From the Ashes Read online

  Connor felt his eyes open. A memory from his childhood, indeed. “Thank you,” he said. “Where on earth did you find it?”

  “One of Olsen’s men had it with him last month when they came by to swap munitions,” Kate said. “I remembered you talking about listening to it when you were younger, so I traded him a couple of extra bandage packs for it. You know, those packs we dug out of the treatment room at the Orange County Zoo.”

  “I just hope Tunney was able to get that CD player working,” Connor commented, cradling the disk carefully in his hands. “I miss music. That and Italian food, I think, are what I miss most.”

  “For me, it’s definitely music,” Kate mused. “Vocals, especially—I used to love listening to a live choir in full four-part harmony.” She smiled faintly. “Just a bit different from your taste in music.”

  “Differences are the spice of life,” Connor reminded her. “And G’n’R is probably better music to kill machines by.”

  “Probably.” Kate’s smile faded. “Besides, nowadays what reason does anyone have to sing?”

  “There’s still life,” Connor said, eyeing his wife closely. Kate didn’t get depressed very often, but when she did it could be a deep and terrible pit. “And love, and friends.”

  “But mostly just life,” Kate agreed. “I know. Sometimes we forget what’s really important, don’t we?”

  “A constant problem throughout history,” Connor said, breathing a quiet sigh of relief. So she wasn’t going there, after all. Good. “Thanks again, Kate. This really makes my day. Probably even my year.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “Oh, and rock on. The man who gave me the disk told me to say that.” She took a deep breath, and Connor could see her chasing the memories back to where they belonged. “Meanwhile, it’s been a late night, and the world starts up again in about five hours. Come on, let’s go to bed.”

  “Right.” Standing up, Connor reached for his gunbelt.

  And paused. “Did you hear something?” he asked in a low voice.

  “I don’t know,” Kate said, her head tilted in concentration.

  Connor frowned, straining his ears. A whispery wind was blowing gently across the bunker roof, setting cat-purr vibrations through the piles of loose debris up there. Everything seemed all right.

  But something had caught his attention. And something was still screaming wordlessly across his combat senses.

  “Stay here,” Connor told his wife, crossing back to the door. He listened at the panel for a moment, then cautiously opened it.

  The earlier overcast sky had cleared somewhat, allowing a little starlight to filter in through the cracked shutters. Connor checked both directions down the empty corridor, then headed left toward the rear of the bunker and the sentry post situated between the living quarters and storage room.

  Piccerno was on duty, seated on a tall stepladder with everything from his shoulders up snugged up inside the observation dome. Like everything else these days, the dome was a product of simplicity and ingenuity: an old plastic office wastebasket that had been fastened to the top of the bunker, equipped with a set of eye slits that permitted 360-degree surveillance, then covered from above with strategically placed rubble to disguise its true purpose.

  “Report,” Connor murmured as he stepped to the foot of the ladder.

  There was no answer.

  “Piccerno?” Connor murmured, the hair on the back of his neck tingling. “Piccerno?”

  Still no answer. Getting a one-handed grip on the ladder, Connor headed up. He reached the top and pushed aside Piccerno’s bunched-up parka collar.

  One touch of the warm, sticky liquid that had soaked the upper surface of the collar was all he needed to know what had happened. He spent another precious second anyway, peering up into the narrow space between Piccerno’s face and the rim of the dome, just to make sure there was nothing he could do.

  There wasn’t. Piccerno’s eyes were open but unseeing, his forehead leaning against the dome, the blood from the hole in his left temple still trickling down his face.

  Skynet had found them.

  Quickly, Connor climbed back down the ladder, a kaleidoscope of Piccerno’s life with the team flashing through his mind. Ruthlessly, he forced back the memories.

  This was not the time.

  Grabbing the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun that was propped against the wall, he hurried back to the living quarters.

  Kate was already dressed, her gun belt in hand. “What is it?” she asked tensely.

  “Piccerno’s dead,” Connor told her grimly. “Longrange sniper, or else one hell of a silencer.”

