The Fence Mender

Chapter 13

It was easy for him to get to the perimeter making his way past the various Sentries posted at the gate, hardly giving him a second look. He had passed that way so many times before with a bag slung over his shoulder that it would barely raise an eyebrow.

Once again, he walked through the fields of tall grass that surrounded the city. He dropped his bag and looked at the fence, trying to determine an exit that wouldn't leave an opening. With his cutters, he made two surgical cuts to a length near the bottom of the fence. Then, with his gloved hands, he pulled the taught wire up and wrapped them with a stray piece—keeping them bound slipping underneath—then pulled the bag through. With the cutters, he snipped the stray piece and snapped the barbed wire back into place. If there was ever a moment to reconsider his actions, it was now, but as he looked ahead into the thick woods in the distance, there was no doubt.

He had never been out past the fence. Few had. The only souls that ventured out beyond the perimeter were those brave enough to drive shipments between cities and banished criminals left to die. Everything he knew about the outside world had been told to him secondhand. There was the occasional story of being attacked on the open road by Vance and conversations he heard between those old enough to remember a world without walls. None of it had really prepared him for the journey he was about to take.

His first steps into the outside world were cautious ones as he moved through the tall grass towards the dark woods. There was a trail leading to them, the same road the delivery drivers used, the same one used to march the damned into exile. The first length of the trip would take him through the woods where there would be a thousand places for them to hide and any number of opportunities to attack. Those were the kind of thoughts he had to suppress. The only thing that mattered was the grim reality that there were only 12 hours until sundown and he had to make every one of them count.

Though he had seen the forest hundreds of times from the other side of the fence, he had never seen the trees this close. From the perimeter, they had always looked like a giant mass, the dark bark blending into one another appearing as one large cluster. Up close, he could see the knots on the side and the twisted branches intertwining with one another. In another time, he might have found them beautiful, but the shadows they cast and the cover they provided made him increasingly nervous.

The sound of dried leaves crunching under his feet sent his heart racing. It wasn't so much the sounds he was making, but the fact that the only ones he heard were his own. There was an absence of noise in these long-dead woods that unsettled him. Even when working on the fence he could hear sounds emanating from the city or the branches rustling in the wind. It was only a matter of minutes before a panic to set in, and his mind began to play tricks on him. The shadows seemed to shift, moving in and out of his peripheral vision. By the time he turned his head to look, they were gone—figments of his overactive imagination. But these figments were real enough to quicken his pace. Had he been a religious man, he would have prayed, but he did not believe in such things, as the world had never shown him anything worth believing in. Up ahead was a light beckoning to him from the last canopy of trees opening into a clearing.
Now out of the forest, Xander stopped to catch his breath, throwing the bag to the ground and pulling the map from his inside coat pocket. The road led straight ahead, but he had heard countless stories of shipments being attacked. If his enemy was intelligent, it would make sense for them to wait on the road, so he tracked a path just parallel to it, keeping far enough away to not be spotted by any dangers lying in wait.

It was almost four hours of walking before he spotted anything of interest. The hilly fields were barren with little growth, giving him enough visibility to see any threat coming from a mile away. He looked back and was, for the first time, unable to see the city skyline. A quick check of the map revealed that there was a town ahead just over the next hill. After a quick swig of water, he headed towards his first marker.