Gatekeepers

by Sam Ferguson

  “Really?” I blurted out before I thought about it.

  Hank nodded.

  “I thought he was just trying to scare us,” I said under my breath, now realizing how badly that particular event might have gone.

  “The enforcer pulled a knife on Mills, Mills broke his arm, twisted it, and then took the knife. He then broke the man’s jaw with a knockout punch.”

  Mack whistled again. “I don’t think that’s what the bible means when it says turn the other cheek,” he said with a wink.

  “Fourth fight was on public transport. Three drunks tried to attack a marshrootka driver.”

  “A what?” Marcus asked.

  “It’s like a bus, but it’s a large van that you can get on or off anywhere along a specified route,” Katya explained.

  “Anyway, Mills threw two of the drunks out of the sliding door while it was moving when the driver shouted for help. The third nearly pushed Mills out, but Mills was able to get back in and subdue the final assailant.”

  “Why did they attack the driver?” Marcus asked.

  I shrugged. “They were fine for the first ten minutes, then they just went off.”

  “Crazy Russians,” Dan said as he looked at Katya. The woman just made a kissy face back at him.

  “Mills married two years after he returned from his mission. Went to join the Air Force, got into ROTC, and then quit after the first year. Tried to get into the Marines as a fighter pilot, but then decided not to sign the papers when he was offered a slot at OCS.

  “See,” Flint said. “I guarantee he’ll be gone in three weeks. He’s a quitter.”

  Hank smiled and shrugged. “His latest fight was with a bull. He was passing by a farm in rural Utah and saw a bull break free from its pen. It then charged and attacked a woman. Mills stopped his car, jumped the fence, and fought the bull with his bare hands until the woman escaped.”

  “Why not just ram it with your car?” Dan asked.

  “Ditch was too deep,” I replied. “My car would’ve gotten stuck.” I then turned to Hank. “You’re missing one,” I said quickly. “I tried to join the army before my mission.”

  Hank nodded. “I left it out on purpose. I was going to bring it up last, for Flint’s benefit.” Hank looked directly at Flint and then said, “Mr. Mills was offered a training slot at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey California. More than that, he had a hefty sign on bonus and his pick of several choice bases.”

  “But he didn’t sign because he can’t commit,” Flint said. “Isn’t that right?”

  I had no idea what was up this guy’s backside, but I had a big part of me wondering if now might be a good time to forget about my rule of not starting fights. Trying to keep my cool, I just shook my head. “I didn’t follow through because the recruiter had promised me a waiver that guaranteed I would be allowed to go on my mission for my church. When the day came to sign all the papers, he told me he didn’t have that one. He tried to get me to sign the papers without it, so I walked out. I can commit, I just have to believe in the cause.”

  “Fine, still doesn’t explain the Air Force or Marines,” Flint said.

  “After getting into the ROTC program, I discovered that a pilot slot wasn’t guaranteed in the Air Force. Worse than that, the competitions weren’t entirely skill based. There was a lot of politics involved, and some luck. So I left the program after hearing that Marines offered a guaranteed aviation contract. Better, their system was skills based. If I passed the tests and did better than others, I could choose my aircraft.”

  “So why’d you bail then?” Flint pressed.

  “I was married by then,” I said. An aviation contract with the Marines was guaranteed to send me away from home for eight to twelve months at a stretch even if I wasn’t called to the front lines. Then, I’d get a couple months home and then go back out again. My wife and I were pregnant, and I didn’t want to leave my family behind. So again, it was for a bigger commitment.”

  “Fat lot of good that did you,” Flint said. “If you’re so upstanding, then why’d your wife dump your sorry can?”

  That took the wind out of me. I knew everyone could see the pain stamped across my face, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. It was a lot like getting sucker-punched from the side.

  “That’s enough,” Hank shouted. “That’s below the belt, even for you, Flint.”

  There was a tangible silence, and then Hank took a seat. “We have four teams waiting for a replacement. Mills, do you have any preference between San Antonio, Miami, London, or Budapest?”

