Gatekeepers

by Sam Ferguson

  “Just me, I promise,” I said as I pulled out my credit card and slid it into the metal pass-tray that dipped into the counter below the window.

  “Need yer ID too,” the manager said as he kept typing on his computer.

  Reluctantly, I pulled out my driver’s license. I had hoped the motel was run down enough that I wouldn’t need to show my identity. I was not sure how I would react if the manager recognized my name. I passed the license under the window, this time catching my knuckles on the window itself. There wasn’t a lot of space in the pass-tray.

  I caught a lucky break. The manager didn’t recognize me. He just click-clacked away on the keyboard and then ran the credit card through his ancient card reader that may have been white at some point in history, but certainly not in the last decade. I frowned as the man swiped the card through seven times. He was cursing at the reader, and I was praying it wasn’t taking the payment every single time he moved his hand. Finally, he passed everything back to me, along with a key attached to a plastic plaque that had most of the number rubbed off.

  “Room three,” the manager said. Then he cursed the heat and walked away. If I wanted a receipt, it was too late now. The light in the room beyond the doorway flicked off and I heard stomping, heavy footsteps ascending a set of stairs somewhere in the back.

  “Here’s hoping I’m not paying Ritz rates,” I muttered to myself as I took the key and my card and license. I walked out from the office, passing under one of those annoying bells that rings when the door hits it. Room three. Well, three was my favorite number, and it was a Friday after all, so perhaps things would go smoothly for a night.

  Boy, was I wrong.

  I took a shower in what can be described as interestingly brown water that came out a smidge warmer than room temperature. I chose to believe that the brown tinge was rust from old pipes. After the brief shower, I toweled off with something that felt more like eighty-grit sandpaper than cotton and moved to the AC unit. I turned the dial and cranked that puppy all the way up. It made a bubbling sound and then sputtered out decently cool air. The only problem was I couldn’t feel the air if I was standing more than eight inches away.

  Well, at least I didn’t have to listen to Slim brag about the things he had gotten away with. Part of me had wondered several times if I could wear a wire and cut my processing short by trading dirt on Slim. Contrary to popular culture, I had no problem snitching on a druggie, especially one that dealt to kids. Unfortunately, that opportunity never presented itself. Let’s just say that Slim had a couple tin stars on his side at the county jail house as well. Not all of them of course, but it was enough of a deterrent to keep my mouth shut. Besides, I’m not sure they would have given me a favorable deal anyhow. I wasn’t exactly an honored guest, what with being accused of hacking my old man down with a sword in an alleyway and all. Texans are big on family. Blood is thicker than water down there. Suspected patricide had actually put me lower down the list than Slim when it came to how valuable a person’s life was inside the jail.

  But, that was all behind me now. I jumped onto the bed. It creaked and groaned. Not sure what I was hoping for, but a plush deluxe mattress this was not. I tried to lay down and get comfortable, but my cell bed had more firmness to it than this thing, and, believe it or not, the mattress in my cell smelled better than this one too.

  I got up and put my pants on, tossed my towel onto the bathroom floor. No need to clean up after myself in this place. I poured a bowl of cereal and flipped through the channels. The TV was so old I actually had to turn a dial to choose between one of the twelve channels. Aside from an old local news station, everything else was just static. Shoot, even the jail didn’t use analog TVs anymore. A part of me thought about asking for my cell back for one more night, not the serious part of me, mind you, but the thought did cross my mind.

  I made do with the granular picture of some suited up weather man standing in front of his little weather board and pointing at images I assumed were little yellow suns. It was hard to tell with the picture quality, but he was talking about lows in the 80’s for the next day and no chance of precipitation. As it switched from weather to local high school sports, I was nearly half-way done with my cereal.

  That was when my door opened.

  Two men walked in and smiled. One was wearing slim jeans and a pair of stiff, tan cowboy boots. The other was wearing carpenter jeans and a checkered button-up shirt.

