Archon of the Covenant (20 page)

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:

“Follow me closely.”

It led her to an unadorned, steel vault door that swung open, wide, with a swipe of its coiled hand across a small sensor.  The pathoton’s dimmed lights reflected the musty interior of a winding, steel ramp leading downward, into the earth.  The gradient lit up with a succession of incandescent lights and the pathoton raced ahead, descending into the depths. Becca followed, sprinting down the ramp as fast as she could, gripping at the rails as she pinballed into the netherworld. Her thoughts careened from one question to the next, unanswered. Her soggy footsteps trailed after the whirring tires of the pathoton as they wound down the ramp.

They stopped at a landing connected on opposite sides with a reinforced cableway stretching from one direction to the next. The long, industrial passage began to rattle and plumes of oxygen and steam erupted from ventilation shafts running along the tunnel. Long fluorescent lamps lit up overhead. The pathoton led Becca down the clanking cableway before finally coming to the forward silo landing. The main antechamber loomed before them, shrouded in darkness. From several floors below, a series of orange lights sparked in a serpentine crawl, igniting the gigantic vault in a soft glow. The payload came into view. It was no missile – the silo housed a towering, three-stage carrier rocket. A heavy-lift launch vehicle. The floodlight above the landing lit the upper fairing and military serial stretching around the cylindrical wall. The model designation was emblazoned down the center body in block, vertical letters:

ARCHON V

The pathoton reached out to an access panel on the wall beside them and flipped a switch. A connecting platform began to slowly extend underneath the landing, locking into the fairing. A series of small, oval windows went around the payload and a light clicked inside, illuminating the inside of the rocket. A face peered out from within. Becca’s eyes locked on a Latino boy who was looking out. He pressed his hand against the small window. The pathoton led Becca across the walkway and opened the fairing access door. Inside the payload, four children, about Becca’s age, were snugly fastened into seats circling the inside payload walls. An empty seat was directly across from Becca as she approached the access door. She looked around at the other passengers. They were terrified. The boy Becca saw looked at her and pleaded:

“Oye! Ayudame! Me siento tanto miedo. Por favor, por favor. Necesitamos a salir!”

The boy broke down sobbing and the other kids began to cry as well. The pathoton looked down at Becca and pointed at the seat, commanding her in its broken vocoder:

“Sit down and buckle up.”