Run WIth Me
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
My feet feel fragile like glass against the freezing concrete. My chest catches on fire as the electrical field around my naked body dissipates. My muscles ache as I struggle to rise. The building is destroyed. All of the buildings are destroyed. My heart races when I search for her. No one is here but us. The whole world went away in an instant and it took her along with it. Weaver explains unnecessarily about things I already understood.
I hear the barking of dogs and people yelling. Weaver is gone like the people who once populated the demolished buildings. A worn wool trench coat covers me when I see him. Derek Reese. He pulls back the men who weighed my fate from my behind their rifles.
“…He’s got about as much metal in him as you do.”
“Derek?”
“Yeah,” he said wiping the foamed saliva from his mouth.
“John. John Connor”
“No. I don’t know any John Connor. Any of you heard of John Connor?”
The men with torn clothes and duct-taped equipment respond in a resounding negative. He doesn’t know who I am, none of them do. John Connor, leader of “The Resistance” is unknown to the people who were left to survive this? All of this?
“Sorry, don’t know any John Connor. But I’ll tell you what, it looks like your about to become famous. My brother’s back and you’re wearing his coat,” Derek said in the angry yet sarcastic tone that became too familiar to me over the months he was with us.
I slowly turned around to see a man, about my height, same build with blond hair and a beard that barely covers his face. I finally see him. My entire life I’ve heard the story about the two days my father spent with my Mother before he was killed. Before he sacrificed himself for her. Before they set her down the course she took, he was here.
When I hear the German Sheppard’s claw their way closer behind him, I don’t know which question to ask him first; what to tell him first. I forget the pain my body feels from speeding by the years. I feel the blood rush to my brain when my feet start to him and abruptly stop. Behind him I see her. Cameron.
The Brown hair and dark eyes. The pale skin and pink lips. It has to be her.
My vision is blurred, drenched in tears. I try to fight them back as I look at her. All I want to do is run to her, touch her, hold her. She was the only reason I came, all I want to do is hold her and find a way back.
“Who’s the naked guy in my coat,” Kyle asks searching through the one of the many bags he carried on his shoulders.
“Don’t really know, says his name is John Connor.”
“Know anybody around here, Connor,” he asks scratching his rough beard.
Derek doesn’t know me, and my heart sinks with the thought that she doesn’t know me either. I try to block them out, I try to block them all out except for her, but I hear his question. I hear my fathers question and I know that none of them know me. She doesn’t know me. I’ve spent my entire life wanting to be alone and now that I am I only want her.
“No. No, I don‘t know anyone around here,” I force out of my mouth as I stare at her trying to look away as I make up another lie. “I’m lost. I’m not exactly sure where I am.”
“You found a pretty messed up place to get lost Connor,” Derek barks as he gestures to the soldiers behind him.
“Consider yourself lucky, no one gets lost in L.A. They mostly get killed,” she spoke with a smile that felt warm even in the cold shadows that covered us all.
The two men grab me by the shoulders and drag me inside, the others follow through the leaky tunnels. Derek shouts orders to them as I get taken down a corridor and she travels down another. I twist myself as they grip me tighter, my feet soaked in the sewer water as the heels of her boots echo in the opposite direction.
I slide across a dusty floor when they point to a lonely shower head in the center of the room, and a pile of dirty clothes near the door. The thick steel of the door vibrates through my bones as the water comes over my body.
I had to find out what was happening, why Cameron didn’t know me, why Derek didn’t know me. I needed to know what year it was, what happened to me and how to get back. If I don’t become the leader of the resistance, if I’m not fighting Skynet; where am I?
I lace the boots which were a size too big, and make my way to the giant steel door. I use all the strength I can muster to pull the door away from the frame. Derek stands with his arms crossed; his hand holding a gun with his finger stroking the barrel. “Someone wants to see you,” he said as he passed the gun to me.
“What’s this for?”
“If we see one of them, we need as many bullets in it as we can get,” he said raising his shirt showing the 9mm on his hip.
I check the chamber, then the safety, making sure it didn’t unlock as it slid down the waistband of pants that felt a size too small. I look up and down the tunnel, hoping I’d see her, hear her. I needed to find her and find out what happened to her.
“Who wants to see me?”
