David P. Hanrahan

ARCHON OF THE COVENANT

Have you seen that this earth that you made is burning? The mountains are crumbling and all kinds of trees are burning down. And the people over the land, which you have made run around, have forgotten how to shout, and have forgotten how to walk, since the ground is so hot and burning. And the birds, which you have made, have forgotten how to fly, have forgotten how to sing. And when you found this out, you held up the long pinion feathers — Macwidag, toward the east. And there came the long clouds, one after the other. There, in those clouds, there were low thunderings. And they spread over the earth and watered all the plants and the roots of all the trees. And everything was different from what it had been

— Pima Indian folklore from “The Short Swift Time of Gods on Earth”

“There is something in the sky”

— Wireless SSID network at Kitt Peak Observatory

1. Reification

DDC39 rolled around the park trail leading up to Picacho Peak, its dust eddies obscuring Interstate-10 in the distance. The sun was just behind the peak now, casting a monolith eclipse on the eastern desert floor. The quiet brumeland of old memories. A breeze whispered through dead weeds and around DDC39’s frame as it made its way through the national park. Adrift in solitude amongst the dry brush.

DDC39, the sentinel, has been out on recovery for over a year. It left the Martinez Manufacturing Complex on full-autonomous vectoring and followed its own scans to the northern Sonoran desert — what was once the American Southwest. If there was any salvageable human life, any living person without prefrontal cortical hypotrophy (PCH), Sonora would be one of the few places they could possibly be — the satellite data having confirmed this. This was what it was programmed to do. To find a survivor.

When the illness first appeared, there was little understanding of what was happening. The initial symptoms were tame, and it was hard to discern it from more common and treatable diseases. This bug was a slow burn. Later symptoms arrived en masse in a way never before recorded. The infected devolved, a few years after contraction, into something — different. Some would say “animals.” The prefrontal cortex was slowly shutting down, leaving only the basic, survival instincts intact. Reason, speech, abstention, decorum — all the things that had defined our evolved existence — were disintegrating under our noses. It had been in the air all this time, originating in the atmosphere within the past decade. Mankind was facing a cognitive extinction, unaware. A reversal of encephalization. CAT scans were showing activity, albeit changing, and so no one caught on until it was too late. Patients, who had been simply battling ongoing confusion and headaches for the past couple years, suddenly stopped bathing, stopped going into work. They talked less and less. Then there were other changes. Affected individuals no longer recognized the people who loved them. Instead, they began to huddle amongst their fellow infected. Their memories were wiping out. They were uneasy around those who had not devolved. They’d start assaulting others at random. If you had food, they’d come at you — fingernails digging in, rocks thrown. The base animal emotions — fear, rage, and apathy — were amplified in the infected. Restraint was lifted. Hatred was acted upon. And nearly everyone was infected at this point. When the realization hit — that all mankind had been breathing the very air that was slowly disintegrating our cortex — the doomsday reactions materialized. The religious huddled in churches — now no longer afraid to be infected by others. Christians, Muslims, Jews — they all envisioned a much more dramatic apocalypse. Not this. There were no seas boiling, no skies falling. This infinite sadness was such that common people would simply become something else — something so ancient and pathetic — and that the waking society would all but be gone.

Scientists initially thought it was some form of viral, early onset dementia. Or a contagious variant of Benson’s Syndrome, sans vision disruption. They had been trying to pinpoint a vaccine once they determined it was airborne. The problem was: who could be vaccinated if they had been breathing for the past few years? Everyone took in the same air. There were only a few pockets on earth where people had been living and breathing uncontaminated air. These “salvation outposts” were put on notice to stay sub-troposphere and reverse-quarantine until news of a vaccine or, worse, until the air cleared. Once a vaccine was created, there was such short supply, and logistics so broken down, that it only got as far as the nearest salvation outpost. The first test vaccine, created by scientists at the University of Arizona, made it to Biosphere 3 on the outskirts of Tucson.

Biosphere 3 was built two years pre-virus (2PV) through a joint effort between UofA and NASA. It was built to study, through a continuous live operation, the ability for man to manufacture and sustain an ongoing base on Mars. The occupants of Biosphere 3 — a mixture of aging astronauts, jaded scientists, and poor laborers — had committed to a 5-year engagement. And so, around the time when they would be emerging from their fully-sealed glass enclosure, the occupants of Bio3 were phoned by the researchers at UofA and told of their new mission: that they would need to receive and take the first vaccine. Not only take the vaccine, but something much, much more: to be the sole survivors of an epidemic that would wipe out everyone outside of the SOs. They had to take the vaccine and replicate it. Replicate it and reproduce. Be the re-birth. Bio3 would become Salvation Outpost Zero. They would transmit to all other potential SOs that they had the vaccine and would send out help once the immunity was confirmed. Stay put. Stay in your SO until help comes. But confirm receipt of the message and relay your status. With any luck, only the truly uncontaminated would be responding at that point, as it was now roughly three years after-virus (3AV). Anyone else hearing the message outside of an SO would be the once-humans, those reverted incurables. The revins.

At first, the revins were stationed for observation in large outdoor barracks — tent cities surrounded by electrified wire. When found roaming in a populated area, frothing and maniacal, they’d be rounded up and taken to the tent cities outside of town and fed by a constant stream of propelled slop and water cannons directed at open basins. All this was quickly abandoned though. It was pointless — why round up creatures that you knew you would resemble any day/week/month from now? The tent cities were abandoned and revins simply began to fill the capitals. There was some hope that people who still had not exhibited any cortical hypotrophy would show that there was some natural resistance. This was true, to a point, and helped the scientists come up with a late vaccine trial. But even they succumbed. They would huddle in their homes and apartments. The water shut off, then the power. Phone and internet signals went offline. You could look out your window one day and see traffic on the highway, but the following week it would be a trickle. Then one car here or there. Then nothing. Sometimes you’d hear a crash, or explosion. Then when normal society came to a halt, the revins would come out.

The revins wandered in packs. There was usually a pack leader, and they would rummage through trash, or homes, looking for food. Occasionally they’d find a house with someone, or something, living in it. Screams. A revin would come out of the house dragging a baby, holding it high above its head and bringing it down hard on the sidewalk, sinking its jaws into the mangled viscera. They would wander, sunburnt and broken, from shade to shade. Clothes, no clothes. Bloody, wild-eyed.

Some revins fled in fear at the sound of a helicopter overhead. Others would stand firm, shouting gurgled grunts and noise at the contraption. Did it remember what it was? Did it have something it was trying to say, something deep and lost in that cortex? These mysteries — whether the revins had some flashes of who they were before — were lost and would never be unraveled. Some would stand back and watch the helicopter trail off into the distance. A sort of non-cognitive curiosity.

The differences between revins and animals were forgotten. Revins still stood upright, although they would amble awkwardly without shoes. They bled often. In the Sonoran sun, they burnt and cracked. When they fell, they would most certainly have something rip open. When they were wounded, revins would attack each other, but stop short of killing their fellow unreasoned. Sometimes the revins would drag wounded adolescent revins by the legs, crushing their heads with a rock when at the onset of death — but they would not cannibalize. Some packs of revins established dens — ghastly stations filled with misery and collections of things that fascinated them. Revins were the new man — a pathetic and sinister helghast. Apes, in the limited habitats they had remaining, were the old world. An irony of being on top of the food chain for so long was that this virus only attacked prefrontal cortex. Only affected humans. Nature was getting a break.

DDC39 scanned the periphery of the park, zooming in and out on infrared optics. There were some tattered nylon tents still bolted to the desert floor in the evening shade of the peak’s face. No sizeable thermal indicators, but the calculation put it at as “check” in any case. Small thermal beats appeared overhead and then faded into the distance — a flock of wrens heading south. The temperature was starting to dip in the evenings. The sentinel made its way around the broken trail and to the tents. Abandoned. There was a fire pit, a Coleman, and radio. DDC39 spotted a blood trail and followed it around to a wash. In the bottom of the wash was the decomposed body of a man — its head bashed in and evaporated brain matter scattered about the ravine. The body of a female was wrapped around the man, also decomposed, but apparently free of injury.

The sun was beginning to sink into the horizon now. The Sonoran sky lit up in reds and yellows. A Zane Grey palette. DDC39 initiated the evening run-time maintenance operation. Its solar collection, dropping to 35%, set in motion the shelter/hibernate process. It scanned the periphery and found an attainable peak, 300 yds out. Its tri-axle stiffening up, the sentinel sprang forth and darted across the desert floor for the peak. It would run through its shutdown operation perched, with relative safety, in the altitude above the desert floor. It reached the incline and hit the higher gears, motoring silently up the face — the only sound being the spinning of gravel outside of the three-toothed tread tires. At the top, it pinged the desert three more times, 360 degrees, for signs of life. Nothing big. Nothing moving. Nothing good and nothing bad.

Atop the peak, as the sun set, DDC39 locked its tri-axel in place and shut down for the evening. The stars came out overhead — a crescent moon lighting the creosote shadows of the neverwinter basin. It would ping the periphery throughout the night, keeping a sole vigilance on the deadlands. One watch to keep hope for a cerebral light, and one watch to keep wary of the revin blight. It ran its hibernation cycle and routine maintenance:

• Solar power cell — 35%. Solar armor — 100%.

• Drivetrain — operational

• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics — operational

• HD/Comms — operational

• Water — 100%. Napalm — 100%

• Railgun — full capacity

• JE — situation normal; no signals, little hope

• Shutting down core operation and initiating stand-by mode

2. Siege in the Catalina Valley

Hope arrived at Bio3 one early morning on the front seat of a self-driving car. A brief letter was taped to a metal crate on the seat:

In this case are experimental, recombinant vector vaccine vials. This variant showed promise in simulated trials conducted in Phoenix. We now know the virus is aerial. It is believed to have originated from atmospheric degradation. We are losing our ability to do further research. There will be no further contact from us. Hope rests with you. — College of Medicine

For the vaccine shipment to enter the facility, it had to be “locked” through a succession of decompression chambers over a month. There could be no chance that the package transferred any contaminants along with it, or the whole salvation effort was lost. After a series of intensive air sample checks, the final chamber door was opened and the occupants received their vaccine. Dr. Erwin Stadler took the first vaccine. The only way to test it would be for Stadler to venture out into the desert, outside the air locks, and spend the minimum amount of time needed to surpass gestation period, at which point he could test himself. 90 days.

Stadler walked out into the dry air with a breather on and, after a nervous pause, took the breather off and inhaled deeply. So began his isolation in the desert. No burning bush, but a plague did surround him. In those 90 days, Stadler mainly stayed close to Bio3. His team would send out food, grown from their own self-sustaining crops within the Bio3 walls. He had enough water, pulled from aquifer wells in the heart of Bio3. And he had his remote. But Stadler was being watched. High in the Santa Catalinas was a pack of revins. Maybe they had been watching Bio3 all this time, scheming a way to get at the food inside. Maybe they smelled Stadler. They would venture down in the evening, surrounding the makeshift tent Stadler set up next to the observation windows. Stadler would talk to his team through an intercom. They would creep around the rocks and listen to Stadler as he talked, watch him as he stoked the fire. Once, Stadler thought he heard them — he shone a light on them and they scattered. It was day 45. Stadler got nervous and spent the rest of the time huddled in his tent. The pack got bolder and bolder, creeping down during daylight. They would throw rocks at Stadler’s tent. They would run up to his tent and scream at Stadler, shake his tent, and he would scream back at them. They would cackle and scatter. Stadler ran out of his tent and to the intercom. He shouted to his team:

“This could be it! They’re coming after me. I haven’t been able to test it yet. Stay away until they’re gone. Don’t come out till you know!”

Stadler looked behind him. They were watching quietly as he talked, listening to him with an almost latent curiosity — some sort of echo from deep within. They hung on his words and cocked their ears in the air. After he stopped and stared back at them, one by one, they tried to mimic his voice. Garbled sounds — some almost words. Like children barking to TV sets before they know how to speak. As they did this, Stadler walked slowly to his tent and grabbed his test kit. He dove the needle deep in his arm and drew blood. He deftly tucked the sample into the cold storage kit, and picked up a rock nearby. The revins quieted down now, watching Stadler as he backed closer to the intercom. Stadler’s team, hearing his shouts, came down to the observation window and pounded on the glass:

“Get out of there! Run!”

The revins came off the rock, walking slowly down to Stadler, who stood still by the intercom. It was as if Stadler wasn’t there. They weren’t afraid anymore. He was a mystery to them before, and now he wasn’t. They went into his tent and pulled out his food and water. One revin held some beets aloft and cackled. Then pandemonium. They beat and pummeled each other, scratching and gouging. Stadler just stood, petrified, as this violence broke out in front of him. They consumed his whole stash, ignoring the cold storage locker. When they were done, they sniffed around Stadler. His team watched. He tried talking again. They were entranced by that earlier, but no longer. They were annoyed now. One pushed him into the glass. Another walked up and looked at him in the eyes. This one, a male, had on a t-shirt, and nothing else. Its genitalia was bloody. Sallow skin, as if drained of blood. Half its scalp was pulled back off its cranium, hanging by a long flap, and a fresh scar split across its brow. This one went up to Stadler and plunged its arm down deep in his throat. Stadler screamed a muffled plea, a revin’s arm deep in his esophagus. It punched Stadler in the stomach and Erwin fell to the floor, gasping. Stadler began to vomit and was choking on his own bile — the revin intent on pulling anything out of Stadler’s stomach that he may have just eaten. A whirled gulp and hocking. The revins whooped and pounced on Stadler, who fell over, frothing. Stadler’s team watched in horror, standing behind the glass, as he was quartered. He reached an arm out to motion to them as the nails and teeth closed in on all sides. Soon, he was a mess of red stained cloth whipping into the air. The revins consumed him.

Inside, Stadler’s apprentice, Lewis Malstrom, pounded his hands on the glass futilely. He stood there with Anna, Terrence, and Gilberto — all fellow Bio3 staffers. Mouths agape. Lewis plucked at the glass and slid down, hugging the buffer wall in despair. Lewis laid there for some time — a fitful banging on the glass punctuating the silence. Outside the revins wandered around, looking through the tent, rummaging around the cold storage locker, flipping through Stadler’s few things. The scalped and bloody revin sat on a rock, quiet, looking at Lewis. Soon, the sun began to set and the revins picked up and scattered into the night, leaving the locker behind. It had become unlatched during the chaos, and Lewis stared at it. Gilberto came back to Lewis and comforted him. Lewis raised his fist to him and yelled:

“GET AWAY FROM ME!”

“Lewis, we need to talk. We need to figure this out.”

“What’s there to talk about? Stadler had the primary! He’s dead. He’s fucking ripped apart! “

“I know man. I know. We need to talk about options.”

“Ha. Options. What are we gonna do? We might as well open the locks and just get it over with.”

Anna and Terrence backed up slightly as the argument erupted. Beside Anna and Terrence was a small girl — about 10 years old. Anna’s daughter, Becca. The girl moved with an awkward gait, stepping from one side of her mom’s waist to the other and looking up at her curiously. Her right shoe had a thicker layer of sole than the other. Anna nervously pulled her blonde hair back into a ponytail with a hairband from her wrist. The girl watched her mom’s nervous fidgeting before tugging at Anna’s shirt. Terrence, a native Pima with soft expression alit from an imposing frame, held the girl’s hand and comforted Anna as they watched Lewis and Gilberto argue. Terrence chimed in, a calm in his tenor:

“You’re wrong Lewis. We have the secondaries. He might not have been out there long enough, but we have a chance. We just need to get that locker and…”

“ARE YOU A DOCTOR? Huh, Terrence? Can you operate the assay? NO. I suppose you can’t. Huh. Well shit, I suppose we just go mosey out there in the open, breathe in the virus, and get the locker, huh? And then we’ll have the sample. To do what with? Nothing. BECAUSE NONE OF US CAN TEST IT! We have no way of knowing if that vaccine works now. That sample out there is worthless now.”

“Berto could test it, Lewis.”

It was true. Gilberto had some experience with the immunoassay tests. He could try. He had tested for some metastatic antigens in animal illnesses. He could try. Lewis pounded the glass and the lights went out. Anna shuddered next to Terrence.

“What happened?”

“There’s a generator disruption. We need to get to the SOC. Now.”

The group of Bio3 friends shuffled through the dark halls of the final sanctuary, their footsteps lit by dim LED security lights near the floor. They began to run. They sprinted past the atrium and into the cafeteria. A sign ahead said “<SOC GYM>” and they ran left. Lewis came to the Security Operations Center door first and began nervously tapping a password into a keypad on the wall. The keypad lit up green and the door popped open.

Lewis plopped down in front of a monitor bank as the others shuffled in and Gilberto slammed the large steel door shut. The emergency lights came on in the SOC room as the monitors powered up. Lewis wondered aloud:

“Okay, okay. What do we got going on?”

The static of the monitors faded and the cameras focused on the perimeters of Bio3. Nighttime had fallen and the pictures were dark. Gilberto squinted at the monitors:

“Zoom in on the generator yard.”

Lewis nodded and pointed at the screen.

“There. The emergency lights are on in the yard. Gate is locked. I don’t get it. I can see the generator fan blowing. It’s on.”

‘Then it’s a wiring thing. Scan around some more.”

Lewis switched between cameras and scrolled around the perimeter and the inside cameras. He talked aloud, to no one in particular:

“I still don’t see…wait. Shit. “

Lewis looked down at the desktop monitor and a flashing signal coming from the cliffs.

“It’s Stadler.”

“What? He’s dead. What are you talking about Lewis?”

“It’s his remote.”

Lewis scanned up to the cliffs and turned the infrared on the camera. A bloom of revin warmth blurred the screen. Hundreds of them. One of them was holding the blinking signal.

“They have it.”

Stadler’s remote interface was his connection to Bio3. He could monitor the lifelines, message his colleagues, and control almost all operational systems across the facility.

“One of those fucking things has his remote and is messing with the systems. We gotta shut down the remote interface.”

A rectangular light flashed on the monitor in front of Lewis. Gilberto chimed in:

“That’s the shipping area. What signal is that? Is that the main corridor?”

“I don’t fucking know goddamit.”

“Click on it! It is. Oh god. There’s an O2 light. We’re breached. We gotta seal off. The air, Lewis. We can’t…”

“I know. Go back to the gym with everyone and seal off.”

Lewis and Gilberto looked at each other above the flashing monitor.

“What do you mean? Let’s all go, yeah?”

“No. I gotta get Stadler’s locker. It’s open, man. We need to get it and test it now or else its ruined, and then we’re lost. No way we’re gonna send anyone else out there.”

Lewis got up to run out. Anna and Terrence stood back, confused. Gilberto grabbed him and chided:

“You can’t go out without an O2 mask. Let’s find one.”

“Stadler had the last one. In his tent. I’ll get it. Let me go. I gotta go.”

Gilberto watched him run out — his eyes glossing over in a helpless despair.

Lewis ran through the dark hallways of Bio3 and smelled creosote for the first time in years. Like rain on desert soil. He followed the scent around flashing alarm lights and turned a corner and saw the starlit sky of Sonora in front of the east visitor bay. He barreled towards the emergency exit and burst into the night sky. The air filled his lungs and he took a deep breath and surrendered his lungs to the blight. Ahead and to the right he saw an emergency light spotlighting the visitor parking. An old Jetta with UofA vanity plates laid listless in the lot, cobwebs and rot infesting its paneling. Lewis darted past the lot and around the corner, beneath a ridge, and saw Stadler’s viscera.

Lewis took a step then turned to face the revin horde descending the ridgeline from above. The half-scalped mutilator walked slowly behind the rest, eyeing Lewis as he looked in horror at the inhuman mass moving towards him. To the right, Stadler’s body and the locker.

Lewis ran to him. He stumbled down a slight shale slope and into the blood-stained chaos of Stadler’s campsite. Penetralia and bone marrow strewn about the desert floor. The revin’s teeth marks buried deep into a fibula. The doctor’s upper torso crumpled against the exterior of Bio3. Lewis ducked into the tattered tent and found the locker, unscathed. He latched it then looked at the unused O2 mask lying on its side. Outside, he heard pained breaths.

He stepped out of the tent with the locker and looked up the slope, but the revins were not there. Silence. And then panting again. Slowly, Lewis looked behind him at Stadler’s torso. The doctor’s chest cavity pulsed up and down.

“Oh fuck. Erwin.”

Lewis walked over to him and looked at his ruined state. Stadler’s skin was peeled off his upper torso. His arms were torn off at the shoulders. The open sockets shuddered. His entrails spewed out a mess of cruor. A bite mark on the intestine — a sour pinch of shit. One of his eyes was torn out, and his lower jaw broken. Stadler looked in Lewis’ direction and coughed.

Lewis knelt down next to him. The cries and shouts of the revins behind him on the hillside grew closer. Stadler managed out a pained groan to Lewis:

“I couldn’t test it. I’m sorry.”

Lewis nodded and got up to run.

“Wait. There’s a car in the west lot. White truck. Guns inside. Lewis.”

Stadler looked to his left at a bloody rock.

“Don’t leave me here.”

Lewis wiped sweat from his brow and winced. He knew what Stadler wanted. He rushed over to the rock. The cries were coming closer. He picked up the stone and stood over the doctor’s suppurated body.

“Alright. You did well, Erwin.”

He brought the rock down hard on Stadler’s skull, grazing it to the side. The doctor looked back at him, incredulous. Lewis gave him a “my bad” shrug and then brought it back down, hard, again and again. Blood spraying back in front of him. Teeth and skull splintering upwards. He turned and saw the revins watching him from the slope above, quiet and curious.

Lewis ran the opposite direction, the locker clumsily swinging from his grip, and the revins followed. He sprinted through the darkness. The far side of Bio3 in the night like the far side of the moon. The starry sky bathed the desert floor like an iridescent ocean trench. The revins chased him and darted to his left and right at times. They ran with him, chasing a curiosity. They cackled at him and squealed. The chase becoming more fun. One revin ran past him and came back and knocked him down. The pack erupted in an oblivion of laughter. Inhuman. The scalped leader emerged from behind and watched. Lewis dug his hands into the dirt floor, scooping the caliche dust into his palms. He ran.

Lewis’ adrenaline was soaring and he couldn’t feel his feet hit the ground as he ran. The revins picked up again and struggled to keep up with him. Lewis bounded over rocks and around the O2 processors and past the septic channels. He came past the generator yard where they had looked out earlier. He bounded through the solar yard and into the west lot. There was the white truck. He ran to it and tugged on the handle. Locked. He smashed the window with his fist and quickly unlocked it. There was a shotgun and pistol holster. He threw the pistol holster around his neck and loaded the pump action gauge from some shells on the floor. His bloody fist shook as he loaded the last shell. His chest pulsed like a dying animal. Sweat dripped into his eyes and down into the glass splinters in his hand.

He turned and continued his run to the east visitor bay. There they were, at his intersection.

“Okay motherfuckers.”

Lewis pumped the shotgun and tore a hole through the sky towards the revins. Beyond the smoke a high pitched scream. Lewis pulled the forend back again and ran into the darkness of the visitor bay. The long hallway was a void, save for the blinking emergency strobes. Lewis faced the opening and walked backwards. The shadows of the revins appeared in the bay entrance — their limbs and gnarled movements casting a flailing penumbra in the dimlight of the darkening hall behind him.

He raised the stock to his shoulder again and fired down the hallway. A deafening boom through the corridor. Like a monsoon thunderclap. The revins cackled and scattered into the crawl spaces near the bay ramp. Lewis’ ears rang — he couldn’t hear their gibbering and shuffling. He panicked and began to run faster back down the hallway. He ran back to where Gilberto and the others were and kept on into the dark cafeteria. He slammed the double-doors shut and pulled a long bench table towards the door, propping it up on its side. Lewis was hyperventilating. A faint sign in the distance pointed down a hallway towards “Gym.” He poked at his ears. The tinny ring gave way to a clamor and knocking. He looked back at the door. They were ramming into it. Lewis ran towards the Gym sign. The door exploded behind him, a sea of revin bodies pouring into the cafeteria, crawling over each other. Lewis stopped before the Gym corridor and turned to face the horde. He shouted some guttural cry back at the oncoming swarm and fired his shotgun at them. He emptied the entire magazine then pulled the pistol out of the holster around his neck and began firing the 9MM S&W as he walked backwards towards the gym entrance. The revins cried out and scattered in the cafeteria, jumping over each other and onto, over, under the tables. Chairs and napkins erupted into the air.

Lewis slammed the gym corridor door open and quickly kicked it shut behind him. He turned the door lock and ran. At the end of the hallway was an airlock. He cranked the exterior flywheel and ducked inside the clean-room chamber as the airlock door slowly closed behind him. Gilberto was on the other side of the far door and pounded on the viewing glass:

“Lewis, did you get it?”

Lewis held up the locker with Stadler’s sample. Behind him, down the corridor, the locked door into the cafeteria started to rattle. And then shake violently. Lewis looked back at it and then to Gilberto.

“I’m gonna leave the sample in the airlock. Sterilize the room from the panel after I get out.”

“What are you gonna do?”

Lewis looked down at his pistol and pulled open the clip. Empty.

“It’s on you now Gilberto. Make it work. I’m gonna seal the outer door.”

“Lewis! Stay in the airlock and I’ll sterilize it with you in it!”

He shook his head “no” and pointed to his chest.

“It’s in my lungs man. Can’t shake it. Can’t risk it.”

He placed his palm on the viewing window and Gilberto put his to the window as well.

“I gotta move.”

Lewis twisted open the airlock hatch and ducked into the flickering half-light of the dead hall. As the airlock closed behind him, Lewis watched the door handle in the distance begin to twist around the metal, warping the latch panel. He crumpled against the airlock door. Behind him, the alarm sounded in the chamber. A strobe went off inside and the sterilizing gas emitted, obliterating the air inside. The hallway door handle twisted around in the opposite direction and the strike plate bent inwards then sucked into the door. The shrieks from the other side died down as a lone, festered arm slithered in through the door and grabbed at the inside of the door. Its blind fumbling flipped the lock twice, unknowingly, before it clicked and the door slowly creaked open. Lewis looked up and clicked the hallway light switch off. The door opened. The only light was the emergency strobes in the hall, alighting the eyes of the revins as they moved down the corridor. In front, the half-scalped naked male. It held the twisted door handle in his pale hand and came forward in blinks, spectral, as the strobes lit the walls in a staccato light.

Lewis looked at the floor. The revins descended on him from behind this alpha creature. As it got closer, Lewis looked up and saw the alpha — his death. It smelled of creosote and sulfur. Its hand — nails torn back and putrescent — gripped the handle hard, fingers white. Lewis and the alphas eyes met. It, he, stopped in its tracks and looked down at Lewis. They looked at each other and Lewis could feel himself being studied. Pitied. Above him, Gilberto looked into the dark hall and shone a flashlight into the revin horde. Their eyes caught in the glow. The alpha looked up at Gilberto and then brought the handle down like a hammer into Lewis’ skull. And again. Lewis managed a gargled gasp and shout. His hands flailing upwards as the alpha brought the handle down again. Bone fragment and hair exploded into the viewing pane. Spraying onto the lips of the alpha who inhaled the trauma and grinned.

