Terminator Salvation_ The Official Movie Novelization - Alan Dean Foster [87]
Until he heard the first screams.
Given all that he had been through, there was very little that could unsettle John Connor. Those hopeless shrieks, imbued with the last vestiges of despair and mired in ultimate agony, sent a chill down his spine. Slowing his pace, he rounded a corner and found himself peering into....
It was not a slaughterhouse. The machines were too neat, too efficient for that. Bits and pieces of what had once been people hung from the low ceiling. Some drifted suspended in viscous liquids while others were kept going by tangles of tubes and cables. As he made his way forward he passed everything from electrically stimulated arms and legs to individual organs to still intact torsos.
Worst of all were the wired heads. He thanked what spirits remained that the eyes of every one of these preserved and studied specimens were closed.
The shrieks came not from the fragmented cadavers he was passing but from deeper inside the building and another direction. Every human instinct screamed at him to go to their aid and it was a real struggle to keep to his preplanned path. If the unfortunates were being experimented on by machines, he could not save them. As had so often been pointed out to him, much more was at stake here than a few lives. But it hurt, it burned, not to be able to do anything to help them, if only by putting them out of their misery.
He kept moving and lengthened his stride. According to the comm readout, he was very close now. He would do no one any good—not Kyle, not Kate, not himself, not anyone, if he ended up stuck in a storage room somewhere in the depths of the vast complex, floating in a vat of gelatinous preservative with an anonymous label slapped over his decomposing face.
The section of Central in which continuing experimentation was being carried out on live humans was not entirely unguarded. While recognizing their superiority to the bipedal carbon-based lifeforms with whom they were at war, the machines had learned not to underestimate them. That included even those humans who were safely confined.
In the early days, security had been interrupted by the occasional breakout or escape attempt. Though one had not occurred in a while, the machines did not relax their vigilance. It was not necessary to maintain a large guard presence in the incarceration area, but a few Terminators were always in attendance. Their mere presence was enough to contain any effort at flight.
The T-600 heard a noise where there ought not to have been one. Tireless, remorseless, programmed to respond to the slightest departure from the norm be it visual or aural, it immediately turned and headed in the direction of the perceived auditory deviation.
It halted outside an elevator bay. While the doors stood open, there was no sign of the lift itself. Another divergence from the norm. Where presently there was only the blackness of the open shaft there ought to have been a waiting cab. Programmed to respond to and investigate any such digression from the expected, it moved forward and commenced a careful examination of the doors. Detecting nothing out of the ordinary, it then advanced to bend forward and inspect the open shaft.
A scrupulous examination of the dark depths similarly showed nothing unusual. Twisting its head upward, the machine continued its inspection. It immediately located the underside of the absent car, which appeared to have become stuck halfway between the uppermost floors.
Something attached to the main cable drew the attention of its sensors. Magnification revealed a small blob clinging to