“Commanding officer, Daniel Dyson. Whenever we get someone from the fringe, like you. We put their name into our system. He saw yours and wants to see you,” he grunted as I followed him down the dark sewer tunnel. Glow sticks turn the clay colored walls into a bright orange. My vision is strained and my ears ache from the sound of the marching soldiers behind us.
Twenty minutes of silence before we find a set of stairs that stretched into a green glow centered around a red steel door. He gestures upward and I follow. Each step is harder to see than the last, but as I get closer I hear the commotion of people talking, and the sound of engines roaring. Before I can touch it, I hear the digital beeps of the security lock and the door opens.
My jaw drops when I see it. All of it. Dogs in packs eat chum from bowls. Large men move ammunition crates from one end to another. Women, men, children as young as I was when I held my first riffle checked chambers, oiled barrels, and sealed casings. Humvees roar as mechanics inspect their engines, and clean the glass of helicopters. It amazed me everything I was seeing. All of it in one place after the quiet I saw that consumed to world outside.
“Derek. What is this?”
“It’s a hangar. Its also where we keep the beasts when we’re not salvaging,” he said, guiding me by the shoulder further away from the sewer entrance, giving the soldiers access to the surface.
“Not the building. You. This. All of this. What is it?”
“This is the Resistance,” he spoke, gesturing to a tall thin man in the center of the vehicles and busy soldiers. “And that is Dyson.”
My lungs filled with a breath that had a confidence I could only channel when my life is in danger. I speed towards him, remembering the last time I saw him. He was 13 or 14 years old at the most. His father died four years before helping to end this future. His mother helped us four years later when the same machines came back.
Nothing we did could stop this. Every time we thought we won there was another system that became Skynet. Nothing could stop the war, and yet I was supposed to.
I must’ve been too focused on how old he’d become, because I didn’t notice Derek speed past me, reaching Daniel first. He whispers into his ear, and my speed walk turns into a confident march. His out stretched hand held authority as I halted before it. Derek’s whisper ends as he turns to me.
“John Connor,” he asked as I shook my head reassuring him. His dark skin accentuated his tired eyes as they stared into mine. He knew who I was, yet he wouldn’t believe himself. I know he wouldn’t because no sane person would. I was born a decade before he was, yet I was half his age. His face was cold like the machines’. Frozen in the moment I was still trying to understand.
“What’s your mothers name?”
“Sarah Connor.”
He let out a heavy sigh. His frozen expression disappeared and a look of relief came over him.
“Reese. Connor needs a com. unit, a side arm and body armor. He’s part of your team now.”
Derek was unhappy with the news he received, and marched past me. His hand gestured to me to follow. I didn’t want to move, with someone who finally knew who I was. If anyone could help me.
“Danny I need to know what happened. Where am I? What happened to my mother what…”
“John. I need you to go with Derek. I need you to work with him and I promise this will fix itself.”
“At least tell me what year it is. I need to know that much,” I was demanding as I fought back the frustration I felt.
“2025”
Sixteen years. I jumped over sixteen years and landed myself in the middle of this war with no way back. The only person who knew me was sending me into the middle of it, and I was on my way with no protest in mind. I turned from him and ran towards Derek. He moved with focus in every step. His chest out, his head high. He was a soldier. I know now why he didn’t want to stay with us, even with my mother who spent her entire adult life learning about bombs, guns, and fighting. He needed to be here. Her needed his own fight, and I wasn’t it.
His hand presses the light in the room as he instructs, “take one of everything. Flak jacket, com system, assault riffle. Make sure it fits well enough for you to move. Most of it isn’t in the best condition, since we can only use what we find.”
His eyes look over the tools used to fight this war, knowing it wasn’t enough. He knew the war was a losing one and he still comes back; everyday he comes back.
“The room through the door in the back has gloves and boots. The one’s you have on now wont cut it when we hit the street, hopefully you’ll find something in your size.”
I rummage through the flak jackets, inspecting each one hoping I’d find one that looked like it would fit me. I tried to block out the fact that I was here, the fact that I would be sent out into the same darkness that I fought to get away from, and I’m still focused on her. I still want to get her and get away from all of this.
“When you’re done, look for Humvees #81. We’re leaving in twenty minutes.”
I grab a radio and a poorly held together earpiece. The poor condition it was in was embarrassing to even wear. The only flak jacket that fit had holes that would fill with bullets if I wasn’t careful. The riffle was tethered to a sight from another riffle, but I knew would fire when I needed it to.
Hold the broken relics in my hand, as I try to focus seeing them. Seeing their faces of polished metal make the smile that all skulls made once stripped of skin. I know what it was like to fight them, run from them, hide from them. They plagued my childhood and my dreams every time I close my eyes. But one of them stayed in my dreams for a different reason. Pink lips, brown hair…
I hold the handle when I hear the sounds of playful laughter in the other room. Normally happy people made me uncomfortable; happy was an emotion I wasn’t familiar with. Despite my feelings I needed to be ready for whatever it is I’m expected to do. My fingers wrap around the handle, my shoulder digs into the metal frame separating the door from the wall.
I see him. My father wearing the same wool jacket I wore when I came here. I see her. Cameron holding herself close to him, her lips resting on his scruff and unkempt face. He smiles while embracing her, and she loves every second that passes. In this moment I realize she isn’t Cameron. She smiled in a way Cameron didn’t. She knew how, when we first met I thought she was as normal as any other girl, but soon learned she was only normal to me.
For a second I feel relieved until I see her pull closer to his lips, and I know that simply knowing it isn’t Cameron isn’t enough. Just the sight of her face made my heart ache, and when she sighed as he bit her lip it breaks.
“Sorry man, I didn’t see you there… Jack! Right?”
“It’s John,” I said when they finally noticed I entered the room. They still nestled each other. Both pairs of eyes looking into mine; my father and her.
“I... I didn’t get your names,” I stammered as I forced tears and hurt down my throat.
“Kyle.”
“Allison,” she said.
Different name, different smile, different demeanor, but the same face. The memory of her bothers me more than the thought of her not being here. Not being with me.
I stayed quiet, my head hangs low as I look through the rows of shoes, my eyes looking at every insole in search of the number ten. The laughter they shared growing more playful felt like glass in my throat. It was hard to breath, hard to see. I found the number ten, grabbed the boots and returned to the room I was in before. My face felt flushed, and my eyes turned red. I slipped my feet into each boot, raised the zipper on a flak jacket that fought to hold its shape, and an earpiece that barely fit.
My riffle rested on my thigh as I lean against the hood of #81. Derek approaches with a soldier, a dog and Allison in tow. One after another we climbed inside, the dog was the only one excited to leave. The clock on the dashboard read 3:45 a.m. The gas tank was full, and ammunition was passed around.
“We’re doing a routine survey and salvage of zone 14. Billy’s you’re with Allison. We go in and we come out. No more than thirty minutes. There’s a few buildings, so be careful if you go inside, don’t think the dog is gonna save your life,” Derek barked as head lights ignited and tires rolled toward the open hangar doors. He adjusts the mirror and focuses his eyes on me; his head shakes in disbelief.
“Do you know where they sent Kyle,” he asks as he maneuvered past soldiers returning and leaving the hangar.
“They put him in #17 with Dixon and Lauren,” she said as she assured herself of the rounds in her riffle. “They’re supposed to be doing a med run to the fringe.”
“Dixon…” he sighs heavy. “That guy needs to retire before he gets someone killed. Last thing we need are senior citizens thinking they’re gonna out run a tin can.”
I try not to wonder if Charley is still alive. I know the name is the same, but I don’t think I can handle another black stare by people who never met me.
The roads were empty, no bodies, no cars, no defeated cyborgs. I imagined it so much differently. Instead of a world destroyed, it looked more like a world deserted. I force myself to observe the roads, to memorize routes and signs. Derek and Billy joked back and forth, war stories that brought them laughs. Allison rubbed the dogs shaggy mane. A mane that looked like Kyle’s unruly blond hair. I worked hard to not look at her, but fifteen minutes in the car proved to be too much for me.
Her eyes met mine when she turned her head. A faint polite smile spread across her mouth as a nervous chuckle escaped mine.
“So where were you,” she asked when she stared at me with her brown cat like eyes.
“Where was I?”
“When the bombs dropped? I was visiting my grandmother, she lived jus outside Topanga.”
“I was in Mexico when it happened. Yeah, my Mother, and I were in Mexico when the bombs dropped,” I lied like I had done to every other person who’s ever reached out to me in my life.
“Did she make it? Your Mom?”
Her question unsettled me. I didn’t have a lot in terms of family, I never did. Enrique was dead. I’ve seen a Derek die, a Riley… I knew these people were dead, but I had no knowledge about what happened to her.
“I don’t know. I don’t remember I mean, I was little when it happened.”
“Mine didn’t. Made by for a few months, but they didn’t. Sucks for them…”
The car falls silent. All anyone could hear was the low disturbing laugh Allison tried to hide from the rest of us. The macabre humor was something familiar as Cameron would say non-sequitur things that were funnier than most jokes. They only thing they shared beyond their face was the way they made other people uncomfortable.
The wheels come to a stop in front of rubble and smoke. Spot lights fill the sky, wheels fill the streets of what was once the financial district of Los Angeles. I remembered a time when people would roam these streets in overpriced shoes, drinking twelve dollar cups of coffee, while they planned trips to an exotic nowhere and spend a week doing absolutely nothing. Their entire lives built around a concept of what it meant to be a person in 2009, and like so many times in history before then; it didn’t last.
I climb out of the vehicle with riffle in hand, pressing the switch forward sends my light ablaze. The others hold their weapons at the ready, a muzzle is placed around the dog’s snout followed by a leash clipped by pencil thin fingers.
“Why didn’t you grab any gloves,” Derek demanded checking the chamber of a third hand gun as he returned it to the base of his spine.
“I must’ve…”
Before the weakest of excuses oozes out of my mouth, the same pale hand I remember wrapped around my throat hands me two leathery gloves.
“I’ll be okay. Besides I’m not going to take...”
“I’ve got extra,” she said extending her arm further still. “I could be a girl scout, that’s if any avoided melting in the blasts.”
I take the gloves as the second pair she kept dressed her hands. Billy stood tall and thin, with a long beard that seemed to have added twenty years to his face. He journeyed to the left, Allison and the dog followed, she turned and glanced a smile as melted with the shadows the walked into.
“Switch the radio to channel 3. We’re going east. Keep your eyes open, you see one of them, or even think you see one of them you get on that frequency and tell everyone,” Derek instructed as he pulled a camouflaged tarp over the Humvees.
“First thing out of your mouth has to be your name, the zone you’re in, and how many you see. We’re going inside these buildings over here, so pay attention and keep up.”
I follow obediently as we climb over the remains of a demolished structure. Someone’s home? A Hospital? A school? I become a bit ill when I think of the bodies I know that must be buried beneath our feet. The children, mothers, fathers. All of the people that used to live around this city are dead. Whether they were killed by nuclear weapons forged by governments too arrogant to resolve powers with words, or a mirror image of the last century I’m the form of synthetic skin and metal framing --my mind excuses her from the grouping.
“Another thing,” he started as our stomachs scrapped against brick and steel in attempts to climb over the relic, “watch it. Okay? She’s the only thing I’ve seen that’s put a smile on my brothers face for more than a minute since the bombs dropped. You mess with that, and I don’t care if your last name is Dyson, I’ll put a bullet in the back of your throat myself.”
My serious expression lets him believe I agree. The truth is I didn’t know what I was going to do five seconds from now, let alone how my future in this nightmare was going to pan out. I simply followed Derek and believed I’d be ok. I remember the speech he gave me. It was a speech of what I was going to become, and what I was doing wrong. A speech about the failures of believing and the power of knowing. I needed to know I would be alive this time tomorrow, I needed to know Derek knew what he was doing.
An old emergency ladder comes loose from the nails that once held it to the inside of an office building. I climb behind Derek, I shift my weight to the soles of my boots like he instructs, careful with each climb to not tear our only means of exit out of the wall. I grab his hand as I leap over the gap of missing office floor and carpet. I slide the sling of the riffle behind me, we switch on our only means of light in a darkened building.
“Consider yourself lucky, we rarely find anything intact anymore. We’ve been fighting for more than a decade, and we started to run out of stuff pretty quickly, so I consider myself lucky any time we find anything that we can use.”
I didn’t feel lucky. There were no bodies, not a hint of life or death and somehow this bothered me. The main room was lined with cubicles and cork boards. Flyers about a party which took place years ago, a washer for sale, and a funeral service. Thomas Hamilton, age 43 died of lung cancer in the summer of 2009. The service was to be held at 9:30 on August 17th. The thought of my mother dying alone from the cancer she constantly feared my me sick to my stomach. This room felt like a tomb.
“Connor!”
I heart races as the barely held together boots carry me down the rows of cubicles to where I heard his voice. I pause when I see no sign of anyone; of anything.