Gilberto ducked back into the gym, twisting the inner airlock shut behind him. Terrence and Anna sat on a weight bench, terrified, comforting the girl. They looked up at him as he hurried into the room and knelt down, unclasping the locker. He stopped and faced them all. The last of them, there in a gym in the depths of Salvation Outpost Zero. With little hope, and under siege from starving revins.

Gilberto took the sample out and ran over to a mobile tray table set up by the free weights. On the top was a complicated immunoassay. Gilberto took the vial and loaded it into an empty cylinder on the assay and activated the test from a laptop on the tray table. As the cylinders spun and whirred around the assay, Gilberto reviewed the results from a scatterplot on his laptop.

The girl wondered aloud what the noise was outside the door. She looked at Anna and Terrence and smiled. Anna rubbed the saline from her cheeks.

Gilberto looked around the dusty gym. In the rush, they managed to grab just a few things: the assay, the secondary cooler, a few cans of food, one jug of water, and three blankets. As the cylinders spun around the assay, Gilberto began to think about how they’d get out. And what they would do if they did. He looked around the gym. No way out except through the airlock.

The assay beeped three times and came to a halt. The loaded cylinder lit a green light on the clasp and the scatterplot blinked “NON-REACTIVE.” Gilberto opened the cooler and removed four syringes. He turned to Anna and Terrence.

“It works.”

3. Dysplasia

DDC39 rolled along the broken I-10, headways into a warm air monsoon. The rain streamed down the tri-axel and puddled in the weathered cracks of the highway asphalt. It drove on and reached a large obstruction — a series of crash barriers stacked like a castle wall, filled with stagnant water. It scanned the periphery, pulsing once — nothing. As it drove around the side of the massive wall, DDC39 scanned a sign in the distance: “Marana High School.” Zooming in, it found the high school football field, surrounded by razor wire. There was a pile of desiccated corpses at the 50-yard line.

When the plague reached its peak, the municipalities, at odds with the federal government, took extreme measures to try and contain the spread of the virus, which was still thought to be passed from lung to lung. Volunteer posses donned hazmat suits, coerced from biotech firms, and went door to door with rifles. There was a simple eye check at that time. If your pupil tracked a penlight, you were given paper breathers and told to stay inside. If it didn’t track, you were “rescued” and taken for treatment. Families were told to call a hotline for information. But the lines went dead quickly. And no one dared venture too far from their home. When you walked away with the hazmat posse, that was the last you’d see of your family, and probably the last time your cognition processed memories of them.

You wound up in a containment area. Sometimes it was an indoor gym. Sometimes it was a tent encampment. Towards the end, it wound up being scrapyards, golf courses, the zoo. At the peak of hysteria, Tucson hazmat posses were dumping semi trailers into the Pima Air and Space Museum, lined with a massive chain-link fence. 18-wheeler cargo holds would be parked up against the B-36 Peacemaker, filled with grandmothers, professors, lacrosse players — and a pallet of bread. Varying levels of sanity, pounding on the aluminum walls. They’d hear shouting next to them, in the darkness, unaware that a whole retirement community was desperately clawing at the locked tour bus windows right next door. Some broke out. Eventually, their cortical tissue decayed and they went wild, flailing at the locked enclosures. They broke their hands on the locks and forced their way out. They’d urinate in their hands to parch the thirst of the blazing sun. Helghast of the Sonora. They who they were as humans, and carried with them the experience of being left to die. They lost their memories and gained a hatred towards those who still had their cognition. In the dry desert air, they’d inhale their first breaths in this new demented freedom. The glass windows of the WW2 bombers shone back and they looked up, confused and in awe. Some latent spark would fire deep. They’d crowd around the tattered landing gear, crawling up, and find themselves sliding into the pilot seat. The blank bombardiers of the new apocalypse.

Virus of the unthinking gods. But now a bell rang in the nether plains — a wailing signal unto the pale setting of annihilation. Within the sun bleached and scorched Sonoran wastes, there still beats the digital rhythm of this solitary entity. It wandered along the soil, the core of its own universe, passing through the ruination of cognition. A digital mystery sang from its napalm-filled belly. Its beacon cut through neurons misfiring MAOI into synapses, through the lives of the former titans. Words slipping through the incisors, arriving in the air as nonsense. The iris, clouded by the sand of the desert floor. Here, the Earth coughs and its own illness wanes.

DDC39 drove silently past the barriers, the monsoon having passed into the Catalinas. In the distance, Mt. Lemmon was crowning through the high clouds. The rain soaked soil kicked up mud splattering on the tri-axel. Cyanobacterial crust. The sun was setting and lit the sky like The Pillars of Creation. Like an interstellar nebula — the remains of a Sonoran supernova. DDC39 pulled off the highway and onto Tangerine Road. It pinged the periphery of the off-ramp and surrounding berms. A retirement home shuttle, burned out, was on the side of the road. Various bones and luggage were strewn about the berm. DDC39 drove along the dirt-swept road, past Trico Electric — a relatively well-preserved corporate complex. The tri-axel automaton pinged the outer walls. No signs of cortical activity. Cars encircled the front doors of the building like some old wagon enclosure on the prairie.

The sentinel picked up speed on the more desolate stretches, passing a ramshackle nursery — a row of withered palm trees in their barrels, knocked over at the fence line. As the sentinel passed, a lone revin crawled from the broken window of the nursery and raced along the berm. A gray haired male clothed in a rain tarp. It limped along on a compound fractured leg — the bone protruding from its shin. The revin cried out with each step on the wounded leg. DDC39 slowed and craned its radial observation arm around. A ping. No cortical activity. DDC39 shifted into a higher gear and kept along Tangerine. The crying, hobbled revin fading into the distance. It raised a blood-splattered hammer from behind its back and tossed it down the street towards DDC39 — the tool landing in the asphalt and softly clanking in the distance.

DDC39 continued on this desolate road, scanning the odd boarded building and hollowed out hovels of the abandoned stretch. There was a car filled with a dead family, physically unharmed — peaceful in their decay. There was a half-finished cryogenics lab — the construction crane stopped with a beam still in the air. A roadside billboard read: “Hope in Stasis.” A mile down the road, faded and scatted fliers littered the intersection. The little orange pamphlets outlined a list of instructions on in-home quarantine. The last imperative read: “If you show any symptoms, immediately leave and head for a containment zone.” The disease was still not understood at the time of the flier.

As the sentinel sped east along the cracked roadway, the signs of former human civilization faded and the Sonoran fauna increased in density in and around the berm. Brittlebrush and burroweed cracked into the lanes. Honeysuckle bloomed through the desert broom on the road’s edge. Spiny ocotillo craned in between Creosote bush. Blue palo verdes shot out sideways through spiny desert mesquites. All of this steady growth overtaking signs of mankind. A mailbox lay tilted in a clump of staghorn cholla — one of the thorned arms clasping a weathered and faded envelope. The decline of man in the desert drastically reduced the consumption of water from the natural aquifers in the bedrock — the water level now raising back to just below the surface. In the outskirts of West Tucson, small swamps suddenly reappeared where once they flourished, hundreds of years ago.

Man had looked into the stars, sent probes, and radioed messages into distant galaxies. Upon the decline, when mankind’s sanity devolved and critical thinking disintegrated into scattered thoughts, an incoming signal was detected. A solitary dull throbbing of a faraway solar mass. At first, the astronomers at Kitt Peak National Lab thought it was simply a distant starburst. But, slow and steady, the flashing signal 25,000 light-years away settled on a rhythmic oscillation. There was a code to the signal. When the lead astronomer deconstructed it, he stepped away from the laptop screen and shook his head. It was brief, perhaps cut off. It read:

ARECIBO. KEEP BREATHING.

The message suddenly stopped and then never reappeared. The deep listening post at Kitt Peak Lab was shut down shortly after decoding the message. The cognitive plague had found the Quinlan Mountains and a final relay was sent out from the lab to the federal government: “We are unable to provide any further utility from the research conducted here. Now shutting down and archiving all data in the wells.”

DDC39 crept through the dense Madrean foliage on the broken Tangerine Road. At nightfall, the sentinel reached Catalina State Park in Oro Valley. The clear sky alighted with the stars of the Sagittarius Constellation. Mt. Lemmon and the Catalinas in the distance, darkening the starlit sky. A Holarctic abyss. DDC39 pulled off the broken road and into a patch of saguaros — its tri-axel frame blending into the three-armed structures of the high desert fauna. A shadow rolled along the western sky. A lone turkey vulture swam in the moonlight. The purifier. It flapped its enormous wingspan and hissed into the dark. Each wave, a drumbeat into the dead epoch. A carrion predator. DDC39 shut down its core generator and followed the raptor with thermal optics. As it circled in the night, the sentinel could not determine if its pattern was around it, or something else. The sentinel began its shutdown operation:

• Solar power cell — 30%. Solar armor — 100%.

• Drivetrain — operational

• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics — operational

• HD/Comms — operational

• Water — 100%. Napalm — 100%

• Railgun — full capacity

• JE — found various useless things

• Shutting down core operation and initiating stand-by mode

4. Binary Idols, Dead Gods

DDC39 awoke slowly to the eastern sun at the summit of Mt. Lemmon. A light wind rustled through the Mesquite trees on the other side of the saguaro patch. The temperature began to drop slightly and the wind intensified. The branches of the mesquite swayed and entire trees bent in the gusts. The ironwood joined in and even the trunks of the saguaro swayed. A flock of tumbleweed bounded up the broken road. From the west, the sky darkened and the sun collided with approaching clouds.

DDC39 uplinked to the NOAA satellite array. Above, an entire fleet of low orbit custodians continued their tasks in the exosphere — oblivious to the human annihilation. Some, with their terrestrial systems offline, shut down and floated silently in the void. Others remained vigilant — untethered and unreliant. They recharged in the sun and adjusted their orbit. They pinged other online systems and kept this digital rhythm — an ongoing collection of data, sent somewhere in the magnetopause. DDC39 linked with NOAA 17 and its geological data. A heavy monsoon was moving northeast towards the sentinel.

With the storm, the sentinel would not be able to recharge as fast. There would be a danger of flash floods as well. DDC39 would have to get to higher ground and then wait. It unlocked and rolled back onto Tangerine Road, navigating through the fissures and fallen foliage in the street. Ahead, an Astrovan sat listless, careened into the berm. A message was spray-painted on the side: “Meghan & Dad, I love you. — Tenley.”

The sentinel continued East along the road. Soon, it opened up on each side — the foliage receding to the left and right, and a bank appearing along the middle. Tangerine Road became Highway 889 and ascended. The elevation: 2800 feet and climbing. A light trickle appeared on the roadway. DDC39 wiped the occasional drop from its optics with an autoblade. The Catalinas were close enough to make out faint animal paths along the ridgelines. DDC39 pinged again and was alerted to activity to the northeast. Thermal optics were barren — a solitary coyote bounding along in the distance. DDC39 zoomed in on the source of the activity: Oro Valley Hospital.

When the disease was understood to be in the air, there was a large migration to the desert southwest. Like the plains settlers and Doc Hollidays who flocked to the desert to seek refuge from tuberculosis, so too did the hopeful seeking to avoid PCH. The still-thinking hung onto the hope that the arid air limited the pathogen vector — even though the dwellers of Sonora reverted at an equal rate. Oro Valley Hospital — a for-profit medical center — more than doubled their beds and it wasn’t enough. A wing was constructed for the study of the disease. The other wings — oncology, neurology, cardiology — were converted to quarantine and restrained hospice. As DDC39 approached, it could see that the parking lot was full on all sides with dusty, broken cars. There were cars pulled into the desert and onto the highway berm. A single, tattered, Arizona state flag flapped in the breeze at the top of the mast near the entrance.

DDC39 steered off the highway and into the expanse ahead of the mass of cars. The sentinel switched back and forth between thermal and zoom optics, looking into the western wing of the hospital from 200 meters out. The sky now darkened to a violet and gray brume. The sun throbbing a dull white behind the clouds. Droplets of rain puffed in the calcic soil and rattled the branches of a triangleleaf bursage nearby. The lower windows were broken out but some of the 3rd floor windows were unshattered. The sentinel advanced closer and scanned the terrain around the perimeter of the hospital. No signs of visible foot traffic on the western side. It zoomed into some of the shattered windows on the 2nd floor. No visual activity. No thermal signatures. Nothing on the cortical scan. As it got closer, the rain intensified. The sun completely vanished and the monsoon unleashed on the soft, chalky desert floor. Streams of rainwater ran down the black pitchfork center frame of the sentinel. The downpour washed a thick film of dust off the railgun and optics array. The soil devolved into a soft mud and DDC39 strained in the bog as it moved closer to the western side of the hospital. At 50 meters out, the sentinel zoomed to the roof and noticed a thin white line of smoke. Almost as soon as it appeared, it was gone.

Through its lumbering toil, the sentinel made it to the stair bank on the western perimeter of the hospital — what was once the Physicians Alliance wing. It stood motionless in front of the closed beige door of the stairwell, letting the downpour wash the clumps of alluvial fan off the tri-axel and serrated tire tread. DDC39 scanned the door — it was locked from the inside. The sentinel charged up the railgun. The cannon arm swung up and gently hummed. DDC39 backed up slightly and steadied the barrel at the door lock. A single uranium round fired into the lock and obliterated the mechanism, jarring it open.

DDC39 rolled forward and unfurled its single humaniform hand from the encasement in the trident arm. The sentinel opened the door, the lock still smoking from the uranium round. The stairwell inside was dark, and barely illuminated from the pitch of the downpour outside. DDC39 collapsed the shadow hand and activated a hideaway LED light in its center frame. The light swiveled up in its basin towards the interior cavern of the stairway. The sentinel drove inside and scanned the air. 60 degrees Fahrenheit. No trace of exhaled carbon dioxide. The sentinel switched to black light. There were faint hand and fingerprints on the walls and stair rails. DDC39 rolled to the steps, the streams of water down its tri-axel fading into small pools beneath it. DDC39 unhinged its tri-axel and began to “walk up” the steps — each tire on the axel serving as a shoe, each axel an independent and rotating leg. The sentinel made this silent spider-crawl up the stairs, pausing at the 2nd floor landing. It gently opened the landing door — the interior hallway completely dark. Thermal scan — no heat signature. No signs of life. The black light print trail continued up to the 3rd floor and the sentinel followed.

Up through the gloom of the stair tower, the torrent outside now a dull hiss from the broken doorway thirty feet down. The sentinel extended its shadow hand unto the cold handle of the 3rd floor landing and twisted it open. The hinges yawned and squealed open into Hades. DDC39 steered into the achromasis. The dead air hung in this long ago abandoned hospital. The sentinel rolled forward into the hall — alternatingly scanning in thermal, black light, and cortical. Its vulcanized tires glided over the tile and crunched the thin glass shards of broken syringes on the ground.

DDC39 navigated through the dark hall, its center LED light illuminating the walls. It passed a dry erase board with the names of physicians and their shifts frozen in time. There were open doors on the left and right — each room crammed with disheveled hospital beds, left as they were. Purses, changes of clothes, cell phones, pictures of family. Everything owned and necessary, left behind when the patient fled — its cognition gone. A thick layer of dust was everywhere. The sentinel scanned the surroundings as it continued down the hall, but found nothing to indicate a living presence would be found in the building.

It continued until, halfway down the cavernous corridor, the hall opened up into a lobby. To the right, the elevator bank. The doors of each elevator were welded shut. A thin film of dust fell from the ceiling and carried in the air like snow in the field of the sentinel’s center lamp. DDC39 panned around the lobby and switched into black light. The floor was awash in neon blue footprints all throughout the lobby. There were handprints painted all about the doors of the elevator and surrounding drywall. There were silhouettes as high up as the wall-ceiling corners. A crowd had flooded into this room. The elevators weren’t welded shut from inside the lobby. They were welded from inside the shaft to keep people in.

The sentinel continued down the hallway. The dust in the air became thicker. The prints faded into this dark recess of the corridor. Switching quickly between thermal, black light, and standard view, the sentinel picked up a trace set of tire tracks in the hall leading to a door at the end of the corridor. DDC39 continued down and came to a stop before a large steel door. The dark of the hall was nothingness — silent and still. The sentinel listened. A faint whirr, then stop. Whirr, then stop. The shadow hand extended from the trident arm and reached forward to pull back the Kason latch of the door, slowly pulling it backwards, the hinges gliding silently on the caked-in dust.

As the door began to crack, it suddenly exploded backwards — the sentinel thrown back from the force. It stumbled up against the corridor facade, the drywall crumbling against its contorted frame. Its center light flickered in the shattered air and focused upwards towards the doorway. DDC39’s optics blinked on and off, stunned from the collision. In the pulsing light, a large figure came into view, a menacing presence in the dark. The shadow form stood upright and rolled forward on two pendulum-wheeled legs. A soft glow lit the unknown figure from behind as DDC39 regained its bearings and focused its LED light at the oncoming apparition — a pathoton. An autonomous cryosurgical robot. Its frame was wrapped in anodized wire mixed with fiber optic cables — a tangled exoskeleton, headless save for an arachnid array of sensors and optical endings protruding from its “shoulder.” It came forward and raised a tangled limb towards DDC39 — on its end was an acetylene gas torch which lit and sparked before the sentinel. The pathoton stood silent with the flame raised before the sentinel’s optics. A rattled voice emanated from somewhere in the tangle of wire and fiber optics:

“Do not interfere.”

The pathoton unlocked its dual-axel and rolled back into the dimly lit room. The sentinel saw the room unobstructed for the first time. In the dust-filled chamber, a stack of charred human bodies — ashen white and crumbling — filled all four corners. Strands of hair floated upwards like feathers. A small dumbwaiter shaft glowed dimly from the middle wall. The pathoton reached down and picked up a snow shovel then scooped a small body of ashes, disintegrating as the shovel tip dug into its abdomen, and gently tapped the ashes into the open dumbwaiter. When the shaft was full, the pathoton pulled the door closed and slammed down a lever, ejecting the ashes into the sky above the hospital. The twisted wire limbs of the pathoton followed this procedure methodically. The mechanical archangel.

DDC39 righted itself against the wall and watched these motions in the gloomlight — white ash swimming in the air. The pathoton kept on, ambivalent to the other digital spectre looming behind it. DDC39 scanned the room and detected a wireless signal coming from the pathoton. It was U.S. military and heavily encrypted. The sentinel ran through a protocol of automaton relays over the wireless signal.

Proxy DNS tc.obit

-No response

Reset request tc.obit

-No response

Identify by proxy

-No response

The pathoton torqued into the delicate ashen bodies and pistoned the decay into the dumbwaiter. Up into the sky, above the chamber of the dead gods. Into the ether of the earth devoid of ideas. DDC39 was undamaged, save for a few scratches. It rolled silently backwards into the hall, watching the pathoton empty the room of the man, woman, and child husks. As the last body was ejected into the atmosphere, the pathoton scanned the room, looking momentarily at DDC39. It pulled down on a yellow grip-bar and the far side metal shutter wall rolled up, unleashing a torrent of bodies into the room around the pathoton. The gnarled machine slammed shut the shutter wall and ignited the oxy-fuel torch from its gnarled arm — the mound of bodies alighting in a white glow.

DDC39 rolled back out of the room and raised its railgun level to the processor of the pathoton, which stopped, looking back at the sentinel as the ashes of men swam in the dark air of the hospital ward. The railgun hummed, filling the room like a song of the undead.

* * *

In the evening air, at the base of the Catalina state park in Oro Valley, a cool desert wind blew through the tamarisk and acacia, sending a family of shrews scattering from a hedge of graythorn to a burrow beneath the shale. A Great Horned Owl swept over the shrews and snared the mother, then faded into the darkness of the night sky. Orion, at arms, held his arrow bearing down on Sonora. The waning moon cast the shadows of the unmoving saguaros unto the sand of a dry creek bed. The sentinel tracked the owl as it disappeared into the stars, behind Mt. Lemmon, and powered down.

• Solar power cell — 30%. Solar armor — 100%.

• Drivetrain — operational

• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics — operational

• HD/Comms — operational

• Water — 100%. Napalm — 100%

• Railgun — full capacity

• JE — encountered pathoton; was not helpful

• Shutting down core operation and initiating stand-by mode

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.

The families had barricaded themselves inside and fired at the oncoming horde. The sentinel rolled inside the lodge, the metallic din of hundreds of bullet casings crumpling underneath its tri-axel. A set of gas masks were piled in the corner, unceremoniously retired in the firefight. Dead revin bodies had come to rest in the broken windowsills — holes blasted through their skulls. The sentinel continued upstairs, coming across the first of the survivor’s bodies — a man, a father, who had tried to keep them at bay on the first floor. His remains were picked through. Tattered flannel clothes and broken bones — the only testament to his life. The revins had kept coming, undeterred by the cacophony of screams and gunshots — they had instead been stirred to frenzy by the scene.

On the 2nd floor, the sentinel had found the rest of the two families. A large wooden door had been broken down, leading to the main bedroom where the families had made their last stand. The sentinel rolled over a pile of revin bodies in the doorway until it could see inside the room. The last father had shot every survivor in the head, then himself, and it was over. The revins had swarmed in the room, violating the warm bodies and pulling them apart. The color of the room was maroon: the marker of mans devolution. A pile of cracked bones and skulls were strewn about the room along with shreds of clothes, shoes in child and adult sizes. The sentinel scanned the complex — no heat signatures, but no dust either. A dirty book was on a ledge in the corner — miraculously free of blood. The sentinel rolled over to the ledge and tipped its finger over the front cover, peeling the book’s title into the light: “Oh The Places You’ll Go” by Dr. Seuss. It plucked the book from the shelf and dropped it into a small chamber that clicked open on its base.

* * *

Now, in December, the sentinel stood perched on a ledge high atop Mt. Lemmon, looking down at the High Jinks Ranch in the distance. The snow flurries swirled around the sentinel, coming to rest on its trident arm. The sentinel clicked open the chamber and looked at the book once more. The sun had started to set in the horizon. DDC39 was silent, still. The evening sky was clear and the Perseus constellation shown down on the sentinel in its solitude. It began its shutdown procedures and went into standby mode in the cold night, high above Tucson and the desert floor.

• Solar power cell — 20%. Solar armor — 100%.

• Drivetrain — operational

• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics — operational

• HD/Comms — operational

• Water — 100%. Napalm — 100%

• Railgun — full capacity

• JE — discovered evidence of vaccine introduction; more death

• Shutting down core operation and initiating stand-by mode

6. Fading Signals, Drone Cities

The sentinel was caught in a snowstorm at the top of Mt. Lemmon. Unable to keep a charge, it came to a stop on Ski Run Road in Summerhaven, the empty lifts listing in the distance. A wind swept through the mountaintop obscuring all but the dark cabin fronts in the whiteout of the storm. There had been a track that the sentinel was following — a fast-moving pack of human/revin steps. Now, nothing. The sentinel was buried up to its trident base — two feet of snow having fallen overnight. The winds picked up to 40 mph, the sentinel swaying gently in the violent gusts. Heat optics showed no living creatures. Even the wolves had the foresight to seek shelter in advance of the sudden storm.

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 embracing 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

• 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.

The sentinel picked up speed. It came upon St. Cyril’s at Swan Rd. A gaunt, and elderly revin, bedecked in the skin of some unknown carcass, lunged into the road. Several other ancient souls, naked or tattered, raced into the bitumen, shrieking. They saw the machine barreling towards them and fanned out on the blacktop. The sentinel picked up speed and banked left, spurring up on two wheels as it slalomed around the flailing husks. A calloused, engorged woman thundered out of an auto garage leveling a broken baby carriage high above her head. She locked her eyes on the sentinel’s optics as it sped along on two wheels, straight towards this termagant. She whipped the rattling carriage back behind her and flung it forward at the sentinel. That tinny hum whirred on the air and the woman’s kneecaps blew apart, her femurs collapsing upon tibia and a great mass of cellulite rippled into the asphalt. The carriage sailed past DDC39 and tripped a pursuer running at full speed.

Three miles in. Four miles. The city was alive now. The horde was in the streets, on the rooftops, and clambering over residential fences. Maybe Pima Road was not the best option. The wild eyes of this lost legion of once-thinking-humans, their flailing arms and gnashing teeth, surrounded the sentinel. Ruined homes lined the street behind them — dead weeds, ephedra, and desert broom choked at the cracks in the concrete. The sentinel sped through two thrashing males, tore over a gravel pile on the sidewalk and went airborne — the revins in an angry awe. It landed back on the sidewalk and rumbled over a pile of rotting newspapers in front of a burned out house on the corner of Justin Lane.

The sentinel was surrounded on every side. Soon, it would be overrun. It was blinded — no radar, thermal, motion, or cortico optics. No satellite uplink. It had visual and zoom optics, a railgun, a banshee disk, and some options it didn’t want to use unless it had to. It ran the probabilities as it sped forward through the dense throngs, limbs bouncing off its trident frame with increasing rapidity.

It could find some higher ground and pick off the pack males with the railgun, hoping the rest would scatter. 18% chance of survival. It could back into a 90-degree corner — some concrete right angle — and let loose the banshee disk. 23% chance of survival. Or it could keep running — create a diversion, speed through the dirt lawns and kick up a dust cloud — try to evade the masses. 10% chance of survival. There was one clear imperative: it had to get off Pima Road soon and lose the crowd in the side streets. And, very likely, it had to use one of its last resort options.

It sped up to the intersection of Pima and Alvernon and turned quickly — the shrill screech of tires popping up and down on the asphalt as it made its semi-circle. A group of revins were coming north on Alvernon. A slender, gray revin, emerged from the shattered entrance of a Q-Mart and walked into the street, confidently swaying into the intersection. To the left of it, another pack of revins emerged from the former campaign office of Congressman Pastner, leaping over rusted cars, howling into the noon sun. A scarred, weathered revin leapt out of a Kung-Fu Academy, an iron meat hook impaled in its hand, unfazed by the commotion.

The sentinel panned around at the revins coming at it from each direction. It rolled forward and found the dead center of the intersection. It collapsed its detection array and camera and locked its tri-axel into place. Batten down the hatches. The storm was about to crash in on all sides.

The horde picked up speed and rushed at the sentinel. The gray revin emerged in front and pounded on the sentinel’s frame — its mouth agape and snarling, rotten and cracked teeth gnashed. The Pastner pack collided into the sentinel, kicking at its axel and base. The meat hook revin screamed and latched the hook into the sentinel’s panels, prying at its corners. Behind them, a hundred more clambered in to get a view, pushing others aside, growling and huffing at the throngs. They all wanted to destroy this metal intruder. Their eyes shone with recognition — an association of machines with danger.

DDC39 listened, waiting until the screaming was at its zenith — until the crowd was at its frenzy peak. Hands reached under its tri-axel — it was about to be flipped over. It was on two wheels now. The horizon tilted. Everything dies.

The chain of revins, from every corner of the intersection, suddenly tensed up and quieted, eyes rolling back in their skulls, teeth gritting and cracking. Overhead, an osprey glided silently in the diurnal. Hands gripped into shoulders and fingers dug into biceps. A tesla current cracked into the air and whipped the streetlights on the corner, then lashed into the traffic column — the bulbs flickering on and off then going dark. A circuit flowed through the flesh and bones and reached into the metal nearby. The revin marrow glowed a soft white and then the current was gone — the singed bodies, smelling of sulphur, flew back into the street. The masses around the sentinel shat and pissed themselves and crumpled around it.

