Guard of the Gate

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright  ã  2011 Plot Roach.

Guard of the Gate

By Plot Roach

An hour before dawn was when the crying began. It was a small thin wail at first, soon followed by a throaty yowl. A woman peeked her nose out of her home, then emerged a moment later. “Do you hear that?” she asked the guard at the gate. “I think it’s a baby.”

“Doesn’t matter what it is.” the guard said. “It ain’t getting in here.”

“But it could be in trouble.” she argued.

“If it’s outside the gate, it’s supposed to stay there.” He said. But he, too, squinted through the gate in the direction of the sound. He had a little one at home. Sarah, only a year and a half old. And he hated to think of her out there in the wastelands beyond civilization’s gate. “Whatever it is, I hope it shuts up soon.”

The woman scowled at him, and moved closer to the gate. There were in actuality two gates, the one that held civilization in, a buffer zone of ten feet, and another gate that held the wastelands and what they contained back. “Don’t get too close.” the guard warned. But with a break of ten feet away from any real danger, it was just a show. She looked as far as the vantage of the gate would allow her. The crying continued.

“I have to go out and see.” she pleaded. “What if it’s someone from one of the other cities?”

“Then why wouldn’t they have called out before now?” the man argued.

“Maybe they can’t. maybe it’s only the child left.”

“Then we’re better off without it.” the man said.

“How can you say that? Knowing that you have a daughter you’d want others to watch over should something happen to you.”

But the man kept to his post above the door to the gate, looking off into the dawn of a new day and not saying a word. The woman climbed the ladder next to him, hoping she could see better than she had on the ground. But as the crying continued, there was still no sign of movement. “Do you have any binoculars?” she asked the guard.

“Nope. Only Smith carries them, and he won’t let them out of his hands for anything. It’s the last set in the city, I’m sure of it. And he knows this too. It would make guard duty a bit better, but do you think that matters to the likes of him?”

“Do you think he’d let me borrow them to look for the baby?”

“I don’t think he’d let you borrow them to look for a pile of gold.”

“Well there’s something alive out there and we need to help it.”

“Ain’t nothing out there but a trap.”

“And I’m telling you that there is something alive out there, I can hear it!” she yelled and stalked off back into her house. He watched her go, feeling guilty himself for not insisting that they go through the gates to check it out. But they would need the key from one of the three Guardians of the town. The gates were kept locked at all times for the safety of those inside.

His eyes returned to the harsh landscape, almost of their own accord. He had been so used to his duty as a guard that he watched the land beyond the gate even when he was in his own home and off duty. A few minutes later he heard a shuffling in the dirt below the watch post and heavy footsteps climb the rungs of the latter. It was about time for someone else to take up his post. “Hey, Ed, we got something crying out there-”

He was knocked from his post by a blow to the side of the head. He fell ten feet and had the wind knocked out of him. He watched the woman pull the gate key from her pocket and slip it into the lock. He tried to call out a warning, but the words would not leave his lips. He gasped for breath and reached out to her. She looked at him apologetically and fumbled through the first gate, dropping the key in her eagerness to get to the crying child. He crawled forward through the dirt and watched her pass from the first gate and through the second. She was in the badlands now, where THEY hunted. And he would have offered up a prayer for her safe return, if he had had the air in his lungs.

“I found it! I found the baby!” she called out. The crying ceased a moment before starting again with fury. “Oh my god! It’s one of them. It’s only maybe two months old, and its got their eyes. Why would they turn a baby? It couldn’t possibly hunt for them. And it’s too young to breed and make more…”

He heard the noise of the ambush and the woman cry out in surprise, and then in pain. All the while the baby kept crying until it was taken away and its noise dwindled with the distance.

Even if she had made it back with the child, it would have been destroyed to save the others of the town. If she had not been bitten, the woman would have had to been isolated in quarantine until it was proven that she carried no sign of the disease which turned humans into the monsters that hunted the wastelands.

He grasped the key in his hand, pulling it up from the dust. He wondered which of the three Guardians she had stolen it from and what she had done to get it. And all for nothing, he thought. From the corner of his eye he saw movement. It was one of THEM. Quick as a rabbit it raced across the dirt and slammed against the inner gate. It paused a moment, snarling its frustration. Its pale skin almost transparent in the morning light. Its solid black eyes squinting against the breaking dawn.

Unable to speak, the man held up the key to the gate, just out of reach of the monster. He then clenched his fist around it before extending his middle finger at the creature. It hissed and then disappeared into the landscape, as they had a way of doing. The man sat in the dirt and listened to the warning bell sound. The woman’s theft had at last been detected, but too late to save her. More than likely she was already dead and being eaten by her hunters. If, by chance, they had kept her alive, they would either turn her into one of them or breed her to make a soldier that could pass for human to infiltrate the town. He had seen these things happen in the last ten years he had been a guard of the gate. Yet never once had he had an attack upon him from someone within the town itself.

“A trap” he whispered. He remembered a time, before the gated towns, before the monsters and their madness, when wild dogs roamed the wilderness outside his home. In the hot days of summer, when the drought chased prey to more hospitable lands, the dogs would hunt their more domesticated kin. A pup would be left just outside the paved roads of the city, its cries luring out a mother dog just following her instincts. And when she was within reach the rest of the pack would ambush her and drag her carcass off back home to the rest of the wild ones.

He sighed and turned away from his post. Soon he would have to notify the Guardians of what had happened. They would notify her family. Her husband would take it the hardest, though the toddler would barely remember her in a week or two. But he wondered who would nurse her baby, now that THEY had run off with his mother.