  “Terminators?”

  “I didn’t check,” Connor said. “Skynet’s obviously trying the sneaky approach, and I didn’t want to do anything that might alert it that we were onto the game. Get back to supply—I’ll go roust everyone and send them back there. Make a quick sort of the equipment and load them with as much as you think they can handle.”

  “Right,” Kate said as she finished strapping on her gun belt.

  “And keep everyone as quiet as you can,” Connor added. “The longer Skynet thinks we’re all still asleep, the longer we’ll have before the fireworks start.”

  Kate nodded.

  “Be careful.”

  “You, too.”

  He continued along the corridor, ducking into each room as he passed and nudging or whispering the occupants awake, giving them a set of terse instructions, then moving on as they grabbed their clothing and weapons.

  Finally, he reached the bunker’s main entrance. There, to his complete lack of surprise, he found Barnes waiting, standing beside the bunker door with his eye pressed to one of the eyeslits, a 9mm Steyr in his holster and one of the group’s few remaining grenade launchers clutched to his chest. A few feet away stood the young man who was supposed to be on sentry duty tonight, his throat working as he nervously fingered his rifle.

  “We got eight T-600s on the way,” Barnes reported as Connor came up beside him. “What’s goin’ on in back?”

  “They took out Piccerno,” Connor told him. “Quietly, and at least several minutes ago. Probably means Skynet’s about to send in the heavy stuff—T1s or maybe a tank or two—and was hoping to sneak up on us.”

  Barnes grunted and straightened up from the peepholes. His bald head glistened with a week’s worth of sweat, his clenched teeth glinting through two weeks’ worth of beard stubble.

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “We run on our timetable, not Skynet’s,” Connor replied. “If we can buy a few minutes, I can—”

  Barnes nodded.

  “Got just the thing.”

  With that he pulled open the door, and fired.

  There was a soft chuff as the grenade shot skyward out of its tube. Biting down hard on his tongue—I can get more men here before you engage—Connor stepped quickly to the other side of the doorway and looked out.

  In the faint starlight he could see eight towering, human-shaped figures picking their way carefully across the treacherous ground. One of the T-600s looked up at the sounds from the bunker, and Connor caught a glimpse of glowing red eyes.

  And then, with a brilliant flash, Barnes’s grenade exploded.

  Not in the midst of the approaching Terminators, but in the doorway of the half-collapsed four-story building immediately to their right. There was a stutter as the grenade’s shockwave set off a line of smaller charges embedded in the pockmarked masonry.

  And with a horrendous crunch, the entire wall gave way, raining blocks of concrete and rebar and broken glass across the street, toppling and burying all eight of the Terminators.

  “That how you wanted it?” Barnes called to Connor over the echoing roar.

  “Pretty much,” Connor said. So much for giving the group as much time as possible to make their escape.

  On the other hand, if Barnes hadn’t blown the building when he did, the eight Terminators would soon have passed that particu
lar trap, and Connor’s fighters would have had that many more enemies to deal with.

  “I’ll send you some backup,” he added, moving away from the doorway. “Hold for ten minutes, or as long as you can, then pull back to the tunnel.”

  “I don’t need no one else,” Barnes growled, throwing a contemptuous glance at the shaking sentry. “You just get the people and stuff out.”

  “I’ll send you some backup,” Connor repeated, making it clear it was an order, and headed back down the corridor. Barnes was probably one of the best ground fighters in the entire Resistance, but this wasn’t the time for lone-wolf tactics. If indeed there ever was such a time.

  If anyone had needed extra incentive to get moving, Barnes’s wake-up explosion had apparently done the trick. The whole bunker was alive with people, many of them still scrambling into their clothing as they ran toward the supply room and the emergency exit beyond.

  A few of the faster dressers had taken up positions in doorways along the way, their weapons pointed toward the front of the bunker, ready to sacrifice themselves if necessary to slow down the machines once the outer defenses were breached. Connor grabbed two of them and sent them up to the entrance, gave everyone else the same ten-minute warning he’d given Barnes, then headed back to his room for anything he or Kate might have left behind.

