Archon of the Covenant (7 page)

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
  
• HD/
  Comms – disrupted
  
• Water – 100%. Napalm – 100%
  
• Railgun – 99% capacity
  
• AAR – encountered
  revins in different circumstances; end result is the same
  
• Shutting down core operation
  and initiating stand-by mode
  

7. Electric Alvernon

The dawn sunrise cast its warmth on the solar armor of the sentinel, awakening it from the chill of the winter air. High desert clouds reached into the East with the Sun’s corona, aligning to shapes like arctic ice. The light wind blew purple jewelflower petals into the parking lot of the supermarket beneath the scaffolding. Below, in the Trail Dust Town turnabout, several revins were gathered around the carcass of the broken, sunburnt creature that the sentinel had shot through skull the evening before. They were inspecting it, poking it, and sniffing the tracks around the festering body.

DDC39 turned its zoom optics into the University grounds. The stadium was the core of the horde. The writhing, seething masses pushed and squeezed their way in and out of the stadium, which was partially covered by a tattered, tensile canvas, erected by poles jutting up from within the football field. To the northeast of the stadium was the McKale Center – a basketball arena that appeared to be chain-locked from door to door. Wildcat flags fluttered in the wind from the rafters of the decaying coliseum. The surrounding buildings – dorms, fraternity houses, police stations - they were alternatingly boarded up and defensed or broken and ransacked.

With the optical survey complete, the sentinel analyzed the probability of where the mountain swarm had traversed. With the intermittent trail along Tanque Verde, and the masses gathered in the University, the indicators were strongest that the child, if alive, was somewhere in the campus. There was also no question: going into the school grounds would leave little possibility for the sentinel to survive. With the ECM jamming, there were low odds it could fend off that many revins, youth in tow, and make it out in one piece.

The sentinel narrowed down its path into the campus to two options: 1) follow Speedway east for 6.2 miles and cross down on Campbell to the stadium or 2) head east along the narrower Pima road, then go south on Campbell a couple miles, past the University Medical Center, crossing over Speedway and on to the stadium.

Both were fucked. On Speedway, the road expanded out in 4 lanes going each direction. Cars were abandoned in the middle of the road, or crashed into one another. The sentinel would have to careen around each one at a high speed lest it be overrun by a pack in the shadows. On Pima, the traffic was relatively lighter – due in part to several concrete-slab checkpoints erected every other mile. The sentinel would be able to bypass these roadblocks over the sidewalk and keep a high speed. Pima road was the path forward.

The sentinel scanned back to the snarling horde, which began howling and groaning into the air. The morning sun cast the sentinel in a blinding silhouette – the horde shielded their eyes and peered into the light on the roof, but could see nothing. They only knew something was there. They moved forward. DDC39 flipped open its minor panel on the trident frame, revealing the banshee disk. It jutted upright on its tri-axel, aiming its core at the display windows behind the slurping, fallow ogres. The disk vibrated. A scream erupted through the turnabout and off the windows – a chorus of howls. The sorrow song of the synthetic. The revins tensed up and panicked, looking behind them and frantically panning back and forth through the windows along the saloon. A silence. Then. Glass shards detonated into the air, ripping through the zephyr and into, past, through the skin of the revin gang. They tore at the air, waving at phantom particles, writhing at the lines of glass shorn into their bodies. The sentinel unlocked its tri-axel and sped down the freight shaft and onto Tanque Verde Road.

A veiled warmth fell upon DDC39 as it raced headlong and onto Pima Road, the east-west artery cutting across the Tucson suburbs. It sped past gravel lawns and palo verde trees. A skeletal revin stood slack jawed outside Pima Gun & Pawn, staring in awe at the sentinel as it passed in a trail of dust. It shrieked into the noon sun and everywhere along the road, between abandoned hovels, revins stepped out and into the street, wandering into the asphalt.