David Hanrahan - Archon of the Covenant

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.