Archon of the Covenant (5 page)

5. Still Life with Annihilation

Over the next two days, the sentinel drove north along the broken Oracle Road and the forgotten earth. In the morning, it would rise slowly, awakening its core systems to the incoming sunlight. It drove all afternoon, stopping frequently to analyze anomalies in the terrain – a set of tracks, a heat signature on a distant roof, a freshly fallen cholla. Satellite data was pinged to the sentinel every 6 hours, providing more information to pore over. There was no sign of human cognition, but there were the primal husks - the revins - gathering in the reaches beyond the road.

The sentinel kept on, aware of this rising tide, until it got to a small RV park in the far north – Oracle Junction. It pulled off the road and turned its sights on the movement to the south. The revins moved from the desert floor onto the broken pavement. The midday sun heated the asphalt to a scalding burn. The revins, shoeless, walked onward towards DDC39. One, a child, ran forward towards the sentinel ahead of the others. It had been badly burned – its ears, nose, eyelids, and hair was gone. It held a rock in its hand and gurgled a guttural scream at the sentinel, shaking the rock in the air until it finally threw it comically astray – landing softly askew of the sentinel’s front wheel. The child shrieked at the sentinel and ran backwards toward the horde.

The revins – ragged and emaciated – surrounded the sentinel and nervously paced back and forth. DDC39 analyzed the condition of these blank lives. Their feet were callused and cracked. Their lips, bloody and peeled. They had a thick layer of dust in their hair, which was knotted and shoulder length. A female shuffled up from behind the group, swollen in the abdomen and bleeding from its genitalia. The males in the group began to jostle and snarl at the sentinel. The female pushed its way to the front of the crowd and before the sentinel. DDC39 locked its tri-axel and scanned the woman before it. She had a festering wound in her face – her nasal cavity was ripped out and, as she breathed, a spray emanated from the torn membranes frayed above her mandible. She stood before the sentinel wearing nothing but a hospital band on her wrist. Many of the snarling revins circling the sentinel had these bands. The woman slapped the ground and squawked a familiar pidgin at the sentinel – a series of bleats and protests that almost resembled some forgotten language. She got increasingly more agitated and pointed at the sentinel and then towards the western horizon.

The sentinel watched this show. The revins crept closer and chortled at each guttural shout of the female. A snarling male in a hospital gown stood alone to the left, holding a golf club awkwardly. A slender adolescent picked up a rock and raised it high in the air.

A small panel clicked open in the sentinel’s center trident column. A black disk rattled in the cavity like a beating heart – then stopped. A silence hung in the air and then the disk erupted in a scream – a deafening torrent that filled the valley. The revins dropped to their knees and jammed their ears full with fingers, palms – anything that would stop this piercing wail. One by one, they got up in a panic, mouths agape with muted howls – a futile plea into the void. They scattered in different directions – all except the female, who knelt motionless before the sentinel. She too unshielded her ears, slowly, and looked back into the lens of the sentinel. Tears streamed down her face, into the gaping wound. She clasped her hands in front of her and motioned her lips, trying in vain to say the words that escaped her many years ago in a forlorn hospital ward.

*              *              *              *              *

DDC39 crested the hill and into the first rays of the morning sunlight in the east. In the distance, a series of cylindrical glass structures shone back in the dawn glare. Biosphere3. The sentinel raised its trident frame in the heat of the world that had long ago shorn itself of cognition. It pinged the perimeter of the complex and scanned the western side. No prefrontal signals, no abnormal heat signatures, and no movement. As it drove down off the hill and towards the parking lot, the sentinel noticed a stained patch of soil - Stadler’s last stand on the northwest side of the main complex. The blood and tissue had dried to a black cake on the façade and his limbs had been picked to the bone.

The sentinel drove silently through the warm flood of the dawn light, cleaving through the dull hum of the aerial apocalypse, and entered the darkness of the East visitor bay. The warmth of the morning glow faded behind it as DDC39 rolled into the dusty cavern of the long bay hall. It continued into the abyss, switching from thermal to black light optics. A cavalcade of footprints went back and forth on the floor. Dried blood streaks went backwards towards the exit – the unmistakable trail of a body dragged into the open desert from deep within Bio3.

DDC39 navigated the dark hall and into the deserted cafeteria. A thick layer of caliche dust covered the floor, tables, and chairs. The sentinel’s center floodlight flicked on and scanned the surroundings. The dust kicked up and clouded the field of view before the machine – like the bottom of the ocean swirling at the arrival of a bathyscaphe. The sentinel found the gymnasium portal and continued on.

Into the hall of Lewis’ annihilation. Silently through the chamber painted with the corporeal remains of a man. Smeared hand marks near the baseboard. Maroon cake and streak marks heading back out of the hall. Lewis’ body was gone.  The airlock was open on both sides. DDC39 rolled slowly over the bloodstain, past the airlock chamber, and into the gym.

The sentinel scanned the area between the bloody remains and the area inside the gym. The assay sat undisturbed on the rolling cart. There were three emptied syringes crushed on the floor near the cart. A fourth syringe, emptied, sat atop the cart. The sentinel switched into black light optics and analyzed the floor. A large set of male footprints traversed the entire gym – a repetitive and blurred circle stamped around the cart. A smaller female print went into the gym and then back out past Lewis’ stain. A single, shoed print from a child was firmly planted near a bench in the corner. No blood traced near the child’s feet. A solitary phantom in the ultraviolet petroglyph.

DDC39 paused, locked into this faint glow. A child. It considered, processed, what had happened here. The sentinel switched into thermal and zoom optics, analyzing the area down to its smallest details. Lewis’ mortal residue left no doubt about his demise, and some other violence occurred – but the footprints and syringes? The sentinel extended its arm and picked up a shard from a broken vessel. A small receptor sprang forth from its palm – a biomonitor.