  I looked up. “I thought I was going to stay here,” I replied.

  Hank shook his head. “I run the team here, and it’s already full. There are four positions open, and I have three other noobs that have joined us in the last couple of weeks. The four of you will fill our current vacancies.”

  “Assuming Mills doesn’t wuss out,” Flint muttered under his breath.

  I thought about Susan and my son. The likelihood of seeing them again was very, very small, so it didn’t really matter where I went. “I’ll go wherever,” I said.

  “Russian won’t be useful in Budapest,” Dan said. “Maybe we could make a lateral transfer and move someone off of the team in Moscow, send them to Budapest, and then have Mills go to Moscow.”

  Hank shook his head. “Budapest is the central and eastern European hub for us. Putting him in Budapest would allow him to use his language in some of the former soviet bloc countries.”

  Dan nodded.

  The group openly debated the assignment process for several more minutes. I was happy to stay out of the discussion though. I had just met these people, yet all of them had my entire life summed up onto a single sheet of paper sitting on the table. It was more than a little surreal. I didn’t bother paying attention as they settled in on a place to send me.

  It was just as well, looking back on it now, because I was never actually going to make it to any of the teams they had listed.

  CHAPTER 4

  I spent the night in a room that reminded me a lot of my old jail cell, except there wasn’t a window. I slept on a stiff cot and was woken up at an inhumanely early hour the next morning.

  “Wake up, sleepy head,” Katya cooed in her sultry voice. “Come on. You have lessons now.”

  “Lessons?” I asked as I rolled lazily off of the cot. I struggled to put my clothes on in the dark, and then followed her back through the room with the long table to a large metal door. She punched a series of numbers into a lock and then the sound of hissing gasses and scraping metal vibrated through the door just a moment before it opened. Inside was a small room with a projector and three desks. I sat at the desk on the far left.

  Katya closed the door behind us and the locks reengaged.

  “Today, I will tell you about those creatures you saw in the alley,” she said as she pulled a remote off of a pedestal at the back of the classroom. The whirring sound of the fans inside the projector filled the room and was followed by a bright light on the wall in front of me.

  “You already know the harbinger wolf.”

  As she spoke, an image of a wolf-man similar to the one I had fought popped up on the screen. He was hideous. Massive claws and fangs. Sitting there in that seat, I had to wonder if I had actually tangled with one of those, because my feet were already itching to run away just from the image.

  “They are very fast. Usually, they are used as scouts, or forerunners. That’s why we call them harbinger wolves,” Katya explained. “The only way to kill it is to stab it through the heart, or take its head.”

  I turned and looked at her. “The one I fought died after hitting its head on the stone, and then I broke its neck.”

  Katya shook her head. “No, that just takes him out of the fight for a bit until he can regenerate. They have amazing healing abilities.”

  “So, like a werewolf then?” I asked.

  Katya nodded. “A werewolf is a lower level creature. Harbinger wolv
es can create lycanthropes by turning a human. However, a werewolf, for all of its power, can never open a gate like a harbinger wolf can.”

  “So if that portal hadn’t closed, it would have come after me?” I said. I had hardly heard anything else she had said as I was too lost in my own realization of how close to death I had come that night in Dallas.

  “The portal closed because the harbinger wolf had gone back through. Had he not been unconscious, he would have reopened the passage with a mere thought and come through for you.”

  “Pleasant thought,” I said.

  “I should warn you, harbinger wolves don’t forget a scent. The likelihood that it will come for you at some point is pretty high.”

  “Wait? It’s going to hunt me down?”

  Katya nodded. “Probably. So, I would suggest you do well in training. Moving on.” She clicked a button and a new picture popped up. I saw something that looked like a demon. It had the right kind of horns on its head, the thick, meaty body, with fangs and wings to boot. The bottom half had a thin covering of fur, and looked like it came from a bull.

  “Minotaur,” I guessed.

