Chapter five

Where once it had resounded to the laughter and awed exclamations of excited children getting their first close‑up glimpses of the stars and the planets, the old observatory now sat silent and ruined. Little of its distinctive green dome remained. Destroyed displays and weather‑damaged exhibits lay broken and battered with scant regard for the knowledge they represented.

The pages of indifferently strewn books rustled fitfully in the wind, their words seeming to drift away to rejoin the vanished spirits of those who had originally set them down.

Marching steadily downslope and across the cracked and shattered parking lot without regard to the priorities or interests of either men or machines, the uninhibited chaparral vegetation that had been cleared for the construction of the observatory was now reclaiming its ancient territory. Trees thrust upward through weakened asphalt, while vines, creepers, and incongruously flowered bushes assailed crumbling walls or pushed their way through windows devoid of glass.

For all the destruction, the place was not quite deserted.

While the war with the machines had cost much of mankind access to electricity, fire had never left him. Around the makeshift pit filled with carefully piled kindling and a couple of chair legs had been gathered the remnants of a devastated civilization: several useless televisions, a couple of radios, a microwave oven suitable for storing if not preparing food. Into this dovetailed detritus came three tired figures. Though their discrepancy in size and shape suggested they might as well have represented three separate species, they were in fact all of the same.

A species that was, at present, not doing very well at all.

Wright studied the debris. “Where are the cars?”

“You don’t want to go out after dark,” Reese told him. “Hunter‑Killers have infrared and who knows what else. They hunt even better at night.” He stepped over a line of crushed metal and plastic. “We can make a run for it in the morning.”

Settling down beside a scorched depression that had obviously been used as a firepit, he began the work of starting a small blaze. Returning from rummaging through a bigger heap of broken furniture and other unidentifiable detritus, Star passed him a double handful of meat–also unidentifiable.

Wright looked on. In his time he had done plenty of scavenging of his own.

“So what’s dinner?”

Reese nodded at the unappetizing bounty.

“Two‑day old coyote.” He paused to let that sink in. “Better than three‑day old coyote.” Pausing again, he added, “There’s enough for everyone.”

Wright smiled. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Sorry, but we’re fresh out of mustard. And everything else.”

Looking to occupy himself as the youth started cooking the single mass of meat, Wright’s gaze settled on the shotgun. Searching the surrounding debris, he found a decent length of intact cord. When he reached for the gun, the teen tensed visibly. Smiling without having to say “take it easy,” Wright positioned the holster around his shoulder.

“Grab it.”

Reese frowned at him. “What?”

“Grab it.”

Letting the meat sizzle on its stick, Reese leaned over sharply and clutched the shotgun. But he couldn’t pull it away–the new cord kept it connected to the older man.

“Magic.” Wright smiled at the youngster. “Got it?”

Reese’s uncertainty turned to understanding. He almost, but not quite, smiled back.

“Got it. Thanks.”

Wright passed the gun, holster, and cord back to its owner. Reese glanced at it thoughtfully. His expression suggested that the stranger was still a stranger. Just–a little less strange, now.

As he turned away from the children and the incipient supper, a spark of interest flared in Wright as he examined the collection of decrepit electronics. Working his way through the pile, he picked up a radio and tried several of the controls. One produced an agonized scraping sound. Holding it at arm’s length, he studied it closely.

“Does this radio work? Looks like it’s in better shape than anything else.”

Reese shook his head. “It’s broken. My dad tried to fix it. But we could never get it to work.” He shrugged. “Better broken anyway. Don’t want to make too much noise.”

Turning it over in his hands, Wright studied the fasteners, then pried open the back cover. Reese was watching him closely.

“If all this stuff is busted,” Wright asked, “how do you know what’s going on in the world?”

The teen looked away. Wright transferred his gaze to the girl. Very little in his life had touched him the way her brief gaze now did before she returned her attention to the ground. That was when it struck him that they didn’t answer his question because they could not. They had no idea what was happening anywhere except in the immediate vicinity of their little observatory camp. They were well and truly alone.

He was the adult. It was incumbent on him to comfort them, he knew. To bolster their confidence. To reassure them now that he, a grown‑up, was here, he would look after them and that everything was going to be all right. Instead of that, when he picked up the radio again he said what was actually on his mind.

“Girl. Phone. Get me a phone. Bring it here.”

Marcus Wright had never been a believer in fairy tales. At least, not the ones with happy endings.

The teen hesitated, then turned and gestured at the girl. She indicated her understanding, rose, and trotted off. Maybe the gesture was some kind of private code they had devised between them. Maybe it was gang slang for this piece of hell. Wright didn’t care. All that mattered was that they had both reacted positively.

In addition to not believing in fairy tales, Wright had never been one to waste time. He had no intention of waiting for the hoped‑for phone. In the girl’s absence he started probing the guts of the radio. His fingers were tough and strong, but they were also capable of more delicate work. In their time they had done plenty of damage–sometimes to inanimate objects, sometimes to those who protested, too often to those who had simply had the bad luck to find themselves on the wrong side of one of his all too frequent bad moods. They could also fix things.

