Night Sentry

ight Sentry

  By: Greg M. Hall

  Copyright 2010 by Greg M. Hall

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and events portrayed in this novel are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Traffic Control (Action)

  Stunted (Fantasy)

  Closure (Fantasy)

  Rick’s Hostage (Horror)

  The Gig (Horror)

  My Pal The Bug #1: For They Know Not… (Sci-Fi)

  My Pal The Bug #2: The Haunted Drug Lab (Sci-Fi)

  My Pal The Bug #3: Bait (Sci-Fi)

  The Water Peddlers (Sci-Fi)

  City of Light (Sci-Fi)

  In Nebraska, it gets cold in January. And the wind tries to rip you in half. On that particular night, it wasn’t a steady gale like usual, but gusty. Just when you thought it had backed off, it blasted you. This led to more frigid air finding its way into coats, under hats, up nostrils.

  And Mikey had another two hours on watch. He hated being up in the middle of the night, and the cold was just the cherry on top of the whole crap sundae.

  Watch. Ha. It wasn’t like Mikey could see that much, anyway. It was too bad they couldn’t get a hold of some night vision goggles. Like he’d seen on Discovery Channel, back when there was a Discovery Channel. That show about futuristic weapons, with that ex-seal. What he wouldn’t give for that kind of hardware. Of course, if they did happen to get a hold of some night vision goggles, it’s not like they’d have been able to have an endless supply of batteries for them.

  Listen to yourself, Mikey grumbled in his head, as if paying attention to thoughts qualified as ‘listening’. You’re just a regular military nut, aren’t you?

  It was true, though. Most teenagers scraped together their minimum-wage earnings to get a junky car. Mikey, as soon as he turned eighteen, was going to drive into Omaha and buy himself an M-14. Not one of those easily-jamming plastic assault rifles that replaced it, but a real, wood-and-iron, thirty-caliber weapon.

  Nobody was driving into Omaha anymore. His dad had joined a few of the other men around town in trying to go there for some critical supplies, just after Mikey’s seventeenth birthday. They never came back. What little ham-radio scraps of information they heard about the world outside their hastily-erected town walls contained no news about them, and nobody but Mikey had the guts to go looking. Not even jock-hero Carey Kolpack, even though his pop, divorced from his mom, had lived in Omaha.

  Mikey found himself staring at the air three feet in front of his face again, like he did when he was a little kid and his mind would allow itself to get drawn into thinking about something. He took in a few deep lungfuls of frosty air, which cleared his head, and tried to refocus on looking for anything unusual, or at least a deer or coyote to take a hunter’s shot at.

  Instead of night-vision, a watchman had to rely on the perimeter lighting. It was an unfortunate necessity, drawing valuable power away from the people inside the wall, but everyone agreed that a modicum of peace of mind was more conducive to sleep than additional heat.

  At least he’d only drawn wall duty tonight. This meant he had room to walk around, and he wasn’t a hundred feet up in the air like Riggs and Cooney, the poor bastards that had drawn sniper duty. He looked to his right, at the looming cylindrical shape of the town’s grain elevator. He made out some movement up there, but it was impossible to tell who it was. There was no point in lighting the top of the elevator, after all.

  A fresh blast of arctic air jolted Mikey, who hadn’t even noticed the last gust slack off. He’d been pacing, and had to stumble a bit before getting his feet back under him. He turned his body to the north, as if whirling on an inconsiderate stranger that had bumped into him on the sidewalk.

  After letting a fresh curse word be carried away on the wind, he turned back south toward the outside.

  A man was standing out there.

  Mikey’s weapon, not an M-14, but a Winchester .243 deer rifle that was shared by the sentries, was out from behind his shoulder in a heartbeat. He fumbled around with the glove on his trigger hand. Crap! If the stranger had a rifle of his own, Mikey could have taken a round to the back of his head, leaving an inattentive, head-shot corpse. They wouldn’t be able to let Janey and little Cass see him; they’d have to mourn an internal picture in their heads.

  Damn, but he was so easily distracted!

