The Keeper

Light is death

‘Don’t go toward the light.’ That was why lighthouses were built. The light was death on rocks; the light was the signal for the hidden trap just beneath the black waves. But there were no more waves. There was no more sea. It had grown hotter every year for a hundred years. All that remained was the dry sands of a dead seabed. There were two constants: heat and corpses.

Occasionally, groups of ragtag refugees, drunk on hope or driven by sheer desperation, attempted the crossing of the dry Channel. From where the lighthouse stood, this meant trudging very slowly thirty miles across uneven desert, each step sapped by the sludgy grit, each breath ambushed by humidity. They were weak when they started, because the Channel was always the last leg of an epic, untold odyssey.

They came in parties of thirty to fifty, but usually only about ten made it to the mainland, where a crew from The Settlement would pick them up to escort them to the cluttered, chaotic little city complex, residing half on the surface and half underground. It was one of the last urban habitats anywhere, as far as anyone knew.

Moving across dry expanses in groups was a solid tactic, as it was inevitable and accepted that the majority would fall, to become the sustenance for the remaining. In essence, your food and water would walk beside you if you were among those who could survive the sun. No one ever made it alone; that was a certainty on these journeys.

Brock Sheran had seen so much death that it barely registered in his mind anymore. That’s why they gave him the job of lighthouse keeper. He wouldn’t flinch at his duties; he wouldn’t stop the light from shining just because people collapsed into contorted shapes in the sand, drawn by the great lamp’s bright beacon. He would not permit himself to wallow in the guilt of drawing people in. Each of the bodies would be retrieved for a higher purpose. It was the way of The Settlement.

Some days, he would ascend the precarious ladder to the man-sized lighthouse lamp, to observe the incoming refugees below, in their sun-bleached, torn clothes, staggering one burnt foot at a time toward his outcrop of rocks in the plains. Many wouldn’t make the last mile, as if relaxing killed them, dropping close by enough for him to see the pulsing black swarms of flies, to inhale the stench of dead flesh.

He felt like he was a fire from hell, lit for human moths to be magnetised toward him and burn under the unforgiving sunlight.

It was another day, another wave of souls washing up from the sand and dirt. He could see clearly from his high vantage point on the circular wooden walkway, right across the seabed sands. An abandoned skeletal shipwreck, used for temporary shelter for anything alive, marked the depth of field for him, as a huge monster of a sandstorm barrelled in, chasing behind a tiny group of exhausted pilgrims. The wall of choking dust towered to block out the blue cloudless sky. Even the sun could not pierce through its matt, uniform bleakness.

The walkers were aware it was creeping up on them – he could tell by observing their sense of urgency, as they busied themselves with their robes around their heads and bodies for protection. Who knew what journey they had been on, what they had witnessed and endured? The rule of these gigantic sandstorms was that if someone fell, you must leave them or die with them – they would all prepare to listen to begging, to feel helpless to their selfish survival instincts. Sandstorms were abrasive, blinding killers, not like anything Earth had witnessed in the years before.

There was something bizarre about the vision unravelling in Brock’s binoculars. The towering, blurry wall of sand was steady, unrelenting and ominous as it moved up behind them like a silently stalking predator. Brock held his long binoculars firmly, as if to acknowledge the suffering, a kind of subconscious obligation to his duty and for his penance. Below him, he watched without blinking as each of them stumbled, to writhe with parched mouths agape, as the sand wall swallowed them whole. They were like beached fish, abandoned by the source of oxygen.

There was one aspect in the familiar scene that was starkly different from the other times he had watched this scenario. There was a pillar of a human with a long unmoving shadow. He was just a teen boy, fourteen or fifteen at a guess. He stood so straight with a posture that Brock had not witnessed in those fleeing, and the boy did not panic as the sand wrapped around him in a dark, curling shroud. The spiky, stone-riddled dust tore at him, yet he was unfazed and stared right back at Brock, despite the distance between them. Through the storm, the lighthouse lamp would not be able to skewer light through the thick dust smog. The boy was fixing the monolith of the lighthouse for direction, just before being engulfed by the buffeting hot dust.

The lighthouse felt lonely in that moment, when the upright figure vanished into the beast of a sand cloud. The tower seemed to transform into a dry, dead tree trunk and Brock into a solitary animal concealed within its sun-hardened bark.

