Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

C.13

In the back of the pet van Kate was desperately trying to pry open the rear door, but the latch was jammed.

They'd hit something and Connor had stopped. She could hear a man shouting. He sounded very angry.

"You did something to the doors," she screamed at Connor. "I can't get the back open."

The man said something else she couldn't quite make out. But it sounded like he was closer than before. Right in front of the van.

"Help!" Kate shouted. "Let me out of here. Help!"

"What's going on?" the man shouted, and Kate could

hear him plainly now. He was just a few feet away. "What are you doing?" he demanded.

"I'm being kidnapped," Kate screamed. "Call the police. Call nine-one-one."

The man was right next to the driver's side. "What? Who's there?"

"Help me!"

Connor was trying to start the pickup truck's engine but it didn't want to catch.

"Where do you think you're going?" the Mercedes's driver yelled. "Hey! I'm talking to you! Get out of there!"

"Help! Let me out of here," Kate cried. "For God's sake, someone please help me."

"What's going on in there?" the Mercedes's driver demanded. He thumped the side of the van. "What are you doing?"

The pet van's engine suddenly roared into life. Connor threw it into reverse and the pickup careened away from the Mercedes.

"Hey!" the driver shouted. "Get back here!"

Kate was thrown against the rear door as Connor dropped the pickup into drive and jammed the gas pedal to the floor.

"Oh, God," Kate cried weakly. It was never going to end. "Oh, God — help me."

In Connor's estimation they had spent way too much time screwing around at the accident scene. Unless he missed his guess, that machine at the clinic was something new, and Terminator wasn't going to have an easy time with it.

One thing he was absolutely sure of, however, was that the new cyborg would not stop coming after him until he was dead, or it was destroyed.

He had been down this path before. There were no other options.

The only question in his mind was how the hell the new machine, and Terminator, had traced him to the animal clinic. That part wasn't making any sense to him.

Kate pounded on the rear window. "You can't do this to me!" she raged. "Pull over and let me out. Now!"

Connor reached over his shoulder and slid the window open. "I can't let you out. You're just going to have to trust me."

"Yeah, right," Kate said. She was totally frazzled, at her wits' end, frightened.

Traffic was starting to pick up with delivery trucks and workmen making their sleepy way to early shifts. Connor had to dodge in and around the slower traffic, while all the while he kept checking his rearview mirror. At any moment he expected to see something behind him. The cyborg would be coming. He would be willing to bet money on it.

A big ball of flame and black smoke rose in the sky around the corner a couple of blocks behind him, and Connor's gut tightened. It was happening faster than he'd feared it would.

Suddenly he could hear sirens. He glanced in his rear-view mirror again in time to see a pair of black-and-whites screeching around the corner, lights flashing. If the cyborg caught up with him and Kate, it would not hesitate to kill them on the spot. But if they were stopped by the cops, arrested and tossed in a holding cell, the end result would be the same. The machine would track them down and kill them.

"That's the cops," Kate shouted over his right shoul-der. "Now you'll have to pull over."

"Yeah, first chance I get," Connor said. He pulled around a slow-moving UPS truck and jammed the gas pedal to the floor.

They were still in a commercial section of the city, lots of warehouses, big buildings, shops, and parts stores.

"What? You think you can get away from them? Are you crazy?"

The first of the two cop cars was right on Connor's tail. It pulled up beside him, and he glanced over, nearly losing control of the pet van and running it up onto the curb.

No one was driving the squad car. There was no one behind the wheel. No one in the passenger seat, or in the rear. The car was driving itself.

The black-and-white swerved right, slamming into the side of the pet van. Connor had just time enough to lean out of the way as part of the squad car's door entered the pet van's cab. He hauled the pickup truck hard to the right, just missing a pair of parked cars, bumped over the curb and up onto the sidewalk, the van's shocks bottoming out with a bone-jarring bang.

The second squad car roared up on the sidewalk behind him, smashing into his right rear fender, metal crunching, glass and plastic breaking.

Connor had just a split second to see that no one was driving this cop car either, before he skidded over the curb and back out onto the street The pet van's left front tire dug in, nearly causing them to flip over, before he regained control.

This was nuts. But he knew damned well it was something that the new machine was somehow orchestrating. He'd seen this kind of weird shit before.

Something else crashed into the rear of the pet van, this time one of a pair of ambulances, lights flashing, sirens blaring. Connor didn't have to look to know that neither of them had a driver behind the wheel.

He just hoped that Kate was somehow okay in the back.

Abruptly the ambulances dropped back Connor hauled the pet van around a corner and stomped on the gas pedal.

"Hold on back there," he shouted to Kate.

Terminator hung a few meters off the Champion crane's left rear bumper. The ponderous machine thundered like an express train down city streets, taking out cars, trucks, and anything else in its path.

Moments ago the T-X had crushed a car, its gas tank igniting with a big ball of flame and black smoke. Terminator barely avoided the fireball.

