Beyond the Gates

by Jason D. Morrow

  “In which case, I exterminate the camp.” He says the words like this is a casual conversation between friends. Like we’re discussing the rules to a game.

  “I suppose not everyone has thought of that scenario,” I say slowly. “I guess there is some hope that we will be set free instead of exterminated.”

  “I don’t see that happening,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “We can’t risk prisoners here getting out into the real world beyond the Containment Zone. If people found out what we were doing here…” He shakes his head. “And Vulture Hill isn’t even as bad as some of the other prisons. We sort the greyskins. Concord makes them! Dark stuff.”

  “Yes…dark…” It is unnerving how open Black is being with me. Knowing that he has just killed someone, what is to stop him from killing me? All he has to do is say a little more than he is comfortable allowing outside his office door and he will pull out his gun and shoot me between the eyes.

  “Well, more to the point, I’ve never heard of someone taking care of themselves as you did against the twins. I’m impressed.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I need someone I can trust,” he says. “I need someone on the inside reporting to me. I need to know what the people of the prison are talking about. I need to know who’s planning an escape and who’s planning to kill someone. That kind of thing.”

  “And you want me to be that person?”

  “I think so. Are you trustworthy?”

  “No one knows me. How would I be able to tell you anything if I don’t have conversations with anyone?”

  “Your cellmate is Rusty,” he says. “Rusty has friends. Make his friends your friends.”

  I’m not so sure that Rusty has any friends other than me. Sure, there are people he talks to, but I’m the only one he has confided in that I know of.

  “But it’s not just about making friends and reporting them,” he says. “It’s about being among them. Getting the view of prisoners from every angle.”

  “And how could I do that?”

  “You become the janitor,” he says. “A new job. Away from sorting. Away from the greyskins. You mop. You clean. You question people. You find those tunnels underneath the prison.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “but what am I supposed to get out of this? Are you assuring me that I won’t be killed?”

  “I don’t understand the question.”

  Is the man so dense that he can’t fathom me getting something out of the deal? Protection? A shorter sentence? Security? Assurances?

  “I just want to know what the benefits of doing this would be,” I ask, trying to be as diplomatic as I can.

  The pool of blood now surround the bottom of my shoe, soaking into the fabric.

  “Well, for starters, you don’t have to work in sorting. I know it can be stressful. Other than that, you get to feed me information. You and I form a relationship. I don’t tend to kill people I like. I usually stick up for them.”

  “Yet, in the end, we’re all dead.”

  “In the end, we’re all dead, Liam. What’s the difference if you die in a year or two or if you die tomorrow? Are you hoping to accomplish something? Are you planning an escape?”

  I want to pound the man for his idiocy. That, or his arrogance, I’m not sure.

  “Of course not,” I say. “I just…”

  “You don’t want to die.”

  That’s not what I was going to say. “Yes.”

  “Well, with this arrangement, we can delay your extermination for a long time. Provided you don’t start wasting my time.”

  “Why me?” I ask. “What made you want me to do this? You could have chosen any number of people.”

  “Well, for starters you’ve only been here a month. The longer someone stays here, the less likely I am to get reliable information. The best recruits for a job like this are fresh ones. Of course, I’ve got a few old ones in the camp.”

  “More people are doing this?” I ask.

  “More than you’d think,” he answers. “It’s a great benefit to me. But you rise above the rest. You know the kind of people we don’t need in here.”

  “If you don’t want the twins here, why didn’t you just kill them?”

  “They have always been an added element of fear,” he says. “They make people feel uncomfortable. When you’ve got enemies all around you, some wearing uniforms, others not, you’re a lot less likely to succeed in trying to escape. The more enemies we can create against each other in here, the better it is for me.”

  I think about his words for a moment and let the offer hang in the air. On the one hand, my life within these bars will be easier so long as no one finds out what I’m doing. On the other hand, I will have to report to Warden Black all the time and be pressured to feed him information regularly, whether I have any or not.

  “What kind of access would I have?” I ask. “I can’t just get information without being allowed to go all over the camp.”

  “Well, that’s the idea,” he says. “I would grant you access to the entire camp. You clean what needs to be cleaned. You listen where you can. You’re more of a spy than a janitor.”

  If he’s saying what I think he’s saying, that means I will have access to the women’s part of the prison, which also means I will be able to see Sky. I could drop her messages. We would be able to communicate. I would also be able to spot weaknesses within the camp, paving the way for our escape. Apart from a couple of downsides, Warden Black has just handed me my ticket out of here if I can play my cards right.

  “If you don’t want to do it…”

  “I’ll do it,” I say, cutting him off. “I think it could be dangerous, but I will do it. If anything it will get me out of sorting.”

  He shrugs. “That’s what I thought. I’ll have everything arranged for you. Davis will instruct you tomorrow morning.”

  He waves me off, and I stand to leave, my left shoe squishing in the blood on the ground.

