Kyle looked down at Star. She was watching him closely, her face calm with the assurance that he had some plan.
Only he didn’t.
“Can’t we at least talk about it?” he pleaded, looking back at Rats.
“Yeah, that’s a smart idea,” Rats said sarcastically. “You go out there and talk.” He jabbed with his rifle again. “Last chance to do it breathing.”
Kyle took a deep breath. It was clearly no use.
“Come on, Star—”
He broke off as a screech of metal on pavement came from behind Rats, from the upended cars that formed the compound’s southern barrier a hundred feet away. Rats and his men spun around at the noise, their weapons tracking in that direction. One of the cars near the middle of the barrier teetered and then toppled over, slamming to the pavement with a teeth-rattling crash.
And through the gap in the barrier strode three T-600s.
Rats’ men were nothing if not fast on the uptake. The Terminators had barely come into sight before a thunder of gunfire erupted from all across the compound, including the buildings on both sides of the blocked-off street. The Terminators twitched violently as round after round slammed into them.
But they kept coming.
Something arced across and down from one of the upper windows on the eastern building, and the machines were abruptly engulfed in a blazing wash of fire.
And then Star was tugging on Kyle’s arm, pulling him urgently backward toward the upended car they were standing in front of. Kyle glanced at the car, noting for the first time that all of the vehicle’s glass was gone. She tugged again, pointing toward the open gap where the windshield had once been.
They had just slipped inside the car when across the way there was a violent triple explosion.
Star turned wide-eyed to Kyle as they pressed themselves back into the wide cavity where the car’s seats had once been. Their guns? she signed.
Kyle nodded. The Ere must have blown their ammo, he signed back.
But if the Terminators’ miniguns were gone, it was clear from the intensity of the gunfire still hammering across the compound that the Terminators themselves were far from defeated. Putting his arm around Star’s shoulders, Kyle eased them both down into sitting positions, trying to make them as small and invisible as possible.
Star took off the jacket Kyle had given her, handing it to him. Kyle nodded his thanks and draped it across their torsos, then changed his mind and pulled it up over their faces as well, covering them from head to chest. The more they could look like a pile of discarded rags, the better the chance that the Terminators and Rats’ own people would miss them in all the confusion out there.
He’d barely gotten the jacket arranged, and his eye pressed against a small rip in the material, when the Terminator who’d been behind them strode through the gap between the cars. It passed them and headed in to join the battle.
Kyle grimaced. So that was why the machine hadn’t shot them in the back. It had known the other three T-600s were coming up on the compound from the south, and had merely been herding its prey toward this new group of hunters. If Rats had let them go like Kyle had wanted, he and Star would probably both be dead now.
And even as the narrowness of their escape shivered through him, it occurred to him that Skynet’s little neighborhood containment setup had suddenly been blown to hell. Between the Terminator he’d shattered in the alley and the four now embroiled in this battle with the Death’s-Heads, there had to be a huge open gap in their sentry line.
He could only hope that Orozco would figure that out, and would take advantage of this chance to get the residents of the Ashes to safety.
The gunfire was intensifying, and acrid smoke was starting to drift in through the car’s missing windows. Pulling Star closer to him, trying not to choke or sneeze, he settled down to wait it out.
Orozco stared at the pile of broken concrete and dirt stretching three-quarters of the way up to the drainage tunnel’s ceiling.
“So that’s it,” he said, his words echoing oddly in the confined space.
“I guess so,” Wadleigh said. “Sorry.”
Sorry. Orozco felt a surge of unreasoning anger. Sorry. Like the two of them had lost a race, or a bet, instead of losing the one chance the people of the Ashes had of surviving the night.
He took a deep breath. Stop it, he told himself firmly. He had more urgent things to do than be annoyed at someone else’s poor choice of words.
He turned around, lifting his torch higher, studying the tunnel roof. If there were any other manhole shafts up there that might offer a way out, this could still work.
But there weren’t. The only shaft that was visible in the flickering torchlight was the one they’d come down, fifty meters back from the blockage.
“We could try heading northwest,” Wadleigh suggested hesitantly. “That has to be the direction Connor and her people came in from.”
“Which is exactly why we can’t use it,” Orozco said. “I don’t believe for a minute that they came here just to recruit new talent. They were hunting Terminators; and if they came in from the northwest, that’s probably where they were hunting them.”
Wadleigh grunted. “In that case, we’d damn well better seal the place down, but good. Just in case the Terminators start hunting back.”
“You’re probably right,” Orozco conceded, eyeing the pile of debris. If he and Wadleigh tackled it together…
But no. Several of the pieces of broken concrete were bigger than even the two of them could handle, especially in such a cramped space. There was no escape for anyone here.
Or anywhere else. All that was left now was to dig in as best they could and prepare for war.
“Time to get back,” he said, nudging Wadleigh back along the tunnel.
“So after we seal the cover, what then?” Wadleigh asked as they picked their way carefully over the curved concrete.
“We start by getting the fire teams together,” Orozco told him. “That’ll be your job. Break out all the weapons, including the ones in the reserve cache, and get them into the hands of people who know how to use them. Pull out all the ammo, too. If Grimaldi gives you static over any of this, you send him to me.”
“Don’t worry, he won’t,” Wadleigh said grimly. “What about you?”
“I’m going to set up a few booby traps,” Orozco said. “If I have any time left after that’s done, I’ll see about making some more bombs.”
They reached the shaft and climbed carefully up the rusted rungs to the rabbit warren of broken steel and concrete that lay just outside the northern edge of Moldering Lost Ashes. Zigzagging their way over and through the debris, they climbed through the empty window that led back into the building.
After his confrontation with Grimaldi, Orozco had rather expected there to be a reception committee waiting for him in the lobby. He was right. Grimaldi and Killough were standing near the corridor entrance, flanked by Barney and Copeland. The latter two were holding rifles at the ready.
“Sergeant Justo Orozco,” Grimaldi said in his most pompous corporate CEO voice, “as the leader of Moldavia—”
“Stuff it,” Orozco said shortly, striding past the group.
Grimaldi was apparently expecting him to do that. He took a quick step forward as Orozco passed and grabbed the sergeant’s arm. “You are ordered confined to your room until—”
The speech cut off with a yelp as Orozco reached over with his other hand and grabbed Grimaldi’s arm, prying it off and twisting it over at the wrist.
“Let him go,” Copeland snapped. He started to lift his rifle.