Let me just say how awed I am by the response to this story -- I know this isn't the biggest fandom out there, so I really didn't know what to expect. Thank you to everyone for their reviews and story alerts and favorites! When I wrote the first installment of this story, I wasn't quite sure where I was going to take it next, but a prompt from the bi-weekly fic challenge over at the terminatorfic community at LiveJournal gave me the idea that inspired this chapter (and some of the ones to follow). I hope you enjoy it!

Two

This guy is crazier than a shithouse rat, Blair thought. She tried to keep the scorn from showing on her face but didn’t know how successful she managed to be.

They’d all seen men like him. He could have been anywhere from his early thirties to his late fifties. Impossible to know for sure, what with the lines engraved in his face, the skin pocked with scabs, the sparse and patchy hair -- not from pattern baldness, but too much exposure to the hot spots that dotted the post–Judgment Day landscape.

Most of them lived a solitary existence, eking out some kind of hardscrabble subsistence at the fringes of the great eastern deserts. They didn’t interfere with the Resistance, but they wanted no part of it, either. Organize, and you risked making a target of yourself for the machines.

But this one had approached the base, for whatever reason. Maybe he’d somehow gotten wind of Skynet’s recent defeat. Or maybe he’d just tired of living off iguanas and rattlesnakes. Right now he was slurping up the contents of an unheated can of pork and beans the way Blair’s mother used to inhale a pint of Ben and Jerry’s during a particularly bad PMS episode.

“Everything you need,” the desert rat said, and waved his fork for emphasis, although not before he’d licked it clean. “Rations. Ammunition. Gasoline. Vehicles.” Was it her imagination, or did he shoot a wild blue-eyed glance in her direction before returning his attention to John Connor? “Planes.”

Don’t forget the unicorns and ponies, Blair thought wryly.

She looked over at Connor. As usual, his expression was almost blank, revealing little of his thoughts. He sat propped up in a camp chair that Kate had altered to give it more padding. At five days past his recent heart transplant, he shouldn’t have been sitting up at all. He should have been lying in an ICU someplace with a team of doctors monitoring him for any sign of rejection. Unfortunately, ICUs and teams of doctors were in pretty short supply these days.

Anti-rejection drugs were not, thank God. Kate had explained it simply enough, the morning after John’s grueling procedure. She had a whole arsenal of syringes at the ready, filled with miracles drugs that would keep him from rejecting the heart. Despite the fact that she’d spent all night working to keep her husband alive, she had sounded steadier once it became clear that he’d at least live through the next day. “It’s getting harder to find antibiotics and antivirals and painkillers,” she’d said. “Even birth control pills. But there’s not a lot of call for anti-rejection medication.”

Blair couldn’t argue with that. The Resistance had medical teams that had been able to manufacture simple sulfa drugs and some antibiotics. Painkillers were more difficult, since the opiates a lot of them required weren’t something that came easily to hand here in 2018 California. Hormones? Forget about it. People used medications years out of date and hoped for the best. At least they’d had the anti-rejection drugs; the Resistance salvage teams always took everything that wasn’t nailed down, figuring someone, somewhere might eventually have a use for it.

A single word from John. “Where?”

“East of here. Two, three days walking.”

“Yet we’ve never found it.”

His delivery was too flat for irony, but Blair heard the skepticism in his words anyway.

She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, then glanced past Connor to see Marcus watching her. Those blue eyes were sharp as laser sights. He knew what the promise of aircraft meant to her. She was still grounded. No planes free -- a pilot might come back to base without his plane, but it never happened the other way around. As close as she was to John, Blair knew she couldn’t exactly ask him take another pilot’s wings away, just for her sake. No, she’d have to wait until a new ride could be found.

After a second or two, she deliberately looked away from Marcus, back to John Connor. They’d had Connor’s recovery to focus on the past week, that and moving the base to another location, one a good thirty klicks from where the last camp had been situated. There hadn’t been any sign of Skynet activity, but John had ordered the move almost as soon as he was conscious. The only way to stay alive was to keep moving, to present a target that could never be nailed down.

