The Gatekeepers

She wasn’t supposed to be alive.

           They had a plan. They watched, pupils dilating with unparalleled shock as the monitors as big as the stumps of a red wood splashed the target’s steps on the bustling sidewalk. Her heart-beating, blood pumping, alert, and alive, very much alive footsteps.

How could this have happened? They all thought collectively. Never had they been unable to plan, predict, and manipulate the puppets who referred to themselves as human beings but to them had become much less, inferior things. They, the watchers, controllers, were the real humans, the ones with the sharpest minds and most elite tools. With eyes that could see into the commoners’ psyche. It was they who fed the masses the information they wanted them to perceive, and they who treated the people’s lives like a miniscule chess game. Not even chess, but checkers, for they saw the intricacies dull and limited. The people were in their hands. They were utterly predictable.

But the barreling truth was that Target 337 was walking down the street of the city center, wholly alive and nothing, not in the remotest sense, was predictable about that. They were never wrong, never unable to breach the boundaries of human control in order to achieve their desires. Treasures were hidden, books obliterated, and people terminated. It was their world, the version they let their subjects see. The common folk were the slaves in the cave, and they controlled the light show cascading along the walls. As they all stared at Esther Johnson, the snake of unease slithered up their legs and quickly tightened around their throats. She made them wrong, forced them to undergo a previously foreign experience. It was a combustion of confusion, disdain, and sheer shock. The control room was silent, but as they stared at the screens, one thing fermented with equal vigor in the deepest depths of each of their bones.

