After the Fall

by Janean Worth

  Chapter Two

  Kara scuttled from shadow to shadow, trying to make her way to the Gate without being seen. The Gate would close at dusk to keep the beasts at bay during the night, and with dusk being only moments away, if she didn’t make it out by then, she would be trapped inside until morning. Morning would be too late to make her escape. As soon as the Enforcers found her missing when they came to collect their new Stray for her servitude in the House, they would search GateWide until she was found. She’d be captured and taken to the House before first light, and she knew that she would pay dearly for her attempt at escape if that happened. Her mother had told her of the punishment enacted upon Strays who tried to escape their forced service to the House.

  The activity in the normally busy streets was waning as dusk approached. With each minute that passed, the crowds thinned and the chances of making her escape from the settlement unnoticed grew tenuous.

  She darted around a small two-wheeled cart that held a pile of hand woven rugs, crouching in its shadow for a moment while she eyed the Enforcer at the Gate.

  From a conversation that she’d overheard while she had been cleaning ­­­­­ Mrs. Malmont’s house earlier in the day, she knew that Trion was on guard duty at the exit tonight, which was a lucky break for her. Everyone in GateWide knew that Trion was one of the laziest Enforcers, which is why he often got stuck guarding the exit side of the Gate. No one ever wanted to leave the safety of the walls that surrounded GateWide to venture into the endless wilderness that was all that there was outside the Gate since the Fall – at least not without an armed party of Enforcers to accompany them for protection - which made guarding the exit the perfect job for one who was as lazy as Trion.

  Kara hoped that he would be feeling particularly lazy today. She needed to be able to slip out of the Gate without drawing attention to herself, and if the guard at the Gate remained alert, she’d never be able to do that.

  She crouched behind the cart until the muscles in her legs began to ache, watching Trion as dusk drew nearer and nearer. When the man’s eyelids began to droop as he leaned against the huge timbers that supported the wall, she darted from her hiding place and headed for the Gate. Her lengthening shadow chased her, evidence that dusk was mere minutes away. She ran as fast as her legs could carry her, the small rucksack of the few possessions she’d been able to rescue from her cottage bumping against her back. She reached up and pulled the strap tight against her body, unwilling to chance that Trion would hear the sack’s contents bouncing around as she approached.

  She kept an eye on Trion as she sprinted across the hard-packed earthen road that led to the unknown outside the safe walls of GateWide. Thankfully, the man was paying attention only to the insides of his eyelids, and she was able to run out of the Gate without him sounding an alarm.

  Breathing hard as she rushed from the Gate, she leapt off of the hard packed road into the tall wild growth of grasses and weeds that bordered both sides and then ran adjacent to the massive wall that surrounded GateWide, keeping close to the huge structure to prevent the sentries atop the wall from seeing her. The sentries sat in their watchtowers or walked along the top of the wall randomly. There hadn’t been an attack against GateWide by man or beast in all the years that Kara had lived, but the Sovereign still insisted that there be sentries to watch.

  When Kara had run a few meters from the Gate, she hunched against the massive stone-and-timber wall and tried to catch her breath as she waited for full darkness. It would be harder for the Enforcers to see her after dark, and she wanted no one to notice as she fled into the wilderness.

  She would much rather face the mutated beasts that dwelled there in the wilderness than to face life in the House. She could clearly remember many of the stories that her mother had told to her, and those stories were frightening enough to make her take her chances in the wilderness.

  Her breathing quickly slowed back to normal tempo, and as she waited for the sun to finish its descent past the horizon, she leaned against the wall and tried not to let her mind retrace the events of the day. It was better to think about the future, about what was yet to come and the things she would have to do to survive, than to allow herself to dwell on the events of the past, which she could not change. She knew that. But still, the horrific events of the day kept replaying themselves over and over in her mind, flashing past like a set of pictures in a book when the pages were thumbed through very quickly.

  The fear on Maude’s face. Her own pounding heart as her mother’s friend had delivered the news. The ache that had pounded behind her eyes as she’d longed to wail and cry and mourn the loss of her mother. Imaginings of her mother’s last few grisly moments. The last long look she’d had of their shared cottage before she’d darted out the door for the final time. The final, bittersweet glimpse she’d had of her mother when they’d parted ways that morning to go to their separate duties.

  Now, as Kara stood against the wall, the last light from the setting sun glimmered at the horizon and winked out, leaving the world covered in rapidly darkening shadow. Just meters away, she heard the sound of the massive Gate being closed, shutting out the dangers that lurked in the night. The enormous timbers used to bar the Gate thumped into place with a finality that had Kara gritting her teeth against the fear that rose in her throat. She was well and truly alone. Outside the Gate. And now, even if she changed her mind and asked to be readmitted, they would not open the Gate to let her back in until morning. If the beasts came to attack her while she stood at the entrance and screamed, they would still not open the massive portal to her. The Sovereign’s rules were absolute. Once the Gate closed at dusk, it did not open again until dawn.

  Kara pushed back the fear that knotted her stomach and wiped away the tears that thoughts of her mother’s death had caused. She looked out into the darkness, across the flat expanse of wild grasses and tall weeds, toward the line of trees that grew several miles away in the distance. And then she did the unthinkable. She stepped away from safety of the wall and ran toward the wilderness.