Part Two: The Flame

Have you heard what they said on the news today?

Have you heard what is coming to us all?

That the world as we know it will be coming to an end

Have you heard? Have you heard?

-Iron Maiden

Chapter Ten: The Voice in the Void

For the next six months, John Connor simply existed in the bunker. Not yet needing to leave for food or water, he maintained his daily routine of eating, sleeping, exercise, and the all-important task of listening to the radio. They were small steps, but compared to his bad days, achieving all these each day was no small feat. The bunker was deathly silent, and the bad days came frequently. His world had become so small since his mother's death that the outside world almost no longer seemed real and sometimes his own existence would come into question. He would scream down into the dark corridor just to hear his own voice bounce back at him along the concrete walls, reminding himself that he was real. It had all been real.

Sometimes he would sit and read from the pile of letters that Sarah had written to Kyle, a man who had died long ago but had also not yet been born. Some days he would walk up and down the bunker and speak to his mother and the Salceda family from his memory, as if they were all still there with him. Jolanda would greet him in the kitchen every morning; little Paco would be drawing on the walls with what little remained of his chalk, narrating whatever story he had come up with; Juanita would pass him in the corridor and give him a kind smile; Franco would be carrying fuel down into the generator room and would give him a nod; and Enrique would be in the radio room admiring and maintaining his weapons, a bottle of Tequila on the coffee table in front of him. Sarah, as always, would be sitting at the desk, head in her hands, cigarette burning between her fingers as she listened dutifully to the static of the radio.

Some nights when he tried to sleep, he could hear them moving around in the bunker, their voices muffled behind the walls as they talked quietly to each other. He could almost see them if he stared long enough into the dark spaces. Some nights, when he did manage to sleep, he would wake with a start as the memory of Jolanda's angry voice would come rushing towards him as it was on the night she had caught him with her daughter. Sitting up in his bunk in the cold room, he would then have to remember the scenes from that day—the day they had all died.

Sometimes, the thought of climbing up onto the surface to face the reality of the new, dead world terrified him, and looking up the shaft towards that thick, metal hatch filled him with such a paralysing dread that he would be rooted to the spot. How much had Skynet advanced its machines in the past year since he and Sarah had last gone north? How much of the fight had he already missed? The great John Connor, Saviour of Mankind, trapped in his mother's bomb shelter. Trapped in his own mind.

A photo of Sarah which he had found amongst her meagre belongings under her bed helped steer him back into reality whenever his isolation became too much. It was a photo taken of her when she was six months pregnant with him, and looked to be somewhere near the Mexican border. Paperclipped to it was a small note with a message: For Kyle when the time is right. This, John realised, was the photo which he would one day give to Kyle shortly before sending him back to 1984 to protect her. It was far too precious to lose; he kept it on him, always.

He listened to the radio, he maintained his routines. It was no small feat. Sometimes, a crackle of interference would send a bolt of fear through him and he would remember that sound he had once heard coming from somewhere out over the dead, grey desert that surrounded him—that clicking sound. The warbling of that unnatural voice. It was something that didn't belong. It was something that John was sure could see him, watching him as he waited in this dark, underground bunker. On those days, to stifle the dread, he would often turn the radio off and pace the corridor, greeting the ghosts of his memories as he passed them by. Down in the bunker, he simply existed.

Months of this had passed and as John stared at the concrete wall of the radio room, counting the small white chalk marks indicating how many weeks—years—had passed, he finally got the urge to venture out onto the surface. To see what had changed. To see how much worse it was. The sky was lighter than it had been before, but it was still shrouded in a vast blanket of smoke, giving it a permanent hazy, grey hue. Even the smell of smoke had faded, and the junkyard around him looked more as it had on the day they had all gone down into the bunker. What little remained of the ash and soot that had previously covered the ground like snow was still piled in the tight corners here and there where the breeze couldn't quite reach. John looked at the old shack and considered the workshop inside. It was time to get back to work.

