Jik crouched a little lower behind his tree, one hand gripping each of the two long ropes he and the others had strung around two other trees, watching the Terminator closely as he tried to track its precise path.
“Needs to go a little north,” Halverson murmured from beside him.
Jik nodded and pulled gently but firmly on the rope in his left hand. Twenty meters in front of the approaching Terminator the grasses shifted slightly, the subtle movement camouflaged by their general wind-induced sway. Jik eyed the T-700’s path and gave the rope another few centimeters’ worth of last-minute tweaking. The machine continued forward...
With a startlingly loud crack, the Terminator’s right foot hit and triggered the bear trap Jik had maneuvered into its path. The machine came to a sudden, awkward halt, its momentum forcing it to take one final step forward with its left leg. There was a second crack as the second bear trap snapped shut around its other leg—
“Now!” Jik shouted. Letting go of the rope in his left hand, he shifted both hands to the one in his right and pulled. All around him, the other men and women leaped into position from the bushes, grass and trees, some hauling on Jik’s rope, others joining with Halverson in pulling on the other one.
Terminators were incredibly strong machines. But their servomotor musculature hadn’t been designed with this sort of movement in mind. The T-700’s legs were yanked apart, pulled in opposite directions into a gymnast’s splits by the two bear traps now clinging to its lower legs.
And with its balance base suddenly gone, it toppled forward to land on its gun and its outstretched arms.
“Belay!” Jik shouted. Not waiting for the others to secure the thick ropes, he snatched up his borrowed G11 and braced the barrel against the side of the tree. He would have just one shot at this.
The Terminator shifted position, leaving its left hand on the ground and bringing up the G11 in its right. It aimed the weapon down and to its right, targeting the bear trap and attached rope.
And with his own gun on full automatic, Jik fired everything he had into the magazine on the Terminator’s weapon.
Sometimes, he knew, a sustained blast into that much caseless ammunition would cause a spontaneous cascading that would cook off the close-packed rounds. That would create a multiple explosion that would wreck the weapon and usually the hand or entire arm of the Terminator holding it.
In this case, Jik wasn’t that lucky. But he was lucky enough. The G11 broke apart in the T-700’s hand, its firing mechanism shattered and useless.
And with its gun gone and its legs still being held, the machine was helpless.
Halverson was already on his way, running across the grass with Barnes’s SIG 542 gripped in his hands. Dropping the empty G11, Jik grabbed the Mossberg shotgun they’d also taken from the visitors and sprinted after him.
He caught up with Halverson twenty meters from the Terminator, which was now trying unsuccessfully to reach the traps pinning its legs.
“Arms first?” Halverson called.
“Arms first,” Jik confirmed. “And then we’ll see.”
“See what?”
Jik grimaced. What he knew, and the townspeople didn’t, was that this was the moment of truth. If their ensnared T-700 and the one he, Barnes, and Williams had tangled with across the river were the only two machines Skynet had out here, that second Terminator should even now be charging to the rescue, trying to get here before Jik and Halverson reduced its compatriot to rubble. Two Terminators working together were always more effective than one alone, even if one or both of them were damaged.
But if Skynet still had other resources available or close at hand, it would be foolish to waste the other T-700 in an attempt to save this one. In that case, the other Terminator would remain hidden and out of range as it waited for the reinforcements.
And Terminator reinforcements would be bad. Very bad.
“See what?” Halverson repeated. “Then we’ll see,” Jik said, “which part of it we want to destroy next.”
Connor had warned Preston that the last remaining Terminator would probably show up before there were any warning sounds of gunfire from Connor’s own position north of town. Sure enough, Preston’s team had barely gotten themselves prepared when the bushes across the river parted and the dark figure of a T-700 strode into view and headed for the ford.
It was not, Preston noted, nearly as fearsome a sight as he remembered it from earlier that day. The fingers of its right hand were bent and twisted where Williams’s shotgun slug and the Terminator’s own exploding gun had damaged it. Its left shoulder also looked a little odd, and Preston wondered if it had been damaged by the fall into the ravine during the later fight with Connor and Williams. The limb might even have broken off and had to be magnetically reattached. There were some serious dents on its torso, as well, where Williams’s shotgun blasts had nailed it at close range.
But the Terminator’s legs, at least, were working just fine. The machine reached the edge of the swirling water and strode in, leaning against the current to keep from being knocked over.
Preston shot a quick look to his left. Three meters away, Hope was standing straight and ready beside her own covering tree, her arrow nocked, a look of nervousness tinged with determination on her face. To Preston’s right, Half-pint Swan also stood ready.
Preston turned back to the river, gripping the heavy rope noose in his hands, making sure the rest of the rope trailing from it was free of any entanglements in the undergrowth around him. The Terminator was nearly to the trap now...
It reached the position, then continued past it. Preston hissed viciously between his teeth, wondering what they were going to do now.
And then, the Terminator jerked to a halt, nearly pitching forward onto its face. Apparently, Preston had been slightly off in his estimation of where the bear trap was actually positioned.
But Connor and Halverson were using bear traps against their Terminator, too. With the two T-700s linked via short-range radio telemetry, that meant this one already knew how to deal with bear traps. It didn’t waste any time trying to pull out the chain, but simply leaned over at the waist and reached its metal arms into the whitewater to get a grip on the trap’s jaws and pry them apart.
And as its eyes shifted downward, Preston leaped out of cover and raced toward it, holding the noose straight out in front of him.
Even with its eyes turned away and the roar of the water in its auditory sensors the Terminator must have sensed Preston’s approach. It looked up as he neared the river, its glowing red eyes staring, its useless teeth clenched, its skeletal face an image out of human nightmares.
But there was no turning back now. With the Terminator’s leg trapped, its body hunched over as its fingers tried to pry the bear trap open, and its head turned upward, the machine was at this moment the most unmoving it was ever likely to be. Baring his own teeth in defiance, Preston picked up his pace.
The Terminator was still glaring cold death at him when Preston heard a sharp double twang from behind and to either side of him.
And the twin red glows of death abruptly vanished as a pair of arrows jammed themselves into the machine’s eyes.
Terminators didn’t scream, in pain or rage or anything else. Nor did they get angry. The machine merely jerked back with the double impact, then straightened up, abandoning the task of freeing its leg, and grabbed at the aluminum shafts sticking out of its skull.
It had succeeded in pulling out one of the arrows and snapping off the other when Preston reached it. Jumping into the frigid water, he threw the noose over the machine’s head, gave a quick tug on the rope to tighten the loop around its neck, then leaped backward again out of the Terminator’s reach.