Chapter Thirteen: "Where have you been, John Connor?"
John drove anxiously north following the main highway until the offramp to Tecate flashed up in his headlights. He followed it to the right and continued on through a crumbling industrial area littered with dark, hulking warehouses and truck stops on either side of the road until they faded away and all that surrounded them was the empty, hilly desert. They were leaving Ensenada behind. The van had sustained more damage from the Terminators than John had realised, noticing the engine rattling harder and the temperature on the gauge climbing.
"Hang on," he said to Rosa, who hadn't yet said much but had been watching him curiously. "I gotta check this thing."
He pulled over, the city behind them now out of view behind the horizon, and killed the engine. He pulled out the key from its slot as he opened the door, trying to be subtle, but knew that Rosa had seen. He couldn't be too careful. The uncomfortable newness of his situation became more apparent as he made his way towards the back of the van and realised that there were five strangers, all of whom he had barely even seen, sitting in the back of his van, all within arm's reach of his weapons. Sitting amongst his stockpile, his only possessions left in the world, it would be all too easy for them to decide to gun him down and claim his belongings for themselves. Opening the back doors, five grim faces stared back at him. None of them spoke as he retrieved his tools and in that moment, John understood—they felt that they were at his mercy, as he felt he was to theirs.
"Food and water is in here," said John, gesturing towards one of the crates. "Help yourselves."
The passenger door opened on the other side as Rosa climbed out, and when he returned he saw that she was already lifting the floor that concealed the engine. She watched him as he worked under the glow of the interior light that he'd turned on, but said nothing. John inspected the damage. The radiator was shot and had been leaking coolant from a bullet hole. He could fix it well enough for the night but it ultimately needed to be replaced. He refilled it with spare coolant and then poured in a whole bottle of old radiator sealant from Enrique's own supplies, then lowered the floor and climbed back in, starting the engine. It would have to do for now, and they had a lot of ground to cover.
Onwards they drove down the dark, desert highway. John thought he could hear someone crying softly in the back, but nobody seemed to take any notice. They were all lost in their own minds, each processing their own individual circumstance. John looked again at the temperature gauge. Surprisingly, the fix seemed to have worked. Now, the only gauge to keep an eye on was the fuel.
John glanced over at Rosa and saw that she was still awake. She had thrown one of John's coats over herself as a blanket and sat staring at the road ahead. He cleared his throat to break the silence.
"So," he began, speaking quietly. "What was that building back there?"
She looked over at him, confused. "What?"
"That big structure that Skynet built in the city. What was it?"
"You don't know?" She looked at him, incredulous. "Where have you been, John Connor?" she said, eyeing him carefully as though trying to work out if he was feigning ignorance to some end. "It's a work camp. When they're not killing us in the field, they're taking us back alive to work for them—cleaning out the disposal units whenever they get backed up with the bodies, assembling their ammunition and weapons… that sort of thing. Work that they can't quite do themselves efficiently yet. The old models are there watching everything, so you can't exactly slack off, or it's lights out. They don't worry about keeping us alive for long, though. As soon as we're no longer useful…" she pointed a finger to her temple, imitating a gun. "One by one, they took each of us away to another room to be scanned or experimented on. It was a room just full of those red eyes, always watching—probably Skynet learning as much as it can about the human body. Most people come back, but not always. Those that do, come back with this." She showed him her wrist, bearing a long, lined barcode with ten digits along the bottom. Just like a carton of milk, John thought.
He thought back to all those times he had watched the structure from up on the hill and saw the HK-Aerial come in and land. He wondered how often it was bringing in prisoners.
"So that place was full of people? Where were they all just before?"
"I don't know how many people were in there. Skynet kept us all in small groups, probably to keep us from talking too much to each other." She glanced back at the five people who were spread out silently in the back of the van. "The six of us were kept together in one cell. The only time we were apart was when they took away Lennie again—he's the big black guy, and the smaller guy is his brother, Jimmy. I'm not sure how long he was gone for, but when he returned he was… different. He hasn't spoken since. I can't even imagine what Skynet did to him."