  He made especially sure that he grabbed his new G’n’R CD.

  Most of the fifty-odd people of the team had made it to the supply room by the time he arrived, with only a few stragglers still coming in. Kate was in the center of the activity, coolly pointing each newcomer to the boxes, bags, and packs she’d selected for the must-save list.

  “How are we doing?” Connor asked as he picked up two ammo satchels and slung one over each shoulder.

  “Another ninety seconds and we’ll have everything we can carry,” Kate told him, threading a bungee cord between the satchels’ straps and fastening them together across Connor’s chest so that they wouldn’t slip off his shoulders. “They took Piccerno’s body down,” she added more quietly.

  Connor nodded. He’d noticed that on his way through.

  “Have Blair and Yoshi been through? I didn’t spot either of them, but it was pretty dark and I wasn’t exactly taking roll.”

  “Blair’s here,” Kate said, waving to a pair of latecomers and pointing them to a stack of ration boxes. “She said she’ll go out with the rest of us and make her way back to the hangar. Yoshi’s already there, or at least he’s supposed to be.”

  “We’ll need to get the ground crew out, too,” Connor said, grimacing as a low vibration tickled at the soles of his feet. “Here comes our company.”

  The words were barely out of his mouth when one of the younger women dashed in from the direction of the sentry post, nearly running down an eight-year-old boy in the process.

  “T1s,” she announced breathlessly. “Coming in from all directions.”

  “Are they heading for the main door?” Connor asked.

  “No, toward here. I saw them through the—” she faltered a little “—where Piccerno was. Maybe a hundred meters out.”

  Connor nodded. T1s were heavy, splay-armed fighting machines mounted on heavy treads, slower than the humanoid T-600s but more heavily armed and even harder to take down. The plan was probably to roll them up onto the roof near Piccerno’s sentry post in hopes of collapsing it by sheer weight and trapping the group in a pincer.

  “Go to the front and tell Barnes and the others I said to pull out now,” Connor told her. “They’re to collect the rest of the backstops along the way.”

  The girl nodded and took off down the corridor at a dead run.

  “Tunney?” Connor called, looking around at the heavily laden men and women.

  “Here, sir,” Tunney called from the side wall. He and the other lieutenant, David, were standing beside the dark opening that led into the bunker’s emergency exit. Like Connor, each man was loaded with two shoulder bags of ammo or grenades, but instead of just a sub-machine gun each of them also carried a grenade launcher and flame thrower. “Time to go?” he asked.

  “Almost,” Connor said, squeezing Kate’s shoulder briefly and then crossing to join them. “Now it is,” he said. “I’ll take point; keep a three-meter spacing between us.”

  “I believe it’s my turn for point, sir,” Tunney said, his voice low but firm.

  Connor shook his head.

  “My team; my job. Stay alert—if Skynet’s found the far end, we’ll have some unpleasant surprises waiting.”

  He looked back at the group, to find them silently watching him. Watching, and trusting.

  “Stay as quiet as you can, and don’t stop moving,” he said, keeping his voice as calm as if this was just another training exercise. “Once you’re through the tunnel, depending on what’s waiting out there, we may decide to split into small groups of two or three. Everyone knows where Fallback One is?”

  The room bobbed briefly with nodding heads.

  “Then I’ll see you all there,” Connor said. “Good luck.” Nodding for Tunney and David to follow, he headed into the tunnel.

  The group referred to the emergency exit as a tunnel, but a real, hand-dug tunnel would have taken far more time and manpower than the group had had to spare over the past few months. The route was instead a mostly natural pathway consisting of half-crushed hallways, basements, and service corridors. Connor’s people had cleared out the blockages, propped up the ceilings, and dug short connecting shafts where necessary until they’d created an exit route that could take them invisibly a good three blocks from the bunker.

