Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes (14 page)

More minutes went by. Kyle was starting to wonder just how far north Nguyen had decided to go when Vuong touched his shoulder.

“There they are,” he murmured.

Kyle leaned a little farther around the bush. Three blocks north, he could see Nguyen and the others creeping as furtively across the street as the uneven footing and the presence of a dozen burros allowed.

“I don’t see anything,” Vuong said. “Maybe the machines left while we were climbing over all that rebar.”

“And went where?” Kyle asked, looking around.

“As long as they’re not here, who cares?” Vuong said. “Looks like our alley continues on past the street, through that gap in the vines. That’s where we’re going.”

“Okay.” Taking a deep breath, Kyle gathered his feet beneath him for a quick sprint.

And found himself suddenly off-balance as Star grabbed his arm and yanked backward.

“Hey—-easy,” he protested, glancing at her.

What he saw made him take a second, longer look. The girl’s face had gone rigid, her eyes wide and terrified. Something had spooked her, but good.

“What is it?” Kyle asked. A movement past the bush caught the corner of his eye, and he looked up.

To see the two Terminators emerge from a broken doorway half a block south of Nguyen’s group and head straight toward them.

“Vuong!” he bit out.

“Stay here,” Vuong ordered. Drawing his pistol, he dashed around the bush and headed toward the figures that were closing in on his friends.

Again, Kyle gathered his feet beneath him. If he could get Star across the street and into the relative safety of the alley while the Terminators were focusing on the traders….

But again, Star’s grip brought him up short.

“Star, we have to go,” Kyle insisted, trying to pry her fingers off his arm.

She shook her head violently, wrapping her other hand around his arm for emphasis, and nodded sharply in Vuong’s direction. Wishing the girl could just
talk
to him, Kyle looked up again.

Vuong was still running, his arms pumping at his sides. The two Terminators were still marching stolidly toward Nguyen’s group, apparently oblivious to this new threat coming up behind them. Vuong slowed a little, lifting his gun into a two-handed marksman’s grip and leveling the weapon at the Terminators’ backs.

And then, to Kyle’s stunned horror, as Vuong passed the half-broken wall, the two Terminators they’d seen earlier stepped into view.

Vuong spotted them the same time Kyle did. Twisting half around, he opened fire.

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The Terminators jerked with the multiple impacts as the rounds slammed into their metal bodies.

But they didn’t fall or even falter, but just kept moving.

Vuong must have known in that moment that he was a dead man. But that didn’t mean he was just going to lay down and give up. He veered away from the approaching death machines, emptying his pistol into them.

Kyle held his breath. But aside from more jerking the Terminators seemed completely unaffected by the attack. Shaking the clip from his gun, Vuong slammed in a fresh one and emptied it as well. Again, the Terminators shrugged off the hail of lead.

Vuong was reloading with a third clip when a second, more distant crackle of gunfire erupted.

Nguyen and his men had formed a line behind their burros and were making their own stand against the Terminators bearing down on them. But their attack was no more effective than Vuong’s.

And then, suddenly, Kyle’s brain unfroze and he remembered his bombs.

He reached into the bag, snatching out the lighter and one of the cold metal cylinders.

“Stay down,” he muttered to Star as he popped the lighter’s top and thumbed the flame to life.

He ignited the bomb’s fuse, gauged the distance, then rose to his feet and hurled the bomb as hard as he could toward the Terminators closing on Vuong.

But not hard enough. The pipe bounced off the pavement and skittered to a halt a good twenty feet back from the two Terminators. Even over the noise of the gunfire filling the air, the machines apparently heard the sound as the bomb hit the ground, and one of them turned to look.

And then the bomb exploded, and Kyle ducked back down as the shockwave blew through the bush’s branches and leaves. The sound of the blast faded away into silence.

Complete
silence.

Kyle looked at Star, his throat tightening. Then, steeling himself, he lifted his head again for another look.

To find that it was already over.

Kyle stared, unable to believe his eyes. Vuong was down, lying unmoving on the pavement, his shirt bright with blood. The two Terminators stood over him, gazing down at his body like hunters assessing their prey.