At any rate, the frenzy of the move had kept her and Marcus from anything approaching a serious discussion of their relationship -- if they even had one, she was forced to admit. They’d huddled together, that long night of John’s operation, and heard the news of his recovery as the sun rose above the hills to the east. But Marcus had made no move to kiss her, and she didn’t quite know how to feel about that.

The whole thing was crazy, if you looked at it logically. There were some women in the Resistance who had shut down that whole side of themselves, who refused to have anything to do with men. Blair hadn’t gone quite that far -- she’d allowed herself to have liaisons with fellow pilots or other Resistance fighters when the chemistry was right, even though there was no point in thinking about the future when each day held the promise of a bloody end. But it was better to have those few brief moments of heat than nothing.

What could she have with Marcus? Was he even capable of the physical act of love? She had no way of knowing for sure. It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing a person could bring up in casual conversation. He probably had all the equipment; after all, he’d believed himself to be an ordinary man, and most ordinary men would have noticed something wrong if the below-belt components were lacking in some way. But still…

She realized she’d been woolgathering and had missed the desert rat’s reply to John. Damn.

Marcus spoke for the first time, “I think it’s worth investigating.”

For a moment John said nothing. He frowned, fingers tapping on one arm of the chair. An IV tube trailed up from the crook of his elbow to a bag of saline solution suspended above his seat. “We can’t spare many people for something that could be a wild-goose chase.”

“You don’t have to.” Something that might have been a smile touched Marcus’ mouth, and he met Blair’s gaze squarely. “You want to go look for a new set of wings, Hickabick?”

***

There had been no real way for her to say no. They hadn’t had much of a chance to talk these past few days, but he’d seen her glance up the few times a Resistance fighter flew overhead, seen an almost wistful look in her eyes whenever she passed by the abandoned barn cum machine shop they were currently using as a hangar to house the handful of planes the base still possessed. He knew the lack of a plane continued to wear away at her. She’d seemed cheerful enough as she helped with the relocation of the base and assisted in the installation of a new security perimeter, but she wasn’t fooling anyone. Or maybe she was, but she sure didn’t fool him.

The desert rat’s story could be complete pie in the sky -- and Marcus thought it probably was -- but they couldn’t risk allowing such a prize to go unplundered, just in case the man wasn’t completely crazy from radiation. That was just another thing that had surprised Marcus about this improbable future he’d found himself in; there were hot spots everyone knew to avoid, but at least the whole planet hadn’t turned into one big plain of fused radioactive glass.

And if he wanted to be perfectly honest, he had a few ulterior motives about getting Blair alone, away from the Resistance base.

John Connor’s word was pretty much law, and somehow it had gone out around the camp that since Marcus had saved the other man’s life, the denizens of the camp were to leave him alone. He’d heard the mutters of “cyborg” -- and worse -- and seen the suspicious looks thrown in his direction, but it stopped there. The situation could have been a lot worse. He could have been locked back up in the brig, his heroic acts at Skynet dismissed out of hand simply because he was one of them.

But he wasn’t. He told himself that every day, whenever he looked in the mirror each morning to shave off the previous night’s bristles, or every time he went to the latrine to take a leak. Did a machine grow a beard? Did a machine require bathroom facilities? Bluntly speaking, did a machine wake up with a spectacular case of morning wood after a night spent dreaming of the woman it wanted?

Marcus kind of doubted it.

Long he’d been born a man and had arrived on this planet about the same way as everyone else. His entry into this future world had been a little more unorthodox, but although the machines had done their best to control him, to weave their pernicious metal through every fiber of his body, somehow they hadn’t quite manage to pollute his soul. Well, at least not any more than it already had been.

But though he felt some sort of gratitude for Connor’s protection, the atmosphere at the Resistance base was still a little frosty. Kind of a tough place to make any overtures toward Blair. Maybe once they were out and away, far from those shifty-eyed stares and hostile whispers, she’d warm up to him a little. After all, she’d stayed with him the whole night while John received his stolen heart. She’d even let her fingers stray into his. True, it was the hand that hadn’t been horribly mutilated at Skynet HQ, but at least it was a start.