The Gatekeepers wanted revenge.

~~~~~

Esther wasn’t supposed to be alive.

She could feel it, like an invisible noose around her neck. The Gatekeepers wanted her dead, just like her grandfather. She could see every taunt they threw in her path. She had to change every step she took, every path and schedule, in order to stay ahead or else she would be rendered the victim of some accident that wasn’t really an accident, or worse, would just disappear altogether. She kept her head down. Her navy shoes had black laces on the left one, with a small sailor’s knot tied at the end of the shoe’s lace. It was a symbol, discrete enough that the usual passerby wouldn’t think to look twice. There were those who would, though. There had to be. Her Grandfather’s teachings had told her that it would signal the right people to come help. People like him. People like her. 

A flash of her grandfather’s face passed in front of her eyes. Read this, child. It will answer all your questions. Esther was only fifteen at the time, but she had never been given a book that wasn’t mandated by The Gatekeepers. All of the ones Esther had been given in school were shiny and stiff. Her grandfather’s gift had yellowed pages with a leather cover that frayed along the edges. Esther could still feel its weight in her hands, long poured over after it was given to her. It had no title. A title, when trying to protect the sacredness of the words inside, would only help in revealing the very thing we’re trying to protect from destruction. Her grandfather had said. Esther remembered wondering who exactly “we” referred to. Her grandfather was always shrouded in an eerie mask, always quiet at family dinners whenever Esther’s father discussed his job as an assistant for the Chosen Council. Esther had always found herself more intrigued from watching her grandfather’s facial reactions than she ever did listening to her father drone. She thought back to the “we” his grandfather alluded to. She wondered if her grandfather was with them now. Maybe he was pacing back and forth, staring out some window, waiting for his granddaughter’s arrival. Esther brushed the thought off her shoulder. That type of daydream was all in vain.

Her grandfather was dead. She saw them do it. The Gatekeepers, sliding silently with the shadows in the night. Esther quickened her steps on the street as she thought back to the dreaded night. She was on her way to their usual meeting when it happened. She peeked from behind a dumpster, having thrown herself there, as always, while her grandfather went ahead to make sure it was safe. That’s when they came for him. Esther felt her grandfather’s strangled screams in her own throat as she watched black attired men grab him. They murdered her grandfather in cold blood, with the effortless click of the deadly technology they held to his neck. Tears, terrified at what her eyes saw, ran in haste down her face to escape. Nothing could come out of her own strangled throat. There was pressure felt there by some invisible noose around her neck, a feeling that would never go away after that night. All she could think was that her grandfather had been right. He had been right, and there was no going back. When the mysterious figures went to drag him away, Esther fell from her crouching position, fear and agony overcoming her. As she did so, her shoulder hit the corner of the dumpster, and an echo shot through the night. In horror, she watched as the men turned around in an instant. She didn’t dare breathe or move, her heart pumping profuse amounts of blood in her ears, loud as drums. Their words were mumbled, but she saw them pace around the perimeter. The lights of the center city didn’t reach this part sector, so there was little they could see. She was grateful for that. One of the men started venturing closer to her, each step striking the chords of panic in Esther’s veins. His eyes roved the vicinity, any second he was going to take a step too close and catch the hidden witness. Esther winced in preparation, already envisioning the feel of the weapon that killed her grandfather on her neck when the other man fiercely whispered that it was all clear. Esther couldn’t breathe until the close man, who took one last look around, walked back to the steps of her meeting room. After that, the men quickened their pace, desperate to get out of there and move on with their murderous evening. Esther caught them saying, “We’ll get killed if we messed this up, let’s go!” and she was never sure if the voice had meant that in a symbolic or literal sense. They hurled her grandfather like some inanimate object into the open side door of the densely black Chose Council hover car. The sight stabbed Esther in the chest and made her want to stride over and beat the two men to a pulp. As they zoomed off, Esther pictured every detail of her assault.

Those men had murdered her grandfather, the truest friend she had ever known. Esther couldn’t move. She was weighed down by the chains that seemed to cut through her body and seer her with pain. It was hours into the night before she could manage to stand up, knowing that her grandfather would have wanted it. He had taught her to be strong, so that night, she would have to be. When she stood, she found herself automatically walking to the back door. She wanted to go inside to their meeting room. The thought of the dim lights, the dark, aging wood and the miscellaneous conglomeration of leather books warmed her. She wanted to make her grandfather alive again, by wrapping herself in his favorite spot. When she reached the back steps, her eyes, swollen from crying, caught sight of something lying on the ground. Esther stopped mid-step and turned towards it. Even in her grief, curiosity gnawed at her insides. She stepped over to the object and peered down at it. Electric currents shot down her spine. The world stopped. The metal device stared at her, taunting her with its single button that lay in its center. The one that killed her grandfather. The men who came must have dropped it in their rush to leave. Esther spat at it, cursed it for its powers and how it was used. There was so much anger boiling up inside her, but something else too. The device, it was inscribed. Esther knelt on the ground beside it, not wanting to touch her grandfather’s murder weapon, to see what it said. When she read what was there, her eyes widened. T.G. embedded inside a Victorian style gate. The Gatekeepers.

The screams her grandfather couldn’t let out in his final moments somehow found their way to Esther’s ears at that moment. Run, he seemed to say, and don’t let the blindness catch you. That night, danger came like a raging storm cloud barreling down on her. She ran away with tears in her eyes and a heart that thumped with something Esther had never particularly experienced. It beat with dangerous purpose.

Esther pulled herself out of the memory, the constant loop of it in her head was the fuel to her fire, but she had to stay focused. Looking around her, she saw swarms of people, all with screen glasses on. They were worn to protect their staring eyes from the strain of looking at the colossal screens that towered over the city. Thousands of screens so close together they all seemed to blend, like a sea of a thousand colors surrounded the heads of city folk and infiltrated the sky. Each one had something to say. Buy the newest hip thinner to get the perfect body you always wanted! One woman said in a sultry voice. Another, NEWEST HOVERBOARD, PERFECT FOR ALL! Then there were the videos of the newsreels, “The Chosen Council is here for the people of this city, they have the experience, and their every rule needs to be followed or we all will perish. The Gatekeepers are on their side, to protect us from the harsh realities of hateful and inaccurate information. We couldn’t handle that darkness; it would infiltrate society and ruin what we have built. Let us heal from the past, and let The Gatekeepers help us do so.” The television shows and news cycles created a cacophony so overwhelming that some opted for earpieces. The earpieces played their own noise, yes, but at least the interruptions for issued ads were limited.

When Esther was younger, many of her friends thought the overload of jumbo screens was chaotically beautiful. Esther just thought it was obnoxious. When she made a remark to them in class about the screens being like the Chosen Council’s vanity haven, no one laughed. Her grandfather had always said that they probably didn’t appreciate a dry sense of humor. You’re like me, Esty. He had said, but some people can't seem to take a joke. As she kept her eyes down on the city street, she wasn’t so sure her joke had been far from the truth. The bitter afternoon air bit at Esther. She tightened her arms around her winter coat. Around her, the sea of anonymous people had alert eyes, but they were dangerously hungry too. It seemed as if everyone was on the prowl, almost hoping for something out of place that they could pounce on. They seemed to close in around her. Could they see her mind? She wondered. Could they see how it believed so differently than their own?

As Esther’s thoughts twirled in her brain, her eyes spotted someone. He walked in the opposite direction just in front of her. He was middle aged, but his dark hair was cut into the sharp lines of someone who had access to the best hairdressers in the city. His trench coat flowed behind him, and if Esther had been lost in the screens like many of her surrounding company, she would have missed it. He was looking down. His eyes trained on her shoes. Specifically, her left shoe, the one with the black laces and the tiny sailor’s knot. The world melted into slow motion. She held her breath. Her eyes glared at the stranger, waiting, praying, begging for recognition. Seconds became centuries as he slowly inched closer. He was almost directly in front of her now, about to pass by when he looked up. When Esther locked eyes with the man, it was as if someone punched her gut. All the air she had been holding flew out. The stranger’s eyes did flare in recognition, but the sharpness of the glare shot warning signals like needles everywhere on Esther’s skin. Just then, the memory of her grandfather’s words sling-shot directly into the center of her consciousness for the second time in her life. Run, he had pleaded. RUN. Her feet carried her off at warp speed. The device that killed her grandfather, the one that she stuffed in her pocket the night she watched him die, bounced in her pocket.

~~

An excerpt from the book of Esther’s grandfather:

They were supposed to honor the truth. To trust them was to believe in the promise of society. Everyone wanted to be them, to be a part of their sanction so as to serve what they thought was the ultimate form of defense against deception of the powerful. They were supposed to be driven by duty.

Until the darkness seeped into their veins, they were everything they were supposed to be.

They were never supposed to be the enemy.