  “Similar,” Katya said. “Minotaurs are the foot soldiers, and they look nearly the same, except the faces are still bull-like, rather than human. This is a greater demon known as a borelian.”

  Dang. Something like that is what had gored Mack. No wonder his lung hadn’t healed. The beast was at least four hundred pounds. It was incredible anyone could survive that kind of blow at all.

  “They can control portals. If you thought the harbinger wolf was bad, the borelian makes that look like a slightly misbehaved puppy in comparison.”

  “How do you kill it?” I asked.

  Katya smiled approvingly. “I like you, straight to the point. You kill it by putting a fifty cal through its skull and into its brain. You can try to sever the head, but unless you have a tractor mounted tree saw, you are not going to cut through its bones. Other option is to hit the heart, but this is another difference between a minotaur and a borelian. A minotaur can be shot through the heart as easily as a moose, elephant, or other large animal, which isn’t to say that it’s easy, but that it is possible. The borelian has a thick layer of bone around its heart, like a second skull. Best option is to have a pair of snipers. One goes for the brain, the other for the heart. If I am the one shooting the heart, I prefer the OSV-96.”

  “What’s that?” I asked. I knew a little about guns, but not a lot, and I had never even heard of that kind.

  “It’s Russian weapon. Very powerful, like the Browning fifty caliber BMG, but instead of a twelve point seven by ninety-nine millimeter cartridge, the OSV fires a twelve point seven by one oh eight. It will knock a borelian down at one thousand meters. The others have successfully used a Barret M-98, but sometimes even that doesn’t get through the heart bone.”

  I nodded. I had never fired one, but I had a vague conception of what a fifty caliber rifle looked like. It was not something I would want to be on the receiving end of.

  “In addition to minotaurs, the borelian can use satyrs and centaurs as foot soldiers as well. Unlike the other creatures on this list, the borelian is native to this planet. At one point, it was nearly hunted to extinction, until it joined up with other dark forces and escaped.”

  “How many are left now?” I asked.

  Katya shrugged. “Too many. The three Vikings will have a more precise count, they are the ones who keep those kinds of records.”

  She clicked the remote again and I saw a tall, gaunt man with wild hair and long fangs. He had been photographed mid-flight, jumping off of a tipping van and toward the cameraman.

  “This is a vampire. Dangerous creature with a love of violence and a hatred for humanity. The bystander who took this photo was ripped in half only a second after taking this picture. The van being tipped in the photo is a Section Four vehicle. Unlike harbinger wolves, vampires are not afraid of direct confrontation with the larger agencies. They’ll cling to the shadows as their first choice, but if you back one into a corner, they’ll be sure to take out as many as they can before they finally die.”

  She clicked the remote again.

  The humanoid in this picture gave me chills. He had a long, thick green tail, and a face much like the reptilian face I had seen on the masked assailant. He had two swords as well. He wore a fitted robe of blue silk. In front of him was a man. Behind him was a tall, open portal like the one I had seen in the alley. Through the portal I could see many dozens of the same reptile-men waiting on the other side.

  “This is a Drakkul, a fierce and deadly opponent. However, unlike vampires and borelians, they are not without honor.”

  “What honor could a creature like that have?” I asked with a shake of my head. “I watched one slice the head off of an old man who was on his knees begging for mercy.”

  “There are bad apples in every basket,” Katya said flatly. “Usually the drakkul do not fight with unarmed opponents, thinking it dishonorable.”

  “They made an exception in Dallas,” I said.

  Katya nodded. “Perhaps there was a reason. Could be that he perceived your father as a thief or some other kind of threat, an enemy without honor.”

  Thief? How could my father, a drunken con-man for all intents and purposes, ever steal something from a race that lived on another planet? Sure, he had told me about taking something, but I just assumed he stole some sort of plans to a proprietary engine. Aliens and monsters had never crossed my mind. As I sat here listening to Katya, however, it did start to make sense. It was almost funny actually. My mother had always said that his schemes would eventually get him into too much trouble with the wrong kind of people.