Brock imagined for the first time in a long time, the concept of a family. Family, it was something that had evaded Brock. Family was not something he could do; his previous job, as a supervisor for the aptly named recycling centre, meant a dedication to drinking himself to near death most nights on a dangerously unpredictable home-brew. He had managed the recycling centre on numerous occasions, extracting the water, flesh and resources from condemned criminals. That seemed like a long time ago. Now, the authorities were running lower than ever on intake, so they needed to find new means of sustenance for citizens. The lighthouse was their answer, a legend of sanctuary, a story of hope. People came every month. It astounded him that there were any at all left out there, but sure enough, they advanced toward his revolving light beam in their pitiful gangs. Somehow, they thought it was better, as if the climate had circumnavigated The Settlement and it had become a miraculous answer to desperate prayers. Dreams and hopes were shallow lies.

It was time to go back inside, as the sandstorm rolled toward him and above him, a tsunami of desert debris. He shut himself in, the transparent glass enclosure around the lamp a hot greenhouse baking his mind. Within seconds, the sky above turned brown, then darker still until black, a coat of sand rasping the glass, scratching to claw for him. He descended the wiry ladder to the storeroom below and further down still, emerging into the bedroom and living segment. He felt for the first time in a long time a little scared of death. It seemed to notice him for once, like it was tapping on his shoulder with a bony finger to alert him he had been exposed. Fear made his heart feel loud inside his chest, and his skin prickled with gooseflesh. He didn’t like it, that feeling that he was being watched and was no longer the watcher.

The traveller from hell

Instinctively, he turned to routine for comfort. It was midday; it was time for his mug of tea, a moment of calm amidst the hot madness. He would boil the rusty kettle for the second time in the day and dip a rationed bag of crushed leaves into his chipped mug. One perforated bag was good for ten drinks, and he’d put it back in the jar after each use. It was a privilege to have the box of teabags, a perk which he did not take lightly. Each six-month stint at the lighthouse required high discipline on rationed stocks. There were no top-ups permitted, no visitors for personal reasons, and all that was required of him was to keep the light on to guide people in from the French side. That was the job; it was seen as one of the most important jobs for The Settlement – to bring in meat, bone, water, sinews – packets of walking resources drawn in by the undeniable gravity of a bright high, powerful light and a tall tale of sanctuary.

The circular living room was like a cocoon for one person. It was where he spent his time, where he slept and found solace. He grappled for the light switch, then took the tea and ambled over to his battered fabric chair with its knitted patchwork cover. He sank into it, and it always felt to him like a gentle embrace. Placing the mug on the small table next to it, he pulled up the tatty lighthouse log that was on the floor and scribbled some notes with a blunt pencil on what he had witnessed, checking the date and time. He tried to ignore the whistling winds outside. When he finished the simple log entry, he fumbled with his scruffy, stained beard for reassurance and began to slurp the drink deliberately slowly.

The room was his life. There was a set of wooden drawers and a ceramic white basin to wash his face. There was a single rail for a few items of clothing, which was rarely interfered with, as he spent most days in his army green shorts and sandals, and nothing else. He also had his radio for alerting the collection crew to pick up survivors, of which he assumed there would be none on this day. The sandstorm beyond was particularly vicious and unforgiving. To pass the time, he had the luxury of an audio box programmed with thousands of music tracks and audiobooks from the old world. A man had to keep sane surrounded by insanity. The stories of how people used to live, what they used to care about, and what they saw daily were fascinating and obscure in equal doses. But best of all was his two-dimensional companion, on the wall was the poster he treasured beyond all else, the beautiful bikini-clad blonde – he named his Kim, draped on the wide bonnet of a historic petrol-fuelled Ford Mustang car, smiling at him every day, no matter what. She had perfect white teeth and captivating brown eyes. Importantly, she always listened to him without judgment each night when he began to ramble. He would talk to her matter-of-factly, nodding as if she replied, laughing at his own jokes with her, and after, he would blow her a kiss, before he slept. As he stared at her image for the millionth time, he felt his eyelids grow heavy with the onset of a nap, a familiar symptom of the intermittent heat exhaustion.

There were three heavy thumps on the lighthouse door. He jumped with the shock of it and waited to make sure it wasn’t an auditory illusion or a frill from a dream. Three more knocks, closer together this time, confirmed it was no illusion.

The barbed wire fence around the rocks must have been breached; every refugee knew the rule: when you see the lighthouse, turn left and you’ll be picked up by a truck at the entrance to an underground tunnel that leads back into the base of the cliffs. There were many warning signs not to attempt to approach the lighthouse door – skulls and crossbones, big red letters, the whole works. No one ever came; it was forbidden. Only at his shift’s end, after half a year, would anyone be permitted to knock on his door and with plenty of warning, and yet in a blinding storm, only two months into his posting, someone had chosen to break all the rules.