“What’s her name?” He struggled with the uncooperative device, but carefully. What he wanted to do was expose the radio’s guts without damaging any of the internal components that might still be intact and functional.

He saw Reese looking on as he manipulated the radio’s components.

“I call her Star. When I found her, she didn’t know her real name. She was all alone under the stars. I’d ask her, and she’d just turn off.” He shrugged. “She loved that hat of hers so much, I just....” His voice trailed away for a moment. “Maybe Star is her real name. I dunno. I just know that she responds to it. What else am I supposed to call her?”

Wright’s fingers slowed as he took a moment to once more regard the surrounding wasteland in which he now inexplicably found himself.

“How do you do it? How do you wake up every day to–this?”

Reese took a moment to consider the question–no doubt because he had never actually contemplated it before.

“Just know it’s important that I do.” His voice was devoid of ego or bravado, his expression even. “Beats the alternative.”

In his largely misbegotten life Wright had associated with men and women who considered themselves tough, even dangerous. None surpassed the resoluteness or conviction he sensed in this slim teen. It stood in stark contrast to his own youth.

He was still working with the radio’s insides when Star returned. The phone she offered him could have been newer and in better condition, but he was glad to have it nonetheless. Lining up his thoughts, he found that he was glad of something to do. Something to focus on besides his unrelievedly depressing environs and the unexplained process that had dumped him here.

“Thanks, Star. I could use another hand. Think you can help me out a little?”

She looked at Reese, who nodded approvingly. Eyes wide and attentive, she turned back to him.

“Here, hold this.” Wright handed her the back panel of the radio that, thanks to careful work, he had managed to remove in one piece. As he probed deeper into the electronic guts, he took no notice of the little girl’s increasingly worshipful stare.

“Where is everyone?” he murmured as he carefully removed the ends of several cords and began rewiring the radio’s interior.

“They’re gone,” Reese told him simply.

“Why are you still here?”

“Star and me, we’re the Resistance.”

Wright forced himself not to smile as he regarded the boy and the girl.

“You and her are the Resistance?”

Reese nodded assertively. “L.A. branch.”

“Resisting what?”

The teen’s gaze narrowed while he studied the enigmatic stranger, as if wondering if perhaps he had escaped from the moon. Or more likely some half‑destroyed mental hospital.

“It’s not funny. The machines. Skynet.”

“Just the two of you?”

“Yeah.”

Using his free hand Wright pointed to the red band that encircled his arm.

“Then why don’t you have one of these?”

“I haven’t earned it yet,” the youth shot back pointedly.

Wright nodded. “Your parents? Are they Resistance? Did they feed you that crap?”

“They’re dead.” Reese spoke coolly, as if discussing the obvious. “Death follows you very closely in this world. It sucks. But you get used to it. You get used to whatever you have to get used to in order to survive.” He glanced meaningfully at Star. “Some handle it better than others. Some just handle it differently.”

Wright understood completely.

“Pain can be controlled. You just disconnect it. Along with whatever else is necessary. It’s better that way.”

Wright flipped the radio’s “on” switch and was rewarded with–nothing. He was disappointed but not surprised.

“Dammit. Okay....” He handed Star the opened device. Colorful wires trailed from its interior like the intestines of some ancient hard‑shelled sea creature. “Hang onto this.”

Childlike curiosity prompted her to study the inside of the radio while he searched through the surrounding debris. Finding a microwave oven, he used the knife Star gave him to unscrew the back and began sorting through the components. Finding the parts he wanted and yanking them free, he strode back to where Star was holding the radio and took it from her. What he really needed was a soldering iron and a crimper. Though the circumstances were radically different, what he was doing was not so very different from similar exercises he had engaged in before.

Sitting down, he resumed working on the radio’s interior.

“Just like hot‑wiring a Mustang,” he murmured contemplatively. “Used to be able to do it in under eight seconds. Beemers took longer, ‘vettes kind of in‑between.”

Reese didn’t understand. “Is that good?”

This time Wright did reply, though without looking up from or pausing in his work.

“Owners didn’t care much for it.” Concluding the rewiring, he started to bring one color against another, then paused to smile softly at the girl. “You want to see some magic, Star?” She stared back at him. “Don’t look at me like that. Make yourself useful. Press the button.” He held out the radio. “This one here. See if you can make it come alive.”

The radio was cheap and its speaker crummy, but the static that crackled from it as he adjusted the tuner was as welcome as any music any of them had ever heard.

The girl’s mouth and eyes widened as she stared at the device. The look she then turned on Wright was so penetrating and adoring that he was forced to turn away. Caught in her stare of childlike wonder, he had for just an instant forgotten who he was. That was not only dangerous, it was unwarranted.

Wright advanced the dial one tiny increment at a time, not wanting to chance skipping over the faintest, most distant signal.

Static. More static. Nothing but static.

Wright saw the youth’s expression fall, watched his shoulders slump. He was just as disappointed as the lanky teen, but there was nothing he could do about it. In a life that had been filled with disappointment the silence of the radio was just one more. Used to dealing with disillusionment, he would handle this latest bout as stolidly as he had all that had preceded it.

