“Wait a second,” Barnes said as he caught sight of his backpack lying on the floor beside the kitchen table. Grabbing the straps, he slung it over his shoulder and followed Williams and Preston outside into the late afternoon sunlight.
“This way,” Preston said, making a sharp left-hand turn toward the back of the house. They ran between two dilapidated houses, rounded a third, and finally came to a thick, chest-high hedge at the western border of a small garden. Preston ran them around to the other side and motioned for them to drop down behind it.
“Okay,” he panted. “We should have a minute. What the hell is going—?”
“No, we don’t have a minute,” Williams cut him off, throwing a quick look around her end of the hedge. “We missed a step, Barnes.”
“What step?” Barnes asked. “What did we miss?”
“In the Theta program,” she said. “You wouldn’t start by installing a complete, floor-to-ceiling false memory like Skynet did with Jik. You’d start by giving one of them a few little pieces of false memory. Patches that cover over any parts of genuine memory you don’t want him remembering.”
And then, Barnes got it.
“Like the memory of getting hauled out of your nice little Skynet lab and turned into a Terminator,” he snarled. “You’re right. Damn it.”
“What are you talking about?” Preston demanded.
“Oxley is like Jik—he’s a Theta,” Barnes told him. “He’s been in Baker’s Hollow as Skynet’s grand experiment to see if Thetas could mingle with normal people without being spotted.”
“It’s been ramping up this whole time,” Williams added. “First you see if people can tell there’s something wrong with your Theta, even if they can’t guess what that is. That was Oxley’s role. Then you tell them what Thetas are, and see if they can spot one. That’s what Jik’s doing.”
“Only now that we’ve crashed it, the party’s over,” Barnes said. “I’m guessing their next job will be to clean out the lab.”
“Wait a minute,” Preston said. “You said Oxley was a Theta. What about Lajard and Valentine?”
“Not Lajard,” Williams said. “He was genuinely hurt when I nailed him with that chair.”
“Valentine?”
Barnes saw Williams wince. “Probably.”
“Damn,” Preston breathed. “We’ve got to get to her—”
“Mayor?” Oxley’s distant voice came. “Mayor Preston? Come now, you’re being foolish. You can’t fight us, and there really isn’t anywhere to run. Come on out and take it like a man. I promise I’ll make it painless.”
“Don’t answer,” Williams whispered urgently.
Preston shot a look at her, his jaw muscles tight. But he kept silent.
“If you’d rather do it the hard way, that’s okay with me,” Oxley’s voice came again, possibly a bit closer this time. “We’ll just kill however we have to, painful or otherwise. Here’s an idea—we’ll start with your daughter.”
Watching his face Barnes saw the disbelief and horror were starting to fade away, and Preston was starting to think again.
“If you want to blame someone, blame your friends there,” Oxley continued. The voice was definitely closer now. “They’re the ones who forced our hand. We’d have been perfectly happy to keep things going the way they were.”
“He’s lying,” Williams muttered. “None of them had the slightest idea of what Skynet had turned them into.”
“Why the hell is he talking so much?” Preston muttered.
“He’s buying time,” Williams said. “You saw how Lajard took off back there. If he’s the one real human among them, he’s probably the only one who did know what they were.”
“He was the experiment’s observer?”
“And its controller,” Williams said. “That Latin he spouted just before Oxley’s attack was probably the code to activate them.”
“And to put them under his and Skynet’s control,” Barnes added.
“Right,” Williams said. “I think Oxley’s stalling to give Lajard time to get to cover.”
“Wait a second,” Preston said, frowning. “If the Latin was code, then Oxley should be the only one who got activated.”
Williams shook her head. “Sorry. They’re all linked via short-range radio through the control chips in the backs of their heads. When he activated Oxley, he activated Valentine and Jik, too.”
Preston hissed a sigh. “And Valentine’s got Hope.”
“Yes,” Williams said grimly.
“Mayor?” Oxley called.
“You know how to kill these things?” Preston asked.
“We know how to make them hurt,” Barnes said, thinking back to his target practice with the chained-up Marcus. “They’ve got human skin, and all the nerve endings that go with it.”
“It’s a start.” Preston took a deep breath. “Okay. We don’t have a whistle signal for a situation like this, so the quickest way to warn everyone in town will be to fire off a few shots. We might was well put those shots to some use. Get ready.”
He stood upright and looked over the hedge.
“Oxley?” he called. “You want me? Come and get me.”
Barnes felt his lips pull back in a tight grin. He’d seen first-hand how tough Thetas were, as tough as any other Terminator model Skynet had come up with. With these wholly inadequate weapons, and with a lot of the town’s best hunters out of reach across the river, he and Williams were going to have a serious fight on their hands.
But at least they finally knew who their enemies were. That was worth something.
He hefted the rifle, throwing a quick glance behind them and then settling down with his eyes and weapon toward the town.
Bring it on, he thought silently toward Skynet. Bring it on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“They hate me, don’t they?” Susan asked quietly as Hope led the way along the path toward Crescent Rock.
“What?” Hope asked, most of her mind on the forest around her. They hadn’t hunted this area for a while, which meant there was a chance that some of the bigger game might have returned.
“The people in town,” Susan said. “I saw the way they looked at me when they came back from the battle with those T-700s.”
“I think everyone’s mostly just tired,” Hope assured her. “They’ll get over it.”
“I’m not so sure,” Susan said. “You heard what Connor said earlier, back at your house. If Nathan, Remy, and I had died instead of letting Skynet pick our brains, maybe there wouldn’t even be T-700s for them to have to deal with.”
“I didn’t think you ever worked on the T-700s.”
“You know what I mean.” Behind her, Hope heard Susan sigh. “I wish to God I was you, Hope,” she said. “With my whole life still ahead of me. Instead of—” She broke off. “I’m sorry, Hope. I’m so very sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Hope said. She looked back over her shoulder.
And froze. Susan was staring straight ahead, her face suddenly cold and rigid and agonized. Hope threw a quick look in the direction the older woman was staring, wondering if she’d spotted a bear or another Terminator. But there was nothing there.
“Susan?” Hope asked carefully, looking back at her.
Slowly, the cold eyes turned to focus on Hope.
“I’m sorry, Hope,” Susan said again as she started forward. “I have to kill you now.”
For a moment Hope just stared at her, the words buzzing around her ears like angry hornets.
“What are you talking about?” she asked as she started to back away.
But it was too late. Susan didn’t seem to be hurrying, but her stride was longer than Hope’s, she was walking forward instead of backward, and she was rapidly closing the distance between them.