Instinctively, he walked over to his desk and pulled up his faded, worn rifle leaning against it, the one he sometimes used when on the lighthouse walkway, to put the fallen out of their misery. He was a good shot, but he possessed only three boxes of bullets, so he had to ration the ammunition, like everything else.

More knocks came; manic, fast, frantic. It was clear, survival for one individual appeared to hinge, literally, on the door opening.

“Who’s there?!” Brock demanded, and part of him already knew.

A boy’s voice, not so much frightened, yet insistent, unrelenting.

“My name is Mallak. Help me, please!”

Brock froze and thought while the storm battered the windows with scoops of airborne, sharp sand.

“You alone, Mallak?”

“Yes, alone. They are gone. All gone. Just me now… Please.”

Brock lowered his rifle and transferred it under his armpit. After a short but awkward spell of indecision, he unlocked and yanked the sturdy door inward.

The teen seemed to be forced into the room, collapsing in a heap of rags, with the angry dust swirling into the lighthouse from behind him. The screaming gusts and cloud of erupting sand felt like a grenade pin had been yanked. Brock stepped over the lump of boy and, with his shoulder, barged the thick door shut, letting the lock slide itself into its default closed position, with a satisfying ‘clunk’. The cloud of glinting mineral-laced dust froze, denied its fuel of wind, and began to drip from the air onto the floor like slow-motion rain.

“Are you scared?” Brock muttered in the dim.

“I am a little scared. But there is no moisture to waste on crying.”

The relative quiet, in the safety of the tower returned, layered with a laboured panting of someone who had fought tooth and nail to stay alive against nature’s worst onslaught.

“Mallak?”

“Yes, Mallak is my name,” asserted the boy, slowly rising into a sitting position. He was lean, his body a sinewy edifice of limbs and stalks, yet his belly was distended, like a pregnancy bump. His face and mouth were blistered and red, and his eyes had tiny veins like fissures around his pupils. He was spitting out the sand. His complexion was dark, his hair black and curly, and even in his state of exhaustion and fear, he held a strength in his voice, a defiance.

“Nice to meet you, Mallak. You are lucky, very, very lucky…”

He smiled to acknowledge the statement, his eyes knowing.

“I don’t believe in luck…” he said without thinking, unfazed by the sentiment.

Brock was now holding the gun again, loosely pointing it in the direction of the bedraggled visitor, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor.

“Where are you from?”

It seemed like an unnecessary question. He had come from hell.

Mallak confirmed it.

“From war. The Seeds War in the mountains. My father and my mother are both gone, as is my home. There was nothing left to stay for – by now, they will all be dead, all of the people there, my neighbours, the people fighting, all dead.”

“You’ve had a long journey. We have heard about that war from some of the people who come here. How did you hear about the lighthouse, about The Settlement… What did they tell you?”

“There was so much hatred in the last days before I left. We were hiding in the shadows. Word spread about a place where people had electricity, real food, houses, and even jobs – a place they would not hate us… The rumour was they were taking people in, if they could just reach the lighthouse across the Channel… I knew my odds were small, but I had faith and I was determined to make it, and look now… With a little extra effort… I did.”

It was a rumour spread intentionally by soldiers journeying from The Settlement. It crossed Brock’s mind to shoot him in the head. That was what he was supposed to do after all, but for some reason, he refrained. The boy had a rare, almost sweet confidence and optimism he could not fathom. It was more than that. It was another voice in his space.

“You can stay here until the storm clears…”

“… and after?”

“You will keep on your original track to the tunnel’s gateway, and I will call it in so they collect you… You will need water. I have water here; there is a storage tank under the lighthouse. It’s rationed for one person for six months, so you will need to be sparing.”

Brock decided to remove the bullet from the chamber before propping the rifle against the curved room’s wall. He did it deliberately and slowly, tucking it in his shorts pocket as the boy watched, so Mallak knew that grabbing the gun would be a futile play. Brock picked up his mug and walked over to the hand pump in the room, near his bed, to draw some water, which took some degree of exertion.

“You’ll need to sip it, or it will burn your mouth,” Brock warned.

A dehydrated throat could react painfully to water if you took too much, too soon.

“I know… I have been this thirsty before,” replied Mallak, calm and not rushing the process. It was impressive resilience; it showed the discipline of his mind.

After sipping down the water slowly, Mallak’s eyes closed for a long blink of relief. He pushed a smile out of his cracked lips.

“This water, I admit, tastes much stranger than usual…”

Brock ignored the remark. Some of the water was extracted from human bodies, and it had a flavour like pork.

“Your gun…” said the child, instantly making his host alert with suspicion again. “No one would attack their saviour after a journey so hard… The gun betrays something, I think. Am I in danger? Did I make a mistake?”

