Chapter Fourteen: Tales
At the north end of the road, just by the front door of the furthest house, a lone figure stood. It was facing them, standing perfectly still, and almost blended into the darkness of the open doorway behind it. It looked armed.
"Are you sure that's a person?" asked Jimmy, quietly.
"I hope so," replied Rosa, not looking away from it.
"That," said John with certainty, "is a goddamn Terminator."
They all stared at it intently, scanning for any of the usual defining features. It looked to be staring right back at them, watching, but hadn't made any movement or any sound. Its face was dark; there was no glowing red eye.
"Well," said Ray, bending down. "Only one way to be sure!"
He picked up a small plank of wood and threw it, the others all gasping simultaneously as it sailed through the air in an arc, landing with a thud by its feet. The figure didn't move.
"Fucking hell, Ray!" said Rosa, exasperated.
"Shh!" said John, aiming his Uzi at it. Its size and bulk were now coming into focus, adding to his suspicions. He had to approach it. Had to know for sure. If it was an intact Terminator, then he fully intended to make use of its parts, especially the battery and CPU. He had to make sure that none of the others fired at it. At the very least, there could be more of them around and gunfire would only draw their attention. If it was a person, then it would not do to fire at a fellow human being.
As quietly as they could, the group hid themselves behind the side of the next house, out of its line of sight. John gripped his flashlight and peered around the wall, aiming it at it. He flicked it on and the figure was quickly bathed in light.
It was a Terminator. Tall, bulky, and with a single, dull eyepiece in the centre of its blank face—one of the new ones. A large machine gun was gripped in its hands, ready to raise and fire at a moment's notice. It was damaged and there were several bullet holes dotted across its armoured chest leading up and down to the exposed sections at the abdomen and neck. Whoever had fired at it was most likely panicking as it charged at them. John spoke quietly to no-one in particular as he placed the flashlight on the ground, the beam still aimed at it. "It looks pretty damaged. I need to get close to it. Nobody shoot at it; I need it in one piece."
"To hell with that," said Jimmy. "If that thing moves I'm not gonna wait around for you to do your thing. I'm gonna shoot it."
Nobody tried to stop him or made any attempt to fire at it as John slowly approached, the flashlight on the ground illuminating the still, rusting figure. He would like to have believed that they were following his instructions, but a more pessimistic part of him told him that it was only out of a morbid curiosity to see what would happen to him if it woke, a collective agreement amongst them of 'better him than me'.
The breeze was getting stronger and was beginning to press against the houses and whistle through the gaps. Loose panels rattled around him from various rooftops and the sense of impending violence crawled right through him. The Terminator loomed tall, remaining still as John approached it, lit bright and glaring against the darkness behind it. The eye was still dark. Silently, John reached for the Termination Knife inside his jacket as he got closer to it.
Suddenly, the eye became red, brightening like an ember catching a draught of air—John had gotten too close. Its head lifted and turned slightly to focus on him and the shoulder-mounted camera began to spin, searching the area. It began to raise the machine gun at him, the damaged parts clicking and groaning loudly as it moved and John leaped to the side as it fired off a quick burst, the shoulder camera watching him incessantly as he scrambled on the ground. He raised his Uzi and held down the trigger, firing rapidly into its abdomen. It lurched and stumbled as John's gun jolted and shook in his hand, and he did not release the trigger until the Terminator crumpled and fell to the ground, useless.
"Fuck!"
John could feel the others watching him as he straightened himself up, aware that he was within the bright beam of the flashlight. His shout had told them that he was still alive and that the Terminator was now dead. They crept out from behind their corner as if anticipating another attack from the shadows, but John knew that if there were any more in the area, then they would already have been shot at.
"You okay?" asked Rosa. She looked down at the wrecked Terminator, the eyepiece once again black. The exposed abdomen was shredded into pieces. "Need it in one piece, huh?"
"This is the part that matters, anyway," said John, pointing at the head. He turned to the others. "Hey, can you guys help me lift this thing?"
-xxx-
It was after midnight when the group was finally settled in for the night. They had holed up in the large house at the bottom of the road, fixing and barricading the front door; it was the most furnished with three beds already set up, and apparently contained the settlement's munitions. They had moved the van closer to the house, rolling it down the hill, and hid it inside one of the nearby sheds, then retrieved some fold up beds and food from it with a small travel stove to cook with. The bodies had been removed—the two dead men were placed in the bedroom with the dead woman and the young girl and covered with a blanket—but it was hard to forget the remnants of the violence that had filled the house.