John didn't know what to say to that, so he just drove on in silence. They passed a turnoff to a small settlement just off the highway and he wondered about the possibility of encountering raiders. He had no idea where he would be sleeping next, but there was a good chance it would be in a small town like that one. It was over two hours this way to San Diego from Ensenada, but with the state of the radiator, it could take much longer.
"So what caused the explosion?" asked John.
"No idea. I thought we were being rescued, especially when I saw this van, but who knows. Maybe one of the other groups in there set something off."
"So how did you—"
"You ask a lot of questions," interrupted Rosa, impatiently. "What about you? How did you get this van?"
"I found it," said John, simply. "I was looking for the Resistance and I picked up some radio chatter. It sounded promising so I checked it out. Instead I find all these dead guys on the street and this van was sitting in an alley a little way up. The keys were in it and everything, which was lucky, because my truck had just died and I needed a new vehicle."
Rosa looked at him for a moment, then turned away, muttering. "Damn it."
"They were Resistance, weren't they?" John pressed. "Did you know them?"
She fell silent for a moment, not caring to answer the question. They passed another turnoff leading away to some single-intersection village, and continued on in silence. Then, she turned back to him.
"So what's your deal? You know about the Resistance, but you don't recognise a Skynet work camp when you see one? Have you been living in a hole?"
John though carefully about how he would answer this question. He watched the road ahead, knowing that one day time travel would become a reality, and that if he divulged too much information now about his whereabouts there would be a good chance that a future Terminator would be blasting open the hatch of the bunker in the past in an alternate timeline. He had already given his real name, hopefully not a mistake that would come back to kill him.
"My mom…" he began, thinking up a vague cover story, "was a doomsday survivalist. She had been expecting the bombs to fall for years. I guess the fear from the Cold War never left her, and I spent most of my childhood living in a bomb shelter as a house. Well, she turned out to be right, eventually. I've pretty much been living there until about a week ago."
"So you're not with the Resistance, then?" she asked, her gaze lingering.
"No, not yet. Are you?"
She looked at him for a few more moments before turning away. "No."
"Who are these friends of yours in San Diego? They're not Resistance?"
"They're friends. Don't worry about it. I'll be sure to introduce you once we get there."
Soft snores could be heard from the back over the sound of the engine. John was beginning to feel at ease with the strangers sitting behind him amongst all of his weapons, but something felt off about the way Rosa held his coat over herself. He looked at the fuel gauge—it was lower than it should have been.
"So," said Rosa. "Where's your mom now?"
"Dead." John glanced towards her. "Don't worry, I didn't do it. She got sick."
"I'm sorry," she said, bluntly.
After another few minutes of silence, Rosa turned herself further away and leaned against the window, getting herself comfortable enough to sleep. A quiet click came from within the jacket as she moved which John recognised, and he realised that his handgun that had been by the gearstick was missing. Rosa had had it pointed at him the entire time. She must have decided after all that he was indeed trustworthy.
The drive was silent along the dark, empty highway. Small settlements were spread out along the road every so often, and at one point the highway took them through a small, empty town, which John thought best not to slow down for. The soft snores from behind him made him feel as though he was driving with a group of friends on their way to some camping trip somewhere, the van already loaded with everything they needed. After a while, John looked at the fuel gauge again. It was much too low to make it to Tecate.
"Rosa?" said John.
She instantly turned to him, alert and on guard. She hadn't really been asleep.
"What?"
"We need to stop somewhere. We're leaking fuel."
He drove carefully, keeping the revs low as he looked for another turnoff. They would have to find somewhere to sleep for the night and perhaps to hide out during the day. Sure enough, after rounding a bend, a dirt road appeared on their right leading up over a rise half a mile away, a row of powerlines running alongside it from the main highway. As he drove up it, John could just make out the shapes of square buildings against the horizon up ahead. Movement came from behind him, the others waking up from the change of pace and the road surface.