  “We have an important relationship forming,” he says. “You can either ruin it, or you can grow it. The more it grows, the longer you live, you see?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  He leans forward and pulls at a drawer in his desk. He produces a small pad of paper and a pencil then scoots it toward me. “If you violate my trust, I will end you. You think the execution of the man in the cage was bad? I’ll have you skinned alive in front of the camp and let the greyskins feast on your entrails.”

  I don’t say anything. There is nothing to say to something like that. Particularly because I believe him wholeheartedly.

  “Take notes,” he says. “If anyone asks you why you have paper and a pencil, you tell them you're keeping track of what you’ve cleaned.”

  “If someone takes this from me I’m dead.”

  He nods and smiles. “Best to keep it hidden away then.”

  After leaving Warden Black’s office, the first question that comes to my mind is, who was that woman next to my daughter, and what conversation did she have with him about me?

  I have never seen the woman. I certainly don’t know her. Perhaps it had been Warden Black who had talked to her previously about my run-in with the twins. Yes, that had to be it. Maybe she’s a rat, too.

  When I leave the office, I look at Hutch who wears a wide grin. “Who was that woman with the little girl, Hutch?”

  “They call her Nine,” Hutch says. “She's the girl’s cellmate. Nine has been here since the beginning.”

  “Is she friendly?” I ask.

  “Never been mean to me,” he answers.

  I nod, thinking about it. He wouldn't know why Nine had been talking to Warden Black about me. He's barely a guard—a dog to bark whenever someone is coming.

  “Thanks, Hutch.”

  “See you!” he says, his grin never fading.

  I have been given my opportunity to work on an escape, but I can’t rush it now. Now, I have to be more careful than ever. Black will be watching me. More than that, he will be
looking for information, which will be my most challenging hurdle.

  Mostly, I want to see Sky again. I want to talk to her. To comfort her. I want to tell her that we might actually find a way out of here. But I won’t tell her that. At least, I won’t tell her about my new position with Warden Black. The more information she has, the more danger she will be in.

  Sky is the one who keeps me going. She is the source of my excitement. The cause of my sorrow. She is the only reason I have to push forward—the only reason I care anything about getting the cure out to the world.

  If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t have finished working on the cure. If it weren’t for the cure, I would have lost her—if not the first time, the second.

  As I walk back to the cell with two guards walking closely behind me, I think about the day the cure saved her life. The same day I learned of my power to suppress pain.

  The day my life changed forever.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Liam

  ONE YEAR AGO

  Things had changed since Sarah’s death. I had lost my motivation for working on the cure. But it was Sky who persuaded me to start back.

  “You’re the only person who can do it,” she told me about a month after Sarah had passed. “You’re the only one who has even come close.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Sure, I do,” I say. “What are the chances that someone alive today had the education you’ve had? The resources you’ve had? The drive? You’re the only one this close to the cure. You can’t give up.”

  Those words were not enough for me, but then one day she changed tactics.

  “What if I’m bitten? How would you feel then? Will you have wished you kept going or will you be glad you’ve stopped?”

  Sarah and I had always made it a point to teach Skylar as best we could. We schooled her with all the books we could find and the knowledge we stored in our own brains. But I still always felt surprised how much it felt like I was talking to an adult when I held conversations with her. It was easy to forget that Skylar was just a child sometimes. I hadn’t met a lot of children over the years, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Skylar was the brightest.

  Her argument pierced me in the heart. I couldn’t imagine losing both her and Sarah. If I lost Sky, there would be no point to keep going. I had little interest in taking care of myself but for the fact that I had to take care of my daughter.

  The next day I was back to work, though things were going to be different this time. Sky helped me make a new outbuilding where we’d keep the test greyskins (only one at a time). I couldn’t bear the thought of letting one of those monsters back into my house. At least if it got out, there would be a chance it would just wander off into the woods.

  Progress was slow, but I continued. I would inject a greyskin with a new version of the cure. Sometimes, depending on the potency, the greyskin would come near to death. Sometimes it wouldn’t be affected.

  It took me almost a year before I came up with a medicine that killed a greyskin for good. Though I didn’t have a chance for trials on a regular person, I knew I had something powerful enough to destroy the virus within the host completely. The only problem was, I didn’t know if the injection would also be so strong that it would kill the host as well. I didn’t exactly have people lining up at my door who had been scratched or bitten by a greyskin, and it would do no good to try the medicine on someone who wasn’t infected. All I would find out in that scenario was if it killed them or didn’t kill them—not enough useful information.

  I stopped working once I knew I could go no further. There were no greyskins on our property, and Skylar and I actually found time to spend with each other. Of course, being carefree didn’t mean we were reckless. We were still aware of our surroundings. We only traveled when we needed to, and we never left each other’s side.

  It was time for a supply run when the incident happened. I should have never given in. Sky was a smart girl, but she was still a child and full of curiosity. I wanted to foster that personality trait, but I let my guard down.

