Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes

CHAPTER

NINE

Orozco felt his heart seize up inside his chest. Suddenly, in a single instant, the whole thing had gone straight to hell.

“Put those down,” he said sharply, walking swiftly around the fountain toward Grimaldi. “Have you lost your minds?”

“Stay out of it, Sergeant,” Grimaldi ordered, raising his own shotgun now to point not quite at Orozco’s feet. “Our people need to see the hollow shell these men really are.”

Orozco looked through the stunned crowd toward the archway where Tunney’s other two men were guarding the group’s weapons. But they, too, were standing motionless, with Barney and Copeland now holding their rifles on them.

“This isn’t an object lesson,” Orozco ground out, shifting his glare back to Grimaldi, his body tingling with the adrenaline of impending combat. The man had drawn down on a Resistance group, for God’s sake. “This is mass suicide.”

“Is it?” Grimaldi countered. “Do you see anything to indicate that they aren’t helpless?”

“Chief, you’re playing with fire,” Orozco warned.

“Do you see anything to indicate that they aren’t helpless?” Grimaldi repeated.

Orozco clenched his hands into fists.

“Not at the moment,” he had to admit. “But—”

“But nothing,” Grimaldi said firmly. “As I said: these men—this John Connor they go on and on about—have the tactical skill of hamsters. They’ll be lucky to keep themselves alive, let alone anyone they con into going with them.”

And then, at Orozco’s left, the crowd abruptly parted and Barnes stepped into the circle.

“Maybe you need to run the odds again,” he said, his voice dark and menacing.

“No!” Orozco snapped as Grimaldi’s shotgun shifted to point at Barnes. “Grimaldi—”

“Relax, Sergeant,” he said, his voice dripping with contempt. “I’m not going to kill him. Not unless he insists on it.”

“You know, Grimaldi, you have a really big mouth,” Barnes said. He looked around the circle, his dark eyes touching each of the residents in turn as if he was memorizing their faces for future reference. “Is this the kind of leader you people want?” he went on. “A leader who uses guns to keep you here, instead of letting you make your own decisions?”

“I’m not keeping anyone here,” Grimaldi insisted.

“You’re the ones holding the guns,” Barnes countered. “You’re like a gang leader, Grimaldi. I hate gang leaders.”

“Hate me all you want,” Grimaldi said. “But the fact of the matter is that you and your group haven’t survived by any kind of skill. If you’ve really been together as long as you claim, it can only be because of sheer dumb luck. If my people want to go with you, that’s their business. But they have a right to know exactly what they’re getting themselves into.”

“Fair enough,” Barnes said. “But like I said, maybe you ought to recalculate. For starters—” He reached down to the hem of his jacket.

And suddenly there was a shining Bowie knife gripped in his hand.

“—maybe we didn’t leave all our weapons in that pile over there.”

“Stop it, both of you,” Orozco snapped. He absolutely, positively had to stop this before it got any more out of hand than it already was.

But down deep, he knew it was too late. Grimaldi would never back down, not when he had a gun against the other man’s knife. Pride alone would keep him from doing that.

And Barnes wasn’t going anywhere, either. His men were in harm’s way, and he would free them or die in the attempt. He had the glint of death in his eye, a look Orozco had seen all too many times before in the midst of combat.

Maybe Grimaldi recognized that look, too. He muttered something to the men beside him, and suddenly two of the three guns that had been pointed at Tunney were pointed at Barnes instead.

“I said stop it,” Orozco tried again. “Barnes—put the knife away. Skynet’s the enemy, remember?”

“Your chief needs a lesson, Orozco,” Barnes said loudly, his voice echoing across the lobby as if he was trying to intimidate Grimaldi by sheer lungpower.

Maybe it was working. Barnes still hadn’t moved from the spot where he’d pulled the knife, but Orozco could see that Grimaldi was starting to have some belated second thoughts. With Barnes’ challenge—even one so patently futile—the chief had suddenly gone from a position of absolute authority and strength to one of dangerous uncertainty.

