David Hanrahan - Archon of the Covenant

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.”