Leaving Fiji
“What did they say?” Kyle asked, leaning over Lanie’s shoulder to see the text. Lanie scrolled through a few paragraphs.
“There,” she pointed at a story claiming the new defense network computers were virus-proof.
“That’s it. At some point SkyNet will go on line and they won’t even know anything’s wrong. All the communications are tied into the main computer.”
They left port at 8:00pm, motoring quietly on the dark South Pacific. Lanie monitored the radar, setting it to alarm mode for anything that came within range. Kyle and Sarah raised the sails. The plan was to remain far out at sea for a few weeks before quietly landing on the California coast, but there was no way to know what was happening there.
Two days out, the GPS disappeared along with the other satellite-dependant communication devices. The VHF stayed silent with no other vessels in range, but the short wave radio was flooded with traffic. They listened for a while until all the panicked voices sounded the same. No one on the Sarah-Elena slept for days. Would there be a tsunami or a noxious blast cloud rolling across the water? Everyone was tense and worried.
A storm developed at five days out, quickly blanketing everything within range of the radar. With no time to navigate around or outrun it, they rode it out for thirty-nine hours. John and Triss had kitchen duty as well as responsibility for monitoring the radios while the adults took four hour watches in pairs. The Sarah-Elena suffered no major damage, but Kyle and Mano had to repair the bilge pump mid-storm. They fumed and complained, but John suspected the chore was a welcome distraction.
When the wind died down, the rain stayed, falling gently for days. It washed over the deck, running along the sails, dripping off the rigging. Everyone relaxed a little. Kyle would relieve Mano in the cockpit, and then it was Lanie’s watch, then Sarah’s. The days were quiet and gray, but as they neared the middle of the Pacific and later the eastern half, Sarah watched Kyle going tight and grim. He stood looking into the distance, watching for what, she didn’t want to know. After four days of constant, but soft rain, Sarah went on deck one afternoon in a swim suit to rinse off the stale cabin air and let her face be washed by the falling drops. She ran her hands through her hair, letting the rain refresh her scalp and cool her fingers as they slipped through the long strands. Kyle sat in the cockpit watching, with water streaming off his nose and chin, his hair pasted flat against his head and his eyes closed to slits under the beads of moisture matting his eyelashes. When Sarah tilted her head to one side to squeeze some of the water out of her hair, unconsciously striking the same pose as she had so long ago in her mom’s cabin, he remembered that morning, the second time they had made love. That day he had been a mass of hurts. The Terminator was gone, but the physical and mental anguish was fresh and disorienting. Even though Sarah had demonstrated both with her words and her body that she loved him as desperately as he loved her, it had taken a while for him to really believe it.
“Mano!!”
“What?” the voice was muffled coming from below.
“Your watch.”
A private moment
The door clicked shut in their cabin and they came together in a frenzy of eager mouths and grasping hands. Sarah leaned into him and they thumped against the teak paneling beside the bed. Kyle was pulling off the swimsuit she wore, untying the top with her arms locked around his neck, her tongue in his mouth. As the small pieces of clothing fell to the floor and his hands curled over her buttocks she bent forward slightly, both pressing into his hands and shifting so she could untie the cord of his deck shorts. Her hands slipped under the loosened fabric. He was kissing her face, her neck, her mouth. Their tongues curled against each other as he felt her fingers feather out and begin to enfold him. One hand brushed softly against the inside of his thigh, then rose to cup him, she tilted her face back as her fingers closed around his shaft, discovering he was already enormously, painfully hard. His hands paused in their caressing explorations.
“Oh,” she breathed, her hands filled with the hot weight of him and he felt invincible. Kyle willingly lost himself in raging need for her, capturing her mouth under his. Sarah had to release him as she pushed the shorts off and to the floor, but her arms encircled his neck and her legs wrapped around him as he lifted her into the bed. Her back arched to meet the warm, gentle touch of his hands in eager surrender. He began to slowly, softly caress her lower belly with his tongue as he slipped one hand under her and the other traveled up the inside of her thigh. She opened her legs. He kissed the inside of her knee, and she felt his mouth skip over her skin, tracing the line of muscle until he reached her sex. She felt his warm breath touch her and then his tongue. Sarah gasped, one hand grabbing a handful of his hair, the other clenching into the sheet as the soft, quick strokes brought her to climax. Then the whole length of him was sliding inside her, filling her, increasing the intensity of her pleasure as their bodies joined.
He listened to her as he moved on top of her, enveloped in her sounds and he watched, greedily savoring the feel of her wet, quavering insides, exhaling a shaky breath each time she took him in. She was so alive and warm; she was freedom from post war life. At the peak of his ecstasy, in the moment his body spent itself, Sarah grabbed the back of his head, roughly pulling his face to hers. “I love you, Kyle,” she breathed the words fiercely into his mouth as he filled her with his seed. For a long time they lay holding each other. He could feel one of her thumbs tracing absently, softly back and forth against his skin. It was an itch, a feather touch that made his flesh jump even as he drifted off to sleep.
