Archon of the Covenant (12 page)

“I need to shut down for the night.”

“What’s happening? Where are you taking me?”

“I promise to tell you more in the morning. I need you to be safe tonight. Go to sleep and don’t wander off. If there is trouble, yell and I will come to your aid.”

She crawled off the rumble seat and curled up under the sentinel’s base, tugging at the blanket and digging her feet in between the tires. The sentinel initiated its shutdown procedure and the world closed around them.

• Solar power cell – 1%. Solar armor – 81%.
  
• Drivetrain – operational
  
• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics – operational
  
• HD/
  Comms – disrupted
  
• Water – 100%. Napalm – 100%
  
• Railgun – 24% capacity
  
• AAR – health
  y, vaccinated girl in tow; posthaste vector to final checkpoint
  
• Shutting down core operation
  and initiating battery recharge
  

9.
Covenant

A sound stirred the sentinel early in the morning. The soft glow of the sun had only just begun to rise beyond the faraway ridgeline of Rincon Peak and Mica Mountain. The interstate corridor was still dark – a faint ray of light glowing off the reflective highway sign above. Patches of weeds that had popped through cracks in the asphalt concrete rustled in the wind. The sentinel pinged the periphery – no closing movements, no significant heat signatures. The sentinel looked down at the girl, who was curled up beneath its base. She coughed. The sound was her, the tiny creature nestled between the polycarbonate axels of the wanderer. The sentinel clicked between thermal and x-ray optics, auditing her bio-signs. She was running a fever. The cool desert air had dropped the temperature dangerously low overnight. She looked up at him.

“I tried not to wake you.”

“It’s okay. Let’s get you into the sunlight.”

She crawled out from under the sentinel’s chassis and hopped back into the rumble seat. The sentinel unlocked and drove back into the blacktop. It stopped abruptly at the scattered belongings of the open luggage and picked up a plastic cup that had blown back and forth between the two bags. The sun began to peak over the eastern highway berm. The machine and the girl rolled south along the I-19, passing under the interchange and emerging into the dawn on the southern outskirts of the city. They pulled off the highway, into hardened earth beside the road. The sentinel’s solar armor glimmered in the half-light. A thicket of trixis and chuparosa listed in the light easterly breeze coming off the distant Starr Ridge. The terror of the city drifted into the ether and was quieted, however momentarily.

The girl hopped off the rumble seat and the sentinel handed her the plastic cup, which she inspected, rolling it about in her hands. As she did, a small L-nozzle flipped open from the side of the sentinel’s trident arm.

“Water. Hold the cup up.”

She held it aloft, underneath the nozzle, and a light trickle of water poured into her cup and stopped as it neared the brim. She stepped back, a smile on her face, and drank from the cup.

“Eat your granola bar.”

She screwed up her eyes at the sentinel and then, padding her sweatshirt pocket, nodded happily and took a granola bar from the Ziploc bag, chomping at it in big bites. She looked around, bobbing her head back and forth as she chewed.

“I’m not fully re-charged yet. We’ll need to rest here while the sun comes up.”

She plopped down in the dirt, plucking petals from a nearby chuparosa stem. Somehow, she was happy. She looked up, thinking of what she wanted to say.

“I knew you weren’t my mom.”

“How did you know that?”

She looked down and took another bite of her granola bar. A line of ants was crossing the desert floor beside her. She peeked her head down at them, tipping the cup slightly over them, a single drop of water falling into their path. She sighed and looked up at the sentinel again.

“Everyone is sick. People are crazy. I’m not crazy though.”

“I know. You’re a healthy girl. We need to keep you away from the people who are sick.”

“Why are they sick?”

“Something happened with the air. It affected the human central nervous system. The advanced part of the brain decayed and twisted. And people were no longer able to think normally. They became like animals.”

The sentinel stopped and turned to her. She was watching the sun rise, rocking back and forth on the ground. She looked at the machine, its optical array, and shrugged.

“Why is everyone else sick but I’m not?”

“Do you remember your time in the Biosphere? Did anyone give you an injection?”

She looked off into the distance and stopped rocking.

“Gilberto gave me a shot. My mom and Terrence got a shot too. My mom has long hair. She gave me a bag of Gummy Bears and I ate the whole bag. Did you know if you eat a whole bag of candy you get sick? You shouldn’t eat that much candy.”

“I don’t eat candy. But that’s good advice. I think you’re not sick because Gilberto or someone in the Biosphere was able to give you a vaccine.”

“Why did God let this happen?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

“Don’t you know who God is?”

The sentinel panned around, pinging the periphery of their position. It switched between optical frames, keeping a vigilance on the sunrise of the Arizona Abaddon.

“Where are the other healthy people?”

“I don’t know.”

“What
do
you know?”

“I was commissioned at the Martinez Manufacturing Complex and my first stage program was to search this region for survivors – people who were immune to the disease. I followed the signs that led me to you. My second stage program is to take you to coordinates not too far from here. South. That’s where we’re going.”

“I’m a survivor.”

“You are. How do you feel?”

