It was a pickup truck that had passed over her body, the wheels somehow miraculously missing her. She could see the back end of it sticking out of the wall.
She got unsteadily to her knees and rubbed her bruised neck where the killer's boot had been jammed into her throat.
She figured that the blond woman as well as whoever had been driving the pickup truck had to be dead. They could not have survived the crash and the fire. But something moved within the most intense area of flames.
Kate tried to shake herself out of her daze, unable to believe anything she was witnessing, unable even to believe her own rationality. She had to be dreaming, or hallucinating. Something.
This was not happening.
A tall man, wearing a leather jacket and trousers, boots on his feet, and a shotgun in his left hand, pushed through the jumbled mass of burning wreckage and melting steel and glass, shrugging out of the flames as if the heat and damage had absolutely no effect on him, and strode purposefully to Kate, who was frozen to the spot.
"Katherine Brewster," Terminator said as a statement of fact, not a question.
Kate could do nothing more than dumbly look up at him and nod.
The stranger scooped her up with his right arm, tossed her over his shoulder like a duffel bag, and brought her around to the back door of the animal van.
"Wait!" Kate shouted, coming out of her fog. "What are you doing?"
The tall man got the back door of the van open and he tossed her inside among a couple of empty animal cages, blankets, and some medical equipment. There were no windows in the pickup's cap. A security screen covered the sliding window into the cab.
"Where is John Connor?" the man asked, his tone neutral.
Kate didn't know what to say or do. "Look, if I tell you, you'll let me go, right?"
"Yes," he said.
"In the kennel. I locked him in one of the cages."
The man spotted a lug wrench attached to the spare-tire bracket. He pulled it free, and Kate shrank back, thinking he was going to hit her with it.
"You said you'd let me go!"
"I lied," he said, which strictly speaking was not true. In fact he had merely omitted the time frame. He would let her go, but not now.
He slammed the door, stuck the lug wrench through the latches, and without any apparent effort bent it into a steel loop, effectively locking Kate inside.
Terminator turned and strode toward the animal clinic's smashed front entrance, his processors evaluating the range of likely scenarios he was heading for.
Most of the fire was on the other side of the brick wall that separated the kennel from the rest of the building, but a big section of intersecting wall had collapsed in a heap of rubble, and the room was filling with smoke.
Connor kept smashing at the cage door with both feet, bracing himself against the rear bars with his back for more leverage.
The animals were howling and barking wildly. Like Connor they were frantic that they would burn to death or die of smoke inhalation before someone came to let them out.
One of the door hinges bent then broke. Connor savagely kicked the door one last time, and the second hinge broke, sending the door clattering to the floor.
He scrambled out of the cage, heedless of the wound to his leg. He wanted out of there right now. He started for the door, but then stopped and turned back He couldn't leave.
The animals nervously switched their attention back and forth from him to the smoke pouring through the collapsed wall, almost pleading with him to help them.
"Shit," Connor muttered. He went back and started opening cages. The animals that could leaped out of their cages and raced for the door. Connor helped the others that were too sick to crawl out under their own steam. But once they were free and on the floor they were on their own.
He turned to get out of there when movement at the base of the rubble caught his eye. He stopped and watched
as silver beads of liquid metal oozed out of the debris and began to pool on the concrete floor.
Connor stepped back a pace. He'd seen this kind of thing before. Twelve years ago. It was the T-1000 model that Skynet had sent back to kill him and his mother. It was happening again. "Oh, shit"
A metallic arm coalesced from the liquid metal, and at even more material began to build on the first, clawlike structure, it was obvious that something very sophisticated was happening. This was no mere T-1000 rising out of the liquid metal.
This was something infinitely more deadly. Connor did not know how he knew such a thing, he just did.
He raced out of the kennel into the storage room where he retrieved his RAK PM-63 9mm machine pistol from where Kate had laid it, and headed out into the reception area, which was filled with dense smoke.
It was hard to breathe let alone see, and he nearly stumbled over the blood-soaked body of a woman. At first he thought it was Kate, but then he heard the distinctive double click of a round being cycled into the breach of a shotgun. He stopped dead in his tracks, trying to figure his options before it was too late. Terminator, the Mossberg 12-gauge 500 pump-action shotgun low at his right hip, appeared out of the smoke, reached Connor, grabbed him by the shirt, and lifted him up.
"John Connor," Terminator said. His head-up display
was slower and less sophisticated than the T-X's, but his processors came up with a very quick match. "It is time."
The first instance a T-800 had come back, it had been sent by Skynet to kill Connor's mother. The second T-800 had come to protect them. Now, twelve years later, it was anyone's guess what this unitthe newest model of the machine which had been the only father figure Connor had ever knownhad been sent to do.
"You're here to kill me," Connor said.
"No," Terminator replied, perhaps a mild expression of surprise forming at the corners of his mouth and eyes. "You must live."
c.ll
The Valley
Connor allowed himself to be hustled out of the clinic, partly because he knew there wasn't much he could do about it, and partly because of what was re-forming in the kennel.
"Why are you here?" he asked Terminator. "Where are we going?"
"Keep moving," Terminator said. He led Connor around to the back of the pet van and pushed him through the doorless driver's side. Fire still raged in the back of the building. Propane flames shot straight up into the dark, early morning sky. Debris littered the street. In the distance, Connor thought he could hear a lot of sirens. Someone must have turned in the alarm. The cops and the fire department were on the way. He glanced toward the front of the clinic in time to see T-X emerge through the shattered glass door. "Shit. Look out!" Terminator turned as T-X came toward them, the cyborg's liquid metal skin and clothing peeling back to reveal its formidable battle chassis armored with a
crystalline ceramic that was interlaced with nano fibers of carbon and titanium. T-X's right arm had transformed into the same model of plasma weapon that had been used in Colorado to wipe out the commands of Colonel Earle and Lieutenant Benson. This was Skynet's latest.
Terminator stepped directly between the oncoming T-X and Connor and raised his shotgun.
"Get out of here," he told Connor.
He fired. The 12-bore slug plowed into T-X's armored skull, showing little effect other than opening a small liquid metal crater that immediately closed.
"Now!" Terminator insisted, firing a second time, and a third, and a fourth.
Connor finally got the van started and peeled away, tires screeching as Terminator headed directly for T-X, firing the last four shells.
He took more rounds that he'd found in the pickup truck from his jacket pocket and loaded them into the shotgun as an electric blue aura formed and intensified around T-X's plasma cannon.
A tremendous burst of raw energy, twenty-five or thirty millimeters in diameter, shot from the transmission head of the weapon, striking Terminator square in his broad chest.