Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

C.10

Out in the lobby Kate saw who was ringing the front buzzer, and she groaned inwardly.

She was still in a state of shock that she recognized the guy she'd locked in the cage. But the more she thought about it the more worried she became. There'd been trouble around him.

Kate unlocked the front door, and Betsy Steinberg, one of Emery's regular and more obnoxious customers, pushed her way past with her pet carrier clutched firmly in her grip.

"It's Hercules, I think he's got pneumonia. He just started coughing and he wouldn't stop—" The woman was about Kate's age and general build, but she could be very insistent, something Kate normally wasn't.

"Betsy, I've got a problem in back."

"A problem?" the woman shouted, alarmed. "This is an emergency!"

Kate peered into the carrier. Hercules was a pampered, overfed, overweight Siamese cat whose only problem was his owner, who treated the cat like a person and not like an animal. The cat lowered its head and coughed politely.

"Sounds like a hairball," Kate said.

"I know what hairballs sound like," Betsy shrilled. "Where's Dr. Monroe?"

"It's five-thirty in the morning, I'm sure he's home sleeping. He'll come in if he has to—" Kate smiled, softening. The woman was frightened enough about the safety of an animal she obviously loved to get up and come down to the clinic. "Look, just wait here with Hercules. I'll be just a few minutes, all right?"

Betsy searched Kate's face to make sure that she wasn't being blown off, then nodded. "Okay."

Kate went back into the kennel, picked up the Tor-butrol bottle, and hunched down in front of the cage that held her prisoner.

"Did you call the cops?" Connor asked.

"Not yet."

Connor glanced at the empty bottle. "Am I going to need my stomach pumped or something?"

Kate felt a little sorry for him. He looked forlorn. Lost. "You took a couple hundred milligrams of a narcotic… you're going to be out of it for a while. That's all."

Connor nodded.

"You're John Connor," Kate blurted.

A look of surprise flickered in his eyes.

"I'm Kate Brewster. West Hills Junior High."

Connor had to laugh quietly; there was nothing much else he could do under the circumstances. He shook his head. "Nice seeing you again, Kate."

T-X came around the corner past the Universal Rentals lot with the big yellow crane behind the fence, and pulled up behind a pickup truck and a Cadillac DeVille parked in front of the animal clinic.

The veterinary hospital was a match with T-X's files.

She got out of the Lexus and started up the walk.

"What happened to you, John?" Kate asked.

It was a good question, Connor thought. He lay back against the bars and closed his eyes. How to summarize his crazy life in twenty-five words or less?

"Middle of the eighth grade, you just disappeared. And there was something about your foster parents—*

"They were murdered," Connor replied, opening his eyes.

Kate reared back.

"I didn't do it," Connor said, matter-of-factly. How to explain that part to her? Impossible. "So, wow," he said, trying to lighten it up a bit "West Hills. Those were the days." He grinned at her. "I don't suppose for old times' sake you'd just let me—"

Something crashed out front. Kate looked up, alarmed. It sounded like a lot of glass breaking. Almost as if a car or truck or something had crashed through the front windows.

She turned back to Connor. "What the hell—? Is somebody with you?"

Connor shook his head. "No."

Kate stood up and hurried into the hall to the reception area. She was just in time at the door to see Betsy come around the corner as a stunning-looking blond woman stepped through the smashed front door, a big gun in her hand.

The woman raised the pistol without a moment's hesitation and fired twice, both shots hitting Betsy in the chest, driving her backward off her feet, blood flying everywhere, her arms and legs splaying out.

Kate took a half step back away from the door, a scream caught in her throat. This wasn't happening. She couldn't move. She could not utter a sound as she watched in horror.

The blond walked to where Betsy lay and bent down over her.

"Katherine Brewster?"

Betsy was still alive. Her mouth moved, trying to form a word, but she could not speak.

The blond touched a delicate finger into the blood that covered Betsy's chest, then raised it to her lips.

A moment later the woman shook her head. "No," she said softly.

The dogs were barking furiously, howling and baying, knowing instinctively that death was nearby. Hercules the cat was out of his pet carrier. He sauntered around from behind the counter, glanced at his owner and then up at the blond woman, a look of indifference on the feline features.

Kate backed up as the woman turned and came directly toward her. It suddenly registered on her that the killer had used her name! She realized that she had just a second to make a decision; stay and be shot to death like Betsy, or move and try to live.