The sentinel tested the fragment and returned a result its own memory suggested was too improbable to be true. So it re-tested it. And re-tested it. The sequence was for a cortical hypotrophy vaccine. An entirely new and promising sequence. The DNA string was a combination of the disease itself and something that it was not. The scenarios computed from within the sentinel’s core processor left very little doubt: some healthy survivors had made a last stand here, and had been able to derive a vaccine that might save the rare few who were uninfected. And hope of all hopes: a child was here, appears to have received the vaccine, and was taken away.

The midday sun crept into the gym through a series of dusty skylights overhead. The sentinel clicked off its LED lights and positioned its solar panels into the warmth of the Sonoran UV. A radical set of possibilities illuminated deep within the sentinel – a great synthesis of realization and digital fulfillment. An artificial joy.

*              *              *              *              *

For months, the Sonoran desert had hummed with life but now grew silent as the air cooled and the days grew darker. The Ocotillo leaves had turned orange and now fell, leaving the blunt spines bare – dead coachwhips of the arid wild. The bleats and calls of the kit fox and coyote disappeared as the wildlife found winter shelter in the crevices of the foothills. The winds died down and the rustling of the bare mesquite quieted to a whisper. At times, the lone sound in the lost barren was high in the Madrean Sky Island, the kingdom of the Santa Catalinas, where a solitary Northern Flicker was boring into an Ironwood.

A light flurry of snow dusted the aspen and pine high in the reaches of Mt. Lemmon. The white crest jutted into the sky and cut through the winter clouds. For weeks, the sentinel ascended the circumference of the Catalinas following trace movements of a large revin pack – the only tracks leading out from Bio3.

In its ascension, the sentinel had discovered a record of man’s ruin – the revin tide crashing at humanity’s shore, the sediment of civilization. On Thanksgiving, DDC39 had reached High Jinks Ranch and found the remains of a last stand. Two heavily armed families from Oracle had retreated here, pursued by a swarm of starving revins. In another era, Buffalo Bill had mined for tungsten and gold in this outpost when it was known as Campo Bonito. On Christmas Day, 1911, Buffalo Bill dressed up as Santa Claus and entertained the children of miners. After his death 6 years later, his foster son built this ranch. In a later era, Oracle would be overrun by revins, mad with starvation. They erupted in the streets, unable to prepare food in the manner known by who they once were. One revin alone had gone from backyard to backyard, cornering dogs and sinking its thumbs into the soft throats of retrievers and dalmatians. The starvation drove the revins to eat anything – but stores quickly depleted of bread. Canned goods went unopened. When the stores were ransacked, the revins would wander from house to house and bleat out cries of desperation. Pride, civility, and law eroded quickly. Cerebral cognition had all but disappeared. An elderly man, breathing shallow and burnt from the sun, was alone in a wheel-chair outside of a large stucco home on Sycamore Dr. Three revins approached him, circling closer and closer. They bleated and groaned. They barked at each other – louder and louder. One ran up and ran back. The old man, now in the early throes of the PCH himself, stared back – understanding, then not - in the fog of cognition failing him. The revin ran back and pushed the chair over, grabbing the old man’s arm and stepping on his chest – the old man didn’t cry out. The revin pulled the arm out of his socket and the others darted over, giddy with what they’d done. Their jaws thrashed at the gore and soft flesh of the elderly man. It was scenes like this that tipped over the violence in towns across the world. They pounced on the weaker “still thinking” – elderly, disabled, and children. The pack males raped the women and guarded them too. The pack mentality surfaced within this new breed of creature. A new, devolved species of mankind. Homo immemores.

The two families who had escaped High Jinks Ranch had been doomsday soothsayers. The Helwigs and Dolans. They had built underground shelters years before the air spoiled. They had lived in contained bunkers until their own foodstuffs had depleted. On the verge of death, they gathered together above ground wearing a mix of gas masks and SCUBA tanks. They agreed to retreat into the Santa Catalinas, hoping and praying that the air would be pure in the higher elevation. They had packed up what they had and ventured into the foothill basin, coming across the abandoned High Jinks Ranch. Here they stayed, agreeing to hold off their ascent until the air warmed again in the Spring. They had been watched ever since their car engines turned over in the garages outside of their bunkers. The Oracle pack – a violent and structured swarm – was aware of these two families. They saw the children and grandfather get into the passenger doors. They tracked the family – the clean scent of the showered wives wafting into the air, filling the night where the blooms of desert broom had vanished into the ether. One of the wives, Michelle, sat atop stone steps leading up to the main lodge of the ranch, looking into the desert floor during their first evening at the ranch. She had noticed her gas mask was loose. She broke down, sitting on the steps, flinging her mask into the dusk air. She sobbed, rubbing her eyes, then laughed. She laughed at the senselessness and futility of her life. She dried her eyes and took in the horizon of Sonora. She held a pistol in one hand, clicking off the safety. She closed her eyes and pulled the gun to her head – with her eyes closed, she heard a series of distant bleats, and yucca rustling in the still autumn night. She opened her eyes and saw them – hundreds of revins descending upon them from the northern pass. She screamed, running back to the ranch to warn the others.

DDC39 stood in the main entranceway of the lodge. The steps where Michelle had sat were awash in dried blood and bone fragments. Around the ranch, scores of revin bodies were shot through – falling to rest in contorted positions. One sat atop a well, having expired with a gun shot in the chest, seated on the wall of the well - a peaceful look on its face. The preservation of the revin bodies suggested this chaos had occurred in the not too distant past.