  “Hey down there!”

  The stranger, his shape indistinct under a dark, flowing top garment, raised two hands in front of him. They were covered by fur mittens of some sort, so it was unlikely he’d be shooting anytime soon.

  “I’m not armed,” he shouted back. “I’d like to come in.” It was odd, the man’s voice. It was raspy, wounded, the product of vocal cords that shouldn’t have been able to heard over the howling wind. Worse yet, there was something familiar in the voice, too, something Mikey felt rather than heard.

  Mikey was supposed to say no to that request. Nobody gets close enough to even touch the wall after dark.

  “I’m supposed to say no. Sorry, buddy, but we get a tad paranoid in here. Especially when people show up in the middle of the night.”

  The man simply shrugged. “I can wait.”

  Of all the responses that he could have given, that was the one that Mikey expected the least. Usually folks would beg, or threaten, or swear vengeance.

  Taken off guard, all Mikey could shout back was: “Okay, then.”

  At this point, the stranger should have walked off into the shadows, toward the trees to the south along the riverbank, to take advantage of the crude shelter they provided. Instead, he remained standing. Mikey thought about shouting to the guy. Something about how if he hoped that him collapsing would stir a sympathetic reaction and get some of the defenders to run out, pick him up, and take him inside, he would be sadly disappointed. But how do you say something with that many words when you’re shouting at the top of your lungs?

  He couldn’t make a face out from under the garment that covered the stranger from head to toe. Even when a fresh assault of frigid wind pinned the folds of cloth back, his face wasn’t revealed. Mikey had a fleeting, perverse thought that if he just put a round through the man’s head, he wouldn’t have to keep feeling the stranger’s eyes boring at him through the winter air.

  “You, ah, just gonna stand out there?”

  There was no shifting before the stranger responded, nothing to indicate he’d been looking anywhere other than right at Mikey.

  “You told me I couldn’t come in.”

  “Yeah. Well… don’t just stand out there. Go back into the trees or something. Catch a nap.”

  “I don’t need a nap. Are you going to shoot me if I don’t go away?”

  “Yeah!” As soon as Mikey yelled the word, he knew it didn’t sound like he meant it.

  And, because Mikey didn’t shoot him, he continued to stand there.

  It was a brutal two hours, but at least the stranger didn’t attempt to come any closer to the wall in an attempt to force Mikey’s hand. He had no problem defending himself, but he wasn’t sure he’d actually be able to shoot if the guy calmly, with no show of belligerence, walked up to him. The wall was twelve feet high, fashioned from precast concrete slabs that had been pulled up from one of the town’s streets, so it wasn’t like anybody could jump it or climb it, but Mikey had a creepy feeling the guy would be capable of doing something he didn’t like very much if he wanted to.

  He was relieved by Carey Kolpack, the jock who a decade before had bullied Mikey around in junior high, who still made him feel off balance whenever they talked. Crap, couldn’t it have been someone he liked,
that he could confide in?

  Instead, he just brusquely told Carey: “I’ve got an idiot that’s been standing out there for the last couple of hours.” He tried just to walk past him to the nearest set of stairs, but Carey grabbed him by the shoulder.

  “Whaddya mean, somebody’s standing out there? You didn’t call for backup?”

  Mikey wanted to explain that the standard signal of two quick shots was an unnecessary waste of ammo for a lone, unarmed stranger. He kept quiet, knowing if he got into it he’d start whining like a seventh grader, they way he always seemed to around Carey. The guy was still revered by many in town; after all, he’d scored three touchdowns against West Point the year they were rated in the Omaha World-Herald. As a result, Mikey felt like nobody would take his side in such a challenge.

  “Well?”

  All Mikey managed to say was: “He’s just standing there. He hasn’t tried anything the whole time.”

  Carey let a curse word out as he looked over the parapet, into the muddy glow of the perimeter lights. He seemed to think of some sort of response that would humiliate Mikey in retribution for the breach of protocol, but must have been too sleepy to come up with anything.

  “Yeah, well, tell Craig about