Everyone was sitting in the lounge room around the small burner on the coffee table, eating their canned food in silence. A small cluster of candles burned gently on it, illuminating the room with their dull glow which almost reached the edges of the room. The wind outside had fully established itself as the loose panels rattled constantly and the drawn curtains swayed against the draught. John sat at the kitchen counter, the Terminator now in pieces on the floor around him, under the glow of a lamp that he had plugged into his battery-generator. The head was on the counter next to his homemade computer, the coverings removed and the CPU access panel exposed, and Rosa watched him carefully from her stool nearby as he slowly worked the CPU chip out of the head with a pair of long tweezers. John, used to being on his own, was very aware of her gaze and the various glances from the others, and found it more than distracting.
The chip came free in his tweezers and he placed it down carefully. Next was to remove the slot that it connected to, which he needed to attach to his computer for it to read. The chip was bigger than the T-200 one, bulkier and more capable. He looked up at Rosa, who was still watching him with interest.
"Something on your mind?" he asked, impatiently.
"Yeah," she answered, unfazed. "You look handy. Do you think you can reprogram one of these things?"
"No," said John. "Well, I did build my own drone from one that we shot down and some parts from a T-200. I can control it from my computer." He tapped the open suitcase in front of him, the keyboard and screen nestled upon a tangle of wiring, each in their own compartment. "But that's remote control, not really reprogramming like what you mean."
"Not bad. Do you think you can remote-control one of these?"
"Doubt it."
"Why not?"
"The drone is just up, down, left, right, and I used one of my own chips. I can't change anything on the Skynet CPU's; I can only read them. And I don't think any of mine will be powerful enough to run one of these guys. And besides," he said as he pulled out the CPU slot from the Terminator head, a trail of wires coming out after it, "we've gotta catch one intact, first."
He connected the slot to his computer and attached the CPU. After a moment, the screen brought up a display.
"Piece of cake." He smirked, then read over the screen carefully. "It's a T-400. Pretty new model. Doesn't need to communicate with a drone; they can all connect and communicate with the rest of their squad. More efficient."
"I know," said Rosa, simply, reminding him of the fact that the war had been going on for a long time without him. Rosa and the others had been the ones roughing it while John was safe in his mother's bunker. He searched through the information on the CPU, hoping to find anything that would make the danger that he had put himself in worth it.
"Termination history…" He read over the screen, eyes darkening. "Fifteen kills. …doesn't seem to differentiate between age or gender. We're all the same to them." John remembered the bassinet and tried to force the image from his mind.
He looked up at the others and caught a few of them looking in his direction as he spoke. Most looked away except for Lennie. Sitting on the couch in the far corner next to his sleeping brother, Jimmy, the big man stared at John with that same expressionless look on his face. He had so far not eaten any of the food in front of him, nor had he spoken a word to any of them.
"Anything else?" asked Rosa. "Does it say where it was built, or where it had come from?"
"Hmm… It looks like it was activated at these co-ordinates." He pointed to the numbers on the screen. "I'm guessing that's only a few miles from here."
He read through the data, squinting slightly against the glare from the screen.
"Looks like this one was left in autonomous mode and was not directly operating under Skynet, so there's not actually a lot we can get from it. Simple search and destroy objective. They probably send single units into these ghost towns to comb the place over for any squatters, and when they're done they just… hibernate until someone else shows up."
"So, it wasn't linked to Skynet when it woke up and saw you?"
John scanned through the history of commands and completed tasks and swallowed as he saw the most recent ones on the bottom of the screen.
23:38 – Skynet uplink connected.
"That's strange," said John. "It was. But then we should have seen a drone or something out here by now, I would have thought. Maybe it didn't connect properly…" He looked slowly around the room at the walls and ceiling, listening for the hum of a lingering drone, floating outside in the strong wind, but there was nothing.
Satisfied, Rosa stood up and left John to his work and crossed towards the lounge area, sitting down on the floor next to Martin. The group had been pretty quiet, most of them lost in their thoughts as they stared at the small flames on the candles. John wondered what they had all gone through, what their own lives had been like ever since Judgement Day. Ray had been sipping a bottle of moonshine taken from the back room getting increasingly belligerent as he tried unsuccessfully to engage Linda, whom he was sitting next to. Certain that he had done all that he could for the night, John powered down his computer, closed and latched it, then went and sat down with the others.
"So what's your story, kid?" asked Ray with a loud, confident voice. "John, isn't it? None of us know who you are. Why were you outside that work camp tonight?"