The felled drone that Sarah had brought back all those months ago had been a worthy project for John. It was his intention to remove its connection to Skynet and to fashion it into his own remote-controlled drone for quick scout trips when it was too dangerous for him to go out on foot. The old T-200 had provided him with the parts that he needed to fill in the gaps—the junkyard around him providing any other parts that he needed—and after many days of building and tinkering, he found himself looking out high over the junkyard through the recycled head of the Terminator attached to the body of the drone, via the screen of his custom-built computer, now fashioned as a closable laptop built into an old suitcase. When closed and bound, it resembled nothing more than an old, dusty, banged-up suitcase, but when opened it revealed a tangle of wires leading from the glass screen at the top to the pieced-together hard drives on the bottom with its keyboard nestled on top of it.

The feed on the screen was pixelated and laggy, rife with image tear and pauses, but it worked. With the keyboard, John could control his drone and could fly it wherever he wanted. What needed testing now was how far it could fly before it lost signal, and how a Terminator would react if it saw it. One of those he could test now. Not willing to risk it falling from a great height, John opted instead to fly it low to the ground along the dirt road that led back to the highway. The road was less than half a mile long and the drone cleared the distance with no issue, though the picture began to pause and flicker alarmingly often. John was happy with the test run and turned it back around towards the shack.

For the first time in months, John had a real sense of purpose and achievement, and he knew that Sarah would be proud of him. His next project involved creating a portable power source that ordinary household objects could be plugged into for use. The battery in his computer and the one in the drone would not last forever. For that, he would need to salvage more Terminators.

The thought of going back up north to Ensenada filled John with panic, and he had vowed to not go north again without a very good reason. It had been many months since the last time he had gone there on that fateful night with Sarah, and the structure they had been observing had nearly been completed. He couldn't imagine what it looked like now and how well-guarded it must have been. But he needed to salvage more batteries.

It was time to head back north.

The drive up had been a surreal one. Staring at the darkening grey horizon, the faded white lines of the highway whipping underneath the truck, John felt a strange sense of belonging within the universe. If he really was the destined leader of the Resistance, fated to save mankind when the flame of life was at its lowest, were his actions already set? Would anything he did now really affect the overall outcome? Had the universe already favoured him, making sure that no matter what kind of dangerous situations he would find himself in, he alone would still be safe from the danger? The people around him may suffer, but would he, John Connor, come out of every situation unharmed? His last encounter with Skynet resulted in Sarah being shot in the shoulder, but John himself barely got a scratch—same as when he stumbled at the base when the T-200 had gotten loose. These reckless thoughts had been creeping into his head more and more, and John repeatedly caught himself developing a growing sense of self-importance. If his fate was already set, then he was untouchable.

The buildings began to rise up on either side of the road as he crept towards Ensenada, the evening sky becoming a dark. The memories of his last trip up here played on his mind, keeping him from going anywhere near the structure which loomed further up to the north, spanning a residential block, obscured by the remaining buildings that surrounded it. He would not be going there tonight.

In a built-up area, but still south of the main city, John parked the truck under the cover of a service station once the streets became more littered. John and Sarah were by far not the only people to have come through Ensenada over the years since Judgement Day, but they had been more careful than many who had. Up ahead on the road was a car that John didn't remember seeing the last time he drove through. It was riddled with bullet holes and the windows had been shot out. Approaching silently on foot, John kept his shotgun raised and his eyes peeled for any movement around him as he got nearer. Everything was silent. Still. Dead.

Inside were the long-dead bodies of what looked like a family, all of whom were covered in dried blood. A man sat in the driver's seat with a woman next to him in the passenger seat. Both had bullet holes clustered together in their chests. The car had been fired upon from the front. In the back seat, a young girl was seated behind the mother, bent at the waist, slumped sideways and forward towards the middle seat. Bullet wounds rendered her face unrecognisable. It looked as though she had leaned over to see what her parents had been looking at when they were suddenly fired upon. The sight of it made John's stomach lurch and he was reminded forcefully of the Jolanda family whom Sarah had found in a similar scene. The body next to the girl, however, held John's attention.

