Chapter Nineteen: The Infiltrator
San Diego, much like half of the entire west coast, had been hit in the initial strike caused by Skynet. A high-priority target due to its strong military presence and major ports, it was subject to the retaliative strike from Russia on Judgement Day and then the following strike from Skynet's stealth bombers. The city was now an immense crater, flattened entirely by the blast for several miles around, while the majority of the surrounding greater city had burned for many weeks in the resultant fires. Here the ash still drifted in the cold breeze, lit like insects in the beam of the van's headlights as they drove slowly through the ruins under the cover of near-complete darkness.
They were nearing Rosa's rendezvous point—a still-upright warehouse on the outer edges of the greater region that had escaped major fire damage. The immense concrete building loomed before them, and John could feel Rosa's melancholy lifting as though she were nearing the end of a long work shift and was about to forgo her responsibilities onto the next person who was coming to take over. For the first time, John thought he saw her smile.
Skynet's presence here was somewhat minimal, consisting mostly of the occasional HK-Aerial drifting across the sky as it surveyed the scorched landscape of the west coast, and John supposed that due to the blast, Skynet had calculated early on that there was no life here. Nevertheless, he sought to conceal the van properly as he drove across the flat parking lot which surrounded the entire building, aiming for a secluded spot under a shelter. They exited the van and followed Rosa wordlessly towards the entrance, smelling the faint tang of smoke that had soaked into the burned buildings around them, hidden by the hazy darkness. John felt an apprehension as they neared the wide, windowed entrance, the glass barely containing the darkness inside, and gripped his machine gun tightly in his hands. A chill had come across him that he could not explain, but Rosa was noticeably lighter in her mood as she was finally returning to her familiar place. She led them inside.
The darkness was near absolute and their footsteps scraped and clopped along the floor as they walked in through the wide doorway. Rosa led the way with her flashlight, the feeble circle of light showing only a narrow view of their surroundings at a time, while Linda lit their surroundings from the rear with the other flashlight, her beam no stronger than Rosa's. The high ceiling had been built firm with long metal rafters that ran from one end to the other, and dotted above them in regular intervals were clear skylights. It had partially collapsed and opened a hole near the centre, and the dull haze of the smoky night sky seemed to glow dimly through it. Rows of empty shelves stood lined up before them and as they walked slowly between them, looking at the bare spaces, it was easy to imagine the commotion and looting that must have taken place back when Judgement Day was recent.
As they walked, John could feel Rosa's relief fading as an unmistakable tension began to creep back into her, and so into him. They reached the end of the aisle and found themselves standing at a long passage in the middle of the warehouse, running from one side to the other with large display benches laid out here and there, with more aisles continuing on ahead of them. Rosa swept her flashlight around, slowly, and a look of fear crept across her face. Something was wrong.
"Where are they?" she asked, speaking mostly to herself.
"Maybe they're not here right now?" offered John.
"There's always someone here. They use this place as a kind of checkpoint."
Quite suddenly, Rosa called out into the darkness around them, "Hello? Hello?" her voice seeming dangerously loud to John as it echoed through the air. Be quiet, he thought. They'll hear us! As quickly as the thought had come to him, another one interrupted: But who will hear us? Rosa turned and moved quickly towards the right back corner of the store, the others hurrying to keep up with her, and she led them towards the large, plastic doors that led to the store room. The brief respite from the constant gloom they had felt, the fleeting feeling of completing their task and finally being able to rest and be safe was now long gone, replaced with a growing certainty that they were within some new danger and could not afford to let their guard down. They entered through the plastic doors and turned left.
The back room was long and appeared to be made entirely of concrete. There were no skylights here, only long fluorescent lights which hung from the high ceiling in a long row from one end of the room to the other. Pallets which once held bulk amounts of replenishment stock now lay scattered and empty across the grey floor along with several bent and damaged shopping trolleys, and along the wall on their right was the metal racking which once held heavy pallets of stock, long since looted. On their left were the many heavy doors to the large, walk-in freezers. Something flashed in the beam of Rosa's flashlight as they walked down the long room, making her pause. Only when Linda's own light joined the first did the bright red objects that they saw become clear.
