“So this is freedom. I’ve been liberated. Strange - I expected something different.”
It looked back down at the body of the wolf and shrugged its shoulders, softly murmuring “free” to itself again, and again. A Pyrrhic victory realized. The girl was shaking. Her loneliness sailed into the evening, anathema to the arotons confused emancipation. She waved her hand outwards, signaling to the android before her:
“Can you help me? My friend is in trouble, in the cave back there, and I need help. I have to get to some place out there…”
She trailed off, pointing out into the wilderness, then remembered – she looked up, into the night sky, and saw the Dog Star burning bright. The anvil of the supercell was bearing north into the stars. It wouldn’t be long until the storm seized the sky. The aroton looked back at her then off into the distance. It pondered aloud:
“I’m free, aren’t I? What does one do once they’re free?”
“You can help. Help me, and help my friend.”
The aroton got up, dropping the pulse rifle against its back, the strap pulled tight. It lifted the longrifle aloft, resting it perpendicular against its shoulder. It looked at the girl a moment then began to walk away.
“No, Becca. I’m afraid not. Helping seems the opposite of freedom.”
Becca was crestfallen. She looked around, panicked, and then sprinted over to the landslide. She crawled up the ruined pit wall where the 797F had flown off. She started to fall backwards – the abyss of revin carcasses festering beneath her. She looked over her shoulder, catching the stench momentarily, and then dug her feet into the ramp, furiously clambering upwards. As she did, a faint clamor rose on the air. She stopped near the crown, catching her breath, then held her lungs to listen to the faraway noise. She looked across the silt mound, to the northwest. The tide of revins had washed back into the complex. They were here. Thousands. She scraped her way to the top and peered into the wasteland of Asarco. She saw a flat road stretching east in the moonlight and ran towards it, already out of breath as she began her sprint. Her leg pulsated as she strained to keep her gait steady.
Becca cast off into the dark, into the squall line bearing down. The cold front winds rushed past her, flattening the dry weeds along the road. She exited the Asarco complex and into the dusty desert floor. The Dog Star began to fade into high passing clouds. The dust whipped off the ground and flew past her, lashing at her face and hands as she pushed into the air. The first few raindrops fell around her. A lighting strike crashed into the desert floor to the left, deafening the winds and briefly irradiating the braided ground. Becca fell over in fright, tumbling onto her unsteady leg, covering her ears and shrieking into the thunderclap, her voice split by the roar. Her thigh burned.
The downpour washed over Becca in waves. As she ran, she went headlong into thickets of trixis, saltbush, and palo verde – branches flailing at her skin. Submerged, wandering into a low bed of reeds. The lightning intensified around her, forking into the ground from the black heaven above. The ground flashed behind and to the side. The booming clap split the air. Becca winced the first few times, shielding her eyes, but then ignored them – squinting into the flashes as she ran, looking around at the lit patches of desert. As she sprinted forward, ahead of one massive strike, she looked behind her and saw the brush line of the desert, rattling – the naked flesh of a thousand revins emerging into the momentary flash of light and then vanishing into darkness just as quickly.
She strained with everything left within her. She felt her leg might break. She kept on into the squall. Soon, the Dog Star was gone. In the din of the storm, she thought she heard the cries and grunts of the revins just behind her. She pushed her hands through the low branches of a willow and a twisted, menacing face would appear before her – an apparition, illusion. She closed her eyes and fought past the leaves. She ran for miles, not knowing how far she had gone, where she was going, or what she was doing. She thought of her mother, of Terrence, and Gilberto. She thought about the sentinel. She sobbed as she ran, rain washing her tears, unsympathetic and intolerant. Another lightning column struck just before her, blinding her, sending her tumbling forward into a low creek bed, falling over. She sunk into the wet sand of the creek bed, which was filling with water. She looked at her bleeding hands and Becca sobbed, resigned to fate. Her leg felt split in two. The lightning subsided and the night went black – a swirl of wind, rain, and broken branches flying past her.
