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 embrac
ing 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.
When the air cleared, the sentinel unlocked its tri-axel and looked off into the tree line where the Mexican Wolf had darted into wilderness. It rolled forward into the thinning line – the high desert just beyond. The drones were overhead, bearing down on anything that came off the mountain through the pass. The sentinel tapped into the closest digital signals but could not reach them – or they would not be reached. The networks of unliving flickered in the ether, all bearing the same wireless network name. A solitary mystery in the digital graph of the ruined waste: “DO NOT APPROACH THE CITY.”
* * * * *
In the morning, when it rose, the sentinel came down off the mountain and into the Tucson foothills. From the Soldier Trailhead, the sentinel got a clear view of the dead city. Milagrosa, The Homestead, Laurel Hills, Outpost Preserve. The abandoned, desert manors of the rich. The sentinel rolled silently through the dust of the Catalina Highway. No cars blocked the path. The stucco mansions, set away from the road, flashed in the periphery – their solar panels and double-panes, cracked and filthy, alighting in the glow of the winter morning. The air was silent save for the shrieks of a lone Caracara that appeared in the sky overhead, disappearing into the south near the city center.
The sentinel was tracing the pack movement of revin tracks off the mountain and into the city. A herd. The tracks would appear on one side of the road and then cross over, disappearing in the asphalt – a trace line of toes in the dust, and skin fragments in the cracked asphalt. The tracks would splinter off – a smaller group darting off suddenly and into a subdivision or a large estate away from the road. The sentinel followed each of these broken trails, only to lead back to the main road. In one house, in Telesis Terrace, the sentinel found a family laid still in the master bedroom. They were dressed in church clothing, holding hands, eyes closed. Serene. The door had been forced open and revin footsteps circled the bodies, which were undisturbed. Excrement and urine filled the corners of the room. The revins had sat in this room, possibly for days, approaching the bodies then turning away. A medical doctorate diploma hung on the wall. The sentinel scanned the air and plucked the hand of the father. The bodies were full of formaldehyde and trace propofol. A German Shepherd, stuffed and preserved, was propped in the corner of the room, posed and staring into the entrance of the room.
Further down the road, the highway split off into Tanque Verde Road and the sentinel followed it, going deeper into the city. The houses were smaller and closer together, separated at times by a baseball field, a Safeway, or the Pantano Wash, which split the ten-lane road. Many of the buildings were boarded up, barricaded, and sandbagged. Some were burned to the ground. Some were untouched. They belied a city that had devolved into chaos and confusion. The silence of the ruined city contrasted with the deepening scene of memory lost – a trail of tumult and blood like wax cast from a dying candle. Graythorn and saltbush engulfed the remnants of a gas station.
Past Grant Road, the sentinel came upon Trail Dust Town – a Wild West theme park. A caricature façade of old saloons, rail stations, and banks, set away from the road, greeted families and visitors wanting to relive an earlier era. The evening sun, the amber and violet borealis, washed over the firmament and cast a shadow on the sentinel, which looked into one of the theme park buildings at an array of mannequins dressed in western garb. A showgirl in corset and petticoat. A marshal in suspenders and cotton trousers. And a dandy in duster and Dorchester. Another mannequin, undressed, was behind them in the shadows, looking out at the road. Its eyes fixed into the distance. It faded into the dark of the room and looked into the solitary optic lens of the sentinel. Then it was gone.
DDC39 rolled back slightly into the entrance of the park and pinged the periphery. There was no motion detected nearby and there was no thermal signature. There was a revin in the darkness of the display window, but the sentinel couldn’t detect it. Something was wrong.
The sentinel scanned around the adjoining buildings – the darkened plank boards and faux fronts, speckled in faded gold trim. The eventide lay wreaths of shadowlight through the park, shifting through the dust with the swaying sycamores. Something was interfering with the sentinel’s radar and detection array. It was operating on visual optics and closed-circuit network alone. Its audio flickered, picking up intermittent sounds – rustling of the trees, a cricket chirping, and the shuffling of feet.
The naked revin exploded from an alley to the left of the sentinel, crashing headlong into its frame, gnashing at its optical array and prying at its edges. The sentinel sped forward and slammed to a halt, throwing the revin into a hitching rail before the saloon. The revin crashed violently backwards, the rail bending back in the collision, snapping with the revin as it went legs up and landing on its head in the dirt. It righted itself quickly, unfazed by the crash. It stood there panting, glaring back at the sentinel. In the fading light, DDC39 saw it now in full view. It was sunburnt to a leathery and wrinkled sienna. Its knees festered, the skin unfurling, bone cap showing through. It snarled and bent forward. A splintered wood spire from the post stuck out from its side but bled very little – the body of this dark wasteland hunter was nearly dried to the bone. It walked towards the sentinel, ripping the wood from its side and holding it like a dagger. Its eyes wide, mouth agape – a hairless creature devoid of cognition.
A tinny hum whirred in the air and the revin’s skull erupted into the twilight. The sentinel’s railgun buzzed and then came to a silent still. The boiled and leathered revin fell to the ground in a clump. A bag of tissue and bones. It bled out slightly from the gash torn open in its head, but no neural matter spilled to the ground.
As the sun came down on the desolate city road, the sentinel turned its optics to the sky. In the distance, the three drones from the mountain pass banked high and rolled off into the orange and violet. In the back of the park, an Albertsons towered into the sky – the sentinel drove towards it. Dusk was falling and the sentinel was processing that something was wrong with its detection array, but couldn’t comprehend it yet. It found the external freight shaft of the supermarket and shot it open. It crawled the three stories and came upon the roof with minutes of light left in the day. A pile of sandbags were stacked in the southwest corner. The sentinel inched up to the canvas mound and then steadily steered up the zenith. From the top, here in the corner of an abandoned supermarket, the sentinel caught a fading glimpse of the city core. Tucson. The satellite connection was lost and all incoming signals were intermittent. The sentinel narrowed it down to one primary cause: ECM jamming. Something, deep within the city, was disrupting all communication and detection systems. It zoomed in, finding the UofA football stadium miles away. Rayon tarps flapped
in the wind above the stadium grounds. Pac-16 flags fluttered high atop the stadium circumference. Huddled in the evening, circled in the depths of the concrete structure, were thousands of revins. They swarmed and wormed about the stadium benches – the steps and aisles an unmistakable brown and black from the detritus of years gone by.
The horde of Sonora huddled in the city center – sheltered from the predator drones by an unknown disruption, a powerful electronic jamming emanating from somewhere within the city. The child, if somehow still alive, would be trapped in this horror – the devolved hallow. If it were to be found, the sentinel would have to find the child blindly – into the heart of the uninvented man. All the gods of the firmament, all the time. The way in is near, and the way out is an unbeating heart into the ether. The sentinel stared out towards the darkening of the city as the starlit desert sky unfurled like a tapestry. It wanted to look further, longer, but its network wouldn’t allow it. The nightly shutdown procedure commenced, there on the scaffolding of the Albertsons in the high desert.
Solar power cell – 10%. Solar armor – 100%.
Drivetrain – operational
Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics – all but visual, disrupted
Archon of the Covenant Page 5
