“You are a survivor.”
EPILOGUE
End and beginning and end. The world without man went on. One epoch passed and another emerged from the cold depths. The cracked glaciers reformed, pulling salt water into crevasses and seracs, freezing into silver tusks that pierced the low clouds of the Arctic Circle. Ice flow pushed into the polar plains, drumlins disappearing into the abyssal sediment. And so with it, the anthropogenic mass extinction was halted. The anthropocence was over. The fallow lands of slash-and-burn were reborn. Forests thrived and saw blades rusted. Cities eroded into the firmament and asphalt roads dissipated like veins wilting with age.
The summers grew short in Sonora, deluged in rainfall and sparked by intermittent sun. The winters crept down from the Catalinas, lingering for most of the year and blanketing the lowlands in snow. The saguaros and palo verdes disappeared, giving way to ponderosa and fir. The desert plains vanished. Dust turned to sorrel leaves and conical detritus. A thick canopy enveloped the ruins of Old Main, Hotel Congress, and the broken dome of Bio3. Bison thundered south across the Baja Peninsula. Condors made their homes in the shattered penthouses of abandoned skyscrapers. And machete fish glimmered along rushing tributaries that sprang from dry washes along the alluvial fan. A new wilderness flourished amidst the cemetery of post-history.
But while one mass extinction was averted, another still loomed. Revins spread across the warmer climates. Those that had huddled in the caves and ruins of the north fled south, congregating in great masses along the Sonoran badlands. While they still couldn’t wield tools, nor could they stitch clothing, they grew in girth, adding heavy layers of fat and skin that kept them warm in the changing seasons. While they didn’t hunt larger animals — elk, bear, ram — they were vicious in their predation of smaller creatures that they would trap in crude ways. Gophers, rabbits, and, in the vast sewers of remnant cities, rats. Populations would swell when food was discovered, and dwindle when depleted. The chain was disrupted. Smaller species were disappearing. The larger mammals had to migrate to survive, or prey on the revins. And they did both. Revins were killed in sporadic numbers by mountain lions, which grew more vicious with each kill. They had to adapt to survive. They would hunt in packs, move in packs, and reproduce in packs. The inbreeding compounded their feral behavior. Their cognitive ability remained unevolved. Their prefrontal cortex was irrevocably destroyed. But their bodies conformed to the environment encroaching upon them. Deep claws, sharp incisors, concave skulls, sloping spines, and calcified kneecaps that protruded from their skin. They moved quickly but stayed close to the ground, sliding along their knees when frightened by some sudden sound. Their nasal cavity elongated, better suited to sniff out predator and prey. Their eyes widened, limbs shortened, body hair thickened. They were almost unrecognizable from their ancient kin. They were distorted relics of bygone times. Wallowing wights of the foreverwinter.
In the frozen melancholy of the hunger moon, a low thundering would roll through the perihelion sky, rattling the tall pines and shaking snow from needles. Just as soon as the storm arrived, it would vanish in the dark. This went on through countless nights. As a sudden burst reverberated in the dusk, the living skittered along the icy soil, ducking under the brush as the echo of abnegation cracked through flurries gusting in the ether. Something was changing in the air, and the revins sensed it. They were nervous.
For weeks, the storm would appear in the evening, materializing from the smallest tufts of vapor in the night sky and blooming into a massive, black anticyclone. The air was consumed by the fury, lights streaking through the opaque veil from a fulmination rocketing through the shelf of the tempest, blankets of snow wafting down in violent winds. The revins huddled in their holes, sheltered in caves, and crammed into ruins, waiting out the wrath of the lost torrent.
Finally, one warm evening, as the revins began to brace themselves for the return of storm, they were surprised to see something else in the sky — the bright, full, lenten moon. It shone down on them like a lantern, illuminating the white sheet of frost and snow in the open ground. They came out of their hovels and gawked at the magnificent glow, basking in the calm which had returned to the high desert at last. They breathed in and smiled wide, rotten teeth and dry sockets gleaming in the warm light.
The next morning, as wisps of snow blew off the high canopies, as the twisted, gnarled bodies of the revins awoke from their slumber, a strange light appeared in the clear blue sky. A white contrail, splitting the empyrean. The feral minds were puzzled by this faint vapor high in the heavens. As the line stretched downwards, arcing into the distance, it picked up speed. The streak in the sky stretched out a great distance and, as the fore descended through a smattering of high clouds, it smoldered red like a flare falling through water. A laceration ripping downwards from heaven.
As the fireball careened towards the earth, it began to arc parallel to the horizon, leveling off and searing across the Sonoran dreamland. Other revins, huddling in their burrows or standing amidst the frost, looked up and were rapt with the ember burning across the sky. The oval-like cinder suddenly broke in two, each fiery piece of debris spinning wildly in different directions, and from the burning shell emerged a gray and white object that continued overhead in a straight vector.
The revins traced this thing as it raced across the sky. It looked to them like some sort of massive, pale vulture — but its wings didn’t beat. As it descended above the Coronado Forest, it came into view. It was a craft. The revin mind alighted with some recognition of its outline. They recalled the rusting hulks of A-10s that lay in heaps at AMARG, the Davis-Monthan plane graveyard nearby. The craft’s underside was gray but its topside was white. Four exterior engines — two aft and two forward, encased in cylinders like the old Fairchild-Republic Thunderbolt — carried the craft through the cold air above Apache Peak. From there, it began to circle and further descend. Strange black markings were painted on the stabilizers and, as it banked, the revins could see some sort of red, circular symbol on each wing. Dark smears streaked out of imperfect panel lines. As it nosed down, they could see the front of the craft had a protrusion, like a cockpit but opaque with a steely luster.
After circling in the midday sun for some time, it slowed, all four engines craning upwards. As it continued its descent, coming fully into view with the handful of revins just underneath, still no sound could be heard from the craft. It skimmed over the ponderosa canopy, heading east, until it came upon a clearing. Ahead was the flat, cracked foundation of a building that had disappeared in the harsh elements, the withered blacktop of a parking lot that had faded into the dirt, and a sign that was black with the soot of brush fire and years of soil blowing across the desert. As the craft hovered forward, it stopped just ahead of the weathered sign, which could just be made out:
An open chasm in the ground loomed in the distance, facing the nose of the craft as it quietly floated above the ground lightly dusted with snow. At first, the shuttle was alone in its vigil over the abandoned park. As the night crept forward, and the clear sky was bedecked with stars, a melancholy wail began to pierce the air, emanating from someplace within the mysterious contraption. Not unlike a whale song. A siren in Sonora. This echolocation blared out loudly across the expanse. For the first hour, it repeated a simple aria that rose and fell in a few notes. Like a car alarm slowed down and lowered in pitch, echoing across the hillsides. As the night grew dark, the frequency shifted. The song changed, but went on in perpetuity through the darkness. As this lamentation filled the woods, revins began to approach. Cautiously at first, but full of curiosity. They looked on at the strange trespasser floating before them, glimmering ashen in the moonlight.