  But there was always the chance that one of Skynet’s endlessly roving machines had spotted the route, and Connor felt his nerves tightening with each step as he made his way through the darkness.

  There were dozens of places where the roof had eroded through to the outside world, allowing in some badly needed starlight but also precluding the use of any lights by the escapees. Worse, the longest straight-line segment anywhere in the tunnel was about six meters, with everything else being a collection of zigzags, right-angle turns, and occasional backtracks. A T-600 waiting in the darkness around any one of those corners could have Connor and his vanguard dead before they even knew what had hit them.

  But each corner was clear, the starlight filtering through the fissures never blazed with HK floodlights, and he heard nothing of the telltale growl of T-1 treads. Gradually, Connor’s hopes and pace began to pick up. They might make it. They just might make it.

  He was about halfway through the tunnel when the sounds of distant explosions and gunfire began to echo through the passageway from behind him.

  He swore feelingly under his breath. The blasts could be nothing more ominous than Barnes setting off the last string of the bunker’s booby traps. But they could also be the rear guard fighting desperately against T1s that had succeeded in crashing through the bunker roof.

  And Kate would be one of the last of the group to leave, probably just a couple of steps ahead of Barnes. If the Terminators had cut through...

  If they had, there was nothing Connor could do to help. He could only trust to hope, and to the destiny that linked him and Kate to humanity’s ultimate salvation.

  He’d gone twenty meters more when a blast rolled through the tunnel, sending a wave of warm air across the back of his neck. The final booby trap had been triggered, bringing down the bunker’s ceiling and burying any Terminators that had made it inside as it sealed off the end of the tunnel. Connor and his people were committed now, with nowhere to go but forward.

  Still no sign that Skynet had noticed them. Connor kept going, the drifting air currents from the overhead gaps slowly becoming a single steady breeze in his face. He rounded one final blind corner, and with a suddenness that for some reason never failed to surprise him, he was at the end.

  Cautiously, he looked out between the carefully positioned rotting two-by-fours that blocked the exit. The street beyond was cleaner than s
ome he’d seen, with much of the masonry and wood having been scavenged over the years by the handful of civilians who still scratched out a tenuous existence in the ruined city. More importantly, there was no sign of Terminators.

  From the direction of the bunker came a short burst of gunfire from one of the remote-activated guns set up there and in nearby buildings. The burst was answered instantly by a longer, staccato roar from the T-600s’ miniguns. Connor gestured Tunney forward, and the two men set to work clearing the exit.

  The wooden barrier looked sturdier and more impassible than it actually was, and it took less than half a minute for them to silently move the boards out of the way. Connor started to step out.

  And ducked back as an HK swooped past, just half a block away, heading toward the bunker. Connor waited a few seconds, then tried again.

  Nothing jumped or swooped out at him, either metal or human. As the sporadic gunfire continued from the vicinity of the bunker, he did a quick three-sixty, then gestured to Tunney and David. The two men slipped past him, moved ten meters in opposite directions down the street, and did three-sixties of their own. They hand-signaled the all-clear, then hunkered down in the rubble with weapons ready.

  Connor stepped back into the tunnel, went back around that final blind corner, and gestured to the line of people waiting tensely in the dark.

  Blair Williams, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail, was the fifth one out. She spotted Connor and stepped out of line.

  “I’m heading for the hangar,” she announced softly. “Any special orders?”

  “Yes; that you wait a minute,” Connor told her, grabbing her arm and pulling her down into a crouch as another HK appeared to the west, weaving its way between the skeletal remains of two of the taller buildings.

  “Why?” Blair countered.

  “Just wait,” Connor repeated.

  Blair huffed something under her breath, but obediently moved over to the stubby remains of a fire hydrant and squatted beside it, drawing her big .44 caliber Desert Eagle from its holster.

  Two more HKs had swooped in to join the party at the bunker before everyone made it out of the tunnel. But none of the machines came close, and there was no indication that they’d noticed anything amiss, especially with all the gunfire masking any sounds the group might make.