“I can see them. I can see their faces.”
“Unbuckle your seat belt and stand on the curb.”
The girl swung her head back towards the sentinel’s optical array, frightened and confused. She hesitated. The sentinel’s voice was calm and reassuring:
“You can trust me.”
She unclicked her seatbelt and crawled off the sentinel’s frame, stepping over to the curb and fidgeting nervously as she watched the horde get closer — their faces twisted, their steps awkward and gangly. A caracole of the consumptive.
The sentinel drove over to the dirt planter beside the sidewalk and leaned forward, plunging its one hand into the gravel and dust, extracting a steel garden rod. A revin raced out in front and darted at them — the sentinel turned quickly, leveling its railgun battery at the lone creature and striking it down with a single shot to the skull. The others just behind hesitated, cackling and shrieking at the lump of tissue in the asphalt. The sentinel went to the front of the vehicle and rammed the rusted bar deep into the solenoid inside the engine cavity. A current flickered up its trident frame, lapping at the air and coursing down, plunging into the dark of the engine. It turned-over and started to cycle and finally it revved — the half-flat wheels tearing off the street, the Grand Cherokee taking off into the dust. The girl looked on in wonder as the vehicle crashed forward into the quarantine barricade, ripping a giant hole in the intersection before finally crashing to a halt into the mottled apartment complex on the other side. The sentinel still had the bar in its hand. It contorted its frame in a convex motion and hurled the steel forward, spinning it like a fan blade. It sailed low to the ground, ripping through the soft epidermis of revin legs, femurs and fibulas shattering, a series of cracks and delayed cries piercing the air. The sentinel called to the girl who was watching the scene unfold, stunned:
“Get back on and buckle up!”
She ran over to the rumble seat and crawled on. As she latched her belt shut, the sentinel rolled into the street and stopped, locking its front tire and hammering the torque on the rear axels. The tires spun in place in the street, kicking up a billowing cloud of dust and smoke behind them. The revins raced forward in the maelstrom, bouncing off each other, gasping, and reaching out for the girl, who screamed as they inched closer. The sentinel released its front brake and tore forward, rocketing through the fissure of the chain link that had curled back on itself, the taught barricade rendered slack from the runaway SUV.
They escaped into the setting sun, the lilac and titian circumference of the arid waste. They passed the burnt out hovels of West Tucson and crossed by the open burial pits of De Anza and Esteven Parks. They drove atop Speedway, a soft whir of tires rolling through the dirt and gravel, a vortex of cinder chasing them through the darkening sky. Then, once again, the sentinel was back on the great western highway. The Interstate-10. They drove down the open chasm of road, heading south and east. The sentinel clicked its LED light on, alighting the highway ahead of them. They passed the St. Marys and Congress off-ramps and the vacant skyline of the extinct city. The pink, faux murals of native life adorned on the overpass abutments faded into the half-light, passing by them in a blur of hieroglyphic spectres. A massive, olive freeway overhang ahead indicated the 1-19 and 1-10 divide approaching.
As the interstate dipped into the earth ahead of the divide, the dust thickened and the sentinel spun up a heavy brume that choked the air around them. The girl began to cough and gasp as they weaved in between an abandoned convoy of retirement home shuttles. The sentinel slowed, looking back at the girl. She had on a light sweatshirt and pajama pants. The air was cooling and would be dangerously cold in a few hours. They slowed ahead of the lead shuttle and the sentinel sidled up to the ground-level luggage compartments. With the sun all but set, and the long day behind them, the sentinel’s solar power cells were nearly spent. They had less than an hour before DDC39 would need to force-shutdown. It cycled between thermal, black light, and x-ray optics before settling on a compartment in the middle of the shuttle. It extended its hand from that hollow encasement aside its vertical scaffold, like a dreadnought battery of old. It reached for the compartment handle — locked. They backed up in the road, rolling near to the berm. The sentinel leveled its railgun — it whirred and then fired, the compartment lock exploding in a shower of sparks that lit the dusk of the road in a brief flash.
From inside the compartment, the sentinel dragged out a duffel bag. It pinned the bag down and pulled the zipper back, revealing a fresh bundle of linen and garments. It tore through them, the girl craning her head around its truss to watch this pitch of clothing in the spotlight of the fading LED flood. In the bottom of the sack, beneath a toiletry bag that spilled out over the blacktop was a small drawstring hoodie and sweatpants. The sentinel clutched at this pair and extended it backward towards the girl, who snatched it out of the grasp of the machine. As she put this extra layer on, the sentinel handed her a pair of oversized sunglasses and a handkerchief and spoke to her:
“When we’re moving, you should cover your face with these. It’s going to be night soon. We’ll need to find a safe spot to rest until sunlight.”
“We need something to eat.”
“I don’t eat. I will get you something to eat.”
The sentinel pulled out another duffel bag and rummaged through the contents. The girl spun back in her seat, looking into the distance of the dim interstate. A lone pair of eyes, incandescent in the underworld of concrete slabs, stared back. She looked back in silence. Her face bore out a silent disregard for the unfortunate circumstances that had befallen what she knew. A steely insouciance — unwavering. DDC39 noticed her fixated on the wolf in the distance and chimed in with concern:
“We can’t have that creature following us. It’s dangerous. If it gets hungry, it will try to attack you.”
“No it won’t.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because its hungry right now. We both are. They threw both of us in that dark place on the same day. It was injured, and the other animals kept nipping at it. I kept throwing broken wood at them. But I can’t walk so well. I felt so bad for it. I tried my hardest. I mostly kept them away and, finally, the wolf stood up on its own and we traded places. The wolf would snarl at the others when they started to turn on me. We’ve helped each other ever since. So, you know, that wolf is with me.”
The machine pulled a Ziploc bag of granola bars from the bag and a small blanket and handed them back to the girl, shaking them at her as she stared back at the spot where the glow had appeared but was, now, gone. She grabbed the Ziploc bag and the sentinel drove onward, off the road, towards the main column of the closest overpass. They nestled into the berm of the highway. The sentinel locked its tri-axel into place. The crescent moon appeared in the night sky and DDC39 spoke to her:
“I need to shut down for the night.”
“What’s happening? Where are you taking me?”
“I promise to tell you more in the morning. I need you to be safe tonight. Go to sleep and don’t wander off. If there is trouble, yell and I will come to your aid.”
She crawled off the rumble seat and curled up under the sentinel’s base, tugging at the blanket and digging her feet in between the tires. The sentinel initiated its shutdown procedure and the world closed around them.
• Solar power cell — 1%. Solar armor — 81%.
• Drivetrain — operational
• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics — operational
• HD/Comms — disrupted
• Water — 100%. Napalm — 100%
• Railgun — 24% capacity
• AAR — healthy, vaccinated girl in tow; posthaste vector to final checkpoint