Archon of the Covenant Read online

  Have you seen that this earth that you made is burning? The mountains are crumbling and all kinds of trees are burning down. And the people over the land, which you have made run around, have forgotten how to shout, and have forgotten how to walk, since the ground is so hot and burning. And the birds, which you have made, have forgotten how to fly, have forgotten how to sing. And when you found this out, you held up the long pinion feathers - Macwidag, toward the east. And there came the long clouds, one after the other. There, in those clouds, there were low thunderings. And they spread over the earth and watered all the plants and the roots of all the trees. And everything was different from what it had been

  -Pima Indian folklore from “The Short Swift Time of Gods on Earth”

  “There is something in the sky”

  - Wireless SSID network at Kitt Peak Observatory

  1. Reification

  DDC39 rolled around the park trail leading up to Picacho Peak, its dust eddies obscuring Interstate-10 in the distance. The sun was just behind the peak now, casting a monolith eclipse on the eastern desert floor. The quiet brumeland of old memories. A breeze whispered through dead weeds and around DDC39’s frame as it made its way through the national park. Adrift in solitude amongst the dry brush.

  DDC39, the sentinel, has been out on recovery for over a year. It left the Martinez Manufacturing Complex on full-autonomous vectoring and followed its own scans to the northern Sonoran desert – what was once the American Southwest. If there was any salvageable human life, any living person without prefrontal cortical hypotrophy (PCH), Sonora would be one of the few places they could possibly be - the satellite data having confirmed this. This was what it was programmed to do. To find a survivor.

  When the illness first appeared, there was little understanding of what was happening. The initial symptoms were tame, and it was hard to discern it from more common and treatable diseases. This bug was a slow burn. Later symptoms arrived en masse in a way never before recorded. The infected devolved, a few years after contraction, into something - different. Some would say “animals.” The prefrontal cortex was slowly shutting down, leaving only the basic, survival instincts intact. Reason, speech, abstention, decorum – all the things that had defined our evolved existence – were disintegrating under our noses. It had been in the air all this time, originating in the atmosphere within the past decade. Mankind was facing a cognitive extinction, unaware. A reversal of encephalization. CAT scans were showing activity, albeit changing, and so no one caught on until it was too late. Patients, who had been simply battling ongoing confusion and headaches for the past couple years, suddenly stopped bathing, stopped going into work. They talked less and less. Then there were other changes. Affected individuals no longer recognized the people who loved them. Instead, they began to huddle amongst their fellow infected. Their memories were wiping out. They were uneasy around those who had not devolved. They’d start assaulting others at random. If you had food, they’d come at you – fingernails digging in, rocks thrown. The base animal emotions – fear, rage, and apathy – were amplified in the infected. Restraint was lifted. Hatred was acted upon. And nearly everyone was infected at this point. When the realization hit – that all mankind had been breathing the very air that was slowly disintegrating our cortex – the doomsday reactions materialized. The religious huddled in churches – now no longer afraid to be infected by others. Christians, Muslims, Jews – they all envisioned a much more dramatic apocalypse. Not this. There were no seas boiling, no skies falling. This infinite sadness was such that common people would simply become something else – something so ancient and pathetic – and that the waking society would all but be gone.

  Scientists initially thought it was some form of viral, early onset dementia. Or a contagious variant of Benson’s Syndrome, sans vision disruption. They had been trying to pinpoint a vaccine once they determined it was airborne. The problem was: who could be vaccinated if they had been breathing for the past few years? Everyone took in the same air. There were only a few pockets on earth where people had been living and breathing uncontaminated air. These “salvation outposts” were put on notice to stay sub-troposphere and reverse-quarantine until news of a vaccine or, worse, until the air cleared. Once a vaccine was created, there was such short supply, and logistics so broken down, that it only got as far as the nearest salvation outpost. The first test vaccine, created by scientists at the University of Arizona, made it to Biosphere 3 on the outskirts of Tucson.

  Biosphere 3 was built two years pre-virus (2PV) through a joint effort between UofA and NASA. It was built to study, through a continuous live operation, the ability for man to manufacture and sustain an ongoing base on Mars. The occupants of Biosphere 3 – a mixture of aging astronauts, jaded scientists, and poor laborers - had committed to a 5-year engagement. And so, around the time when they would be emerging from their fully-sealed glass enclosure, the occupants of Bio3 were phoned by the researchers at UofA and told of their new mission: that they would need to receive and take the first vaccine. Not only take the vaccine, but something much, much more: to be the sole survivors of an epidemic that would wipe out everyone outside of the SOs. They had to take the vaccine and replicate it. Replicate it and reproduce. Be the re-birth. Bio3 would become Salvation Outpost Zero. They would transmit to all other potential SOs that they had the vaccine and would send out help once the immunity was confirmed. Stay put. Stay in your SO until help comes. But confirm receipt of the message and relay your status. With any luck, only the truly uncontaminated would be responding at that point, as it was now roughly three years after-virus (3AV). Anyone else hearing the message outside of an SO would be the once-humans, those reverted incurables. The revins.