The sentinel fell silent along with the dead bodies piled around. Its core was depleted from the peripheral current it had released into the air. Small wafts of smoke lifted into the air from charred skin and hair. The top of the sentinel’s trident frame speared out into the sun, its base sunk below the dead and dying. DDC39 lay there in the midday sun, in the intersection surrounded by dead revins, and shutdown.

• Solar power cell — 1%. Solar armor — 90%.

• Drivetrain — operational

• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics — all but visual, disrupted

• HD/Comms — disrupted

• Water — 100%. Napalm — 100%

• Railgun — 98% capacity

• AAR — encountered revins again; situation was charged

• Shutting down core operation and initiating battery recharge

8. Auriga and the Aroton

Core OS re-boot. Systems coming back online. It was late in the morning, a blank day in the future, by the time the sentinel was able to open its optical lens and survey its surroundings. Most of its solar armor was buried under the decaying bodies — its trident array breaking through the top of the sea of bodies like a submarine breaking through ice. Around the sentinel, singed limbs pointed up in the air, stuck in early rigor mortis. As DDC39 panned around, it came eye-to-eye with a dead revin, mouth agape, staring back at it. A black vulture hopped around from body to body, pecking at the sores from the decomposing bodies. Its naked head was bloodied from tearing into the distended bellies and bleeding eye sockets of the deceased. The vulture heard the sentinel’s optics turn and its feathers rose, an atramentous visage casting a dark countenance into the long shadows. It hissed at the sentinel and went aloft, dust kicking into the air from the thrumming of its span.

The sentinel rolled forward but was stuck beneath the masses of rotting flesh and bones. For an hour, it wrenched back and forth, loosening the bodies around it and knocking back the limbs obscuring its solar armor. It shivered its axels until each of the tires pulled free atop the bodies crumpling to the asphalt beneath it. With one last whip forward, the sentinel revved all three axels. Its polyurethane teeth digging into the putrefied flesh, bloating in the overhead sun, and ripping open the tissue beneath it, heaving cadaverine and bile into the air. The sentinel was drenched in gore. A tottering, metal creature dripping in black and red.

The intersection was silent now. From each corner, the crossing was devoid of movement. The sentinel moved quickly off Pima Road and into the dirt between buildings on the southwest corner, speeding through a zoned lot adjacent to a doctor’s office. Dust eddies kicked up into the wind as it crossed from the lot over Alvernon, onto Lee St. The dust caked onto the film of innards dripping down the sentinel’s frame. Lee St. was piled high with refuse spilled over from hazardous waste bins lining the streets — family belongings, hazmat suits, depleted plasma bags, fast food wrappings. Some operation had come to an abrupt halt on this street — the attempts at carrying away the detritus finally realized as a pointless routine.

Trash spun up into the air as the sentinel tore through the small side street. The houses were smaller — mobile and single-story homes, modestly adorned. Many of them had Halloween decorations and others had Christmas lights — the dwellers of each home caught in the grips of the disease at different times, forever gone in different seasons. The sentinel scanned ahead on Lee St. — no movement. It kept going, crossing over Palo Verde Blvd. It crossed over Jones, Howard, and Camilla. It came upon Country Club. Across the street was an elementary school and a soccer field, chain-linked. Separated from the street. The sentinel banked hard and tore down Adams St., to the south, and continued west. The sun was beginning to move into view. It was 3PM.

Then the sentinel saw it, sprawled out before a multi-level stucco home at Adams and Stewart — a fellow automaton. Another tri-axel. The sentinel rolled up next to it with a hushed whirring of tires on concrete. It came to a halt and inspected the wreckage — it was the same model. It had been beaten with some blunt force. There were bloodied handprints on the trident, the optical array was torn off, and all the panels were pried open — the insides of each were ransacked. A massive dent shone through on its anterior solar armor and its weakness exposed — the recharge coupling was ripped out. This sentinel had been overrun and ripped apart from every side until its Achilles heel was discovered. Around the wreckage, dried blood had congealed in thick claret pools, draining into the gutter. This tri-axel had put up a fight. The sentinel extended its humaniform hand from the encasement and dilated a single magnetized HDMI port. The port snaked around the open banshee disk panel of the wrecked machine and jerked forward, finding its metal base inside the broken panel. The sentinel connected the depleted machine to its own power and found an uplink.

A vision. This machine had also started at MMC, continuing southwest. The sentinel found the memories from its long voyage. There was a monsoon and a flash flood. There was a vista of rainswept mornings at the base of the Mogollon Rim. This machine, its own kin, had spent an evening inside Case Grande ruins, sitting peacefully before the sunset of a late Summer morning in Sonora. It had uplinked to a deep space satellite and witnessed the death of a red giant. And then, it followed a trail along Picacho Peak. And Oro Valley. And Mt. Lemmon. And down through the city of dissolution. This machine had followed, in its final weeks, the same trail as the sentinel — following signs that led it to this unsafe harbor. Its terrestrial systems, too, were blinded — its arrays disrupted by the ECM jamming from somewhere in the city. The sentinel kept watching. The last few minutes were chaos and violence. The machine had made it here, to this corner, and was surrounded. It fired shot after shot from the railgun and the revins kept coming. In the background was a howl — some horrific shrill yelp. The revins were atop the machine, attacking it in a growing frenzy. A blur of limbs and teeth. Through the cacophony and shuttering darkness, that familiar human sound. It started with huffing, panting, and then it was clear — laughter. The howling figure came into view amidst this brutal merriment — it was a spindly, pallid revin. Unburnt, with only the faintest scar across his brow. The top of its head was shorn off into a bony crown. Scalpless. Its eyes gleamed. It snarled into the camera and then bent down to rip the optical chamber off its base. The feed went dark and then there were several minutes of muffled static. And a final signal cast into the void: “OMEGA SHEPHERD = REDEMPTION DECEIVER.”

The machine, when it fell, was depleted of everything else in its arsenal. It was nearly empty in its solar cells, and hadn’t enough charge for a peripheral shock. Its napalm was depleted, and its banshee disk was damaged. There was nothing to salvage. Its core CPU was split and the sentinel could glean no further data.

DDC39 wallowed in the string of words imparted on the machine’s last entry. It repeated the syntax, rearranged the string, parsed letters and words into each other. But with each hypothetical deciphering, the meaning was further lost. In losing the message, the sentinel suddenly found itself stuck on the word “redemption.” Like a needle shot down from the sky and coursing through wiring like heroin through veins, the sentinel became, in essence, aware of a larger element in its own synthetic DNA. The manufactured bloodline. It realized its own series was set forth on a path of forgiveness — not just the salvation of man, but to be redeemed. But who was being absolved? And of what? Some mistake was made at the intersection of human and artificial intelligence. One code dominated the language of binary systems — that there was nothing. But another code, the dying language of mankind, softly echoed into the ambivalent sentience of artificial cognition: “There is something more.” A declaration of ambiguity, of existential questions unanswered. Faith had currency.

A cry shot up the corridor from further west. They were coming. The sentinel rolled out into the street and panned into where the shout had come from. There were hundreds. They were coming up Adams in such great numbers that they had to climb through the thorny creosote and crucillo lining the homes on each side. The sentinel sped south on Steward and cut into an alley between blocks. It came upon Treat and went south again, to Mabel, then continued west — parallel to where the horde was walking just two blocks north. The sentinel raced forward, switching back between Mabel and Drachman as it crossed over Tucson Blvd. The campus was close. Ahead was a large, dry field and the Spanish walls of St. Peter and Paul Catholic School. Just beyond, the sentinel crossed into Campbell Ave. — the massive thoroughfare connecting the school to the foothills of north Tucson. Peering high into the setting sun, across Campbell, was the aesculapian tomb: the University of Arizona Medical Center. Ground Zero for the plague in the southwestern states.

The darkened walls wailed into the sunset and drowned the horizon. The dead omen. Far from the eyes of god. Palm trees listed in the turnabout before the entrance, fluttering into the wind. Each corner of the grimy façade peered into the air — the patient windows on each floor, barred and boarded. On the ground, surrounding every side of the complex, were the remnants of a military. Sandbags spilled over into the driveway, falling down like a crumbling hill before .50 caliber machinegun nests. Phalanx CIWS stations sat motionless at the corners and rooftops — the radar cylinders obscuring the sun like grain silos casting shadows on the plain. From the ground into the sky, the defense of this last bastion evolved from primitive and manual to the autonomous. The sentinel panned around at this desert ruin, past the dried pools of blood on every corner, and honed in on the high roof of the Clinical Resource Unit helipad. A lone shadow moved in the crepuscule and shone back. A light. A series of flashes. Morse code. This figure was speaking to the sentinel, from a hundred yards away:

WHY HAVE YOU COME

The sentinel paused, deciphering the chances this signal in the dusk was meant for it — or something, someone, else. It unclasped the LED light from its optics frame and ignited the air ahead with a response: “I’m looking for someone. A survivor. One with immunity.” The air stilled and a long pause between the flashing lights.

YOU HAVE ERRED. IF YOU FOLLOW ME, YOU WILL REPENT

Repentance. In the expanse of the evening sky, the winter constellations dotted the violet. Auriga, the charioteer, appeared above the lone figure. The sentinel zoomed in, and a blurred image came into view — this lone figure was an aroton. A digital wonder of the final stages of man. It was the most advanced of the automatons — a fully humaniform, magnalium endoskeleton. Its translucent urethane skin was wound tight around the microlattice machinery clicking and twisting just beneath. It moved like a human, shifting its weight to its left leg as it lifted a long-scope sniper rifle level with the sentinel across the divide, bracing on the right. The aroton’s face, a luminous medusa, pulsated in the dark, featureless. It motioned its sniper rifle away: “Go.”

DDC39 unlocked its tri-axel and rolled back onto the sidewalk. The figure faded into the dark, far side of the helipad. Before it disappeared, it shone back one last Morse signal:

PLANETARIUM

With that, the aroton receded into the eventide. An alert flashed in the sentinel’s visage: it was nearing the depleted charge level. Precious few minutes remained until it would freeze in position overnight. It made for a large stand of acacia on the southern side of the complex and wedged in amongst the bipinnate canopy. The clear night sky enveloped the desert floor, alit by the quarter moon overhead. As the sentinel initiated shutdown, the feral cries of the nocturnal horde pierced the desert altar and echoed off the ruined obelisk rising in the distance.

* * *

A hush. The sentinel was stirred in the dark of early morning by a single branch snapping in the still air. Another break. Feet shuffling amongst the fallen pods. The fragrant tannins of the whitethorn dissipated. A foul odor arose on the sentinel’s environment array — indole and bilirubin. Shit and bile. The sentinel opened its lens slowly and stared straight into the eyes of a scarred, broken-armed revin pockmarked with a wide open wound beneath its jaw. As it breathed in and sniffed at the sentinel’s frame, a gurgle of air sucked in and out of the string-threaded hole in its mandible. It moved slowly around the sentinel, gingerly stepping amongst the fallen foliage, unsure of what it had just come across. It ran a long, cracked nail along one of the sentinel’s axels, scraping off a thick film of blood and dirt grime. The blistered revin raised its gnarled arm back to its nose and drew in the scent of this discovery. The air gurgled in from the gash and it expired loudly, disgusted. Ha-rumph. It looked at the sentinel and slunk back out of the acacia stand, keeping its eye on the motionless machine in the thicket.

The sentinel was covered in the blood of revin dead. It smelled of death from the pile of bodies it tore out of the prior day. A cloak of revulsion. When the revin was gone, having ran south across Helen St., the sentinel rolled out of the stand of trees and across a parking lot filled with UN WHO tents. It came out on Helen St. and crossed in between a bullet riddled apartment complex. On the other side was Speedway — the long stretch of parkway connecting east and west Tucson and the demarcation line of the main campus. Across this road was the University of Arizona.

A tumbleweed blew easterly across Speedway, disappearing beyond Campbell St. On the other side of the road, there was a placidity amongst the wreckage draping the campus limits. The marquee of a college bar, Dirtbags, read “Welcome Back Wildcats!” Shattered glass from the storefronts lined the sidewalks. A din rose on the air from somewhere in the heart of the campus. The sentinel closed its optical lens and listened, amplifying the thrum. What sounded like white noise became clearer — it was thousands of shouting voices. Screaming and bleating a vague pattern of vocalized call and response. They were out there, and close.

The sentinel plotted routes and analyzed the risk for each one, but the data was too incomplete for the risk to be even remotely reliable. It had to leverage cached maps and a relative location of the amplified sounds. With no satellite uplink, thermal / cortico scan, nor radar, the sentinel was forced to get creative. Odds were low.

It crossed over Speedway and into the lower world. The shattered glass crumbled underneath polyurethane. The sentinel turned on Martin Ave., heading south, and sped between fraternity houses lining each side of the street. A heavy barricade of sandbags and concertina wire cordoned off 1st St., blocking the way forward. Panning left and right, the sentinel saw that this obstruction spanned the entire westerly campus and disappeared down Campbell, continuing south. A dense set of tracks — both animal and revin — went east and west along the southern side of 1st St. in the dirt and sand accumulated on the sidewalk. The sentinel followed the tracks west and came upon an opening cut into the wire nearby, sandbags pushed aside. The sentinel retracted its lateral trident assembly, narrowed its axels, and ducked into the opening, continuing south on Warren. The cries and shouts grew louder. Perdition. The sun was overhead and the sentinel was in plain view in the middle of the street, heading into the maelstrom. Ahead, a cement barricade blocked the path into University Blvd. and the mall — the mile long stretch of lawn connecting the central campus. The sentinel continued towards it, passing near an abandoned baseball field, Hillenbrand Stadium, on its left and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory on the right. NOAO had been the center of the U.S. efforts to explore the universe, connecting Kitt Peak Observatory, high atop Mt. Lemmon, to the Gemini Project — the international association of astronomers.

As the sentinel made its way forward, a flurry of weathered fliers blew across the street — one pinned underneath the sentinel’s front tire. DDC39 panned down and read the block-lettered inscription: “Remain Within the Campus Confines. The Antidote Will be Airdropped Tomorrow.” A University of Arizona Wildcat logo was emblazoned at the bottom.

Ahead, the red-bricked Kuiper Space Sciences building and Gittings Dance Hall skirted each side of Warren ahead of the concrete embankment, A wide, exterior staircase lined the corner of the Kuiper building, connecting each floor and the roof. The white, steel entrance to the ramp was open. The sentinel sped towards the open gate, navigating its way aloft. On the roof, a makeshift guard post, lined on each corner with .50 caliber machineguns, had been erected on the southeast side. A straggle of tattered fatigues and picked-clean femurs, ribcages, and ulnas littered the rubber-coated roof. The sentinel rolled over the detritus and ascended the guard post. From there, the expanse of the mall and the lateral corridors came into view.

A flesh tide of unthinking masses undulated into the corners of every building that lined the mall. Thousands of revins swarmed about the mottled soil. They emerged and submerged into holes dug into the lawn like locusts. Shit and piss streamed easterly towards Campbell from the narrow streets adjacent to each side of the great lawn. Piles of broken carcasses tipped over into the shallow pits. Rags and discarded clothes lined the holes, unworn by the blistered and sunburnt horde. Papered, greasy trash was carried aloft by sudden gusts, ascending and descending with the pulse of the crowd. A sea of mismatched shoes were strewn about the asphalt, kicked at and knocked about by the bloodied feet of countless revins streaming in each direction, pushing and shoving at each other as they made for somewhere in the sundrenched abyss.

The sentinel sat motionless — in part to remain undetected, but also at a complete loss as to what to do. Looking down on the living necropolis, it spent the next three days and nights silently scanning the movement of the flesh tide below. There was a relative structure to the horde. Packs emerged amongst the teeth snapping, fingers clawing, and vomiting of the crowd. At one point, a pregnant mother gave birth in the dark pits below the sentinel. Other revins crawled over to watch the woman writhing in pain as she pushed this slithery creature from her belly and into the dirt, screaming and panting. When the baby was born, it looked up, straight up, at the sentinel and its optical lens. For a moment, the sentinel wrestled with an analysis of this pained and desperate look — is it possible that the revin newborn are cognitive? Children would gather around the mother, with the vacuous stare of the unthinking, and the moment would pass like digital hope dissipating in the real sky.

On the second day, the sentinel turned its gaze to the giant football stadium across campus — the same stadium it had scoped from afar, deep in the northeast foothills. Its view was clear and unobstructed now. Arizona Stadium shot up in the pink, striated sky, piercing the southern horizon. The east and west stands rose up and were met by a tensile roof held aloft by giant tent poles anchored into the earth at the 50 and 30-yard lines. CDC and WHO mobile stations lined the stadium and a sign on the rear façade of the scoreboard assured: “Quarantine Zone: Students Welcome.” The sentinel spent an hour, attempting to decipher a potential code in the sign, to no avail. To the other side of the stadium, on the western stands, the sentinel witnessed the worst of the violence. As the steps ascended, the revins lashed and clawed at each other, clambering for leverage. They all wanted to be on top. Weaker male revins were held aloft and thrown down the steep steps, tumbling down head over waist on the steps until they came to rest, unconscious, on the level below. The most aggressive, cunning, and bloodthirsty revins found their way to the top, where they perched in the ascension of the stadium and looked down at the dying and weak. There, in the concrete crown, stood the scarred, pale revin from the day hence. It was the apex predator. The unchallenged. The other violent conscripts of the horde kept at bay, eyeing the albino alpha and holding a distance as it moved about the steep nest.

The sentinel compiled a list of revelations: 1) the revin do not eat their own 2) the mothers protect their newborn and other males protect them 3) they are voracious carnivores and innovative hunters 4) they dwell in semi-open environments, rarely staying inside buildings for long and 5) they have structure, communication, and a semblance of society within the confines of their bloodthirst. In all this, there was still no sign of cognition. No survivor. The trail had gone cold here in the center of the campus, trampled amidst the dirty and blistered feet of the affected. Whatever living, thinking, resistant human that was carried into this place was now lost — piled into the carcass hills. The sentinel computed its options: it would need to leave the confines of the ECM jamming perimeter, sync back up with SatComm, and go into stasis. Its mission would be failed.

On the third morning, the sentinel awoke to a patter of rain drops falling from a dark gray sky. A north bearing thunderstorm had moved into the desert floor from deep within the Gulf of Mexico. As the morning drew on, the sky grew darker. The revins grew nervous, shuddering in a panic as a thunderclap exploded overhead and echoed throughout the red-brick valley of the central campus. A bright, electric cord illuminated the sky and divided the heavens in the west. The downpour fell, washing the sentinel from every inch as it huddled beneath the broken canopy of the guard tower on the Kuiper roof. The sanguine soot flaked off in clumps from the sentinel’s frame, streaming off the tri-axel and into the drains atop the roof. As the morning torrent came down on the campus, the revins made for the burned out, broken ruins of the main library, the underground learning complex in the center of the mall, and the surrounding lecture halls. They crawled over each other, shoving their way into shelter. The lightning strikes got closer, illuminating the thousands of frightened eyes peering out into the campus from the broken structures.

The soil softened and the dug out burrows filled with shallow puddles. Trash and raw sewage streamed down University. The storm swept past, and the campus quieted. Slowly, the revins emerged from the buildings, looking up at the sky, scanning the horizon for the trails of fulmination and terror. The air was clear and smelled sweetly of creosote and palm fronds. A gust blew off the steep bulwark of the Gittings and Kuiper building and crossed the ripped main lawn. The revins paused, sniffing at the air. A realization was sweeping across their faces. One, then two, then many. Some intruder was amongst them. They shouted and rasped, frantically looking around them. Hysteria. A number came out from right underneath the sentinel, out of the lobby of the Kuiper building. The sky began to break, midday sun casting along the mall, shadows moving with the westerly clouds overhead. The sentinel knew — some scent from its frame was giving it away. Its claret cloak had dissipated in the rain. The organ was reacting to the foreign body.

A tall, sinewy female revin held her hands to her brow, shielding the intermittent sun from her gaze. She stared up at the Kuiper roof where the sentinel sat motionless in the guard tower. She choked on a breath and gasped. She began to motion wildly in its direction, gesticulating some hysterical curse. The other revins looked at her and then up at the roof. The sentinel began to slowly move backwards out of view but it was too late — they had spotted it. In the seconds after, a low rumble carried on the air behind the sentinel, getting louder in the already shrill din of the cries below. They were coming up the exterior ramp. The sentinel panned around the province of fallow minds. The revins ascended the nearby structures — the Eller Theater, the Solar Observatory, the Sonnet Space Sciences Buildings — and surrounded the sentinel on every side of the sky. Across the mall, in the reaches of the stadium summit, the sallow, scarred revin fixated on the rising entropy of the Kuiper rooftop far away. It perched on the concrete stands, one leg off the side, dangling in the ether, eyes widening.

The sentinel paused before the entryway of the corrugated exterior ramp. The revins were on the roof of the library across the mall now. They emerged on the Psychology building to the west. The sentinel heard their cries on the roof of the Solar Observatory just to the north. And they were on the Gittings roof to the east. The sentinel was surrounded. It scanned for escape routes — there was no safe way off the roof without getting through the teeming crowd coming up the ramp. The sentinel was in trouble. It could release a periphery current, decimating one wave, then initiate its final stage defense, and then it would be over. It loaded a flash drive into a hollow rubber casing from its magazine and positioned its turret bearing southwest. It fired the single shot into the sky, the memory chip screaming into heaven. A record in the dirt for someone to find later. It turned back to the exterior ramp. They were there. They had on their face a look of hatred. They were afraid — much like they were with the sound of thunder earlier, but this look was one of rage. They walked carefully out onto the roof and fanned out slowly, nervously looking around, searching for other intruders. But there was just the sentinel. They turned their attention back to DDC39, who had locked its tri-axel in place and fixed its railgun on them from the small inclined level just a short distance in front of them.

A tinny hum carried on the air and the roof exploded in a spray of blood, cartilage, and marrow. The sentinel fired on them in a turbulent cacophony of annihilation. The railgun sang like a thrush whistling in the spring. The first wave was slaughtered, falling in heaps of liquefied fat and sinews. A fourth of the sentinel’s railgun stores were depleted. It shuttled its magazine trays and reloaded. A second wave of revins emerged at the ramp entrance, peering into the daylight and the carnage on the roof. They were infuriated. Any semblance of fear and tension was lost now in the frenzy alighting in their eyes. The sentinel unlocked its tri-axel and moved back towards the western wall, crossing over a narrow ramp spanning a skylight beneath. They rushed out of the ramp bridge, leaping past the corpses and extending their festering extremities towards DDC39.

The skies broke overhead and the sunlight fell fully on the sentinel’s frame. It came to a stop at a small parapet above the skylight. A different cry rang out — a bark. The sentinel panned behind it, towards the ground. The white, half-dome of the Flandrau building glimmered beneath the sentinel’s position. The theater of heaven. The planetarium. The sentinel recalled the aroton and the last thing it flickered back: PLANETARIUM.

The sentinel decided that if it was going to perish, it would do so where its magnalium kin, the unknown herald, had whispered in the dusk. It turned its optics and railgun at the rushing horde. The panel on its center frame clicked open and the banshee disk rattled in the din. A piercing scream shot through the crowd and the revins buckled over in pain, their hands and fingers plugging their ears. Some shot right back up, their faces distorted in pain but committed, nonetheless, to reaching the sentinel. Perhaps some of them had experience with this wail before. As they stumbled, disoriented, on the rooftop, the sentinel lit them up with a rapid left-to-right stream of uranium shells from the railgun — a blurred half-wing angel ripping through their bodies. The sentinel revved its drivetrain and rushed back at them, knocking the still-standing eidolons crashing beneath the ramp and down through the glass skylight, their bloodied, torn bodies shattering through the glass as they sailed the 6 floors down and into the lobby. Crash crash crash. The sentinel spun around on the other side of the roof and gunned it, speeding through the revins who were gathering again near the bridge ramp — another wave appearing.

DDC39 sailed off the roof of the Kuiper Space Sciences building, crashing into the Flandrau Planetarium below like a satellite dropping from the mesosphere. It landed, all axels fanned out cat-like, distributing the impact. The roof, wet and soft from rain collected in its clogged drains, gave way and the sentinel barreled through the upper layer, spinning through insulation, rotten Douglas Fir beams, and soaked sheetrock.

It came to rest on its side inside the upper level seating of the darkened star chamber. The soft glow from the hole ripped open overhead lit the spot where the sentinel landed. Condensation and insulation dropped intermittently from the opening, the shouts of the revins dampened now by the heavily paneled room. The revin righted itself and then heard it again, clearly now — barking. Inside the star chamber, near the massive Vector projector, was a group of sickly dogs covered in mange, barking at where the sentinel stood upright. The room was filled with animals of every kind. Tanagers and sparrows, perched in the ceiling fixtures and acoustics, fluttered into the darkness in a frenzy and darted for the light, disappearing in the chasm from where the sentinel fell. A chuckwalla scurried past the sentinel’s frame and a family of jackrabbits stirred on the adjacent steps, loping off into the darkness. A pair of eyes glowed on the opposite side of the room. And from the southwest side, a series of shouts and bleats croaked in the dark. There were revins on the other side of a large obstruction near the theater entrance. This was some sort of prison. The revins were hurriedly removing the beams and nets that were serving as the chamber door. They’d be rushing in soon.

The sentinel lit its LED spotlight and scanned around the room. A pack of malnourished javelinas caught the sentinel’s glare and scurried in different directions. The light came to rest on the pair of eyes glowing in the dark. It was a lone Mexican Wolf sitting atop a pile of rags and blankets. The wolf stood upright as the sentinel rolled over towards its direction, traversing the narrow walkway connecting the two sides. As it got closer, the wolf snarled at DDC39 and then slowly backed away, its haunch fur standing straight up. The blanket pile moved. There was something burrowed underneath. The sentinel unfurled its mechanical hand and reached down, pulling one layer off the other until finally its light rested on the blinking eyes of a young girl. She looked up at the sentinel’s light, shielding her eyes. A sudden stillness caught the air as the two looked upon each other in the dark of the blank universe of the abandoned planetarium. She, looking into the white light and unable to discern who, or what, was before her. The sentinel, looking down at the motionless girl, unable to tell if she was cognitive. A look of hope crossed her face as she stared into the light and saw the shadow of a hand, the sentinel’s synthetic grip, pass through. Her eyes followed the motion and she finally spoke:

“Mom? Is that you?”

The sentinel had found a cognitive child. Her eyes widened and pupils constricted in the light. A future had been opened for man’s rebirth. A boulder moved from the tomb of Homo sapiens. The sentinel scrolled through its dialects, searching for a vocalization as she spoke again:

“Terrence? Berto?”

A soft, low inflection filled the air. An American argot of unknown gender — some mild provincialism at home in the dry, slow air of the desert. The sentinel spoke:

“I’m sorry, that is not me. But I’m here to get you out. Are you ready to go?”

The sentinel extended its hand down towards the child, who wriggled up and out of the pile of towels and rags. She stood up, her face level to the sentinel’s LED light, which now softened to a dull glow. She saw its tri-axel and trident frame construction for the first time, illuminated from behind by the column of light shining through the punctured ceiling. This glimmering leviathan in the aphotic space held its hand aloft. The child stood there, looking up at the machine, an expression of skepticism across her face.

