Beyond the Gates

by Jason D. Morrow

  “Not any man,” he says. “But we’re not there yet. We’re not even close. Right now, what we need to do is tell each other what we know.”

  “I’m already holding up my end,” I say. “I don’t know anything.”

  “You will,” he says. “You just have to be a good observer, and you have to do it for a long time.”

  He has no idea how much I observe. I wonder if he knows how many paces it is to each exit? How many windows are on the front of the building? How many steps to the front gates?

  “I observe,” I say. “And I have nothing but time.”

  “I have a little information that will be of some use to us,” he offers. He scoots off the edge of his bed and kneels in the dark next to me. His voice is low and barely above a whisper. “Truth be told, I don’t really know how much time we really have.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I do whatever I can to talk to newcomers every time they come to the prison,” he says. “You’d be surprised how open to talking some of them are. You…pssht…” He shakes his head. “You’ve been clammed up since day one.”

  “You’ve learned something?”

  “Maybe,” he says. “This prison has been around for some years now, before the Containment Zone. I’ve heard rumors of Pass Cards…new prisoners talk sometimes. Sometimes I get word from my friend on the outside.”

  “Pass Cards?”

  “That’s right,” he says. “A ticket out of the Containment Zone. It was rumored that a number of them would be handed out to loyal Screven citizens, and to all those employed by Screven.”

  “Like soldiers, patrol officers…”

  “…and prison guards,” Rusty finished for me. “If it’s true, and the government plans to give every guard and Warden Black a Pass Card, then what do you think they are going to do with us?”

  I don’t have to say it.

  “Our bones are going to the top of Vulture Hill,” he says. “Now I don’t know if this mass exodus is happening soon or anytime at all, but I do know that Pass Cards are real.”

  “How?”

  “I have someone on the outside named Teagan. I know he’s got one.”

  “How did he get one?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.”

  “So, he could just walk right out of the Containment Zone?”

  “Maybe, but that depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether he’s got a citizen Pass Card or an official Pass Card.”

  “Official meaning soldiers, guards, etcetera.”

  “Exactly,” he says. “If it’s an official’s Pass Card, then he can’t use it without extra verification.”

  “Such as?”

  “A handprint scanner,” he says. “You ever been up close to a gate?”

  I hadn’t. I had seen one from a distance. I saw the guns and the bodies that littered the ground near the site. I knew there had to be authorization to get out of the Containment Zone, but I never knew what kind.

  “The automated guns won’t kill you if you don’t try to get through,” he says. “I’ve taken a look at the box where you insert your Pass Card to get through the gate, but I noticed there was a scanner, large enough for someone to place their entire hand over it. It’s the secondary verification meant for officials. Screven doesn’t want anybody getting through the gate impersonating a Screven official.”

  “Is this common knowledge?” I ask, feeling a bit sheepish. I hadn’t done my homework.

  “No,” he says. “In fact, most of the people in the prison don’t know about the Pass Cards at all because they were implemented recently and quietly. I don’t know how many were given out to ordinary citizens, but I’m guessing it’s not a lot. And the longer we’re in here, the less of a chance we have of stealing some Pass Cards before they all take the notion to leave the Containment Zone freely.”

  “What makes you think any of them will stay behind for any time at all?”

  “Raiders,” he says. “If Screven has given away Pass Cards to citizens, then raiders have already hunted down as many Pass Cards as possible to hold onto them. You know how valuable those things would be? It’s freedom for the person who owns one.”

  I have often wondered if Sky and I would get out of the Containment Zone once we finally left Vulture Hill. Now the possibility seemed less likely than ever. If only a small number of people received Pass Cards, there was no way I would get my hands on two. I have no plans of taking on raiders, and I can’t very well steal a Pass Card from someone who is innocent, while just holding onto the card and waiting for the right time. Even if I would stoop so low, it’s not like these people are going to advertise the fact that they have a Pass Card.

  “Here’s the thing,” Rusty continues. “I work with a guy in the prison who has confirmed everything. His name is Chet. He came in when you did. You know him?”

  I shake my head and sigh. “I’ve met him. He’s a loudmouth and half-crazy. You can’t trust him.”

  “He's a talkative man,” Rusty agrees. “Talks a little too much if you ask me. He said someone in his settlement received a Pass Card and he was dead within minutes. No one knows who got it.”

  “So, that leaves us with an official’s Pass Card,” I say. “Which requires extra verification. A useless card, essentially.”

  “The official Pass Card is a rumor,” he says. “It’s a rumor likely to be true, but few people know anything about it because if and when the guards get theirs, they are going to kill us quietly. Then they are going to leave quietly.”

  “But it doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “What’s the point of sealing us all in here? I get that they use us to harvest greyskins for their gain, but if all the soldiers and guards are gone, what’s left?”

  “Pandemonium,” he says. “I think Screven is afraid of what the Containment Zone has become. They want all the extra greyskins, but they didn’t think they would get so many. It’s a dangerous place to be, and it’s starting to get too dangerous even for the Screven soldiers to be here. They would seal off the way in or out. They would keep us in here to rot.”

