Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

C.5

He had trashed his bike, permanently this time. The frame was bent all to hell, the gas tank punctured, the engine case cracked when it hit the boulder, both wheels folded like pretzels.

Riding in the rear of the ratty flatbed truck back down into the valley, John Connor had plenty of time to feel sorry for himself, and to be pissed off as well by his own stupidity.

He knew what his mother would have said about it; she had been the one talking all the time about how fate was what we made of it. Not the other way around. He had done it to himself, this time, with no help from anyone.

Any of her biker boyfriends would have laughed, clapped him on the shoulder, passed him the tequila, and said something like: "Next time you go rodding around in the middle of the night, maybe you should wear a parachute." Or something like: "Did that big, bad deer knock you on your ass, kid?"

There'd be no sympathy from anyone, but there would be a grudging acceptance that he'd had the cojones to pull off such a stunt in the first place and the bald-ass luck to survive it.

The stuff from his packs had been scattered halfway down the hill to the ocean, and it had taken him the better part of two hours, climbing up and down in the loose sand and rocks, fighting his pains, to find most of it and get back up to the Drive.

It'd only taken one minute, however, from the moment he'd reached the tangled mess that had been his bike, until he came to the conclusion that it was beyond repair. He might have been able to salvage some parts, but he'd been unable to find his tools or flashlight, and he didn't have the heart to lug around a bunch of useless crap.

He'd had the balls, or the stupidity, to pull the stunt, but he had to wonder if he'd been lucky after all. If there was no purpose in living, then why live at all?

It had been a recurrent theme of his. Maybe it was time for him to finally do something about it.

Put up or shut up, his foster mom had told him once. That was when his real mother was in the nuthouse up at Pescadero.

The first vehicle that had come along had been the flatbed loaded with ten Mexican laborers nearly blind drunk, laughing and singing.

They had come from one party and were headed to a sister's house somewhere over near Van Nuys. None of them noticed that John was banged up, his hands raw with road rash, jeans torn up, blood oozing from a long gash in his leg.

Never mind that the beer was piss warm, and the tequila was so cheap that kerosene would have tasted better. They were willing to share.

They had no trouble deciding who and what they were, or where their lives were going. They had never been fed any delusions about becoming a world leader. Nor probably had they ever been the target of some machine, sent on an assassination mission.

They had come down out of the hills and passed under 1-101 before Connor looked up out of his morose thoughts and became aware of where he was.

The neighborhood was blue collar, industrial. They passed a small bank and a supermarket, and at the end of the block, across from what looked like a construction site or maybe a place where they stored heavy construction equipment, was an animal hospital.

John flexed his leg, which had stiffened up on the long ride, and fresh blood oozed out of the wound. He needed help, but he wasn't willing to go to the emergency room of some hospital. There would be too many questions. And that was the one thing he was very bad at, answering questions, especially the kind that cops were bound to ask. He had no permanent address, no real money, not even a proper ID. He was in no one's database, so far as he knew. He had never applied for a loan or a credit card. He had never owned a house. In fact he'd never owned anything, except for his bike, which he bought from a down-and-out biker who needed the cash for drugs. If the cops started digging into who and what he was, he figured that he would be in trouble.

He pulled himself up and pounded a fist on the roof of the cab. The driver stuck bis head out the window and looked over his shoulder at John.

"Que?"

"AcA me bap," John shouted at him.

"Si, si," the driver said, and he pulled over, bumping up on the curb and then down again. Everyone laughed. This was great fun.

The sign on the building read universal rentals, and behind the chain-link fence a big yellow mobile crane, its massive telescoping boom fixed over the truck's cab like a tank's cannon, loomed over the neighborhood.

Across the street a small glass-fronted building was lit only from the outside. The sign on the front read emery

ANIMAL HOSPITAL.

Connor gathered his tattered packs and bedroll and climbed painfully down from the back of the truck.

"Gracias," he called to the driver, who waved back.

"Si, si," the man said, and the others waved as the truck took off in a cloud of smoke and dust, leaving Connor standing alone in the middle of the street.

There was no traffic here at this hour, and after the truck was gone the night turned silent.

Connor limped across the street and looked through the front windows into the darkened reception room of the animal clinic. It was unlikely that a place this small would have a night watchman, but you could never tell.

He made his way around to a back loading area. A small window looked into a kennel where animals undergoing treatment were kept overnight.

He pulled a towel from one of his packs, wrapped it around a fist, and smashed the window.

Immediately the bigger dogs started barking and growling wildly, while the small animals yipped and a few of the sicker ones mewled or whined.

"Shh, it's okay, guys," Connor told them. He reached inside, undid the latch, and lifted the window. "It's okay," he called. He dropped his packs inside, then climbed in after them.

The kennel was filled with animal smells only partially masked by the odor of a strong disinfectant Water was running somewhere, and the compressor motor for what was probably a refrigerator kicked on. But there were no alarms, and the dogs were already calming down, more curious now than frightened or aggressive.

There was a row of cages, some large, some small, a lot of them empty. The animals here were sick, some of them banged up as badly as Connor. He felt an instant empathy with them.

A big chocolate Lab, its left rear leg in a cast, looked up with mournful eyes. John offered the dog the back of his hand, then scratched it behind the ears. The animal almost groaned out loud in ecstasy.

Love at first sight, Connor thought, following the line of cages through a door into what appeared to be the clinic's medical storage area. The room was small and cluttered with cardboard boxes, many of them unopened,

file cabinets, large cases, and glass-fronted supply cabinets.

"Bingo," he said under his breath. It was exactly what he was looking for.

He went back for his packs, then jimmied open the glass doors of one of the supply cabinets that held tran-quilizers, gauze, antibiotic creams, syringes, boxes of sutures, splints, catheters, and an entire shelf of prescription drugs.

He picked one marked torbutrol. for relief of pain, veterinary use only. He shook out a handful of the pills and dry swallowed them. If they didn't work on humans, he figured he would find out about it soon enough when he dropped down on all fours and started howling at the moon.

From the time he, and the T-800 sent back to protect him, busted his mom out of the sanitarium, Connor had essentially been on his own. He'd been thirteen then, and before his fourteenth birthday he could disassemble, clean, repair, reassemble, and fire more than two dozen different types of weapons, explosives, and even Light Antitank Weapons and Stinger ground-to-air handheld missiles.

It had been quite the education. He could calculate blast radius damage for various plastique explosives, but he had never heard of the Magna Carta let alone the year it was signed.

And he was still alone, he thought, grabbing sutures, gauze, alcohol, disinfectant ointment, and bandages.

He dropped his pants, cleaned the six-inch gash in his thigh with alcohol, then opened one of the suture packs and began sewing up the wound, the animal narcotic already fuzzing out the worst of the pain.