His enhanced biology had done its job, though. Marcus glanced down at his left hand, now indistinguishable from his right. He supposed if you looked closely enough you could see a certain vagueness about the nail beds, how they weren’t quite as formed as the ones on his right, but it wasn’t as if he was going to be getting a manicure any time soon.

That was a laugh. The closest he’d ever gotten to a manicure was the time he’d ripped off a fingernail while yanking an engine block. Said block was a pristine 426 Hemi in a ’68 Barracuda, and a vital piece of the car that the owner probably didn’t want to part with, but such niceties had never bothered Marcus. A fingernail was a small price to pay for something worth so much on the black market.

A potentially much greater haul awaited him now, hidden somewhere in the wastes of the Mojave Desert. If he were the one to help Blair lay hands on her next plane, he could only imagine she’d be grateful. And he could think of all sorts of ways he’d like her to express her gratitude.

Now all he had to do was find the desert rat’s mythical cache.

***

Blair had the feeling she’d somehow been neatly maneuvered into this expedition, but logically, it made sense. Although no one would say it, they all considered Marcus, if not expendable, at least someone they’d prefer to not have around, and she was just a grounded pilot. Sure, she’d been able to provide some muscle during the move to their current location, but until she got her wings back she wasn’t going to be much use to anyone.

Some precious stores of food had been allotted them, and she’d asked to take Rufus, one of the camp’s guard dogs, along as well. The dogs hadn’t quite known what to do with Marcus -- they knew he didn’t smell right, but he must not have smelled like a Terminator, either. The camp’s canine denizens tended to mill about, confused and uneasy, whenever he came in range.

For some reason, Rufus had warmed to Marcus best, and besides, Blair had a soft spot for the mutt. He was a rangy shepherd/border collie mix, lively but a fierce protector of the camp when the need arose. Like every one else at the Resistance base, Rufus took his job seriously.

The sun had barely peeked over the horizon when Blair shouldered her loaded pack and went to meet Marcus at the eastern perimeter of the base. Years ago it had been an almond farm, and a few frail-looking trees that had survived the post–Judgment Day climate change still dotted the landscape. He stood under one of those now, gazing eastward, Rufus in a similar attitude of wary watchfulness a few feet away. The Jeep Connor had requisitioned for their mission waited just inside the gate.

That gate wouldn’t have kept out would-be almond thieves, let alone any of Skynet’s machines. Just beyond the gate and its attached barbed-wire fence was a no-man’s land dotted with mines, both pressure and magnetic. But Blair knew the safe path to take; she’d been one of the people who helped lay those mines. No chance of Marcus getting himself blown up this time.

She remembered the hideous damage the mines had inflicted, remembered the cold horror that struck her as she looked inside his chest and saw what Skynet had done to him. Blinking, she pushed those memories away, but not before a shiver passed over her.

“Cold?” asked Marcus. He made as if to move toward her, then stopped.

It was cold; a sullen overcast covered the sky, and an icy little breeze snaked through the pitiful almond grove. But she was used to that by now. August in 2018 didn’t mean the same as it had back before the machines dropped the bombs. Once summer had been a blur of bright skies and shimmering swimming pools, lazy days of ice cream and hot dogs and her family’s annual trip to Disneyland. Now it just meant you wouldn’t freeze your ass off quite as badly as you did the rest of the year.

“No,” she replied. “I’m fine. You got your stuff loaded?”

“Ready to go.” Another one of those odd little smiles ghosted around his mouth. “You driving?”

“Of course.” She stepped past him and tossed her pack in the back of the Jeep. Marcus’ rig was already there, along with a few precious boxes of ammo and a grenade launcher. A pump-action Mossberg and a hunting rifle were stowed in the back seat.