The kid was smart, perhaps too smart.

“We’re all in danger, boy. All of us. The gun, as you can see, is no longer loaded, so you are safer here, right now in this moment, than anywhere else in the world.”

They held each other’s stare, working each other out. You stare at anything long enough, and you can see new things.

Deep down, both of them were physically relieved by a small conversation. It meant more than they both expected – a thread of real human interaction. The wind became wilder, the sand seemed to be rising outside, burying the world and everything in it, but the lighthouse was tall, ancient and an untouchable monolith. Its large, burning bulb shone defiantly.

“You can sleep on the floor,” said the lighthouse keeper.

“Thank you, I mean it, thank you, Sir…” said Mallak earnestly.

Brock was surprised. The word ‘Sir’ was unexpected. Courtesy, respect – they were remnants from the old times.

The boy unfurled onto his back and let himself relax. How had he survived, pondered Brock, and stayed as intact as he had?

Brock stood there a little longer, suspicious. He had one last question.

“Tell me, honestly. To make it this far, you must have eaten human flesh. You must have killed someone to eat them for food?”

Mallak propped himself up on his elbows to address the question seriously.

“I won’t kill anyone; I have never killed anyone, and I would rather die. But, yes, I have come across bodies freshly dead, many of them. I would eat from them. I took a man’s spinal column for some of the journey – it was naturally protected and held in the bone, so easier for travelling. It is whitish with an orange butterfly pattern inside, when you cut it with a knife… It sustains… But I am not a killer. Are you?”

Brock nodded, and Mallak wasn’t sure if his saviour was nodding in answer to his question or to affirm that he was satisfied with his response. Either way, Mallak would take the chance to sleep inside the secure walls, protected from the fierce sandstorm. It was all about knowing when to take chances and when the risk was deemed acceptable.

Circling behaviour

The next morning, Mallak awoke to another cup of water set down beside him and the sound of Brock noisily making a hole through the dune that had risen against the door.

“This was a big sandstorm!” yelled Brock, asserting himself with a shovel. The sun was already burning hard in the first hour of morning light. Brock had a sheen of sweat about his bare, hairy back. He looked slimy, uncomfortable, and out of place against the emerging landscape of endless yellow nothing.

Mallak was already losing the substance of the dream he had of a giant shadowy figure hovering over him, perfectly still, watching with indifference. Waking in a lighthouse was a novelty. No flies, mosquitoes or insects teasing him, darting in and out, trying to crawl on his eyeballs. He rubbed his aching back as he slowly pushed up to stand.

Brock turned, naturally suspicious, but then rubbed the sand from his hands on his shorts, as if to apologise to the unexpected guest for the dirt. It seemed strange.

Mallak noticed it.

“When was the last time you talked to someone?” asked Mallak.

“None of your fucking business,” barked Brock, and seemed to regret it, frowning in a half-apology instantly.

“I mean no disrespect to you, I owe you my life.”

“It’s okay, boy… I don’t get to have cordial conversations. That’s not been in my job description, never has been.”

Mallak waddled over to the doorway to peek out at the miles of raised crested dunes that had appeared overnight. It was surreal, almost beautiful. It was a pale desert sea where the surf was paralysed.

“I guess this means the escort to the city will be impossible, the tunnel entrance will be buried.”

“No shit…” said Brock, clearly aware they were in a unique situation.

“Look… I’m going to level with you, child, this place is not the Disneyland that you heard of, it’s not what it seems. No free drinks and pancakes here. Sorry, but you are better off not going to the pickup point. Just believe me on that…”

Mallak took a step back but worked hard not to reveal his shock.

“So… This is all a trick?”

“Like everywhere else… We ran out of food, we ran out of meat… It’s that simple… What were we supposed to do, send out all our people to hunt for more and die in the dirt?”

Brock was taking a gamble, but he realised this teen was mentally tough but physically weak, just a bundle of bones in skin and rags. There was nothing to fear. The previous night, Brock had checked his dishevelled clothes and removed the child’s knife, the one he talked about in the conversation about cutting a spine. There was no way Mallak could hurt him, and he felt instinctively that he would not try to, so being honest felt almost good – felt like the natural flow that had been missing from the long days.

“You’ll be fine here until we figure out what to do. I am pretty sure it will be at least a week till anyone uses that tunnel – they’ll take a while digging it out.”

“Okay…” murmured Mallak, “…But what is this, Disneyland, and what are pancakes?”

