Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes by Timothy Zahn Read Free Book Online Page A

rat scurrying past and disappearing into the shadows. The rats, at least, had done all right for themselves in the post-Judgment Day world. So had the cockroaches.
    Orozco knew eight recipes for rat and three for roaches. Some of the residents here knew even more. Some of those recipes were even pretty good.
    Judgment Day. Sighing tiredly, Orozco continued his visual sweep of the street, the bitter irony digging under his skin like the ever-present dust dug beneath his eyelids.
    A stupid name, “Judgment Day.” Someone in the Resistance had apparently coined it, and it had spread by radio and word of mouth until it was the universally accepted name for the destruction that Skynet had unleashed upon the world.
    But there had been no true judgment to it. None at all. Good and evil, rich and poor, sinner and saint—everyone had suffered equally in the attack.
    Unless perhaps the judgment aspect was in the way •death and life had been handed out. That the chosen had been the ones granted the quick death of nuclear holocaust, while the evil had been those consigned to this living hell of hunger and cold and darkness.
    The good die young. The old saying echoed through his mind. He’d never believed that before.
    Maybe it was time he did.
    But tonight, at least, the darkness out there concealed no fresh horrors. Taking one last look around, Orozco went back inside.
    He was heading to his sleeping mat when a pebble clattered softly across the ground at his feet.
    His first impulse was to look upward, through the broken sections of flooring toward the building’s top floor, where the group’s lookouts were stationed. But a second later his brain caught up with him and he realized it couldn’t have come from one of them. The lookouts always dropped their pebbles onto metal plates, where the clatter would alert Orozco or one of the other watchmen.
    The nearest such plate was a good twenty meters away, and impossible for the lookout to miss.
    Which made the source of the pebble at his feet obvious.
    He peered a few meters down the broken tiles and cracked walls of what had once been a luxurious apartment building lobby to the pair of sleeping mats tucked into a small alcove. Nine-year-old Star was half sitting up on her mat, her wide-open eyes gazing unblinkingly at Orozco, a taut questioning look on her face.
    He gave the girl a reassuring smile and a thumb’s up. Her questioning look lingered another few seconds, as if she was wondering if there really was something wrong and Orozco was merely humoring her. But then she nodded, lay back down, and closed her eyes.
    He watched her a moment, then shifted his gaze to the sixteen-year-old boy sleeping soundly on the mat beside her.
    People at the Ashes wondered about the two kids. They didn’t wonder a lot, of course—with basic survival the top item on everyone’s list, no one had much time left to spend pondering anyone else’s oddities. Certainly everyone here had a long list of peculiarities of their own.
    24
    But even against that backdrop, Kyle Reese and Star stood out. They weren’t brother and sister—that much Kyle would readily tell anyone who asked. But how and where and why the two of them had linked up, that no one knew. Not even Orozco, and he was closer to them than probably anyone else in the building. It was something Kyle simply wouldn’t talk about. Not even when asked point blank, which a couple of the less tactful residents had done on occasion.
    Star didn’t talk about it either.
    But then, Star didn’t talk about anything. Whether she was physically unable to speak, or whether the trauma of Judgment Day or its aftermath had sent that part of her personality into a hole too deep for anyone to reach, was just another of the mysteries surrounding them. The system of hand signals she and Kyle used to communicate bore no resemblance to any formal sign language that Orozco had ever seen. Presumably it was something the two of them had created themselves