As for the kid, well, he had obviously learned how to cope with worse. He would deal with this, or he wouldn’t. Either way, Wright figured, it wasn’t his problem.

Reaching the end of the dial, his expression set, he starting turning the knob back. As if in his careful search he might somehow have missed something. Static, rising and falling. The music of nothingness and nowhere.

Unexpectedly, a scratchy voice emerged from the speaker. Stunned, Wright nearly forgot to stop turning the knob. Doing his best to fine‑tune the reception, he had to settle for turning up the volume. The distant words remained faint but intelligible.

“...the effective range of their main weapon is less than 100 meters. Your best plan is to outrun them.”

Weak as the reception was, the speaker’s assurance still came through clearly. Without really knowing what was going on or what had happened to the world he once knew, Wright found himself drawn to the spokesman’s voice. You could tell a lot about someone not only from how they carried themselves but from how they carried their vowels.

“This guy sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. Who is it?”

Equally fascinated by the confident transmission, Reese could only stare at the radio and shake his head.

“I don’t know.”

As for Star, she did not care about the words that were being spoken. She did not begin to understand everything that was being said.

What mattered to the nine‑year old was that somewhere, someplace, there were still others.

It had become an intermittent but highly anticipated ritual. Scattered across what remained of the western United States and parts of northern Mexico, groups of survivors gathered together to listen to the unscheduled broadcasts on motley assortments of cobbled‑together radios and amateur receivers. No dearly lamented sports play‑by‑play, no important political speech, no jocular social commentary or international reportage was ever listened to with the rapt attention that the still‑living paid to those sporadic transmissions. Knobs were turned, wires pressed together, components coddled, speakers constantly cleaned as the often intermittent, sometimes scratchy, but always mesmerizing voice of John Connor resounded through crumbling buildings, desert canyons, dense forests, and shattered lives.

“If you can’t outrun them,” declared the by now familiar voice as it spoke from its unidentified location, “you have one or two options.”

Somewhere in Utah, a group of bedraggled citizens huddled closer around a campfire, listening intently.

“The T‑600s are large and pack a lot of firepower, but they’re a primitive design.” Connor’s voice hissed from the remnants of a radio.

***

In a cave in New Mexico, the senior male present stretched skyward a hand holding a makeshift antennae, fighting for every iota of improvement in the sound his family’s scavenged equipment was receiving.

“The small of the back and the shoulder joints are vulnerable to light weapons fire. As a last resort, ventilation requirements leave the motor cortex partially exposed at the back of the neck. A knife to this area will slow them down. But not for long.”

Sitting in front of the broadcast unit in the outpost, Connor halted. Many times he had delivered the irregular evening address. Many times he had fought to find the right things to say. He was not a comfortable speaker, not a natural orator. He did not intuitively know how to reassure people, how to comfort them, how to offer hope. Practice alone had made him better at it.

Practice, and necessity. Still, there were times when he just came to a dead end; out of words, out of thoughts, out of encouragement.

It was at such times that a comforting hand on his shoulder was of more help than volumes of instruction on public speaking. Seeing Kate smiling down at him enabled him to resume transmitting.

“Each and every one of you....” he continued.

Huddled around a fire near the ruins of the observatory, two determined children and one very mystified adult found themselves captivated by the broadcast.

“...above all, stay alive,” the voice on the radio emphasized. “You have no idea how important you are–how important you will become, each and every one of you.”

***

Connor paused to look up at his wife. A more personal note had begun to creep into his voice and he deliberately forced it down.

“Humans have a strength that cannot be measured by mechanical means, by the machines that struggle to understand us. Join us. Get to a safe area to avoid detection. Look for our symbol. Make yourself known. We will find you,” he murmured into the pickup. Swallowing and regaining full control of his emotions, he rushed to conclude the broadcast.

“I promise–we will win. But you, me, everyone, we all need to keep fighting. My name is John Connor. If you’re listening to this, you are the Resistance.”

Static returned, but this time the listeners did not mind. The broadcast had proved that there was more out there than devastation. More than silent, inhuman, hunting mechanisms. There were people. People who were fighting back, instead of living like the rodents and roaches they had so long disparaged. There was–hope.

Reese turned to meet Wright’s contemplative gaze.

“John Connor.” His expression and voice overflowing with unrestrained admiration, he peered over at the radio. Star was watching him intently. “I don’t know how–but we gotta find this guy.”

Off to the side the technician was checking to make sure the evening’s transmission was not being traced. Connor slumped back in the chair, rubbing at his eyes.

“Was it good?”

Kate Connor squeezed his shoulder and nodded.

“It was good, John. It’s always good. The words don’t really matter. It’s hearing the conviction in your voice that gives people reason to have faith in something.”

He nodded, reached up and pressed his hand over hers. How many were still out there, hanging on? Of those, how many had access to working receivers? Was Kate right and his irregular sermons were doing some good? It was impossible to know. Was it just possible, just maybe, one of those out there listening and trying to survive was his own father?

That too, was impossible to know.