Their mission was simply recon at this point. Further questioning of the desert rat had led him to inform them that he hadn’t seen any real defenses around this oasis of technology he’d found out in the depths of the Mojave, but that didn’t mean much. The best defenses were the ones you couldn’t see. He also hadn’t spotted much in the way of activity, human or otherwise, but again, that meant squat. If a group of humans was somehow canny enough to hold onto that kind of loot even with both Skynet and the Resistance scouring the countryside for anything remotely useful, then they must be a force to be reckoned with.

And if it was a trap set by the machines --

Well, it wouldn’t be the first time Blair had shot herself out of a tough place. Naturally she preferred to do it from behind the controls of an A-10, but she was pretty handy with a variety of weaponry if the situation called for it.

Rufus, clearly realizing that they were about to set out, jumped in the back seat and wagged his tail. Blair repressed a grin. Even nuclear holocaust and hordes of rampaging robots weren’t enough to keep a dog from enjoying a car ride.

Without comment, she climbed into the driver’s seat and buckled the harness. All Resistance vehicles were furnished with equipment that would have satisfied a NASCAR safety inspector -- six-point safety belts, fire extinguishers, fuel kill-switches. Chances were that you’d run into some kind of trouble on the road, so every safeguard to protect precious human life was utilized.

Marcus went and opened the gate, then returned to the Jeep and got into his own seat. Somewhere along the way he’d picked up a pair of aviator-style sunglasses; he planted them on his nose and stared directly into the rising sun, which appeared to have found the one break in the clouds.

“You look like a pimp,” Blair remarked. She fished her own sunglasses -- a more subdued pair with polarized lenses and black curved frames -- out of her pocket and put them on. Driving directly into the sun was always a bitch.

“Is that a good or a bad thing?”

“Guess.”

She turned the key in the ignition. From behind her, Rufus let out a happy bark, one that was cut short as he apparently remembered he was only supposed to bark when Terminators were around.

She knew how he felt. Even though she’d rather be back behind the controls of a fighter plane, and even though she wasn’t quite sure how she was going to handle being alone with Marcus for the next few days, a ripple of excitement moved through her. It was something to be away from the hunted urgency of the camp, out into the wind and the freedom of the open road. Skynet hadn’t made a peep in the last week. Maybe the thrashing John and Marcus had given the machines was even worse than the analysts said. Maybe they’d be free of the machines for a month or even more.

Marcus raised his face to the wind as the Jeep began to move through the mine field. Blair couldn’t really watch him, since she had to maintain focus on the narrow safe path that wound through the treacherous ground, but she couldn’t miss the ripple of amusement in his voice as he said,

“I’ve been a lot of things in my time, but never a pimp. So you’re saying there was a reason why no one had claimed these glasses from the supply closet?”

Despite herself, she smiled. “Something like that.”

The gleaners brought everything to a central supply dump, where items were sorted into their respective storage areas. Clothes were harder to come by than one might think; people tended to wear stuff until it fell apart simply because there were no more factories manufacturing cloth, not to mention a dearth of people to construct garments even in the rare instances when fabric could be found. Stores and homes had been picked over years before. The same was true for accessories -- shoes and belts and eyewear. That Marcus had been able to scrounge the aviators said something about their sartorial appeal.

They emerged from the mine field and began to rattle down the narrow track that led away from the erstwhile almond farm. This had never been the main road; that one was off to the west and intersected with what used to be Interstate 5. This was a one-lane job that had probably never been kept in good repair and now was more potholes than asphalt.

The desert rat had said he found the installation out in the desert wastes roughly northwest from Barstow. On good roads, the trip would normally have taken only three or four hours. There wasn’t such a thing as a good road anymore, but Blair thought they still could make it well before sundown. She hoped so anyway; she’d prefer they did their initial recon while there was still some light out.

For awhile they were both silent. The track met up with a larger road that headed northeast, and Blair pulled onto that. John had sent them out with a GPS tracker, but she’d also studied the local road maps carefully the night before. They were good Army Corps of Engineers maps, too, not the usual Triple-A ones. Who knows where John had gotten them, but he’d always had an uncanny knack for digging up the most useful stuff.

It wasn’t until they’d gone a good five miles or so down the road that Marcus said thoughtfully, “You know, Skynet might have done Connor a favor.”