"What's going on?" asked a male voice in Spanish, a man leaning towards Rosa from behind her seat.
"Gotta stop for repairs," said Rosa. "It's okay, Martin."
The man sat back down, not acknowledging John. Due to John's American accent, there was a good chance that the others assumed that he didn't understand them; a presumption that he did not care to correct.
They crept further up the dirt road, the incline getting steeper. They drove between the flat-roofed buildings, their details sweeping by for a moment within the glow of the headlights. They were small white houses and shacks, dusty and weathered with age, many with flat porches protruding from the front entrances. All of the front doors were open, the darkness within staring back at them. Dotted within the rows the houses were old metal sheds of various sizes, most likely containing farming machinery and equipment. The van reached the top of the hill and as they crawled slowly over the crest, the headlights revealed the rest of the settlement.
The dirt road they were on stretched out below them and, spaced out evenly in a grid pattern, were three intersections, each side road lined with more houses. The further on they drove, the more apparent it was that every house had been ransacked, the doors all hanging open, some even laying on the ground in front of them, pulled from their hinges.
"This'll do," said John, turning right at the first side road and parking between two houses. "Can't waste any more fuel, and I can't work in the dark. We'll have to set up camp here tonight. But before we do, we'd better check this place out. Make sure it really is as empty as it looks."
They climbed out of the cab, Rosa putting on John's spare jacket and discreetly tucking away the pistol she had hidden. John pretended not to notice. There was no need for confrontation just yet; they outnumbered him six to one, and he was about to arm them with some of his weapons from the crate. He walked around to the back of the van to open it, now paying attention to the smell of fuel, whereas he earlier took it to be the smell of his fuel cans. Each of the five people stepped out one by one. They grouped around Rosa and in the calm on the quiet night, John was able to take in their details properly.
The first person John noticed was Lennie. He was the black man Rosa had mentioned, well over six feet tall and was of a strong, solid build. The second thing John noticed about him after his size was the look on his face. Unshaven and his hair long and scruffy, he looked blank and dead inside, his eyelids not quite opened all the way and his eyes having no light in them. John wondered what it was that had been done to him in that camp to dull the life from his face. Next to him was his brother, a smaller man named Jimmy, who was just as bearded. He was smaller even than John, and wore a look of determination on his face, his eyes hard set. Next to Rosa was a man of Mexican appearance who John figured was Martin. A greying, stubble-faced white man and a woman stood nearby, him looking tired and impatient, while she looked much more broken, not meeting anyone's eyes. They both looked close to middle-aged.
Once John had armed each of them, his trust in them was put to the test as he turned away to lock the van. There was nothing now to stop them from holding him at gunpoint and robbing him or simply shooting him dead where he stood, a thought that was intruding on his mind regularly. He could only hope that these remnants of humanity were kinder than the machines. For now, they were.
They decided to split up and search each of the houses one by one. Rosa, after being given one of John's spare flashlights, went with Martin and the two brothers, while John was paired with the older man and woman.
"I'm John, by the way," he said, introducing himself to the pair while retrieving his flashlight and an Uzi submachine gun that he could hold in one hand.
"I'm Linda," said the woman.
"Ray," said the man.
The empty rows of houses were silent and still in the night air. The only sound to be heard was the occasional scuff of a shoe against the dirt road or the creak of a front door as it was pushed slowly open. Slow, creaking footsteps groaned out from the floorboards as they made their way through each small house. The darkness inside was near absolute and the beam from the flashlight only showed so much at a time, but all of the houses and sheds were each as empty as the other. Not even any beds remained. Once the three of them reached the end of the road and searched the large shed that stood there, they turned and began to search the houses on the other side, eventually making their way back to the main road. They could see the small light from Rosa's flashlight over the road making its way back towards them, and they all met back on the intersection.
"Anything?" John asked Rosa.
"Nothing," she replied. "All of them are empty. Not even a bucket to piss in. I really don't think anyone's here."
"We're checking all of them," said John bluntly. It was the only way he could be sure—it's what Sarah would have done.
