There was even a trademark on the side: cyberdyne systems PHASED PLASMA RIFLE, 40 MGWT RANGE.
Skynet really had a don't-fix-it-if-it-ain't-broke complex; under other circumstances, he'd admire that. Right now he was puzzling out the controls; this model was made for a Terminator, which meant that it probably used a physical trigger… yes.
He pointed the blocky, chunky weapon at the prone metal skeleton, which was already beginning to stir. Squeeze the trigger…
Crack!
The plasma bolt struck the curve of the skull; John threw up a hand as the metal that sublimed away from the bolt burned in a hot mist. When it died, there was only a stump of metallic neck left.
Wow, he thought. Well, that's what my dad meant.
He'd heard every detail of Kyle Reese's conversations with his mother, over the years; everything she could remember, and she remembered nearly all of it. Including Kyle complaining about how difficult it was to kill a Terminator with the feeble weapons of the twentieth century.
He looked down at the smooth metallic and synthetic shape in his hands, and shivered a little. Skynet hadn't invented this.
Neither had humans. He, John Connor, had pulled information about plasma guns from the skull of a Terminator whose computer brain had been sent back in time, full of information from Skynet-in-the-future, and Skynet-in-the-future had the information because it had received it from its own future self…
"Time travel makes my head hurt," he muttered as he turned off the motorcycle and began ghosting through the woods toward the trapped humans. "Oh, fuck it, probably some unknowable cycle of cycles of history-changing time travel 'before' this one, someone did invent these things…"
Screams and explosions brought him sprinting forward, caution abandoned. Eye-hurting brightness as plasma bolts hammered flesh and asphalt, and the stink of burnt flesh; he threw himself over a final rise and caught the glint of metal.
That nearly killed him; some reflex below the level of conscious thought made him turn his leap into a dive, and a bolt split the air above his head.
The ozone stung his nose and teared his eyes, but he knew where to shoot. A great silence fell as the Terminator toppled forward and crunched into rock and pine needles; they hissed as gobbets of molten metal and silicon poured from an alloy-steel skull that had opened like a hard-boiled egg.
* * *
People lay in twisted heaps where they'd been mown down in windrows during the first moments of the attack. It looked to John as if more than half of the refugees were dead. Many of the survivors were severely wounded.
Okay, he thought. I've got a small first aid kit, some guns and ammunition, and a motorcycle. How can I use these to save these people? Mom would know… Dieter would know…
There seemed to be a lot of children. Most of them were unharmed, all of the youngest seemed to be crying, the very youngest were screaming their distress.
"Megan," he called out when he saw her standing in shock over her father's body. She looked up, pale and startled. "Get some of the older kids to help you gather up the little ones. See if anyone is hurt." She stared at him. "Now!"
Megan blinked and walked over to a blond girl, touching her on the shoulder; she spoke and the girl nodded numbly. Then the two of them started rounding up the other children.
One thing done, Connor thought. "Does anybody here know first aid?" he called. No one looked up. He shouted louder. "First aid!" That brought some heads up. "Does anyone know any, any at all?" One man stood up and came toward him, then, more hesitantly, a young woman.
"I took a CPR course," she said.
"I took a general first-aid course," the man said.
"Good," John told them. "This is what we've got for supplies."
He paused, looking as grim as he felt. "We may need to take clothes from the dead to make bandages," he said. The two in front of him looked horrified.
"I'll do it." John turned to find himself looking down at an older woman, red-eyed from weeping. "Had to stay with my husband," she said, indicating a body nearby with a jacket covering the face. "I know he'd want to help. Won't be the most sanitary bandages, but we need to stop the bleeding and clothes will do for that."
She turned and went back to her husband. On the way she said something to another woman, who recoiled, then after watching her, started to do the same.
"We need shelter," another woman said.
John turned to find Paul's wife at his elbow. It occurred to him that he'd never learned her name. She smiled, tired. . "I'm Lisa," she said. "I was just remembering something your
^mother said to me when we first met. Your priorities should be shelter, water, and food in that order. That's what she said. But I I don't think we should stay here."
"Maybe that's what I should do," John said. "Scout out some place we can sleep tonight while you folks patch up the wounded as best you can."
Lisa nodded. "Good plan."
I "I'll be back," John said. He went to his bike and revved the motor. Dammit, he thought as he drove off, I'm supposed to be leading, not asking permission or begging advice.
Still, it was a good sign. He could take these people to shelter, but they'd have to look out for themselves after that.
John Connor looked at the piled bodies. "Because I have a lot of work to do."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MISSOURI
Dennis Reese had gone about fifty yards before he realized that Mary wasn't with him. He looked in all directions, then headed back along his trail to find her sitting on a boulder beneath a huge shagbark hickory, just coming into leaf. She was sitting with her legs crossed at the knee, leaning her chin on one fist, staring at nothing.
"I thought I'd lost you," he said.
Mary just looked him over.
Now what? he wondered. "Hello?"
"I think we need to talk," she said, sitting up.
"I think we need to get away from that thing."
"We have, for the moment. Now we need to figure out what to do and where to go. I honestly don't think the camp would be our best choice."
He looked away from her, folding his arms across his chest, then took a few steps away from where she sat. Mary raised an eyebrow and one corner of her shapely mouth, but said nothing.
He turned and they looked at each other, neither wanting to be the first to speak, until finally Mary rolled her eyes.
"Pull up a rock," she said. "We could use a break at least."
After a beat she said, "I'm sorry I hit you." Which she'd done a number of times as he dragged her into the trees. Hard.
Lucky she didn't have any combat training, he thought. She hit as hard as she could… which is exactly what you should do in a situation like that. Too many untrained civilians just made symbolic hitting gestures, particularly women.
He waved her apology aside and sat down. "You're taking this well," he commented.
"Bullshit." She sneered. "I'm taking this very badly and I'm thinking things that scare me." She looked him in the eye. "But I'm not the type to run around in circles yelling 'the sky is falling.' "
Reese lowered his eyes and nodded. He was taking this pretty badly himself. He kept hearing the sudden barrage of shots and the pitifully few screams from their abandoned patients. While it was true that most of those people were probably going to die anyway, exterminating them like that was vile. Especially if what Mary had overheard was true and they'd been deliberately infected in the first place.