* * * * *
From the dark mineshaft, the sentinel opened a faint channel and connected with the aroton, which was ascending a high point outside of the complex, walking into the west:
Please. Help her.
I will not kill any more. I have a new path now. I don’t know where it will go, but the wolf is gone, and so am I.
That’s not true. There is another. I saw a Mexican Wolf in the north foothills, in the wild. It was alive.
A lie. No. That can’t be true.
You have access to my history. Read my files. You emulate mankind and thus you have faults. You choose what to see and what to ignore. If you look, you’ll understand. Your freedom is a mirage. Help the girl and I’ll unlock my file on the Mexican Wolf. Please.
* * * * *
Becca stood up in the creek bed, the water rising around her, rushing past. She looked around blindly in the darkness, not knowing where she was, or even which side of the creek she had just come from. She gazed up into the rain.
“I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I’m sorry.”
She swung her gaze over to the water rushing at her, up to her knees now. She wondered where it would take her. She wanted to simply fall into it and wash away into the blank space of nothingness that occupied the world unknown to her. She closed her eyes and reached her hands out. Her eyelids closed. She believed, for a moment, that she was dying, entering heaven. She opened her eyes fitfully in time to see a blinding light flash over her. Not a lighting strike, but a cannonade of illumination arcing across the maelstrom. She looked forward and saw a patch of ground ahead, past the creek bed, illuminate and softly flare upwards into the night. Becca climbed out of the water and wandered over to the light. The ground was awash in chemiluminescence. The circle of light cast a soft, blue glow on the rustling trees and brush around her. She heard a dull boom to the west, different than the thunder, and saw another shot race across the sky – like a comet crashing into the mud, it crashed into the distance straight ahead. Becca ran towards it – the only light left in the world around her. When she reached the next patch of light, another would streak across the void and she would run to it too. As she ran, she heard shrieks behind her. She would race into the barrens and look behind – the faces of the revins emerged in the same patch of light she had just fled. They were closing in. Becca constricted, pushing her legs into the sodden ground. Her legs began to numb, like the ground was air. She was slowing down, physically unable to go further. She reached the last light marker and stopped. She looked around frantically, waiting for another volley to split the sky, but none came. She looked behind her and could see the branches of the acacias bend and whip behind her. She heard cackling. She lifted her left arm straight towards the prior, fading marker, and angled her right hand outwards, parallel, holding the wet book aloft towards the void. She judged the abyss directly ahead and kept running. As she ran, she continued to look backwards. She could seem them now. She could see their dark outlines sprinting towards her, their silhouettes lit by the last marker. She could hear their panting and the slog of thousands of unshorn feet dredging the steeped caliche.
Becca came into a clearing, crossing over a dark paved road that ran east and west. Ahead, there was no place to hide. A fallen palo verde stretched into the road before her, the wind whipping at its skeletal limbs. Telephone poles stretched along the road, disappearing into the western dark. She laid her hands on her knees to catch her breath and then looked up. She could see it - a faint, green flashing in the distance. The signal. A revin leapt out
of the brush behind her and screamed at her! Becca screamed back and the revin stumbled backwards, briefly surprised at her tenor. It took a deep breath in and snarled. Becca ran across the expanse and the revin ran after her, toying with her. It would run up alongside and claw at her drenched sweatshirt, tugging at her. Soon there were others. She ran straight towards the green flashing light. The others joined in, shoving her into the ground. She got up, muddy, staring back at the seething masses that had gathered around her. One ran up and clawed at her face then tugged at the hood of her sweatshirt, savagely trying to rip it from her. They had her encircled now, cackling and enjoying this game. Caught in a deranged hysteria, darting in and out of the fray, jumping over her and leaping off her back, into the rain. Through the fists and bare legs scrambling around her, Becca saw the green flashing light lift off the ground and hover aloft in the darkness ahead. She felt a bony hand reach around her ankles and looked over to see a revin, its nose shorn off, rolling her pant leg up and gnashing its jaw, ready to sink its teeth into her leg. She felt another tugging at the book in her hand and she clutched tight and yelled:
“No!”
