“Good enough,” Orozco said. “Vaya con Dios, Ms. Connor.”
* * *
Kate had been waiting by the pile of stone for about two minutes when Barnes and the rest of the squad returned.
“No one else?” Kate asked. A silly question, she knew—they would certainly have called her if they’d found anyone else still alive.
“No,” Barnes said, making it official, as he gestured everyone to start climbing the rubble. “You got a litter coming for Orozco?”
Kate shook her head as she started up the treacherous footing.
“He’s not coming with us.”
A couple of the other heads turned at that one. But Barnes just grunted.
“You get attached to a place like this, I guess.”
They were over the rock pile and walking down the empty streets before Barnes spoke again.
“I found that preacher—Sibanda—over in the hallway off the lobby,” he said. “Still had his arms around a couple of kids.”
“Thin black guy?” Simmons asked. “North hallway by one of the windows?”
Barnes nodded. “That’s him.”
“I saw him, too,” Simmons said grimly. “Looked like he was huddled over the kids, trying to protect them, when they shot him in the back.”
Kate felt a fresh wave of sadness and guilt flow through her. All those children…and neither she nor anyone else had been able to save a single one of them.
“Any particular reason you brought that up?” she asked Barnes.
“Not really,” he said with a shrug. “Just making conversation.”
* * *
For nearly half an hour Kyle and Star just sat there in the abandoned ganghouse, quietly eating and drinking, Kyle on the chair, Star on the ground at his feet. It was the first time since they’d left the Ashes, Kyle reflected soberly, that he’d felt at peace.
But it wasn’t real, he knew. Peace was only an illusion these days.
And it was time for them to go.
To Kyle’s relief, there was no lightheadedness this time when he stood up. Maybe he hadn’t really been injured in the blast, but had mostly been just hungry and thirsty. Adjusting his new shirt and jacket across his shoulders, he fastened his holster around his new jeans.
“Ready?” he asked Star.
She nodded, then pointed questioningly at the packages of ration bars and water bottles.
Kyle pursed his lips. If this stuff had belonged to the gang that Orozco had chased out, he would have no particular qualms about taking it all. It wasn’t really stealing to take something from a thief.
But his new clothes didn’t look like the stuff the gang had been wearing. It was too clean, for one thing. And the water bottles seemed way too well taken care of, too. He had the feeling that someone else had moved in after the gang had cleared out.
And he and Star couldn’t steal from ordinary citizens. Even if all the stuff really had been abandoned.
Or at least they couldn’t steal everything.
“Go get two bottles of water and four of the bars,” he instructed Star. “Somebody might still come back for the rest.”
Star wrinkled her nose, but nodded and went over to the stack. She was sorting through the packages when something behind the clothing seemed to belatedly catch her eye. Reaching down, she lifted a shotgun into view.
This time, Kyle didn’t hesitate.
“Yes,” he said firmly.
A minute later, shotgun in hand, food and water in his new jacket’s pockets, Kyle opened the door and they once more slipped out into the night. Where are we going? Star signed.
“Back to the Ashes,” Kyle told her, frowning as they set off along the street. Was that the sound of helicopters just fading away in the distance? Probably his imagination.
“We need to see if there’s anything we can do there to help,”
The streets were eerily quiet, with only the sound of their own footsteps breaking the silence.
Kyle looked around carefully as they walked, wondering if any of the people they’d seen earlier were still lurking around here somewhere.
But they all seemed to have left. Could that have been what the sound of the helicopters had been about?
Too bad. He would at least have liked to find out who they’d been, and whether they’d really been with the Resistance or just faking it. He might have been able to find out whether the people in the bus who had saved him and Star had made it out alive, too. Now, he’d probably never know.
But at least when the men and women had left, the Terminators had left with them.
The Ashes building, when Kyle caught his first glimpse of it, was a shock. The distinctive stone archway was gone, as was most of the front of the building just above it, the whole mass having collapsed into a shattered heap of stone blocking most of the entrance.
Star clutched suddenly at Kyle’s arm.
“It’s okay,” he soothed her. “Remember how Orozco told us that if there was ever an attack he could put bombs in the archway to bring it down on them?”
Star shook her head violently, her fingers digging into Kyle’s arm. Kyle frowned…and then, his fogged brain got it.
He pushed Star against the building beside them, pressing himself there next to her as he fumbled his new shotgun to his shoulder. Heart thudding in his ears, he gave a quick look around them, then turned back to the Ashes building.
There it was, digging diligently through the rocks at the far end of the pile, lifting huge chunks of stone and concrete off the stack and setting them down on the street beside it.
Apparently, not all the Terminators had left.
Kyle frowned, wondering what the machine was doing. Was it looking for other Terminators that had been trapped in the collapse? It was using both hands, he noticed, and he looked briefly for where it had set down its minigun.
But there was no weapon to be seen. It must have lost the weapon, Kyle decided, or else had run out of ammo and dumped it. The Terminator pulled out another block of stone and set it aside.
Then, without warning, it turned directly toward Kyle and Star.
And as Kyle got his first clear look at the torn skin on its torso, skin torn away by a close-range shotgun blast, he suddenly realized who this was. Not some random Terminator, but their old enemy Fido.
For a long moment the machine gazed toward them. Kyle froze, his shotgun still pointed even as he realized how utterly useless the weapon was at this range.
And then, to Kyle’s surprise and relief, the Terminator merely turned back to the rock pile.
Leaning over, it reached both hands into the hole it had dug.
Kyle started breathing again. Maybe the machine hadn’t seen them. Maybe its optics had been damaged by its tumble through the rotten floor near the Death’s-Head compound.
The Terminator was still working at something in the hole, perhaps a stubborn stone that didn’t want to be moved. Then, with a massive tug, it pulled a half-crushed metal arm out of the hole.
Only it wasn’t just an arm. It was an arm that was still clutching a minigun, the weapon’s ammo belt trailing down into the hole behind it.
Fido hadn’t given up on hunting them. It also wasn’t simply looking for broken Terminators or scrap metal to take back to Skynet.
It was looking for a new gun.
“Time to go,” Kyle murmured, taking Star’s arm and backing them along the wall again. They reached the corner, and just as they eased around it out of the Terminator’s sight the machine once again turned its red eyes toward them.
It had seen them, all right. And as soon as it got its new weapon free, it was going to come after them.
“Come on,” Kyle said. Still holding Star’s arm, he broke into a dead run back toward the ganghouse.
Where? Star signed frantically as her feet pounded against the pavement.