The second street was much the same as the others, though by now John was beginning to get a creeping feeling on the back of his neck. Something was off about this place, and there was a familiar smell in the air which put him on edge—the faint, sugary smell of recent death.
They found their first dead body in a house near the end of the road, the man still lying in his bed, the front door wide open. He had been shot point blank in the chest from close range, the bullets having ripped through into the blood-stained mattress. They stepped back out and John swept the flashlight slowly across the surrounding houses, his Uzi held up next to it. Each open front door now implied a similar tragedy just hidden within the darkness. John, Linda, and Ray pressed on silently.
More of the houses told the same story with the differences lying only in how much warning the occupants had to their intruder. Some of the bodies showed a certain amount of readiness, struck down by the front door or in the middle of the room in plain sight. None of them appeared to be armed, and there was no evidence of returned gunfire, though some of these scenes showed bullet holes drawn along the back walls as the occupant tried to run. John had been around death and violence before and was not too affected by what he had found in those houses, but one image in particular would stay with him as he turned away from a makeshift bassinet, a woman lying dead next to it. There was just no way to convey to a newborn that it needed to stay quiet.
Once they met with the other group again at the main road, John saw that Rosa wore a grim look on her face. The two groups confirmed that they had both come across the same scenes of murder within the houses along this street.
"Who do you think these people were?" asked John.
"Who knows?" said Rosa. "Could be people who tried to hide here from someone who then found them anyway."
"Hiding from who?"
"Raiders," said Linda quietly.
The group fell silent as everyone subconsciously strained their ears to listen to their surroundings. A breeze had picked up, causing loose parts on the houses around them to rattle and bang gently. Rosa and John turned their flashlights off.
"How long ago do you think they were killed?" asked John, straining his eyes in the dark for any movement from the houses further down. He thought he could see dark shapes lying on the ground further down the hill in the last intersection where the road ended.
"Maybe a few weeks ago?" said Rosa. "I'm not good with that sort of thing."
Jimmy addressed them with defiant certainty. "We should go back to the van and get out of here."
"We can't," said John. "It's leaking fuel and I can't fix it in the dark. We have to secure this place first."
The next building to check was a large one made of cinderblocks by the main road, not far from where they were standing. Built in the middle of the town, it was propped up on stilts to compensate for the uneven ground, and the windows were all blocked out with curtains. It either used to be the community centre or a main office; age and disuse had made its original function hard to determine. They agreed to all stick together from here on out and to be as silent as possible as they searched. Flashlights off, the group made their way towards the dark building, the small dead trees in the side garden whispering rapidly in the wind. The double doors had been forced inwards, the handles broken off, and were swaying gently in the breeze. They stepped inside and switched on their flashlights, sweeping them slowly across the room.
The posters on the walls gave the impression that it used to be a classroom, but it now served a very different purpose. The desks and tables had been pushed together to form one long table that ran along the middle of the room, and was surrounded with mismatched chairs. A faint smell of cooked meat seeped from the walls, and for an instant, John was reminded of the lunch that Enrique had been cooking on Judgement Day just before the bombs fell. At the far end of the room, near the end, sheets and curtains had been strung up as a divider from wall to wall, an opening visible in the middle. They crept along the cracked, green linoleum towards it and stepped through, then stood and stared for a moment, trying to process what it was that they were seeing behind the makeshift divider.
Behind the curtains was a wall of bedframes, all upright and tied together, forming a solid barrier between the main room and the small section they now stood in. One single bed sat against the back wall to their right with large bottles smelling of alcohol scattered around it, and cuffed to it was a corpse unlike the others, one that told a grave secret of the people that lived here. It was an old man, lying naked on a plastic-covered mattress, a cluster of bullet holes in his chest just like the others. Both of his legs had been sawn off just below the hip and the wounds had been tied off with belts and cauterised. The bed was tilted up slightly and at the lower end, where his feet would have been, a hole had been cut into the mattress with the plastic pushed through to form a drain. Underneath was a bucket to catch the blood that would have poured down.