The world outside had risen metres overnight, burying the old world in another layer of dunes. If such a storm occurred again soon, they would surely be buried for good. It was a strange time. With a few shovels more, the door was cleared, with curled banks of sand on either side. Beyond was a bleak view of a frozen ocean of rippled sand waves as far as the eye could see. It made Brock shudder. He grappled away the last of the clumpy sand in the doorway to emerge into the oven-like open air. He stared up at the sky, squinting, to confirm it was back to its usual fierce blue.

Mallak decided to join him just outside the lighthouse to see what the environment had done to itself. Some of the rock bed foundation of the lighthouse still protruded, and on a nearby slab was the strangest sight, a spiralling circle of desert ants, head to tail and walking forever nowhere, close behind each other.

“I’ve seen this once before. They all just die eventually. I don’t know why they do it, why just one of them doesn’t change direction to get out of the loop of certain death?” said Brock. “It’s like they have to follow, they can’t help it, it must be instinct, even if they know they will all perish if they keep the path they take. They survive something like this storm and then, I don’t know, they just malfunction into a death spiral. Fucking idiot creatures.”

“I think they are all soldier ants following the scent of the one in front. I have read about this…”

Brock shrugged, not impressed by any of it.

Mallak looked at them and made the decision quickly that they were a food source, crushing them with his hand into a paste, and licking it off his palm.

It took Brock by surprise, but it shouldn’t have.

“Sorry,” said Mallak as he realised he was not technically alone. “Habit. Food, I should have shared this meal, especially as you shared your water.”

“It’s fine. I have food at the lighthouse. This means I don’t need to spare you a meal today.”

It seemed a cold but realistic logic to Mallak, so he licked the ant paste slowly with his tongue to savour every last particle of their dead little bodies.

Brock took a few steps outside, into the intense heat. It was a furnace. Nothing alive should be here, it was obvious, yet the lighthouse was in itself a prison, a circular wall with nowhere to go and nothing to aim for.

“Fuck…” he winced, like he had been punched in the face. The landscape was dead. There was nothing.

He let himself crumble into a sitting position, like an observer of the end of times, contemplating eternity.

Mallak shielded his eyes from the sun, unhappy to be exposed once again, and remarked casually, “I’m going back inside…”

He slunk back into the dark open rectangle, the mouth of the lighthouse digesting him, letting him reside in the sanctum of its cooler enclosure.

That’s when Brock heard the door shut and automatically lock behind the boy.

Mallak was inside, and he was outside. That sound of the locking door was like hearing the announcement of his death. One mistake was all it took.

He sprang back up immediately, slapped by reality, and stared up at the towering smooth stone walls of the lighthouse, like his gravestone had revealed itself in the planes.

“Mallak….” He drooled. “Mallak!” he snorted.

It was the longest thirty seconds of his life. The door unlocked and opened, the frail teenager pulling its bulk inward with considerable effort. His eyes were a little confused by Brock’s obvious alarm.

“Don’t worry,” the boy said quietly, “I came all this way to live, not just survive. You helped me. You are a good man. I’ll not leave you in the sun.”

Brock’s heart was racing. He groaned and let his head hang forward, so he was doubled over.

“I tell you what, boy… For opening that door, if you do die here before me, I’ll dig you a grave, and promise not to eat your flesh… For that one act… I’ll make that promise to you…”

Brock staggered back to the door, cursing himself for his tardiness; he usually had the key about his neck on a string, but his routines were broken, and he was in disarray.

As he grabbed the door edge for security, they both abruptly turned in distrust toward a new sound erupting across the sands quite unexpectedly. It was an industrial, mechanical noise, the sound of a sizable, motorised machine moving toward them at some speed. They could see the spurting trail of a dust cloud zig-zagging over the soft terrain, churned from the tracks of a vehicle.

Brock closed his eyes and wiped the sweat off his forehead as if trying to reset.

“Shit. I was so wrong. It’s them,” he said plainly. His whole body seemed to slump again.

“What will they do if they find me?” Mallak whimpered.

“They will kill us both. They’ll kill me for harbouring a resource for myself, and you should never have been here.”

“What can we do?”

“You will hide. Let me show you a place!”

Brock hurried the boy to a step ladder that led to the first ceiling of the tower’s three, the largest. There was a loft door of sorts; it was a false ceiling with a shallow storage space jammed with protein packs, noodles, prickly pears, rice, yucca, Chai, and agave – foods resistant to heat. He was small enough, even in his bundled rags, to cram into the space between the boards. It would be wholly uncomfortable and require a degree of contortion to fit all of his body in.

