“If you’ve got a medic handy, send him over,” Barnes said, squatting down beside the injured man. “If not, we got it covered.”
The two women arrived and deftly shouldered the men aside as they broke out medical kits.
Orozco watched them work, and it was only as one of them turned briefly into the glow of a small flashlight that he realized it was Kate Connor, the woman who’d made that dramatic appearance earlier on the Ashes’ balcony.
“Snap it up,” Barnes said, looking around them. “We need to get under cover.”
“You’re not going to try to use that bus again, I hope,” Orozco said. “Skynet knows you were in there. It’s probably already got a T-600 or two on the way.”
“You got any suggestions?”
“Right there,” Orozco said, pointing to the building across the street. “We’ve got a sniper’s nest up on the second floor overlooking our entrance. We knocked out the walls so that it runs all the way along the building’s eastern side, including the two corner apartments. We also put in a bunch of extra shielding, mostly scavenged stone and brick.”
“Sounds good,” Barnes said, running a quick eye over the building. “We’ll take it.”
Turning toward the bus, he waved. A moment later, a man loaded with heavy machineguns and ammo boxes slipped out of the front and headed toward them, staggering under his load. A grunted order from Barnes, and the other uninjured Resistance man headed back to help him.
Orozco looked down at the wounded man. The two women had finished with him, at least for now, and were packing up their gear. “Is he going to make it?” he asked.
“He should,” Kate said. “He’s stable, at least for now.”
“You need any help carrying him inside?” Orozco asked.
“We got it,” Barnes said.
“Okay,” Orozco said. “Oh—very important. If you decide you need to come in here for any reason, stick to the edges of the archway, the places where it’s too low for a Terminator to get through without ducking.”
Kate’s eyes flicked upward to the archway.
“Understood,” she said.
The two men arrived, puffing under their load of munitions. At Barnes’ hand signal, they headed across the street and disappeared into the sniper nest building. “I guess this is it,” he said, nodding to Orozco.
Orozco nodded back. “See you on the other side.”
Barnes slung the two captured T-600 miniguns over his shoulders with his other weapons. Then, stooping down, he carefully lifted the injured man in his arms.
Orozco must have looked as astonished as he felt, because Kate chuckled. “Clean living,” she explained dryly. “Good luck, Sergeant.”
“And to you, Ma’am.”
She and Barnes headed across the street. Orozco checked both directions, then made his way carefully back through the archway and returned to the fountain.
“Who were they?” Grimaldi asked. “It was too dark to see.”
“Nobody special,” Orozco said. “Just the people you drew down on this morning.”
He had the minor satisfaction of seeing Grimaldi’s eyes widen.
“Oh, hell,” the chief muttered.
“Yeah, well, don’t panic,” Orozco advised him. “They’re here to help.”
Grimaldi looked over at the building across the street…and for the first time, Orozco saw some actual hope creeping into the other’s eyes.
“I hope you thanked them,” he said.
“I did,” Orozco said. “You’ll get a chance later to do that yourself.”
“I hope so,” Grimaldi said. “You want me back on watch?”
Orozco shook his head.
“No need. When the next batch gets here, we’ll know it.”
There had been a couple of bad moments along the way, the worst being when Fido made it through the Death’s-Head barrier before Kyle and Star had quite reached the building they were heading for.
The Terminator managed to unload a couple of bursts of fire before they could get inside, but the distance and piles of rubble protected them.
And then they were through the sagging doorway, Kyle pulling Star to the side as the machine behind them uselessly hammered a third burst of fire into the concrete wall.
“That was close,” Kyle muttered, breathing heavily as he eased back to the doorway for a look.
The Terminator was still coming, of course. If there was one thing about Terminators, it was that they didn’t give up.
He stepped back out of the doorway and looked around. He and Orozco had checked out this place a few months ago, hoping to increase their farming area. But the structure had turned out to be too dangerous, with the flooring in particular badly decayed in far too many places.
One of the worst of those places was right here on the first floor.
He returned to where Star was huddled against a sagging wall, wheezing a little as she panted, an uneasy look on her face as she glanced around. She’d stepped though one of the floor’s weak spots on that last visit, and would probably have fallen all the way to the sub-basement if Orozco hadn’t grabbed her arm in time to pull her out.
“Come on,” Kyle whispered, taking her hand. “Don’t worry—I remember where the safe paths are.”
Star looked doubtful, but she nevertheless allowed Kyle to help her to her feet and lead the way around flaking concrete pillars and decaying wooden walls.
The building’s wide central corridor was just as Kyle remembered it: a single two-foot-wide line of solid tile running above an under-floor girder, with five feet on either side of equally solid-looking tiling that rested on utterly rotten joists and floorboards. Kyle led Star along the safe path to the far end of the corridor and settled her behind a rusting stove.
“Stay here,” he told her, taking the shotgun and handing her the rifle. Grabbing a length of half-shredded copper tubing that lay partly buried in dust beside the stove, he returned to the corridor.
He walked back to the middle of the central path and poked a couple of holes into the flooring, one on either side, with his knife. Bending the tubing into a U-shape, he pushed the ends into the holes he’d made, turning it into a sort of copper rainbow and what had to be the world’s most obvious tripwire. He returned to the corridor’s far end and then worked his way through the row of half-shattered rooms flanking the corridor until he’d reached a spot directly across from the tubing.
Settling himself near a large hole that looked out into the corridor, he pressed his eye against a much smaller hole and waited.
He had barely gotten in position when the Terminator appeared.
For a long moment the machine stood motionless at the end of the corridor, its head panning back and forth as its blazing red eyes assessed the situation. Kyle watched, wondering whether the machine might just walk carelessly ahead onto the rotten floor and end the problem right there.
But no such luck. Either the Terminator had sensors that warned it of the floor’s hazards, or else the presence and positioning of the copper tubing in the middle of the floor was enough of a clue for it to come to the logical conclusion. With one final sweep of its head, it stepped forward onto the safe path. The tiles creaked ominously under its weight, but held. Holding its minigun ready, the machine started forward.
Keep going, Kyle urged it silently, fingering his shotgun as he watched it picking its way carefully along. It reached the tubing—
And stopped.
Kyle held his breath, knowing there were two ways it might choose to deal with the obstacle facing it. The most obvious would be for it to merely reach down and pluck the tubing out of the floor. In that case, Kyle and Star were in big trouble.
But the machine—and the Skynet computer that controlled it—had no way of knowing how long the tubing had been there. For all Skynet knew, it might have been there for hours or days, connected to some immensely clever, immensely destructive booby trap.