She turned and sprinted back into the storage room where she snatched her cell phone from the top of the file cabinet and ducked behind the stack of dog food boxes. With shaking hands she managed to enter 9 and then 1 before she fumbled the phone and it clattered to the floor.

Before she could retrieve it, the door opened and T-X stepped inside, the big gun sweeping left to right across the room.

The cell phone was on the floor less than a foot from the killer's right boot Kate could do nothing but hold her breath.

T-X spotted the bloody gauze and other surgical supplies on the floor. She moved forward, picked up the gauze, and touched it to her tongue for a sample to process.

A double helix DNA sequence appeared in her head-up display. lines of genetic code streamed across her eyes with lightning speed.

A moment later her head-up display cleared. John Connor's head shot came up over the legend:

JOHN CONNOR-PRIMARY TARGET.

Kate watched with openmouthed amazement and fear. It was almost as if the killer had tasted the blood to see who it was from.

But that was crazy. This whole thing was insane. Surreal. It was a nightmare from hell.

Making as little noise as possible, Kate stepped out from behind the boxes, grabbed her keys, and dashed out the door back into the hallway.

The killer turned inhumanly fast, fired at the retreating figure, wood splinters hitting the back of Kate's neck, and continued to fire, emptying the gun as she gave chase.

Kate raced out into the reception area, skirting Betsy's blood-soaked body, her heart hammering nearly out of her chest.

The stupid cat leaped from out of nowhere, tangling with Kate's feet, sending her sprawling on all fours.

The cat howled in rage and pain and shot away as Kate picked herself up, ducked through the broken glass, and sprinted to the animal van.

This had something to do with John Connor. She'd had a bad feeling terrible things were going to happen the second she realized who he was. There had been a lot of weird shit going on when they were kids. It had been more than Connor's foster parents. There'd been other killings, explosions. Strange stuff.

His mother had even gone crazy and had been locked away. The rumor was that the woman claimed that robots from the future had come back to kill her.

Kate tore open the driver's side door, scrambled behind the wheel, locked the door, and fumbled to get the key in the ignition.

She looked up. The killer was right there! The homicidal woman ripped the driver's side door off its hinges. She tossed it aside as if it were nothing more than a piece of cardboard, and pulled Kate out of the truck, tossing her on the ground like a dishrag.

Kate frantically backpedaled, desperately trying to get away from the killer, but she jammed the heel of her boot into Kate's throat.

"Where is John Connor?"

Kate couldn't breathe, let alone speak. She managed to shake her head. Somewhere in the foggy distance she thought she heard the sound of a car or truck or something screeching around the corner at the end of the block, its engine revving high.

"He was here," the killer said in a calm, unhurried tone. "Where did he go?" She eased the pressure on Kate's neck.

Suddenly an impossibly large, dark presence loomed directly over Kate's head; screaming, roaring noise, the strong odors of burnt rubber, oil, gasoline, and something else, tall wheels bracketing her body.

The killer looked up at the same moment the grille of the big-wheeled Dodge pickup truck plowed into her body, carrying her in a seeming instant into the side of the Lexus convertible, bumping over the curb and shoving the entire mass of steel and plastic and cybernetic circuitry and framework into the side wall of the clinic.

For the briefest of moments the crash seemed to hang in midstride, until the leading edge of the wreck, still moving in excess of three meters per second, ruptured a large, three-fourths-full propane gas tank.

A huge ball of fire erupted, blowing straight up and then out, the heat instantly bringing tears to Kate's eyes.

Still dazed, she sat up as tremendous clouds of dust and black smoke billowed up from the great flash-bang of the explosion. She'd never seen anything like that in her life.

It was a pickup truck that had passed over her body, the wheels somehow miraculously missing her. She could see the back end of it sticking out of the wall.

She got unsteadily to her knees and rubbed her bruised neck where the killer's boot had been jammed into her throat.

She figured that the blond woman as well as whoever had been driving the pickup truck had to be dead. They could not have survived the crash and the fire. But something moved within the most intense area of flames.

Kate tried to shake herself out of her daze, unable to believe anything she was witnessing, unable even to believe her own rationality. She had to be dreaming, or hallucinating. Something.

This was not happening.