The machine they had heard was an all-terrain tunnel burrower, with a spiralling nose cone that had made short work of the tunnel blockage. It stopped close by, where the lighthouse rock’s perimeter was likely buried in the shifting sands. The noise of its rumbling engine and clacking tracks was deafening, as the lighthouse door was still jammed wide open. Brock continued to push Mallak’s sandaled feet up and under the ceiling hatch, dragged the step ladder away, and brushed himself down in preparation for even more visitors. He took a deep, deliberate breath and appeared in the doorway as a three-man security detail from The Settlement strutted toward him aggressively. The first was the leader, who wore the attire of a level-two officer and the other pair seemed to be his ‘guard dogs’, a gruff hulk of a man and a leaner counterpart.

Just from their gait, he could tell that this was no friendly visit to check on his safety. They must have known.

“Greetings! I didn’t expect any company, especially after the storm…”

The man at the front was Officer Jake Garr, according to his shirt’s shiny nametag. He had two rusty silver stars on his lapel, and he smirked distastefully at Brock’s fake joy, shoulder barging him out of the doorway’s space to inspect the living room of the lighthouse.

In proportions, Jake Garr was a little man, with rosy, red cheeks from a mixture of high blood pressure and the ever-present sun. Brock noticed that when the officer had brushed against him, he had to push up on his toes to attain height in an almost comical way. What he lacked in physical stature, he made up for with an oozing authority. The officer had skin that was pitted and rubbery, like old desert boots. He moved with a robotic officiousness, ferreting, yet with his chin pointed upwards in arrogance.

“What is this?!” barked Brock, acting his disdain. Garr’s two henchmen ushered Brock back into the lighthouse by lifting him clear of the ground by his elbows, in a humiliating display of power. They were different, like a pair of simple, subservient apes. Their grey uniforms, with wide shoulder pads, gave the impression they had small heads and big muscles. Brock scanned their name tags; the biggest man was simply named Danish, perhaps given to him because of his heritage. He had striking blonde spikey hair. He was all bulging gristle, so he must have worked out a lot. He didn’t look at all bothered lifting Brock off the ground with one hand. The other guard in support was called John Banks, and he reminded Brock of most of the guards in The Settlement, just there to be higher up in the food chain, not giving a shit about anything much bar a means to eat, drink and kick someone in the back once a day.

“What the fuck do you think you….?!” But before Brock could finish, Jake Garr had spun about to confront the keeper with a serious charge. He was furious, and more than that, it was as if he had been personally betrayed. It was the way he pursed his lips, clenched his fists, and marched in a semicircle like a spoiled child, denied something he wanted.

“Spare me the indignation, keeper! You knew the rules. You have a resource hiding here, a boy.”

“That’s a crazy thing to say!” spat Brock.

“We found one of his group alive – somehow, they made it to the tunnel entrance before the sand swamped it – they broke in through the gate, and they walked the whole five miles down the tunnel to the first guard house. Before we processed him, he talked about the boy who made it. He was smiling with pride, so he was not lying. He assumed we’d go back out, of course. They saw him walking toward the lighthouse… They convinced me that you, keeper, you… Let. Him. In!”

“That’s bullshit…”, said Brock. “What boy? They must be mad with the heat… Look for yourself, you see anyone here?!”

Jake flitted his eyes about the room, and then, quite suddenly, in a whirlwind of frustration, powered up the ladders through the lighthouse one by one, right up to the top level, to the lamp. After an angry scan of the barren landscape from the walkway, Jake came crashing back down, level by level on the ladders, pushing over any objects en route. Barrels were being overturned, bags and packets were being kicked. It was a display of disgust and seemed at odds with the argument the officer had come to pick. By the time he arrived back in the main living room, he immediately realised Brock was side glancing at the poster of the woman on the wall, and it gave Brock’s weakness away. Jake marched over to it quite candidly, and with a twisted smile, he slowly tore Kim from the wall and proceeded to rip her into evenly sized strips with his two dirty hands. Brock’s stunned apprehension turned to something black and red all at once.

“Tell me the truth, keeper, or it will be your audio box next…”

To escalate further, the raging officer strode close up to Brock and held him firmly by the chin with his grubby, taut, vice-like fingers, squeezing hard.

“Where is he? Did you eat him already, or store him somewhere? Where’s his body? You know full well, a resource like that can feed fifty men, his bones, his teeth, his sinews, the water in his flesh, these are the things The Settlement needs to sustain. You, above anyone, as a prior supervisor in the Recycling Centre, know this and yet, you take the whole body all for yourself up here in your little kingdom of one! Not even one from the sands outside, you take a fresh one, still alive on contact!”

