Downstairs, outside the condo block's high brick fence, someone pressed the buzzer. Damn it, who could it be at this time of night? Oscar checked the security system. Its four-inch video screen showed a young Hispanic woman with very long hair. He pressed the button to speak with her through the microphone, "Yes? What do you want?"
"Oscar Cruz?"
"Yes."
"From Cyberdyne?"
"Yes, what do you want?"
"We need to talk," she said.
No way was he talking to some total stranger who'd come to talk about Cyberdyne, not after 1994. "Call me at work. You can sort it out with my secretary."
"Mr. Cruz, we need to talk now."
"No we don't." He terminated the connection, but the buzzer went off again. He activated the mike. "I said to call me at work."
"We need to talk now, Mr. Cruz."
"I don't think so." When he disconnected this time, he pressed another button, activating a duress alarm connected to the police station. In a moment, a squad car should come round to check.
The woman vanished from the range of the security camera. Oscar waited for the L.A.P.D. If the woman had really gone, he'd thank them and send them on their way, but he wasn't going to cancel the alarm just yet. The phone rang-that would be the security company, who'd also have received the alarm. He answered it, gave them his confidential code, and explained what had happened. At the other end of the line, a young man's voice said, "Okay, Mr. Cruz. The police will be there soon."
He put the phone down. As he did so, something peculiar happened. Something came in under the door. It was silvery, like snail slime, but thicker, a sort of liquid, which gathered up into itself to form a kind of pool.
Suddenly, it rose up in a liquid-metal fountain, taking color and form. It was the woman from downstairs. The woman-and a big, fierce-looking dog. Before Oscar could run or scream, the woman's finger stabbed out, a thin needle piercing his skull, lodging in his brain.
For one terrible second, he thought this was death, but then he knew it was something else. Much became clear to him; he saw his destiny. The future needed his help. Whatever it wanted... whatever Skynet wanted. There was so much to do.
Whatever it takes, Oscar thought.
"You understand?" the woman said.
"Absolutely."
"That's so helpful. Please, now, we have to visit Charles Layton. Will you drive me there?"
"Not a problem," Oscar said. "Anything at all."
CHAPTER TWELVE
SKYNET'S WORLD
ARGENTINA
2003
People were rushing from everywhere. Each time "Raoul" stepped forward, the T-800 fired again. Sarah ran from her bungalow, saw what was happening, and skidded to a stop on the gravel. She ran back, shouting something over her shoulder. Gabriela ran into her house. Meanwhile, Juanita had calmed down and taken action. She got into the rear of the Humvee, feeding ammunition into its 50mm. gun, then swinging it round on the T-1000.
The T-800 kept firing. It glanced at John, still on the ground. "Get away," it said. "Run!"
It pulled the trigger again. Click! It was out of ammunition. John fired with his handgun. The .45 caliber Colt had plenty of stopping power at this range, but not like the shotgun, not enough to slow the T-1000. But Juanita opened up with the Humvee's machine gun, as everyone else scattered out of the way. The T-1000 became a mass of silver-chrome crater wounds, deforming like a metal zombie.
Sarah returned with the T-800's M-79 grenade launcher. "John! Get away!" she shouted.
John ran like devils were after him. Juanita followed, and they got to the back of Raoul's garage, then threw themselves, face down, on the concrete floor. Even the T-800 rolled away, as a grenade pierced the T-1000's body and exploded. The T-1000 stayed in one piece, but it splashed into an inkblot shape. Within a second it was struggling to reform. John grabbed Juanita by the wrist—a glance of understanding passing between them—and they got out a back door, then doubled round, just in time to see Sarah reload and fire another shot into the polyalloy Terminator. "Take this, you metal son of a bitch!"
The grenade hit the T-1000 before it had fully reformed . It splashed out again, some of it breaking away. The broken piece, like a huge tom-off strip of silver foil, turned to liquid on the concrete and flowed back to the T-1000's feet.
At the front door of her house, Gabriela had an RPG tube, which she held at her shoulder, kneeling to aim. Now she fired, the rocket-propelled grenade hitting the T-1000 and exploding, showering more of the Terminator's liquid metal parts across the space between the house and the garages. The fragments of T-1000 liquefied when they landed, rolling together like water droplets on a slick surface, struggling back together. How much did it take to destroy the thing? No matter what they threw at it, it was still fighting them.
"Don't let it reform," the T-800 said. It rushed forward, seizing the amoeba-like main body of the T-1000 and tossing it twenty feet, well away from the liquid metal pieces that had been heading towards it. With an appearance of special effort, the T-1000 pulled into itself, becoming the young, severe-looking policeman John had first seen it as, back in L.A., nearly nine years before. It grappled with the T-800, getting the better of it, and tossing it to one side. The T-800 bounced on its haunches, but sprang to its feet immediately, obviously unhurt. It ran at the T-1000, which moved like the liquid creature it was, somehow getting under its body and twisting round, smashing the T-800 head-first into the gravel.
A silvery liquid blob, the size of a ham, now slid over the ground heading home, for the T-1000's main body. All the broken-off bits had formed into this single mass of mercury-like metal. Sarah fired another grenade, directly into the fast-moving blob, which sprayed into droplets as the grenade hit. But even they started running together. Couldn't anything ever destroy it?
By now, there were dozens of well-armed fighters gathered to help. Many of them had useless weapons, but not all. Bruce Axelrod threw a hand grenade, pitching it hard, right into the T-1000's body. Again, the explosion blew the Terminator out into a free-form shape. Enrique and Franco Salceda fired at it with shotguns, blasting bits off and driving it back. The T-800 pounced on the T-1000, gripping and tearing with both hands. It ripped the T-1000 in half and threw the two pieces aside, well away from each other. Immediately, they liquefied on the ground. Bruce tossed another grenade, then another, hitting each liquid mass, and splashing droplets of the liquid metal far and wide.
Still the droplets tried to rush together. John started to wonder if they could ever defeat it, or whether they'd finally run out of ammunition.
As parts of the T-1000 managed to reform, they'd take on shapes it must have encountered in its travels: machines, animals, strange abstract forms with pincers and snapping jaws. They kept hitting it with more and more explosives, trying to blast it to smaller pieces, faster than it could reform, some of them throwing or firing grenades into it, while others ran for ammunition. The battle waged for hours, until they were exhausted. Finally, the polymorphic Terminator ceased reforming, its pieces liquefying and pooling, but no longer making shapes. As they watched it carefully, dozens of weapons now trained on it, it formed a single large pool of liquid metal, but no solid shape emerged from the pool. It seemed to be dead.
Even then, John didn't trust it. Perhaps the thing could still reform and come back at him, if they left it to itself.'
John said to the T-800, "Is that the end of it?"
"Yes," it said. "Terminated."
Juanita was close to him. He turned to her, seeing her more sharply than ever before. She'd almost died, just as he had. He realized how terrible that would have been. She deserved to live—and in a better world than this. All he said was, "Thank you."