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.”
In the morning, when it rose, the sentinel came down off the mountain and into the Tucson foothills. From the Soldier Trailhead, the sentinel got a clear view of the dead city. Milagrosa, The Homestead, Laurel Hills, Outpost Preserve. The abandoned, desert manors of the rich. The sentinel rolled silently through the dust of the Catalina Highway. No cars blocked the path. The stucco mansions, set away from the road, flashed in the periphery — their solar panels and double-panes, cracked and filthy, alighting in the glow of the winter morning. The air was silent save for the shrieks of a lone Caracara that appeared in the sky overhead, disappearing into the south near the city center.
The sentinel was tracing the pack movement of revin tracks off the mountain and into the city. A herd. The tracks would appear on one side of the road and then cross over, disappearing in the asphalt — a trace line of toes in the dust, and skin fragments in the cracked asphalt. The tracks would splinter off — a smaller group darting off suddenly and into a subdivision or a large estate away from the road. The sentinel followed each of these broken trails, only to lead back to the main road. In one house, in Telesis Terrace, the sentinel found a family laid still in the master bedroom. They were dressed in church clothing, holding hands, eyes closed. Serene. The door had been forced open and revin footsteps circled the bodies, which were undisturbed. Excrement and urine filled the corners of the room. The revins had sat in this room, possibly for days, approaching the bodies then turning away. A medical doctorate diploma hung on the wall. The sentinel scanned the air and plucked the hand of the father. The bodies were full of formaldehyde and trace propofol. A German Shepherd, stuffed and preserved, was propped in the corner of the room, posed and staring into the entrance of the room.
Further down the road, the highway split off into Tanque Verde Road and the sentinel followed it, going deeper into the city. The houses were smaller and closer together, separated at times by a baseball field, a Safeway, or the Pantano Wash, which split the ten-lane road. Many of the buildings were boarded up, barricaded, and sandbagged. Some were burned to the ground. Some were untouched. They belied a city that had devolved into chaos and confusion. The silence of the ruined city contrasted with the deepening scene of memory lost — a trail of tumult and blood like wax cast from a dying candle. Graythorn and saltbush engulfed the remnants of a gas station.
Past Grant Road, the sentinel came upon Trail Dust Town — a Wild West theme park. A caricature façade of old saloons, rail stations, and banks, set away from the road, greeted families and visitors wanting to relive an earlier era. The evening sun, the amber and violet borealis, washed over the firmament and cast a shadow on the sentinel, which looked into one of the theme park buildings at an array of mannequins dressed in western garb. A showgirl in corset and petticoat. A marshal in suspenders and cotton trousers. And a dandy in duster and Dorchester. Another mannequin, undressed, was behind them in the shadows, looking out at the road. Its eyes fixed into the distance. It faded into the dark of the room and looked into the solitary optic lens of the sentinel. Then it was gone.
DDC39 rolled back slightly into the entrance of the park and pinged the periphery. There was no motion detected nearby and there was no thermal signature. There was a revin in the darkness of the display window, but the sentinel couldn’t detect it. Something was wrong.
The sentinel scanned around the adjoining buildings — the darkened plank boards and faux fronts, speckled in faded gold trim. The eventide lay wreaths of shadowlight through the park, shifting through the dust with the swaying sycamores. Something was interfering with the sentinel’s radar and detection array. It was operating on visual optics and closed-circuit network alone. Its audio flickered, picking up intermittent sounds — rustling of the trees, a cricket chirping, and the shuffling of feet.