  I jumped up from the bed and glanced at the door. I was certain I had locked it before taking a shower. “This room is occupied,” I said, hoping that maybe the manager had overbooked the room.

  “Joshua Mills?” one of them asked.

  The man with the button-up shirt pulled a glock from his back pocket and started screwing a silencer into the barrel.

  “Whoa, what is this?”

  “Calm down, we’re from the government, and we’re here to help,” the man in slim jeans said.

  Really, he was going with that line?

  “We aren’t here to hurt you.”

  “Fooled me,” I said as I looked to the pistol.

  “Here, let me show you my badge.” The man in slim jeans pulled out a black wallet and opened up to show a shiny badge with the number four emblazoned on it and an ID card below in a separate section of the wallet.

  “I haven’t done anything,” I said, still not entirely sure they were real agents.

  The guy with the gun gently closed and locked the door behind him. He then moved to lean against the wall, pointing his gun down and resting his left hand over his right wrist as if this was nothing more than a casual conversation.

  “If you’re feds, shouldn’t you be wearing suits?” I asked as I took a step back.

  “Suits in a place like this would draw attention,” the man in slim jeans said. “Now, jeans and a pair of cowboy boots are about as Texan as a man can get.”

  “Except you don’t have an accent,” I noted.

  “Pitch it,” the man with the gun said.

  “Pitch what?” I asked, glancing to the gun and making sure he wasn’t preparing to shoot me. I had had guns pulled on me before, but never by someone pretending to be a law enforcement officer.

  “We know what really happened in that alley,” the man in slim jeans said.

  “I didn’t kill my father,” I said quickly.

  The man smiled and shook his head. “No, you didn’t. I know that, and so does Briggs here.”

  “Don’t give him my name,” Briggs said. “It makes it more personal.”

  The other man shrugged. “I’m Jones. Special Agent Jones from Section Four.”

  This was either some deranged idiot’s idea of a fun time, or I was about to get merced by these two clowns. I kept running through the past eight months, trying to think of any inmate that I might have offended badly enough to warrant this. I couldn’t come up with anyone.

  “You know, you were at the best steak house in Dallas, fine eating.”

  “What does this have to do with anything?” I said.

  “Cameras, my friend, cameras. Don’t you think it odd that a fine restaurant wouldn’t have any cameras pointed in the alleyway?”

  “The DA said the cameras went out due to a power surge right after we entered the alley. They were there, they just hadn’t been working.”

  “On the contrary,” Jones said as he pulled out his phone. He typed a few keys and then turned the screen to face me. There, in jerky black and white, I saw me and my father enter the alley. I had seen this part before. I had tried to use it to show that I was unarmed going into the alley. The tape was going to die in 3…2…1…

  But it didn’t. There was a bright flare, followed a moment later by another. My mouth dropped open and my cereal fell to the floor. On this man’s phone was the proof that I hadn’t killed my father. It showed the wolf creature, and then it showed me tackling it and then disappearing. It then showed me remerging just before the masked man killed my father. I then tangled with the m
asked man.

  “I think he gets the point,” Briggs said.

  “Quite right,” Jones replied as he turned the screen off.

  “You knew?” I was both relieved and infuriated at the same time. “How could you let me rot in there and go through all of that?!” I started toward Jones, but Briggs whipped his pistol up and aimed it at me faster than I could blink.

  “Careful, boy, I wouldn’t mind making a mess of your brains,” Briggs said. From his cold tone and the wicked sneer on his face, I knew he wasn’t bluffing.

  “The simple answer is this, we had to know what kind of person you were. We wanted to see if you would talk about the real experience or not.”

  “Okay,” I said, realizing that they must be feds if they had the footage and had managed to erase it from existence elsewhere. “Why?”

  “Well, Section Four is a very secret organization. In the plainest terms, we don’t exist. The FBI doesn’t know about us, the CIA wishes they were us. We deal with incidents like the one you encountered in the alley.”