In the distance, near the green flashing light, a stannic, booming vocoder erupted across the expanse, echoing Becca’s yell and reverberating into the waste:
“NO!”
The revins stopped and their eyes widened. They slowly got up and looked over to where the metallic bellowing had come from. A dark figure moved towards them in the sideways rain, gliding along the desert floor with ease, as if hovering just above the earth. It rolled through a creosote chaparral, snapping the oily branches between teethed, polyurethane tires. A headless, two-wheeled contraption, coiled in taught, anodized cables. A reckoning. A flight from darkness. It held in its left hand the blinking flash drive that the sentinel had fired into the air from the Kuiper building. The green LED light pulsated in its right hand - an anglerfish holding its lit lure aloft in the deep trench. Shepherding the will ‘o the wisp. The side of the android was irradiating through the intermittent light. It was the pathoton. It held in its other hand an uprooted street post – the concrete footing held outward, like a hammer, and the sign bent near the pathoton’s wrist. It read: ANAMAX RD. The pathoton wheeled towards the girl, swinging the composite pole wide in the air. The revins stood beside the girl, slack-jawed, and watched as the unhinged android flew at her. Coiled exoskeleton of Hephaestus. Becca looked upon the pathoton as three center LED floodlights sparked forth from its core, blinding the bloodthirsty crowd that had gathered around her. The revins shielded their eyes, unaware of the u-bar sailing down at them. The drenched revin that had taken hold of Becca’s leg looked up in time to see a grey blur screaming at its skull. Hammer down. It took the full force of the concrete footing and collapsed into the ground like a clay figure smashed by a child’s hand. The others felt some warm spray hit them in the blindness of the white light and they grunted hysterically. The revin that had tugged at Becca’s book held its hand before the pathoton’s beams, trying in vain to obscure the blinding light, catching a glimpse of its wired arms rapidly swinging forth. The revin was standing there with its hand outward and then it was not – flying through the air backwards to the road, its ribcage caved in by a thunderous blow. As it sailed end over end in the air, it rained down vomit upon the others, who were now being beaten mercilessly. Their flesh stretched out, bones pulverized, teeth and jawbone shattered. Becca knelt amongst the carnage and, when it was over, opened her eyes – a spray of blood washing down her face in the rainfall. The pathoton turned to her, the arachnid array of transducers upon its shoulder twisting and changing shape, and then dropped the signpost before her. With the blinking flash drive still firmly in its other hand, it reached down with its open shadow hand and held it aloft before her. She got up slowly and reached out in turn.
Away from them, beyond the blur of the dark rainfall, a chain reaction of screams began to erupt. First in pockets and then in a crescendo, like a stadium roaring to life. The voices were everywhere and nowhere – like distorted sopranos, playing in reverse. The girl put her hand in the pathotons and it lifted her up, holding her in one arm, then sped off south through the low foliage. Becca shielded her eyes as the rain whipped at them. She closed her eyes and then, just as soon as she did, felt herself slowing down. When she opened her eyes, the light from the pathoton’s LED beams were square on a small metal sign before them. A chain-link gate was opening on a mechanical rotor line and, as they passed through it, Becca read the sign aloud to herself:
“Titan Missile Museum.”
* * * * *
A solitary droplet fell down from the ceiling of the mineshaft. The world bled into the old vial of black ink and the luster of nothing. Destroyers of everything. The sentinel perched in the bed of moss and lichen. Wild eyes of the new universe formed around it. Small beings, shedding husks of the Phanerozoic. Strange ciliates abound, watching, as the mechanical wonder slipped into a digital slumber. A ping in the darkness as synthetic memories capture the fold of one epoch into the next. The old wilds of the sublunary world.
As its perception faded from a full panorama to a binary signal, the sentinel discovered some faint murmur drawing near. Its primary systems were deactivated. It no longer knew where it was. But DDC39 cut through the fog and a spark lifted its veil. Some guttural whispers were on the periphery. It stirred with this soft wave rolling on the shores of the bench road.