It was a young-looking man—most likely the girl's older brother—who was leaning out of the window on the driver's side. As John walked around the vehicle, he saw a machine gun on the ground just below the man's hanging arms. He picked it up and inspected it, seeing that it still had ammo. Whoever had fired at this family did not then scavenge their belongings afterwards; the back of the vehicle was still full of the family's supplies. Looking towards the source of the attack, John noticed a figure lying prone on the ground about thirty feet away wearing a long, green, hooded jacket. He approached it slowly, trying to determine what it was that was off about it, when he noticed a metallic glint from behind the edge of the hood as it fluttered in the breeze.

It was a T-200 which had staggered in its steps and fallen forwards after being shot at by the man in the back seat, but not before killing him as well. The sight of it chilled John to the bone as he crept nearer. It was wearing clothes. To John, this looked like the first attempt at infiltration by Skynet. The first attempt to pass a Terminator off as human, even if for just long enough to make the targets hesitate. Looking at the scene, John began to imagine how it all played out: the family would have seen a lone, cloaked figure on the street with its hood up over its head and, presumably not having seen a Terminator before, they would have slowed down to call out to this stranger. Then it would have opened fire on the vehicle.

Quietly, and not taking his eyes off it, John crouched down, picked up a rock, and threw it at it. It bounced off the still figure with a dull thud, and it did not stir. With his shotgun raised, John stepped closer to the thing and prodded it with the barrel, then rolled it over onto its back. The long jacket opened and revealed the spindly metal limbs and the partially exposed hydraulics and he saw that it was beginning to rust in places. Certain that it was inactive, John got to work dismantling it and removing the battery within the chest cavity. With this done, he returned to his truck that he had left parked under the shelter of the nearby service station.

After a few hours of surveying the area with the drone and salvaging any nearby Skynet tech that looked intact enough to use, John tied down his haul in the back of the truck with a tarp and climbed in the cab to head back home. The drone had worked perfectly, though it had been louder than he had wanted. From behind the counter of the service station, John had flown his drone up and down the nearby streets, hidden against the dark sky, and searched for any useful wrecks. He had come across more scenes like the one he had first seen—hapless explorers taken by surprise by the scarecrow-looking T-200's—but had not seen any signs of life. Perhaps the sound of his drone had kept any other scavengers away.

It appeared that much had happened in his absence. The light from the structure which glowed against the clouds several blocks further north had indicated to John that it was complete and in full use, and the handful of bodies that sparsely littered the streets indicated an increase in human activity, whether fleeing the structure in fear or curiously approaching it. Much had happened in his absence, and John shuddered at the thought of the potential scale of Skynet's progress.

-xxx-

Shotgun held firmly in his hands, John peeked carefully out from behind a pile of wreckage to the junkyard beyond. Three Terminators were searching for him, each armed with a machine gun, and were moving somewhat aimlessly across the property—there was no drone to guide them. John checked where they were, and then he ducked back down quickly. They all clanked loudly as they moved. They were damaged, but they still worked and were still deadly. One of them was nearby and was almost facing his direction, searching left and right carefully before turning to move to the next section. This was his chance, and he took it.

Staying low, John sprinted to the next pile of wreckage—an old tow truck that had seen its last day of work delivering the car behind it to this very yard. He was on the far side of the junkyard now, opposite the converted mobile-home-shack. Even to these primitive Terminators, it was the most obvious human dwelling in the area, so they were not straying too far from it. He stopped and listened.

Clank!

Clank!

Clank!

One of them was coming nearer and John could see its feet moving from underneath the raised car. He raised the shotgun over his shoulder into the holster on his back and waited, picking up a rock. It stopped, searched, and eventually turned. Its fatal mistake. Quickly and silently, John came up and grabbed it from behind, throwing it sideways onto the ground. He needed to know if he could take them out by hand—he would not always have his guns to hide behind. The T-200 was light, easy to throw around, but still deadly and accurate with its weapon and with stronger hands than a human if things got too close.

Heart pounding, John heard the metallic thud as it landed on its side and wondered if the other two had heard it. Up close, he could see all of the exposed parts and wondered how Skynet could allow such a model to be used on the field. A solid rock was all he really needed. Based on the human anatomy, the Terminators shared similar weaknesses, so in combat it was somewhat safe to rely on instinct. John slammed the rock into the Terminator's eyes repeatedly, shattering the glass lenses and partially crumpling its head in. It writhed—uncannily gruesomely as though it were a living being—and tried to react along with its slow processor. John pulled out his knife and quickly severed every exposed piece of tubing and wiring that he could see. Before he could be sure that it was dead, the sound of machine gun fire forced him to scramble back behind the car hanging from the back of the tow truck.