  “We clean up the messes left behind too,” Briggs said, still pointing his pistol at my face.

  I didn’t like him.

  “Had you tried to tell the authorities, we would have worked within the system to have you transferred to Rusk State Hospital; they handle the criminally insane. Then, we would have had this very same meeting with you, except we’d be dressed in lab coats and you’d be strapped to a table and hooked up to a few powerful electrical devices,” Jones said.

  “So the gun is like the table and the straps then?” I asked.

  “Except I get more fun this way,” Briggs put in.

  Jones nodded. “I am rather impressed that you didn’t tell the authorities about the encounter. It shows discretion, and it shows that you can still think while under pressure. Not to mention the fact that you survived the encounter in the first place; that is usually enough to warrant an interview.”

  “Interview? You make it sound like a job offer,” I said sarcastically.

  “It is,” Jones said flatly. He smiled briefly and then motioned toward the bed. “Have a seat.”

  “I’d rather stand,” I said. They had the gun, but it didn’t mean I had to be totally compliant.

  “He said sit,” Briggs said with a twitch of his gun toward the bed.

  “It’s fine, Briggs,” Jones said. He then folded his arms and looked me dead in the eye. “Listen, we’re here to offer you a spot with Section Four. Normally we hire through other channels, but when we get ahold of footage that shows the tenacity you displayed, we tend to make exceptions.”

  “And so you barge in on me with weapons drawn and want me to believe we’re gonna be friends?” I asked. “Seems far-fetched, and mind you I lived through the events on that tape, so I think I know what a ridiculous story looks like.”

  “Briggs, put the piece away,” Jones said.

  Briggs frowned and was slow to comply, but he did put the weapon into the back of his waist band, though I noticed he didn’t bother to remove the silencer.

  “I get it, believe me, I do. I actually joined Section Four under similar circumstances. A portal opened up and one of those wolf creatures came through and attacked my boss. Killed him in the blink of an eye. I lived thanks to my .44.” Jones smiled. “It was not easy trying to come up with a story that explained the bullet holes in the wall and my boss’ body on the ground. I went to jail too. Section Four showed up the day after my release and offered me the same thing I am offering you. It’s a good gig, great benefits, good pay, and you get to play with some amazing toys. Best of all, we investigate and mitigate the kinds of incidents that upended your life.”

  “So, what? If I say yes, is there some kind of training involved?”

  Jones nodded. “We have a facility where we train new hires. Those who pass become agents, those who fail the training become administrative staff. It’s a win-win either way.”

  “And if I say no, do you pull out a little pen and flash away my memory?”

  “We aren’t the men in black,” Briggs said dryly.

  “No, that’s the downside,” Jones said with a nod. “Memory wipes are horribly expensive. Besides that, they are never absolute. There’s always the chance of the subject regaining their lost memories, and I’m sure you understand why we can’t have people running around talking about monsters and Section Four and all of that.”

  “So what then, I sign a document of some kind and swear myself to secrecy?” I asked.

  Jones shook his head. “In the rare case that a civilian survives an encounter similar to yours and wants to keep to themselves, that usually works. However, yours is a …special case. You see, the individual hunting you is part of a larger group that we are working against. It seems they have taken a special interest in you, and your father. Frankly, to explain it all now would be giving you access to information that is classified at such a level that the president doesn’t have routine access to it, so you’ll forgive me if I say you just have to trust me on this. To put it in terms that you can understand, the encounter you had is likely the first of many. They want you dead. So, either you work with us and we see if we can put the puzzle pieces together and stop them, or, we kill you to avoid future incidents like Dallas where more lives are lost in the cross-fire.

  “I’m sorry, what was that?” I asked.

  Jones sighed. “If you say no, then Briggs will kill you. I’m not going to sugar-coat it. We’ll make it look like a suicide, or some sort of armed robbery gone wrong, but you’ll be just as dead either way. Believe me, that isn’t the option I want you to take.”

