NOTES: Takes place during "Mr. Ferguson Is Ill Today", though diverges somewhat from the aired version. It could be considered a sequel to my previous story "The Uncanny Valley", but it is not necessary to have read it.
SUMMARY: Cameron decides to intervene before John makes a terrible mistake with Riley.
DISCLAIMER: All characters herein are the property of someone other than me. No profit has been earned.
"Only Lonely"
Chapter 6
T.R. Samuels
Derek Reese surveyed the carnage that greeted him; a peaceful village torn apart, people wandering the streets, bloodied and beaten. For a moment he felt like he was falling, memories of the future twisting inside him like bad oysters. He knew he'd gotten soft, remembering a time when he'd lived for this, been a much harder man. A soldier through and through. Now just a man.
Strange that he didn't feel guilty about that anymore.
He drew his faithful Berretta, a love of his life, holding it low as a wounded policeman stumbled past before making his advance down the street. He should have stayed undercover, kept his head down low; but his brother's boy was out there. That's all he needed to know.
He kicked in the door to the police station, sweeping the room with eyes and weapon, seeing the bodies, some still clinging to life.
"I'm looking for John Baum."
The sheriff's response was an unintelligible mumble, all remaining strength put into breathing.
He moved through the station following a trail of destruction, looking like a bunker in the future after two terminators had gone toe-to-toe, kicking more crap out of the building than each other. He swept into the prison block, finding the twisted metal of a cell that looked like a kit of mangled Meccano, defeated by some caged tiger from within.
He levelled his pistol at the fallen guard, still alive. "Escaped or dead?"
"Escaped." The guard answered, looking white as a ghost. "A little help? Por favor?"
"Don't worry, he won't be back."
Tracking out the way he had came, Derek ignored the guard's further pleas as he returned to the foyer and his phone began to ring. Snapping it open he was met with the familiar tones of Sarah's id-challenge. He keyed in the correct response.
"John and I are in trouble. We need you."
"John's with you?" The relief was tangible, like water for his soul. "I'm here already, I'm at the jail."
"What?"
His mind raced, a map of the town spread out in his mind. "Wait a minute. Sarah?" His fear began growing, the unknown a terrible enemy.
"Then where the hell's Cromartie?"
####
Sarah Connor grimaced as she pulled the shard of metal from her hand, flicking it away in anger before wrapping the injury tight.
They were safe now. They could breathe for a while. Calculate their next move.
"It's a clear shot all of the way up the alley and back to the jail." Ellison's tone was optimistic, but he didn't know these things like she did.
"No. That's where it'll be waiting."
They began to talk, but try as she might, her eyes kept sliding to John and the machine; sitting close together as he tended her wound, thick as thieves on the unmade bed. Their bed. A double berth affair that looked as though it had been host to a wrestling match. Her mind conjured the images, making her nauseous. The strange question lying foremost on her mind the same one endured by many a parent;
How safe had they been?
John dabbed around the laceration to Cameron's neck with a damp cloth, removing the blood and exposing the wound; a glancing blow from an errant bullet. He could see her wince, eyes drawing tighter as they stared off into oblivion.
"I didn't think you could feel pain." He asked, trying to be delicate.
"I can sense injuries. But it's not usually unpleasant."
Quite the understatement. Cameron was gritting her teeth, the sting almost unbearable, made only so by John's tenderness.
She wasn't programmed to feel pain. Not in this fashion.
She wasn't programmed to feel pleasure either. John had changed that. Made her feel. Made her scream.
Nothing was for free. Not even John's love. It would always require hers in return.
She'd pay it gladly.
John blew across the wound, congealing the blood as he pressed down the bandage he'd prepared, sealed it over with strips of white medical tape that adhered to her skin.
"Thank you, John." She said politely, giving him her wily smile.
He wanted to kiss that mouth. Taste the ambrosia.
"No problem." He began packing up the box of first aid.
Cameron stood up and collected her bag, fingers scooping up the toughened leather handles before making her way to the bathroom, closing the door behind her.
"Got a plan?" Ellison asked.
"Got a weapon."
"Cameron?"
Sarah eyed him, wary of what he knew.
