Archon of the Covenant (6 page)

The families had barricaded themselves inside and fired at the oncoming horde. The sentinel rolled inside the lodge, the metallic din of hundreds of bullet casings crumpling underneath its tri-axel. A set of gas masks were piled in the corner, unceremoniously retired in the firefight. Dead revin bodies had come to rest in the broken windowsills – holes blasted through their skulls. The sentinel continued upstairs, coming across the first of the survivor’s bodies – a man, a father, who had tried to keep them at bay on the first floor. His remains were picked through. Tattered flannel clothes and broken bones - the only testament to his life. The revins had kept coming, undeterred by the cacophony of screams and gunshots – they had instead been stirred to frenzy by the scene.

On the 2
nd
floor, the sentinel had found the rest of the two families. A large wooden door had been broken down, leading to the main bedroom where the families had made their last stand. The sentinel rolled over a pile of revin bodies in the doorway until it could see inside the room. The last father had shot every survivor in the head, then himself, and it was over. The revins had swarmed in the room, violating the warm bodies and pulling them apart. The color of the room was maroon: the marker of mans devolution. A pile of cracked bones and skulls were strewn about the room along with shreds of clothes, shoes in child and adult sizes. The sentinel scanned the complex – no heat signatures, but no dust either. A dirty book was on a ledge in the corner – miraculously free of blood. The sentinel rolled over to the ledge and tipped its finger over the front cover, peeling the book’s title into the light: “Oh The Places You’ll Go” by Dr. Seuss. It plucked the book from the shelf and dropped it into a small chamber that clicked open on its base.

*              *              *              *              *

Now, in December, the sentinel stood perched on a ledge high atop Mt. Lemmon, looking down at the High Jinks Ranch in the distance. The snow flurries swirled around the sentinel, coming to rest on its trident arm. The sentinel clicked open the chamber and looked at the book once more. The sun had started to set in the horizon. DDC39 was silent, still. The evening sky was clear and the Perseus constellation shown down on the sentinel in its solitude. It began its shutdown procedures and went into standby mode in the cold night, high above Tucson and the desert floor.

• Solar power cell – 20%. Solar armor – 100%.
  
• Drivetrain – operational
  
• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics – operational
  
• HD/
  Comms – operational
  
• Water – 100%. Napalm – 100%
  
• Railgun – full capacity
  
• JE – discovered evidence of vaccine introduction; more death
  
• Shutting down core operation and initiating stand-by mode
  

6.
Fading Signals, Drone Cities

The sentinel was caught in a snowstorm at the top of Mt. Lemmon. Unable to keep a charge, it came to a stop on Ski Run Road in Summerhaven, the empty lifts listing in the distance. A wind swept through the mountaintop obscuring all but the dark cabin fronts in the whiteout of the storm. There had been a track that the sentinel was following – a fast-moving pack of human/revin steps. Now, nothing. The sentinel was buried up to its trident base – two feet of snow having fallen overnight. The winds picked up to 40 mph, the sentinel swaying gently in the violent gusts. Heat optics showed no living creatures. Even the wolves had the foresight to seek shelter in advance of the sudden storm.

Around 330PM, the winds calmed and the sky broke for the first time. Brief rays of light struck the sentinels solar armor and its secondary systems came back online. The sentinel scanned around. Two hot air balloons had entangled in a towering thicket of ponderosa nearby. A skeletal figure hung in the suspension cables, its ossified hand still clasped around the valve cord. Beneath the trees, in an open clearing, scraps of blue tattered cloth flapped in the wind, half sunk in the snow. The sentinel clicked through its optics: thermal, black light, x-ray. Beneath the snow, gathered below the wicker baskets of the tangled dirigibles, were the deceased bodies of a group of Boy Scouts from Camp Lawton. All death, all the time, surrounding the fading signals of man’s binary spine.

