“You get it working?”
Wright spoke without taking his head out from under the hood.
“Almost. Won’t know ’til I try. Parts seem to work okay separately. Next we’ll see how well they work together. At least the gas in the tank hasn’t turned to varnish.” He indicated the assembled wrecks. “Managed to siphon enough to fill ’er up.”
Turning, Reese gazed off into the distance.
“We should head east. Into the desert. That’s the best place to get away from the machines. If we’re lucky, we might run into some real Resistance fighters.” Long-suppressed excitement crept unbidden into his voice. “Maybe they’ll give me something to fight the machines with besides spring traps.”
Wright was tightening a bolt deep within the engine compartment. It wouldn’t do to get the jeep up and running only to have some vital part fall out halfway to his destination. He doubted a call to the Automobile Club would bring much in the way of a response. If there still was an Automobile Club. If he had anything to call with.
“I’m heading north.”
That didn’t sound good, Reese decided. Not just the “north” part. The “I’m” part. He immediately protested.
“No—why—you can’t. That was one of the first places the machines took over. Machines control the whole Northern Sector. It’s Skynet Central. You can’t get in there. Why would you even want to try?”
Something went clang under the hood and Wright cursed. The expletive was short and pungent. Reese twitched while Star looked on in continued and blissful ignorance.
“I’ve got to find someone,” Wright finally responded.
It was enough to solidify Reese’s suspicions. Not “we”—“I”. He glanced at Star, whose expression was as open as ever, then turned back to the preoccupied stranger whose face still had not emerged from the depths of the jeep’s engine compartment.
“I don’t know where you came from or what you do or much of anything else about you, but I do know that there’s obviously still a lot you don’t know about Skynet. How it works, how the machines work—all kinds of stuff. Stuff that if you don’t know can get you dead. It’s too dangerous for us, for anyone, to go there.”
“What about the ‘L.A. Branch’ of the Resistance? Who’ll fight the machines here if you leave?”
Reese hesitated, uncertain if the older man was being serious, having fun at his expense, or a mix of both, and decided to take him at his word. He turned to Star.
“Come on, man. We need to get out of L.A.” He nodded at Wright, then indicated the jeep. “If you can actually make that thing go, that is.”
The girl wasn’t waiting. Clambering over the side of the vehicle, she settled herself into the passenger seat and waited. Ignoring her, Wright continued to tinker with the engine. Something coughed under the hood and sputtered to life. Half expecting it to die at any moment, he was more than a little surprised when it did not. In fact, the longer the engine ran, the smoother it sounded.
No telling how long it had been sitting busted and unmoving, he told himself.
Alone in the idling jeep, Star studied the profusion of knobs on the dash. Since no one told her not to do otherwise, she began playing with them, twisting and turning one at a time. None of them did anything until she pressed a button slightly to the right of the steering column.
That there was a CD in the player was not exactly a revelation. That the unit functioned was considerably more of a surprise. A startled Star gaped at it in amazement. Reese both looked and listened in awe.
“What is this?”
Coming around from the front of the 4x4, Wright gazed at the indicator lights on the in-dash entertainment unit.
“A CD player.”
“No, no,” Reese corrected him impatiently, “the music.”
Wright’s thoughts were ping-ponging back and forth between the inexplicable present and a less-than-inspiring past.
“Doesn’t matter. Something my brother used to listen to. ‘Us and Them’, by Pink Floyd.”
And what about me, he wondered silently. What’s happened to the world? What kind of wall am I another brick in?
The music was bringing back too many memories. Reaching in, he switched it off. When the girl gave him a cross look, he motioned impatiently for her to exit.
“Come on,” he prompted her, “let’s go.” She didn’t move, confused both by his words and his suddenly abrupt tone. He clarified his meaning for her. “Get out.”
Her eyes never left him as she slowly climbed over the far side of the jeep. At least, that was how he felt. He could not meet the wide-eyed girlish gaze.
Reese gaped at him, unwilling to countenance what he was hearing. Despite the doubts he had been feeling, the stranger’s words still left him in shock.
“You’re leaving?”
Ignoring the teen, Wright dropped the hood, made sure it latched shut.
“You’re just gonna leave?”
Reese continued as the stranger carefully collected the tools he had scavenged and put them in the back of the jeep. By this time he was crowding the older man. Wright tolerated this invasion of his space even as he ignored the increasingly accusatory teen.
“We saved your life.”
Reese wanted to grab Wright, to shake him and make him look into his eyes. It was a good thing he didn’t.
“You’re going to leave us here?”
Realization suddenly dawned and he stepped back.
“I get it. I understand. We’d just hold you back, right? Slow you down. You can move faster without us. It’ll be easier for you alone.” Somehow he kept in check the anger that had been building within him.
“You know one of the differences between us and the machines? We bury our dead. They don’t bother.” Taking the bewildered Star by the hand he started to back away from the now silent stranger, eyeing him as if he carried some incurable communicable disease.
“Go on—you go kill yourself. You’re not the first one to leave. But no one’s coming to bury you anyway.” He spat at the ground. “Star and me, we’ve got better things to do.”
Wright just nodded. In his life he had been insulted by experts and disrespected by masters. The teen’s feeble efforts had no effect on him.
What did have an effect was the expression on the girl’s face. It had shifted from hurt and confusion to one of sheer terror. Remembering what Reese had told him, Wright instantly began scanning the immediate vicinity. So did the teen. Their search was unnecessary, as a moment later the source of Star’s alarm dropped down on them from above.
Compact, utilitarian, and extremely advanced, the small flying machine buzzed rapidly past the jeep before rising back into the sky and preparing itself for a second pass.
“Aerostat!” Reese was yelling even as he ran toward the jeep. As he did so, the ruddy light of a scanning laser was taking the measure of him from head to toe. The light was harmless—except for what it implied. The Aerostat would be transmitting even as it was evaluating.
Wright didn’t wait for further explication. Picking up the girl, he vaulted the side of the idling jeep to land in the passenger seat. He did this only because the driver’s seat was already occupied by Reese. The teen fumbled with the shift, managed to get the vehicle in reverse and moving away from the steep slope that rimmed that section of the parking lot.
Wright had other ideas. Reaching over the seat, he threw the jeep into drive.
“Go!”
***
Reese wanted to argue but was already mature enough to realize this was neither the time nor the place. Gritting his teeth, he floored the accelerator. Responding with welcome agility, the jeep obediently shot forward, jumped the curb, crashed through the remnants of some decorative border brush gone wild, and plunged down the embankment on the other side.