Tarissa pushed herself up from the bed and stumbled to the window.
Pressing her hand hard against her mouth, she kept as quiet as possible so as not to disturb her sleeping children. A great fire made of pain and rage and fear
swelled in her chest and sobs like a series of blows racked her.
After a few minutes the worst was over and she leaned panting against the window frame, feeling sick. Tarissa could feel the world crumble to broken ice as she stared at the dingy parking lot through her tears. How was she going to tell her children that their father was never coming home?
ALTADENA, CA: 1995
John paid the clerk with some of his stolen cash. Easy money, he thought: it was only two days since he and his best friend had ripped off that hapless whoever-it-was, hacking his PIN number at the ATM machine. It seemed like a lifetime.
Then everything had seemed to be going in a straight line toward a future as miserable as the present. Now? It was all different.
Poor Todd and Janelle, his court-appointed foster parents, were dead. Now they'd be dicks forever. His mother wasn't a psycho, she was a hero, and his life had been saved repeatedly by a Terminator.
If he didn't feel so rotten He'd think he was dreaming this. He felt numb and tense at the same time, wired and exhausted. Every motion he made seemed remote, like the gestures of a puppet. His mother looked like hell and her wounds didn't seem to want to stop bleeding, and though he cared—a lot—that also felt distant somehow.
John came back to the car, pulled a jar of orange juice out of the plastic bag, uncapped it, and handed it to his mother.
"I wanted coffee," she said. Sarah's hand was shaking as she took the drink from
him.
"You coulda used their coffee to seal tire leaks, Mom." He looked at her, worried, as he worked the cap off a bottle of aspirin. "Anyway, isn't sugar supposed to be good for you if you're hurt or something?"
Sarah took four aspirin and a swig of orange juice.
"Yeah," she said, closing her eyes and leaning her head back against the seat.
"Glucose. Energy."
The car they'd stolen was a well-used Chrysler, nondescript and fortunately full of gas. It ran well, too. They were already fifty miles from Cyberdyne.
"I got some bandages, too," John said, offering her a look into the bag.
Sarah opened her eyes slowly; it was a struggle. Despite her pain she wanted desperately to sleep. Bad idea, she told herself. She couldn't leave John alone.
Her full lips jerked in an almost smile. He was something special, but he was still only ten years old.
"There used to be a doctor who didn't ask questions," she said vaguely. With an effort, wincing, she sat up straighter. That was better. "Where are we?" she asked.
"Altadena," he answered.
Sarah seemed to come out of a fog she'd been sinking into, shifting again into a still more upright position.
"All right," she said. "I know where we are. Let's go. Get on the highway, John,
head north."
"Can this guy give you a transfusion?" he asked, slipping into the driver's seat.
She shook her head. "But he can stop the bleeding."
John started the car and drove. They didn't speak for a long time, but he didn't notice as he concentrated on driving and on not thinking. Suddenly alarmed, he glanced over at his mother, afraid she might have finally fallen unconscious.
He caught the gleam of her eyes as she looked at him, and was reassured.
"It's going to be all right," she said, a world of satisfaction in her voice. "We stopped them. We stopped Skynet, Judgment Day, all of it."
John glanced at her again and saw tears glisten in her eyes. His throat tightened in sympathy.
"What will we do now?" he asked. His voice sounded weak in his own ears.
"Head to South America, I think," Sarah told him. "We'll make a nice, peaceful life for ourselves and die in obscurity many, many years from now."
"Heh," he said, hardly daring to believe it was really over. "Sounds good."
"It does," she said. "It does."
CYBERDYNE SYSTEMS CORPORATION PARKING LOT: 1995
Paul Warren and Roger Colvin, respectively president and CEO of Cyberdyne
Systems, stood together in the cold predawn darkness and watched their company headquarters burn.
"Dyson!" Warren exclaimed. "Dyson, of all people."
"Goddamn Luddites," Colvin growled. "The bastards are everywhere." He crushed the empty coffee cup he was holding and threw it away in disgust. "Did he leave a note, anything to explain why he did this?"
Warren shook his head.
"The cops said that his house was shot up. His computer and all his records were trashed or burned. They said his wife and kids were missing."
Colvin looked at him quickly.
"Do you think he killed them?"
"If he did he hid the bodies." Warren looked at his boss. "There was a lot of blood. It doesn't look good."
Colvin ran his hands through his thinning brown hair.
"Guys kill their wives and kids all the time," the CEO said in frustration. "But they don't blow up the company they work for! Why the hell would he do this?"
"There's a good chance that terrorists forced him to it," a friendly-sounding voice said from behind them.
The two executives turned to find themselves under the regard of a middle-aged
man remarkable only in the perfection of his ordinariness. He looked like he'd dressed as rapidly as they had, expensively casual yet rumpled. He approached the two men slowly and their stance became subtly deferential.
"Mr. Colvin," he said to the CEO. "Mr. Warren." He turned piercing blue eyes on the president.
"Everything is backed up off-site," Colvin assured him.
"Everything is not backed up, Mr. Colvin," the man said, his voice still friendly, his pale gaze like an ice borer. "We've lost the chip and we've lost the arm.
These items are irreplaceable. Let's not kid ourselves. Even Mr. Dyson can be replaced eventually, but not those two items."
"We have copies of all his files," Warren offered eagerly. "Even his home computer files."
The man stared at Warren for a long moment. The president's hands fisted inside his jacket pockets; nobody had looked at him like that since high school, since he'd been a pencil-necked geek bullied by the jocks. Making a very large fortune before he turned thirty had been vengeance enough… until now. Now he felt as if he'd been face-slammed into a locker again and had his lunch money stolen.
"But the loss of those materials," the man continued, "will be a very heavy blow to your research." He turned his attention to the CEO. "Frankly, your security was a joke. The most valuable artifacts ever found by human beings were put into your trust and you just—"
He made a single sharp gesture toward the burning chaos of the Cyberdyne labs.
The other men flushed, as if the movement of the long narrow hand had somehow flicked something rancid into their faces.
"—pissed it away. The very least that you could do is have off-site backup. Have you checked with that site?"
Colvin and Warren shot a panicked look at one another.
"You haven't, have you?" The two men shook their heads. "Is there at least a spare off-site backup?"
They just stared at him.
"Jesus! You people are unbelievable!"
"We're engineers," Colvin said with strained dignity, "not security."
"I would never have guessed," the man sneered. "Okay"—he spread his hands
—"get your shit together; whatever shit you might have left, that is. From now on you'll be working under our auspices at another location."
"Our people won't like that," Warren said.
"Then get different people! The only guy you're going to have trouble replacing is Dyson, which makes everybody else expendable. Including you two clowns. If someone mouths off about working for us, fire them. And for Christ's sake get yourself a decent security manager… or I will!" He spun on his heel and walked away. After a few steps he turned back. "I'll be in touch. Check your backup and for God's sake get a few more copies of everything made and distributed to