Four dead bodies hung upside-down from the rafters by ropes tied to their feet, their arms dangling limply above—or rather, beneath—their heads. Each one had been completely and expertly skinned, and in the glare of the two flashlights the fresh red muscles and tendons glowed brightly against the grey surroundings. Each had been stabbed through the abdomen. The floor was awash with darkening, drying blood. John's mind whirled and the room around him seemed to tilt. Skynet didn't do this—he had never heard of it skinning people. It killed on sight and moved on, methodical, mechanical, efficient. This was the depraved, practiced work of someone who took pride in their kills, someone who took trophies for themselves as keepsakes, or one who simply relished in instilling fear in others by mutilating the dead for no other reason than for its own sake. It would have made more sense to carve and butcher the bodies for their meat, but these bodies were more or less whole. Trophies, John thought, and remembered the headless man at the raider base.
Someone was heaving nearby, their vomit splashing wet on the solid concrete.
"Jesus Christ!" said Jimmy, leaning over, wiping his face. He then looked over at Ray. "Don't you have some fuckin' joke to make right about now?"
Ray said nothing.
They had to plan their next move; it was not safe here. John looked to Rosa, hopeful that she would have a backup plan ready, hopeful because they were now in her turf and that they had finally gotten her to her rendezvous point where John had thought—had hoped—that her associates would then take over. He had hoped that tonight he would be meeting with members from the Resistance. He looked to Rosa and saw that she was scared.
"Rosa?" he asked quietly. "Did you know these people?"
She swallowed. "I'm not sure."
"Do you know who could have done this?"
She could only shake her head as she stared at the hanging corpses, looking for any sign of who they had been.
"Is there anywhere else we can go? Anywhere that's safe?"
"I don't know, anymore," she said quietly, her voice dry.
Ray was walking around the bodies. "This looks recent. Maybe others will come looking for them."
"The others…" said Rosa, turning to him. "Yes, we can call the others! On the radio! This way…"
She led them through the long backroom to the end where a narrow, enclosed stairway led upwards into darkness. To John it felt like they were backing themselves into a corner with no way out, but the confidence in Rosa's step dulled that uncertainty. They climbed the concrete stairs, single file, the walls rising up on either side of them until they reached a small landing. There were no windows. Everything was enclosed. A door on their right led into a lunch room with a few small beds and mattresses lined up, a stash of food and water put on a bench, and a collection of guns leaning up against the wall. The door ahead led to a small bathroom, and the door on the left led to the manager's office. All were empty, and the lack of blood stains in these rooms was small comfort to John as he thought that at least the dead people downstairs hadn't been killed up here.
They all filed into the manager's office. Rosa was staring at a crumpled heap of metal sitting on the bare desk, crestfallen. The radio had been destroyed. Because of course it had been destroyed. Escape was never going to be that easy. She looked around the room as if looking for something, not really seeing the others around her. She was lost, her plan completely taken away from her. She now had no idea what to do.
And so they waited up in that small office at the top of the stairs, all huddled together for warmth around a small electric heater which had been connected to an old Terminator battery. All they could do was wait to see if any more of Rosa's group would arrive. The thought of travelling any further hadn't occurred to any of them—that morning they had woken up in the underground tunnels of Tecate, and the day had not been a kind one. Everyone just wanted to rest. Sleep drifted through each of them, letting them fade in and out of merciful oblivion where they could forget their problems temporarily.
John had dozed, and when he awoke he heard Jimmy speaking quietly. He was telling a story.
"Me and Lennie used to work in a slaughterhouse back before everything happened. The sheep would come through hanging from the rail, like a train, and would go past each of us. My job was to cut the front hoofs off. Made it easier to skin them—that was Lennie's job. His spot was just after mine at this big machine that had like these big pincer things sticking out of it. The sheep were already halfway skinned by the time they got to us, and the pincers would grab the loose skin and pull it down. It would just peel off like a wet sock. Sometimes they would be too slippery and it would slip through the pincers and Lennie would have to pause the machine and grab the skin to pull it down. Just fistfuls of warm, fatty skin, pullin' 'em down as hard as he could back into the pincers. You got used to it, and sometimes it was funny. One time Lennie fell on his ass and the whole skin landed on him. As he's getting' back up he's just yellin' at me, 'Baa! Baa! I'm a sheep! Have you seen my mom?' Yeah… you got used to it.
