The Beyond

Chapter 3 - Rewind

"Daniel Lotts to Forward Stationing immediately."

The loudspeaker on the wall crackled as it turned off. Daniel inwardly groaned as he received yet another order from his superiors. The loudspeaker was the only contact ever initiated between the superiors and the workers along The Wall, often resulting in an order to run to the specified location as fast as your legs could carry you. He broke into a jog and began to make his way from the darkened tunnel he was walking in towards an old stone staircase ahead of him. The moss-covered walls absorbed the sound of his work boots clopping on the concrete floors. He passed a rusted and beat up metal door that was slightly ajar and sighed. The room behind the door would have been his preferred destination to Forward Stationing. The room was filled with buttons and monitors of every variety, far too many to ever know what they were all for, but the room contained something vital to his survival: his wife Rebecca. Hour upon hour his wife stared at the monitors, looking for anomalies in the system and strange happenings along the borders of the Wall, anomalies that never occurred. Nothing had ever gone wrong with the system; the system was perfect.

As Daniel passed the room at his quick pace, he caught a glimpse of his wife, hunched over her keyboards, peering at the many screens in front of her. A shot of regret that she had to continue working such long hours to aide in sustaining the family ripped through his body straight to his heart. Life behind the Walls wasn't easy, and even with their combined hours of work logged, they barely managed to earn enough goods to make it through the week. Often Daniel and Rebecca would go without a meal for the sake of their children, giving them the full day's ration to help their frail bodies get stronger.

Recently Daniel had been promoted from duty in the tunnels to patrol along the Walls, a very prestigious role in the city. Wall Patrollers received twice as many rations as those that worked inside the tunnels and out of sight. The Patrollers were the first line of defence should anything ever happen to threaten the Walls or the city within. The Beyond had been quiet for years. In the first years of the Walls' existence, many disturbing things had happened; or so Daniel had been told. Storytellers often spoke of incessant noise from the Beyond: screams, the cracking of trees, the howling of animals not found in any book in the Atriums. No one had been able to come or go from the city once the Walls were built. The Benefactors had ensured that no one could ever come into the city, destroy the peace they had created, so they built the Walls with no way to access the Beyond. Thereafter, maintaining the population inside the Walls was essential to survival. Too low and the vital systems in the city wouldn't be properly monitored; too high and the resources they were able to grow would be consumed at too fast a rate, threatening the survival of every resident.

As Daniel reached the stairs, he took them two at a time and used his momentum to propel himself out of the darkened tunnels and into the harsh afternoon sun. Outside the tunnels lay the electrical compound. Concrete stones covered the grass in rows as far as the eye could see. They extended from the edge of the Wall out towards the city about 100 feet, where the grass began again. Any resident of the city that wasn't on Wall Patrol that attempted to enter the compound and walk over the line created by the concrete and grass was shot on sight, no questions asked. There was really no reason for an ordinary resident to be out this far from the city and if they were, it was assumed that they were a threat to the integrity of the Walls and they were killed immediately. Daniel had only ever seen this happen once before.

A few years back, a man in his mid-forties had come running to the line, not crossing over, but screaming senseless things. Daniel still remembered what he had said, though he never knew what it meant: "12,416, 12,416, 12,416! Keep the sensors intact or the Walls come down and the Beyond will swallow us all!" Chills had run down his back that day. The man's foot had barely touched the first concrete stone before he fell down dead, shot in the temple. After his words, every sensor in the tunnels and adjacent rooms were tested and retested, with nothing out of the ordinary found after two weeks.

Daniel gave a quick look around outside and saw his superior officers standing near a section of the Wall covered in tall-reaching vines. As he came closer to them, he noticed the mixed looks of anger and confusion written on their faces as they peered down into the vibes growing near the bottom of the Wall. His supervising lieutenant looked up at him as he approached but quickly returned his gaze to the ground. Daniel stopped just short of reaching the collected group and walked slowly until he was standing beside his lieutenant.

Without looking up he said: "What do you make of this, Lotts?"

Daniel squinted to be able to see through the vines, but failed to register the cause of the commotion. Sensing his confusion, one of the other officers moved the vines slightly allowing him to see what lay behind them. He could feel his eyes widen and his heart quicken as he finally rested his eyes on something that shouldn't be there. Behind the vines lay a hole. A hole big enough for a grown man to crawl through, right to the other side; right to the Beyond.

"A hole. Why is there a hole in the Wall?!" Daniel asked with panicked urgency.

"We were hoping you could shed light on that, Lotts."