Sarah fired, aiming for the thigh of the leg inching its way into view.
Jordan went down screaming. He thrashed on the floor cursing and trying vainly to keep quiet. It hurt so damn much!
"Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!" he hissed, half cursing, half praying.
Sarah recognized him from Sacramento: the man who had said he would take care of John. She rushed from behind the desk to stand over him, her gun aimed at his head.
"Don't move!" she ordered.
Jordan opened his eyes to find himself staring into a small black hole. His breath stopped; it took five long seconds for him to make his lungs work again and he took his breath with a long, tearing gasp.
"Where's my son?" Connor said. Her voice and face were as cold as the moon and as distant. ,
"He… he's okay," Jordan stammered. He couldn't stop shaking and his leg burned. "He's on three, setting up bombs."
She appeared to think about that; after a moment she took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. Then she almost smiled, looking younger in an instant.
"That's my boy!" she said proudly. "He can talk anyone around— even me."
Sarah bolstered her gun and squatted down to offer help to her victim. "The bullet went clean through, doesn't look like I nicked any veins or arteries from the way it's bleeding. Can I have your tie?" she asked.
"No!" Jordan snapped. "I already used it to bandage your son." I will never again question why I have to wear that stupid strip of cloth to work, he thought. He wished now that the unofficial dress code required him to wear two.
"Well, you'd better give me something to use unless you want to bleed to death,"
she said briskly.
Jordan shrugged out of his jacket and took off his shirt, with her help. Sarah used her knife to tear it into strips.
"First you shoot my brother, now you shoot me. What the hell have you got against my family, lady?"
"What are you talking about?" she asked, frowning.
"My brother was Miles Dyson," he said. He sucked in his breath through his teeth as a sharp pain shot through his leg.
"Miles," she said thoughtfully as she sliced away his pants leg. "He was a good man." Sarah smiled, her eyes on her work. "I guess next time I'd better ask questions first and shoot later," she said.
"Duh! Yuh!" he agreed. "OW!"
"Has to be tight," she explained.
"What about circulation?" he asked, glaring.
Sarah stood up and looked down at him.
"I guess that's your responsibility. Look, I've got things to do. Stay cool, I'll be right back."
"Stay cool? Hey!" he said as she walked away. "I'm being chased; that mommy Terminator you've been worried about is after me!"
She looked over her shoulder at him.
"Then I'd better work fast."
Dyson let his head fall back against the wall and closed his eyes.
"Yeah, I guess you better," he said softly. He swallowed and tried to fight down a sudden nausea. Maybe it's time I tried to make a deal with God, he thought irreverently.
Every agent does, sooner or later, Paulson had once told him. So you should work out your terms in advance.
Jordan lightly placed his hands on either side of the wound, just above the bandage, and wished he could ignore the pain. He felt a falling sensation within, and when he opened his eyes again he thought some time might have passed.
Off to his right, the door to the stairs began to open.
"Connor!" he shouted. He tried frantically to move, to back into the elevator, and couldn't seem to make his body work as a coordinated whole. "SARAH!"
Sarah dropped her screwdriver and ran toward his voice. She arrived in time to see a Terminator raise its gun, aiming at Dyson. Response was automatic: she plucked the laser from her belt, ran toward it, aimed, and fired even as it began to wheel toward her.
The results were dramatic: sparks shot from the Terminator's head and it flailed its arms and legs like a marionette gone mad. Its trigger finger convulsed again and again, firing the gun in uncontrolled bursts. Sarah threw herself to the floor and wished she could get lower. The machine kept firing until all that could be heard was the impotent clicking of an empty magazine.
Then, without warning, it was over. The Terminator crashed to the ground, frozen
—sprawled like a giant doll, broken and abandoned.
After a moment's silence she crawled to the edge of the desk and peered around it. The Terminator lay inert. She moved over to it and tugged at the gun; it wouldn't let go, not without tools. She rifled its pockets for spare magazines and took those.
Dyson was flat on his back, most of his body in the elevator, so she couldn't tell if he was alive or dead. Sarah moved cautiously over to him, her eyes on the Terminator.
As she moved she snapped out the used taser cartridge, its wires still attached to the Terminator's torso, and replaced it. It was more powerful than the standard model, but it would be useless until it recharged. She quickly checked her watch; twenty minutes or so until it could be used again. She hung the unit on her belt and withdrew her pistol from its holster just in case. It wouldn't kill a Terminator, but it might slow one down—and it made her feel better.
She wished there was some way to be sure the Terminator was down for good, but the damn things didn't have a pulse she could check.
She glanced in at Dyson; he was looking back, seeming no worse for wear.
"You okay?" she asked, moving her eyes back to the quiescent Terminator.
"Just ducky!" he said sarcastically. "Incidentally, if you see a blond ho' with a very bad attitude who can walk through walls, kill her. That's Serena Burns, inhuman genius from the future. Sorry, I'm babbling."
"Shock," said the woman he'd hated for six years, and smiled.
He struggled to a sitting position and Sarah was reaching down to help him when the door to the stairs was thrown open, hitting the wall like a gunshot. Sarah straightened, saw a woman with a gun, and without hesitation raised her gun and shot.
Serena's head snapped back from the force of the blow and her vision went white, then black. She felt herself falling and had time to comprehend one word and to feel all the dread that accompanied it.
Failure.
Then she was gone.
Jordan leaned forward and watched with his mouth open in horror as Serena slowly crumpled, then fell to her knees, then forward onto her face. The right
side of her head was a mass of blood, the pink gray pulp of her brain was visible, and the gold-blond hair was matted into spikes with it.
"My God," he said. He looked at Sarah, who was frowning at the fallen woman.
"I thought you were going to ask first."
Sarah looked down at him.
"Everybody's a critic," she growled. She indicated Serena with her chin. "That the one you were talking about?"
"Yeah," Jordan said. "That's her. She dead?"
Sarah shrugged and put away her gun.
"Time will tell."
She glanced at Jordan, then went over and pried the gun from the woman's stiff ringers. Sarah touched her neck, feeling for a pulse. If she has a brain, which she visibly did, then she must be human, she thought. So if there's no pulse she should be out of the game. There was a lot of blood, too. Terminators didn't have this much in their whole massive bodies. Sarah frowned. The idea of a human running Terminators was mind-boggling. No time, she reminded herself. Get going. Returning to Jordan, she offered him the gun butt first.