"So the bombs go off and the whole building goes dark. Dead silence, and that place was loud, man, when it was workin'. We're all standin' there in the dark, blood around our boots with a hundred headless sheep hanging upside-down around us. No one knew what had happened, and then we heard the boom. And that was it. The world ended. We used to do three and a half thousand sheep a day out there, so I've seen a lot of skinned carcasses. Hell, what we did out there is the same as what the machines are doing to us now. But that shit out there… Those were people, man. People skinned like sheep. Just what the hell are we up against?"
John looked over and saw Rosa sitting at the desk, working on the broken radio. It was in pieces and she was trying to re-wire as much as she could to get it working again. It was a problem that she could fix. John stood and walked over to her.
"Hey," he said, looking over her shoulder at her work. "Any luck?"
"Not much, yet."
She didn't look at him. Her attention was fully on the pieces of radio, as though it was her fault that it was broken. John looked at the others. They were huddled around in a circle around the heater, some on chairs, talking quietly, just passing the time until someone came to get them, whether they be friends, Terminators, or their new, unknown foe.
"They're all getting along well," said John.
"It's either that or we all kill each other."
With a sigh of frustration, she dropped the wires she was twisting together and pushed the parts away from her. She rubbed her eyes, then looked over at the group. "It seems all we have left are stories. Memories. Maybe even songs, before we start to forget all the words."
John remembered the cassette tape that Enrique used to listen to back at the bunker, and while he could still recall most of the tunes, the lyrics themselves had faded quite a bit. The cassette had broken a long time ago. Rosa looked at him and asked, "Do you know how many verses there are to Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star?"
"The nursery rhyme?"
"Yeah. There's five. I used to know them all, but now I can only remember the first two. I used to sing it to my little sister all the time to put her to sleep. I guess it's like that, though. Soon we'll all forget the old days, and the kids being born now won't even know what the old days were. It'll just be stories and half-remembered songs. What nursery rhymes will we sing to our kids in the future? What songs are we going to come up with?"
"What victory songs will we sing at the end?" added John.
They were silent for a moment, both of them just staring into the scattered parts of the broken radio. Then, quite unexpectedly, Rosa looked up at John and said, "She died, you know."
"Who did?" asked John.
"My little sister. She was five. Her name was Lola. She was sick, but with each visit to the hospital for her treatment she was slowly getting better. Then Skynet decided to set the world on fire. Her illness got bad again and she died in her bed less than a month later. She was in pain, John, and there was no more medication. The only thing that could make her calm enough to sleep was singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. I had to sing it over and over, so you'd better believe I learned the whole thing for her."
The group was slowly going quiet as each person fell into a light sleep of their own. The fact that they could sleep at all was remarkable to John, and was testament to man's resilience to horrific ordeals.
"Who do you think killed your friends out there?" asked John, suddenly. "Do you think it was the same… thing that took out the raiders?"
Rosa paused for a moment. "I don't know. To be honest, I don't remember any of it. I just remember them taking me there and the next thing I knew I was in the van again with you guys, heading up here. Oh, poor Martin!" Her eyes welled with tears as she suddenly remembered, and then felt guilty at having forgotten about him at all. "They didn't need to do it!"
She picked up the wires on the desk again and attempted to resume her work, but not really focusing on it. "Thank you for coming for me. Really. I can't thank you enough."
"Thank Linda. She was the one who knew where to go."
"And it was a shame that she did know." She sighed, a wave of exhaustion suddenly washing over her. John wondered how long it had been since she had actually slept. "We're not going to make it, are we? People, I mean."
John stared at the desk, unprepared for this question which he already knew the answer to, but couldn't answer truthfully. Any slip up could potentially alter the course of the future, if not this one, then any of the possibly infinite others. They would make it. He knew that. It was already fated. What remained a genuine mystery to him was the day-to day between now and the next twenty-two years. He knew that the war would end in 2029, with the humans being victorious. Kyle Reese had told his mother that—he had come to her within hours of the war ending. Kyle Reese, his father, who still wouldn't be born for another year or so. For as much as John knew about with certainty, much about the events around him now was unknown. He touched the photo of Sarah that was in his pocket, the one he would one day give to Kyle, ensuring the cycle would be complete.
"It is in our nature to destroy ourselves," he said. "It was why we built Skynet in the first place. But yes, Rosa, I think we'll make it. We have to."