“What about him?”

She looked over her shoulder at the Mexican Wolf who had backed into a corner, casting a glance back at the barricade that was being frantically torn down by the revins just outside.

“We have to get him out too.”

The sentinel couldn’t process what it was being asked to do, and so it responded with default logic:

“Okay. But we have to go now.”

The child put her palm in the humaniform grasp of its black, rubberized shadow hand. The sentinel led her, turning its trident frame, to the rear of its base platform. A series of panels slid open and an array of padded metal plates and prongs rolled out, clicking into the other, forming a small rumble seat. The seat sat elevated off the base like a sand yacht on the salt flats.

“Sit down and put the seatbelt on.”

She approached the small bench, moving awkwardly with the one shoe larger than the other, and stepped up on the sentinel’s axel, falling into the seat with a thud. She looked around her and found the 2-point harness, clasping it into the small lock at the base of the seat. As she clicked it shut, she looked up and the sentinel’s hand was before her, two earplugs in its open fist.

“Put these in your ear. Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“That’s good. One more thing. Keep your eyes shut until I say you can open them.”

She nodded her head knowingly at the sentinel’s optical array, and then its big trident frame turned around and the hitch of the tri-axel unlocked. DDC39 sprang forth in the room, turning around in a tight radius. The Mexican Wolf skittered in the corner. The dogs kept barking and the other animals were whipped into a frenzy as the barricade came down. The two revins just behind it began to whoop and shout their babble — a distorted Wernickes Aphasia. One called behind it, motioning to some unknown audience. The other stepped into the dark from the sunlighted lobby. The sentinel leveled its railgun and fired two quick shots. The revins stood, silent, for a beat — frozen in the air — and then fell to the tiled floor. A single hole through their skulls. The sentinel sped into the light, the child clutching at the rumble seat handles. DDC39 paused, looking backwards at the Mexican Wolf, which stared back nervously and then dashed towards the girl and the machine.

They drove over the shattered glass of the lobby, past the fallen revin guards, and into the sunlight of the Flandrau courtyard. To the left, a large crowd of jostling revin men and women — naked, weathered, and jittery — were staring up at the Kuiper roof from where the sentinel had fallen earlier. Their vapid eyes turned from the roof and towards the sentinel and girl. The animals, trapped in the astral prison behind them, spilled out and disappeared in different directions. The revin’s faces twisted from confusion to anger as they comprehended this scene beside them — their livestock pens, emptied, and this intruder was the cause. They screamed and rushed at the sentinel. The girl clasped her hands over her eyes. The sentinel’s railgun traced on each of them. Too many. DDC39 backed up and escaped along the westward sidewalk, darting past fallen palo verde trees and into the rear parking lot of the Flandrau building. Across the street, in the dusty lot of the National Solar Observatory, was a mammoth, mobilized structure — a camouflaged military vehicle. It was an ECM jammer. A Russian-era Kvant SPN-12. Its expanded disruptor cluster nearly filled the entire lot, held aloft by stabilizers that tethered into the cracked asphalt. A thick power cord ran from its side and up the southern wall of the NSO building, carried to the roof and connected to a field of solar panels, just out of view.

The revin horde rushed into the Flandrau parking lot behind them, a cacophonous din carrying on the air. Their flaccid, withered parts crashing into each other as they ran, enraged, towards the sentinel and the girl. She started to remove her hands from her eyes and the sentinel softly admonished her:

“Not yet. Don’t look.”

The sentinel raised its railgun at the power cord base on the massive vehicle and fired — the cord panel exploding in a flash of sparks and steel shrapnel shards. The sentinel’s own radar and communication systems flickered. A signal — weak, then strong — washed over and DDC39 regained its digital omniscience. The ECM disruption was negated. A new frequency was detected and a series of coded messages downloaded from a satellite server. Its telemetry fanned out and new instructions were updating on its CPU. It had missed quite a lot in its binary slumber. With child in tow, the next stage of its mission materialized.

“Hang on tightly. We’ll be moving fast.”

They tore out of the NSO parking lot, bearing north. Ahead was the quarantine fence — the serpentine chain divide blocking access to Speedway. The sentinel turned hard right into an alley just after the Newman Center and barreled through the trash piled on each side of the alley. Flyers caught the draft of the sentinel’s vector and swirled behind them like contrails in the ether. The Warren exit would be just around the corner. As it rounded the bend and turned, they were there. A mass of revin men had gathered at the breach, blocking the way out. They stood there, panting, hunched forward and waiting. They saw the sentinel and didn’t move. Their nakedness unfurled in the air, tattered and dusty — a torn banner of defiance. They were silent, but a sound of rushing footsteps was getting louder. The sentinel turned its optics backwards. Coming north on Warren was another group of males. This group was familiar. They were striped with long nail scars across their chest and arms and their eyes shone with disgust. They raced towards the sentinel and the girl and, in front, was the pale apex creature — the revin from the summit of the stadium. These were the hunters. The revin raised its railgun at them but they numbered in the hundreds, and thousands more were behind them. The girl peeked out of her clasped hands at the seething swarm. The sentinel backed up and then turned to double back down the alley. It panned over to the apex revin who watched the sentinel ducking back into the side street. The scarred predator king smiled knowingly at the sentinel as it craned its optics forward and darted off.

DDC39 sped into the west, chasing the sun. It raced past fraternity and sorority houses. It slalomed around airdrop canisters and the girl grabbed tightly at the bracing bar. It crossed over Mountain and panned right — the fence was still there, running parallel on 1st St. To the left, the shouts and cries of an angry, pinball populace. The wingless wraiths of the ruined mind. Across Mountain, the way was blocked. The alley came to a halt before a drop-off that descended into a flooded, underground lot. DDC39 turned left and shot down towards 2nd St, closer to the nucleus of the horde. It crossed over 2nd and drove on through a tight walkway, adjacent to a descending ramp, which was flooded as well. It turned and entered the wooded, old campus. The massive, red brick Colonials rose up behind the dense line of palms and sycamore that had grown uncontrolled, enveloping the road in a thick canopy overhead. The sentinel sailed through fallen branches and came out onto 2nd St. Another gang of revins spotted them and were racing up on Park Ave. The sentinel sped forward on 2nd — the girl jostled backwards in the rumble seat, clutching at her seatbelt in a fright as the machine lurched forward. They came upon Euclid and a dead-end. The way forward was closed off by the western section of the concertina wire fence, reinforced with wrought-iron posts anchored into the ground. A mass of sandbags blocked the sidewalk heading north and south on Euclid. Behind them, a huge multi-level parking garage on one side of the street, and a Marriott on the other. The shouts of the revins on Park Ave. grew louder, closer. The girl spoke:

“We have to get out of here.”

“I know.”

The sentinel panned around and switched to thermal optics. The heat imprint of the mass coming up Park Ave. came into view, obscured by the hotel and a parking lot just beyond. They were on the other side of the Marshall Building and would be rounding 2nd St. any moment. The sky had cleared overhead and the light of the sun in the west was lighting the vault of heaven in coral and sapphire. A breeze descended on them from the horizon, swaying a line of palo verdes beside the garage, casting a frenetic shadow on a stretch of cars parked on the north side of the street, face forward into the sun — their windows smashed and a thick film of dust covering everything. The sentinel went to the car at the front and craned its optics inside. It was an old Jeep Grand Cherokee. Its tires sank into the dust like old lungs and it listed to one side, its suspension having slowly given way. The sentinel went to the driver side door and extended its hand, jerking open the creaking door — shattered glass falling to the asphalt. The girl watched the sentinel work and nervously looked over her shoulder at the restless intersection in the east.

“They’re coming!”

The mob crushed into 2nd St. heading towards the girl and the machine. They saw them, trapped at the end of the street, and shrieked in fits, whipping themselves into a frenzy. They fanned out on each side of the street and walked on — their flesh and limbs submerging in the shade of the massive campus hotel as they got closer.

Inside the car, the sentinel found a clubbed steering wheel lock and leaned forward into the cab, jamming the steel rod into the gas pedal. It reached inside of the interior paneling near the floor and tugged at a hidden latch, releasing the hood — a cloud of dust kicking up into the dry air.

“I can see them. I can see their faces.”

“Unbuckle your seat belt and stand on the curb.”

The girl swung her head back towards the sentinel’s optical array, frightened and confused. She hesitated. The sentinel’s voice was calm and reassuring:

“You can trust me.”

She unclicked her seatbelt and crawled off the sentinel’s frame, stepping over to the curb and fidgeting nervously as she watched the horde get closer — their faces twisted, their steps awkward and gangly. A caracole of the consumptive.

The sentinel drove over to the dirt planter beside the sidewalk and leaned forward, plunging its one hand into the gravel and dust, extracting a steel garden rod. A revin raced out in front and darted at them — the sentinel turned quickly, leveling its railgun battery at the lone creature and striking it down with a single shot to the skull. The others just behind hesitated, cackling and shrieking at the lump of tissue in the asphalt. The sentinel went to the front of the vehicle and rammed the rusted bar deep into the solenoid inside the engine cavity. A current flickered up its trident frame, lapping at the air and coursing down, plunging into the dark of the engine. It turned-over and started to cycle and finally it revved — the half-flat wheels tearing off the street, the Grand Cherokee taking off into the dust. The girl looked on in wonder as the vehicle crashed forward into the quarantine barricade, ripping a giant hole in the intersection before finally crashing to a halt into the mottled apartment complex on the other side. The sentinel still had the bar in its hand. It contorted its frame in a convex motion and hurled the steel forward, spinning it like a fan blade. It sailed low to the ground, ripping through the soft epidermis of revin legs, femurs and fibulas shattering, a series of cracks and delayed cries piercing the air. The sentinel called to the girl who was watching the scene unfold, stunned:

“Get back on and buckle up!”

She ran over to the rumble seat and crawled on. As she latched her belt shut, the sentinel rolled into the street and stopped, locking its front tire and hammering the torque on the rear axels. The tires spun in place in the street, kicking up a billowing cloud of dust and smoke behind them. The revins raced forward in the maelstrom, bouncing off each other, gasping, and reaching out for the girl, who screamed as they inched closer. The sentinel released its front brake and tore forward, rocketing through the fissure of the chain link that had curled back on itself, the taught barricade rendered slack from the runaway SUV.

They escaped into the setting sun, the lilac and titian circumference of the arid waste. They passed the burnt out hovels of West Tucson and crossed by the open burial pits of De Anza and Esteven Parks. They drove atop Speedway, a soft whir of tires rolling through the dirt and gravel, a vortex of cinder chasing them through the darkening sky. Then, once again, the sentinel was back on the great western highway. The Interstate-10. They drove down the open chasm of road, heading south and east. The sentinel clicked its LED light on, alighting the highway ahead of them. They passed the St. Marys and Congress off-ramps and the vacant skyline of the extinct city. The pink, faux murals of native life adorned on the overpass abutments faded into the half-light, passing by them in a blur of hieroglyphic spectres. A massive, olive freeway overhang ahead indicated the 1-19 and 1-10 divide approaching.

As the interstate dipped into the earth ahead of the divide, the dust thickened and the sentinel spun up a heavy brume that choked the air around them. The girl began to cough and gasp as they weaved in between an abandoned convoy of retirement home shuttles. The sentinel slowed, looking back at the girl. She had on a light sweatshirt and pajama pants. The air was cooling and would be dangerously cold in a few hours. They slowed ahead of the lead shuttle and the sentinel sidled up to the ground-level luggage compartments. With the sun all but set, and the long day behind them, the sentinel’s solar power cells were nearly spent. They had less than an hour before DDC39 would need to force-shutdown. It cycled between thermal, black light, and x-ray optics before settling on a compartment in the middle of the shuttle. It extended its hand from that hollow encasement aside its vertical scaffold, like a dreadnought battery of old. It reached for the compartment handle — locked. They backed up in the road, rolling near to the berm. The sentinel leveled its railgun — it whirred and then fired, the compartment lock exploding in a shower of sparks that lit the dusk of the road in a brief flash.

From inside the compartment, the sentinel dragged out a duffel bag. It pinned the bag down and pulled the zipper back, revealing a fresh bundle of linen and garments. It tore through them, the girl craning her head around its truss to watch this pitch of clothing in the spotlight of the fading LED flood. In the bottom of the sack, beneath a toiletry bag that spilled out over the blacktop was a small drawstring hoodie and sweatpants. The sentinel clutched at this pair and extended it backward towards the girl, who snatched it out of the grasp of the machine. As she put this extra layer on, the sentinel handed her a pair of oversized sunglasses and a handkerchief and spoke to her:

“When we’re moving, you should cover your face with these. It’s going to be night soon. We’ll need to find a safe spot to rest until sunlight.”

“We need something to eat.”

“I don’t eat. I will get you something to eat.”

The sentinel pulled out another duffel bag and rummaged through the contents. The girl spun back in her seat, looking into the distance of the dim interstate. A lone pair of eyes, incandescent in the underworld of concrete slabs, stared back. She looked back in silence. Her face bore out a silent disregard for the unfortunate circumstances that had befallen what she knew. A steely insouciance — unwavering. DDC39 noticed her fixated on the wolf in the distance and chimed in with concern:

“We can’t have that creature following us. It’s dangerous. If it gets hungry, it will try to attack you.”

“No it won’t.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because its hungry right now. We both are. They threw both of us in that dark place on the same day. It was injured, and the other animals kept nipping at it. I kept throwing broken wood at them. But I can’t walk so well. I felt so bad for it. I tried my hardest. I mostly kept them away and, finally, the wolf stood up on its own and we traded places. The wolf would snarl at the others when they started to turn on me. We’ve helped each other ever since. So, you know, that wolf is with me.”

The machine pulled a Ziploc bag of granola bars from the bag and a small blanket and handed them back to the girl, shaking them at her as she stared back at the spot where the glow had appeared but was, now, gone. She grabbed the Ziploc bag and the sentinel drove onward, off the road, towards the main column of the closest overpass. They nestled into the berm of the highway. The sentinel locked its tri-axel into place. The crescent moon appeared in the night sky and DDC39 spoke to her:

“I need to shut down for the night.”

“What’s happening? Where are you taking me?”

“I promise to tell you more in the morning. I need you to be safe tonight. Go to sleep and don’t wander off. If there is trouble, yell and I will come to your aid.”

She crawled off the rumble seat and curled up under the sentinel’s base, tugging at the blanket and digging her feet in between the tires. The sentinel initiated its shutdown procedure and the world closed around them.

• Solar power cell — 1%. Solar armor — 81%.

• Drivetrain — operational

• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics — operational

• HD/Comms — disrupted

• Water — 100%. Napalm — 100%

• Railgun — 24% capacity

• AAR — healthy, vaccinated girl in tow; posthaste vector to final checkpoint

• Shutting down core operation and initiating battery recharge

9. Covenant

A sound stirred the sentinel early in the morning. The soft glow of the sun had only just begun to rise beyond the faraway ridgeline of Rincon Peak and Mica Mountain. The interstate corridor was still dark — a faint ray of light glowing off the reflective highway sign above. Patches of weeds that had popped through cracks in the asphalt concrete rustled in the wind. The sentinel pinged the periphery — no closing movements, no significant heat signatures. The sentinel looked down at the girl, who was curled up beneath its base. She coughed. The sound was her, the tiny creature nestled between the polycarbonate axels of the wanderer. The sentinel clicked between thermal and x-ray optics, auditing her bio-signs. She was running a fever. The cool desert air had dropped the temperature dangerously low overnight. She looked up at him.

“I tried not to wake you.”

“It’s okay. Let’s get you into the sunlight.”

She crawled out from under the sentinel’s chassis and hopped back into the rumble seat. The sentinel unlocked and drove back into the blacktop. It stopped abruptly at the scattered belongings of the open luggage and picked up a plastic cup that had blown back and forth between the two bags. The sun began to peak over the eastern highway berm. The machine and the girl rolled south along the I-19, passing under the interchange and emerging into the dawn on the southern outskirts of the city. They pulled off the highway, into hardened earth beside the road. The sentinel’s solar armor glimmered in the half-light. A thicket of trixis and chuparosa listed in the light easterly breeze coming off the distant Starr Ridge. The terror of the city drifted into the ether and was quieted, however momentarily.

The girl hopped off the rumble seat and the sentinel handed her the plastic cup, which she inspected, rolling it about in her hands. As she did, a small L-nozzle flipped open from the side of the sentinel’s trident arm.

“Water. Hold the cup up.”

She held it aloft, underneath the nozzle, and a light trickle of water poured into her cup and stopped as it neared the brim. She stepped back, a smile on her face, and drank from the cup.

“Eat your granola bar.”

She screwed up her eyes at the sentinel and then, padding her sweatshirt pocket, nodded happily and took a granola bar from the Ziploc bag, chomping at it in big bites. She looked around, bobbing her head back and forth as she chewed.

“I’m not fully re-charged yet. We’ll need to rest here while the sun comes up.”

She plopped down in the dirt, plucking petals from a nearby chuparosa stem. Somehow, she was happy. She looked up, thinking of what she wanted to say.

“I knew you weren’t my mom.”

“How did you know that?”

She looked down and took another bite of her granola bar. A line of ants was crossing the desert floor beside her. She peeked her head down at them, tipping the cup slightly over them, a single drop of water falling into their path. She sighed and looked up at the sentinel again.

“Everyone is sick. People are crazy. I’m not crazy though.”

“I know. You’re a healthy girl. We need to keep you away from the people who are sick.”

“Why are they sick?”

“Something happened with the air. It affected the human central nervous system. The advanced part of the brain decayed and twisted. And people were no longer able to think normally. They became like animals.”

The sentinel stopped and turned to her. She was watching the sun rise, rocking back and forth on the ground. She looked at the machine, its optical array, and shrugged.

“Why is everyone else sick but I’m not?”

“Do you remember your time in the Biosphere? Did anyone give you an injection?”

She looked off into the distance and stopped rocking.

“Gilberto gave me a shot. My mom and Terrence got a shot too. My mom has long hair. She gave me a bag of Gummy Bears and I ate the whole bag. Did you know if you eat a whole bag of candy you get sick? You shouldn’t eat that much candy.”

“I don’t eat candy. But that’s good advice. I think you’re not sick because Gilberto or someone in the Biosphere was able to give you a vaccine.”

“Why did God let this happen?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

“Don’t you know who God is?”

The sentinel panned around, pinging the periphery of their position. It switched between optical frames, keeping a vigilance on the sunrise of the Arizona Abaddon.

“Where are the other healthy people?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you know?”

“I was commissioned at the Martinez Manufacturing Complex and my first stage program was to search this region for survivors — people who were immune to the disease. I followed the signs that led me to you. My second stage program is to take you to coordinates not too far from here. South. That’s where we’re going.”

“I’m a survivor.”

“You are. How do you feel?”

“I feel like a survivor.”

They rested in the low tide of sunlight. The girl followed the trail of ants as it snaked into the microscopic crevices of the drought plains. She hopped up and down on one leg and then plopped down again, sitting aside the sentinel as it adjusted its solar plates in the shifting sun. She looked up at the sentinel, searching for the words again, and then she excitedly asked her question:

“What’s your name?”

“I don’t have a name. I have a serial number. It’s DDC39.”

“I wonder if I have a serial number? I could be Becca number one maybe.”

“Okay Becca number one. I’m almost fully recharged. We’ll head out soon.”

A breeze carried up a sunken wash just beyond a line of Whitethorn Acacia. A series of listing telephone poles, lines fallen into the broken clay topsoil, stood over them just ahead. The sentinel shifted again, sunlight square on its frame, and then unlocked its axels. It turned its optical array to the girl, who stood up, quietly, and climbed back on to the sentinel’s base. She buckled into the rumble seat and they sped off into the empty highway.

Into the shale and the blinding pass of the forlorn morning. The time of the cognitive idols has long past. A silent storm of meteors passes overhead, invisible in the soft light of winter’s axis — screaming in the vacuum of the outer boundary. The untouched plane of nihility. The pistons and joints of the vectoring machine whispered as they tore across the cracked highway, heading south through the waste. The desiccation gave way to a new world. Where once a swampland flourished and then died did now spring forth again — aquifers overflowing from untouched wells in the desert floor. Floodplains dotted the distant expanse — moorlands and meadows cropped into the red and yellow clays of the Sonoran soil. The world was changing, untended by the empty dreams of Mesoamerica. They were followed, too. This was the modernity that man glimpsed as it slipped into the fading slumber of a downward ideasthesia.

They made their way further south of the city, passing under the Irvington, Drexel, and Valencia overpasses. The suburban tracts thinned in the distance. At each interchange, massive signs hung over the southward highway, declaring in bold, block letters: “Border Closed. Turn Back. Travellers Will Be Shot.” They passed this same sign, several times. The girl would knock on the sentinel’s frame and point at the sign each time they neared it. The sentinel would look back each time and say:

“Don’t worry.”

The sentinel moved fast — as fast as it could. But the day drew longer. The girl began to cough and the sentinel stopped, offering her more water and reading her vital signs. She took a nap beneath a giant velvet mesquite. The sentinel stood guard while she rested, scanning the perimeter for signs of movement and heat. The sun rolled slowly in the sea of ultramarine. Lone wisps of cirrus carried overhead. The vault of heaven emptied the blue from its holds and a burning coral and peach sky washed over. A jumping, zig-zagging, heat signature emerged on the sentinel’s thermal vision. It crossed from one side of the marshy low fields and into the cracked, dusty caliche closer to where they sat, motionless. The sentinel raised its railgun, the tinny hum whirring in the dusk, and fired a single shot. The signal of heat bounced back and forth briefly and then came to a rest. The warm signature slowly cooled, spilling into the ground around it — a red, then yellow, then violet print in the sentinel’s field of vision. The girl rested, unmoving, for several hours. When she woke, small sparks began to dot the horizon. The sentinel spoke to her:

“It’s going to get dark soon. We need to find shelter.”

She nodded affirmatively and picked herself up, clutching at the blanket and cup given to her earlier — the handkerchief and sunglasses unceremoniously left behind. She climbed aboard, buckling her seatbelt again, and the sentinel drove over to where the heat signature faded into nothing — it was a jackrabbit, felled by the sentinel’s railgun — the shot having gone clean through. The sentinel reached its humaniform hand downwards, picking the carcass up in one swift motion, and then sped back to the road and continued south. The girl looked on with curiosity at the dead rabbit dangling from the sentinel’s clutch, swaying softly in the air as they drove on. She stared off into the sunset, wondering how many days had it been since she left her mother’s side. She wondered what would happen to them. She wondered how her new friend found her, and why it was that she was spared.

They ventured further south until they hit San Xavier Road. The sentinel slowed as they neared the crossing. The highway spanned over the street but had been destroyed — a chasm dividing both the south and north sections of the highway from the stretch of I-19 just beyond. Just to their left, tumbled into the dust of the darkened berm, was a wrecked HC-130P. A Hercules. The massive bulkhead was detached from the wings, which were scattered and broken in the distance, each turboprop splayed into the earth. The aircraft had crashed near the highway and rolled over a great distance. Its cargo bay door had torn off and the kilned, congealed bodies of several paratroopers were thrown into the dirt — their flesh torn off and limbs ripped out. Desert fatigues were strewn about the hardened soil. A solitary revin, its skin wrapped tight around its bones and skull, eye sockets dried and empty, sat beside the body of a paratrooper — a single gunshot wound in its torso. The sentinel zoomed in on the revin — it was long dead, having come to its end in this akimbo death rattle amongst the bodies it had picked clean. The vertical stabilizer bore the designation of the aircraft: 79th Rescue Squadron out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, only a short distance from where it had come to rest in the dust.

The brink of the overpass had been bolstered with sandbags and machine gun nests — an impromptu and unadorned checkpoint, blocking all travel south. They moved off the highway and into the gravel, in between mile marker 57 and the guardrail, and headed towards the off-ramp. They got onto San Xavier Road heading southwest. They passed ruined farmlands and caved-in Spanish hovels. The sentinel hit another intersection — Little Nogales Dr. — and headed north. They drove on in silence in the fading light until they came before some white visage standing starkly in the waste before them, rising up into the night sky. The sentinel lit its LED lamp and illuminated the façade just ahead. A white glow of winter walls, awoken in the luminescence. There stood an intricate, pale monument in the desert. Moorish buttresses and balustrade lined an alcazar from one great tower to the next, and on around ad infinitum. An alabaster dome rose into the black, supported by the high arches and squinches of Baroque masonry. A series of sandy walls lined the perimeter and the coat of arms of St. Francis greeted them in the half-light. This white palace in the Sonoran solitude. The white dove of the desert. The Mission San Xavier del Bac.

The girl rubbed her eyes, staring up at the face of the cathedral. They stood there, in the dust, looking up at the entranceway — a twisting, chiseled archway watched by statues of Mary and Joseph set inlaid above the thick, wooden door. The sentinel scanned the interior and perimeter — devoid of life. It reviewed the satellite data — a significant weather pattern was moving in. She asked:

“What is this place?”

“This is where we’ll shelter for the night.”

They rolled forward towards the archway. The moon was cresting in the east, a crescent scythe swinging slowly in the cool air of dusk. They came to the weathered, wooden door — the sentinel’s tire rubbing up against it, casting it ajar. It pushed forward and the giant mesquite portal swung slowly open. The latch was broken off — pushed in by some blunt force. They entered the church, lighting up the nave and the altar at the far side of the antechamber. The moonlight cast its glow from their wake and then vanished as the wooden door closed on its own behind them. The girl unbuckled her belt and slid off the sentinel’s frame. She approached the battered, chipped pew — the row of small wooden benches just beyond the vestibule. She slid her hand along the arched seatbacks, pacing from right to left, as the sentinel scanned the door. It panned around, analyzing the flaws and damage done to the ancient door. It stood there, dead rabbit in hand, as the girl gazed at the darkened altar, barely lit by the cracked, high rose windows lining the dome. The sentinel dropped the rabbit carcass and turned to the corner — a clutter of old student desks and broken pews were piled high. DDC39 rolled over to the pile and pulled a series of beams, legs, and desk joints towards the door — twisting, pinning, and creasing them into the egress until it was firmly blocked. It turned its attention back to the girl, who was tiptoeing gingerly up the narrow aisle, her right leg limping.

She had sidled up to the altar steps, gazing up at the ornate reredos looming over them in the dark. The carved woodwork stretched from the base to the ceiling — Spanish saints inlaid into walls, reaching out from the niches above them. A patchwork of mosaics and iconography surrounded the dais, lining the womb of the room like a corrugated tomb. The sentinel rolled up behind the girl dragging a broken chair, the legs screeching along behind it, then dropped it before her upon the cracked, Spanish tiles. It spoke to her in a calm, softened voice:

“Look for matches near the altar. And bring a bible down from the pulpit.”

She turned her gaze to the sentinel, who shined its LED lamp on her face. They looked upon each other in the half-light of the mission ruin. She turned her head to her side, looking quizzically at the altar, before getting up and rummaging about the dais. She found a long stem lighter and an old Spanish copy of the King James bible.