  Supply runs always raised my blood pressure, but we were generally safe. The journey there would take a full day, and we would spend the night with friends. For the trip, I would take my hatchet and gun, and I would give Sky a large knife to carry with her. She knew the rules—she was instructed to run as quickly and as far away as possible should I be taken down by a greyskin. But if she were to find one clawing at her and she was cornered somehow, at least she would have something to jab into its brain.

  Supply runs were usually uneventful. Gone were the days of foraging through abandoned houses looking for canned goods. Forty years in, there was none of that left. If one was truly desperate, they might go into a home in hopes of finding some food, but it was unlikely unless the person still lived there.

  Survivors were usually a part of towns or villages. People like us, those who lived spread out in the district, often grew their own food and hunted. Skylar and I were productive farmers and decent hunters, though we often preferred trapping to tracking. Naturally, we lived off a lot of rabbit and squirrel. Our winters consisted almost exclusively of protein from scrawny rodents. Our summers, however, were full of the good stuff like tomatoes, peppers, and squash. I got those seeds in the previous summer’s supply run.

  This year, however, we were on the lookout for tools, and if there were some extra seeds, we might see what we could get. Food was expensive.

  There was a small village called Fairview at the edge of our district that often carried supplies. Sometimes they would have what we needed. Sometimes they wouldn’t. But they usually made fair deals. No one in the district had money to use, and if they did the people of Fairview wouldn’t have taken it. The only way they procured supplies at all was a bartering system.

  Skylar and I looked through the house for some things we could trade with. We brought along a couple of knives I had made as well as a few kitchen items we rarely used.

  This run wasn’t essential, but we’d made plenty of supply runs that weren’t essential. Sometimes we would just go to talk with people we had met. There was a girl there about Skylar’s age named Bonnie, and the two of them enjoyed playing together.

  For the past month or so, Skylar had been continuously asking about the Containment Zone gate.

  “What is it?”

  “How does it work?”

  “Why do they have it?”

  “Who are they keeping out? Or in?”

  “Is it to keep out the greyskins?”

  I never had a good answer to any of her questions. I had to speculate on most of them, but I was straight with her when I could be.

  “I think they are afraid of more greyskins getting out into the rest of the world,” I had told her.

  “But they’re locking us up with them?”

  “For now, at least. But we aren’t in danger.” I didn’t think we were. It was true that there were a lot of greyskins within the Containment Zone. I had heard rumors that there were districts and zones where people almost never saw greyskin herds roaming around. Weekly sightings weren’t uncommon for us. For most of us, it was assumed the rest of the world lived as we did, but the implementation of the Containment Zone seemed to have repaired everyone’s perception of the situation.

  Since that meeting more than a year before, it was all anyone ever talked about. There was no wonder a curious mind like Skylar’s would be pelting me with questions about the gate. I had never taken her there, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

  “I don’t understand what’s wrong with taking a look at it,” she said as we walked. “It’s just a gate.”

  “If it’s just a gate, why do you want to look at it so badly?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Because everyone talks about it. Last time we went on a run Bonnie told me she’d even seen it.”

  “Really?” Skylar wasn’t one to tell lies, but I seriously doubted Bonnie’s parents would have taken her to the gate.
<
br />   “Yep,” she said with excitement. “Said it was really cool. The guns are huge. The computer terminal is surrounded by bulletproof glass. I just want to see it.”

  I weighed the pros and cons in my mind. On the one hand, I didn’t want Skylar to dwell on the gate so much. There was no leaving the Containment Zone, and the gates were dangerous. On the other hand, showing her the gate would relieve some of that curiosity that burned in her mind. I didn’t hate the idea of getting a good look at it myself. Curiosity didn’t escape me, but I thought I already knew what we would find: large guns and the destruction of hope.

  The two of us were not actively planning to leave the Containment Zone, but things had gotten worse. News around the district spoke of devastatingly large herds that even some of the villages couldn’t ward off. There had been talk of a large village of roughly 2,000 people about fifty miles away that had been attacked. Those who weren’t completely consumed had become part of the herd. One change of the wind, one loud noise in the wrong direction, and the herd could come our way. And if we weren’t prepared to hide or run, we would be dead.

  It was the same all over the world, I was sure, but it was much worse here. That was why there was a Containment Zone. Better to keep large numbers of greyskins in one area to die off than to try and kill them all. Unfortunately, that meant we had to die off with them.

  There’s a spring in Sky’s step when I tell her we can go by the gate to have a look. “But only for just a second,” I said, “and we can’t get too close.”

  “That’s fine!” she said, smiling.

  Perhaps if anything she was simply looking for something to brag about to Bonnie, or at least to be able to share the experience. It took us about an hour to reach it. The metal glinted off of the side of the computer terminal from the hot sun. No trees surrounded it. The area leading up to it was barren and flat.

  The gate rested in front of a small mountain pass, though some might just call it a large mound of rocks. The area was mostly dirt, giving it the look of a desert. The red rocks were brown and dull. The pass was a narrow walkway, barely wide enough for three people to walk side-by-side. The gate stood in front of the entrance to the pass, its metal bars standing out against the rock.