“You’ve lost your mind, Officer Garr, the sun has tainted you… You take the word of a refugee over me? I’m the lighthouse keeper. I’ve been supplying your food for months.”

Silence but for a few agitated winces from Brock as he endured the painful humiliation of the moment.

It seemed like a good point, on reflection. Jake took his response in, and after bouncing thoughts back and forth, finally let his grip lighten, till he allowed his hand to fall to his side. Maybe there was a possibility of a mistake. The truth was that the heat was interfering with his mind; that was undeniable – he was getting more impatient and aggravated each day. Besides, he knew that the lighthouse keepers were always selected for their ruthless, task-oriented disposition. Brock had never flinched before, had never shown compassion where it might interfere with duty to The Settlement.

“I can’t see any boy here, that’s true – and you don’t have space for hiding anything. The resource we interrogated was convincing, but I suppose it was a bad storm; how could he see for sure?”

“Exactly that…” grumbled Brock, shaking the guards’ hands off his arms in rebuke.

A few tense moments of deliberation, of contemplation, and the three unwelcome visitors stepped aside so Brock could rub the dull pain from his bearded chin.

Jake shrugged and changed in demeanour, looking around the room with eyebrows raised.

“This place, it’s not very big, so how are you managing?”

“Just fine, even with this latest sand issue… How’s the Settlement?”

It almost felt like nothing had happened, and this was a conversation to pass the time, or perhaps it was Garr’s idea of an apology.

“Well, there was a lot of sand in the tunnels, but the Settlement wasn’t too bad. We’re all digging out the excess now. We’ll be back to normal shortly.

We did lose a few citizens, but it could have been worse, and of course, every death means another meat delivery in the evening.”

They stood staring at each other, almost embarrassed by the event.

“Well, if that is all… Are you satisfied? I’m sorry you wasted a trip out here.”

Jake clicked his heels and smiled, letting his rage dissolve and mellow with the assumed error of judgment.

“No harm done…” he grinned flatly, but he kept staring at Brock, as if trying to catch him out, like he had a sense that could not be quashed with logic.

If he had left a few seconds earlier, he would not have heard the unmistakable thump of a bony knee banging hard upon the ceiling boards.

The violence of a good man

Brock had been waiting for a cough, a knock or a shuffling sound of adjustment from the ceiling. Mallak was a boy after all, a boy crammed into a space not fit for the living. He had resolve, but he had limits too, physical ones.

To win against the odds, you have to do the unexpected and do it fast.

Brock reached over to the guard called John Banks, smiled at him – maintaining eye to eye contact and then without a word he unclipped the black metallic truncheon dangling from John’s uniform belt and, with a fluid, graceful movement, swung it around to his other side and smashed Danish full in the face three times in quick succession. Great loops of blood spiralled upward, along with some liberated, yellowed teeth. He had decided while the officer was running about the lighthouse like a madman, that he would take the biggest guy out first when the time came. He needed to make the most of surprise, to make priorities in the order of the attack.

Moving around in such a confined circle of a room was not an easy feat, and close personal combat was even harder. After a few intense seconds, the sheer adrenaline-pumped speed and brutality of Brock’s response enabled him to break the faces of the two men on either side of him, till they crumpled into bloody heaps under his strikes. They were concussed at least for a minute or two, and that, he hoped, would be long enough.

Jake was aghast at the audacity, but the unexpected violence had frozen him into a paralysis from shock. As the only one properly armed of the three, by the time he had the gumption to fumble for the handgun in his holster, Brock had slammed him hard against the curved room’s wall to knock the wind out of him.

Fighting is exhausting; it takes more than physical energy, it takes a cocktail of logistical, spiritual, and dark energy that’s hard to define but which drains the soul quicker with each commitment to inflict pain. To compound this, fighting in fifty-plus heat is utter madness.

The airlessness was a blanket smothering them as they wrestled. Brock located the hot metal handle of the handgun and pulled it free of its holster, stepping back two paces with his finger tight on the trigger. The officer’s eyes seemed to fade as they pleaded. A pop of noise and a singing bullet pierced Jake’s heart. With the singular, white hot point of pain, Officer Garr’s little world of cruelty, authority and rebuke disintegrated into a forever darkness.

It wasn’t over for Brock.

His other two victims were groaning on the floor, returning to consciousness with intense anger overriding the pain of their fresh wounds. Brock strode over the lesser one, John, he recalled, and directly stood over him as the guard attempted to raise his head, a sandaled foot planted on either side of his torso. Without further ceremony, he delivered a volley of well-placed bullets point-blank to the man’s skull. Long jets of blood leapt from the holes as the bullets drilled into bone and brain. Brock had been an executioner before, but this seemed more personal than the way he had recycled humans. It was the difference that men felt between hunting and farming.