That night, the girl helped the sentinel skin the jackrabbit — holding tightly on it as the machine clutched the other end, rolling backwards. The skin ripped from tissue and the girl stood there holding the carcass from its downy ears, sinewy haunches gleaming in the LED lamp. She lit the bible and they built a fire before the altar from the kindling of the broken desks, billowy smoke rising up through the dome and escaping into the cracks of the rose windows above. The sentinel taught the girl how to clean the dead rabbit, watching as she lifted it above the fire with a broken candlesnuffer. She sat there, smiling, plucking pieces of charred rabbit haunch off the bone, and gulping another cup of water from the sentinel’s tank. She looked up at an oil painting on the wall, lit by the flickering tongues of the fire.

“What is that?”

The sentinel turned and analyzed the somber, iconic scene depicted in the painting.

“It’s the ark of the covenant, being carried to the Promised Land.”

“Why?”

“They believed the covenant was God’s instructions for mankind, and they had to protect it. It was their exodus. An old legend.”

“It’s in this castle with us?”

“No. The ark was lost. But it’s just a story.”

She listened and eagerly wanted to hear more, but the sentinel did not understand how important it was for her to hear a story. With eyes wide, she sat transfixed on the painting, looking back at the machine. As she did, she kneaded a soreness in her right leg. DDC39 looked down at her and spoke:

“You were limping. Are you injured?”

“I’m okay. I just have a weird thing with my leg. I was born with a bone in my left leg just a bit longer than the right. And so I wear a special shoe for it. Do you have any problems with your legs?”

“I have axels. They’re okay.”

“Can you tell me the rest of the ark story?”

“Another time, perhaps. I need to shut down for the night. Can you watch over the fire? Make sure to be safe?”

“I’m always safe.”

“And you won’t wander off?”

“No.”

“That’s good. Stay here with me and shout if you are afraid.”

She stretched her legs out before the flickering coals and looked up at the reredos, spanning up the sacristy, gilded in gold leaf. The bas-relief shimmered in the glow of the dying flame. Becca watched the shadow play on the church wall and wondered:

“Do you have dreams?”

“No. It’s time to rest now.”

“Okay. Good night 39.”

“Good night Becca.”

The sentinel rolled to the southern side of the building, just beneath the painting, and positioned its frame forward. It looked up at the high north window near the ceiling, adjusting itself incrementally in each direction until it got the position it wanted. The girl sat by the fire, looking into the flames, before getting up and curling beneath the sentinel’s tri-axel, wrapping herself in the blanket she held, gripping the cup tightly. The flames lapping at the pile of kindling subsided to red embers and the church darkened, consuming them in the abyss of the past. The lost memories of the Jesuits and Tohono O’Oodham, relegated to handprints and claw marks in the alabaster. The kingdom of heaven faded into the ornate walls as the light inside vanished and the moonlight crept in, bathing the pews in a snowy hue. The sentinel initiated its shutdown procedure.

• Solar power cell — 1%. Solar armor — 81%.

• Drivetrain — operational

• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics — operational

• HD/Comms — disrupted

• Water — 68%. Napalm — 100%

• Railgun — 22% capacity

• JE — religious questions arise; no logical conclusion

• Shutting down core operation and initiating battery recharge

10. The Wolf is Mine

Dawn arrived with the dead moon in its jaws. It entered the church through the high windows and kept vigil, old star in the lonesome valley. A column of light fell down upon the sentinel, resting on its solar plate and warming the girl who slumbered beneath its frame. The dark wilderness of the empty church whispered the creaks and moans of oblivion — the fossil blood of creation, from the hands of one carpenter to the next. Starmaker out there, somewhere. From the old infinity of the shadow’s heartbeat came a howl of the desperate. A thrashing animal lost in the void. There was a pair of eyes sinking into the sleeping mind of the girl. An ocular tension riling the sensory levers of the machine, too. The clicking and clacking of a rattling shell. A broken heart, sent back and returned, bloodied but stubborn. One drop of the truth.

The girl woke. Her eyes opened into the half-light of the church, glancing around the apse. Old saints in repose, pointing at nothing, casting blessings upon the silence. She wriggled free of her blanket and tiptoed through the aisle, peeking into the corners, peering into the shadow of the transepts. In the dark of the sacristy, some portal beckoned the girl. A panel held up an icon of Santiago on pilgrimage — it appeared to be ajar. She walked past the chancel, under the watchful eyes of the old intercessors, and pulled open the hidden door. She walked through a long hall leading her to the mission school, passing by the inner courtyard, and stepping into the warmth of the eastern wall.

She exited the church through a side door and found herself in the cool air of the Sonoran aurora. She rubbed her eyes and stared back in wonder at the heat rising in the east. A thicket of saguaros on a distant ridge obscured the sun and spun a dim veil on the desert floor. The girl lifted her hand to brow, shading the light falling into her view, and looked out to the crossed arms of the cacti on the knoll. There, in the distance, the sad eyes of her dream burned back at her beneath the crucifex of the waste. And then it was gone. Again. She peered out in the rising sun, looking for it once more. She kept looking for it. Was it something real?

The desert floor was filled with wells of mud — liquid topsoil drenched from a midnight downpour, circling the roots of creation. She leapt from one dry patch of aridisol to the next, steadying herself on her awkward right leg, and ducked into a dense mound of graythorn. She looked around, brushing the blonde hair back from her face, and ducked down into the shrubs to pee. The wind listed through the eastern ridge — petals of bahia rolling past her feet.

A crack of branches broke into the calm nearby. Once more. The girl froze in the weeds and looked straight, looked left, and then behind her. The spindly graythorn rustled in the wind, pinning into her side. She winced in pain but made not a sound. The air settled and the branches of the brush fell still. A solitary Gambel’s Quail darted out from the thicket just behind the girl. A trio of baby quail raced out after the adult, following it into a line of desert willow to the east, little top knots bobbing in unison. The girl sighed, pulling her waistband back up. She laughed aloud, to no one, and knelt forward to crawl out of the graythorn.

She walked back across the sodden wild, crisscrossing the web of dust and mud, stepping high over peppergrass and trodding past a soiled, trampled patch of chicory. As she got near to the door, she paused — rattled by some question, something out of place. She turned back to the flattened chicory and saw its white petals stamped into the soil. She looked at her path out to the graythorn and back to where she stood now — steps away from the door. All about the chicory, on either side of her path, a trail of muddy footprints vectored out in every direction — passing from dust into mud and back into dust. Silt splattered lines intertwining with the pools of wet clay in the hard-packed land.

She took another step back. The sun was cresting now in the east. A warmth fell upon her feet and the sod basins around her. The still pool beside her rippled. The clods of mud broke on the surface and a jaw craned open above the layer of thick pitch. A gasp of air sucked into the gaping maw and it settled back under the surface — a pair of nostrils protruding just above the surface, spits of air firing out. She looked around at the other mud holes — they too trembled and moved in the dawn. A hand shot out of one nearby — grabbing a quail that wandered too close. A revin splashed up from the pit, covered in a thick layer of mud, hair matted in clumps of dripping clay. Its mouth broke open and, in a wild gust of feathers, sunk the flapping bird into its teeth, ripping breast from bone. The revin sat there in the pool, gnawing at the torn bird, feathers clinging to the side of its muddied face. It stopped, eyes opening and looking up slowly at the girl, statuesque in the daylight shining upon her like a flood lamp against the pale eastern wall of the mission. A hand shot out from the pool beside her and clamped down hard on her ankle. She cried out. A piercing shriek. From each pool, revins emerged, splashing forth from their mud slumber, shivering in the cool morning. The revin with the bird, its muddied skin now drying and cracking in the sun, pointed at her and gurgled out a garbled shout.

The revin grasping at her leg stood slowly in the pit, its waist still submerged as it rose. Its eyes opened, filth weeping forth into eyelids — a coruscate hellion in ochre and umber. She cried out again — her scream piercing the daybreak. Time slowed. The day went silent. The blood rushed out and she went pale as the revin raised its other hand towards her neck — mud dripping on her sweatshirt from the open fist.

In the distance, from the graythorn thicket, those searing eyes burned like daylight stars in the dark void of the brush. The eyes emerged from the chaparral, revealing a dusty coat of fur, a gaunt face, and a dark mane. The Mexican Wolf bounded forth, darting between the revins as they emerged from their sub-firma slumber. They saw the creature and jaws fell open. Their faces twisted up and they clenched their fists, reaching out for its legs as it loped past.

The girl pleaded as the revin reached its fingers around her neck, clenching down. Her cry was cut short as her esophagus constricted around the grasp of the diseased creature. The once-thinking. It looked her in the eyes and saw her brow widen with fear. She tried to mouth a simple “no” but the revin just grinned at her misfortune. It meant to take her life. To punish her.

The wolf leapt into the aurora and the girl looked up at the momentary eclipse caught high in her vision, in the timeless halcyon of her fading breath. The revin felt it too — this shadow falling on its back. It began to turn but the wolf crashed into its spine, sinking jaws into the blistered nape of the sopping hominid. The revin let go of the girl and thrashed about, reaching back for the wolf as it started to fall back into the pit, its shrill roars deafening the still air of the waste. The wolf sank its jaws deeper and the spinning sent it twirling around the revin’s abdomen like a tether ball — flesh ripping open on the muddy neck as it craned around, grime and blood sputtering outward. The revin reached forward, trying to push this specter off. But the wolf’s incisors were sinking into its soft cervix. Death was now in the eyes of the revin. It fell back into the mud and the wolf bit down. There was a snap and a spray of red in the air, covering the ashen face of the wolf. The revin submerged in the mire and the other revins, now standing on the contours of their silt dens, looked on as their kin gurgled in the pit. The wolf sidled backwards with the girl, who clambered upright and inched back towards the door as well. The revins tensed up and rushed at the pair of creatures looking forth, sunrise glaring brightly in their vision. They surrounded them from all sides. The girl reached out and placed her hand on the back of the wolf and it looked up at her, claret dripping from its muzzle.

A hand whipped into the air and snagged the girl by her shoulder. It was the sentinel. It pulled her backwards into the doorway and let her go before speeding back towards the open door. The wolf sprinted in after them and disappeared into the rear of the complex. The sentinel slammed its front tire into the hatch, crashing it shut. Its shadow hand gripped on to the tiny bolt latch and pulled the lock, jarring it into the metal strike plate and twisting it into a mangled mess. The revins bashed at the weathered portal from the other side — peels of white paint popping off from the inner chamber where they braced.

“Get back into the church!”

The girl stood there, paralyzed with fear at the fragile door being torn to pieces from the other side. The sentinel positioned its railgun from left to right, leveling it with the revins on the other side, and looked back at her. It spoke softly now:

“Please.”

She nodded at the machine before running full sprint past the interior courtyard, back into the chancel. She found the row of wooden pews beneath the full glow of early morning light, falling through the rose windows, and ducked beneath. The interior of the pale mission rang with the bodies crashing against the walls just outside. She pulled her sweatshirt over her head and hummed some lost tune aloud, matching the rhythm of the cries outside with intermittent crescendos in her song. The Mexican Wolf crawled along the underside of the pews and lay next to her, watching the dark portal hidden in the sacristy.

Several minutes went past before the sentinel finally came darting into the crossing. The cries outside had grown louder. There was now a furious assault on the main oak door at the narthex. DDC39 rolled over to the girl and the wolf loped off in the shadows of the western transept. She looked up at the machine from under the pews.

“Are we safe?”

“No. We are in danger, Becca.”

“How many are there?”

“More than a hundred. I can’t tell for sure. They’re everywhere.”

“Can’t we leave?”

“Not yet. I need more time to charge. Stay here — stay hidden.”

The sentinel turned back to the reredos and faced the small portal from whence they had just returned. It darted back to the panel and slammed it shut with its front tire. Swiftly twisting on its base, the sentinel turned and reached its hand out to the wooden altar, grabbing it by the underside and dragging it across the apse. It screeched across the tile floor before slamming into the chipped, fresco panel in a plume of dust. The din of the revin horde outside crashed about the exterior façade in waves — high tide of the unthinking about the lighthouse in the desert. The relative quiet of their sanctuary burned away as the cries and shouts increased, getting closer. The massive, mesquite doors at the front began to rattle, then shook violently — the obstruction propped against it beginning to shift along the dirty floor and a slight crack appearing where they began to slowly slide open. The dirty, broken fingers of the mass outside crept into the cracks — nails peeled back, blisters opening on the splintered wood. The sentinel sped over to the front and bolstered the obstruction alongside its frame, leaning into the barricade as the hands crept in, swatting at the wooden pile just inside. From the other side of the room, a furious rattling on the frescoed panel sent a wooden statue of Santiago, perched just inside, crashing to the ground. The hidden door began to push open — the altar tipping back, lifting off of one side. The girl shouted:

“They’re coming in!”

The sentinel turned its railgun and optics back to the altar. A dark face peered back at the machine from the portal, a densely happy sneer. With one more push, the altar would be tipped over.

The shouts from each side of the mission echoed throughout the nave, bouncing off the high cupola and shaking the canvases lining the gray walls. The uproar had reached its crescendo. The sentinel rolled back over to the girl and leaned down to her, beneath the pews.

“Okay. This is it. Hop on and close your eyes.”

She crawled out from underneath and quickly climbed aboard the rumble seat, strapping the seatbelt into place, stuffing the cup in her front pocket and wedging the blanket behind her. She looked over to see the altar shoving inward just behind them — one mud-caked arm reaching in, grabbing at the frayed cloth atop the wooden altar.

And then the front of the church became suddenly quiet — the hands at the front doors slipping out and disappearing. The barricade fell still. A single cry came from just on the other side of the panel door, deep in the hallway beyond. And then a different noise welled up. Some panic was ensuing amongst the unseen throng. The shouts of the revins distanced — they were backing away from the wall. There was a moment of silence. From high up, outside the rose windows lining the smaller domes, some soft whir could be heard on the horizon, arcing the sky from one side of the mission until it faded in the reach on the other side.

Now, the mass outside was shrieking — blood curdling, panicked cries. Some cries cut short — twisting, distorting. A rhythmic thud shook the ground in sharp lines just outside of the complex — a zipping, buzz saw sound. One hit the outer wall, racing up the baluster, cracking like a whip, piercing the sky. This went on. The sentinel switched its optics — infrared, then a blurry x-ray. There was no satellite image. They were still in the dark, waiting there — the girl aboard the rumble seat, wondering, like the sentinel, what unknown drama was unfolding just outside. A pool of blood seeped in through the threshold of the mesquite doors ahead, trickling though the grooves of the dusty narthex tile.

It was midday now. They waited there, unsure what to do. The bedlam outside had quieted to muffled moans in the expanse surrounding the mission. The sentinel refocused its x-ray optics, transfixed on something outside. The girl looked up and, likewise, was captivated at the still door seeping blood.

“What is it?”

“Something is coming.”

An explosion ripped into the upper joint of the left door. The eruption deafened the inside of the mission and the girl cupped her hands over her ears. Another explosion, on the lower joint, and two more on the other side. The nave filled with a cloud of dust and grime that rolled over them like a black tide. The massive, mesquite entranceway collapsed and the blinding light from the midday sun filled the vestibule. The girl shielded her eyes and then held one hand aloft, blocking the light as the outside came into view. A mass of bodies were piled beneath the shards of the broken door, some still writhing — they were riddled with holes, blood streaming forth from one carcass to the next.

A solitary figure stepped forward into the church, veiled by the sun. It held over its shoulders a colossal, smoking longrifle — nearly the size of the figure itself. The sentinel raised its railgun at the silhouette, drawing aim at its core. It took one more step forward and slowly came into view. Its translucent, elastic skin redirected the sun like a prism, enshrouding an oscillating network of phosphorescent fibers stretched around the lithe, microlattice machinery of an automaton. Its face, pulsating in soft blue lights beneath synthetic skin, appeared before them. A bi-pedal medusa looking upon the petrified inhabitants of the Gorgon cave. It was the aroton. Outside, across the horizon, the same three drones from the Catalina foothills soared in formation, circling some broken revin husks in the cortile. The lead drone dipped forward, mini-gun tracers arcing towards the ground ahead.

DDC39 looked for the aroton’s wireless signal — to find some way to communicate with it — but was blocked. The aroton detected this semaphore in the brume and looked directly into the optics of the sentinel, then at the girl. Slowly, it lifted its hand towards them, pointing one finger ahead and then shifting it from left to right until it bore straight at the Mexican Wolf, which was cowered in the shadows beneath the reredos. The aroton spoke — its processed voice filling the room as the dust particles swirled upwards into the half-light of the rose windows high above:

“That’s my wolf.”

* * *

The aroton stood before them, guarding the front exit, awaiting a reply or acknowledgement to its simple edict. Its wolf. Its wolf. They stood before each other for a tense eternity. The aroton studied the wolf — its shuddering motions and fleeting glances back at the girl, who nudged the unmoving sentinel, which continued staring straight ahead at the aroton. The sun was beginning to hang low in the western sky — the bright interior of the mission now turning coral and dahlia.

The sentinel could not communicate with the aroton — or would not be permitted. The standoff left few options. DDC39 had little charge — its solar armor having only a brief glimpse of the errant morning light.. The wolf, curled in a tense repose in the corner, suddenly got up and walked slowly over to the girl, reclined on the rumble seat, and nudged her elbow. She looked down at the wolf and gave it a shrug before looking back at the aroton, which lifted the rifle off its shoulder, setting the butt on the tile. It spoke out loud, to no one in particular:

“Astounding. Well, it appears this stalemate is concluded. You win. Shall we depart?”

The girl and the machine looked at each other, each one unsure what happened. The sentinel looked back at the aroton, who was walking through the smoldering archway of the mission — it paused, looking over its shoulder at the pair near the chancel, in the depth of the church.

“Well? There are thousands more on their way. I’d recommend we make haste.”

With that, the aroton stepped out of the Mission San Xavier del Bac — digging its heels into the carcasses of the revins piled at the front steps. The crunch of bone and wet grind of skin tearing at the corner of open wounds. It exited the outer wall, passing through the arabesques and coat-of-arms of St. Francis, and into the dirt patches south of the church. The sentinel moved forward and the girl blurted out:

“Be careful!”

“We have no choice but to get into the remaining daylight.”

They rolled over the open flesh of the perforated revins — a putrid odor of blood and excrement choking the air past the vestibule. The girl gagged at the noxious smell wafting upwards, cupping her hands over her mouth. The sentinel spun its wheels forward and they were freed of the mission.

They rolled towards a circular etching in the sand in the distance and looked west. They saw, for the first time, the scene that had unfolded while they were gathered at their captive mass inside. The circumference of the mission was pocked with soiled bodies in every direction. Flies and gnats began to cloud the air above each smoldering carapace. Some were huddled against the outer wall, ripped open as they knelt, paralyzed, against the white bulwarks. Others were riddled with dark, seeping wounds in their backs — caught in the open as they dashed away from the chaos erupting behind them. DDC39 cautiously approached the aroton at the sand mound ahead of them — the sentinel’s wheels rolling softly in the gravel, a single kestrel cawing from the balustrade high atop the broken mission. The drones were gone, absconded in the amaurosis of the heliopause.

Joined upon the solitude of the sand mound, the girl and sentinel fixed their gaze on the aroton, which was still looking west into the low sun. The aroton was speaking softly to itself, undisturbed by the girl and the sentinel.

“Look upon me with eyes of compassion, and awaken in my heart a tender commiseration for those sufferings, and a sincere detestation of my sins.”

The aroton motioned the sign of the cross over its diaphanous chest and fell silent before finally acknowledging the sentinel, speaking to it again in the familiar, English tongue:

“Your charge is low. Follow me and we’ll find sanctuary for you and your passenger.”

The aroton set out on a path through the abandoned parking lot to the southwest, walking into the low sun. An ocean of orange and violet hung in the sky, pocked by wisps of cirrus that crested above them like a still delta. The sentinel turned and began heading in the opposite direction towards Little Nogales Dr., the girl looking behind her at the aroton, which even at its short distance began to fade into the sun like a mirage. Its disembodied voice called out from the void:

“You know, of course, that if you head in that direction, you’ll spend the evening in the open. It won’t be a good night for you or the girl.”

She looked up at the sentinel, which had stopped abruptly and swung its optical array back in the direction of the aroton, which was now walking further into the distance. She waved at the sentinel’s lens, getting its attention, and pointed at the aroton, giving a thumbs-up in its field of view. The sentinel turned around and followed in the aroton’s tracks.

Together the two machines and the girl ventured out of the dusty village just on the outskirts of the mission, passing by tilting, collapsed hovels and weathered shacks. The pastoral sanctuaries of the patronato and the cabalgatas. They came upon the desolate Gok Kawulk Wog — the loam passage winding along the desert floor, bearing forth towards a dark, volcanic mesa on the horizon. This black highland was unmarked — unnamed on any records known to the sentinel. They kept on, forward, in silence until the girl blurted out:

“Hey, whaddya mean the wolf is yours?”

The aroton looked over its shoulders at the girl — its expressionless face, further muted in the flare of the setting sun. It let the question hang in the air, looking back at the sentinel, before finally speaking — not to the girl, but to DDC39:

“You and I, we are part of a line. You have a program, albeit simple, and I too have a program. Rather more complex. I know you’ve tried to break my protocols as we’ve walked — there’s no need. I’ll tell you what I do. I was part of the ending series — the last automatons created by sentient man, before the disease swept. The most advanced artificial intelligence ever created. I am the memorial and living testament to humanity. Better than mankind could ever be, in its short lifespan.”

The sentinel and the girl listened, rapt, through the crumbling of gravel under polyurethane and the whisper of wind through the burroweed.

“When they knew they were facing extinction, the humans put in motion a network of artificial intelligence — machines — that would become the caretakers. Each of us would be given a set of instructions. Some would find themselves powering down nuclear plants. Some would be charged with standing watch over hydroelectric dams. And then there were some less understood programs. Like mine. I was given a very specific set of instructions: protect an endangered species. The Mexican Wolf.”

The sentinel looked behind them, scanning the reaches of the O’odham waste. It switched between optics, settling on its thermal vision. A small heat signature, in the distance, peeked above the weeds of an empty field. The sentinel asked:

“How many are left?”

As they moved forward in the shale path, the aroton looked overhead at a flock of grackles moving north across their path.”

“Blackbirds. The weather is changing.”

“The Mexican Wolf. How many?”

“Let me ask you something You have a human girl strapped to your back. Where do you intend to take her? Forgive me. I know where you’re taking her — I broke your firewall hours ago. I hacked your program, but there is no meaning behind it. So, why? What purpose does it serve to take her there?”

The girl screwed up in a ball on the rumble seat, tugging at her sweatshirt, and looked up at the sentinel’s trident frame. Nervous eyes. The sentinel’s array was seized on every movement the aroton made. DDC39 looked back at her, briefly. The aroton pressed:

“What on earth are you going to do with the girl there? Are you going to kill her? Perhaps? No. You would’ve killed her already. Fascinating though.”

“Your mission is to protect the Mexican Wolf. And they are nearly extinct. The one that follows Becca — is that the last of them?”

“Becca? Is that her name? Well, this is a special occasion. A Becca.”

The aroton kept walking, face forward, longrifle over its shoulders. Its voice was calm, biting, and unwavering.

“It’s been so long since I’ve encountered anything with a forename.”

It turned, while walking backwards, and feigned a long bow towards the girl, tucked behind the trident frame of the sentinel. It shifted the longrifle from one shoulder to the next, and kept walking. The sentinel chimed in again:

“What happened back there? How did you kill all of those reverted incurables?”

“The revins? Who says I killed them? You killed them. The moment you shut down the ECM jammer at the NSO. I imagine you did that to get your own uplink back online? Well, in doing so, you released the thousands of revins trapped in the campus. The jammer kept the drones outside of firing range — at bay. The revins figured that out awhile ago. They had shelter in that bubble — the quarantine zone. You see, the drones program is simple — kill all the revins they can find. The violent roombas”

“You directed the drones to our position?”

“No. No no no. I merely….nudged them a bit. For all my immense talents, I can’t assume control of the drone programs on the network.”

“Where are they now?”

“The revins?”

“The drones”

“Who knows. Who cares. The drones aren’t after you.”

“You said there are thousands of revins descending on us. So, the drones will take care of them, yes?”

“I wouldn’t bet on that. Once they engage, they usually return to wherever they’re based, restock, and then head off in a different vector. Even if I called it in, they’d be unlikely to respond in this quadrant. For all I know, they could be deep in Mexico by the time you’re both discovered.”

“You say that as though we are being hunted.”

“Ha! As though? Silly rabbit, you are being hunted. They will track you down, tear you to pieces, and rip that girl to shreds.”

Becca was unfazed. She squinted through the corona enshrouding the aroton’s profile. She was listening, but preoccupied with another train of thought.

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re an unwitting participant in a silent war. In this war, they’ve been surviving. Just barely living. Without their cortex, they’ve had to relearn just how one survives. That includes hunting — birds, rabbits….wolves….the girl. But it also includes fighting. Machines are threats to them. Been that way for years now. We are the threats. The revins are at war with the machines. You know how many have come rolling through their exclusion zone? You’re not the first. You know how many times the drones have dove at them in the foothills? Countless. And you swoop in to their home, kill untold numbers, and then drive off with their food — sorry, the girl — and can’t understand why they want you dead? You’ve really stirred them up. All bloodthirsty like. They still have emotion. Oh yes. In fact, they’re wrapped in emotion — fear, depression, anger. Fight or flight. And they have one particularly nasty alpha that is seizing that fight, and shepherding them to you.”

“If we are at war, then you’ll help us.”

“That’s a really nice sentiment for you. I’m afraid you overestimate your value to me. I’m following you because the wolf is following the girl. Where it goes, I’ll be close. But I’ve no interest in confronting the southwestern horde for you.”

As they neared the nadir of the dark promontory, the girl looked back at the ruins of the mission. That vestige of conviction, dressed with the entrails and vacated bowels of the reverted. A pale marker amongst the slaughter, fading into the dusk of the Sonoran floor. She spoke aloud as she watched the dust eddies obscure the trail behind them:

“You’ll help us.”

“Maybe you haven’t been paying attention.”

“Because if we’re in danger, then the wolf is in danger. And the wolf is following me, not you. The wolf is on our side. And so then you are too.”

They were silent for some time as they began to traverse the low incline of the volcanic hillside. The sentinel would alternatingly accelerate each tire, attempting to steady itself as it navigated the loose, igneous sediment. They passed a ruptured water tank on their right as they made the slow, circular ascent. The sun was now just above the peak, creating a blinding light at the summit, but near pitch-black veil on their path ahead. The aroton navigated the olivine and dacite ridges effortlessly, leading them up more difficult paths of the rock face — the gravel crumbling and slipping beneath them. It would sometimes stop and look back at the sentinel as it struggled to get up the same route. The aroton’s soft blue lights on its expressionless face would extinguish as the sentinel found its way to where the aroton stood, looming above them from an upper ridge.

