Archon of the Covenant (2 page)

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 “” 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.