She smiled weakly at him, as though he were being an unrealistic dreamer, young and hopeful, and looked at the others who were still talking quietly amongst themselves. "Yeah. I think we will, too."
"So who are we contacting, Rosa? Really?" John leaned in closer, speaking quietly. "Is it the Resistance?"
She looked at him, then glanced at the others, unsure whether she should answer or not. In the end, she decided that John was trustworthy. After all, he had led the others to come rescue her.
"Yes," she said in a low voice. "I'm with the Resistance. Well… I scavenge for them. I'm not a soldier or anything like that. I'm more like a courier. I got picked up by the machines while on a run. The Resistance knew that I was at the work camp in Ensenada and they tried to come rescue me. That van outside that you took was theirs. I thought at first that you'd stolen it from them."
"Why would anyone try to steal from them? They're on our side." John quickly realised how naïve his question was. Even though the real enemy was Skynet, many separate groups of humans existed who were not allied to each other—different groups who currently kept to themselves, who had not yet come under the authority of the Resistance. But John knew that one day, as the war went on and Skynet advanced itself, it would reach a point where the need for human co-operation could not be ignored.
"You need to be careful who you tell if you're with the Resistance," Rosa said. "People are quick to take hostages, believing that they'll get some sort of ransom, but it never really works like that. The Resistance don't like to reveal themselves too much. Not just yet."
John looked at the group suddenly—he wasn't sure why—and saw Lennie by the far wall watching them. Ray's words came to him as he looked at that blank face: 'you give me the creeps, you fuckin' mute.' At this moment, John couldn't fault him for saying that. He turned back to Rosa and, switching to Spanish as to not be overheard, said, "Can you take us to them? I want to join them."
She gestured to the radio that she was working on as though that's what they were talking about, and replied, "I can, but it's dangerous. We don't know who killed those guys downstairs, and they were Resistance. Right now I'm hoping that others will come soon. They must know that something went wrong here. Best case scenario, they show up and can escort us back to the base."
"And if they don't show up? Can you take us there?"
"I can, but it's a bit of a way. There are more checkpoints like this one around the city if we get stuck, but base itself is set up in an old high school, south of the Elfin Forest Reserve."
What happened next was so sudden that both John and Rosa could only stare as the event unfolded. Lennie stood up, quite quickly, then looked down at his brother, Jimmy, who had been startled awake as he lay next to him. Lennie then reached down and grabbed him around the throat, lifted him into the air, and clenched his fingers into a fist in a burst of strangling blood. Jimmy wore a look of immense pain and surprise, clutching weakly at the big man's arm, his feet kicking, then quickly dangling. Lennie then turned his head towards Linda, who had been asleep on the other side of him and was now trying to stand up, a scream rising in her chest. He swung Jimmy's limp body around himself in an arc, striking Linda against the wall so forcefully that the crunch of the back of her skull could be heard against the force of the impact. Lennie looked at the two dead bodies on the floor, as if confirming his deed, then looked up as Ray scrambled for his handgun. Ray got three shots off at him, striking him in the chest and shoulder as Lennie approached, unfazed, and was struck down by a single, solid punch to the chest, crushing his sternum and stopping his heart. All of this took five seconds. All of this, Lennie did with no expression on his face, that same dead look in his eyes that he had always had. He then looked towards John and Rosa.
As he started towards them with surprising speed, Rosa raised the chair that she had been sitting on and threw it at him. It had little effect, but it bought them precious seconds to duck past on either side of him. John grabbed a shotgun that was leaning against the wall near the exit but did not stop to use it. He and Rosa ran down the stairs into the dark storeroom below, and hid themselves around the corner at the bottom. They heard the door upstairs being thrown open and heavy, solid footsteps moved purposely down the stairs after them. John gripped the shotgun, ready to fire, waiting for him.
Lennie's bulky figure appeared at the bottom of the stairs, and John fired at him, point blank, with the shotgun. The blast threw him over onto the ground and then he lay silent. Their ears still ringing from the blast, Rosa clicked on her flashlight and shined it at him. He lay face down, a scorched hole smoking high up in his jacket, peppered around the edges with smaller tears. A machine gun was gripped in his right hand.
"Let's go," said John, urging Rosa to follow. "Get away from him!"
"What do you mean? You got him. He's dead."