This time Blair figured it was safe enough to look over at him. “Excuse me?”

“Everyone’s been going off about how he’s the savior of mankind, the leader of the Resistance, right?”

She wasn’t sure she liked the sarcastic tone in which he’d asked the question, but she knew she couldn’t really argue. Some people tended to treat John like the second coming of Christ.

“That’s the rumor.”

“But as far as I could tell, he wasn’t really running things. Sounds like he was getting his orders from Command.”

“Yeah.”

Marcus shrugged. “So Skynet blew up Command, right? All those fossils from last generation’s armies -- gone. So who’s left to give John orders?”

Once he’d said it, it sounded so simple, but Blair had to admit to herself she really hadn’t stopped to think about how things stood in the current structure of the Resistance. It had always been taken as fact that one day John would be in charge. The details of how he was supposed to end up the leader of humanity’s remnants had always been a little hazy, though.

She wondered then if machines could appreciate irony. Artificial intelligence was one thing, but somehow it seemed uniquely human to be amused by the various twists fate could devise. Anyhow, she sort of doubted the bits of Skynet that remained would be pleased to learn that it was through the machines’ actions that John had assumed the title of de facto leader of the Resistance.

“No one’s left, I guess,” she replied.

“Convenient, huh?”

Again she allowed herself to glance away from the road so she could meet Marcus’ gaze. His eyes were hidden behind those ridiculous mirrored lenses, but he was smiling slightly.

“I hope you’re not trying to say that John Connor had anything to do with -- ”

He cut her off. “Of course not. It was the machines doing what they do best: killing humans. But it does sort of bear out the prophecy, doesn’t it? After all, it would’ve been a lot harder for John to take charge if he still had to contend with Command. Right?”

Some days she had the feeling of being stuck in a car with no brakes, one that was about to career off a particularly steep cliff. That sensation rose in her now. “Fate?”

A shrug. “I never had much use for that sort of thing. But if you people had intel from the future that John would lead you to victory -- or whatever -- then I guess all we’re seeing now is the events that’ll bring him to that point.”

No fate but what we make. She’d heard the words so many times that now she thought she could hear them echoing in her dreams. But with time twisting in and out of itself like a nest of twining snakes, how could a person ever begin to distinguish cause and effect?

She made her tone deliberately hard. “And the rest of us are just along for the ride.”

For a long moment he didn’t say anything. Then he shifted in his seat so he faced her directly, even though she kept staring ahead, watching the road for any of the usual hazards: sinkholes, wrecked vehicles, treacherous expanses of gravel and shale.

At least, she told herself that was why she wouldn’t turn to meet his gaze.

The smile never left his lips. He said, “I’m glad to take that ride.”

***

No, she wasn’t like any other woman he’d known. She’d understood him, he could tell that much. But the only acknowledgement of his comment had been the slightest lift of an eyebrow as she expertly maneuvered the Jeep around a sinkhole that looked as if it could have swallowed a Hummer.

Short of going down on bended knee and pledging his undying love for her, Marcus wasn’t sure what else he was supposed to do. And even if he’d been crazy enough to pull a stunt like that, he had the feeling she would have just laughed at him.

Not that he knew much about love. Desire, sure. Lust, absolutely. He faced the physical evidence of both pretty much every morning when he woke up. In the old days he hadn’t bothered with any notions of a higher connection between a man and a woman. His love life had consisted of a series of one-night stands in cheap motels or quick tumbles in the back seat of a car. Even the ones that had lasted a few weeks or a month at most had ended the second the women involved expressed a desire for more. He’d just been satisfying a biological urge. Nothing more and nothing less.

This, though. This was something different.

It might just be a need to make a human connection. Blair was the only woman he’d met in this future who looked at him with anything besides barely concealed horror. Wasn’t it natural that he craved her presence, wanted someone around who more or less treated him like a man and not some monster out of a mad scientist’s lab?

