Orozco squinted as a wave of dust blew threw the lobby, tasting the bitterness of this last twist of irony. He’d set up the booby trap to hopefully eliminate some of the attackers before they could get inside the building. Instead, they’d come in through the rear, and had missed the trap entirely.
Now when everyone was already dead and destroying the Terminators gained nothing for anyone, they had finally triggered the damn thing.
Just the same, he was glad he’d lived long enough to see it.
The roar of tumbling rock faded away, and with it the last sound Orozco knew he would ever hear.
Resting among the dead, he closed his eyes and prepared to join them.
* * *
The Terminators were coming.
Blair watched them as she circled as slowly as she could without stalling out. There were sixteen in all, marching in from the west and northwest, probably the last of the T-600s that had been on containment duty at that edge of the neighborhood. With the steadiness and determination of an incoming tide, they were converging on the warehouse.
And unlike the remnants of the earlier attack force, this group almost certainly was still heavily armed.
Blair shifted her attention to the warehouse itself. David and his team had unlimbered two of the spare miniguns, and Tunney’s team was busy uncrating extra ammo belts. It was shaping up to be quite a fight.
Though it could have been a lot worse, she knew. Between her own strafing run on the crowd behind the Moldavia, Connor’s and Barnes’ squads blowing away T-600s in job lots, and the entryway crash that Kate Connor had described—and which Blair again hadn’t seen, damn it—the Terminator count was way down from what Skynet had started with that evening.
The gasoline fire west of the Moldavia might have taken out a couple, too—one of Barnes’ team had reported spotting two T-600s in that area just before that particular balloon went up.
Still, there was no getting around the fact that there were sixteen fresh troops moving in.
So far none of them had tried taking a potshot at Blair’s A-10, but that might just be because Skynet wanted them saving their ammo for the main event.
She grimaced, wishing she had a few rounds left in her GAU-8. Just a few. A strafing run now with 30mm explosive shells would be so soul-satisfying.
“Incoming!” David’s voice snapped.
Blair jerked her head up, swearing at herself under her breath. So intent had she been on the approaching T-600s that she’d neglected her primary duty of watching the skies. She darted her eyes around the horizon.
And felt her blood freeze. Approaching rapidly from the north were no fewer than seven shadowy aircraft.
All of them bearing down on the warehouse.
“Oh, hell,” she murmured, automatically turning her fighter to intercept. Though what she could do against that many HKs, with an unarmed fighter—
“Hickabick, isn’t it?” an unfamiliar voice crackled suddenly in her ear.
Blair frowned. Since when did Skynet program its HKs with folksy voices?
“Hickabick here,” she acknowledged cautiously.
“Snarkster here,” the voice said. “Commander of Squadron Five. No offense, but you might want to pull up just a bit.”
Blair frowned even harder…and then, as she peered out at the approaching shadows, their shapes suddenly clarified. She saw the slender bodies, the side-mounted weapons pods, and the flickering of the rotating blades above them.
They weren’t Skynet’s Hunter-Killers. They were Resistance Apache combat helicopters.
“About time, Snarkster,” she chided, pulling up out of their way. “Got some targets for you about half a klick west.”
“Excellent,” Snarkster said grimly. “You just point ’em out, step aside, and enjoy the show.”
Two minutes later, the sixteen T-600s had been turned into blazing mounds of scrap metal. And Blair had very much enjoyed the show.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Kyle woke up to the very strange sensation of being hot and cold at the same time.
Carefully, he opened his eyes. He was lying on his side on the ground, his head propped up on Star’s lap. One of her hands was resting on his cheek, the other clutching his shoulder like she was afraid he was going to leave her.
“How long?” he asked, startled by the croaking sound of his own voice.
Half an hour, Star signed. Her expression, Kyle noted, was seriously worried. How do you feel?
“Cold,” Kyle told her. “And hot. What—?”
And then it all came flashing back to him. The fire and explosion he’d set off, the wall of flame that had thrown him clear out of the tunnel…
He reached a hand to his cheek. It was warm, but sunburn warm, not at all like skin that had been burned to a crisp. The image he’d had of being bathed in flame must not have been nearly as bad as it had seemed at the time.
His back, on the other hand…
He started to reach behind him, but stopped as Star caught his hand. Gone, she signed. Your jacket. Gone.
“Ah,” Kyle said. So that was where the cold part of the sensation was coming from. The wall of flame that had kicked him out of the tunnel had burned the jacket clean off his back.
Hopefully, it had left most of the skin behind. At least Kyle couldn’t feel any particular pain coming from back there.
Maybe the pain would come later. Propping himself up on one elbow, he blinked his eyes a few times and surveyed the damage.
It was pretty impressive, if he did say so himself. The broken-building camouflage that had disguised the three entrances to the gasoline stash was completely gone, though pieces of it were still smoldering with foul-smelling black smoke. Where the chamber and stash itself had been was now a deep crater.
And lying in the middle of the crater were three unmoving metal bodies.
So it had worked. He hadn’t been completely sure it would, not even with something as hot as a gasoline fire. But it had worked.
“Come on, we’d better get moving,” he said. Pressing one hand to the ground, he heaved himself to his feet.
And nearly fell over again. Star was instantly at his side, holding him up as he fought against the sudden light-headedness that had sent the whole world spinning around him.
The spinning faded away, leaving behind a terrible weakness. There was no way they were going to make it back to the Ashes, he knew. Not yet.
But there might be another option.
“The ganghouse,” he told Star, nodding his head in that direction. “The one where they tried to jump us yesterday.”
But there’s someone still in there, she objected.
So she’d also seen the face looking out when they’d passed by earlier with Nguyen’s people.
“I doubt it,” he said. “If they had any brains they took off as soon as the Terminators started shooting.”
And even if they hadn’t, he added to himself, there was still no choice but to risk it.
It took them five minutes to pick their way around the smoldering rubble and get to the ganghouse. Gripping his Colt—somehow, in all the chaos around the gasoline stash he’d lost the rifle and shotgun—he pushed the door open.
To his relief, the place was deserted.
“This’ll do,” he declared, glancing around and spotting a chair that had been conveniently left beside the door. “Hang on—I have to sit down for a minute.”
He eased himself down on the chair, relieved that he’d made it here without collapsing. His legs were trembling, and there were white spots dancing in front of his eyes. Taking deep breaths, keeping his eyes on the floor in front of his feet, he concentrated on not passing out.