A tall man, wearing a leather jacket and trousers, boots on his feet, and a shotgun in his left hand, pushed through the jumbled mass of burning wreckage and melting steel and glass, shrugging out of the flames as if the heat and damage had absolutely no effect on him, and strode purposefully to Kate, who was frozen to the spot.

"Katherine Brewster," Terminator said as a statement of fact, not a question.

Kate could do nothing more than dumbly look up at him and nod.

The stranger scooped her up with his right arm, tossed her over his shoulder like a duffel bag, and brought her around to the back door of the animal van.

"Wait!" Kate shouted, coming out of her fog. "What are you doing?"

The tall man got the back door of the van open and he tossed her inside among a couple of empty animal cages, blankets, and some medical equipment. There were no windows in the pickup's cap. A security screen covered the sliding window into the cab.

"Where is John Connor?" the man asked, his tone neutral.

Kate didn't know what to say or do. "Look, if I tell you, you'll let me go, right?"

"Yes," he said.

"In the kennel. I locked him in one of the cages."

The man spotted a lug wrench attached to the spare-tire bracket. He pulled it free, and Kate shrank back, thinking he was going to hit her with it.

"You said you'd let me go!"

"I lied," he said, which strictly speaking was not true. In fact he had merely omitted the time frame. He would let her go, but not now.

He slammed the door, stuck the lug wrench through the latches, and without any apparent effort bent it into a steel loop, effectively locking Kate inside.

Terminator turned and strode toward the animal clinic's smashed front entrance, his processors evaluating the range of likely scenarios he was heading for.

Most of the fire was on the other side of the brick wall that separated the kennel from the rest of the building, but a big section of intersecting wall had collapsed in a heap of rubble, and the room was filling with smoke.

Connor kept smashing at the cage door with both feet, bracing himself against the rear bars with his back for more leverage.

The animals were howling and barking wildly. Like Connor they were frantic that they would burn to death or die of smoke inhalation before someone came to let them out.

One of the door hinges bent then broke. Connor savagely kicked the door one last time, and the second hinge broke, sending the door clattering to the floor.

He scrambled out of the cage, heedless of the wound to his leg. He wanted out of there right now. He started for the door, but then stopped and turned back He couldn't leave.

The animals nervously switched their attention back and forth from him to the smoke pouring through the collapsed wall, almost pleading with him to help them.

"Shit," Connor muttered. He went back and started opening cages. The animals that could leaped out of their cages and raced for the door. Connor helped the others that were too sick to crawl out under their own steam. But once they were free and on the floor they were on their own.

He turned to get out of there when movement at the base of the rubble caught his eye. He stopped and watched as silver beads of liquid metal oozed out of the debris and began to pool on the concrete floor.

Connor stepped back a pace. He'd seen this kind of thing before. Twelve years ago. It was the T-1000 model that Skynet had sent back to kill him and his mother. It was happening again. "Oh, shit—"

A metallic arm coalesced from the liquid metal, and at even more material began to build on the first, clawlike structure, it was obvious that something very sophisticated was happening. This was no mere T-1000 rising out of the liquid metal.

This was something infinitely more deadly. Connor did not know how he knew such a thing, he just did.

He raced out of the kennel into the storage room where he retrieved his RAK PM-63 9mm machine pistol from where Kate had laid it, and headed out into the reception area, which was filled with dense smoke.

It was hard to breathe let alone see, and he nearly stumbled over the blood-soaked body of a woman. At first he thought it was Kate, but then he heard the distinctive double click of a round being cycled into the breach of a shotgun. He stopped dead in his tracks, trying to figure his options before it was too late. Terminator, the Mossberg 12-gauge 500 pump-action shotgun low at his right hip, appeared out of the smoke, reached Connor, grabbed him by the shirt, and lifted him up.

"John Connor," Terminator said. His head-up display was slower and less sophisticated than the T-X's, but his processors came up with a very quick match. "It is time."

The first instance a T-800 had come back, it had been sent by Skynet to kill Connor's mother. The second T-800 had come to protect them. Now, twelve years later, it was anyone's guess what this unit — the newest model of the machine which had been the only father figure Connor had ever known — had been sent to do.

"You're here to kill me," Connor said.

"No," Terminator replied, perhaps a mild expression of surprise forming at the corners of his mouth and eyes. "You must live."