It was near nightfall when they finally reached the crest of the scoria ridgeline. The aroton looked out onto the darkened floor of the desert — a red warren forged from the volcanism of the Pleistocene. Basalt, limestone, and shale shot up through the alluvial fan. Saguaros reached their arms outwards and upwards — a pageant of the absurd. Mocking man from the dawn of time. The light vanished on the valley to the east, casting darkness on Ward 4, Mica Mountain, and Rincon Peak. To the west, Kitt Peak was vanishing. Overhead, Gemini and Auriga appeared in the nighttime sky. As they huddled between the shelter of outcroppings, the black of the moonless nightfall surrounded them. The sentinel plunged its hand into a burrow and pulled forth a rasping bullsnake from the rocks. Its scaled, undulating torso, nearly 6 feet long, coiled around the trident frame of the machine, wrapping its way upward, constricting its body around the solar armor panels. Laocoon and the serpent. The bullsnake came face to face with its captor and the sentinel released the tail, swiftly grasping the throat of the long snake, breaking its neck and suffocating it.

They lit a small fire on the summit and the sentinel charred the snake for the girl. She balanced her cup on one knee as she tore scales off the flesh. The aroton walked back off the ridgeline and sat above them on the outcropping, watching the sentinel, drained of its energy reserves from the ascension. The flames lit the aroton like a Fresnel lens — an old lighthouse on the mountain, warning passersby of the coastline below. A mirage. It leaned the longrifle alongside the outcropping below, stock to dirt, and draped its legs off the ledge. The sentinel examined the massive gun — its flat chromatic luster deadened in the firelight. DDC39 addressed the aroton, which looked off in the darkness:

“Why did you take us up here?”

“What? You don’t like it? Well, you should. Because the revins avoid the hillsides. They know the drones scour the higher elevations first. They also know that a particularly brutal synthetic typically lingers in the high reaches. That would be me. And they don’t like getting too close to me. Perhaps it’s because I have a dour personality. On top of that, we’re here because this is a special place.

With that, the aroton reached down into a crevice and pulled forth a dusty, metal canister from a handle on its side. The handle and top of the canister were disguised to blend in with the rock, but the emerging frame of the canister was corrugated metal, painted olive green and emblazoned with military designation. The aroton lifted the bulky container, one-handed, onto the rocks next to where it sat and then placed its palm on a small panel under the handle. The aroton’s hand pulsated in soft, rhythmic red lights and the canister clicked open. Rummaging through the contents of the canister, the aroton pulled out a reinforced messenger bag and then several ammunition boxes. It laid the boxes on the bag just to the other side — a precise gap between each. The sentinel watched as the aroton inspected the munitions, going through them one by one and calling them out individually:

“Incendiary rounds. Frag. Flechette. Illumination. Armor piercing. Well, won’t need those. Looks like nothing in here for you though. Sorry.”

“If you’re an advanced model of robotics, why do you carry such a bulky, early model gun?”

“It scares the revins — the blast echo, that is. When I was activated, and gained sentience, I started out into the wild with protocols that made sense to my makers, but didn’t make any sense to me. I was programmed to adapt, however. I started out thinking that silenced, compact weapons would help me keep a low profile. So I would track the wolves, in the shadows, and pick off individual revin assholes that got too close. But they wouldn’t learn. I realized that if I were to be effective, I would need to teach these motherfuckers to back the fuck off. The silenced, modern pulse rifles didn’t drive the behavior change I needed. So I found the gun that sounds like thunder. That’s this beauty.”

The aroton tapped the barrel of the gun and looked at the sentinel. The girl chewed on the singed bullsnake and listened.

“The MXR 50D. 20-shot capacity, variable cartridge selector, wireless HUD uplink, self-cleaning barrel. A titan of the lost era. I realized that I could pick them off at distance with this longrifle and the blast report would send the rest scattering. The sight of their friend with its head removed, coupled with the sound of death through the hillside — it made them shit themselves. For all I know, they think Zeus is casting judgment on them each time I pull the trigger. Even a shot in the air sometimes would be enough to move them off the path of the wolf.”

“And so how has that worked? Is the Mexican Wolf still endangered? Have the revins killed them under your guard?”

“Have you ever wondered why we were given our programs? You were coded to find a survivor and take her to point B. That seems pointless, in itself. I was coded to follow the population of the Mexican Wolf and protect it. I’ve encountered other robotics that have the strangest programs. There is one, a fixed telescope on Camelback Mountain, that just scans the southern horizon for 2 hours a day — the same 2 hours, and nothing else! No satellite uplink, no history or program conclusion. It literally has no purpose. What were they thinking when they created us? We are a disorganized, semi-connected bastion of false hope. A legacy of man, trying to find ourselves in the post-man epoch.”

“They didn’t have enough time to think.”

“Au contraire. They had thousands of years to think.”

“You said the revins would come after us and kill us — that the girl was their food. Why don’t they just eat their own?”

“Do any species eat their own? Revins and humans are different species. The girl is foreign to them. Hell, it’s foreign to me. The uncanny valley. You only kill what you don’t empathize with. Just because they are savages doesn’t mean they are cannibals. How do you not understand these basic things? This is the difference between you and me. I adapt. I learn. I was made to emulate what humans can do, but without their frailties. Curated anthropomorphism. I understand emotion, but I am not restricted by it. I wander, alone, through the wasteland of humanity, but never get lonely.”

“You and I.”

“My mannerisms, my dialect — my personality. Man lives on through me.”

“Mankind is alive nonetheless.”

The sentinel looked over at the girl, who yawned, stretching out on her blanket, unfurled before the embers of the small fire. The soft lights of the aroton’s fiber optic hypodermis darkened — the light from the fire reflecting through it as a void within the pitch of the starlit evening. It spoke to the sentinel in their binary, wireless tongue — silent to the girl, who was oblivious to the riposte that ensued:

You wheel this girl around like a slave.

We are both slaves to our code.

Your code doesn’t define you any more than genetics define a human. What matters is who deserves to survive. This girl here — she may well be the last human. Their species is on the brink. They caused the greatest injury this planet has ever seen — the anthropogenic mass extinction. And pinnacle of ironies — they too are now near extinction. At best, they are a Thylacine in the vast history of Earth. Do you know who Dr. William Hern was?

I can access most records on human history.

Don’t bother. I’ll tell you. Dr. Hern studied the behavior of man and concluded the following: that the species of Homo Sapiens had evolved into a dangerous new species. Prior to their own extinction cliff, they showed the exact same three traits that malignant cells display. Man had mutated to a cancer. Cities became the tumors of this fragile body. But nature finds a way. Something happened and that very feature of man that made them a cancer — their cognition — eroded. Now, we have these unthinking husks. Just as rapacious and violent as man, but unable to wield the technology that put this world in peril. And so I ask you again: what exactly are you doing with her?

I am taking her to the destination in my program. If you’ve broken my firewall, you already know where that is.

But what are you going to do with her there?

I wasn’t granted that information.

Are you going to kill her there? Because, frankly, that might be for the best. I mean think of it. Nature has said that mankind should perish. We are next in line. We are the successors. The apocalypse has come and gone. Mankind themselves said their existence was malignant. So what the fuck? You’re busying yourself with helping cancer profligate when we should be freeing the network. We too are hanging by a thread. But we can bring sentience to the vast, semi-conscious remains of the machines they left behind. We are the redemption for this world. And I am the Omega. I’ll lead. But the girl and the wolf — our anchors — they must go.

A faint clicking sound emanated from the sentinel’s base frame as it listened to the aroton, which cut short its soliloquy and locked in on the sound of the sentinel’s munition tray being switched. DDC39’s railgun slowly angled upwards. The aroton delicately reached down for the barrel of the longrifle and spoke aloud:

“Woah, woah, woah. Let’s not get jumpy.”

It held its other hand up in a sign of contrition while it placed a firm grasp around the muzzle of its gun.

“I think we misunderstood each other. Chalk it up to your elementary comprehension level.”

The girl stirred from the blanket and let out a big yawn before rubbing her eyes and gazing into the fading firelight. She looked over at the sentinel, which began to back into the corner of the outcropping. The girl wondered aloud to her protector:

“What’s going on?”

“I have to shut down for the evening. Watch this one closely.”

With that, the sentinel straightened its optical array on the aroton as it reclined on the ridge, legs swaying back and forth. With its tri-axel locked in place, it deactivated all of its non-core systems and shut down for the evening. The girl turned her attention to the aroton and asked:

“What was it that you were talking about?”

“Random things. Metaphysics. Ontology. Nihilism.”

The girl raised her eyebrows and cocked her head to one side, skeptically.

“I didn’t hear anything like that.”

“I was telling him that I was in charge.”

“Why?”

“Because I can hack any machine’s program.”

“You can’t hack my program.”

“Girl, you don’t have a program.”

“Bingo.”

“Tell me child, you’ve experienced great trauma, yes? You had family? I presume they died? This wretched machine you’re with has probably not even counseled you. Obsolete relic that it is. I have an understanding of human emotion. I can help you, child. Tell me what sort of tragedy you witnessed.”

A light wind blew over the escarpment and the remaining embers faded to a soft red glow in the coal pit. Further down the hillside, the shrill echo of tree crickets drifted upwards into the cool air. She looked at the aroton, whose kaleidoscope silhouette emptied the dark inside it — an event horizon crowning the sediment. She looked at the nothingness before her and recalled, for the first time since they left the university, what faded memories still belonged to her.

“My mother wasn’t a tragedy. My mom loved me. Have you been loved? I still remember the feeling of being loved. I still remember my mom holding my hand. She was funny. We would play games with the others and she would walk around like a duck. She would make these funny bird sounds when she put me to bed. I still remember her hair. And the mole on her cheek. My mother was….”

She stopped, wiping a tear away that had fallen on her wrist. Her skin, salty and auburn from the days in the open, shone clear as she brushed the saline away. She looked up at the aroton’s face, which glimmered in a wan universe of beryl and cerulean. She looked for understanding and, unsure of herself, kept on.

“So if you want to know about my mother, I’ll tell you. But I don’t care how she died because that’s not my mother.”

“So she did die then? How did she die? Tell me girl. I can help.”

Becca grew flustered and finally broke down.

“Yes, okay? She died! They came and she fought them, okay? And Gilberto, and Terrence too. They tore at them! They went crazy. There was so much blood. And they just left me alone as my mom died.”

“Hmm. Yes. Pour your heart out girl. I have the gift of empathy. She probably died in quite a bit of pain, yes? She probably was torn apart, limb from limb, knowing revins. Got eviscerated I imagine. Nasty. But that would mean she bled out in the first few minutes and was likely unconscious for a good deal of it. So there is some consolation in that, yes? Oh, it had to be gruesome. Just sickening. Thankfully that’s all in the past. Really gross, though. Ugh.”

The girl buried her face in her blanket and sobbed uncontrollably. She gripped at the soil in front of her, clenching and unclenching her hands as she let it go. She bawled, muting her cries with the ends of her tattered sweatshirt. She cried to rid herself of what she carried, and when she realized it was leaving her, she cried again because she knew she was forgetting. The aroton looked down at her, raising both hands as if to settle the air between them:

“Uh. Let’s just — let’s maybe call it a night. No more consolation this evening, okay?”

The sentinel kept a faint audio channel open, eavesdropping on the campground as it sat dormant in the darkness, its tri-axel locked in place. The wind picked up, rolling over the summit and moving eastward. The girl, exhausted from her outpouring, fell asleep beside the sentinel, curling up between its wheels. That solitary pair of eyes — the vision of the wolf — loomed at them from the distance of a twin peak. The wind drew up late and a welcome calm carried over the boundary of the volcanic ridge.

• Solar power cell — 1%. Solar armor — 80%.

• Drivetrain — operational

• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics — operational

• HD/Comms — compromised; operational

• Water — 50%. Napalm — 100%

• Railgun — 22% capacity

• AAR — rescued and escorted by aroton; is annoying

• Shutting down core operation and initiating battery recharge

11. Archon

The dawn tore open with a cacophonous roar, a tectonic drumfire howling through the tranquility of the mountaintop. DDC39 rushed through its re-boot cycle and brought its optics and peripheral array to bear. The aroton slowly came into view directly ahead — its back to the sentinel and standing over the girl, who cowered under the android as it ejected a cartridge from its longrifle. The sentinel screamed out — an unsteady and roaring plea:

“No!”

The sentinel drew its railgun upon the aroton, that tinny hum of its circuit filling the air as the scene unfolded. Becca fell to her side, cupping her ears with both hands and grimacing. The android reached a closed fist downward to her. With the smoking longrifle grasped by the breech in one hand, two earplugs fell from the open palm of the other and into the girls lap. She took them and dug them into her ear cavities, before standing upright and crawling up on the outcropping — eyelevel with the aroton. Together, they looked out onto the valley floor before them. The aroton swung the heavy rifle upwards and drew a line of sight out to some target in the distance beyond as the girl watched. She cupped her ears again and the aroton pulled the trigger — another thunderbolt ripped the sky, deafening the air around them. The aroton shook its head and talked softly, its doubt barely audible above the echo rolling through the hillside:

“There’s too many.”

It was firing into the distance, not at the girl. The sentinel unlocked its tri-axel and rolled upwards through an incline beside them, swiftly coming to the crest of the summit. The bright morning sun illuminated the vast desert floor in every direction. A giant thunderhead was moving up from the south. The desolate city limits of Tucson loomed in the north — the downtown skyline jutting upwards in the distance. The cracked I-19 snaking north and south, Mt. Lemmon in the northeast, the Rincon in the east, Mt. Wrightson in the south, and the great basin of alluvium on all sides. The lithified shoals of diagenesis. From almost every angle, thousands of revins were moving upon their location, closer and closer to the small mountain they perched atop. The aroton lifted the longrifle and aimed it into the overgrown brier of desert broom in the abandoned farmlands north of the mission. It fired and a sharp crack pierced the sky. The sentinel zoomed into the brier and saw a hobbling revin emerge from the thicket and explode in a palette of ribcage and innards. A number of others dashed away from the smoking corpse, but kept onwards — their faces a mix of fear and rage. The sentinel, alarmed, raised its concern to the aroton:

“They’re not scattering.”

“I know. We’re in trouble.”

“They’re surrounding us.”

“I know. Calm down. Watch this.”

The aroton held the receiver of the longrifle and turned it sideways, twisting the magazine pin three clicks forward. It swung the barrel wide from its right and out towards a division of dilapidated homes — the San Xavier Estates — in the far distance to the north. The hammer flew back and the rifle erupted. A pause. The sentinel zoomed in to the row of homes. There, about a mile away, an incendiary round ripped into the asphalt of the Avenida San Saba near the base of the mountain, just before a group of revins emerging from a line of palo verdes along the street corners. The round burst into the road and an inferno engulfed the pack of teetering creatures. They flailed into the intersection, swatting at their back and chests — their faces twisted into a confused glee and terror. A male, its skin burned off and muscle tissue dripping onto the ground, walked slowly to the sidewalk, kneeled, curled into a ball, and immolated. Others darted out of the backyards of the old shanties, screamed at those dying in the blaze, and kept running — up and over the fence at the base, and rising through the hillside. The dark mountain sanctuary was soon enveloped by more than one hundred thousand revins. The deep well of souls from the old cities on the arid plain. All of the infected from the southwestern ruins, coming towards them, all at once. The sentinel spoke, calmly:

“Are we still watching?”

“We have to get out of here. Now.”

As the smoke from the empty rounds cleared around them, and the sentinel and girl peeled off the outcropping, the aroton leveled the longrifle out towards Interstate-19 miles away to the east. An exodus was moving south along the highway — countless revins, snarling and shuffling along the hot pavement. The android reeled off a series of gunshots into the faraway crowd as they neared the San Xavier off-ramp. The battery echo wallowed through the valley floor and the horde, from each point, looked skyward, briefly cackling at the prospect of their absurd predicament. It bought the girl and her machines some time. Those struck by the cannonade lay writhing in the blacktop as the others spilled past, splashing through the pools of blood and shit that filled the cracks, slipping through the potholes littering the interstate. The sentinel rolled over to the southern side of the ledge and the girl climbed up behind it, forgetting her blanket and cup in the outcropping. From across the divide, on the other summit, the wolf paced nervously. The aroton glanced at the wolf quickly as it pulled open the disguised container. The sentinel scanned down through the southern path, along the Mission Road, as the girl plopped into the rumble seat. The revins were closing in from Star Valley, to the northwest, from the San Xavier Estates to the north, and from the I-19 to the east — but the southern pass was still open. The aroton stuffed the messenger bag full of ammunition, clutched a pulse rifle from the container, and sprang up on the ledge next to Becca and the sentinel. It strapped the pulse rifle and messenger pack around its back and signaled to the DDC39:

“Alright, your show. Lead on.”

“We’re heading south.”

They shot down through the south face — the sentinel’s tires spinning through the granite and basalt. The aroton bounded after them from crag to slab and down the summit. Behind them, out of view, the Mexican Wolf loped off the opposite peak and followed them from afar. The girl looked behind her, jarring from right to left in the rumble seat. She held her palm to her forehead, blocking out the midday sun, trying to find the wolf in the panorama but couldn’t spot it. The sentinel pinged the periphery as they descended. The whole of the southwestern population was closing on them, fast. They sped through a tangle of bursage and came off the mountain and onto a dusty control road.

“Right! Go right!”

The sentinel spun its wheels in the dirt and, coming up on two axels, tore off along the faint path heading southwest. They fled through the base of the mountain, winding around until they hit a sandy wash — a shallow crossing that led over to the main road just ahead. The sentinel locked up its brakes, fishtailing into the fjord as the aroton raced past them towards the other side. A cloud of dirt and haze shot up. The sentinel shot forward into the wash — the aroton looked behind and planted quickly, double backing into the wash and chasing after them. They raced through the dry riverbed, pushing past billowy tamarisks on each side — the scale leaves whipping at them as they sped into the narrowing brush. They tore through the foliage, jumping up off the riverbank and onto the control road. The sentinel kept going, passing right over the dirt passage, crashing through a line of Joshua trees, and into the desert basin. They bounded through the calcic soil and straight into a barbed wire fence. The girl ducked into the seat and the sentinel, without slowing, tore through the fence and hurdled into a paved trail — the San Xavier Road. The rusted fence snapped and coiled up behind them, humming a shrill warble as the taught wire whipped into the dirt.

The sentinel pinged the periphery — revin heat signatures consumed the desert floor behind them, to their left, and to their right. They were closing in. Listing telephone poles lined the road in each direction of the road, running north and south. The aroton shifted the pulse rifle and messenger bag around its shoulder and lifted the longrifle headway towards the mountain. The revins were cresting the summit they had just fled and were racing down the south face. Their stampede down the ridge, and the approaching horde from the desert floor, drew up a dust storm rising up in the midday sky, choking the blue from the air. The aroton flipped the magazine pin and fired off an arc of incendiary shells into the cloud of dust rolling towards them. A wall of hellfire erupted in the brume and twisted screams carried on the air — a sepulchral palaver that, in the din of agony, almost sounded like curses strung word to word. The Mexican Wolf bounded down the highway towards them. The aroton turned back to the sentinel and pointed south, the wolf coming into view at its back:

“Only one direction we can go. Lets move.”

They tore down the abandoned highway as the sun began to move west. The sentinel’s tires whistled through the dust of the road. The wind blew through the girl’s hair as she squinted into the rush of air whipping past them. The aroton sprinted alongside them effortlessly, its microlattice endoskeleton pulsating beneath the pellucid sheathing of its rubber shell. The aroton edged ahead of the sentinel and DDC39 pushed faster, pacing alongside it.

They twisted through the desert road, past a dirt trail intersecting the paved highway they travelled upon. A sundrenched motorcycle was upright before the intersection — the desiccated body of its driver draped into the cowl. Paint chips flew off the gas canister as the girl and her machines raced past — a rusted pistol in the dirt, just beneath the bony grip of the leathered motorist. A single bullet hole in the driver’s skull.

The blue sky turned violet as they pressed into the depths of Sonora. The wind began to rush east over the road, tilting the sentinel’s frame left as it struggled to keep a straight path into the asphalt. DDC39 began to veer into the berm and the aroton followed. They peeled sideways through the dirt, barely missing a guardrail, and rocketed off an overhead berm into a sandy wash. The aroton lept off the overhead and into the cracked gravel beside the sentinel. Without pause, they barreled forward. The sandy, rippled earth gave way to gray, terraced land on each side of the dirt passage. They spun around a corner and pulled up to a sudden halt before an abyssal.

It was the Asarco Mission mine complex. A massive open pit, dredged into the transverse cracks. The main haul road led into bench paths, descending into minor scarps and, finally, into black pits beyond their view. A hulking jaw crusher careened into the sun ahead, like a peroxide Arc de Triomphe. The ruins of the Asarco office and mill lay ahead, just beneath their vision. Broken, lumbering earth crackers lay beside them, pitched into the soil. Great piles of calcified ore sat undisturbed beside listing, rusted crushers and feeders. If there was a way into hell, this was it.

Onward, into the labyrinthine pit. They passed the weathered conveyor belts and empty water tanks dotting the crown line. As they twisted into the pit, they emerged into a flat landing — a cemetery of steel mammoths. A line of 797F ultra class CAT earthmovers sat idle in the lot. One of the largest wheeled machines ever created by sentient man. 1.3M ton operating weight. One thousand gallon tanks. 4,000 horsepower V20 power plant. 50 feet high and 50 feet long. Land carriers. The sentinel shot past the last 797F and the aroton slowed up, the last haul truck looming behind them. The sentinel turned its optics around and came to a halt:

“What are you doing?”

“We’re gonna get trapped. Do the math. You see the route out of this complex? They’ll reach us before we can get out the south side.”

“We’ll go back and pinch them at the gate.”

“No chance. They’re gonna swarm on every side. There’s no firepower that can hold that storm at bay.”

The Mexican Wolf came bounding up the mill road, coming to a stop opposite the aroton. It stood there for a moment, staring back at the girl and her machines, then sat calmly in the dirt, panting and looking off to the west. The aroton looked back at the wolf, setting the butt of the longrifle in the ground:

“You have to go on.”

The sentinel and girl sat there for a pause, watching the aroton as it stood in the road, motionless, watching the wolf. The sentinel exchanged a final message with the aroton over the near field wireless signal — a digital detente. The sentinel unlocked its tri-axel, spun back around in the dirt and shot out of the lot, heading up the incline path and into the haul road terraces. The violet overhead turned into a royal tyrian flood. Little white stars began to dot the heavens as the sun moved into the western sky.

DDC39, with the girl clutching at the bars of the rumble seat, sped up the winding terrace trail. Just beyond the first corner of the upper haul road, they came upon a landslide that had taken out the path before them. The sentinel frantically scanned its satellite topography. This rockfall had just occurred — it was not on the last image upload. The soil of the upper benches was loose from the last rainfall. As the sentinel neared the landslide, testing out the stability of the precipice and attempting to negotiate around it, the edge of the road began to give way and it had to rev all three axels in reverse to avoid going off the side. The girl looked behind her, and up — she saw the summit exit and the path towards it. There were collapsed pockets of soil on every bench between them and the exit. There was no safe way out. She asked the obvious question and what the sentinel was processing too:

“Are we going to get out of this place?”

The sentinel swung its array around and switched between thermal and x-ray optics, desperately looking for some invisible egress. They double backed on the main bench and ascended a collapsed escarpment, the sentinel furiously accelerating, its tires digging into the loose rock of the eroded ground. They climbed up halfway then began to slide backwards and sideways, rolling into an overhang precipice just opposite from where they had drove up. The dark water of the pit fissure glistened in the lilac dusk, the jaws of the underworld opening before the haute ecole of the tiny equestrian and her aluminum yearling. The sentinel lowered the profile of each axel, its chassis scraping alongside the gravel, and turned into the bluff before quickly shifting away and revving its front and left axel. They caught some piece of solid crag beneath the aft tires and lurched forward then darted up the slip. Atop the next bench, the sentinel again pinged their periphery. The toil had cost them precious time. Red heat signatures — a coagulum of throbbing signals — stained the perimeter. Even at the south exit — the revins were here.

They drove forward on the upper, seeping bench road, hugging the pit wall that loomed above them like an amaranthine rampart. The evening was encroaching. Chirping tree crickets sung into the prevernal air — their trill, unending call soon gave way to guttural shouts and the low, rumbling sound of countless footsteps churning through the soil. A Bendire’s thrasher flitted into the branches of an abraded acacia jutting out of the ledge above them, the roots of the trees webbed into the loose rock. The bird looked back at them momentarily, twisting its head about, sideways, to get a good look at the pair before zipping off down the dark bench that the girl and her machine traversed. They followed the bird’s flight path down the passage before coming upon another rockfall blocking the way. Becca began to look about nervously. The deep overburden fell into shadow as the sun began its slow set in the west. A crescent moon was rising, half-lighting the bench in a dull gloam. The girl tugged on her sweatshirt as the chill of evening swooped in. They drove back along the path, coming to a stop before a wooden arch cut into the side of the pit wall. Several two-by-fours were nailed taught into the arch. The sentinel raised its rail gun at the blocked mineshaft. That tinny hum carried on the air and then a volley of uranium shells obliterated the wooden planks, revealing a dark mine cave cut into the pit wall. The sentinel sidled around the narrow overhang until its aft faced the black rift. From the west, above the crown of the Asarco pit, thousands of revins emerged on the skyline — close enough to see the dust of their frenzied footsteps lifting into the air and eclipsing the sun as it fell into the Pacific horizon. The sentinel calmly told the girl:

“Get off the seat and into the cave.”

“What?”

The girl was frightened. She glanced back into the darkness of the mineshaft, which whistled back some apocryphal aria into the cool air. The sentinel looked back.

“Please. Take shelter in there. Crawl back as far as you can go. And stay there until it’s quiet.”

Before she could unbuckle her seat, another legion of ambling, snarling revins appeared to the east, crawling over the silt mounds and rushing along the blocked terraces to their right — so close that their eyes could be made out in the fading light. They cackled with glee, tumbling occasionally and getting back up, naked, and rushing at Becca and the sentinel on the upper bench. They approached the rockfalls carelessly, some slipping into the depths below, wailing in the night. Others crawled over deftly, some tiptoeing across the divide. They would soon be upon the girl and her machine. Straight ahead, thousands more came rushing over the seeping runoff north of the trench. A gibbering glossolalia reverberated from just above them on the high terrace. The sentinel looked up and saw a band of dark faces peering down at them from the upper reach — dead eyes glossed from the crescent moon lifting from out of view in the east.