Ray smirked and turned to Rosa. "There's your piss bucket, Chavez."
Rosa gave him a look of disgust, but said nothing. They looked around. To their left at the opposite wall was a small kitchenette, the counter strewn with butcher's knives and other utensils. A large pot-belly stove had been placed in the corner, the chimney pipe sticking up through the ceiling. Its surface could hold a large pan. Next to it on the counter was a stack of pots and pans, several plates, and a scattering of cutlery. The people who operated here appeared to be organised and well-practiced in their craft.
"Jesus Christ, they were keeping him alive, eating him bit by bit!" said John, studying the setup in the corner. "They must have been having big family meals out there at the table while this poor bastard was tied up listening to them. How could they… how could they do it?"
"I dunno," said Ray. He gestured to the corpse on the bed. "I'm just as stumped as this guy."
The group's comparative nonchalance at such a sight drove home to John the fact that he had spent the last ten years hiding in a bunker, and had missed everything that had been happening in the outside world. There was a good chance that they had come across this sort of scene before. Rosa's words rang again through his head: Where have you been, John Connor?
"Fuck you, Murphy," Rosa snapped at Ray.
"What?" he laughed. "It looks like they were keeping him drunk, anyway. Was probably having a great time of it, being the centre of attention."
Having seen enough, the group turned and left. Standing outside the community centre, looking around at the rows of small houses, the dark, secluded settlement now felt tainted and cursed. How many people had lived here? How long until they had resorted to cannibalism, and had they been eating their own or capturing outsiders? Ray reappeared from behind them holding a large bottle of alcohol.
"This moonshine will surely make a man legless." He took a swig.
Jimmy turned to him, scowling. "What's your problem, man? Are you enjoying this shit?"
Ray's face suddenly grew serious as he stared back at Jimmy, as though offended that he'd had the audacity to speak to him with such a tone.
"Come on," said John, starting down towards the last intersection. "We've gotta make sure this place is empty."
They continued downhill, stepping around dead bodies that lay on the road, shot down as they ran from their attacker. Slowly and carefully, the group searched the houses on the bottom street one by one along the right-hand side, keeping their flashlights off whenever they were between houses. These houses had been more populated, each one containing several dead bodies either hiding in the bedrooms or lying in the living room, shot while trying to block the door. These people must have heard the gunshots and made better attempts at hiding themselves.
In the middle of the intersection at the foot of the hill, facing up towards the main road, stood a house that was larger and more well-built than the others, topped with a proper sloped and tiled roof. Three dead bodies lay on the ground just in front of it, each of the victims having been shot in the back. The front door had been knocked down and thrown in, the barricades failing, and John felt a particular apprehension at entering into the darkness within.
Inside, their flashlight beams swept through the darkness, revealing two dead bodies behind a kitchen counter, most likely a father and a son. Both had been armed with assault rifles and next to them was a large collection of guns and ammunition spread out and ready for use. Of all the people found dead in this settlement, they were the only ones who had been armed.
This house contained several rooms compared to the others, and inside the old bathroom was a large homemade distillery consisting of small tanks and pipes and appeared to be the source of their moonshine, full bottles lined up along the wall. The people of this house appeared to have been in charge, the property looking more decorated and maintained than the others, and was more nicely furnished. There were three bedrooms which the group searched, turning up nothing interesting apart from a notebook that Linda had found open on a bed. Two women, presumably a mother and a daughter, were dead on the floor, holding onto each other. Ray took it from her and opened it, then tossed it aside.
"It's all in Mexican."
He walked away as Linda picked it up again, shaking her head to herself. She handed it to Martin.
"It looks like a diary. Might answer some questions."
"I'll give it a look," he replied, taking it and putting it in his jacket.
Once back outside, the group turned to search the rest of the houses down the other end of the street. They had walked only a few steps toward the next house when Rosa suddenly stopped, holding her arm out gesturing for the group to stand still.
"What is it?" whispered John.
"There's someone standing there. Just outside that house at the end."
