" 'Cause he's not Uncle Bob," Sarah said. The longer she looked at this engine the more discouraged she became. "But the resemblance is amazing, isn't it?"
He straightened up and wiping his hands on a rag looked at her askance.
"He's not the same hombre?"
Sarah shook her head. "They say everybody on earth has a double somewhere,"
she said.
Enrique shrugged. "They say bullshit a lot, too. What can you do, eh?"
Sarah laughed. "It's when I tell the truth that no one believes me."
"Maybe that's because for you the truth is always very strange." He held up his hand to forestall any protest. "About this Jeep," he said, "if it was a horse I'd put it out of its misery."
"Can you fix it?" she asked.
He looked off into the distance, then grimaced.
"You ask me can I fix it? Si, I can fix anything. But with a car like this, you have to fix it every time you stop. You know?" He screwed his face up. "I got something better I can trade you for a few hundred. It's not pretty, but it will get you there and back again."
"Better let me see it," Sarah said.
He led her out into the desert and tugged a sand-colored tarpaulin off a diseased-looking Marquis. Sarah pursed her lips and walked slowly around it. The white paint had turned to chalk in places, exposing the underpainting, and the paint under that. It had a leprous look to it and rubber was dangling from the windows.
"That is one ugly car," she said.
"Like Lupe's Jeep would win a beauty contest?" Enrique challenged. "It's under the hood you'll see her value." He popped the hood and set it on its stick. "See?"
Sarah leaned in. She had to admit it looked a hell of a lot better than the Jeep.
The hoses didn't look like they were going to melt, for one thing. And the interior looked pretty good for all its age.
"Air-conditioning?" she asked.
Enrique nodded proudly. "Works great." He held up the keys. "Want to try her?"
She snatched them out of his hand and opened the door. "Coming?" she asked.
* * *
Sarah leaned her elbows on the old picnic table, gazing out over the desert, watching the sun go down in opalescent fire. She let her eyes wander around the compound, resting briefly on the incongruous chain-link fence. Almost every open diamond formed by the crossing of the wires was filled with the head of a rattlesnake, jaws open as if screaming, fangs out in ferocious display.
She sighed, remembering when she'd first met Enrique and Yolanda. They were a young couple then, with only the trailer to live in. She'd been lost and thirsty and frightened, as well as big as a house with John.
They'd taken her in, fed and watered her and calmed her down, letting her stay as long as she wanted. They'd introduced her around and, in a sense, had gotten her started. Who knows how long it would have taken her to make the contacts she needed without them.
Sarah thought about the girl she'd been then. She'd led a sheltered life, protected, well fed, well cared for. Better than her son's actually. Until the night that changed her life the worst thing that had ever happened to her was her father's death from a heart attack when she was seventeen.
When she met Enrique in the desert she was still soft as a kitten, despite the loss of Kyle and the terror of being pursued by a Terminator.
Kyle, she thought wistfully, seeing his beautiful face in her mind's eye. What a life he must have had. And yet he'd remained a decent and gentle man. He'd touched her as though she were spun glass, impossibly delicate.
One night, she thought, not bitterly, but with an aching longing. Just one night to learn to love one another, to express that love, to conceive their son. Her throat tightened. She loved him still, and he deserved her love. I wonder if he would love me if he could see the woman I've become.
With an effort she pulled her mind from such maudlin thoughts. She was certainly a different woman than she'd been when she last sat here. Then she'd just met the T-1000, been saved by a Terminator, and was coming down from the drugs Silberman had pumped into her. Desperate to do something to stop Judgment Day. She looked at the words in the table before her, carved into the wood with a K-bar bayonet.
NO FATE.
"There's no fate but what we make for ourselves," she murmured, completing the thought. Kyle had told her that. John made him memorize it as a message to her from the future.
"That Web site is very strange," Dieter said, coming up behind her.
Sarah shifted, making a place for him on the bench.
"Why?" she asked. Sarah put her elbows on the picnic table and rested her chin on her fist, her eyes on the first faint evening stars. "What's strange about it?"
She looked at him, and rubbed a finger over the time-smoothed words.
Dieter glanced at the graffiti, then swung one long leg over the bench. "Well, for one thing, whoever put it up thinks you're the victim of a government conspiracy."
Sarah laughed; it was so stupid she couldn't help it. "No kidding?" she said. "Are there UFOs?"
"How did you know?" he asked. "There seems to be a sizable group of people who imagine that the government is working with aliens to make your life difficult." Dieter hunched his shoulders, leaning his big arms on the table. "I find it disturbing that people that dumb can afford a computer."
"And they can vote!" She grinned at his expression. "Don't let it get to you. If they're busy on-line they aren't out making trouble."
"Not necessarily, Sarah. The ones that worry me are the ones who call themselves Luddites; they seem very serious. They had a private chat room, but I couldn't get into it. It seems to be by-invitation-only."
"So what are you saying? That I've got a following?"
"Just a feeling," he said. "I think somebody's manipulating these people. They attract them by using certain key words—'conspiracy,' 'aliens'—like ringing a supper bell for a dog—then direct the discussion. Whoever set up the site also set up the invitation-only chat room. It feels like they're picking and choosing individuals." He shrugged. "Big things have started from such small beginnings."
Sarah picked at a splinter on the table and thought about it. A Web site suggesting a government conspiracy would pull in a lot of discontented people no matter what the conspiracy was supposed to be about. But my name on it…
Could that be a coincidence?
She sighed heavily. "It could be that 'master Terminator' we were talking about,"
she said, making air quotes. "If it exists it might just be smart enough to know that under the right circumstances humans could help it." She grimaced.
"Interesting, but I don't see what we can do about it."
Sarah looked at him sidelong and watched him shrug again. She punched his arm gently and he looked at her.
"If it's some long term plan then the only thing we can hope to do is disrupt it by destroying said 'master Terminator'."
"What if there's more than one?" he asked.
Sarah rolled her eyes. "If you want a headache that badly! Dieter, just hit yourself in the head with a hammer." She stood up. "I'm going to check on John."
"Hey, sweetie," she said, coming up the steps of the bus.
He looked up from the keyboard and grinned. Sarah glanced at the arrangement he'd made on the tabletop. He'd stripped the Terminator's skull off the interior matrix, which he put in a smaller version of the Faraday cage he'd made for the whole head. The CPU was connected to Dieter's laptop by yet another jury-rigged contraption.