Alan Foster - Terminator Salvation

TERMINATOR

SALVATION

THE OFFICIAL

MOVIE NOVELIZATION

ALAN DEAN FOSTER

Based on the motion picture written by

JOHN BRANCATO & MICHAEL FERRIS

TITAN BOOKS

Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Novelization

ISBN: 9781848569300

Published by

Titan Books

A division of

Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St

London

SE1 0UP

First edition April 2009

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Novelization is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Terminator Salvation™ & © 2009 T Asset Acquisition Company, LLC.

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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group UK Ltd.

For Brian Thomsen, who would have approved.

But who left much too soon.

In appreciation and friendship.

The future is not set.

I’ve been told I said that once.

Many years from now.

It was a warning.

That I was going to hell.

But if I fought hard enough,

I could escape.

I believed it for a lifetime.

—John Connor

Also available from

Titan Books:

TERMINATOR

SALVATION

From The Ashes

The Official Movie Prequel

By Timothy Zahn

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

Longview State Correctional Facility was no better or worse, no more architecturally attractive or depressing, than any other maximum security prison in the state of Texas, which meant that on the inmates’ gauge of such wretched establishments it fell somewhere between dismal and butt-ugly.

Its residents, both short- and long-term, tended to be as hard and unforgiving as the land atop which their current place of residence had been raised. Few blue-collar criminals dared raise hand or head among the growling populace, whose professional pursuits tended to involve cracking heads as opposed to persuading them.

Or to put it another way, Longview was home to far more head-crackers than crackheads.

Among the former could be accounted a certain highly antisocial specimen named Marcus Wright. Regrettably, for much of his life Wright had been in the wrong. At the moment, he was sitting on a cot in a small piece of concrete hell staring at the wall opposite. The vision of flecking stone and cement had nothing particular to recommend it, but it beat gazing at any of the three men standing nearby. Two wore uniforms, the third did not.

No , he corrected himself. That wasn’t quite true. All three wore uniforms. It was depressing for Wright to look at them because two stood on the other side of the welded iron bars that confined him in his current cage and the third could exit at any time. Society preferred to call his present, and increasingly transitory, home a “cell.” Wright knew better. Both were four-letter words.

Two of the free individuals were guards. Armed and holding metal shackles, they kept a wary eye on the proceedings taking place on the other side of the bars. Their posture and expressions reflected the preoccupations of hard men who are fully conscious of the fact that any relaxation in the carrying-out of their daily routine could result in pain, injury, or death. They hadn’t acquired their current positions within Longview because those of neurosurgeon and rocket scientist were unavailable.

It wasn’t that they were ignorant: just that in their chosen line of work muscle and physical agility were more critical to continued survival than the mental kind. Not that this usually mattered. With few exceptions, their cranial capacity normally exceeded that of those they were expected to dominate.

Normally.

The third member of the triumvirate standing just inside the cell door defined himself through his words, though having attended to many present and former residents of the prison he too had inevitably been toughened by the experience. Over the years his recitation of the traditional biblical standards had devolved into a monotone tinged more by a lingering, bastard hope than actual expectation.

While the priest’s optimism in the face of the brutality human beings could render unto one another had never been entirely quashed, it had been repeatedly squeezed and pummeled by a demoralizing range of harsh realism until it bore little resemblance to what one could expect to hear asserted on The Outside.

His faith was punch-drunk.

“Yea,” he intoned mechanically, “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

Stupid , Marcus Wright thought. Stupid and redundant. Why would I be afraid of myself? Wasn’t he evil incarnate? Hadn’t that asshole of a judge told him so, and hadn’t he had it confirmed by a smarmy, quivering public? If that was their verdict on him, then it had to be true, didn’t it? He’d long ago lost any desire to dispute society’s judgment. That much he had in common with the concrete wall at which he was presently staring. Both of them were solid, impenetrable, blank-faced, and mute. If the wall could accept its fate in silence, so could he.

“...for thou art beside me.”

The priest droned on. Why couldn’t the man just shut up ? Wright wondered silently to himself. Why would he, why would anyone, spend one minute longer in the bowels of this gray cesspool of decomposing humanity than they had to?

“Thy rod and thy staff comfort me.”

Now that was a homily Wright felt he could get behind. Give me a rod and a staff , he thought with grim humor, and then you better get out of my way. Give me a chance...

One thing about hard polished floors and solid enclosed corridors: they make for excellent acoustics. This can be unpleasant when someone is screaming incessantly, an activity not uncommon at Longview. The construction can also magnify ordinary footsteps, and this was the sound that caused Wright to give a cursory glance in the direction of the outside.

An instant later his full attention had shifted from the immovable wall to an approaching waist. His suddenly alert eyes proceeded to rove silently over everything both above and below that gently bobbing dividing line.

The guards looked, too. Visitants like Dr. Serena Kogan were rare in Longview. Her title was not what interested them, though Wright’s reaction was more conflicted than they would have suspected. Long used to such blatant testosterone-fueled stares, Kogan ignored them.