"There's not much to say," said John, uncomfortably. Looking around, he realised that he was the youngest amongst them and it was hard to not feel somewhat intimidated. "My mom was a survivalist and was convinced that we would be attacked by the Russians one day. She never had any faith in humanity. Turned out she was right—well, half-right. We lived in a bunker down south and she had it fully stocked with food and guns."
"So you're not with the Resistance, then?"
"No, but I—"
"And you didn't steal that van full of weapons out there from the Resistance?"
"What? No—"
"You with the raiders?"
"Ray," said Martin, scowling at him, "he saved out asses tonight and took out that Terminator for us. Can you spare him the interrogation?"
Ray turned to him, his eyes struggling at first to focus. "You speak to me like that again, this bottle will be going up your ass."
The room went quiet. Everyone was watching him warily. Linda sat perfectly still beside him, not looking at him. All she wanted to do was get up and sit somewhere else, probably next to Lennie for safety, but she knew that if she did, Ray's moonshine anger would then be focused on her. Fortunately it was Ray who stood.
"I've gotta piss," he said, taking a swig from the bottle. He turned to John. "We coulda used you a few years ago, kid. Hell, a week ago."
He walked carefully towards the back door, his balance lurching and swaying with each step. The door slammed behind him and the house was silent, the howling wind outside the only sound to be heard.
"Asshole," said Martin. He relaxed and turned to John. "So, where were you on Judgement Day?"
"I was twelve, and I was riding my motorbike with my friend, Franco. His dad was cooking up a barbecue and then my mom just came out of nowhere and told us to get into the bunker. She had been listening to the radio and heard the warning." He didn't want to say too much about just how prepared they were. "She did that a lot back then; always listening to the news. We were running into the bunker and everything flashed white. Couldn't see shit. Closed the hatch and then we heard the boom. Didn't come up for a few years. Franco and his dad went up, though, about a week after. They both died."
Rosa looked up at him. "Where was this bunker?"
"You ask a lot of questions," he answered with a quick smirk.
He wondered if he had said too much by mentioning Franco by name, and if in some other timeline, that information had been enough for Skynet to find him. Occasionally, he wondered if a Terminator, an Infiltrator like the one that had gone for Sarah, would suddenly appear from a different time to come for him, based on some small information that he had given about his past. He would have to be careful.
"Well, I was on a field trip," said Martin. "I was about fourteen. My classmates and I were on a trip from Mexico City to Toluca, about an hour west, when the bombs dropped. Everyone started panicking when the news got out, saying that America had just launched its nukes towards Russia and that Russia had sent theirs back. Then they were saying that there were nukes flying into Mexico. We were all hiding in the cathedral when Mexico City got hit. We didn't understand why we were attacked or who had attacked us. It didn't make any sense. I just remember knowing that my entire family was gone. My classmates were all the same, all of us just knowing in that instant when we felt the blast that our families were gone. All we had left were our teachers and tour guides.
"The police were saying to stay inside, but our teacher took us back out to the bus. She said she had a feeling that we had to get away out into the country. We were just teenagers, so we all just went along with it. We were maybe ten minutes out of Toluca when the stealth bomber flew over with its own nuke. It dropped it on the city and in a flash, it was all gone. The teacher said that we were saved by God."
Heavy footsteps thudded on the back steps followed by the back door being roughly thrown open. Ray stepped in and said, "All clear out there. No machines."
"You weren't actually wandering around, were you?" asked Rosa with a firm tone.
"Weren't we all just outside there an hour ago?" Ray asked, his words slurred. "There's nothing here!"
"So what about you, Ray?" said John, sensing a fight coming and wanting to keep the peace. "Where were you when the bombs fell?"
Ray looked at him, surprised by the question, and John could see his bloodshot eyes glazing over as he thought back to that terrible day that changed the world only ten years ago. He walked towards the couch, his footsteps heavier than intended, and sat down heavily. Linda had gotten up during Martin's story and had sat down next to Rosa on the floor. He took a swig from the glass bottle of moonshine, wiped his lips, and spoke.
"I was a truck driver back then. I was heading up through Utah and I'd stopped for an early lunch at some pizza place. I remember there were just kids everywhere. There were these three dancing robot animals on the stage—I remember the middle one was a bear and there was a yellow one, a duck maybe. I can't remember what the other one was…
"Anyway, I left and was on my way north when I had to pull over into a truck stop to check something on the back, and while I was in there I just saw this great big flash of white light. Shit, it was so bright it lit up the back even with the sides still closed. Scared the hell out of me. Then came the boom and everything just shook and shook. After a while, I got out and all I could see were these huge towers of black smoke in every direction. I remember them looking like black, rocky cliffs."