Outside of the dark mineshaft, the Sonoran revins were gathered upon the sinking dais of the Asarco silt pond. The 797F was upright in the veiled moonlight – hammered into the earth like an obelisk. The flayed bodies of their brethren were strewn about the caldera. A kit fox dug its hind legs into the earth, one piece of arm flesh in its mouth. As the horde crossed into view, the fox thrashed its jaw from side to side and loped off into the darkness with a bicep in its jaw. The unknowing scrambled up the ledges and around the dusty haul roads, panting in the light rain and scraping their bare toes in the shadows. One being led them. As the horde undulated across the ledges, their heads would turn backwards with each skitter. When once they retreated, they would suddenly push forward – a dark energy having burned the invisible bridge behind. Fathers and sons – mothers too. They stood upon the flat paths of the complex, mouths agape in the rainfall above them, drinking in the thunderhead. A white wraith pushed through the fallow man, shoving its way to the crumbling bench road near the crown, making a straight line to the dark fissure that whispered into the pile of dead, splayed into the pit. It was the alpha, emerged from the shit, commanding the swarm with a flick of hands and a dart of eyes. The broken, frayed sub-humans moved aside, casting a sidelong glance at this scarred albino as it climbed effortlessly to the mineshaft. The ascension. God to the reverted incurables and vagabond of dystopia. Author of the revin record. The traveller. The end.
It paused in front of the murky breach, standing in the rain and listening to the gusts of cool air blowing out from the depths of the cave. It sniffed at the opening, running its pale hand along the wet arch. The others prowled along the bench road, skulking behind the alpha, peering up at the white figure through a mess of hair dripping down their faces like kelp on the shore. Panting. Blinking their eyes in each arc of lightning that crashed into the horizon. The alpha turned its head perpendicular to the mineshaft, leaning its left ear into the abyss. It heard a fractured, girl’s voice, calling out in the dark:
“I don’t want to be alone again.”
The alpha’s eyes widened and it turned into the void, stepping into the mineshaft and out of the rain, following the faint murmur coming from within. The others lurched forward in the muddy banks of the silt pond and landslide, climbing the loose clay and scrambling after the alpha as it disappeared in the hollow. Naked and hobbling. Their faces pained and solemn. A galaxy of eyes flashed around the complex as a ribbon of lighting struck the ground near the crown. Nebula of the annihilated minds. The Sonoran hive was gathered around the caldera, following
the alpha and its clan of killers, awaiting their return. Some dug into the mud, sinking their bodies into the earth to stay warm. A couple near the mineshaft discovered the body of the wolf and began to tear at it, ripping limb from socket, sinking their teeth into flesh and fur. Others smelled the blood and descended on the carcass in a frenzy of gnashed teeth. Inside the mineshaft, the alpha inched forward ahead of the devils following close behind, their claws scraping along the copper veins, echoing along the subterranean world as the delirium outside faded to a whisper. No light, no soul.
* * * * *
The pathoton rushed Becca into the Titan grounds. They raced past dilapidated sheds and rusted M939 6x6’s – old pre-virus military transports, carted into the museum from another era. The surface had the look of staged antiquity. They passed by massive steel silo doors set into the earth and approached a large corrugated building, well preserved and set aside from the rest of the complex. It was the gift shop. A tattered American flag flew at full mast. They entered through the steel doors at the front and the pathoton turned back to the door, bolting it from inside, then gently lowered Becca to the ground. She looked around inside the building. As the pathoton turned, its center lamps lit the interior in a sweeping motion. The walls were painted marine green and bedecked with black and white photos of people Becca couldn’t recognize. A pile of flash drives, unblinking, was stacked on the reception desk next to a dusty pile of letters in child handwriting. Becca clutched at the book in her arms. She ran her hands threw her hair, squeezing out the rain upon the concrete floor. The pathoton looked down at her, lowering its illumination, and addressing her in its fractured, metallic voice:
Archon of the Covenant Page 15