*              *              *              *              *

Early the next morning, the sentinel moved out going south along the Mt. Lemmon Highway, slogging through the undisturbed snow banks.  From a ledge on the steep road, the sentinel looked out into the depths of the Coronado Forest. Obscured in the distance would be the ruins of Tucson. Far beneath the ledge, miles down the road, the snow thinned out as the elevation receded into Sabino Canyon. Here, in 1450 AD, the Hohokam people dwelled in pit houses and irrigated the soil of Sonora. They carved their stories into canyon walls, crafted ceramics and jewelry from turquoise, and then vanished, never to be found. The desert dwellers of the Southwest became the O’odham through ethnogenesis and the arrival of the Spaniards in the 1600s, then fractured upon the Anglo-Saxon arrival and eastward tide of manifest destiny.

In the sky, high above the sentinel, three figures circled in unison. The sentinel switched into zoom optics, panning into their path as they began to bank out of view. And then they vanished, disappearing north behind Butterfly Peak.

The snow continued to thin as the sentinel made its way slowly down the highway. Beyond Rose Canyon Lake, near the switchbacks of Bear Canyon, the sentinel came across a convoy of camper trailers that had come to a halt in the middle of the road. A large flatbed truck had been steered perpendicular to the lanes, blocking all traffic ascending the mountain. A series of fresh tracks came off the berm to the right, crossing through the road and circling the trailers, and then descended left down the steep decline. The sentinel switched into thermal optics and imaged the decay of the tracks. It came to a halt and listened. Water trickled down the embankments of the road from the melting snow. Something was breathing. The sentinel detected trace bile and hydrogen sulfide – the gut flora of revin excrement.

Overhead, a leeward air passed down the peak of Mt. Lemmon. An orographic lift. The sky darkened and the wind turned upwards into the heavens.

The sentinel moved closer to the trailers and pinged the periphery. Fallen branches of Aspen trees crumpled under the sentinel’s radial tires. A gust of wind blew through the colony of poplars lining the road and sent down a flurry of dead leaves around DDC39. The sentinel moved in between the trailers and pinged the periphery again. Movement. And heat signatures - further down the road, on the other side of the trailers and the flatbed truck. Three spectral figures lit the horizon of the highway in red, flickering in and out of view of the sentinel’s thermal range. A scream carried on the air, echoing through the steep walls of the Catalina expanse. The sentinel drove forward to the figures on the highway and then stopped in its tracks. A different sound. A fragile, strained cry. The sentinel was between the flatbed truck and the first trailer – a Prevost Motorcoach. A luxury behemoth, torn apart - its windows shattered and the side door ripped from its hinges. The sentinel scanned down and saw a soft, pink body inching along underneath the flatbed. Its tender arms pulled it along the broken asphalt, scraping its underbelly with each push of its hind legs. It was a revin baby, alone.

Another scream echoed from the high walls of the highway further downhill. The horizon pitched into the canyon abyssal. Rain. One drop turned to two. And then a constant pattering. The sentinel’s frame was awash in a sudden downpour. Beneath its optics, the revin infant clambered on in the direction of the scream. Its own pitiful cries now drowned out by the winter rainstorm.

The sentinel kept a frenetic watch on the baby moving perpendicular beneath the flatbed and then craned its neck above the baseboards to peer into the thermal palette of the road. Coming into view was a Mexican Wolf perched in the center of the road, 20 meters away, jaws dripping with blood and eyes wide into the expanse. It reared up on its hind legs and snarled – two naked revins circling it. One revin, a male, was bleeding profusely from its right thigh. The other, a female, was shouting at the wolf – a mix of panicked cries and bleats. The female’s abdomen was slack and her inner thigh was caked with dried blood, now smearing in the storm. The sentinel looked down at the revin baby crawling towards the violence.

The Mexican Wolf was cornered further down the road ahead – but it didn’t run. It looked down the road and scurried despondently from one side to the next. The male revin slapped the road and screamed at it. The sentinel zoomed forward and saw just beyond the wolf - a pile of bodies lay riddled with bullets in the road, strewn about strafed automobiles that lay mangled and pounded into the Sabino stretch. Trees had fallen into and about the mountain highway – their trunks exploded into white husks. The wolf inched closer to the no-mans land of the asphalt.