Orozco had never seen Grimaldi backed into a corner this tight before. But he’d seen the man in lesser corners, and he knew that the road ahead could only lead to disaster. At Barnes’ first threatening move, or whatever Grimaldi considered a threatening move, the chief would order his men to open fire. Barnes would die, right there in front of everyone. After that, Tunney and the others would also have to die. Grimaldi could hardly leave witnesses to take back the news to the rest of their team.

And Moldering Lost Ashes would have the blood of four murders on its hands, and would have lost its soul.

There was only one chance, one move that might at least buy Orozco enough time to make them all see reason. Stepping directly in front of Barnes, he turned to face Grimaldi. “No,” he said firmly.

“Out of the way,” Grimaldi ordered.

“No,” Orozco said again. He could feel Barnes’ breath on the nape of his neck, and the skin of his back prickled with the awareness of the knife poised only inches away from it.

If Barnes had already crossed the line from calculating strategist to mindless berserker, Orozco had only seconds before he died with that blade buried in his back. If Barnes hadn’t crossed that line, giving him a human shield this way could still get Orozco shot, and by the very people he had been protecting for the past two years.

Not that most of those people were probably thinking very highly of him right now. He could feel the eyes of the whole crowd on him, but didn’t dare look away from Grimaldi long enough to see if they were looking on him as a peacemaker or as a traitor. Very likely the latter, he suspected.

It had been Orozco, after all, who had let these strangers in and had thus sparked this confrontation in the first place.

What was worse was the fact that Grimaldi had a point. From a strictly tactical point of view, for Barnes and the others to have voluntarily disarmed themselves was foolish, even if that had been the price of entry.

Orozco had considered their gesture to have been one of trust and goodwill. Perhaps he’d been wrong. Perhaps trust was a luxury people could no longer afford.

Certainly their trust in Orozco’s implied promise of safety had betrayed them. Barnes probably considered Orozco a traitor, too.

And then, from somewhere behind him, cutting through the thick silence like a knife through freshly churned butter, Orozco heard the distinctive chink-chink of a pump shotgun action.

Grimaldi’s eyes flicked upward.

Abruptly, the man froze.

Carefully, Orozco turned his head. Standing in a nicely spaced line on the mezzanine balcony were six men and women. All of them had heavy rifles or shotguns pointed downward at Grimaldi and his men.

All of them except one of the women in the middle. Her hands hung empty at her sides as she gazed coolly down on the scene below her.

And the look in those eyes…

Behind Orozco, Tunney cleared his throat. “Chief Grimaldi,” he murmured, “meet Kate Connor.”

“There are two ways this can go, Chief Grimaldi,” Kate Connor called, her voice glacially calm.

“Your choice.”

Orozco looked back at Grimaldi. The other’s breath was starting to come in quick, shallow gusts, his gun still pointed at Orozco and Barnes.

His back to the corner…

“Be smart,” Orozco said quietly. “Put the guns down.”

Grimaldi’s gun didn’t waver. But if the chief was frozen in pride and fear and indecision, his cohorts weren’t. All three of them quickly squatted down and set their weapons on the floor.

Steeling himself, Orozco stepped forward into the bore of Grimaldi’s shotgun and gently but firmly took the weapon away from him. Turning around, lowering the muzzle to the ground, he offered it to Barnes.

To his surprise, Barnes waved it away.

“Keep it,” he said calmly. He flicked his hand again, and the knife vanished once more beneath his jacket.

So, too, did his death’s-head scowl.

“A lesson, you said,” Orozco said as he suddenly understood. “Only you weren’t the lesson. You were the distraction.”

“We all were,” Tunney put in as he came over and retrieved the weapons Grimaldi’s men had set on the floor. “First lesson of warfare: if you can get your opponent looking in the wrong direction, you’re halfway there.”

“And if you can talk your opponent into treason, that gets you the rest of the way?” Grimaldi bit out. He still looked a little shaken, but he was rapidly getting back on stride. “So, Sergeant. What did they pay you?”

Orozco stared at the man in disbelief.

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play innocent with me,” Grimaldi said, raising his voice so that the entire confused crowd could hear. “You’re the one who handles the building’s security. Either you deliberately let them in, or else you screwed up in your duties. Which is it?”

