"The supreme leader has decided that we should take over this part of the country," the big, muscular one said, leaning on his handlebars. "Get all the little farmers growing food for us in exchange for protection."
Again Sarah knew the answer but decided to be a good sport.
"Protection from what?"
"From us!" the smallest of them shouted gleefully, and they all laughed uproariously.
Sarah didn't roll her eyes, but the urge was almost irresistible.
Then the amazon started her bike forward and began to slowly circle Sarah.
"Y'know what might be fun?" she asked, never taking her eyes off their captive. She licked her lips. "Let's you and me fight."
The boys went wild, whoo-whooing fit to burst their own eardrums. The amazon grinned, holding her clenched fists up like a victorious boxer. "If you win, then you get to go, tax free. If I win… well, you won't need to worry about anything anymore if I win." Howls of laughter greeted this sally.
Jeez! Is there a camera around here someplace? Sarah wondered. Or have I stumbled onto the Tribe of the Cliche Speakers?
The girl wasn't a problem; Sarah knew she could mop the floor with her, big as she was. The problem was that fighting her meant getting off the motorcycle, leaving her vulnerable when she finally stopped kicking the crap out of the…
Brainless slut-bitch? Sarah thought. Yeah, that has a satisfying sound.
However, before she'd left home, she and Dieter had come up with something that should intimidate the small and the stupid, and this was an excellent time to deploy it. She dug her hands into her pockets and flung the contents in either direction.
Packets of gray putty with a short length of cord sticking out of them went skittering across the ground, and in Sarah's upraised hand was a black plastic sunglasses case with a big red button on top.
"That's C-4," she announced. "It probably won't hurt you too badly unless you're right on top of one. But it'll tear the hell out of your tires. And asphalt makes pretty good shrapnel." She let them think about that for a few seconds. "Like I said, I don't want any trouble. In fact, I mean not to have any trouble. But I'm perfectly happy to make trouble for you." She looked them all in the face. "So just stay right where you are and maybe I won't push this button."
Sarah turned her bike and glared at the men in front of her.
One of them moved aside, slowly, resentfully, and she drove through the gap and gunned it. She was almost 100 percent sure that they wouldn't come after her. And if they did, well, she could always use the thermite grenades.
On to Mexico, she thought, hoping she wouldn't run into any more world-conquering biker heroes. Because too many and I might just start agreeing with Skynet.
ALASKA
John flopped down into the battered desk chair and put his dirty, booted feet up on the gray metal desk. He whipped off his hat and sunglasses with a sigh and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
Since that cyber-controlled seal had scarred it, his nose sometimes ached when he wore sunglasses for any length of time. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
It had been his first real command, he now realized.
One hundred and seventy-one people, slaughtered in the first moments of the Terminators' attack. And of the seventy-nine left, more than half were wounded, twenty of them severely. Nothing like being thrown in at the deep end.
His throat tightened painfully as he thought of the smallest victims. The sight of those tiny, broken bodies kept flashing before his inner eye. Don't let it go, his mother had advised him about things like this. Keep it inside, channel it into anger.
Controlling your anger, using it, will make you strong. Mom would know. He swallowed painfully and gathered up a sheaf of reports from the resistance cells across the continent.
One bit of luck was that one of the women was a nurse practitioner, who had greeted his gift of a liter of alcohol as though it was worth its weight in diamonds. There had been seven men who'd been in the military who seemed to be shaking down to a decent working team by the time he'd left them. And the moms that were left had taken the children in hand in an almost magical way.
"We can't stay here," John had said to the nurse when they'd patched up the worst of the wounds. "I'm going to take the bike and search for a likely place."
She'd nodded and waved him off as though said likely place would certainly be found. Though he'd thought at the time that a more unlikely place for a likely place would be hard to find.
Yet two miles down the road he'd found an almost invisible track leading to an abandoned lumber camp. The buildings had been log-built and so some of the walls were pretty sturdy. The roofs hadn't fared as well and only two buildings still had any.
They would probably leak like sieves, but they'd do for temporary shelter. There were even a couple of rusty woodstoves still in place. It was things like that that made John think God just might be on their side.
It would have to be temporary, though. Even two miles away from the slaughter site was much too close. Soon, if there was a relocation camp, Skynet would have them send out searchers.
And when the number of bodies didn't match their manifest, they'd go looking for survivors.
It was too close to danger, but it had still been a long haul for the kids and the wounded. Two miles is a long way to carry the deadweight of a wounded man or woman, especially on cobbled together stretchers. But Alaskans were a hardy bunch and they'd managed it with a minimum of fuss.
Though it had left him feeling naked, John had given his shotgun to a man who claimed to be a champion shot and a
"damn good hunter." He handed out a brace of hand grenades to the military types. It probably wouldn't do them much actual good, but it was better than nothing and therefore good for moral.
Then he'd left them, promising to send help. Which he'd done as soon as he could get to one of their encrypted satellite relays.
It might be a full day before that help arrived, but trucks and medical help were on the way.
John hoped someone would be there for his friends to find.
They were good people. Wearily he brought his feet down from the desk. Time to go to work, he thought. He glanced at the phased plasma rifle he'd taken from a Terminator. Time to get the resistance and himself rolling. These rifles, so handily provided by Skynet, would kill Terminators. Although he was certain that these easily destroyed first attempts would quickly be replaced by vastly more formidable models, thousands of them.
He picked up the plasma rifle. Ike's gonna love this, he thought. Until I tell him he has to relocate to manufacture 'em.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ALASKA
I love this thing!" Ike Chamberlain said with the enthusiasm of a six-year-old on Christmas morning. "This plasma rifle is so cool!"
The sound came clearly through the speaker in the communications bunker, albeit it had a slightly flat tone—the machine was taking the compressed digital packets and reconstructing them, which inevitably meant a slight loss of tone. It was more easily understandable than ordinary speech, though, if anything.
Love this gear, John thought, giving it an affectionate pat; the operator matched his grin. Thank you, Dieter.