"Just come on!"
She stared at him incredulously as he continued to step away from the body, desperate to run. He hoped he was wrong. Lennie's actions were shocking enough, but there was something in his movements that hinted at the reason behind them. No, he thought. It was far too soon, at least another twenty years away. Rosa flinched and stared wide-eyed at Lennie's body as it began to move, the man lifting himself slowly up off the ground. Rosa ran. They rushed through the storeroom towards the swinging plastic doors and back out into the vast, open store. Heavy footsteps followed and John knew that they would be relentless.
Rosa's flashlight beam swiped quickly up and down as they ran, illuminating the rows of tall, empty shelves before them in quick flashes. They hurried down an aisle and as they reached the long passage halfway down, John urged Rosa to switch her light off. They fell silent as they heard the plastic doors behind them swing open and slide along the floor. Lennie's footsteps stalked steadily along the ends of the shelves, and John had the sense that he was looking down each aisle carefully, hunting them, those footsteps, though dulled by his boots, reminiscent of the T-400's. John and Rosa moved down the centre passage, hoping to stay out of the man's line of sight. If John was right, then he knew that despite the near-complete darkness, Lennie would be able to see them in total clarity.
Gunfire rang out suddenly from the back end of the warehouse, and John and Rosa broke into a sprint down the passage between the rows of shelves, shrapnel ripping past them, keeping out of the man's line of sight. The gunshots ceased and they heard the quick, regular footsteps resume towards them.
Fight or run. Those were the options. The van was outside, but felt much too far to reach. The minigun. They needed to get the minigun. That would put him down. John and Rosa were huddled behind a shelf, trying to summon the nerve to run to the front doors. Lennie's footsteps were getting closer. He had reached the centre aisle and had turned in their direction. Then he stopped. John heard it, too.
A voice called out from the other end of the store, its source indiscernible. "Jesus Christ!" the voice called. It sounded like Jimmy. But that was impossible; Jimmy was dead. Lennie turned away from them, turned towards the source. He was standing still, seeming to scan the darkness. A few seconds later, it rang out again. "Jesus Christ!" There was something off about it, something that made John's skin crawl. Both outbursts sounded exactly the same. The same inflection, the same tone. Jimmy had said it like that when they had encountered the dead bodies hanging from the ceiling. John could remember it now: 'Jesus Christ!' as he vomited onto the floor. Lennie stepped quickly away from John and Rosa and disappeared into the darkness.
Silence followed, thick, palpable, and heavy. John and Rosa dared not to make a sound, only staying huddled together behind a row of shelves. Hearts pounding. Chests straining as they forced their breathing to a deathly slow rhythm. A loud explosion suddenly burst from halfway down the store and the darkness flashed blue for a second. A few seconds later, a heavy thud landed upon the same spot. A pause, then movement followed by a quick, high sound, like blades ripping into flesh. Another moment of silence, then John heard another thud, much softer this time, come from the rafters up above. Something then moved rapidly along them to the hole in the ceiling, then was gone.
Carefully, John and Rosa stood from their hiding spot and went to investigate. Lennie was dead, they were sure of that. But what had killed him? What had lured him, using his brother's voice? Rosa flicked on her flashlight and the beam soon found its way to his body. He was laying on his back, his upper chest and shoulder burned black, the flesh and clothes still smouldering. Something appeared at first to be embedded into his face. Something metal, glinting in the light. They reached him, stepped around him, both staring at what the attacker had revealed about him. No, not him, John thought—it. Lennie's face had been scorched halfway up the left side, revealing a grey, metal skull underneath. It looked quite like a human skull, but of Skynet's forged metal and of a design far beyond its years. John knew that the black eyepiece that stared up into the air had moments ago been glowing red, had always been glowing red behind those dull, lifeless human eyes. Lennie was dead, but he had died long ago. John had never known him.
John could only stare at the body. From what he understood, from what his mother had told him at least, this type of Infiltrator shouldn't exist yet. And the method was different, too. Instead of growing a human skin for a Terminator to wear (that technology almost certainly didn't exist yet), Skynet had instead killed and carefully skinned a man who was already known to a group of people, one of whom it suspected had connections to the Resistance. Skynet knew that Rosa would sooner trust a familiar person than a stranger. It had skinned him and placed his likeness upon this advanced model Terminator, then sent it back into the group hoping to learn the locations of the Resistance bases.