“I feel like a survivor.”

They rested in the low tide of sunlight. The girl followed the trail of ants as it snaked into the microscopic crevices of the drought plains. She hopped up and down on one leg and then plopped down again, sitting aside the sentinel as it adjusted its solar plates in the shifting sun. She looked up at the sentinel, searching for the words again, and then she excitedly asked her question:

“What’s your name?”

“I don’t have a name. I have a serial number. It’s DDC39.”

“I wonder if I have a serial number? I could be Becca number one maybe.”

“Okay Becca number one. I’m almost fully recharged. We’ll head out soon.”

A breeze carried up a sunken wash just beyond a line of Whitethorn Acacia. A series of listing telephone poles, lines fallen into the broken clay topsoil, stood over them just ahead. The sentinel shifted again, sunlight square on its frame, and then unlocked its axels. It turned its optical array to the girl, who stood up, quietly, and climbed back on to the sentinel’s base. She buckled into the rumble seat and they sped off into the empty highway.

Into the shale and the blinding pass of the forlorn morning. The time of the cognitive idols has long past. A silent storm of meteors passes overhead, invisible in the soft light of winter’s axis – screaming in the vacuum of the outer boundary. The untouched plane of nihility. The pistons and joints of the vectoring machine whispered as they tore across the cracked highway, heading south through the waste. The desiccation gave way to a new world. Where once a swampland flourished and then died did now spring forth again – aquifers overflowing from untouched wells in the desert floor. Floodplains dotted the distant expanse – moorlands and meadows cropped into the red and yellow clays of the Sonoran soil. The world was changing, untended by the empty dreams of Mesoamerica. They were followed, too. This was the modernity that man glimpsed as it slipped into the fading slumber of a downward ideasthesia.

They made their way further south of the city, passing under the Irvington, Drexel, and Valencia overpasses. The suburban tracts thinned in the distance. At each interchange, massive signs hung over the southward highway, declaring in bold, block letters: “Border Closed. Turn Back. Travellers Will Be Shot.” They passed this same sign, several times. The girl would knock on the sentinel’s frame and point at the sign each time they neared it. The sentinel would look back each time and say:

“Don’t worry.”

The sentinel moved fast – as fast as it could. But the day drew longer. The girl began to cough and the sentinel stopped, offering her more water and reading her vital signs. She took a nap beneath a giant velvet mesquite. The sentinel stood guard while she rested, scanning the perimeter for signs of movement and heat. The sun rolled slowly in the sea of ultramarine. Lone wisps of cirrus carried overhead. The vault of heaven emptied the blue from its holds and a burning coral and peach sky washed over. A jumping, zig-zagging, heat signature emerged on the sentinel’s thermal vision. It crossed from one side of the marshy low fields and into the cracked, dusty caliche closer to where they sat, motionless. The sentinel raised its railgun, the tinny hum whirring in the dusk, and fired a single shot. The signal of heat bounced back and forth briefly and then came to a rest. The warm signature slowly cooled, spilling into the ground around it – a red, then yellow, then violet print in the sentinel’s field of vision. The girl rested, unmoving, for several hours. When she woke, small sparks began to dot the horizon. The sentinel spoke to her:

“It’s going to get dark soon. We need to find shelter.”

She nodded affirmatively and picked herself up, clutching at the blanket and cup given to her earlier – the handkerchief and sunglasses unceremoniously left behind. She climbed aboard, buckling her seatbelt again, and the sentinel drove over to where the heat signature faded into nothing – it was a jackrabbit, felled by the sentinel’s railgun – the shot having gone clean through. The sentinel reached its humaniform hand downwards, picking the carcass up in one swift motion, and then sped back to the road and continued south. The girl looked on with curiosity at the dead rabbit dangling from the sentinel’s clutch, swaying softly in the air as they drove on.  She stared off into the sunset, wondering how many days had it been since she left her mother’s side. She wondered what would happen to them. She wondered how her new friend found her, and why it was that she was spared.

They ventured further south until they hit San Xavier Road. The sentinel slowed as they neared the crossing. The highway spanned over the street but had been destroyed – a chasm dividing both the south and north sections of the highway from the stretch of I-19 just beyond. Just to their left, tumbled into the dust of the darkened berm, was a wrecked HC-130P. A Hercules. The massive bulkhead was detached from the wings, which were scattered and broken in the distance, each turboprop splayed into the earth. The aircraft had crashed near the highway and rolled over a great distance. Its cargo bay door had torn off and the kilned, congealed bodies of several paratroopers were thrown into the dirt – their flesh torn off and limbs ripped out. Desert fatigues were strewn about the hardened soil. A solitary revin, its skin wrapped tight around its bones and skull, eye sockets dried and empty, sat beside the body of a paratrooper – a single gunshot wound in its torso. The sentinel zoomed in on the revin – it was long dead, having come to its end in this akimbo death rattle amongst the bodies it had picked clean. The vertical stabilizer bore the designation of the aircraft: 79
th
Rescue Squadron out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, only a short distance from where it had come to rest in the dust.