Walk Through Hell
Kyle was climbing up the stairwell, almost to the surface now. Where was the rest of his squad? He glanced down the gray concrete corridor behind him, but he was alone. Emerging from a manhole, he was in the familiar ravaged landscape of post-war Los Angeles, standing amid ruined cars, bones and collapsed structures. The air was heavy with acrid dust. He was the only thing not covered with ash or mud; when he looked down at himself he was wearing clean, light-colored clothing and his skin, still tanned from hours in the warm sun, glowed with health. Unease at his conspicuous appearance crept over his mind. He saw someone in the distance, noisily climbing over the debris, “Kyle!” It was Sarah. She was wearing a brightly colored sundress and flimsy sandals with high heels that made it almost impossible to navigate the twisted metal and piles of bones. “Sarah!” she stumbled, almost breaking an ankle on a crumbling hunk of concrete wall as she looked toward him instead of where she was going. When she straightened, he saw she had John with her, but he was a toddler and wearing a play outfit Kyle recognized from when his son was maybe two. Sarah and John were in the open, she holding his hand, helping him over piles of human bones and rubble as if they were on a playground. Kyle watched as an HK lifted over the horizon. His instinct was to dive back into the manhole, but it would have to wait. He needed to reach John and Sarah first. “Get down!” he shouted and tried to run forward, but his body was anchored in place. Sarah just looked up and waved. “What?’ he heard her faintly over the roar of the approaching machine. “Get down!” he screamed, but his voice was muted and went unheard. His hands remained relaxed at his sides, only flexing slightly when he tried to raise them. He watched the HK advance with its precise and efficient target locating equipment. His lungs refused to suck in enough air to let him breathe, let alone shout a final warning. Sarah, still holding John’s hand turned and pointed at the pretty lights from the hovering killer. The guns servoed around and blasted them into shreds. Impossibly, a tiny patch of the playsuit fabric floated down at Kyle’s feet as the machine zeroed in on him. It didn’t matter, though; he now waited eagerly for the blinding, silent explosion.
His eyes snapped open and suddenly he could move, though he was partially tangled in the bed sheets. He could breathe after what had seemed like many minutes of suffocating paralysis and gulped in a lungful of air, sitting up on the edge of the bed, panting as if he’d run up a mountainside, his hands braced as if to stand and run some more. Sarah sat up behind him, warm with sleep, reaching one arm over his shoulder and the other around him to place both hands on his chest.
“Your heart feels like it’s going to jump right out of you. What is it?” Her fingers moved in a familiar caress that felt like safety.
“I was back in post war,” he paused, thinking. “And I watched an HK kill you and John.” Sarah got on her knees so she could lean over and touch her lips to the corner of his mouth, but she said nothing. He turned and pulled her into his lap, holding her close, remembering when she had slept in his arms under the roadway that first night. Then, her falling into exhausted asleep had been a welcome accident and when she awoke, a small awkward moment. Now she curled up with her face pressed into him, sighing comfortably on the edge of sleep, but then her fingers stole over the scar on his arm, the old wound she had bandaged with the emergency kit from the stolen Pinto, and he knew she was remembering too. Her hand moved lower, touching the place where the obscene bar code was burned into his flesh.
“I watched you the whole time you were sleeping that night,” he said.
“Yes, I know. You told me.” She drew his wrist closer and pressed it against the side of her face, her eyes drifting closed. “You gave me nightmares telling me about post-war times.”
“You’ll see for yourself.” She blinked awake, startled at the coldness in his voice and sat up quickly, not caring how or where she elbowed him.
“Look,” she said, “we are in this together. We will survive it together, you and me and John.” She was digging her fingers into his shoulders, the love expressed on her face and in her eyes savage and consuming. “Together,” she said again. He wished he could believe it. “What the hell has happened to you, soldier?” She watched his expression ratchet up from worry to anger.
“Nothing,” he met her aggressive stare. “Nothing, but fifteen friggin’ years of daily, no hourly terror, worrying about what stupid accident might interfere with the mission! Remember Andy? I sure as hell do,” he held up his scarred hand and instantly felt ashamed, but he couldn’t stop himself. “How close did we come to losing it all right there?”
“Close, but look where it got us. Mano and Lanie. Me. I survived and even learned from all the stuff that happened to me with Andy and his brother.” Her voice dropped to a softer tone, “Just in case I forgot what it was like running from that Terminator and how dangerous life can be.”
“I don’t just want you to live; I don’t want anything else to hurt you and this thing is now days away, not months or years—“
“Ok I get it. I get it!” she was shouting now. “You’re scared that I’m not scared enough. I’m afraid, Ok? I am terrified, all right?” Her eyes searched his, ripping through his defenses, reading his thoughts, and seeing the intense fear there. She stared into him for what seemed like a long time before she spoke again. This time her voice was almost a whisper. “You told me once how in your time if you stayed afraid, you stayed alive.” He was silent, but she could feel the high voltage draining out of his body. “Don’t worry, I’m staying alive.”