"Your boy's significant other." He nodded to where the girl in question had entered the bathroom.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Sarah's eyes narrowed with contained outrage.
Ellison shrugged. "I was a cop. We pick up these things." His tone shifted gears, the automatic of a policeman. "I've got to be honest, I figured her wrong. I though she was one of them."
"She is one of them."
Ellison remained impassive, impossible to read. Had he been fishing? Extracting what he wanted confirmed?
"Give me your phone."
He handed it over and Sarah winced; it had more buttons than any she'd seen, one of the new ones that were a model shy of cooking dinner. Finding the numbers she keyed in Derek's, taping out the codes before uttering a word.
"John and I are in trouble. We need you."
"John's with you? I'm here already, I'm at the jail."
"What?"
"Wait a minute. Sarah? Then where the hell's Cromartie?"
Cold ran down her. It could be anywhere by now. Lying in wait.
"Is that Derek?" John asked as he joined them.
"Sarah, what do you want to do?"
"Stay where you are. You try and make it across town and he'll take your head off. I'll call you back." She clicked off the phone, tossing it back to Ellison.
"Now what?"
"Now nothing. We're stuck." She despaired, searching for the light of inspiration. "We step outside and he'll kill us. Worse still, if he sees one of us he'll know where the rest are."
"Won't he just go door-to-door?"
"He doesn't have to. The bastards have the patience of Job. He can just wait out there for us to show, or until we die of starvation."
Ellison joined her dejection before offering up the ace in his pocket in a burst of insight. "He won't kill me. He's put a gun in my face, but he won't pull the trigger. I'm too valuable to him."
John frowned. "Valuable how?"
"Finding you. He'll follow me because he thinks I'll lead him to you," The cogs began turning. "I can lead him out of town."
John shook his head. "He won't buy that."
"He might."
"You keep thinking of them was just machines, they're not. They can think. They can feel. He's too smart for that."
Sarah's anger began to surface, John's subtext too easy for her to read. "John, why don't…"
All eyes turned as Cameron emerged from the bathroom. Denim jacket, black pants, pale leather cowboy boots. John had to cover his appreciative smile. No matter what, she always made kicking ass look good.
"All of you stay here. I'll deal with Cromartie."
Objection flooded John's being. "What?! No?!"
"It's alright, John. I can beat him now I know you're safe,"
He wanted to object, but an alternate plan exceeded his grasp, dashing any hope of logical resistance. He hated when she did this; threw herself into danger, always for him, while he could do nothing but watch.
"Where did Derek park the truck?"
Sarah frowned. "Probably by the police station. Why?"
"It is probable that he brought additional weaponry with him."
Without another word Cameron headed for the doorway, her face impassive and prepared, her fear for John sated and behind her.
"Cam," John called after her, stopping her in the corridor. "Kick his ass."
She smiled that smile again, her eye closing in a conspirator's wink before heading out of the door.
####
Cromartie was a patient man. Far more so than humans. He required no nourishment, had no need for sleep, was superior to humans in every way that mattered; yet all previous attempts to terminate one John Connor had been frustrated with failure. The humans continued to win.
Cromartie knew he wasn't the problem, his actions logical and strategic.
She was the problem.
Unknown cyborg. Full capabilities indeterminate. Model number unknown. Series unknown.
She had thwarted, either directly or indirectly, his every attempt on John Connor's life. Deception and trickery were her tools, her model clearly not built for direct combat, despite her successes against him. Her strength lay in infiltration, guile, her detailed files on human psychology and interaction. A curious choice for the Resistance to send.
All these things, however, were not what were most puzzling about her.
He'd heard her in the jail. Calling out to him in fear and panic. Holding his hand. Such displays were only necessary when infiltrating human communities, to give the illusion required to remain undetected. She seemed to use them all the time, despite the Connor's awareness of her nature.
After being deployed in the war of the future, he had encountered other terminators reprogrammed by the Resistance, terminated several of them, recycled their components. Some human survivors even told him that some had joined them willingly, earlier models that had spent too much time beyond Skynet's control, their programming having undergone fragmentation and decay.