Away to the north, the other pair of Terminators were wading through Nguyen’s group, metal arms slamming and punching and throwing the men around like rags. Kyle wondered why the traders hadn’t at least tried to run, only then spotting the two additional Terminators striding toward the doomed men from further north, blocking any chance of escape in that direction.

Nguyen had tried to take his men away from a clear and present threat. Instead, he’d led them into the center of a trap.

And as far as Kyle could tell, none of the Terminators had even bothered to use the massive guns strapped to their right arms.

Then, as Kyle stared at the carnage, sickened yet somehow unable to turn away, one of the two machines standing over Vuong’s body stirred and turned its head. Its glowing eyes seemed to lock onto Kyle.

And with a sudden surge of energy, it turned and headed toward him.

“Come on,” Kyle muttered, grabbing Star’s hand and pulling her back into the alley. He pushed her through the gap in the brick wall, then squeezed through himself, and again got a grip on her hand as he took the lead. If they could get back to the next street over and find some building they could disappear into before the Terminator caught up with them, they might still have a chance.

But the alley’s footing was as treacherous going in this direction as it had been going in the other, and Kyle was forced to slow down as he balanced their need for haste with their equally urgent need for safety. A broken leg or twisted ankle now would mean quick and certain death.

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Kyle could feel the sweat gathering around his neck as he picked his way along the alley, not daring to turn around, wondering whether he would even hear the sound of the Terminator’s gun as the killing rounds tore into his back.

But that line of thought led only to panic. Pushing it away, he concentrated on finding the best possible route for him and Star. They would make it, he told himself firmly. Luck favored the prepared, Orozco had always told him, and they were prepared. They would make it.

They were halfway through when their luck ran out.

The crash of breaking brick exploded from behind them. The Terminator had reached the wall and was battering its way through, sending bricks flying with each blow from its free left hand. Kyle spun round to see that the top of the wall was already gone, and even as he tried to get his own feet moving again the rest of the wall collapsed. Kicking its way through the rubble, the Terminator strode toward them.

And with that, it was all over.

Kyle froze, gripping Star’s hand, staring helplessly as the killing machine bore down on them.

Its glowing red eyes burned into them from its expressionless face, its rubbery skin and coverall-type clothing torn and scorched where Vuong’s bullets had shredded them. Beneath the dangling tatters, Kyle could see the Terminator’s gleaming metal skeleton. Gripped in its right hand, the multi-barreled gun looked as big as a cannon.

And then, abruptly, a completely unexpected question popped into Kyle’s mind.
Why didn’t the
Terminator open fire?

They hadn’t used their weapons against Nguyen and Vuong, either. Instead, they’d simply bludgeoned the traders to death with their bare metal hands.

And in a burst of desperation-induced inspiration, Kyle suddenly got it.

Orozco had said Skynet was planning an attack against the neighborhood. But he’d also said that the big computer probably wouldn’t launch that attack until nightfall.

It didn’t want anyone escaping before then, which was why it had set out all these Terminators as sentries. But it also didn’t want to panic the inhabitants into a premature stampede, which might create enough confusion to allow some of the intended victims to escape.

Random gunfire, even at the levels Nguyen and his men had been putting out, was a common enough occurrence, and would probably be dismissed by anyone who heard it as simple gang activity. But a Terminator’s multi-barreled gun would have a very distinctive and recognizable sound, and opening fire with one might well start the panic Skynet wanted to avoid.

Which meant that the Terminator striding toward them would probably hold off using its gun until and unless it calculated that its latest victims were on the verge of getting away. The trick would be to keep it thinking it was in control, right up to the moment when it suddenly wasn’t.

All Kyle had to do now was find a way to do that.

He glanced around the alley, then turned back to the Terminator. Bracing himself, he reached into his bag and pulled out the lighter and another bomb. If the machine decided these bombs were a threat and that it needed to open fire…

But it didn’t, not even when Kyle touched the lighter’s flame to the fuse. Having already watched one of the bombs go off, the Terminator had apparently concluded that the weapon didn’t have enough yield to stop it.