  Katya continued. “Either way, it is not entirely unheard of for rogue drakkul to go off on their own. If he were banished from his tribe, or forced to flee, then he would have been very desperate. You are fortunate to have survived the encounter. Drakkul are excellent swordsmen, and they do not yield. Normally, when a raiding party of drakkul comes to this planet, they open a gate and challenge the guardian.”

  “Didn’t Hank call our entire group guardians?” I asked.

  “Yes, but there is one senior guardian who is responsible for the gate. The group exists to act as a buffer, and fight off the creatures that sneak into our world, but the senior guardian is a sort of champion for our world. He or she fights one on one against enemies who initiate an open claim on our world. If our champion wins, then they leave for a period of time. If we lose, then their invading force has earned the right to assault our home.”

  “Who makes these rules?”

  “The Ancient Ones,” Katya said. “There is a race of being out there that has always been fighting for control of our universe. Some faiths refer to them as angels and demons, but they are essentially the same thing, just some fight for what we would call good, and the others fight for evil, or darkness.”

  “So angels and demons set down rules that govern duels fought whenever someone opens a portal to our world?” I asked.

  “Not just our world, but any world,” Katya corrected. “It is a vast universe out there. Most believe that the dangerous aliens will come on large spaceships, but those are cockroaches, nothing more. The dangerous ones use an ancient power to teleport directly into the world they wish to conquer. They are the ones who can topple empires with only a handful of soldiers. The other ones we see in the movies, that come in massive spaceships and invade our skies with fighter spacecraft, they are nothing. They’re more like fleas jumping from planet to planet, and are easily defended against.”

  “Defended against?” I pressed.

  “Come, you didn’t think the international space station was really orbiting the earth in some sort of peace-keeping initiative did you?” She smiled coyly and sat in the desk next to mine. “It is there to warn us of extraterrestrial threats, and to eliminate them. There is also a base on the dark side of the moon, lovingly nicknamed Fort Floyd, for obvious reaso
ns.”

  I smirked. “And all of the countries of the world just sing koombiah and get along with massive weapons overhead?”

  Katya shook her head. “You have heard of mutually assured destruction, yes?”

  I nodded. “The theory that one nuke fired will set off a chain reaction wherein all nuclear powers will launch nukes and everybody dies.”

  “The weapons up there,” she said as she pointed upward, “would burn our atmosphere in seconds. No government will call it down on an earthly enemy, as everyone would die. Humans, plants, animals, everything.”

  “What if a crazy guy gets his hands on it?”

  “Let’s hope that doesn’t happen,” Katya said with a wink. “Besides, there are safety measures. Keys, codes, all of that. Only the permanent U.N. Security Council states know of the weapons, and it would take their vote to fire it. Unanimous decision. No exceptions.”

  “You know a lot about that,” I said.

  “Don’t tell anyone else, or I will slit your throat like a goat and hang you up to make blood pudding,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was joking, so I nodded. “Now, there is something else you should know about the portals. When they open…”

  WEEEEEEE-OOOOOOO, WEEEEEEE-OOOOOO!

  I covered my ears as a siren blasted through the room. A blue light flashed, stabbing my eyes painfully.

  “Come,” Katya said as she yanked me up by the arm.

  I had to run to keep pace with her as she dashed through a series of halls. I wasn’t sure whether the alarm signaled a true emergency or some sort of training lesson. She stopped in a side chamber and disappeared for a moment, only to return three seconds later with several weapons. I realized that this wasn’t a drill when she offered me a glock. I took the handgun and looked at her as she adjusted the tactical strap on an AK-47 so that the weapon sat evenly over her back. She tucked what looked like a futuristic Uzi into a holster on her left hip and held a strange, long barreled rifle in her left hand. When I looked I saw that the stock was folded up. The thing looked like it would be well over three feet long when unfolded. I wanted to know what it was, but she motioned for me to follow and didn’t bother explaining.