Kyle obeyed, leaving the two satchels balanced against each other with the plunger beneath them.
“That should do,” Callahan said, glancing back at the Terminators as he got back to his feet. “Back to the tunnel face. Reese, you want me to do it?”
“No, I’ve got it,” Kyle said as the three of them sprinted down the uneven ground.
Seconds later, they were at the tunnel face.
“On the floor,” Callahan ordered Zac, dropping onto his face between the younger teen and the approaching Terminators. “Reese: go.”
Kyle dropped into a crouch, pressing the shotgun’s stock to his shoulder. The T-700s were coming up fast, their eyes bright enough to paint the tunnel walls and ceiling in a red glow. Lining up his sights on the satchel he’d braced against Callahan’s, Kyle fired.
The blast slammed into the charge, knocking it backward out of alignment and sending the other one dropping toward the plunger. Kyle squeezed his eyes shut—
With an ear-hammering explosion, the whole cluster blew up.
The blast of sound and superheated air slammed into Kyle’s face and chest, knocking him backward onto the tunnel floor. For an instant his mind flicked back to the massive gasoline explosion and fire back near the Moldering Lost Ashes building, the one where he’d thought he was dying—
And then someone had his arm and was hauling him back to his feet.
“Look!” Callahan shouted, his voice barely audible through the ringing in Kyle’s ears. “It worked!”
Wincing at the grit still swirling past his face, Kyle opened his eyes. Through the floating dust he could see an angled pile of debris where that part of the tunnel had been ten seconds ago.
And at the very top of the pile was a jagged hole and the beautiful light of a late-afternoon overcast sky.
“Come on,” Callahan called, urging Kyle forward. Zac was already halfway up the rubble, his feet kicking up dust and little pebble avalanches as he climbed. Blinking a few more times, Kyle followed, with Callahan still gripping his arm beside him.
Hours of toiling their way through twisted passageways and switchbacks had completely ruined Kyle’s usual sense of direction. But his assumption as they traveled had always been that the tunnel itself was running more or less straight from where they’d entered it, except for the small curves and jogs that had been forced on the diggers. That direction, combined with the distance they had traveled, should by his estimate have put them inside the nighttime perimeter somewhere near the mess tent.
But, as he clawed his way out into the open air, he found he’d been only half right. They were indeed inside the inner perimeter, but somewhere along the way the tunnel had taken more of a turn than he’d realized. Instead of being by the mess tent, the tunnel had taken them to within fifty meters of the medical recovery tent.
The tent where John Connor was currently lying weak and nearly helpless in a hospital bed.
“It’s all right!” Callahan shouted, waving his hands toward the guards by the tent.
But the guards weren’t listening. To Kyle’s surprise and dismay, they were hastily unslinging their rifles and bringing them to bear.
“It’s all right!” Callahan shouted again. “We’re your people.”
And then, abruptly, Kyle realized the guards weren’t aiming their weapons toward him and Callahan. Spinning around, he looked back toward the hole they’d blasted.
Their exit wasn’t the only hole anymore. Fifty meters further back along the tunnel, the force of explosion had collapsed another section of the roof.
And clawing its way up to the surface was a T-700.
Kyle looked frantically around them. But the search and clean-up teams were still out working the smoking wasteland, and the perimeter guards hadn’t yet pulled back from the outer daytime ring to their nighttime stations. Just as he’d predicted earlier, all the fighters and heavy weapons were miles away.
Against all odds, Kyle and the others had made it out of the tunnel alive.
Just in time to watch the Terminators kill John Connor. Sweating, Barnes followed Preston across the old rope bridge, trying to ignore the churning water beneath him. Several of the boards were cracked or rotted, and the only safe places to step were the points where they were fastened to the supporting ropes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
But the ropes themselves were sturdy enough, and the young Preston and his visiting friend had done a good job of anchoring the bridge to the banks. Despite Barnes’s misgivings, both men made it across.
Equally surprising was the fact there was nothing waiting on the other side. Either Skynet had mistakenly written off the bridge as impossible to cross, or else its resources were indeed down to Lajard, Valentine, Jik, and whatever Jik was in the process of salvaging from the two broken T-700s.
The sun had passed behind the mountains, and the sky was rapidly headed toward dusk, when Barnes and Preston reached Bear Commons.
“Hell,” Preston murmured as they crouched behind a thick fallen tree trunk at the edge of the clearing. “I thought this was going a little too easy.”
Barnes nodded silently. In the middle of the clearing—the exact geometrical center, if he knew Skynet—was a small cabin, similar to some of the houses he’d seen in Baker’s Hollow, except that this one was constructed of slabs of metal instead of wood or brick. Above the clearing, strung across the empty space, was a thick camo netting that, as near as Barnes could tell, was a perfect match for the contours and coloration of the ring of fifty-meter-tall trees supporting it.
And squatting silently on the ground at the far side of the clearing, like a dragon guarding its hoard, was the dark metal bulk of an H-K.
“What now?” Preston asked.
“Give me a second,” Barnes growled, eyeing the H-K. He’d been hoping that Skynet’s bungled attempt to get hold of their Blackhawk the previous night had left it without any more aircraft in the area. He should have known it would be careful enough to keep at least one heavy fighting machine in reserve.
And that lack of foresight was going to cost him and Williams.
Especially Williams.
Preston was obviously thinking the same thing.
“How fast can Skynet get that H-K into the air?” he asked.
“Fast enough.” More than fast enough, actually. Even from a cold start, if Skynet kicked in the H-K’s ignition ramp-up as soon as it picked up the noise of the Blackhawk’s engines, it could probably be in the air well before Williams arrived.
Unless he and Preston could keep it from leaving the clearing in the first place.
Barnes frowned up at the camo netting. The mesh was laid out across a loose crosshatch of cables that looked capable of being pulled out and back along two thicker cables running along the north and south ends of the clearing. Another pair of cables, thinner than the support lines, snaked down one of the trees on either end and ran along the ground to the cabin in the center.
Which implied that either the control or the power for retracting the netting was inside the cabin. And from the sheer size of the netting and its support cables, not to mention the way it was bending in the treetops it was connected to, the covering had to be both strong and heavy.
Strong enough and heavy enough to trap the H-K inside the clearing? Maybe. Especially since the things weren’t designed to fire upward.
It was worth a try.