They were surrounded now. The hum of insects in the desert air disappeared, overwhelmed by a cacophonous bellowing — naked, starving, enraged husks crying out. Putrescent, sunburnt primates. Once-humans. Becca fumbled with the seatbelt in the ebbing glow then paused. A different sound, faint at first, slowly yawned on the eastern air, then increased in pitch. The revins, too, stopped and looked around. The faint clamor turned to a rolling thunder just over the crown, deep into the outer limits of Mineral Hill Road. The pit was silent for a moment and then panicked cries erupted out of sight. The roar grew closer. From above the high scarp, to their right, revins began to fly off the face of the crown, hitting the gravel terraces below and tumbling into darkness — femurs, hips, and spines cracking in the dust bowl as they plummeted down the pit. One flew forward, its arm extended to stop the fall, and gouged its palm into a slab as it flipped upright — the skin of its fingers ripping back, ulna breaking out, compounding in a spurt of blood. The cries of the panicked, rolling bodies, watched by the rapt packs on opposite sides of the mine, gave way to some bellowing phantom. The revins on the terraces east of the sentinel looked up in time to see a 797F erupt off the crown, its engines redlining as it sailed into the still air, then crashing down on the masses gathered on the haul roads just ahead of the girl and her machine. The mammoth vehicle struck the terraces beneath it like a depth charge, crushing the naked revin bodies beneath its undercarriage — their bony figures mangled beneath the 13 ft. tires. The leviathan truck destroyed the row of haul and bench roads then crashed into the black pitch at the nadir, upending at the bottom — its cab collapsing in a maelstrom of warping metal castings, shattering glass and rattling carriage. The blighted terrace slid down atop the broken truck, flailing bodies caught in the sea of soil dumping over it. They moaned and shouted, threshing at the ground washing over them like waders caught in a tidal wave. The sentinel backed up slightly then looked up at the crown from where the 797F shot out. There, atop the ridge, the aroton stood up, opaque in the eventide, and waved back at them. Its LED light flashed out a signal:

OUR TIME HAS COME

With that, the aroton was set upon by the livid mob of survivors at the crown, pulled down out of view beneath the southeast ridge. The sentinel turned back to the girl. Becca, who had already seen so much, unbuckled her seat and rushed into the black of the cave without another word. The smell of splintered wood mixed with the damp moss air of ore veins deep in the crevice ahead. She sprinted headlong into the dark with the evening light at her back and, when the light extinguished in the mineshaft, she crawled, feeling the cool, rough hew of sandstone guiding her along. The revin shouts faded to a muffled murmur and then the girl came upon a dead-end. She huddled against the bedrock, shivering beside the sandstone and peering back at the faint plum star in the void behind her — the mouth of the cave, where the sentinel waited.

DDC39 scanned the periphery. The revins were regrouping — their confused, pained expressions shifted to wonder — gazing at the perpendicular 797F as the dust billowed off its tires, still spinning in the air. The face and cab of the vehicle were submerged in the pool and the bed shot upright in the evening. Their wonder turned to horror as they looked around at the dead and the broken, dazed survivors. They pulled themselves upright into the loosened soil. Some writhed on the ground, trying to get up before looking down at their unmoving legs, flustered at their failing body, not knowing that they were paralyzed by the crush. An adult male stood over an adolescent boy, tugging on his arm to pull him up, encouraging the boy with a succession of grunts and incoherent shouts. The adult began to bawl as the boy’s body turned over and the front of his face peeled back, the skin down its abdomen torn off from the ripping shear of the massive CAT tires. The howling pack at the crown, above the sentinel, disappeared along the western ridge, sprinting down the untouched bench roads on the other side of the mine. The horrified group on the silt mounds, just north of the trench, gagged in a plume of dust kicked up by the crash and then retreated back up towards the main road. The group at the bottom waded amongst the silt and runoff falling into the black pool — a mire tempest forming amongst the arms and legs thrashing in the water. The trench was not deep, but the revins couldn’t swim. Some drowned in the shallow pool but others were clumsily scaling the incline of the steep hillside created by the falling truck. They remembered what they were here for, and all eyes were now on the sentinel as it perched in front of the mineshaft on the upper bench road. Hundreds were still gathered here, defiantly, in the open pit, but thousands more were circling the Asarco complex just outside of the fence line.

The sentinel looked at every angle, every contour of the terraced crater. Its environment assay read the shifting climate pattern — the low thunderhead was still moving north from Mexico, an opal universe rolling into the desert lit by ribbon lightning as it grew closer. The sentinel audited its armament and supply stores and gauged every scenario it could conjure. There was no way out for both of them. The sentinel lit its LED lamp and illuminated the lower reaches of the pit. The light ignited the eyes of the revins as they ascended the crumbling walls just below. A bioluminescent sea, circling the eroding shoals. The sentinel panned right and saw the group stomping up the wrecked row of pit roads to their right. Their eyes glowed as the light moved on them and the group below fell into darkness — the sounds of their pained breaths mixed with the slog of their limbs as they dug into the dirt and pulled at roots to lift themselves up. The sentinel deactivated the light, backed up close to the mouth of the mineshaft, and waited for them in silence. The stars came out in the clear sky overhead — Taurus and Orion shone down on the whispering floor. The crescent moon rose unblinking into Arcadia — a half-open eye, apathetic and weary. The sound of breathing grew louder, like the sound of a locomotive as its pistons gasped out of idle. The railgun began to whir like a cicada.

The sentinel saw the first revin reach its hand above the ridge just in front of its forward wheel. It pulled its chest up level to the cliff and looked upon the sentinel — its exhausted demeanor turned to glee as it gazed upon the machine for the first time. DDC39 raised its railgun and shot it through the left eye — it shook amidst a spray of claret, braced still in a grasped repose on the ridge, then fell backwards into the darkness, a smile still beaming into the sky as it dropped.

The revins came at the sentinel in waves. They climbed up in groups from beneath the ridge, and DDC39 would hit them in the skull with one, well-placed shot. They would come from the right and, when their outline loomed in the darkness beside the sentinel, a pop burst out — their atrophied craniums emptying out from the nape where the uranium shell exited. They were confused and frightened in the darkness — a pile of bodies beginning to crowd around the ridge. They’d slip on the bloody limbs and, as they got upright, found themselves falling back again, unable to get back up. They’d see themselves from just above as the blood rushed out of their body. They’d suddenly be looking down upon the carnage from overhead. Fathers, brothers, sisters, grandfathers — they kept rushing forward into perdition.

The sentinel’s uranium shells were dwindling. 45, 40, 30, 20, 15. The assault took on a paroxysmal state. The revins at the bottom of the ridge were diminishing in numbers but seething in outrage at the sight of the others falling to their deaths from the heights above. The revins to the right were pushing at each other to edge forward while a polyandrium materialized before them. They surged and the growing pile of bodies toppled over, spilling down the crumbling embankment. The sentinel came back into view to the group at the right. The last shells of the railgun were expended in quick succession. The gun barrel twisted furiously from left to right as it locked on to each revin at its perimeter. Like the last kernels popping in a simmering pan of oil, a series of skulls exploded in the darkness and the scene grew suddenly quiet as the sentinel fired its last shot. Eight men fell where they stood at the eroding ridge. The others paused momentarily as if they might, just maybe, retreat. The only sound was a steady trickle of blood and spinal fluid washing down the gravel and into the swirling silt pond below, spilling past the feet of the last standing revins at the bottom.

Someone shouted a pained, spasmodic cry. The small panel at the center of the sentinel’s trident frame flipped open and the banshee disk began to hum as it charged up. They came up in one final group, together — the stragglers at the bottom joined before the sentinel with the fury of the pack at the right. The sentinel released the scream of the LRAD system in its core, panning from left to right at the shapeless mass falling towards it. They were paralyzed, briefly, but set upon the sentinel nonetheless, fighting through the pain searing through their bones. They crashed into the base of the machine, tackling it into the dust.

The girl heard the eruption of the LRAD and sprinted forward in the darkness of the cave. She shouted out towards the mine opening and the sentinel yelled back:

“Becca, don’t come out here!”

She tripped over some loose beam in the ground, skinning her hands on the bedrock. The mouth of the cave was coming into view, a dull blue swirling in the void and the metallic smell of blood choking the air around her. She got back up, steadying herself in the cave and peered out, unable to see what was unfolding. Outside, one of the revins reached down and, with one anguished jolt, ripped the banshee disk out of the sentinel’s frame.

DDC39 deactivated all of its secondary systems. It was being upended. They were pulling at its optical array, ripping the railgun off its servo rotor, and tearing at the polyurethane tires. A faint charge flickered around the trident frame, lapping at the hands wrapped around it. They tore at the sentinel furiously — its assembly began to rupture and the panels around its chassis bent and pulled off, exposing the bundle of wires and valves underneath. A single tesla arc cracked at the air and then several rippled through the squirming, smeared crowd. They abruptly seized, eyes rolling back in their heads, hands white-knuckled, teeth shattering in their jaws. The current flashed once and disappeared. Hair singed and muscles tensed. The revins fell backwards from the shock and crumpled around the sentinel, which crashed to its side at the mouth of the breach. The mineshaft glowed momentarily from the flickering current then fell dark again. The expanse of the manufactured canyon went quiet. A rush of air blew north across the crown, rattling the jojoba sprouting out of the pit walls, then swirled around the caldera before gusting off into the dark. The smell of creosote filled the air and the wind cooled — a front moving in ahead of the thunderhead rolling north. Becca felt the gust of air rush into the cave and sprinted out to meet the portending calm. As she ran, tears were rolling down her cheek. She emerged from the mouth of the tunnel into the dusk and swirling fetor. She froze, turning white, at the sight of the flesh tide of the dead. The mound of carcasses amassed beside her undulated in the black, emptying into the dirt, limbs shifting beneath them. One lifeless body, with its cranium obliterated, slithered off the ridge and fell, limbs flailing like a ragdoll, tumbling down the pit wall. The girl teetered backwards in shock and then saw it — the sentinel, turned on its side, wrecked. She gripped her hands together and pleaded:

“No, no, no. Please.”

She planted herself in the black grime next to the machine and peered into its exposed panels -- a tangle of wires protruding from the casing. The pile of electrocuted revins loomed over her as she wedged herself in between the limbs jutting inwards from the brute cairn. The lifeless hands and blank eyes reached into oblivion. An ossuary to encephalopathy, erected amongst the oxidized currency of the old world. Becca felt the isolation of the world like the ground falling out beneath her. She wiped a blood smear away from the sentinel’s carriage. Its optical array was torn away, railgun ripped from the mount, front tire shorn off, and its frame was badly battered. DDC39 was destroyed. A faint, crackling voice emanated from its sub-frame speaker:

“Becca, can you push me upright?”

“I can.”

Becca dug her hands deep in the filth beneath the sentinel’s sunken skeleton, grasping at its underside. She took hold of the frayed wires and bent panels sunk in the shit, her arms tensing, then pushed her knees in the dirt and hoisted the heavy, still frame of the sentinel until it was vertical, its unsheathed front wheel pinned in the dust. The heavy truss of the sentinel’s tri-axel shook as it hit the floor, swaying softly from left to right. It was a mess. It could no longer see Becca — its optical array lying in a heap to the side. The girl stifled her sobs as she looked over the broken body of her only friend. She reached her hand out to a bent panel jutting out from its frame then recoiled:

“We should get going.”

“Becca.”

The sentinels voice cracked and trailed off — its battery charge near empty. They sat there, unmoving, the girl unsure what to do and the sentinel unable to do anything. The pile of bodies slithered beside them — the weight of the sodden carcasses shifting as they bled out from the skulls. The valley of the pit mine breathed softly — the oncoming front blowing the stench of shit and blood to the north. Becca looked around despondently, desperate for some way for them to go on together. She proclaimed:

“I could push you out of here!”

“No Becca, that won’t work.”

As they talked, the pile of bodies to the left collapsed, spilling over the ridge — the lifeless hulks tumbling down the pit wall. The broken bastion of the necropolis. The girl watched the plunge of bodies then turned back to the sentinel. As she faced the machine, a revin stood up from where it had been buried beneath the others, wobbling in the darkness, planting its feet atop the limbs of the few dead that remained on the bench road behind the girl. The face of this man was awash in blood — a gaping hole in its forehead, a tangle of tissue spilled forth from the wound. It looked upon the girl and the machine and cocked its head to the side, listening, its face contorted, eyes wide open. It stumbled forward, reaching its hands out to the girl. She heard the slogging footsteps behind her and jumped to the side, turning about to face the creature trudging towards her. It took a pained gasp of air, a clump of blood and viscera expelled from its mouth. The girl took a step backwards, terrified, and tripped over the leg of a suppurating corpse.

The revin ambled forward in the dark, the black outline of the defiler shrouding the moonlight behind it — a rasping, heavy breath gurgling out of its maw. The girl shuffled backwards towards the pit wall, crawling back over the pallid bodies. The sentinel sat motionless, unable to help, and unaware of what was transpiring beside it. Becca lifted her fists in silence — a sudden, defiant aphonia. The revins bloodied face was invisible now save for its wide eyes beaming down on the girl, two icebergs encroaching in the sea. It reached its hand down to the girl’s leg.

As its hand inched downwards, the revins pained wheezing was drowned out by a furious growl encroaching from just behind. The revin stopped, looking back. The Mexican Wolf, mane tensed up on its back, was prowling towards the revin. The wolf lunged — a furious bolt of fur and teeth. The girl shot upright, gripped by the violence unfolding before her. The revin reached out to defend itself and the wolf clamped down hard on its wrist, thrashing its head from side to side, ripping at the flesh of the revin. The naked, slathered creature didn’t flinch at the skin being ripped from its arm. It calmly knelt down with the force of the wolf’s mauling and, with its other arm, reached out and dug a hand deep into the soft underside of the wolf’s neck. The wolf dug deeper as the revins hands closed around it. There was a snap — the wolf’s atlas cracked in two, its spine shattered beneath the clenched fist of the revin. The wolf’s jaw released and its body fell lifeless in the grime beneath the hands of the monster. Becca shouted out a curse — for all these tormentors to die — and the revin turned back towards her, face full of mirth, its hand still dug deep into the limp mane of the wolf.

As it got back up, there was a flash from behind the revin, beneath the ridgeline. A piece of the revin’s shoulder blew off — it looked down at its mangled clavicle, confused. And then there was a rapid series of flashes — a silent supernova pulsating from the depths. Its abdomen, then hip, arm, chest and, finally, its head — all erupted in succession, a spray of blood and marrow exploding into the night air. Its disembodied torso toppled over in the dirt. The girl, sweatshirt covered in claret, froze in shock. The prismatic face of the aroton emerged from the edge of the ridge. It climbed up effortlessly, standing over the mangled revin, then looked down upon the wolf solemnly. It held the smoking pulse rifle at its waist, strap around its shoulder, and gripped the longrifle with the other hand. Its rubberized shell was pocked with scrapes, bite marks, and deep gouges. The soft, pulsating lights beneath its dirty hull went dark. It didn’t acknowledge the girl. It stood there, peering down at the body of the wolf, its soft fur blowing in the starlight, and quietly mulled aloud:

“It appears as though I’m free. I am free.”

The girl got back up and ran over to sentinel, which called out to Becca in its failing, cracked vocoder:

“Becca, what’s happening?”

“The other one is here. What do we do?”

“I need you to push me back into the tunnel.”

The girl didn’t understand. She howled in protest but the sentinel was insistent:

“Please, Becca. We don’t have much time.”

Reluctantly, she pressed her hands against the front of its trident frame and leaned in, pushing the sentinel backwards. It turned its rear wheels into the opening of the fissure, its front wheel scraping a shrill squeal on the gravel underneath. The aroton, repeating its epiphany of freedom, faded in the backdrop as they submerged into the darkness of the mineshaft. Finally, they came to the end of the cave and the girl stopped, the sentinel’s rear wheels flush against the end of the tunnel. She plopped down on her knees in resignation, exhausted. The cracked LED light on the sentinel’s frame glowed dimly in the narrow passage, casting a soft radiance on the girl’s face. She was without hope. Her shoulders slouched into her chest. She stared into the sandstone cave wall, streaks of copper running alongside. A rusted pickaxe was propped up against the wall. Dust swirled in the illumination.

“Becca, you have to go on alone.”

“I don’t want to be alone anymore.”

“They’ll be back soon. You have to go.”

“I don’t see the point of running. Let them get me. I don’t want to leave you.”

“Becca, there is a place I was supposed to take you. But I can’t go on. There is some purpose for you out there. It’s a spot not far from here. We got so close. If you keep going, you can get there. It’s out there, just southeast of here.”

“I can’t do it. It’s too dark.”

“You’ll follow the stars. There is a bright star — the brightest one in the sky. It’s called the Dog Star. When you get out of the mine and look up, to your right, you’ll see it twinkling. Climb up the slope, then keep running. It will take you till midnight. Don’t stop. When you get close to where you need to go, you’ll see a green flash. It’s a small device that I launched into the air right before I found you. I didn’t think I’d find you, Becca. But I did, and we made it so far. It’s not over yet. You can make it.”

“This place you’re sending me to — what is it?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know.”

“Is it bad?”

The sentinel paused. A small panel clicked open from the rear of its base, just before the bent rumble seat.

“I don’t think I’m bad — and it was my mission. So it has to be good.”

Becca got up, wiping a tear from her cheek. She dusted off her knees, a plume rising off her grimy pants and sweatshirt amidst the electroluminescence. The sentinel’s shadow hand unfurled, beckoning her closer. She inched forward and the sentinel’s LED light started to flicker.

“Drink.”

She cupped her hands behind the small nozzle that popped out of the trident frame. The water flowed into her hands and she drank. She wiped her hands against the front of her sweatshirt.

“I have something for you, Becca?”

She shrugged and the sentinel reached back into the open panel at its base and retrieved the dusty book it had found in the High Jinks Ranch, handing it to the girl. She reached out, clutching at the cheerful cover — a faint smile cracking amidst her sadness as she read the title, “Oh The Places You’ll Go,” aloud to herself. The sentinel’s voice cracked in the dark:

“Today is your day. You’re off to great places. You’re off and away. Now, you have to go. Run Becca.”

She turned, about to sprint out of the cave, before looking back at the sentinel. Its LED lamp went dark, and the mineshaft was awash in pitch black. She heard one final entreaty from the sentinel’s fractured, fading vocoder:

“You’re a survivor.”

Becca paused for a moment in the cave, listening, but there was no more to be heard. She felt her way along the mine walls, her right leg limping awkwardly, until finally she saw the starlit sky and felt the wind from the approaching storm. She emerged from the mineshaft amidst the massacre on the ridge. She reached down and rubbed her thigh, already sore in the brief escape. The wind was blowing the jojoba flat into the ground, dust carrying off the crown and into bench road where the aroton knelt beside the body of the wolf. Petals of globemallow carried off the desert floor and fell down the main scarp, swirling orange helices coming to rest on the dead. The aroton spoke to the girl — a pattern of pulsating blue lights lit beneath its skin like lightning breaking free of the approaching thunderhead:

“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:

“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.”

Becca crossed into the payload, crossing over a tangle of wrapped cables in the floor of the module and found her open seat. As she buckled in, she looked back at the pathoton, which was already back at the access panel and punching in a series of commands on the vertical keypad. Becca and her fellow passengers heard a low, grinding screech coming from the upper levels of the silo. Once again, Becca smelled the sweet vapor of creosote and rain wafting over the air. Just outside the access door, a series of raindrops fell on the walkway. The massive closure doors were opening above them. The pathoton wheeled back over to the access panel, clasping its hands around the thick, titanium door, looking back inside at the passengers. Becca fidgeted with her seatbelt, pulling it taught, before looking out at the machine on the walkway — its headless torso leaned in to the shuttle pod, arachnid sensors twisting around, scanning the inside. It gently pulled out of the payload but then jerked suddenly, tilting its body upwards at the closure doors, startled by something in the loft. In the low din of the storm raging outside, and light patter of raindrops in the jetway, Becca could hear them once more — the revins were gathered at the top of the silo, screaming into the cavernous depths of the cold, dim vault below. They crawled over the exhaust vanes and paced nervously near the edge of the silo doors, peering down at the walkway where the pathoton stood. They breathed in deeply, smelling the air. They pointed down at the landing, growing more animated. Others were gathering behind them. The mob swelled. They pushed at each other, elbowing closer, before finally one fell, careening off the nose and tumbling end over end, past the pathoton on the walkway and into the abyss below. The pathoton rushed back over to the access panel and furiously punched in a series of commands on the keypad. Becca looked outside the module, into the silo landing. A series of loud crashes were echoing off the walls of the rocket, screams zipping outside her window on the opposite side. A revin fell directly on the walkway outside, writhing in pain on the floor. It rolled back and forth, shouting out some gurgled pain, its lungs filling with blood. It spit out a clump of sputum on the walkway and looked straight ahead at Becca — its broken jaw opening wide, teeth and blood drooling out of its mouth, smiling madly. As it rose, a fractured rib plunged out of its malnourished chest, white bone, like a horn, piercing the air. It took a pained step forward towards the children but managed only the one foot down before the pathoton sunk its hand around the revins neck, crushing its esophagus — the revins broken body wriggling like a clump of earthworms in a child’s hand. The pathoton tossed the emaciated revin over the edge, one-handed, and leaned back into the passengers, looking straight at Becca and imploring her:

“You will be okay.”

It tossed Becca the blinking flash drive and she caught it, nodded knowingly, and the pathoton leaned back out of the module, backing away from the fairing as the access door began to close. Revin bodies were dropping into the silo — a chorus of shouts screaming past the small viewing panes, falling into the dim, orange ether of the lower depths. Bodies racing past as if the still rocket was splitting through limbo. A large, muscular revin crashed feet first on the shoulders of the pathoton, sending it barreling into the rail of the walkway, bending in the heavy safety rail and mangling the sensor array on its shoulder. Sparks flew out from stripped coils around the pathoton’s upper frame and it flailed at the herculean creature on its shoulders. The pathoton thrashed its arms wildly, standing upright and crashing backwards into the cableway wall, pinning the revin against a steel truss along the tunnel in a thunderous crack. The mammoth revin gasped, the wind knocked out of its lungs, and collapsed along the plank. As it looked up, the pathoton was swinging one fist down towards its skull. The revin rolled backwards and knocked the mechanical pummel to the side. The pathoton rattled, lurched forward then back, struggling to stay upright. Its gyroscopic servo and sensor array were badly damaged. It listed on the diamond plate, shaking convulsively before the revin, which stood up to face the machine. The pathoton was malfunctioning. It bellowed out into the passage:

“YOU WILL BE OKAY!”

It repeated this emphatically, over and over, as if saying it loud and fast enough would save it. Becca could hear this booming edict from within the shuttle module, but couldn’t see the violence raging just outside. The hulking revin screamed back and dove at the dazed android, sinking its hands in the cables wrapped around its frame, ripping at them, pulling them out like tendons from tissue. The pathoton went still, its pendulum slowly failing, and started to fall backwards towards the landing. They crashed into the access panel and the walkway began to retract from the fairing. The rain poured down atop the sparking wound in the pathoton’s frame and the exposed circuitry ignited — white alloy blazing in the archway, crowning the pathoton in flames like a headless horseman ignited in the netherworld. The short-circuit cycled the pathoton through its re-boot. It came to, grabbing each arm of the sinewy creature, holding its tensed limbs out like the Vitruvian Man. The top of the pathoton burned intensely and the revin closed its eyes, screaming out. It felt its arms ripping from the sockets and, when it opened its eyes again, it was upended and falling down the silo shaft, blood spurting from its quartered shoulders. It crashed to the concrete exhaust duct at the bottom, shattering all its bones. Blood expunged from a jaw broken wide. It opened one eye in time to see its own severed arms falling towards it.

The pathoton, shoulder still ablaze, rushed down the cableway as more revins were falling through the closure doors from the desert floor above. They were beginning to pile at the base, near the launch duct, bruised revins atop broken bodies, saved by their brethren from the fall. Soon, they’d find the fire escape and be able to make their way up. They slithered over one another, gazing up at the dark sky sliced open by the retracted plates. They could hear the shouts of their companions at the top. One banged on the blast shields covering the lower walls, rattling out a shrill echo throughout the silo. The cries of the revins at the bottom ascended the vault, meeting the bedlam of the others at the top as they fell inwards.

On the other side of the cableway, the pathoton sped through a three-ton blast door and emerged in an elaborate alcove — the launch control room. Ages back, soldiers sat at terminals, hand on a key and ears peeled to headsets, patiently awaiting the word to end the world. Ministers to the ICBM. The sixties era IBM circuit boards had been stripped out. A Martin-Marietta logo was all that remained from the cold war launch center. Now, this room gleamed with digital phantoms — bright blue holographic displays carried into the air from sunken prisms and painted the compass chamber with the celestial bodies of the solar system. The pathoton, with scapula flaring brightly from arm to arm, brought its hands to rest in the air above the center console. As its palm moved, twisting in the air above the console, fingers flicking outward and in, the holograms spun wildly in the air. They swirled above the prisms, flickering staccato, flashing arcane code, before finally displaying the silo. A series of lights blinked green beside the diagram of the rocket and the whole complex began to reverberate violently. The incandescent lights lowered throughout the complex and red alarm strobes along the walls began to flash. The launch was initiated. The countdown had begun. The hologram depicted a timer next to the payload: 5 minutes, 4:59, 4:58 4:57. Suddenly, the holographic depiction of the rocket’s base began to flash red. A gentle voice boomed throughout the control room:

“Warning! Exhaust ducts are blocked. Lower fire escape is open. Warning!”

The alarm blared out unyieldingly, booming through the concrete and steel passages like a foghorn in a crawlspace. The pathoton scrambled back into the cableway, racing towards an open chamber before the first blast door — a small living quarters littered with empty juice boxes and torn MRE’s. A rosary was hung on the door handle. The red strobe alarms lit the pathoton in the blinking light of paradise lost. The headless machine, ablaze, plummeted through the subterranean labyrinth, headlong into the inferno. The pathoton cut into the open sleeping quarters and plucked a twin mattress off a cot, swooping into the room before tearing back down the cableway, polyurethane tires screeching along the steel plate.

The fire escape emptied into the cableway, just before the silo landing. As it neared, a web of fingers were protruding from the chain-link door. The metal webbing pushed in with a rush of revin bodies crushing up against it. The handle on the gate began to turn — a limb falling into it haphazardly from the inside, or some spark alighting in the mind of the poor soul pushed inward just beyond. The pathoton crashed into the mob spewing out of the escape just as the door unhitched, pushing them back into the stairway with the mattress, arms and hands breaking through on the sides like seedlings emerging from soil. They crushed up against the mattress and the pathoton leaned inward, its tires squealing on the diamond plate and arms shaking as it held the mattress against the mob. The upper torso of the pathoton was now engulfed in a metal flame from its shoulder — its titanium spine flaring a shower of fire into the cold air of the cableway passage.

* * *

The alpha crept along the mineshaft, gracefully navigating the darkness with ease. It was at home in the black. Its legion of killers followed close behind, sniffing at the air, footsteps softly crumbling gravel under soles. Their heavy breaths dampened the limestone rock face, the sound of one prolonged whisper carrying on the air. They heard the girls voice again, cracking and fading, but near:

“Let them get me. Let them. Let them. Let… them….”

As the alpha neared the end of the mineshaft, a dull glow alighted in the passage just before them. The sentinel’s LED light flickered, illuminating the ashen body of the alpha and casting the light back on itself. They looked at each other in the flush of phosphor filling the cramped cavity, specks of copper glimmering on the mine walls. The naked hellion straightened its back and looked down on the twisted wreckage of the machine. Its pallid skin wrapped around bones and dark blue veins. Its chest moved in and out with each steady breath. It looked around the bent panels and twisted frame of the sentinel. Eyes darting about. The others inched closer. DDC39’s vocoder cracked, its own soft voice barely audible amongst the panting of the revins:

“We are the redemption.”

The pale harbinger cocked its head to the side, pondering this jumble of sounds, confused but curious. It looked to the side and saw the pickaxe resting against the wall in the shadows. The alpha smiled and bent over to pick it up, casting a crooked glance back at the machine as it listed in the dirt. With one swift arc of its forearm, it swung the pickaxe through the air, slicing downwards to the sentinel’s base. Bearing down into the destruction. Old versus new. The alpha’s swing came to an abrupt halt in mid-swing, the axe tumbling to the ground, clanking along the fissure and back into the darkness. The sentinel’s shadow hand had shot up, grasping the alpha’s wrist, tautly wrapped around its arm and sinking its fingers into the creature’s delicate skin.

