Archon of the Covenant (3 page)

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