  “You’d shoot me right here, in a motel room?”

  “Rather naïve question,” Briggs said as he reached for his pistol.

  “Don’t say no,” Jones said. “Come with us. Try it out, you’ll like it. What else have you got to live for anyway? Your wife left you, you’ll never see your kid again. This could be your fresh start.”

  He wasn’t wrong. The idea of having a job offer was certainly more tempting than discovering whether I would hear the pistol report before the bullet struck my brain. Still, none of it sat well with me. The idea that someday I could be Briggs or Jones, barging in on some poor guy in a motel who barely had escaped a death penalty for a murder he had tried to stop, was not something that I could swallow. On top of that, the way he tried to use my family as leverage sickened me.

  “You’ll have to shoot me then,” I said. The words flew out of my mouth before I fully realized what I was saying. I had always been like that. Once I was sure I was on the right side of an argument, it had never mattered to me if I lost, so long as I stood up for what I believed in. Right now, I was very much against the manipulation and abuse of power these two had already displayed and admitted to.

  “Would it help if we discussed the pay?” Jones asked. “I do have some power to get you a slightly higher starting salary, seeing as how you already killed a—”

  “No,” I said sternly. “All I want is to pick up what’s left and forget any of this ever happened.

  “You can’t forget this,” Jones said. “It doesn’t work like that! These are the things of nightmares. These are the beings that we base our horror movies and camp fire tales on. They have been around as long as we have, and they are not going anywhere anytime soon unless we make them leave.”

  “They tried to kill me, you are threatening to finish what they started. I don’t see much difference,” I said.

  Briggs smiled and cracked his neck. “Can I do it yet?” he asked.

  “No!” Jones yelled. He put a frustrated hand to his head. “Come on, Mr. Mills, think this through. We are the good guys here. We fight the monsters and keep people safe. You can join our team. What’s not to like about that?”

  “Can you promise I won’t be pointing a gun at an innocent man five or ten years from now, just like Briggs?”

  Jones glanced to Briggs and then back to me. “Sometimes a bit of coercion is
necessary. I get that you’re upset, but if you like, you can volunteer for an admin position. You wouldn’t even carry a gun doing that line of work, but you’d still be helping Section Four with its mission.”

  “And I would be supporting other thugs like Briggs,” I argued.

  “All right, I’m doing it now.”

  “Briggs, I said no!” Jones yelled.

  Fists pounded on the wall from the next room over.

  “Shut up in there!” someone called out.

  “Briggs,” Jones said in a calm, yet deadly voice. “We’ve already woken the neighbors, let’s just simmer a bit.”

  Briggs shrugged. “I could do them too,” he said casually. Just like with the threat against me, I could tell he meant it. The man had no soul.

  “I said no.” I folded my arms for emphasis. Certainly I was anything but intimidating to either agent, standing there shirtless with a spilled bowl of cereal at my feet in a rat-dump motel room.

  The door opened again and someone came in with a very exuberant, “Why helloooo Briggs and Jones!”

  Briggs pulled the pistol up, and Jones reached to his waistband as he turned around. As I got a better view, I could see that Jones was holding a snub-nose .38. My grandfather had one of those.

  “What do you want, Hank? This is official business,” Jones growled.

  Hank? As in the man with the bent business card? I craned around to see and sure enough, it was the same man. He smiled and winked as he waved at me. He kicked the door wide open and then stuck his foot there to keep it open. Briggs stepped closer to the wall and Jones put his .38 back in his pancake holster.

  “I came to say hello to my new friend here, and make sure you weren’t going to cause him any trouble.”

  “Are you with them?” I asked.

  Hank shook his head. Jones tried to close the door, but Hank leaned on it and winked at Jones. “Door stays open, Jones, and I have three cameras pointed at you right now.”

  “One maybe,” Briggs said. “We can take care of one camera.”