He could see the T-X's reflection in the broad driver's side mirror. She turned and spotted him, their eyes locking for an instant. Terminator registered an extremely brief dilation of the T-X's pupils, indicating a mild form of what could be classified as AI surprise.

The T-X had expected that he had been destroyed in front of the animal clinic.

It was a mistake. The T-X was not infallible after all.

The pair of driverless ambulances dropped back in front of the crane, like a shark's remora, and then slid back along either side of the big machine.

Suddenly the Champion's huge boom lifted off its cradle and began to extend, while rotating to the left.

The ambulances dropped back on either side of Terminator, then swerved inward, trying to crush him between them.

At the last possible moment, Terminator slammed on the bike's front brake. The rear tire lifted high off the pavement, but the Indian stopped nearly in its tracks, just managing to clear the rear bumpers of the two ambulances as they crashed together.

The crane's boom continued to extend and swing around, taking out electric wires and transformers above the street in showers of sparks.

Terminator grabbed his shotgun. When the ambulances separated, he hammered the throttle, pulling a wheelie. He roared between them, firing over his left shoulder at the nearest ambulance, taking out one of its front tires.

It dropped back, but did not drop out.

The Champion crane surged forward.

Behind T-X was the T-850 that Skynet expected the human resistance would send back, along with the two ambulances that were working the problem.

She was helping that element by using the extended boom to lay down a continuous debris path that might slow the obsolete model warrior/cyborg.

Ahead of her was the target, John Connor. His van was damaged, and she could sense the heat signature of an overworked engine that was leaking lubricating oil from a rear seal in the aft section of the main mass of the block.

Two LAPD remote units were harrying Connor, but to this point they had not been completely effective. The human showed the unusually strong resilience and inventiveness that Skynet had programmed her to expect.

T-X punched a hole in the windshield, morphed her right arm into her plasma weapon, and quickly charged the unit.

Her head-up unit displayed a reticle roughly centered on the pet van. Her target-acquisition stabilizing circuitry popped up and the reticle locked on the pickup truck.

Her weapon indicator showed fully charged as the pet van and flanking police cars raced through a red light, just avoiding collisions with two automobiles.

T-X fired at the same instant a semi tractor-trailer entered the intersection, filling her targeting frame.

For an instant nothing seemed to happen. But then the semi was engulfed in a blue plasma charge field and exploded with an impressive flash-bang that sent flames and debris hammering off the fronts of the commercial buildings on either side of the street.

The Champion crane plowed through the debris like a hot knife through soft butter, and on the other side, T-X glanced in her rearview mirror.

Terminator, his motorcycle laid over on its side, skidded through the flames, then shot upright, apparently unharmed.

Behind it, the first ambulance ran headlong into a major piece of the semi's frame and disintegrated, while the second ambulance emerged from the fire, leaving behind twin vortex swirls in the dense smoke.

A huge explosion obliterated the intersection behind Connor. He looked in his rearview mirror in time to see the Champion crane crash through the fire and debris, followed a second later by Terminator on the police bike, and one of the ambulances directly on his tail.

It was Terminator! Somehow he had caught up.

They weren't out of the woods yet, but Connor felt a small measure of relief. He and Kate were no longer alone. Terminator might be an older model of cyborg, but he'd been there in the past for John, and it looked as if he would be there again.

For the briefest of instants, Connor wished that his mother were here. But then he put that thought out of his mind.

First, he would have to survive this trouble.

The driverless cop cars still flanked him. And it wouldn't take much more for them to finally box the pet van in and run it off the street.

"Hold on," he shouted to Kate in the back.

He slammed the brake pedal as hard as he could, locking up the pet van's wheels, smoke pouring off the tires.

The cop cars shot past, and Connor made a sloppy but effective four-wheel drift to the right, just missing a delivery truck at the corner.

The pair of cop cars locked up their brakes in unison and made perfect 180s, jumping back on Connor's tail as quickly as they'd been thrown off.

The Champion crane took the corner wide, the extended boom taking out the entire side of a building, brick and wood and plastic exploding in every direction.

Whatever kind of weapon the cyborg had fired had been big enough to take out an entire semi truck. One hit, even a near miss, would make short work of the pet van.

Connor kept checking the rearview mirror as the huge crane actually gained on him, rolling over cars whose drivers weren't quick enough to get out of the way, whereas he could only weave in and out of the slower-moving traffic.

But the ambulance and Terminator were still back there, along with the cop cars in some kind of a crazy Fourth of July parade complete with fireworks.

There was a large hole in the Champion crane's wind-shield and something jutted out from inside.

Connor swerved hard to the right, nearly sideswiping a row of parked cars, and then swerved sharply left, laying on his horn for cars to get out of his way.

Kate was being thrown from side to side in the back. He could hear her body slamming against the cap.

"Stop it!" she screamed in desperation. "Stop it!" But he could not. Their lives depended on his driving. He could see a bright blue glow around whatever it was sticking out of the crane's windshield. It was the cyborg's weapon. And it was ready to fire again.