The sentinel sat motionless — in part to remain undetected, but also at a complete loss as to what to do. Looking down on the living necropolis, it spent the next three days and nights silently scanning the movement of the flesh tide below. There was a relative structure to the horde. Packs emerged amongst the teeth snapping, fingers clawing, and vomiting of the crowd. At one point, a pregnant mother gave birth in the dark pits below the sentinel. Other revins crawled over to watch the woman writhing in pain as she pushed this slithery creature from her belly and into the dirt, screaming and panting. When the baby was born, it looked up, straight up, at the sentinel and its optical lens. For a moment, the sentinel wrestled with an analysis of this pained and desperate look — is it possible that the revin newborn are cognitive? Children would gather around the mother, with the vacuous stare of the unthinking, and the moment would pass like digital hope dissipating in the real sky.
On the second day, the sentinel turned its gaze to the giant football stadium across campus — the same stadium it had scoped from afar, deep in the northeast foothills. Its view was clear and unobstructed now. Arizona Stadium shot up in the pink, striated sky, piercing the southern horizon. The east and west stands rose up and were met by a tensile roof held aloft by giant tent poles anchored into the earth at the 50 and 30-yard lines. CDC and WHO mobile stations lined the stadium and a sign on the rear façade of the scoreboard assured: “Quarantine Zone: Students Welcome.” The sentinel spent an hour, attempting to decipher a potential code in the sign, to no avail. To the other side of the stadium, on the western stands, the sentinel witnessed the worst of the violence. As the steps ascended, the revins lashed and clawed at each other, clambering for leverage. They all wanted to be on top. Weaker male revins were held aloft and thrown down the steep steps, tumbling down head over waist on the steps until they came to rest, unconscious, on the level below. The most aggressive, cunning, and bloodthirsty revins found their way to the top, where they perched in the ascension of the stadium and looked down at the dying and weak. There, in the concrete crown, stood the scarred, pale revin from the day hence. It was the apex predator. The unchallenged. The other violent conscripts of the horde kept at bay, eyeing the albino alpha and holding a distance as it moved about the steep nest.
The sentinel compiled a list of revelations: 1) the revin do not eat their own 2) the mothers protect their newborn and other males protect them 3) they are voracious carnivores and innovative hunters 4) they dwell in semi-open environments, rarely staying inside buildings for long and 5) they have structure, communication, and a semblance of society within the confines of their bloodthirst. In all this, there was still no sign of cognition. No survivor. The trail had gone cold here in the center of the campus, trampled amidst the dirty and blistered feet of the affected. Whatever living, thinking, resistant human that was carried into this place was now lost — piled into the carcass hills. The sentinel computed its options: it would need to leave the confines of the ECM jamming perimeter, sync back up with SatComm, and go into stasis. Its mission would be failed.
On the third morning, the sentinel awoke to a patter of rain drops falling from a dark gray sky. A north bearing thunderstorm had moved into the desert floor from deep within the Gulf of Mexico. As the morning drew on, the sky grew darker. The revins grew nervous, shuddering in a panic as a thunderclap exploded overhead and echoed throughout the red-brick valley of the central campus. A bright, electric cord illuminated the sky and divided the heavens in the west. The downpour fell, washing the sentinel from every inch as it huddled beneath the broken canopy of the guard tower on the Kuiper roof. The sanguine soot flaked off in clumps from the sentinel’s frame, streaming off the tri-axel and into the drains atop the roof. As the morning torrent came down on the campus, the revins made for the burned out, broken ruins of the main library, the underground learning complex in the center of the mall, and the surrounding lecture halls. They crawled over each other, shoving their way into shelter. The lightning strikes got closer, illuminating the thousands of frightened eyes peering out into the campus from the broken structures.
The soil softened and the dug out burrows filled with shallow puddles. Trash and raw sewage streamed down University. The storm swept past, and the campus quieted. Slowly, the revins emerged from the buildings, looking up at the sky, scanning the horizon for the trails of fulmination and terror. The air was clear and smelled sweetly of creosote and palm fronds. A gust blew off the steep bulwark of the Gittings and Kuiper building and crossed the ripped main lawn. The revins paused, sniffing at the air. A realization was sweeping across their faces. One, then two, then many. Some intruder was amongst them. They shouted and rasped, frantically looking around them. Hysteria. A number came out from right underneath the sentinel, out of the lobby of the Kuiper building. The sky began to break, midday sun casting along the mall, shadows moving with the westerly clouds overhead. The sentinel knew — some scent from its frame was giving it away. Its claret cloak had dissipated in the rain. The organ was reacting to the foreign body.
A tall, sinewy female revin held her hands to her brow, shielding the intermittent sun from her gaze. She stared up at the Kuiper roof where the sentinel sat motionless in the guard tower. She choked on a breath and gasped. She began to motion wildly in its direction, gesticulating some hysterical curse. The other revins looked at her and then up at the roof. The sentinel began to slowly move backwards out of view but it was too late — they had spotted it. In the seconds after, a low rumble carried on the air behind the sentinel, getting louder in the already shrill din of the cries below. They were coming up the exterior ramp. The sentinel panned around the province of fallow minds. The revins ascended the nearby structures — the Eller Theater, the Solar Observatory, the Sonnet Space Sciences Buildings — and surrounded the sentinel on every side of the sky. Across the mall, in the reaches of the stadium summit, the sallow, scarred revin fixated on the rising entropy of the Kuiper rooftop far away. It perched on the concrete stands, one leg off the side, dangling in the ether, eyes widening.
The sentinel paused before the entryway of the corrugated exterior ramp. The revins were on the roof of the library across the mall now. They emerged on the Psychology building to the west. The sentinel heard their cries on the roof of the Solar Observatory just to the north. And they were on the Gittings roof to the east. The sentinel was surrounded. It scanned for escape routes — there was no safe way off the roof without getting through the teeming crowd coming up the ramp. The sentinel was in trouble. It could release a periphery current, decimating one wave, then initiate its final stage defense, and then it would be over. It loaded a flash drive into a hollow rubber casing from its magazine and positioned its turret bearing southwest. It fired the single shot into the sky, the memory chip screaming into heaven. A record in the dirt for someone to find later. It turned back to the exterior ramp. They were there. They had on their face a look of hatred. They were afraid — much like they were with the sound of thunder earlier, but this look was one of rage. They walked carefully out onto the roof and fanned out slowly, nervously looking around, searching for other intruders. But there was just the sentinel. They turned their attention back to DDC39, who had locked its tri-axel in place and fixed its railgun on them from the small inclined level just a short distance in front of them.
A tinny hum carried on the air and the roof exploded in a spray of blood, cartilage, and marrow. The sentinel fired on them in a turbulent cacophony of annihilation. The railgun sang like a thrush whistling in the spring. The first wave was slaughtered, falling in heaps of liquefied fat and sinews. A fourth of the sentinel’s railgun stores were depleted. It shuttled its magazine trays and reloaded. A second wave of revins emerged at the ramp entrance, peering into the daylight and the carnage on the roof. They were infuriated. Any semblance of fear and tension was lost now in the frenzy alighting in their eyes. The sentinel unlocked its tri-axel and moved back towards the western wall, crossing over a narrow ramp spanning a skylight beneath. They rushed out of the ramp bridge, leaping past the corpses and extending their festering extremities towards DDC39.