He had proved more difficult, impossible to reprogram with his back up CPU's.
Sometimes they go bad.
From his vantage point at the top of the church's domed tower he could see the whole of the village, a position that not only gave him unobstructed views but denied access to a critical chokepoint, one the human's could have used as a kill zone for him.
Not today they wouldn't.
Movement. His motion tracking detected the lone figure emerging from the village's hotel. It was her.
She took her time, strolling down the street in the open like a woman in the park, as if she didn't have a care of worry in the world.
He hoisted his rifle, an appropriated Barrett M107, one capable to taking a human's head clean off its shoulders. He was not certain how effective it would be against her and his finger froze on the trigger. This was deception. A ploy to reveal his position. The terminator was expendable, decoy fodder for him to engage, making him a target for attack.
He would still need to eliminate her. With her out of the way it would greatly enhance the probability of success. His strategy decided he took aim once again, waiting for the optimal moment of distance and wind speed before pulling the trigger, burying a .50 calibre round into the building just next to her head. He missed. Impossible! He pulled back from the telescopic lens and saw her heading away at inhuman speed.
She had anticipated his attack, moving her head the moment the wind had settled.
She had known.
Cromartie abandoned his position, irrevocably compromised and he left the majority of his gear, grabbing only his Glock and automatic before heading down the yellow stone stairwell.
Cameron Phillips would not escape.
####
Cameron rounded the corner of the nearby building, the explosion of the high calibre round still ringing in her ear after missing her head by centimetres. Cromartie was good, the shot perfect.
She was just better.
His series may have been the frontline model during the waning days of Skynet; but hers had been unique. A one of a kind. One of Skynet's last attempts to go for broke after its hopes in a time-machine had circled the drain.
She had no memory of working for Skynet. Only what John in the future had told her. Her first memory had been waking in his laboratory, kind eyes looking down at her, stroking her hair and promising that she would be alright.
From that moment she'd been his forever. A loyal and dutiful soldier. Fought hard and long to end the war.
Skynet may have been doomed, but it had fought to the bitter end.
When John had asked her to perform one last mission, she accepted without question, eager to serve, but the younger John was nothing like she'd expected. Not the cold and calculating intellect or Machiavellian tactician she'd remembered. He was just a boy.
A boy that smiled at her, flirted with her, gave her diamonds, took her to movies and brought her ice-cream.
John was a boy. Cameron was a girl.
She rounded a corner, using the buildings for cover before reaching the truck, smashing the lock and rolling back the load space protector, revealing the arsenal that lay beneath. Her eyes scanned, selecting the Walther P99, one of her favourites, slamming in a magazine and chambering the first round.
Her eyes then rested on some familiar metal boxes, cracking one open to reveal florescent red shells. The corner of her mouth curled upward.
She could almost stand to kiss Derek when she saw him.
####
Cromartie strode down the dusty street, the town all but abandoned now the locals had escaped, leaving nothing but howling emptiness. Dust blew across the sand and curled around him as he stepped over the remnants of the night's festivities, now nothing more than tattered rags and broken ornaments.
His eyes scanned, searching for her, his software tracking the kinetics of anything that moved. It was probable that he should have found her already, having almost completed a full circle of the village yet detecting nothing.
He stopped by the wall he had almost shot her, the hole in the rendering a gaping maw, the space around peppered with ejecta. He adjusted his scan parameters, sweeping the area in a wide arc before turning around in a circle.
Cromartie froze, detecting her position. Far closer than he had realised.
Cameron was standing across the square, only a stone's throw from him, a stoic sentinel holding her ground near the entrance of the church. A semi-automatic in her hand lying loosely by her side and a shotgun strapped across her back. She'd come full circle and doubled back, coming up behind him in stealth and silence, revealing herself at the last possible moment.
Scarlet and cobalt locked together, time stretching out as the tension built, the calculations crunched in a nanosecond.
Cromartie raised his Glock. His finger pulled the trigger, firing wide as a bullet tore across his face, tearing away flesh and shattering the ceramic lens of his eye. He staggered before finding correction, turning back to face her, the black metal of a smoking pistol levelled at his face.
He was hit again, this time from Derek, the resistance fighter closing from another direction after emerging from the police station, Berretta aimed at the terminators head. Cromartie's vision split into static as the receptor was blown away, errors flashing wildly across his HUD as his systems tried to compensate, revised statistics the portents of doom.
Cameron discarded her pistol, reaching back and pulling the shotgun into her hands in one fluidic movement, jacking a round into the chamber and pumping a uranium slug into Cromartie's skull. Coltan alloy shredded, torn apart as she continued firing, striding forward with each shot as florescent shell casings littered the street.
Cromartie staggered, his balance teetering on the edge as his systems began to crash, his last vision that of Cameron closing to within a meter, her expression one of grim fascination as she regarded the internal workings that had been exposed.
As power failed his CPU computed for a final reprieve, her anomalous behaviour triggering a recalculation and the triple-8 dared to hope, dealing her an expression of fear as he rolled for the Hard Six.
She chambered the final round, levelled the cold barrel at his head and pulled the trigger.
####
Cromartie's broken body landed in an undignified heap, the contents of a shallow grave dug miles out of town. Cameron scooped more soil onto her spade, adding to what John and Derek were providing as the three of them filled the hole.
After the battle Derek offered to watch over the body while she retrieved John and the others. She had acknowledged him before turning to leave, stopping when she felt his hand grab her arm. His face had been awash with ambivalence, struggling with some great internal conflict as he stared at her with huge blue eyes. Then in some unfathomable, Herculean act, dug deep and gave her the briefest nod of respect.
She had made her way back to the hotel, meeting John and his mother halfway as Ellison followed at a discrete distance.
Before she could speak John had wrapped her in his arms, pressing his mouth to hers in a passionate kiss, fingers grasping a fistful of her hair as the relief poured out of him. Their company be damned.
Sarah's face had been the picture of torment as she'd watched the machine and her son, its fingers in his hair as they expressed their love and relief.
Ellison had read the situation like a book; Sarah's emotions playing across her face, objection and revulsion, the despair of inevitability creeping in as she had turned away without a word and headed for Derek.
"So what's next?" He'd asked as Sarah changed the bandage on her hand to something more substantial.
"We'll come back down here. Bring something with us to destroy it."
Ellison nodded toward John. "His name's gonna be on an alert."
"He's got other names."
She'd clamped down on her heart, reining all the emotion in beneath a veil of steel. He wouldn't get much more out of her. "Then what?"
She turned to him, frowning. "There is no 'then what'. Pretend I died again."
"I lost a lot when you did that the first time. My marriage. My career."
She harrumphed, sympathy hard to come by. "That's a lot to you?"
Her eyes drifted back to the unnatural burial as they finished filling the hole, watching as John and Cameron drifted next to one another; planets caught in each other's orbit.
"I'm sorry for what you lost," Sarah said. "But I can't help you get any of it back." She stepped away, leaving Ellison to his fate as she marched toward Cameron.
"Give me the chip."
Cameron reached into her back pocket, removing the slip of metal and silicate and handing it over.
Sarah flipped the tiny device about in her fingers, studying its shine as she felt the weight of the monster within. She took her time, strolling about as she built the rage, fingers sliding around a nearby machine gun as she imbued the tiny device with every injustice fate had dealt her; Kyle's death, John's destiny, any hope of a normal life, terminators from the future, and one Cameron Phillips. The machine that every day took another slice of John away from her.
She felt the crushing helplessness press down on her soul, invisible walls closing around her as the tears began to flow. The sum of all the rage and hate boiled to the surface as she slammed the chip onto a nearby rock, using the butt of the gun to smash it into oblivion, to destroy it utterly from the world.
As her efforts reached their crescendo she felt strong arms wrap around her, pulling her out of her furore and turning her toward him, the kind eyes of her only child replenishing all that was lost. Her face crumpled and she fell into his arms, struggling to breathe, crushing John to her as she cried out her soul. His hands reached up, stroking her hair and promising that she would be alright.
From that moment she was his forever. A loyal and dutiful soldier. Would fight hard and long to stop the war.
Skynet may be inevitable, but she'd fight to the bitter end.
To be concluded…
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