Kyle looked around. With the sentry ring spread out beyond the hills of rubble so that they could cover the whole hunt area, there wasn’t a single person in sight. Even the edge of the main camp over half a mile away was deserted, with everyone there out of sight somewhere inside the camp.
“You could whistle it in,” he suggested.
“You find me a code for this situation, and I’ll be happy to use it,” Yarrow said. He was all the way inside the conduit now, gripping the edge as he did a controlled slide down the rough concrete.
“What happens if you get hurt?” Kyle persisted.
“Then you’ll come down and get me,” Yarrow said. “Relax, Reese—I can see the ground from here. Nothing’s going to happen.” His head disappeared into the darkness, and then his hands. “Okay, I’m touching bottom,” he called, his voice echoing oddly. “Let me see if I can see anything—”
And he broke off amid a sudden crunch of breaking concrete.
“Yarrow!” Callahan snapped, pressing his face into the conduit. “Yarrow! Can you hear me?”
There was no answer.
“I’m going in,” Callahan said, grabbing the sides of the opening and jumping his feet inside the way Yarrow had. “Reese, whistle a distress signal, will you?”
“I can’t—Yarrow has the whistle,” Kyle told him, biting back a curse. So much for initiative and bold thinking. “No, wait—”
But he was too late. With a sliding hiss and a second, quieter crunch of breaking concrete Callahan was gone.
“What do we do?” Zac asked anxiously.
Desperately, Kyle looked around again. But there was still no one visible. If both Yarrow and Callahan were injured, or even dead—
“Reese?” Callahan’s voice floated up hollowly from the cylinder.
“I’m here,” Kyle called back, sticking his face into the opening. It was too dark down there to see anything. “You okay?”
“Yes, but Yarrow isn’t,” Callahan called grimly. “He must have hit his head on the way down—there’s some blood on the side of his face and he’s not really conscious. And his leg’s jammed.”
Kyle clenched his teeth. Great.
“How far down are you?”
“Not very,” Callahan replied. “It’s less than three meters from the floor to the base of the pipe, plus the two meters of the pipe itself. If you and Zac can find a rope or something we can tie up there and then tie under his arms, I think the three of us can get him back up by ourselves.”
“Right,” Kyle said, looking around again. “Let me think.”
“How about the backpacks?” Zac suggested.
“Worth a try,” Kyle agreed. “Dump ’em.”
It took half a minute for them to dump all the scavenged ammo and brass out of the four backpacks. Kyle tied their shoulder straps together, then took the sling off his shotgun and added it to the makeshift rope. A quick knotting of the sling to one of the bits of metal mesh protruding from the edge of the conduit, and it was ready.
“Here it comes,” he called, and lowered the packs down. “You need any help down there?”
“Yeah, and a lot of it,” Callahan called, his voice grim.
“I can’t get his leg free. It’s bleeding, too, pretty bad.” “We’ve got to get some help,” Zac breathed.
Kyle nodded. “Callahan, I’m sending Zac back for the medics,” he called into the conduit.
“There’s no time,” Callahan said. “We have to get him back up before we can treat him, and I’m going to need both of you down here for that. Once he’s up and we’ve got room to start bandaging, then Zac can go for help.”
Kyle grimaced. But if Yarrow really was bleeding badly, Callahan was probably right. The main part of the camp was a good mile away, which meant at least a fifteen-minute round trip, plus whatever time it took to find a medic.
“Hang on,” he said. “We’re coming.”
“I’ll go first,” Zac volunteered. Before Kyle could say anything, the younger teen grabbed the edges of the conduit, swung his legs inside, and slid out of sight.
Grimacing again, Kyle rested his shotgun against the side of the conduit and got his legs up inside. Holding on with one hand, he retrieved the weapon and shoved the barrel awkwardly down the waistband of his jeans. He shifted his grip to the sling and slid carefully down the pipe.
There wasn’t a lot of light down there, but as Kyle worked his way down the line of backpacks his eyes adjusted enough to see that he was heading into a relatively narrow area lined by more of the tangled debris that littered the surface. Callahan and Zac were crouched beside a hunched-over Yarrow, and Kyle had to splay his feet to either side as he came down to avoid landing on any of them.
“How is he?” he asked as he came to a halt on the uneven ground.
“I think he’s starting to come to,” Callahan said, his voice grim. “He’s moaned a couple of times. Come on, give me a hand with his leg.”
Kyle looked down. Yarrow’s leg was jammed up to his shin between a couple of blocks of broken concrete. Even in the dim light Kyle could see the man’s pant leg was soaked with blood.
“Right,” he said, gingerly getting a grip around Yarrow’s thigh. “I’ve got the leg. You two see if you can pry apart the blocks.”
“Shee—!” Yarrow hissed suddenly.
Kyle jerked in surprise, but managed to keep his grip on the leg.
“Yarrow?” Callahan asked anxiously. “You all right?”
“It look like I’m all right?” Yarrow bit back between clenched teeth. “What the hell are you doing to my leg?”
“Trying to get it free,” Kyle said. “Hold on to my shoulder.”
“Wait!” Zac said suddenly. “Shh.”
They all froze. Kyle kept his grip on Yarrow’s leg, trying to take some of the man’s weight onto himself. He looked around, wondering what Zac had heard.
And felt his blood run cold. He’d assumed Yarrow had crashed into some sort of chamber, some accidental gap randomly formed by the blast, shockwave, and collapse that had devastated Skynet Central. But this wasn’t simply a gap.
It was a tunnel. A twisty, meandering tunnel that wound its way haphazardly between huge slabs of concrete or around twisted tangles of metal or broken machinery. Its floor was littered with debris and pieces of broken concrete. Its roof was even more irregular, and at places there were pieces of girder or twisted nets of rebar that had been pressed into service to hold up sections of the ceiling.
This wasn’t something that had happened randomly in the explosion. This had been deliberately, carefully built.
And there was only one possibility as to who the builders were.
“Terminators,” Zac breathed. “I can hear their footsteps. They’re coming.”
“Get out of here,” Yarrow murmured. “All of you, get out. Now.”
Kyle looked up at the line of backpacks hanging down from the conduit. If the Terminators were close enough for Zac to hear...
Callahan had come to the same conclusion.
“There’s no time,” he murmured back. “Zac, find us a place to hide. Reese, give me a hand with Yarrow.”
“No,” Yarrow, said, pushing Kyle away. “No time.” He looked around. “There—that gap at the edge of the floor. See it?”
Kyle looked around. The gap was little more than a darker shadow at the side of the tunnel a dozen steps away.
“Yes.”
“See if it leads someplace where you can hide,” Yarrow ordered. “Go.”
Clenching his teeth, Kyle headed toward the shadow, trying not to trip on the uneven ground. He reached the gap and looked down.