Orozco was still trying to unfreeze his tongue when the crowd parted like the Red Sea and Kate Connor walked into the circle.

“You need to enlarge your thinking, Chief Grimaldi,” she said, her voice mildly reproving. “You also need to forget about finding someone to dump the blame on. Not everything is someone else’s fault.”

“Then how did you get in?” Grimaldi demanded.

Kate smiled. “So that you can plug up the hole?” She shrugged. “Fair enough. There’s an old underground drainage tunnel that runs past the northern edge of your building. My husband John found it. It’s outside where your outer wall used to be, but the debris blow-out covered one of the manhole covers so it’s not visible from the street or any of your windows. We got it unblocked and then came in through one of the broken windows that you didn’t bother to seal up, since the whole side was already blocked by a heavy wall of junk.”

Grimaldi’s lips compressed.

“Very clever,” he growled. “So now what? You kill me and take over?”

Kate sighed.

“This isn’t about you, Grimaldi,” she said. “We came in here for one reason: to recruit willing people into the war against Skynet. Some of your neighbors suggested that you might take exception to our efforts, so we decided extra caution might be in order. It appears we were right.”

“Yes, you’re very clever,” Grimaldi said. “So again: now what?”

“We take those who’ve decided to go with us and we leave.” Kate looked around the group.

“Anyone else?” she called.

The lobby remained silent.

“Looks like you’ve already got all the rash fools we had,” Grimaldi said bitterly. “So get out.”

He raised his voice. “And all the rest of you can get back to your jobs. The circus is over.”

A few of the residents glanced uncertainly at each other.

“You heard me,” Grimaldi snapped. “Back to your jobs. We work together, or we die together.”

Still silently, the crowd began to disperse. A minute later only Orozco, Grimaldi and his men, and the Resistance team and their four new recruits remained in the lobby.

Grimaldi’s eyes had never left Kate Connor since the residents began their exit, Orozco noted, and he could tell there was considerably more that the chief wanted to say. But as the last of his people disappeared down the hallways and up the staircase, he merely gave Kate a curt nod and strode off across the lobby toward his office. His men followed, trailing after him like sullen sheep.

“Keep an eye on the doors and staircases,” Barnes ordered as Tunney set aside the confiscated weapons and he and the others started collecting their own from the cache by the door.

“What about you, Sergeant?” Kate added.

Orozco frowned at her.

“What about me?”

“Are you coming with us?”

Orozco felt his lip twist.

“Is this standard Resistance procedure, Ms. Connor?” he asked. “You come into an area a few days ahead of the Terminators, and glean out all the best and the brightest?”

The lines in Kate’s face seemed to deepen.

“Would you rather we stayed away and let everyone die?” she countered.

“That depends,” Orozco said.

“On…?”

“On whether or not Chief Grimaldi’s right,” Orozco said bluntly. “On whether or not you’re the flame that draws the damn Terminator moths in the first place.”

Kate shook her head.

“You know better than that,” she said. “Skynet’s purpose is to destroy humanity. All of humanity. Yes, it keeps track of our activities, but hardly to the point of sending Terminators trailing along behind us to punish the locals for talking with us.”

Orozco felt his stomach tighten.

“I suppose not,” he conceded.

“I understand how you feel, though,” Kate added. “It would be easier to be able to blame someone for what was happening. If you could see some kind of direct cause-and-effect at work.

But that’s not how things are. Skynet’s not so much an opponent as it is a force of nature.”

“Like a hurricane,” Orozco said. “You don’t try to reason with a hurricane. You try to figure out where it’s going, and get out of its way.”

“Exactly,” Kate said, a sudden fierce edge to her voice. “Except that unlike a hurricane, Skynet can be defeated. And it will be, if enough people are willing to take a stand against it.”

“Which gets back to her question,” Barnes said. “You coming with us?”

For a long moment Orozco was tempted. Very tempted.

Grimaldi and his friends didn’t really appreciate all the work he had put into making the Ashes as safe as it was.