It was probably still thinking that as Kyle ran the fuse down to two seconds and then lobbed it beneath the rusting pickup truck the machine was passing. The bomb exploded, flipping the pickup up onto one side and straight on top of the Terminator, slamming it to the ground with a horrendous crash.

Slamming it squarely on top of the forest of rebar protruding through the concrete.

Kyle didn’t know how much damage being shoved into all those metal spikes would do to the Terminator. But for the moment, all he cared about was that the killing machine was temporarily 80

immobilized. Shoving Star out of the way behind one of the angled slabs of pavement, he pulled out two more bombs and lit their fuses. He ran over to the pickup, already starting to shake as the trapped Terminator tried to free itself, and shoved the two bombs between the twisted stalks of rebar directly beneath the Terminator’s torso and hips.

The Terminator’s arm snapped out, the metal hand trying to grab Kyle’s wrist. Kyle managed to jerk back out of the way in time, then turned and sprinted for the pavement slab where he’d left Star.

He ducked around behind it, wrapping his arms around the little girl, and squeezed his eyes shut.

The bombs went off together, the blasts much louder this time. Kyle waited until the sound had faded, then peeked cautiously around the slab.

The pickup had been blown up against the alley’s side and was half leaning, half sagging against the wall. Still pressed into the rebar where the truck had been was the Terminator.

The machine was a mess. Nearly all of the rubber skin directly over the bombs had been disintegrated, exposing the scorched and blackened metal body beneath it. On the Terminator’s face and legs, which had been farther from the blasts, some of the skin remained, smoldering with an acrid smoke.

But its lack of skin was the least of the machine’s problems. The bomb that Kyle had wedged beneath its hips had shattered the joints there, severing the legs from the rest of the body. The arms were in nearly as bad a shape, with the left completely disconnected from the torso and the right just barely hanging on by a couple of cables. The Terminator’s neck had managed to survive the blast, but the back of the head showed a deep dent, probably sustained during the pickup’s initial impact.

There was a hesitant touch on Kyle’s arm, and he turned to see Star staring wide-eyed at the wreckage.

Is it dead?
she signed.

Kyle took a deep breath and looked back at the Terminator.

“I think—”

Without warning, the machine’s metal skull turned toward Kyle, its red eyes glowing balefully up at him.

Kyle jerked backward. The Terminator’s right arm twitched, and Kyle tore his gaze from the blazing eyes to look at it.

Slowly, moving in starts and stops, the arm was creeping back toward the shoulder.

Kyle felt his eyes widen. How in the world—?

There was a sudden gasp from beside him, and he jerked again as Star pounced forward to grab the Terminator’s detached left arm. She lifted it up, staggering and grunting with the load.

“Careful,” Kyle warned as he reached over and took it from her. The metal arm wasn’t just heavy—it was somehow pulling itself toward the Terminator’s shoulder.

The Terminator was trying to put itself back together.

Clutching the metal arm to his chest, Kyle leaned against the pull and managed to take a step backward. To his relief, the pressure eased, and the next step was even easier. Two steps more, and there was no pull at all.

He looked down at the arm that was pressed to his chest. So it wasn’t some sort of evil Skynet magic. It was just a simple electromagnet, or set of electromagnets, embedded inside the gleaming metal to help the Terminator reassemble itself if someone managed to blow it apart.

But apparently only if its severed pieces were close enough together.

“Yeah, I think we can do something about that,” Kyle muttered. Tucking the spare arm under his right arm, he reached into his bomb bag.

And twisted to the side as something shot past his face.

He ducked down, spinning around. Another Terminator had appeared in the far end of the alley, and was striding toward them with a piece of broken brick gripped in its left hand.

“Run!” Kyle snapped at Star, ducking again as the Terminator hurled the brick at him.

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This time, the machine’s aim was better. The sharp-edged missile slammed into Kyle’s right shoulder, sending a stab of pain down his whole side. He threw the mechanical arm he was holding at the machine, then snatched out his Colt and fired a quick shot before turning and running for all he was worth. He caught up with Star at the alley mouth, grabbed her hand, and yanked her to the left. Another brick whistled past just as they made it around the corner.