A new problem. The gun jammed – his trigger finger unable to force the hammer despite repeated attempts. At that same moment, his core strength began to collapse with the elements of the situation, and he felt a dizziness infect him completely from head to toe from the sheer effort. He heard himself breathing badly, and he let himself kneel to scrape some dregs of strength back if he could.

The last of the unpleasant trio, the man-giant called Danish, had made it back onto his feet and was staggering aggressively toward where he knelt, shaking out his thick arms, wiping off the blood streaks and swaggering in readiness to punch hard.

Brock threw the handgun at him, but Danish batted it away like it was nothing, blood dripping from his gums, his eyes black with rage and retribution.

The keeper lost his resolve and felt weak and lightheaded; he would need to regain some recovery time, force some space between them. He turned and jumped onto the ladder to the next floor, scrambling up as fast as was feasible, trying not to lose his grip and balance. Behind him, Danish propelled his broad-set bulk up the rungs, eyes fixed with murderous intent on his prey.

“You are going to fucking die…” the deep, thuggish voice grunted, watching Brock’s sandals slapping the wood.

Brock was already fixing on the next ladder, somehow aware in the periphery of the unsightly mess Jake had recently made of his main store room, and ascended to the lamp level. He knew there was nowhere left to run to when he reached the top. As he ascended that last ladder, the bullet tumbled from his shorts pocket to bounce and roll across the floor of the storeroom.

Danish seemed to pause, watching the bullet skitter, taking his time to slow down, knowing he had his man trapped in a tiny glass dome, like a butterfly in a jar under the sun. He would measure his next moves carefully. With circumstances as they were, he was entitled by law to execute this criminal as he saw fit – and after, prepare him for the Recycling Centre himself – it would be a fitting end for the traitor.

The goliath guard could hear the lighthouse keeper gasping for air and retreating onto the small walkway outside. It was a dead end, too high to jump from, too limited to run around. A few steps up the last little ladder, and Danish filled in the space around the lamp, rolling up his sleeves, preparing mentally to push the keeper over the rail onto the rocks when he was in arms’ reach. He poked the raw cavities where his teeth had been with his fat tongue, reminding himself of his reason to kill.

Brock watched on with dread as the thick-set figure loomed up high into the glass room, an unfurling gorilla. He had no reserves left to grapple with such a monster.

Danish, distorted by the slats of glass, moved toward the transparent door to the walkway, like an evil reflection becoming real. The lamp came around behind the man, framing the brute with that intense beam. It was so blinding that Brock raised his arms over his head, blinking up a purple haze where his sight was obliterated temporarily with the glare.

He knew he was a dead man. All his life in service to The Settlement, for what? To be murdered in his own lighthouse…

There was a single gunshot. It burst into the air.

A long gurgling groan, and then, to Brock’s amazement, the sound of a human hulk falling flat and dead onto the old sun-faded floorboards of the lamp room.

By the time Brock could blink away the noise of colours, to see again, he made out Mallak holding the rifle he had propped against the wall downstairs. It looked heavy and clumsy for a child, but somehow Mallak had managed the unthinkable.

“I found your bullet,” said Mallak.

The keeper nodded and closed his eyes, as a silent thank you.

“You said, you would rather die than kill…,” laughed Brock.

“It was him or you. So, I changed my mind…”

Brock smiled. He had never believed in people before, but he, too, was changing his mind.

They both seemed to notice it together from on top of that high walkway, the little black dots of humans down there in the desert, somehow alive, walking toward the lighthouse like brainless zombies, desperately edging closer to the place they had been told would save them.

“Shall we let them in?” asked Mallak, his eyes wide with excitement.

They moved so slowly, like time’s march itself, plodding at a crawling pace, relentless, steady and unstoppable. You can’t stop hope, it was obvious.

Brock could see there were six or seven survivors in this group, tired, ill, one carrying an infant, and it was impossible to say if the child was alive or not.

“You know, we will have to ration and figure out what to do next; it won’t be easy at all…”

“Nothing is easy, nothing… And they can help us. We let them in then, I was right, you are a good man…”

“In our favour, we have three bodies for resource now, that’s a lot… We can make do for a while… I guess we’ll let them in and see what happens from there…”

Brock caught the sun in his eyes as he let his head loll back for a moment in relief. He was momentarily stunned by the idea of its enormity and impact; a massive, unthinking energy from the Universe that had power beyond comprehension, a beast of sorts, unaware it was destroying souls every day by merely existing.

“I’ll make sure the door is open…,” said Brock.

The End