Nor did they have any understanding of the true situation they were in. In fact, they seemed to almost pride themselves on their ignorance of the danger Skynet posed. There would definitely be poetic justice in letting them find out the hard way.

But Grimaldi didn’t speak for everyone in the Ashes. And the rest of the people didn’t deserve to die just because the chief had a double helping of boneheadedness.

“You know I can’t do that,” he said.

“I suppose not,” Kate agreed, her voice heavy with regret. “But we needed to ask.”

She nodded at him, then gestured the others toward the archway.

“How soon?” Orozco asked.

Kate paused mid-turn. “We think you’ve got until tomorrow night,” she said.

Less than two days. “Any suggestions?” Orozco asked, forcing his voice to stay calm.

“Explosives are always a good place to start,” Tunney said. “T-600s have electromagnetic cores built into strategic joints so that they can reassemble themselves if you blow off their arms or legs.

Blow them far enough off, though, and that trick won’t work anymore.”

“Do you have access to explosives?” Kate asked. “We might be able to spare you some.”

“I have some,” Orozco assured her. “And the makings for quite a few more.”

“Good,” Tunney said, glancing around the lobby. “You could also consider rigging a few booby-traps. There’s a lot of heavy stonework in here, especially this archway and the stone facing above it. Collapse a wall on a Terminator, and even if you don’t destroy it you’ll put it out of action for awhile.”

“Of course, blowing up walls could also bring the whole building down on top of us,” Orozco pointed out.

“There is that,” Tunney conceded. “I notice you also have a fair number of guns, which is good.

How many of them are large caliber—9mm, .45, or bigger?”

“A fair number,” Orozco said. “Unfortunately, a lot of our armament is smaller than that.”

“Those won’t do much against Terminators,” Kate said grimly.

“But if you can get in enough head shots with the larger rounds, the T-600s will usually go down,” Tunney said. “You can also go for the joints—if you can cripple them, they aren’t as much trouble.” He pursed his lips. “Of course, if Skynet throws in more than a couple of HKs, life will get trickier.”

“Your other choice is to run,” Kate said. “Collect everyone you can, collect everything you can, and get out.”

“And go where?” Orozco countered. “Is there any place that’s safe from Skynet?”

Kate’s lip twitched.

“No,” she admitted.

“Then there’s not much point in running, is there?” Orozco said.

Barnes snorted contemptuously.

“Or you could just roll over and die,” he growled. “Guess that’s up to you.”

“I wish it was up to me,” Orozco said ruefully. “Unfortunately, it isn’t.”

From behind him came the sound of an opening door, and he turned to see Grimaldi’s men filing out of the chief’s office. Apparently the skull session—or chewing out—was over. A couple of the men glowered at Orozco and Kate as they all headed together across the lobby and into the hallway that ran along the north side of the building.

“Excuse me a moment,” Orozco said, and he headed after them.

Halfway across the lobby, as he circled the old fountain, he glanced back over his shoulder to discover that Kate and her people had quietly disappeared.

He caught up with the nearest of the men, Wadleigh, halfway down the hallway.

“What are you doing?” Orozco asked him.

“What do you think?” Wadleigh retorted. “We’re going to find Connor’s back door and plug it.”

“Go ahead and find it,” Orozco said. “But don’t plug it. Not yet.”

Wadleigh snorted. “Sorry, Orozco, but the chief gave orders.” He turned away.

Orozco caught his arm and turned him back around.

“Find the door,” he repeated, enunciating each word carefully and distinctly, “but don’t plug it.

Put a bar across it if you want, or pile a few bricks on it that can be quickly removed. But don’t plug it.”

Wadleigh started to speak, took another look at Orozco’s face, and nodded silently. Orozco held his arm another moment, then released it. Wadleigh turned and continued down the hallway, hurrying but trying not to look like it.

Orozco watched for another moment, then returned to the lobby.

Four people. Only four people had been willing to leave the Ashes’ false sense of security in order to take on the more immediate risks of standing up against humanity’s common enemy. Only four people. And one of them had been just a teenager—

Orozco felt his breath catch in his throat.

Damn.

Damn.