John's mind raced. This Infiltrator's existence was far too early, he thought, but it explained the smaller things that had been quietly bothering him since he had first encountered Rosa and the others. The explosion at the camp, freeing the group. No-one had known what had caused it. Skynet had done it itself to free them, shutting itself down temporarily until they were gone. John's luck in reaching them with the van without getting shot but being shot at plenty. The unusual nature at not being followed as they drove off into the night by any Skynet units. It had all felt too easy.
The T-400 in the small settlement had been inactive and not part of the plan until John had accidentally activated it. It connected to Skynet and received orders to attack, but to miss. Again, John had thought that it had just been his luck. The drone, which arrived much later than he would have expected only did so once Lennie had observed John and Rosa discussing it, wondering why one hadn't arrived yet. Skynet then did send one to avoid suspicion, and probably intended to do a quick search and then leave, but could not ignore Martin as he stood there in the open, petrified. Skynet then had no choice but to send a HK-Aerial out to investigate, and allowed itself to be fooled by an empty car rolling down the hill. The entire time, Lennie was with them, broadcasting their location to Skynet. It allowed them to think that they had outsmarted it.
Lennie had been with them all the way through the underground tunnels of Tecate, and had subsequently doomed the citizens of the ruined city. They had survived for years there, undetected, until John and his group had come through. As they ran through the tunnels, Lennie was leading the way for the pursuing T-400's. The group themselves came out unharmed, and that was always Skynet's intention.
It had worked. Jimmy had loved his brother and was determined to ignore the changes in him, believing his new behaviour to be the result of torturous experiments done to him. Lennie didn't speak. He didn't eat. He was never seen to sleep. Without Jimmy's perception that his brother was fine, the others might have become suspicious sooner, but nobody quite wanted to push Jimmy's temperament too far, especially after what he had done to Ray. It had worked right up until the conclusion of its mission. As soon as Rosa had revealed the location of the Resistance base to John, even in Spanish, the mission was complete. Skynet got the information and the Infiltrator was now free to terminate all humans in the vicinity. It had worked up until this moment when it was lured and killed by another attacker, something that John suspected had been around far longer than he had realised, something that had quite an interest in the struggles between Skynet and the surviving humans.
John looked down at the body and stared at the skin on the face, seamlessly attached to the skull as though it had grown there naturally. He looked up to the rafters. It had fooled the attacker, too. It didn't take a trophy, saw no value in artificial machines, had no intention of revealing itself to Skynet. Not deliberately.
The warehouse was empty. He was sure of it. If Lennie had updated Skynet with the Resistance's locations, it would also know that they were still in this warehouse, now. There was surely an army coming for them. The question was: how far away was it? The more pressing question on John's mind was: what exactly was this Infiltrator, and were there more of them?
"Rosa," he said, turning to her. "We need to take this thing to the Resistance and find out what it is."
Author's Note
This is the end of part two. Part three is in the works and is mostly laid out, but I don't expect to have it finished until the end of the year. Life just keeps getting busier.
Sometimes a bunch of OC's are needed to tell the story you want to tell and it took me a while to sort each one out. In the end, for me at least, any OC's I write into a fan story is eventual cannon fodder. I made it a challenge to myself to create a diverse group of survivors who are hopefully somewhat memorable. Ray was a fun one to write, and was somewhat cathartic as he was heavily based on people who I have had to know in the past. Lennie was named after Lennie from 'Of Mice and Men' as that is who I originally pictured, but then I decided to make him black as I don't remember seeing any black Terminators in the franchise. Rosa is largely Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn 99, and Linda (originally named Carol) was largely based on Carol from The Walking Dead. I changed her name to Linda after the immortal Linda Hamilton who was, and still is, the only true Sarah Connor.
For a long time, I couldn't decide what to do with Lennie and whether or not he should be connected to Skynet the entire time, or to have him in automatous mode until the very moment his task was complete, but then I got the idea for the assault on Tecate just before writing it, and that felt like a fun action scene to throw in while also adding to the mystery of just how exactly Skynet knew where to go.
If you've read the story so far, thank you, and I hope you stick around for part three. The Predator itself will be the main focus and I have a few surprise characters planned out for John to interact with.