  “So, why the Pass Cards? Why not just gather all the officials and leave?”

  “Without verification, imposters would leave with them. Pass Cards make the most sense for soldiers and guards.” He looks at the ground and sighs. “Pass Cards given to citizens in the Containment Zone were loyal to Screven. People who believe in what they’re doing.”

  “Surely those people don’t know what the Screven government is really up to,” I say.

  “Probably not. But those people more than likely have voiced a favorable opinion about Screven in some way or another. And Screven listens to its people.”

  It’s true. I’ve always been one to seclude my family from the villages and settlements, usually finding it safer to be on our own. But whenever I visited a settlement for a supply run, I would sometimes see Screven soldiers. They policed where they could, no doubt monitoring the citizens to report data back to Screven.

  “So, with a Pass Card, we would have to carry around someone’s hand to get through. For the fingerprints.” I shake my head. “That doesn’t help us.”

  “That’s where my friend on the outside, Teagan, comes in,” Rusty said. “He can help with that.”

  “How?”

  “Printing,” he says. “Essentially a plastic mold of the hand detailed all the way down to the prints.”

  “But if we have to find out when the guards receive the cards, if they ever receive them,” I say, “that doesn’t help anything. By the time we find out, it will be too late.”

  Rusty shrugs. “I’m just telling you everything I know and how it goes beyond Vulture Hill. If you really want to escape prison with your daughter, you’ve got to get out of the Containment Zone altogether. Only then will you really be free.”

  I know this. I’ve known this since they built the gates. I just can’t see how it’s possible. Skylar
and I can make a life for ourselves within the Containment Zone if we have to, but that’s not the case within Vulture Hill. We are here to die.

  Bright lights blind me, and doors fling open at every exit. Yelling. Lots of yelling. Rusty and I scramble to our feet as our eyes adjust to the brightness. It couldn’t be past three in the morning. Why would the guards be waking us?

  Davis is the first to come into view. “Everybody up! Get up! Get up!”

  The cell doors slide open, and we’re told to start marching toward the mess hall. I look at Rusty and I can tell he is thinking the same thing. Had the guards already gotten their Pass Cards and were they about to exterminate us? If so, there was nothing we could do.

  Still, I’m not so sure. I feel like we would have noticed some changes in behavior among the guards—an indifference toward us as they thought about their futures outside the Containment Zone.

  We start toward the mess hall, but we stop in the prison camp yard. There are a group of guards in the middle of the yard and on the other side are all the women of the prison. I scan the crowd for Sky, but can’t see her anywhere. I catch Rusty looking at me who has an eyebrow raised. I ignore him, searching the crowd for any sign of her, but it’s too dark and there are too many people.

  A tall, dark figure walks in the middle of the yard, his hair falling in every direction, his thin frame hunched and pointy. Warden Black paces back and forth until each prisoner is standing quietly along the sides of the square.

  “It’s not often I call you out in the middle of the night like this,” Black says. “I want you all to be well-rested for your workday tomorrow.” He lifts his hands in the air. “But how can you be well-rested if you’re already up all night, digging your way through your cell?”

  He motions to a guard with his right hand. The guard walks out with a man whose hands are tied behind his back, a gag stuffed into his mouth.

  “I want you all to look at this man,” Warden Black says. “This is a man who is desperate. So desperate to get out of here that he would risk a gruesome death over the simple death that we provide all of our inmates here in the end.” He looks at the man and leans in to meet his gaze. “Tell me, three-three-four-two, was it worth it?”

  Warden Black nods to someone in the crowd, and a man emerges carrying a briefcase. The man kneels next to the bound prisoner and opens the briefcase.

  “I don’t want any of you to think I don’t know the saying that goes around the camp,” Black continues. “If you’re not trying to escape, you’re suicidal. Well, let me propose another mantra: If you are trying to escape, you’re suicidal. Not one person…not one…has ever escaped this prison. Every single prisoner who walks through the entrance leaves only to be eaten by the vultures at the top of the hill.”

  The man with the briefcase holds something in his right hand. The prisoner squirms, grunts getting past the gag as three guards have to restrain him.

  Warden Black nods at the man with the briefcase. The man reaches out for the prisoner, and I can now see that he’s holding a syringe, slowly making his way toward the prisoner’s neck. The man’s needle slips into the prisoner’s veins despite his incessant struggle against the guards holding him.

  “He’s being injected with greyskin blood. Within the next twenty-four hours, he will slowly turn into one of those monsters.”

  A set of eight guards carry a large metal cage to the middle of the yard and set it down in the dirt. A door swings open on its hinges. The prisoner lets out a scream, but it’s already too late. The blood is in his system. Honestly, I am the only person in the world with the potential to help him, but only if I had the cure with me. Of course, even if that absurd notion were possible, this wouldn’t be how I played that card.

  I turn my eyes toward the ground as the guards shove the prisoner into the cage. Why is this happening to any of us? How does this help anything? There is evil in this world, and you are in hell. That is the answer.