No, he thought, and glanced over at her again. Her gaze was still fixed forward, but her loose hair blew around her face in the breeze generated by their progress down the road that once had been Highway 58. The sun broke through the clouds for a few seconds, picking out sparks of red and copper in her dark hair. Something about her beauty awed him. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been with beautiful women in the past. But none of them had been her.

“Do I have a bug stuck in my teeth or something?” she asked.

He looked away at once. “Well -- ”

Rufus barked.

At once Marcus sat up straighter in his seat and began scanning the area around them. Nothing much to look at -- while they hadn’t hit the desert proper yet, the area around them was almost as desolate, just low rolling hills dotted with chaparral and the occasional stunted California live oak tree. The undulations of the landscape prevented him from seeing what lay ahead.

“What is it?” Blair asked. Her knuckles whitened against the steering wheel, and the Jeep picked up speed.

“Don’t know.” He pulled off the sunglasses and shifted in his seat to look back at Rufus. The dog barked again, and his teeth showed as he let out a low, guttural growl.

“Shit!”

The safety harness bit into Marcus’ shoulder as Blair slammed on the brakes. Almost at the same moment, the acrid smell of burning gasoline hit his nostrils.

Their way was blocked by a large SUV -- probably a Suburban or Expedition -- that lay on its side, spanning both lanes of the two-lane highway. And rising from the wreckage was the familiar form of a T-600.

No time to stop and think. In one fluid movement he reached into the back seat and pulled out the short-barrel riot shotgun Blair had stashed there earlier. She’d made sure it was preloaded; all Marcus had to do was pump it and aim.

The heavy magnum shell impacted squarely in the machine’s chest, and it reeled a bit. But that wasn’t enough to stop it. Another shell followed, and another. The Terminator staggered, even as it lifted an arm equipped with a Vulcan cannon.

That was all the opening Marcus needed. By then Blair had skidded to a stop and had jumped out of the driver’s seat, no doubt running for the grenade launcher in the cargo compartment. Rufus’ crazed barking formed an odd counterpoint to the roaring of the flames from the wrecked vehicle.

Neither of them mattered at the moment. The only thing that counted was the dark space between the T-600’s shoulder joint and its arm. Marcum aimed, and fired again.

The arm blew off, neatly dropping the attached Vulcan cannon to the ground. That didn’t stop the Terminator, of course. Self-preservation wasn’t in its vocabulary. It saw humans, and so had to kill them. It would crawl to them if necessary, and rip its victims apart with one metal claw.

Not if Marcus had anything to say about it. He lifted the shotgun and pumped it once again.

A wall of yellow flame roared past him. Cursing, he dropped to the ground, even as he felt bits of super-heated metal rain down on the exposed flesh of his hands and neck. When he raised his head again, he saw the smoking carcass of the T-600 lying on its back in the middle of the highway.

Getting up hurt more than he thought it would. He glanced over at Blair, who held the M79 in both hands, still pointed at the Terminator.

“Nice shooting, Tex,” he remarked. “A little warning might have been nice.”

She shrugged. “I knew you could survive a little scorching. Care to finish it off?”

True enough. As he looked down, he could see the bright pink-red of the second-degree burns on his hands already starting to heal over.

Miracles of modern science, he thought, and made his way over to the downed machine. It looked dead enough, the lower half of its body completely blown away. But he knew better.

A single shot from his gun at the back of its neck was enough to kill the red glow in its eyes forever. He looked away from the T-600 to see Blair returning to the Jeep and stowing the grenade launcher in the back seat. Then she cast a critical eye on the burning wreck of the SUV.

“Doesn’t look like there’s much to save, but we’d better check it out.”

The vehicle had held a couple, probably a man and a woman. Marcus was glad that any distinguishing features had been completely burned away. They were just two ashy shapes in something that used to be a Suburban.

But the SUV had been packed to the gills, and some of its contents had spilled themselves on the roadway before the flames consumed the vehicle. In grim silence he helped Blair gather up cans of food, a bundle of clothing, a box of .357 rounds. They would all be welcomed back at the Resistance camp.

He smiled grimly. They may not have arrived at their final destination, but already he and Blair had found something to salvage on this trip.