A whirring hum rode upon the air, getting closer. The sentinel moved around the flatbed, looking down at the violence, and then zoomed upwards towards the oncoming whir. The wolf, spooked, turned to run towards the annihilation in the road just beyond. It got to the edge of the mangled bodies, riddled with deep grooves, when the whir got closest and a buzz rippled through the sky. The road ahead of the wolf exploded in a line of gunfire. A torrent of bullets tearing through the street from side to side. Three drones shot past overheard in a whir. The sentinel looked up at the lead drone, optics to optics. The revins didn’t flinch. The wolf stopped, defeated and cornered.

It was being wedged into the strafing of the drones – some sort of pattern on the highway, killing everything that moved off the mountain. The revins were starving and were bent on killing this Mexican Wolf – one of its kind left alive in the wild upon the reversion of man. The sentinel looked down again at the revin baby, which cried out towards the female down the road. The mother was unable to hear the cries of her child in the torrent.

The sentinel moved back towards the baby and picked it up, clasping the humaniform hand around its tiny abdomen. The whirring of the drones came closer, humming in the cirrus like phantoms from heaven. DDC39 unclasped its center speaker and turned towards the two revins terrorizing the wolf.

A deathly siren erupted forth from the sentinel’s frame, echoing off the shorn walls of the Sabino throughway and taking flight into blue sky. The male revin cowered into the asphalt, bloodied knees into dust. The female turned, unfazed by the spectre of unbeing. Her child was held in the metal and plastic of the digital Perseus. DDC39 rolled towards her, child aloft and squirming in the grasp of the machine. The mother shrieked and shook her head. She let howl a garbled anguish. A child is a child and a parent is a parent. Tears ran down her cheek, dissipating in the rain washing over her naked form. The sentinel looked at the wolf, whose hair was standing straight on its shoulders. The wolf gave a glance to the male revin, who was now helpless in the straight, before running off into the trees lining the highway.

The female pleaded to the sentinel. Her world crashed before her and she wracked her mind for some ancient tongue that was once known. She struggled for the words that she once had. Love. She looked her child in the eyes, upside down before her. It is the time of memory forged in binary time. The sentinel clasped the child harder, wriggling desperately in its clutches. The male stood, hands over ears, and mumbled to itself before turning towards the woman and placing his hands on her back. He chortled and bleated to her, but she was inconsolable.

The sentinel lowered its arm, placing the pale child, the beast, square in the highway ahead of the man and woman. She cried out and ran towards the child, picking her up and embracing her, hell ending. The male, exhausted, too embraced the woman and child. There they stood in the mountain pass, terror over. The sentinel pinged the periphery and initiated a corticoscan. They were alone in the cold foothills of the Sonoran desert. The man and woman were fully advanced in their cortical hypotrophy. The child too. No prefrontal cognition present. They were mindless animals of the arid sea. They looked back at the sentinel, aghast at this emotionless creature, and inched towards the line of annihilation – the ruined cars and shredded corpses piled in the road ahead of the flatbed. The whirring returned and got closer. The male hopped up on a riddled car and extended his hand down towards the woman, child in tow. He smiled a broken grin at her and helped her atop the car. They stood there in the sun, skin warming in the phosphorient. The drones appeared behind them in the horizon of the road. They bore down. The sentinel scanned upwards at their descent. A whistle floated on the air and the floor erupted into a carnage of dirt and blood. A cloud of shrapnel and asphalt slapped near the sentinel and filled the air around it. When it cleared, the bodies of the man, woman, and child lay writhing on the street ahead of the wreckage. The woman gasped, her lungs filling with blood. Their bodies were filled with ball bearings from a gatling gauss gun. She grasped her still child’s hand, convulsed, and died there in the street.