  At first, the revins were stationed for observation in large outdoor barracks – tent cities surrounded by electrified wire. When found roaming in a populated area, frothing and maniacal, they’d be rounded up and taken to the tent cities outside of town and fed by a constant stream of propelled slop and water cannons directed at open basins. All this was quickly abandoned though. It was pointless – why round up creatures that you knew you would resemble any day/week/month from now? The tent cities were abandoned and revins simply began to fill the capitals. There was some hope that people who still had not exhibited any cortical hypotrophy would show that there was some natural resistance. This was true, to a point, and helped the scientists come up with a late vaccine trial. But even they succumbed. They would huddle in their homes and apartments. The water shut off, then the power. Phone and internet signals went offline. You could look out your window one day and see traffic on the highway, but the following week it would be a trickle. Then one car here or there. Then nothing. Sometimes you’d hear a crash, or explosion. Then when normal society came to a halt, the revins would come out.

  The revins wandered in packs. There was usually a pack leader, and they would rummage through trash, or homes, looking for food. Occasionally they’d find a house with someone, or something, living in it. Screams. A revin would come out of the house dragging a baby, holding it high above its head and bringing it down hard on the sidewalk, sinking its jaws into the mangled viscera. They would wander, sunburnt and broken, from shade to shade. Clothes, no clothes. Bloody, wild-eyed.

  Some revins fled in fear at the sound of a helicopter overhead. Others would stand firm, shouting gurgled grunts and noise at the contraption. Did it remember what it was? Did it have something it was trying to say, something deep and lost in that cortex? These mysteries – whether the revins had some flashes of who they were before – were lost and would never be unraveled. Some would stand back and watch the helicopter trail off into the distance. A sort of non-cognitive curiosity.

  The di
fferences between revins and animals were forgotten. Revins still stood upright, although they would amble awkwardly without shoes. They bled often. In the Sonoran sun, they burnt and cracked. When they fell, they would most certainly have something rip open. When they were wounded, revins would attack each other, but stop short of killing their fellow unreasoned. Sometimes the revins would drag wounded adolescent revins by the legs, crushing their heads with a rock when at the onset of death – but they would not cannibalize. Some packs of revins established dens – ghastly stations filled with misery and collections of things that fascinated them. Revins were the new man - a pathetic and sinister helghast. Apes, in the limited habitats they had remaining, were the old world. An irony of being on top of the food chain for so long was that this virus only attacked prefrontal cortex. Only affected humans. Nature was getting a break.

  DDC39 scanned the periphery of the park, zooming in and out on infrared optics. There were some tattered nylon tents still bolted to the desert floor in the evening shade of the peak’s face. No sizeable thermal indicators, but the calculation put it at as “check” in any case. Small thermal beats appeared overhead and then faded into the distance – a flock of wrens heading south. The temperature was starting to dip in the evenings. The sentinel made its way around the broken trail and to the tents. Abandoned. There was a fire pit, a Coleman, and radio. DDC39 spotted a blood trail and followed it around to a wash. In the bottom of the wash was the decomposed body of a man – its head bashed in and evaporated brain matter scattered about the ravine. The body of a female was wrapped around the man, also decomposed, but apparently free of injury.

  The sun was beginning to sink into the horizon now. The Sonoran sky lit up in reds and yellows. A Zane Grey palette. DDC39 initiated the evening run-time maintenance operation. Its solar collection, dropping to 35%, set in motion the shelter/hibernate process. It scanned the periphery and found an attainable peak, 300 yds out. Its tri-axle stiffening up, the sentinel sprang forth and darted across the desert floor for the peak. It would run through its shutdown operation perched, with relative safety, in the altitude above the desert floor. It reached the incline and hit the higher gears, motoring silently up the face – the only sound being the spinning of gravel outside of the three-toothed tread tires. At the top, it pinged the desert three more times, 360 degrees, for signs of life. Nothing big. Nothing moving. Nothing good and nothing bad.

  Atop the peak, as the sun set, DDC39 locked its tri-axel in place and shut down for the evening. The stars came out overhead – a crescent moon lighting the creosote shadows of the neverwinter basin. It would ping the periphery throughout the night, keeping a sole vigilance on the deadlands. One watch to keep hope for a cerebral light, and one watch to keep wary of the revin blight. It ran its hibernation cycle and routine maintenance:

  Solar power cell – 35%. Solar armor – 100%.

  Drivetrain – operational

  Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics – operational

  HD/Comms – operational

  Water – 100%. Napalm – 100%

  Railgun – full capacity

  JE – situation normal; no signals, little hope

  Shutting down core operation and initiating stand-by mode

  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: