Watchtower

Part 1

    A huge purple sun sat low on the horizon. Thorpe sat on the high stool of his guard tower and looked out over the ocean. It was calm tonight, and the flat water was the colour of blood. He was tired. This was always the worst time, the end of the shift, just before dark. He stretched, then slapped himself gently about the face to stay alert. He understood what would be done to anyone who fell asleep. More importantly, he knew what might happen if someone was ever allowed to slip through the island's defences.

Thorpe checked the monitor in front of him. The slow flash of the display told him that everything was normal. He looked down again at the coastline. There were no waves tonight, and he could hear the gentle movement of the tide against the security fences. He tried to imagine how it would have looked in the old days, before the outbreak. The sea was blue then, they said, and people swam in it. Without the barriers, fish swam in so close to the shore that people could catch them with a rod and line. His grandfather had seen a photo of it. But that was before their leaders became afraid that memories of the old days might encourage people to do foolish things.

Birds used to fly over the island, bringing strange calls to the silent nights. That was when the air was better-back in the days when you didn't have to line up outside the hospital every second Saturday for treatment. The island was a tourist resort then, a place people would visit just for a holiday. Now nobody was allowed in and nobody ever left.

A low hum in the distance brought Thorpe back from his daydreaming. He adjusted the focus on his vision goggles and scanned the ocean. There it was, out over Disaster Head, the only part of the mainland visible from this coast. A huge grey cloud ship hovered just above the harbour. Its orange lights blinked as it gained altitude. It would rise for a few more moments, then bank to the left and disappear, the way they always did. If it broke the agreement and entered the island's airspace, it would be shot down. Thorpe had seen that happen once, when he first started working. It was how it had to be. They couldn't afford to take any risks.

Thorpe wondered what they were like, the feviremaining people on the mainland who'd outlasted the epidemics. He'd heard

he rumours, everyone had, even though the leaders told them not to speak of it. Some said the only ones to survive were mutants, weird-looking and with strange powers. Others said that there was still great suffering over there, and the cloud ships took the bodies away to dump in the ocean. And then there were those who said the epidemic had passed, and the precautions were no longer necessary. But people like that were made to be quiet soon enough.

A shrill noise sounded, and Thorpe checked the security screen. It blurred for a moment and then showed the face of his replacement, Buzz.

"Well, are you going to let me in?" Buzz asked. He was a year younger than Thorpe, just out of the academy. He had red hair and freckles and a smile that nothing could wipe off. Thorpe remembered one time when Buzz slipped on the rocks during training and gashed his knee. He lost so much blood that he had to be hooked up to the machines, but even then, he kept smiling the whole time like it was just a big adventure. Buzz had his own theories about the epidemic, but he was smart enough not to talk about them.

Thorpe entered the code, and the door slid up.

"OK, then, you're done." Buzz smiled. "Anything interesting happen today?"

"Nothing. Same as always," said Thorpe. Just then the monitor gave a high-pitched squeal, a sound he had only  ever heard in training. He jumped at the noise and turned to Buzz, who was looking carefully at the monitor, still smiling.

"It's something in section four," Buzz said, leaning forward and fiddling with the controls below the monitor. "You want to wait around and see what it is?"

"Sure," Thorpe said. Two years in the job, and this was the first time anything exciting had happened. He wasn't about to miss it. "Should I call Control?"

"Not yet," Buzz replied. "Let's just see what we've got first."

Buzz tapped a command on the control panel. Somewhere high above the coast, a sky eye responded, zooming in on the spot and beaming the pictures back to the monitor. Thorpe and Buzz looked at the image on the screen. It wasn't a surprise. This was why they were here, it was what they were trained for. But somehow, seeing it for real made it worse than Thorpe had ever imagined.

It was a small boal-so tiny it looked like a toy. There was no engine to be seen, and the one person aboard appeared to be using two long sticks with flat ends to paddle through the water. The sky eye zoomed in closer, and the two men looked at the face of the intruder, who stared ahead at the security fence, her big dark eyes filled with surprise.

"She's just a girl," Buzz said. "Not even my sister's age. What's she doing here?"

"You know what she's doing." Thorpe replied, "She's trying to find a way in. She's trying to escape the cpidemic."

"You don't know that," Buzz told him. "Maybe she's lost."

"Il doesn't matter." Thorpe remembered his training well. "We have lo inform Control."

But then something very surprising happened, something Thorpe could never have anticipated. Buzz turned to look at him, and his smile had disappeared.

* You can't call through.

 "I have to. It's the rules."

"You know what they'll do, don't you? "You know what will happen to her?"

"It's what they have to do. It's for our own protection."

"We don't even know if there's still an epidemic," Buzz told him, speaking aloud the forbidden words. "Look, Thorpe, I know you think this is your duty, but I'm going to ask you to help me. I want you to call Control and tell them it was a false alarm. I'm going to run down to the cliffs. I can call out to her from there, tell her to turn back, before anyone else notices."

"Why?" Thorpe asked. Buzz stared at him, his smile still missing. "Because it's the right thing to do."

Thorpe thought back to his training, back to all the stories he'd heard about the

pidemic. Then he looked at the screen, the little girl in the tiny boat moving gently up and down in the low swell. She didn't look sick. She just looked lost ... and frightened.

Thorpe keyed in the call sign to Control.

"Control," he said, surprised by how calm his voice sounded. "This is Watchtower Three. We've had a false alarm. I'm dealing with it now.