He paused and took a swig from the bottle, emptying it. "Now, whenever I think about Judgement Day and the Terminators and all that, I remember those creepy dancing robots on the stage. Can you imagine if Skynet managed to take control of them? I can just picture them leaving their stage to hunt people down along with the other Terminators, carrying their guns. It always makes me laugh."
Ray didn't laugh, or smile. None of them did. The room fell silent once again, the only sound to be heard was the snoring coming from Jimmy as he slept sitting on the couch in the corner, his brother Lennie sitting next to him, staring blankly back at the group. John turned to Rosa.
"How about you? Where were you when it happened?"
She stared at the candles on the coffee table and sighed, then stood up.
"It's late. We should try to get some sleep. We've got a lot of ground to cover tomorrow and I want to get as far from here as possible."
One by one they all stood and made their way to their beds. Jimmy was still asleep on the couch with Lennie sitting next to him and John, Ray, and Martin got themselves comfortable on their fold up beds, the thin, unused mattresses feeling like luxury to many of them. Linda and Rosa made their way to the empty bedrooms down the hallway in an unspoken arrangement that was made earlier when they first set themselves up. John wasn't sure how the group agreed that the two women should get the proper beds in their own rooms while the men slept on their small camping beds on the lounge room floor, but to him it felt somewhere between chivalry and sexism. It wasn't an arrangement his mother would have bothered with, at the least.
John laid in the dark, the candles having been put out, and knew that the others were lying awake in their beds, too. The wind pressed against the house every now and then and he could picture the entire structure leaning with each gust. He didn't like sleeping in so much noise; it would mask any approaching Terminators. He must have dozed, however, because he woke with a start when he heard a sound come from the hallway. He reached out and gripped a machine gun that was on the floor beside him and leaned himself up slowly, careful not to let the bed creak. Something was moving around in the house. Slowly, he stood and crept across the living room, his eyes making out a slightly open door ahead of him. He could hear a quiet voice speaking in a murmur. Ray.
As John got closer, he realised that Ray was in Linda's bedroom. He listened closely, trying to get a feel for whatever was going on in there. Perhaps she had taken to him, after all? Standing just next to the doorway, John could hear panicked breathing. It was quiet, but he could make out the quick, sharp intakes of panicked breath coming from within the room and Ray's voice, speaking in a reassuring tone.
"Come on, surely you want to. We're still human, aren't we? We're not machines."
A stifled gasp came from the bed, louder and more urgent this time, and John could now clearly hear it in her voice. She was terrified.
John pushed the door open and aimed his assault rifle at the figure standing beside the bed. Ray had been holding Linda's hand close to himself and now that John had burst in, she pulled it back and scrambled away from him.
"What the fuck, kid?" said Ray, indignant.
"I could say the same thing," replied John.
They both stood still, staring at each other for a few moments, Linda's hyperventilating breaths filling the room. Movement from the other room. Rosa was awake. John heard her door open followed by the sound of her quick footsteps before she appeared in the doorway just behind him, also armed, shining her flashlight beam into the room.
"What's going on here?"
John lowered his gun as he could now see that Ray was unarmed. John was silent, as though he was trying to decide whether to tell the truth about what he saw or to cover it up for Ray's sake. Perhaps it had been a mistake. Already he was less certain of what he had interrupted, and with each passing moment Linda was more calm and collected, sitting curled up on the bed, staring at the wall.
"Thought I heard something," said John. "Turned out to be nothing."
It didn't feel right to say nothing, but John couldn't bring himself to potentially instigate vigilante justice against Ray on the off-chance that he had been wrong. He simply wasn't completely sure.
"Yeah," said Ray. "Turned out to be nothin'." He stepped around the bed towards the door and shouldered his way past John on the way out. "Fuckin' hero."
Ray left back to his bed in the living room and after a moment Rosa turned and left, too. Tentatively, John approached Linda and set his gun down by her side. "If he comes in again, you shoot him."
She made no sign of acknowledgement and John didn't press the issue. He turned and headed back to his own bed which was set up only a few feet from Ray's. In tense silence, he laid back down onto his bed, aware that several people in the room were now awake and must have heard what had happened. John looked over into the far corner and flinched—Lennie was still staring at him from the dark corner. Rolling over, John took comfort in the fact that if Ray attacked him in his sleep, at least Lennie would be a witness.
