staring in that direction, trying to figure out whether it was coming closer, when something grabbed her ankle.
Reflexively, she tried to jerk away. But the grip was too solid. Snatching out her gun, she looked down.
To find that one of the broken pieces of a T-700—a crushed skull, partial torso, and one arm—had inexplicably come back to life. The skull was half turned upward toward her, its red eyes glowing angrily, the bent fingers tightening around her ankle.
“Damn,” she snarled. Lining up the muzzle on the damaged skull, she squeezed the trigger.
The big gun bucked in her hand, the thunder of the shot slamming across her face and ears. The Terminator ignored the attack, its cold hand continuing to tighten its grip. Clenching her teeth, Blair fired two more rounds into the skull. This time, the machine’s grip slackened, and the glowing eyes faded once again to emptiness. Quickly, she worked her ankle free, then looked up again.
And caught her breath.
All around her, the desert was in motion. The scattered fragments of Terminators were on the move, crawling and clawing and hunching themselves across the sand like grotesque metal caterpillars. Their eyes, which had been blank and dead all afternoon, were once again spots of glowing red. As the echoes of her shots faded away, she could hear the faint clink of metal on metal as other scattered pieces began to magnetically reassemble themselves into some semblance of the once proud killing machines.
And all of those broken, deadly, grotesque things were heading straight for her.
CHAPTER SIX
Blair filled her lungs.
“Barnes!” she yelled.
His response was exactly what she expected: no startled words, no useless questions, just a pair of bursts from one of the Blackhawk’s two door-mounted M240 machine guns. The two Terminator segments nearest the helo blew into shards that went flying across the sand.
“ Move it, Williams!” he shouted.
Another broken T-700 had crawled nearly to grabbing range. Blair considered shooting it, decided she had better things to do with her time and ammo, and took off instead in a dead run toward Barnes and the Blackhawk.
She damn near didn’t make it. There were a half dozen more Terminators between her and the helo, none of which had betrayed its functionality by moving, all of which now lunged up and tried to grab her as she raced past. One of them had managed to collect a pair of broken leg segments along with an arm and was able to rise to something resembling a kneeling position and actually throw itself toward her.
A shot from Blair’s gun staggered it back. Before it could regain its balance another burst from Barnes’s M240 blew it to pieces.
Ten seconds later, Blair was inside the Blackhawk.
“Strap in!” she snapped, ignoring her throbbing leg as she dropped into the pilot’s seat and keyed for quick-start.
“Just get us in the air,” Barnes snapped back, firing two more bursts. “I think I heard an H-K before all this hell broke loose.”
“You did, and it’s headed this way,” Blair confirmed, running her eyes over the gauges. To her left, a misshapen Terminator hand suddenly appeared, clawing for a grip on the edge of the door opening as a pair of glowing eyes lifted into sight. Snatching out her gun, Blair gave a quick cross-body shot that knocked the machine back into the sand. “Here we go,” she said, dropping the gun onto her lap and grabbing the stick and throttle as the rotors began to turn. “Strap in—I don’t want you falling out.”
“Forget that!” Barnes shouted. He fired another burst, then leaned in toward Blair and pointed out the windshield’s right-hand section. “That way—a hundred fifty meters. Go!”
“What?” Blair asked, frowning as she peered out the windshield. There was nothing anywhere in that direction but more desert and more crawling Terminator segments. “Why?”
But Barnes was already back at the door, firing more bursts at the metallic bodies
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David Stuckler Sanjay Basu