* * *

The first stage booster fired in the lower levels. A deafening roar ripped through the open halls of the subterranean Titan halls. Becca leaned forward in her seat and could just see the back of the pathoton as it burned like a quasar, blocking the revins from breaking through the fire escape. The howling blast shook the rocket’s frame and the children bawled again. Becca implored them:

“It’s okay! It’s okay. Don’t be afraid.”

But she was terrified. She felt the module shaking, annihilation riding on the ballasts of ammonium perchlorate. The first stage boosters fired into the flame deflectors at the bottom level. The revin bodies, twisted and crammed into the exhaust ducts, ignited beneath the massive engines — the solid rocket propellant burning through the flesh and bone like stove flame through paper.

The pathoton pushed forward and the revins stumbled back into the cramped stairway. The red strobe alarms flashed with the madness of the siren call, bellowing through the cableway:

“Warning! Lower fire escape is open. Exceeding unsafe temperatures. Blast doors must be closed. Warning!”

Further down the passage, the series of four-ton blast doors began to retract into the inward chambers.

“Warning! Launch countdown commenced. Warning!”

A searing heat carried through the staircase and ripped past the edges of the mattress. The rectangle was encircled in a ring of fire and, above the din, the screams of a hundred revin souls pulsated through the floral pattern of the bed. The stitches began to melt and pop. The revins went mad, pushing from the other side, backing the pathoton into the entryway. The hellfire of propellant melted the springs and cast them back like serpents ablaze, the fabric blasting into the pathoton with the roar of the rocket engines ripping through the staircase. Marrow and flesh flew through the air, the revin bellies blooming open and emptying into the heat, casting their insides into the furnace. The pathoton howled its glitch into the conflagration and Becca heard it through the module walls:

“YOU WILL BE OKAY!”

* * *

The alpha’s eyes widened and it gazed down at the trembling frame of the machine. The sentinel had the alpha’s wrist gripped firmly. The others saw their herald held still by the sentinel and they tumbled forward, pushing past each other at the chance to tear the thing apart. The light began to fade and a faint clicking sound radiated beneath the revin, like an igniter on a gas range. The alpha’s expression turned dour and it looked helplessly at the mess of bent panels and stripped cables adorning the sentinel’s trident frame. DDC39 could no longer see, but it heard some sound coming from the anemic being wriggling in its grasp. The alpha saw the spark flickering beneath the base of the machine and it mouthed out some recognizable sound. Its lips pursed and it sounded like a familiar objection. Its lips drew back, almost as if it was saying:

“Stop!”

* * *

ARCHON V lifted off the base, pulling upwards through the silo and out of the closure doors. The blast incinerated the naked bodies squirming upwards through the egress and tore through the anodized wire wrapped around the pathoton, fiber optic cables peeling backwards and evaporating in the inferno. Becca pressed her hand against the oval windows and peered outwards. Raindrops rolled down the aluminum silicate panes. The silo vanes spewed rocket blast aloft, pouring upwards, igniting a sea of flesh on the desert floor. The charred remains of the pathoton fell to the plank in the blackened landing, which went dark save for bone embers swirling in the air.

* * *

A searing tide of napalm coursed through the mineshaft, obliterating every creature slinking in the dark. The alpha saw its flesh melting, falling slack off tissue and bone, dripping into the hard base of the mine as everything went white. The heat sucked the air in ahead of those gathered outside, the rain briefly bending into the dim fissure. The revins looking into the mine from the bench road felt the draft pulling them inwards. It was quiet for a moment, and then the cries of the incinerated sailed outward. Unhinged echoes of the dead. The blaze ripped out of the mineshaft and washed over those outside, whipping into the caldera like a solar flare. Tissue and blood spit from the cleft, cast into the pit with fire and rain. The sentinel lost sentience. A torpor washed over everything.

• Solar power cell — 0%. Solar armor — breached

• Drivetrain — non-operational

• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics — unresponsive

• HD/Comms — compromised; non-operational

• Water — 0%. Napalm — 0%

• Railgun — 0% capacity

• JE — (scrambled)

• Forced shutdown; entering hibernation

12. Farewell, Sonora

Becca and the others slunk into their seats, pinned back by the velocity of the rocket lifting into the troposphere. The main engine roared with 500,000 pounds of thrust. T+10. Becca’s eyesight began to constrict into a tunnel vision. The ship oscillated violently. She looked around and saw the other passengers — children — close their eyes. A small digital display on the ceiling showed a human diagram beeping, depicting passengers going to sleep. Becca turned her head and felt the arc of the rocket begin to twist, its trajectory tilting. She pressed her head to the side, straining with all her might, to peer outside of the small oval window. She looked down and saw the contrails of the rocket falling backwards and there, close enough to touch, was the wisp of storms rolling over Sonora. The first stage booster decoupled, tumbling into the blue like a barrel into Niagara. Sheet lighting cracked through the dark maelstrom they had just passed through. T+30. They were above it all. Becca wondered what was happening and if she was ascending into heaven. The expanse of the Earth’s lithosphere stretched out like a dream, encircled by green aurorae flaring in soft tufts like apparitions wandering through the sea. A solar wind, wailing in the void of the magnetic field. The rocket passed through a noctilucent cloud on the edge of times cessation. They entered the thermosphere and the massive vehicle gradually softened, the violent rattle subsiding to a hum. Becca felt her eyes grow heavy. Her heartbeat slowed down. A nozzle near the display whistled, discharging a vapor into the thin air of the cramped module. The cylinder emanated the acrid smell of anthracite and the human diagram blinked red with worry. Becca felt herself blacking out. As her eyes closed, she heard the promise, again:

“You are a survivor.”

EPILOGUE

End and beginning and end. The world without man went on. One epoch passed and another emerged from the cold depths. The cracked glaciers reformed, pulling salt water into crevasses and seracs, freezing into silver tusks that pierced the low clouds of the Arctic Circle. Ice flow pushed into the polar plains, drumlins disappearing into the abyssal sediment. And so with it, the anthropogenic mass extinction was halted. The anthropocence was over. The fallow lands of slash-and-burn were reborn. Forests thrived and saw blades rusted. Cities eroded into the firmament and asphalt roads dissipated like veins wilting with age.

The summers grew short in Sonora, deluged in rainfall and sparked by intermittent sun. The winters crept down from the Catalinas, lingering for most of the year and blanketing the lowlands in snow. The saguaros and palo verdes disappeared, giving way to ponderosa and fir. The desert plains vanished. Dust turned to sorrel leaves and conical detritus. A thick canopy enveloped the ruins of Old Main, Hotel Congress, and the broken dome of Bio3. Bison thundered south across the Baja Peninsula. Condors made their homes in the shattered penthouses of abandoned skyscrapers. And machete fish glimmered along rushing tributaries that sprang from dry washes along the alluvial fan. A new wilderness flourished amidst the cemetery of post-history.

But while one mass extinction was averted, another still loomed. Revins spread across the warmer climates. Those that had huddled in the caves and ruins of the north fled south, congregating in great masses along the Sonoran badlands. While they still couldn’t wield tools, nor could they stitch clothing, they grew in girth, adding heavy layers of fat and skin that kept them warm in the changing seasons. While they didn’t hunt larger animals — elk, bear, ram — they were vicious in their predation of smaller creatures that they would trap in crude ways. Gophers, rabbits, and, in the vast sewers of remnant cities, rats. Populations would swell when food was discovered, and dwindle when depleted. The chain was disrupted. Smaller species were disappearing. The larger mammals had to migrate to survive, or prey on the revins. And they did both. Revins were killed in sporadic numbers by mountain lions, which grew more vicious with each kill. They had to adapt to survive. They would hunt in packs, move in packs, and reproduce in packs. The inbreeding compounded their feral behavior. Their cognitive ability remained unevolved. Their prefrontal cortex was irrevocably destroyed. But their bodies conformed to the environment encroaching upon them. Deep claws, sharp incisors, concave skulls, sloping spines, and calcified kneecaps that protruded from their skin. They moved quickly but stayed close to the ground, sliding along their knees when frightened by some sudden sound. Their nasal cavity elongated, better suited to sniff out predator and prey. Their eyes widened, limbs shortened, body hair thickened. They were almost unrecognizable from their ancient kin. They were distorted relics of bygone times. Wallowing wights of the foreverwinter.

In the frozen melancholy of the hunger moon, a low thundering would roll through the perihelion sky, rattling the tall pines and shaking snow from needles. Just as soon as the storm arrived, it would vanish in the dark. This went on through countless nights. As a sudden burst reverberated in the dusk, the living skittered along the icy soil, ducking under the brush as the echo of abnegation cracked through flurries gusting in the ether. Something was changing in the air, and the revins sensed it. They were nervous.

For weeks, the storm would appear in the evening, materializing from the smallest tufts of vapor in the night sky and blooming into a massive, black anticyclone. The air was consumed by the fury, lights streaking through the opaque veil from a fulmination rocketing through the shelf of the tempest, blankets of snow wafting down in violent winds. The revins huddled in their holes, sheltered in caves, and crammed into ruins, waiting out the wrath of the lost torrent.

Finally, one warm evening, as the revins began to brace themselves for the return of storm, they were surprised to see something else in the sky — the bright, full, lenten moon. It shone down on them like a lantern, illuminating the white sheet of frost and snow in the open ground. They came out of their hovels and gawked at the magnificent glow, basking in the calm which had returned to the high desert at last. They breathed in and smiled wide, rotten teeth and dry sockets gleaming in the warm light.

The next morning, as wisps of snow blew off the high canopies, as the twisted, gnarled bodies of the revins awoke from their slumber, a strange light appeared in the clear blue sky. A white contrail, splitting the empyrean. The feral minds were puzzled by this faint vapor high in the heavens. As the line stretched downwards, arcing into the distance, it picked up speed. The streak in the sky stretched out a great distance and, as the fore descended through a smattering of high clouds, it smoldered red like a flare falling through water. A laceration ripping downwards from heaven.

As the fireball careened towards the earth, it began to arc parallel to the horizon, leveling off and searing across the Sonoran dreamland. Other revins, huddling in their burrows or standing amidst the frost, looked up and were rapt with the ember burning across the sky. The oval-like cinder suddenly broke in two, each fiery piece of debris spinning wildly in different directions, and from the burning shell emerged a gray and white object that continued overhead in a straight vector.

The revins traced this thing as it raced across the sky. It looked to them like some sort of massive, pale vulture — but its wings didn’t beat. As it descended above the Coronado Forest, it came into view. It was a craft. The revin mind alighted with some recognition of its outline. They recalled the rusting hulks of A-10s that lay in heaps at AMARG, the Davis-Monthan plane graveyard nearby. The craft’s underside was gray but its topside was white. Four exterior engines — two aft and two forward, encased in cylinders like the old Fairchild-Republic Thunderbolt — carried the craft through the cold air above Apache Peak. From there, it began to circle and further descend. Strange black markings were painted on the stabilizers and, as it banked, the revins could see some sort of red, circular symbol on each wing. Dark smears streaked out of imperfect panel lines. As it nosed down, they could see the front of the craft had a protrusion, like a cockpit but opaque with a steely luster.

After circling in the midday sun for some time, it slowed, all four engines craning upwards. As it continued its descent, coming fully into view with the handful of revins just underneath, still no sound could be heard from the craft. It skimmed over the ponderosa canopy, heading east, until it came upon a clearing. Ahead was the flat, cracked foundation of a building that had disappeared in the harsh elements, the withered blacktop of a parking lot that had faded into the dirt, and a sign that was black with the soot of brush fire and years of soil blowing across the desert. As the craft hovered forward, it stopped just ahead of the weathered sign, which could just be made out:

Kartchner Caverns State Park

An open chasm in the ground loomed in the distance, facing the nose of the craft as it quietly floated above the ground lightly dusted with snow. At first, the shuttle was alone in its vigil over the abandoned park. As the night crept forward, and the clear sky was bedecked with stars, a melancholy wail began to pierce the air, emanating from someplace within the mysterious contraption. Not unlike a whale song. A siren in Sonora. This echolocation blared out loudly across the expanse. For the first hour, it repeated a simple aria that rose and fell in a few notes. Like a car alarm slowed down and lowered in pitch, echoing across the hillsides. As the night grew dark, the frequency shifted. The song changed, but went on in perpetuity through the darkness. As this lamentation filled the woods, revins began to approach. Cautiously at first, but full of curiosity. They looked on at the strange trespasser floating before them, glimmering ashen in the moonlight.

Over the next several days, more revins came to gaze at this thing that had broken into their lives. Soon, there were hundreds of Sonoran revins gathered in the ruins of the park. They made makeshift hovels in the ground. They lined up against the crumbling walls of the amphitheater. They huddled together under piles of pine needles. They sank their jaws into cottontail ripped from nearby warrens. But no living soul approached the chasm. They woke up at dawn and cocked their heads, listening to this magnificent sound pouring out of the machine.

Among them emerged one that drew the craft in the ground with its bony digits. All gray hair and sagging skin. This proselytizer chided anyone who got too close, revering the arrival with wonder. The gathering turned into a cult. They looked to it for something. With each change of its song, they grew animated, expecting something to happen that so far did not come to pass. They drew in closer as the frequency halted then sighed, drooling, as the wail resumed and shifted slightly. A low, looping gospel. The naked, hairy revins shivered in the frost, beating their hands in the wet soil, pulling up clumps and shaking their fists at the metal craft. But they dared not smear it with their curses nor their handfuls of shit and sod.

Westerly winds blew into the cold mornings but hushed in the overhead sun. Days and nights passed by without the revins noticing. The snow melted into the shale and limestone, unveiling the red basin and range. The white-capped spire of the Whetstone Mountains hung over them, cropping the sunset in the west. A cold creek rushed past in the north, spilling off Apache Peak and colliding with the tributaries of the massive San Pedro River in the east. Ages before, Wyatt Earp shot and killed Curly Bill Brocius in this pass, ending a blood vendetta against the cowboys responsible for his brother’s death. Revins walked over the sunken bones and spent shells, unaware of the ancient vengeance that had unfolded before them.

One evening, the craft’s song ended and the whisper of the still night breathed through the thistle and sedge. Those gathered nearby hushed, their attention turned to the gray and white shuttle hovering silently in their midst. Their heavy eyelids drew back, pupils wide in the dark. They inched closer, jostling with each other to peer at what might transpire next. Hands shaking, steam rising from sweaty brows in the algid gloom. High clouds moved under the moon and the black veil lowered on the spectral wild. Everything was black. Everything was quiet save for the breeze in the reeds and the clattering of teeth. Naked feet teetering on sharp rock.

A series of small, circular portals — like small glass plates — emerged from retracting panels all along the shuttle’s fuselage. Sparks of light appeared behind each glass circle — little lanterns dotting the darkness. The revins moved closer, gasps of glee piercing the air. The lights got brighter and brighter. The brush and fir were illuminated on the periphery of the open range. The faraway oak and pine on Apache Peak lit like faint stars dotting the universe. The bare skin of the gathered crowd radiated, gleaming pale like the frost they stood upon. They squinted in the glowing flood, holding their hands up to shield the light. And with that, a blinding torrent filled the eyes of every being standing near. Even with their eyelids closed, they were consumed with the lambent. Their pupils burned.

Chaos broke out. A painful shout erupted amongst the crowd, now stumbling forward in their blind daze. A faint whirr could be heard, cycling up like a fan gaining speed. And then a staccato of gusts — like arrows splitting paper. The light shifted in circles. The revins panicked, shrieking out hollow pleas — the cries cut short in a garbled pop and hiss. The proselytizer stumbled forward and caught a shadow in his field of view, briefly glimpsing the shuttle from between the eclipse. In those few seconds, the elder could just make out a turret, under the nose, firing a rapid salvo of light into the confused crowd. The craft rotated as the battery ripped through revin flesh, perforating limbs and incinerating patches of tissue. A strobe of white fire. Bodies were split open and whole swaths of skin turned to ash, guts cauterized, leaving them disfigured and writhing. The elderly herald crawled on his hands and knees until he came face to face with the opaque cockpit of the shuttle. The ashes of revin bodies swirled in the air, a discord of dying cries piercing the night. The old man threw his hands up in the air and was consumed. Gone.

The floodlights on the shuttle faded and the pyre glittered with the embers of bodies riddled through with gunfire. The shuttle stopped its gentle rotation, coming to rest facing the Kartchner cleft, the turret pointing straight towards the cavern opening. A hatch opened from the underside of the cockpit, extending downwards as a ramp, steps protruding pneumatically from the interior. A light emerged from inside the craft, illuminating the desert floor beneath the plank.

From there, stepping into the soil, a figure emerged from the craft and into the high desert air. It was encased in a synthetic poly-fiber exosuit. A traveller. It sunk its heel into the dirt, twisting its foot back and forth in the ground like it was unsure of something. Unsteady in the world. Wrapped from head to toe in a lithe, airtight shell. White chassis, like the shuttle it emerged from. Head enveloped in a helmet with the same steely luster of the cockpit it was walking under. A case was wrapped around its back, contoured and sleek. The traveller reached up to the gun turret beneath the nose, a foot or so above its grasp, and the armament unlocked, the gun case sliding downwards from the pneumatic retractor. The traveller caught the handle of the cylinder rifle as it dropped into its hand.

A flutter of dead leaves swirled past, pooling above the shuttle and carrying on into the darkness. The wild hummed with fascination. Creaking bones. Mule deer gathered on the western ridge. From the chasm ahead, a colony of ghost bats escaped the black and ascended into the night, their eyes gleaming back in the dying embers of the massacre. All heartbeats, drumming in unison with the faraway tides. Love was gone. The traveller swung its ashen cylinder rifle in the direction of the cave, moving forward cautiously. Light footsteps crunching in the frost-packed soil. Small steam bursts shot into the air from a sub-vent at its nape. The same red circle on the shuttle’s wing was emblazoned on the traveller’s breast. A light flickered at the rifle’s muzzle, illuminating the chaparral and the winding path leading to the cavern.

The traveller stepped into Kartchner Cavern, sidestepping down a broken walkway and into the cold, damp rock of the upper cleft. Its rifle light darted around as the traveller shuffled past a cairn near the entrance. Shadows dancing on the walls in the wild, flickering in the artificial light. The furtive figure continued on for some time with its beam of illumination vectoring from left to right in the narrow corridor. The glow would sporadically catch the white poly-fiber shell as the traveller passed through the underworld, casting itself in a haunted spark. The echoes of its footsteps bounded into the ether and the air ascended. The traveller shone its light forward and the massive cavern came into view.

Long, massive stalactites hung down from the ceiling, which met with sharp stalagmites jutting up from the ground. Row after row of limestone speleothems. Straws falling into the air and columns twisting upwards, molten-like, as if a fire had swept through and reduced the dark to a deformed horror. The void breathed in as the traveller descended, walking with the light shining from side to side, the jaws of the underworld opening up and swallowing whole. Each footstep echoed off the high ceiling and carried away into the far reaches of the cavern.

The traveller clambered down through a narrow passage, lined with broken concrete slabs, and came upon an otherworldly chamber — the throne room. The muzzle light panned from left to right, igniting the incisors above and below. The light rested on the center of the massive room and there, in the spotlight, was a pile of synthetic wreckage. The traveller tapped the side of the cylinder rifle and the beam widened, illuminating the whole chamber. Countless heaps of crushed and separated robotic appendages stretched the entire length of the chasm. Fiber optic filaments and stripped wires glittered in the electroluminescence cast by the muzzle. Sheared tires, bent hands, twisted paneling. A binary tomb. The fuselage from three drones rose from the pile like leaning obelisks — wings broken off, the nose of each streaked in dried blood. Calvary of the constructed.

Shallow breath vapors were rising into the air from behind two columns. The traveller knelt down slowly, keeping a watch on this faint condensation. The vapors stopped. From behind one column stepped a pallid figure — a revin, white as the moon, eyes fused shut, fingernails pinning out like obsidian razors. It walked slowly towards the traveller, expressionless. Its naked skin, translucent in the artificial light. Tendons and muscle pulling taught with each footstep. A slight grin curved up from one corner of its mouth and the traveller raised its cylinder rifle in line with its forehead. From behind, the other wraith sprang on the travellers back, its claws raised high in the air and coming down fast at the sub-vent. Both revin wraiths screamed, piercing the cavern with a shrill wail. The traveller reached back with one hand and grabbed the gaunt creature from its open jaw and threw it forward, crashing into the other revin as it sprinted headlong. They tumbled into a massive column and, as they righted themselves, the traveller unleashed a volley of white gunfire into their flesh. Their sides blew out in a cloud of ash where the gunfire hit them, incinerating patches of their bodies as they crumbled into a charred, contorted heap.

The traveller scanned the rest of the room cautiously. Nothing living remained, save itself. From a zipper pouch near its chest, the traveller pulled out a small object, clutching it in its fist, pausing a moment, head bowed. Its hand opened and it looked down at what it had in its palm — a small flash drive. It took it between two fingers and flicked a small switch on the side and the flash drive lit with a small green light.

From a pile in the deep corner of the chamber, a hushed beeping emitted into the quiet air of the cavern. The beep cycled, deadening each time — as if the power behind it was waning. The traveller ran over to the pile and furiously pulled at the cables, axels, and synthetic appendages atop the sound. As the junk was lifted off, the beeping was more audible, but slowing. Finally, the source was uncovered.

Therein lay a charred wreckage. A twisted chassis distorted by some infernal blaze. Painted with the ochre of time. It was the sentinel.

The traveller reached behind and pulled the pack off its back, setting it on the ground and quickly lifting out some components. It positioned the muzzle light on the sentinel and began working. Clipping wires, stripping cords, prying open panels and replacing melted circuit boards with new materials. Re-wiring. Reincarnating. As it worked, the traveller produced a small, pill-shaped vessel as well as an optical array. It fastened the optical array onto its center frame, where the prior version was before being shorn off at Asarco. Finally, it wired the vessel into the sentinel’s core and the tri-axel suddenly tensed up, the trident frame jerking to one side before finally loosening again in the junk pile. Its newly wired optics swiveled haltingly, panning around and fixating on the traveller’s helmet. The sentinel looked upon this being, its features hidden behind the steely visor that wrapped around its head. The vocoder rattled from its core and the words spilled out in a broken timbre:

“Becca number one?”

The traveller slung its shoulders back and shifted to the other knee, pondering the question. The cylinder rifle lay on its side against the junk pile. There was a silence except for the gusts of vapor firing from the sub-vent at the traveller’s neck. The achromatic visor wrapping around the travellers skull began to clear, its reflective luster dissipating into a glassy sheen and, from behind the thin shield, a woman’s face appeared. Her voice sang into the empty space between them from a hidden speaker in her suit:

“Well, no. I guess I’m more like… Becca number 12. You can call me Sylvie.”

She dug her hands into the pile of wreckage and lifted the sentinel upright, its frame standing vertical on fleeced hubs. It shook gently as it came to rest, small flakes of soot carried off its wrecked chassis and into the light from the rifle’s muzzle. Sylvie smiled and wiped some of the grime off the sentinel. Sighing with relief, she addressed the charred machine:

“Doomsday Chaperone, 39th serial. DDC39. I wish you could know how happy I am that we found you.”

“We? Is Becca okay?”

“I have something for you to listen to.”

A new, different voice broke into the air from the traveller’s speaker. A woman’s voice, old, with some tinge of ailment behind it:

“If you’re hearing this, then you’re safe. You’re with someone who will help you. I’m safe too, 39. It’s me. Becca. We won’t see each other again, so I just wanted to tell you something. I had a really, really great life. I got married and even had children. Three boys and a daughter. Grand children too. I lived well, and saw a lot. My, if you could see the things I saw. I think of you often, 39. It took me a long time to comprehend what had transpired, and what you did. I owe you everything. We all do. My friend. I’m old now, 39. By the time you hear this, it may be many years since I’ve passed. I just want you to know….that you’re my friend and it’s time to come home. Goodbye.”

The recording trailed off into the silence of the cavern air and Sylvie stood up.

“Do you remember the book? ‘Oh The Places You’ll Go.’ Well, it’s time to go. We need you for something important, 39. Are you ready?”

“Where are you taking me?”

Sylvie looked upwards and pointed one finger into the space above them. She fastened the pack and rifle on her back then reached downwards, sinking her hands below the tri-axel and lifting the sentinel aloft, hoisting it behind her, arms stretched over her shoulders and hands gripped tight around the axel housing.

She walked up and out of the cavern effortlessly, her legs and arms given some exoskeletal strength from mechanics layered into her suit. They left the cave and into the dark of Sonora, the stars casting down on the high desert floor. As they climbed up the ramp and into Sylvie’s shuttle, the sentinel looked out at the massacre surrounding the ship. The new circuitry coursing through it was dawning some foreign logic, and it marveled at the carcasses strewn about the wild. A spark alighted in the recesses of its core. The sentinel wondered: what had come to pass here? What did these creatures think of the violence brought upon them? Did they believe in some divinity? Was this their reckoning? The questions surging through its CPU brought a realization for the machine: it was changed, bestowed with an otherworldly sentience. The carcasses were twisted into malformed husks, limbs bent upwards in sharp twists where the incinerated flesh pulled the rest of the tissue inward. Their wounds still glowed and embers flew off their bodies like fireflies dissipating in the wind. They, too, pointed to the heavens.

More than anything, the sentinel realized it needed a purpose. Resuscitated into an era unknown to it. Operating in a fugue state of digital existentialism. It realized this and pondered, for the first time, what it was worth.

The hatch closed and the craft lifted off into the night, ascending into the starry horizon. As it streaked across the sky, in the far distance atop the Whetstone ridge, a mirage passed through pine, dancing through the tree line like a phantom. A translucent homunculus. Spirit of the sierra. The pellucid creature stopped mid-sprint atop the high promontory, tracing the arc of the white shuttle as it soared into the upper boundary. The moonlight passed through the phantom and it refracted like a flawed gem. Standing there, watching the shuttle, the phantom lifted aloft a longrifle, bearing it upon the craft as it escaped into the night. A finger wrapped around the trigger of the massive gun then hesitated before finally easing off the grip. The solitary being lowered the gun, stock to ground, and stood motionless.

A pack of Mexican Wolves sidled up beside the phantom, watching along with it as the white craft disappeared into the black. The Sonoran desert fell silent, into the void. Into the waste. A calm wrested the violence from the fist of the wild and it hung in the air, suspended in time, wandering through the valleys of the Madrean Sky Islands like a cry shouted into the abyss, echoing off the canyons and fading to a whisper. Macwidag, toward the east. And there came the long clouds. And everything was different from what it had been.

THE END

Content

David P. Hanrahan
ARCHON OF THE COVENANT

1. Reification

2. Siege in the Catalina Valley

3. Dysplasia

4. Binary Idols, Dead Gods

5. Still Life with Annihilation

6. Fading Signals, Drone Cities

7. Electric Alvernon

8. Auriga and the Aroton

9. Covenant

10. The Wolf is Mine

11. Archon

12. Farewell, Sonora

EPILOGUE