Over the next several days, more revins came to gaze at this thing that had broken into their lives. Soon, there were hundreds of Sonoran revins gathered in the ruins of the park. They made makeshift hovels in the ground. They lined up against the crumbling walls of the amphitheater. They huddled together under piles of pine needles. They sank their jaws into cottontail ripped from nearby warrens. But no living soul approached the chasm. They woke up at dawn and cocked their heads, listening to this magnificent sound pouring out of the machine.
Among them emerged one that drew the craft in the ground with its bony digits. All gray hair and sagging skin. This proselytizer chided anyone who got too close, revering the arrival with wonder. The gathering turned into a cult. They looked to it for something. With each change of its song, they grew animated, expecting something to happen that so far did not come to pass. They drew in closer as the frequency halted then sighed, drooling, as the wail resumed and shifted slightly. A low, looping gospel. The naked, hairy revins shivered in the frost, beating their hands in the wet soil, pulling up clumps and shaking their fists at the metal craft. But they dared not smear it with their curses nor their handfuls of shit and sod.
Westerly winds blew into the cold mornings but hushed in the overhead sun. Days and nights passed by without the revins noticing. The snow melted into the shale and limestone, unveiling the red basin and range. The white-capped spire of the Whetstone Mountains hung over them, cropping the sunset in the west. A cold creek rushed past in the north, spilling off Apache Peak and colliding with the tributaries of the massive San Pedro River in the east. Ages before, Wyatt Earp shot and killed Curly Bill Brocius in this pass, ending a blood vendetta against the cowboys responsible for his brother’s death. Revins walked over the sunken bones and spent shells, unaware of the ancient vengeance that had unfolded before them.
One evening, the craft’s song ended and the whisper of the still night breathed through the thistle and sedge. Those gathered nearby hushed, their attention turned to the gray and white shuttle hovering silently in their midst. Their heavy eyelids drew back, pupils wide in the dark. They inched closer, jostling with each other to peer at what might transpire next. Hands shaking, steam rising from sweaty brows in the algid gloom. High clouds moved under the moon and the black veil lowered on the spectral wild. Everything was black. Everything was quiet save for the breeze in the reeds and the clattering of teeth. Naked feet teetering on sharp rock.
A series of small, circular portals — like small glass plates — emerged from retracting panels all along the shuttle’s fuselage. Sparks of light appeared behind each glass circle — little lanterns dotting the darkness. The revins moved closer, gasps of glee piercing the air. The lights got brighter and brighter. The brush and fir were illuminated on the periphery of the open range. The faraway oak and pine on Apache Peak lit like faint stars dotting the universe. The bare skin of the gathered crowd radiated, gleaming pale like the frost they stood upon. They squinted in the glowing flood, holding their hands up to shield the light. And with that, a blinding torrent filled the eyes of every being standing near. Even with their eyelids closed, they were consumed with the lambent. Their pupils burned.
Chaos broke out. A painful shout erupted amongst the crowd, now stumbling forward in their blind daze. A faint whirr could be heard, cycling up like a fan gaining speed. And then a staccato of gusts — like arrows splitting paper. The light shifted in circles. The revins panicked, shrieking out hollow pleas — the cries cut short in a garbled pop and hiss. The proselytizer stumbled forward and caught a shadow in his field of view, briefly glimpsing the shuttle from between the eclipse. In those few seconds, the elder could just make out a turret, under the nose, firing a rapid salvo of light into the confused crowd. The craft rotated as the battery ripped through revin flesh, perforating limbs and incinerating patches of tissue. A strobe of white fire. Bodies were split open and whole swaths of skin turned to ash, guts cauterized, leaving them disfigured and writhing. The elderly herald crawled on his hands and knees until he came face to face with the opaque cockpit of the shuttle. The ashes of revin bodies swirled in the air, a discord of dying cries piercing the night. The old man threw his hands up in the air and was consumed. Gone.
The floodlights on the shuttle faded and the pyre glittered with the embers of bodies riddled through with gunfire. The shuttle stopped its gentle rotation, coming to rest facing the Kartchner cleft, the turret pointing straight towards the cavern opening. A hatch opened from the underside of the cockpit, extending downwards as a ramp, steps protruding pneumatically from the interior. A light emerged from inside the craft, illuminating the desert floor beneath the plank.
From there, stepping into the soil, a figure emerged from the craft and into the high desert air. It was encased in a synthetic poly-fiber exosuit. A traveller. It sunk its heel into the dirt, twisting its foot back and forth in the ground like it was unsure of something. Unsteady in the world. Wrapped from head to toe in a lithe, airtight shell. White chassis, like the shuttle it emerged from. Head enveloped in a helmet with the same steely luster of the cockpit it was walking under. A case was wrapped around its back, contoured and sleek. The traveller reached up to the gun turret beneath the nose, a foot or so above its grasp, and the armament unlocked, the gun case sliding downwards from the pneumatic retractor. The traveller caught the handle of the cylinder rifle as it dropped into its hand.
A flutter of dead leaves swirled past, pooling above the shuttle and carrying on into the darkness. The wild hummed with fascination. Creaking bones. Mule deer gathered on the western ridge. From the chasm ahead, a colony of ghost bats escaped the black and ascended into the night, their eyes gleaming back in the dying embers of the massacre. All heartbeats, drumming in unison with the faraway tides. Love was gone. The traveller swung its ashen cylinder rifle in the direction of the cave, moving forward cautiously. Light footsteps crunching in the frost-packed soil. Small steam bursts shot into the air from a sub-vent at its nape. The same red circle on the shuttle’s wing was emblazoned on the traveller’s breast. A light flickered at the rifle’s muzzle, illuminating the chaparral and the winding path leading to the cavern.
The traveller stepped into Kartchner Cavern, sidestepping down a broken walkway and into the cold, damp rock of the upper cleft. Its rifle light darted around as the traveller shuffled past a cairn near the entrance. Shadows dancing on the walls in the wild, flickering in the artificial light. The furtive figure continued on for some time with its beam of illumination vectoring from left to right in the narrow corridor. The glow would sporadically catch the white poly-fiber shell as the traveller passed through the underworld, casting itself in a haunted spark. The echoes of its footsteps bounded into the ether and the air ascended. The traveller shone its light forward and the massive cavern came into view.