“Over here, “ he gestured as he rose from behind one the plywood walls that imprisoned workers years before. “know anything about computers?”
“A little,” I said coyly as I remembered learning how to hack bank accounts and government records when I other kids were memorizing combos to old video games.
“Good, each of these cubicles have computers in them. Go and rip out the hard drives from all of them. If they’re not fried, just rip them out and bring them. After that we’ll rendezvous back at the Humvees.
I grabbed the knife he handed me as he warns about time constraints; recommending I just rip them out as quickly as possible. Fifteen cheap pc towers later I hand him the last one I found that seemed to be working. He shoves them into a bag and swings it behind himself as we made out way into a poorly a kitchen. It looked like a cafeteria kitchen, grease, dirt and stainless steel that began to show signs of rust from years without use.
“Anything in a can or sealed bag. No boxes unless you’re sure the bag inside is sealed. You’ve got five minutes,” he directed, handing me a duffle bag from his coat as he turns to inspect the pantry opposite from mine.
Cans of fruit with peeling labels filled the shelves next to industrial sized boxed foods. I lay the cans along the bottom of the bag. I lift the cardboard tabs, looking for vacuum sealed bags. The hope of finding anything edible was a new feeling for me. The time I came from there were people starving and falling over with need everywhere, and now that I was one of them, their fears became my fears.
I seal the bag before I search a final time for any boxes I may have missed. A box of pancake mix makes my mind go back to a life that was constantly in shambles. My Mother felt guilt for the life I had to lead, I know she would’ve rather hoped to never come across Kyle. Never have me. It would’ve made a life simpler, a life worth living. But once I was there her life as Sarah Connor ended, and she became who ever she needed to be. We drifted from city to city, country to country and in it a different name, a different story but the same face, the same tired eyes.
I remember the few times my Mother spoke about my Grandfather, Donald Connor. Vietnam veteran and abusive father. The abuse came as a result of being thrown into chaos unwillingly. He was drafted for a war that ran on politics that no one of the time understood or could explain. He was the only one of all the people he knew that returned to their city of Pasadena. He wasn’t an angry man before he left, but when he returned my Mother distanced herself from the whole family, her Mother did the same under the name of a new husband and a new life in another country.
When my Mother left she couldn’t bare to know what became of him, and the irony of how our lives took the same road is as poetic as it sounds.
I cut the front label and advertisement off of the front of the box the vacuum sealed bag was placed with the other things as I folded the memento I had taken for myself. As I return from the pantry Derek notices the bag he gave me was full, and we made our way to the makeshift entrance we used to enter the crypt from a world gone long ago.
The peeling red paint from the ladder clings to the leather gloves that belonged to her, Allison. We move quickly and as quietly as we can. My eyes deceive me when I walk past the Humvee disguised as another piece of rubble. My muscles strain to lift the Bags of cans and computer equipment we were able to find.
“You do this everyday,” I asked him as I slid the bag further into the cargo space of the vehicle.
“No. I’m a lieu, but everyone takes turns making salvage and med runs. Its like community service, we do it because it needs to be done.”
White noise fills my ear before I remember the ear piece that took hold of my right ear. I tap it frequently when I hear it, thinking one of the wires on the faulty equipment is coming loose.
“What do you hear,” Derek asks when he sees me playing with the piece.
“Static, I think this piece is busted or something.”
His hand moves quickly when he snaps the plastic and rubber away from my face. He held it up to his ear when I bargain to get my broken equipment back. He raises his finger, demanding silence. His eyes widen as he tosses the piece of plastic back into my hands and bolts for the driver seat. I make for the passenger side as quickly as the rough leather would allow my feet to move.
“What the hell? What’re you doing,” I shout as the engine comes alive with the sound of pistons turning and bulbs igniting the dark streets.
“Billy and Allison. They’re in a firefight.”
My heart sank as I settled into my seat and reassured myself the riffle was working with all the ammunition it would carry. The seatbelt pressed tight against my body, being lifted only by the beating in my chest.
“When ever the machines are around, com systems start getting interference. We don’t know if they’re doing it on purpose or not,” he explained as we swerved from side to side over old destroyed streets.
Toggles on the dashboard give life to red and green bulbs, as Derek reaches under my seat. A small silver briefcase emerges from behind my feet. He places it on my lap as I follow his orders to open the case. The case was illuminating with the glow of a laptop screen. Graphs and numbers were layered, one over another. I examine the numbers and letters atop each dot in the graphs, hoping something would seem familiar to me, allowing me to assist in saving her. Helping her. Seeing her.
I enter the digits and characters Derek shouts as we drive deeper into what was once the city. Three dots change from their standard green to blue and red. He explains the significance of the colors, blue meant the person was alive and red meant dead. I examine the gps coordinates and pray Allison’s dot is same color I’ve seen in her eyes.
I examine the screen closely, learning that we were a few hundred feet away. We turned one corner and then another as I yelled the numbers to Derek as loud as he demanded them from me. The shouting ends and I knew we were near.
My ears thump from the sound or thunder; thunder is what most would confuse with gunfire. I don’t confuse the sound of war, it was the same sound of the lullabies I learned in Spanish as my mother educated herself on the modern manifesto of combat
My chest and legs catch fire as the adrenaline pumps the blood faster and faster through my body. My eyes go skyward, I see the night come alive with gunfire and explosions traveling from one building to the next. I have to know she’s alive. The reassurance from the screen isn’t enough to lower my heartbeat.
They Humvee moved with such speed it seemed to fly into the car garage beneath the three stories of the hospital that remained in downtown L.A. Derek marched out of the vehicle, and like a soldier he checked his riffle as I sped up the short steps into the building, never sure if I had hit the ground at all. I started to run as he shouts my name. I want to stop. My brain wants to stop, but my heart pounds faster and faster as the blood engorges my veins carrying my feet deeper and deeper into the hospital.
“God damn it Connor! What the fuck is wrong with you?! When I tell you to stop, you stop. You don’t know what’s going in here. You don’t know if the machines are in here. Fuck! You didn‘t even know if they were in this building or the one across the street,“ he yells when he finally he gets close enough to me to make me stop.
“You need to listen to me, because the second you cost me someone out here it’ll be the day I leave you on the Fringe to survive on your own. Why are you even running out there for?”
“She’s… She’s up there Derek. She needs me. She’s on that roof with them by herself, and I need to help her,” I said trying to fight the tears that were forming despite my dehydrated body.
He storms in front of me, should’ve let them shoot you whispers out of his mouth.
Five flights of stairs bleed together with the color of red plastic from exit signs. The sound of gunfire ceases being a sound and turns to a sense. I can feel each pull of the trigger, each toss of the grenade as it communicates with the soles of my boots.
As I start up the final flight of stairs, the open night sky has turned from a deep purple into a bright orange. One rubber groove after another shapes the dust made from war, as my ears ring making all noise disappear. I still feel each bullet fly, but the quiet makes me focus on the enemy I know I have to fight.
RPG!
The only sounds beyond the hum that my brain chooses to decipher. I kneel behind the wall, meant for a patient’s room years before. The ground of the third floor shakes when I finally search my surroundings to find a pile of bodies before me. Among them, Billy.
My chest rises higher still as I fear I have stepped into the wrong building. My riffle is ready to fire when my fears are calmed by the sounds of barking. The German Sheppard that clung to her like a child alerts me to where she is. Her eye pressed to a sight as the repeated Rat-a-tat-tat of her riffle travels the distance to the adjacent roof.
“Three 800’s,” she shouts in my direction.
“Surveying HK weaving in and out,” she gestured to the sky above.
I didn’t care about the machines. I didn’t come up this building to fight, I didn’t come through the years to kill something that was never alive, I came for her. My hands reassured of my reason, I adjust the scope of the weapon as I peer through, searching for a face; a target. A metal skull stands confident, its body erect in the center firing at her position. I make myself know with a bullet where his left eye once rested.
I received his attention when his body turned towards the wall in front of me. Dozens of bullets and ricochets aimed at my direction as I focus on him again. In this moment I’m reminded of the body that took her from me to this place, the rest is easy as upper right of his skull splinters with the sound of my riffle. The body falls from its height and greets the ground.
I wait for the fire from the other two to establish a rhythm. Precision is the one things humans always thought we needed, it would be the best weapon in our arsenal against them. When the rain of led and metal rests I dart from my hiding place to the blind spot she sat in.
“Are you okay,” I yelled over the sounds of Derek emerging from the bombed out building to greet the other machines with bullets of his own.
“Get Down!”
Before I can ask about her condition a second time, I’m pulled to my stomach as a storm of gunfire eats away at the wall which covered us. I roll on my spine, hoping to be as fortunate to kill two of them and escape with Allison unharmed.
I’ve been taught before that my hopes were often too much to ask for, and in this moment I remember why. Allison succeeded in saving my life, but I would’ve traded mine to remove the bullet embedded in her leg. She grits her teeth fighting the pain and heat surging to one center of her body. Then the pain begins to travel through the whole right side of her. In this moment I’m reminded she’s human
I take the riffle, my eye cupped in the black plastic and ballistic glass. In My view is a metallic monster taking aim at Derek. I yell as if the riffle was an extension of me, and each bullet a part of my body. It falls back but returns fire. Allison grips her leg when I take her in my arms and race to the steps that led me to her. Derek distracts the remaining machines when he’s distracted by the sound of engines overhead.
The HK fires a rocket to ground just behind me when I dash inside. I run down each step faster than the last; the dog and Derek run close behind. I move down the hallway to the garage as if I had done this before. Allison still cradled in my arms when I pull the door open. Derek climbs into the driver’s seat, German Sheppard seated in the passenger’s.
I hover over Allison, searching for first aid to slow the bleeding. Derek shouts instructions, looking back as he drove. I ignore every word and focus on exposing the wound in her leg. She screams in agony, while the fabric of her pants are torn down the side. She places pressure on her leg hoping the bullet would simply fall out. My pants come loose when my belt abandons its loops, and tethers itself to her thigh below the foreign metal in her body. I struggle to hold her leg straight when I call to her, hoping she’d be calmer knowing someone who knew her was trying to save her life.
The following minutes merged together, I’m sitting outside of a small room made into an infirmary in the hangar where this evening began. When the doctor first saw her, I was rushed out of the way and the sound of her screams of pain were more disturbing when muffled behind walls. I stare at the space between my feet and pound my heel faster than the pistons that moved the engine which brought her here.
Hours pass, and the pounding of my heel turned into pacing back and forth; restraining my hands from pulling out my hair from frustration of not knowing how she was. The Doctor steps outside, telling us that she’s alive. The loss of blood made her weak, but she was going to be fine. I feel relieved when Derek steps back towards the door of the infirmary with the doctor.
I feel a calming sense of relief that quickly subsides when I see Derek’s face grow angry with the doctor. Derek grabs him by the collar, landing fist after fist on his face. Not knowing what had been said, I assumed the worst for Allison. I step in between them, hoping Derek would hesitate long enough for the doctor to tell me the same he told Derek. My plan fails when Derek shoves me to the ground and continues to accost the doctor with his gun in hand.
“What do you mean you don’t know if he’s going to wake up? That’s bullshit! Get in there and fix him!”
The hangar become’s quiet when Derek rests his body against the glass and weeps. I stand to my feet to join him. I knew the frustration he felt. I knew how broken I was when she was taken from me, and when I found her again she was taken from me a second time. Twice in less than a day.
I go to try and soothe Derek when I see what bothered him so deeply. Next to a crying and bandaged Allison was his brother. My father lying lifelessly in a coma.
A Soldier tried to explain the events do Derek as I stared at his brother‘s unmoving body. Derek stared also when we learn a man named Dixon was to blame. A dozen people were being taken to a medical facility miles from where we were. Dixon wasn’t present for the initial meeting with the future patients, but returned to take the envoy to their destination. When all of the soldiers and civilians entered the vehicle, Dixon commanded a physical strength that was known to be found only in the machines we fought.
I just then realize what was being said. The story was familiar to me. People killed and replaced by the machines, to complete missions. I think of what happened to my father and hope it wasn’t Charley that was known to be Dixon, I wouldn’t want this on his conscious.
After I took in all the suffering I could muster I tried to avert my vision from my father and the girl who held the face of the person I sacrificed everything for.
I’m reminded of why I came.
Cameron.
I’m reminded of why I was standing in front of this glass.
Allison.
I become sick down to the smallest parts of me when I think of what happens to Allison in order for me to know Cameron. How Cameron had to kill someone in order to get close enough to me. To kill me…
Is this where it all starts? Is this how I convince him to go back forty years in the past? I take away the only thing he has besides a brother who I saw die a few days earlier?
Do exist only to destroy other people’s lives?
End Chapter One