Archon of the Covenant (9 page)

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 1
st
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 1
st
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.