in one of the strongholds in Yellowstone. It's carved into the mountain's galleries."

"And I sent you back," said John. He clenched his fist around his mug's handle. Being reminded of his future self always gave him a feeling of doom that stretched between rightful anger and utter fear. "I remembered you," he added softly.

"You trusted me anyway," said Riley.

"I entrusted you to do what?"

"To deliver a message. You said that if it didn't come from someone you already knew you'd have a hard time accepting it. And that your mother might kill the jumper on sight."

Sarah made a sharp nod of acknowledgment. "Damn true."

"What's the message about?" pressed John.

"The end of the world."

"So it's happening…" sighed Charley. He put his arm around Savannah's shoulders.

"What is the date?" demanded Sarah.

Riley sat back up straight in her seat and her face became neutral as if she was about to recite an eulogy. "August 24, 2018," she said.

They all stared at each other – not Savannah, however, currently nursing a big strawberry milkshake.

"Four years from now," said John. "Hell."

Sarah was losing her temper but she kept her voice low, "You were sent back to tell us that? A date?"

Riley leaned over the table. "No," she said, "not just that. I'm here to tell you how it happens."

Sarah snorted. "You're not the first one to carry this message. You should know that our previous attempts at stopping Armageddon were met with disappointment." Still, she had become quite an artist in the destruction of property business. "You guys just keep pouring from that God-forsaken future," she added grimly.

"I'm sorry… I guess? Anyway, he said you're not gonna like it," whispered Riley. "John said that, I mean."

"Just talk or I swear I'm gonna get intimate with that nose anew."

"Are you always so intense?"

"Yes," echoed John and Charley and Savannah nodded vehemently, sipping her milkshake through a large bamboo straw.

So Riley told them.

"No!" blurted Savannah, bolting upright with clenched fists. "You're a liar!"

The waitress and the lone patron turned briskly toward the sudden noise.

"Calm down, sweetie." John reached across the table to caress her tiny arm. She took shallow breaths for a minute. Her face had become red. She finally obeyed and sat back, quietly crying.

"It's true," said Riley sternly.

"Explain yourself," said John.

Riley knew she was not addressing the boy at the moment but the cold and calculating man that had sent her back. And that she should not fuck with him, right now. She told them her piece from the top.

"It was a government-funded project. It came on the news a year before or so. It was the LRAAN. It stands for… let me think… long-range anti-aircraft network. Does it make sense? Then the news channels renamed it. For the sake of the audience, really. It became the Sky Protection Network and then just Skynet a few weeks before the bombs fell. Most of us were wiped out. But we fought back. We hid at first but you came around, you knew everything. You were some kind of messiah to us, you knew how to kill them, how to reprogram them and we fought on your shoulders. Then it was around 2029 or 2030… we found something in the basement of a government facility. The place was wrecked and covered with moss and small trees, but still, we found files and papers."

John held up his hand. "What kind of papers?"

"The classified kind. And there was a picture of it. The metal. It was captured at some point and they used the goddamn chip to build Skynet. It was the right architecture to sustain the AI or something, I don't really know about that stuff. That's why I'm here," she finished, "to tell you we need to burn it down."

John made a gesture toward the counter. They remained dead silent until the young waitress came over to refill their mugs and back again behind the tiled counter with a forced, metal-braced smile.

"I hear you call Cameron metal again, I put a bullet through your skull. Copy that?"

Riley made some kind of gulping sound in agreement. "Loud and clear," she croaked.

"John?" said Sarah, resting a soft hand on his shoulder.

"That's a gambit I did not foresee. I need to think," he said. He took a sip from his mug and sighed. "I need to think."


James Ellison fell on his hands and his body jerked and fumed and he rolled out of the searing ground. He felt like he was lying on a bed of fiery, angry worms. They said it was like being born again and he had thought in his inner, calm self, that these were just words but still, he had prayed hard.

These were no mere words. The crushing heat had been so wet and solid, his bones had been compressed and shattered and he had been squeezed out of a womb made of black clouds and thunder. His lungs had deflated and blossomed back in his chest with a sharp pain, increasing with each shallow, inefficient breath. But no air was coming and he was suffocating and the world had melted and forged itself back into something else.

He felt the ozone-tinted air penetrate his chest and he cried out like a newborn. Get it together, James. He'd kept his mind over the years, he'd kept his faith. His body was decaying but his mind kept him going. James Ellison crawled and got up to his feet. The orders were already vanishing like so many figments of dreams… run between the two hills and keep on going. He did. James ran and his body ached and his bare groin was swinging in the damp air… it was the worst. The sand was gruel on the sole of his feet and he kept on running, leaving behind the vitrified crater. Find the Connors, James. Find them. Survive.