More footsteps now, clanking quickly towards him. He had been spotted, but the first Terminator of the three was destroyed. He had to move. Seeing the legs of the two remaining Terminators approaching from under the car, John stood and ran back the way he had come, towards the front of the tow truck. The next pile of wreckage was just that bit too far, and he would be too exposed if he ran directly towards it. The clanking footsteps behind him were coming closer, one on either side of the truck, and he could only think of one thing to do. He dropped down onto his front and crawled backwards underneath the truck and waited, holding his breath.

The two pairs of metal legs clanked from either side of him towards the front of the truck, paused, then kept walking. John sighed with relief. These early models were easy to fool and hadn't yet learned to search thoroughly and under things. But the further away they got from him, the easier he would be to spot if they turned around. Again, he needed to move.

They were now out of sight behind the wreckage, but John knew that they could come back at any moment. He crawled forwards out from under the truck and trotted towards the wreckage that they had just gone behind, slowing down to listen to their loud movements. They were not splitting up. Creeping along the old cars, watching the two Terminators through the gaps, John knew that this next attack would have to be done with guns. Keeping his eye on them, he pulled the shotgun out from his shoulder holster and held it firmly, ready to aim for the head.

They stood close together, weapons raised, both looking left to right. Quickly, John rushed up to the one closer to him and with a hard kick of his foot, he sent it sprawling forwards onto the ground. The other one noticed and began to turn, its machine gun aiming dangerously close in John's direction, but before it could complete its turn, John fired at it with his shotgun, knocking it backwards as the buckshot blasted through its head, ripping it to pieces in an instant. It fell with a thud and John turned to watch the first one beginning to stand back up. He stepped towards it quickly and fired at it, point blank, into the back of its head. It flung back down violently and hit the ground, and all that followed was silence.

After dragging the three dead Terminators back to the workshop inside the shack, John removed the still-intact batteries from their chest cavities and put them together on the bench with the other one, making up the four required for his portable power source that he was working on. He collected the machine guns and removed the blanks that he had filled them with before activating the salvaged Terminators to use for his live training. He sat back down on the couch in the mobile-home and stared out the window at the grey landscape outside, the graves of the dead watching him from across the lot.

That afternoon's training had given him a taste of the outer world, and he still didn't feel that he was ready for it. He couldn't stay in the bunker forever—the food and water supplies were beginning to dwindle as it was—and he knew that he would have to venture out into the world sooner or later. He just hoped that the Resistance would call out soon, before the decision to leave would be made for him. As night crept across the sky, John got up and left the shack to head towards the bunker.

A few nights later, after a hearty meal of warm canned soup, John sat in the radio room reading a book that he had found tucked away in the shack. The radio rang out its endless tune of snowy static which reverberated softly against the concrete walls, a sound John had long since gotten used to. He turned the page of the book and paused, his eyes no longer moving over the words. A crackle behind the static. His heartbeat quickened as it always did when he heard a disturbance in the radio waves. He was sure that he would hear that clicking again. That dreaded clicking. The sound that followed was one that he hadn't realised how much he had been needing to hear.

It was a voice. A human voice, speaking Spanish, to someone else on the line whose replies were too faint to hear. John rushed towards the radio and turned up the volume, listening intently. It was grainy, but he was able to hear a handful of clear words from the mystery man. Few, precious words:

"Skynet building in Ensenada sighted. You were right. Approaching now for a better look…"

The voice vanished and the static returned, but John didn't move from the radio for quite some time. He wasn't sure if the person was Resistance, but they sounded military. For John, it was good enough. A joy overcame him unlike anything else that he had ever felt before, not since before Judgement Day, and his cheering voice filled the bunker, pushing away the years-long established silence that had resided thickly there. There were survivors, and they were organised. Finally, after years of waiting, he had heard the sound of another human being.

The decision was made. He would be going north to Ensenada one last time, and he would not be coming back.