At last it could once again move its right leg. It brought it up and hooked the door frame with its remaining foot. Then it thrust its head through the door.
Sarah and John gave a mighty heave and the door slammed onto the Terminator's head. It worked its way forward, scraping its ears off against the unyielding steel of the door and the frame. With the crisp sound of rending metal, it thrust the stump of its left arm into the gap and pulled itself farther in by pressing its chin against the door frame. Its shoulder inched forward.
Dieter staggered erect and swiped at the blood dripping from his nose, then joined them at the door, lending his weight and strength to theirs. The Terminator was stopped. For the moment.
"I want the head," John said.
The head? the pilot thought. He couldn't have heard that right.
Sarah nodded, and leaving her son and Dieter to hold the Terminator, she began to spin a rope of plastique between her hands.
"I never saw anybody work it in quite that way," Dieter said dreamily.
John looked at him, trying to see both his eyes, wondering if their friend was contused.
"It's how she works pastry," he said. "She does that to make these cinnamon thingies for Christmas."
"Cinnamon bows," Sarah said, distractedly.
She moved forward and attempted to wrap the plastique around the Terminator's neck. Three thrust its head forward and bit, its teeth flashing. Sarah jerked back with a gasp and looked into the mutilated face, with its glaring eyes.
You never get used to this, she thought, fighting back tears of frustration, her heart pounding. No one could ever get used to this.
She brought her hands forward and jerked back again while John and Dieter watched her. After a few more attempts Dieter reached forward and pushed up on the Terminator's forehead, lifting it back with some untapped resource of muscle power that vaguely surprised him. He almost let go when the thing's blue eyes shifted to glare at him and something within clenched and closed off his breath in sheer atavistic terror.
Sarah took advantage of the Terminator's momentary distraction to flip the rope of explosive around its throat like a neckerchief. It redoubled its efforts to sink its teeth into her as she tried to push the detonator into the soft substance.
With her lips tightly closed, Sarah took a deep breath, set the timer, and tried again. This time John lifted his hand to aid Dieter and the Terminator snapped its head up, attempting to grab him. Sarah pushed the detonator into place and then
grabbed John, yanking him away.
Startled by her sudden move, Dieter pulled as hard as he could against the door, using his body as a weight. Once again he went flying as though smacked by God's pillow when the plastique blew. This time, in answer to the explosion, the Terminator's head flew into the cabin and bounced off the far wall. Bits of flesh and spatters of blood sprayed out into the cabin; not nearly as much as from a real body, but enough. Its massive body went pinwheeling through space, exploding in a magenta ball of flame just before it hit the azure blue of the water.
Dieter was slumped, once again unconscious, against the bulkhead. The door hung open.
Sarah raised her head and found herself looking into the Terminator's blue eyes.
It snapped its teeth at her and wobbled on the floor, helpless to make itself move toward her.
"John?" she said, not taking her eyes off of it.
"Here, Mom," he said from beside her. He was watching the Terminator, too.
"We'd better get that door," she said.
Taking in her breath in a gasp that was too close to a sob for her liking, Sarah staggered to her feet and grabbed the door. John moved in beside her and pulled.
They found that it moved better this time; at least the hinges weren't fighting them. It just wouldn't stay closed. Sarah tried to work the lock and got nowhere.
Apparently something was jammed inside.
"Shit," she muttered. "I can't shut the door!" she shouted to the pilot.
"Right there," he said, a quaver in his voice. "Okay, got her on autopilot."
He came into the passenger cabin white-faced, a sort of crowbar in his hand.
There was a slot in the floor into which he inserted one end, then pushed the other end into a similar slot on the door. "That's never happened before," he said weakly. "But it's good to be prepared."
He turned around to see John pick up the head. My God, he thought, the kid really did want the head!
"I'll need to make a Faraday cage for this," John said to him. "To cut it off from communicating with any of its friends. Assuming it has any. So I'm going to need some wires. Where can I take them from so I don't do serious damage to the plane?"
The pilot watched the head dangling by its hair from John's bloody hand with fascination. Then the head swung out, face forward, and clicked its teeth at him, its eyes rolling wildly.
From some place deep within, possibly the soles of his feet, the pilot felt a scream building, rushing upward until it blared out of his mouth. He leaped toward the pilot's cabin and slammed the door behind him, locking it and cowering in his seat, screaming.
Sarah tsk'ed and looked around her, then went over to Dieter, kneeling beside him to feel his pulse. She looked up at John and smiled, giving him a reassuring nod. Peeling back one of Dieter's eyelids and then the other, she breathed a sigh
of relief. The pupils were the same size. Pretty much. He should be all right.
"First the Faraday cage," she said briskly to John. "And then the pilot."
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
FAMAULIPAS. MEXICO, NEAR THE
TEXAS BORDER: THE PRESENT
Sarah tossed another stick of mesquite onto the fire and glanced over at John, at work on the Terminator's head in the uncertain light of a pair of Coleman lanterns. She watched him pull something out of the thing's skull with a pair of long-nosed electrician's pliers, holding it up in triumph under the brilliant desert stars.
Somewhere a coyote announced its presence to the night.
"This is a Terminator all right!" he said. "But it's primitive. Heck." He held up another bit he'd excavated. "This thing here is from a cell phone! It's nothing like Uncle Bob. Y'know? But the chip seems right."
At least it resembled the stuff he remembered seeing on Miles Dyson's computer printouts. This weird little-connected-boxes design had been all over everything.
He turned it, studying it by the light of the lantern.
He'd been trying to get this thing out for the last forty-five minutes. The CPU
was the first thing he'd wanted to take out. The damned Terminator seemed disinclined to stop trying to bite them all to death until he did so. Unfortunately the CPU had been buried deep underneath a solid steel cage and getting to it had
been a long and nasty process.
Even knowing that the Terminator wasn't a living being, cutting into its head as it snapped its teeth and rolled its eyes at him had been pure nightmare fodder.
"And I suppose the power cell must be authentic, original equipment, too," John continued. "It sure wasn't running on a lawnmower engine! But the rest's like a cheap knockoff. Like something someone could do in a lab now. It's all a little different somehow. This thing was made out of here-and-now components, mostly. With the essential stuff from Skynet—from the future. It isn't Skynet's style, really."
Sarah smiled tiredly; they'd driven a long way through the desert today in the rather crappy Jeep one of her "friends" had sold them. Desert grit still made unpleasant little sounds between her back teeth, and itched in all the creases of her underwear.