From their yelling, they were following him. "Shut up!" he shouted—not the most inspiring battle cry in the world, but it would have to do.
Ahead of him was one of the observation towers; a wooden box on top of four splayed wooden legs, with a little roof above it.
There was a searchlight and two machine guns in the box; the guards there were both looking at the firing around the gate, though… and the tower was outside the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp.
" Go!" he barked, panting slightly as they reached the tower.
Reese went down on one knee, his carbine to his shoulder. The figures up top were dim, until they lit up the searchlight…
"Perfect," he whispered as he gently squeezed the trigger.
Braaaapp. One short burst, and a body toppled over the edge of the railing, falling inert not far away.
That left the other one, who was turning a machine gun Reese's way.
"Open fire!" he bellowed. " Shoot, for Chrissake!"
The survivalists did, belatedly. For an instant, the man above looked as if he was dancing—bullets went through the floor of the wooden observation box as if it wasn't there. One of them struck the searchlight, and it went out with a shower of sparks that left orange afterimages drifting across Reese's eyes.
"You, you, get up there!" he snapped. "Man those guns. The rest of you, follow me!"
Hot damn, he thought. For the first time since Judgment Day he was doing something, something that might help. Striking back, at least, at the machine and its collaborators.
* * *
Dennis Reese looked at the… Well, collaborator, I suppose, he thought.
The man had been passing for a corporal when Reese and Mary left the camp. Now he was in Yanik's quarters and wearing his rank insignia… and not being very cooperative.
"I won't tell you zip," he said.
"I think you will," Reese said, conscious of the slight tremor in his voice.
He'd had time to tour the camp. A lot of the people he'd known hadn't been buried yet; the matron at the clinic where Mary had worked was lying where she'd fallen near her chair, swollen and purple, with flies walking across her eyes.
" Nada," the man said; he had a thin stubbled face and hard eyes.
Juarez touched Reese on the shoulder. "Sir, I think you should so for a walk," he said.
"What?" Reese asked.
"Sir, you should go for a walk. Check on the people. We'll call you when this is taken care of."
Reese opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. There were times an officer should take a walk—not something that was covered in the formal curriculum at the Point, but it did get passed on by word of mouth from generation to generation.
And Sergeant Juarez had seen everything that Reese had.
Reese smiled at the man in the captain's uniform and walked out. There was a lot of work to do… and one of Juarez's men was bringing up a bucket of water.
By the time the noncom joined him—Reese had carefully not listened to the sounds—the camp inmates were gathered. Reese looked down on them from the steps; they'd gotten the lights working again, and a corner of his mind was wondering whether they could salvage the camp generator and take it with them. It would be so useful… The faces looking up at him held fright, anger, despair.
"What do you mean, these weren't really the army?" a man asked.
"The American army doesn't do this"—Reese pointed around; everyone had been shown the mass graves—"to American citizens. This was a bunch of terrorists pretending to be soldiers."
"And you're the real army?" somebody called.
"There isn't one left," Reese said grimly. "It died on Judgment Day. We're the… resistance. And we're not just fighting for America; we're fighting for the survival of the human race."
Juarez bent to whisper in his ear. "Sir, you're damned right about that. We got a lot out of him…"
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DOT LAKE, ALASKA
We're getting organized, John Connor thought. Which means… paperwork!
Luckily, he and Sarah and Dieter had all been in favor of a decentralized structure, which kept bureaucracy to a minimum.
Which did not mean "small."
He sighed and leaned back in the chair until it creaked dangerously, even with his boots on the table to stabilize it, and took another sip of lukewarm herbal tea. For a moment his mouth crooked up at one corner; the central HQ of humanity at the moment was a man barely old enough to drink, in a nowhere town in the wilderness.
Lists were scrolling across the screen of his laptop, mostly of new recruits brought in by various resistance cells across North America, Europe, and East Asia. Skynet hadn't had a chance to pulverize Latin America quite as thoroughly, yet—it had probably been much worse in the "original" Judgment Day scenario, which had happened back when the major powers had tens of thousands of ready-to-go nuclear warheads, instead of a couple of thousand all up. Of course, once Skynet got its production facilities fully operational, it would probably make more nukes—
"Christ!" he said suddenly, putting the cup down fast enough to slosh.
Jack Brock had sent in his list from Missouri, from the Ozark Redoubt. One of their more promising cells…
Dennis Reese.
He called up a picture. No absolute proof, but there was a resemblance—thin features, light brown hair, something about the eyes…
How would you define the relationship? Technically he's my granddad…
Even though the lieutenant was only twenty-five to John's recently turned twenty-one. John shook his head slowly. I think the reason time travel makes my head hurt is that it makes my eyes spin. Right now his gut was hurting, too. He felt an overwhelming urge to send a priority-one message to Brock: keep Reese safe at all costs!
But I can't do that, he knew, with a sinking sensation. That might be the exact thing that would keep Reese from fathering the son who's going to father moi!
The chaos-butterfly-wing thing evidently wasn't entirely correct; for all the time-loops and frantic attempts to change the past, each cycle tended back toward the original course of events.
But the past was changeable; sometimes the future created its own past. He had to be so careful…
* * *
John turned his attention to the single truck and bus waiting for passengers in the town square. Poor suckers, John thought.
They should be all right, though. He'd moved some of the resistance into that old logging camp and they'd be watching the road for these newcomers. If Skynet tried anything, it would lose.
They planned an attack on the "relocation camp" any day now. As soon as thirty of the new plasma rifles arrived from California. He had no intention of sending his people into battle less well armed than the enemy. At least not if he could help it.
Reports on conditions in the camp weren't good, but they weren't as bad as the Black River camp in Missouri. For some reason, Skynet seemed to want the humans in B.C. to survive.
Ah, here she is.
Ninel rode up on a blue bicycle, put down the kickstand, and took a clipboard out of her saddlebags. Then she blew a whistle to get the small crowd's attention.