Free We Stand at the Gate by James Pratt

WE STAND AT THE GATE
    A Short Story by James D. Pratt
    Copyright 2012 James D. Pratt
    Smashwords Edition
     
    Cover image © HeroMachine.com
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    Heinrich hated sentry duty. A grizzled
veteran at forty, he damn well should have merited exemption from
such menial tasks. That’s what new recruits are for, and there were
always plenty of new recruits. The mortality rate was high out on
the edge of the southern frontier, but such was a soldier’s life.
Dying from unnatural causes was part of the job and where the
Damned Company was concerned, there was plenty of unnatural to go
around. The Blight wasn’t going to guard itself, after all.
    Granted, it was a small consolation that he
was sharing guard duty with Eobard Critchler. The younger man was
fairly tolerable as far as fresh recruits went. Most of the new
guys grew up rough and tumble and arrived with scars on their faces
and chips on their shoulders. With no prospects back in
civilization (unless you counted death by knife or noose a
prospect) they came south, lured by the promise of a generous
pension for a mere ten years of service spent in shouting distance
of the most dangerous place in the world. Heinrich didn’t just know
their collective story, he’d lived it.
    As for the Damned Company, the outfit’s
nickname wasn’t just a colloquialism. Their job was to stand at the
threshold of damnation and with nothing more than swords and spears
protect the border against whatever might emerge from the
otherworldly wasteland known in legend as the Blight. Heinrich was
the last of the fellows he’d joined up with an eternity ago to
still be counted among the living. He had less than a year to go
till retirement, but figured it might as well have been a
thousand.
    Heinrich suspected and most men agreed that
the only reason a member of the Damned Company could retire after
ten short years with full benefits was because nobody made it that
long. Not that he could remember, anyway. Heinrich had seen all
sorts of weird things emerge from the Blight (sometimes
materializing from thin air), scoop up grown men like a raptor
pouncing on a rodent, and escape lickety-split. He’d seen seasoned
soldiers silt their own throats after going mad from living in such
close proximity to the unnatural. But mostly, he’d known more than
a few men who simply vanished and were never seen again. Whether
they deserted under the cover of night or were taken by the Blight
in some unknown way Heinrich could only speculate.
    Heinrich watched Critchler out of the corner
of his eye. Most of the men, even the veterans, hated being
outdoors after dark. The Blight was bad enough in the daytime, but
when night fell strange lights could sometimes be seen in the sky,
and strange shapes sometimes darted, crawled, or oozed across the
no-man’s land between the edge of camp and the towering guardian
pillars which marked where the sane world ended and the Blight
began. Sometimes those shapes were so bizarre the mere sight of
them could drive a man mad. A fair number of the men were even
willing to trade a month’s pay to avoid sentry duty. Not Critchler
though. He was one cool customer.
    Critchler didn’t strike Heinrich as