“You look very human,” the man said grimly. “But that isn’t a defining quality anymore.” He murmured some sort of curse under his breath. “Unfortunately, aside from cutting you open, I don’t know any way to prove you’re who you claim.”
The skin on the back of Barnes’s neck began to tingle.
“Let’s not do anything drastic,” he said carefully. “There’s got to be some way we can prove ourselves.”
“While we’re thinking, how about telling us your name?” Williams suggested.
There was a short pause.
“Call me Jik,” the man said.
“You a pilot?” Williams asked.
“No,” Jik said. “Why?”
“Jik sounds like a pilot’s call sign,” Williams said. “Who’s your friend out there?”
“My friend?” Jik asked. “Oh. This.” The distant bush rustled again. “Some rope tied to a small branch. Simple but effective. If you spotted smoke in Baker’s Hollow, what are you doing way out here?”
“Hunting a Terminator,” Barnes told him. “It headed up this side of the river, and we wanted to see where it went. Or whether it just gave up and went away.”
“Oh, it didn’t go away,” Jik said sourly. “It’s somewhere to the south, I think—I caught a couple of glimpses of it while I was trying to get to the ford.”
“So you’re the one it’s hunting?” Williams asked.
“So it would seem,” Jik said. “And be advised that there are two T-700s on this side of the river, not just one. I shot the other one earlier, during all the gunfire. But I only had one round left, and that wasn’t enough to kill it.”
Barnes felt a cautious stirring of hope.
“You only had one shot?”
“But I got its weapon away from it before it recovered,” Jik said, an edge of warning in his voice. “In case you were thinking I’m bluffing back here.”
“No, of course not,” Barnes said. “Those G11s are heavy, aren’t they?”
“Heavy enough,” Jik agreed. “But I’m sure I’d be able to get off a couple of rounds before my biceps gave out.”
“What did you mean, looks aren’t a defining quality anymore?” Williams asked.
“I mean that Skynet’s come up with something new,” Jik said grimly. “A human heart and organs wrapped up inside metal.”
Williams inhaled sharply. “You mean Marcus?”
“Was that its name?”
“His name,” Williams corrected harshly. “His name was Marcus Wright.”
“Well, its name isn’t Marcus Wright anymore,” Jik told her. “I killed it. Or destroyed it, however you want to put—”
“Wait a second,” Barnes interrupted. “You killed it?”
“I just said that,” Jik said.
“Yeah,” Barnes muttered.
Only that was impossible. He’d seen Marcus Wright die himself, and it hadn’t been at the hands of anyone named Jik.
“When and where’d this happen?”
“Back in the forest, a couple of days ago,” Jik told him. “Why? Was it a pet or something?”
Barnes looked at Williams. She was looking back at him, her face gone suddenly pale.
“It wasn’t Marcus,” she breathed. “My God. There were two of them?”
“What do you mean, two of them?” Jik demanded.
“She means the one you killed wasn’t the one we called Marcus,” Barnes told him. He eased his head to the side, just far enough to see Jik out of the corner of his eye. The man was a little taller and thinner than Barnes, with sunken cheeks, unkempt brown hair, and a scraggly beard.
And he was indeed hefting a Terminator G11.
“Look, can we maybe point the gun somewhere else—?” Barnes began.
And then, right at the edge of Barnes’s vision, the dark metal skull and glowing red eyes of a T-700 appeared from behind a tree.
“Behind you!” Barnes snapped, leaping to his feet and spinning his 542 around toward the Terminator. He caught a glimpse of Jik raising his own weapon—
Barnes’s rifle was barely halfway to target when a burst of fire from the G11 blasted in his ear. Reflexively, he winced back, his body tensing in anticipation of pain from torn muscle and shattered bone.
But the impact and pain didn’t come... and it was only as Barnes took a second look at Jik’s face that he realized the man’s eyes weren’t focused on him and Williams. He was looking at something beyond them, over their shoulders.
Oh, hell.
And then, the barrel of Barnes’s assault rifle arrived on target, and there was no more time for thought or worry or wondering how close the Terminator was that was coming up behind him. He squeezed the trigger, firing a round into the T-700’s torso that staggered the machine back. A quick flick of his thumb shifted the weapon to three-shot mode, and he fired again. The multiple rounds slammed into the metal chest, this time nearly knocking the T-700 off its feet. Williams was shouting something as Barnes fired another burst, her words lost in the racket of his own fire and the chatter from Jik’s weapon. A third burst from the 542 spun the T-700 halfway around, and Barnes finally had enough breathing space to throw a quick look behind him.
The second Terminator hadn’t been hiding behind a tree like the one Barnes was shooting at. From its current position at the edge of the gorge, he concluded it had been waiting out of sight below ground level, probably hanging onto the nearly sheer side of the drop-off to the river. It had no doubt climbed up the bank while the three of them were talking, concealing itself in the tall grasses that lined both sides of the gorge.
Only now, the steady hammering from Jik’s G11 was threatening to knock it back over the edge and into the rushing water ten meters below.
But only until Jik’s gun ran dry. The instant that happened, the machine would get its balance back, and the beleaguered humans would be caught in the middle of a pincer.
Unless Barnes could take out his target first.
He turned back around, to find that Williams had left her position and was heading off in a curved path toward Barnes’s target.
Barnes fired again, staggering the Terminator with another three-shot burst. It was essentially the same tactic they’d used back at the ford, with Barnes covering Williams while she got close enough to use her shotgun to its best advantage.
On the plus side, this time the Terminator didn’t have a weapon of its own. On the minus side, there wasn’t a nice convenient river separating them.
Which meant that if Williams got too close the Terminator could simply reach out and snap her neck.
Barnes flipped his rifle back to single-shot, spacing out his blasts, keeping the machine off-balance while he waited for Williams to get in range.
And then, Jik’s chattering gun went silent.
Cursing, Barnes threw another look over his shoulder. With the hail of lead no longer battering it, the other T-700 steadied itself and straightened back to its full height. Its eyes seemed to take them all in...
“Williams!” Barnes snapped.
“I know!” Williams shouted back. There was the boom of a shotgun— “Go—I’ve got this one.”
Barnes spun around, swinging the 542 toward his new target. The T-700 was already on the move, striding through the grass and dead leaves toward them.
And then, as Barnes lined up his sights on the Terminator’s torso, the machine gave a sudden jerk, its stride faltering, its body and limbs weaving around as if it was drunk.
And as it turned its head to the side Barnes saw that an arrow had unexpectedly sprouted in the back of the machine’s neck.
Dead center in the Terminator’s partially exposed motor cortex.