  “Each of you will know this transformation intimately,” Warden Black continues. “For the next twenty-four hours, you will watch this man die and you will watch him turn. You do not eat. You do not sleep. You relieve yourselves where you stand. If you move before this man has turned, you will be shot. If you talk to someone next to you, you will be shot. If you fall to your knees to rest, you will be shot.”

  He points to the man in the cage who now leans against the side as his shoulders bounce up and down in response to his sobering sobs. There are several sniffs in the air from those who might know him or are quietly torn apart by this horrid display of punishment.

  This has the opposite effect that Warden Black intends. All this does is make me want to escape more than ever, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way.

  I can’t believe we will have to stand here in the summer heat for the next twenty-four hours. That alone is torture. But to have to watch a man make the transition from living to dead, to reanimating…that’s sickening.

  In every situation that happens here, my mind always drifts to Sky. What is she thinking right now? Is she scared? Does she think we should halt our attempts to escape? Should we?

  Hours go by. The heat rises with the sun. The man in the cage writhes in pain, the fever taking over him. Both sides of the yard are silent. Man and woman stare at the cage and watch as the inmate sweats, as his eyes start to turn to a shade of black.

  I look straight ahead, my mind drifting to the past, thinking about how I got here in the first place, wondering if I had never been so interested in finding a cure for the virus, would I have somehow skipped this prison? Did my insistence of isolation force my daughter and me to be where we are now? If I hadn’t desperately searched for the cure for so long, we would be free. I would still have my wife.

  Regardless of the answer, there is nothing I can do about it now. I look at the prisoner who seems to be whimpering. There is nothing any of us can do. That realization, however, doesn’t take away my regret. What were all those years of searching for a cure? It now rests in a vault, locked away, never to see the light of day. I lost my wife because of it. I might lose my daughter. If not for the cure, we might not be here at all.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Liam

  TWO YEARS AGO

  When we received word of a mandatory meeting at the Red Rock Trail, I had a feeling more bad news was on the way.

  I strapped my pistol to my belt on the right side, and on the left hung a sharp hatchet. My wife, Sarah, held hands with our nine-year-old, Skylar, as they waited in front of the house for me to leave. The meeting was in an hour, and the walk would get me there just in time.

  I had seen construction at the Red Rock Trail entrance a few days ago, and I assumed the meeting would be to explain what that was about.

  Our district was under control of a man named Gerard. I didn’t know much more about him than that. He was a Screven official, which meant we had to listen to him. Sometimes he would warn of a high concentration of greyskin herds roaming about. Sometimes he would tell us about new policies to be implemented by the Screven government.

  Those of us under Gerard’s leadership weren’t bound so much by his directions. Not like other colonies, villages, or settlements. People in this district like my family and me were spread out, too far apart to form specific communities. And none of us had ever asked for Screven to take control of the area, yet here they were. This district had been taken over by them, and they had allowed us to live here so long as we bent to their rules.

  None of us liked it. None of us wanted them to be here. But we didn’t fight it. There was no point.

  Sarah stood next to me, looking toward the horizon. The meeting was scheduled too close to sundown, but I figured it to be a strategy. No one in the district wanted to be out after dark. Greyskins weren’t always the loudest creatures, so it wasn’t unheard of to walk up on one and not realize it until it already had its teeth in your flesh.

  Gerard wanted the meeting to be short and sweet
, and the lack of light would keep him from having to answer a lot of questions. The later the meeting, I thought, the worse the news. But I couldn’t imagine what sort of news he could bring us. We barely lived under Screven’s rule. None of us really knew who was in charge. To us, Screven soldiers were just another clan of raiders looking to expand their territory, though a bit more organized in their endeavors. The best we could do was to stay out of their way.

  Sarah hated these meetings and would have preferred me to stay at home, but skipping out on the meetings was not permitted.

  “It won’t be long,” I said. I tousled Sky’s red hair and leaned in to kiss Sarah. Her soft lips pressed into mine and she set her hand at the nape of my neck.

  “I don’t like being here alone with that creature in the basement,” she said.

  I didn’t like it either, but it was safer than the three of us traveling so close to dark. If the meeting were in the middle of the day, I would have taken them with me, but I wasn’t going to risk it.

  “It’s locked away. Just keep the gun with you. There is no way it will be able to get out.” There had never been an incident before. There was no reason to think there would be one now.

  “I hate it as much as you do,” I said. “But I’m so close. I’ve got a new development that I want to try tomorrow. I think it might actually work.”

  “You’ve been saying that for years,” she said.

  I swallowed and looked toward the ground, then at Sky. “But I have to keep trying, don’t I, Sky?”

  “Yep,” she said. “You’re going to save the world.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said, my eyes meeting Sarah’s. “I’m trying my best.”

  “And you will get there,” she said. She kissed me again. “Now, go and find out the terrible news Gerard has to tell us this time.”

  My feet felt heavy and slow. I hated leaving them behind more than anything. I would have considered not going to the meeting, but that would have probably resulted in Gerard showing up at my doorstep asking why I hadn’t been there. It would be a slap on the wrist, but a Screven official coming to my house was an unnecessary danger. If for some reason they found out about the greyskin in my basement, I could get in a lot of trouble. I don’t know what kind of trouble exactly, but it wouldn’t be good.