Gatekeeper's Secret
Copyright© 2026 by Fick Suck
Chapter 32
<Dude, come out to the ranch Saturday morning with Darla. Linh is coming.> Grady texted Randy.
<How am I going to get there?> Randy texted back. <Darla says yes.>
Grady called Bettina, “Hey, you still need my truck, or can I have it back?”
“I’m sitting down with Leslie tomorrow afternoon to sign the paperwork,” she said. “Then I have to figure out how to get it to you.”
Grady clenched his jaw for a moment. “I’m glad you’re getting the van. The easiest way for me is if you drop off the truck with Randy Patterson, who is coming out to the ranch on Saturday. He’s my friend who installed the new commode when you were working on the new panel.”
“Oh yeah, the guy who got caught with his pants down by his girlfriend’s mother,” Bettina said. Grady could hear the smirk over the phone. His list of questions for her was long, but he held his tongue and wished her well.
Grady made the arrangements. Having to make the calls and juggle the schedules to get back the truck that he owned was aggravating. He wanted to yell at the heavens demanding to know why it was suddenly his job to get people to move their butts, but he was interrupted.
“Excuse me, sir, the two younger women departed for the bunkhouse thirty-two minutes ago and Jessica is snoring on her bed,” Claire said. “May we explore your inventory now?”
“Sure,” Grady said. He led Claire out the back door while wrestling his arms into a light jacket. He took Claire into the shed, showing her the key and keyhole. After prying the door open because it still was tight, Grady led him downstairs, flipping on the overhead light.
“By the seven rings of Kamor, sir!” Claire exclaimed. “This place is a disaster preparing itself to reduce us into subatomic particles.”
“Eh?”
Claire walked over to a shelf and pointed at a device that looked like a child’s fishing pole, “This device is the ignition key for a star killer. Three of them were manufactured by the Opthian Empire. One was used with devastating effect, one was destroyed with their second fleet when they attempted to destroy a second sun, and the third one disappeared. Here it is. There is a reward of ... half a planet’s resources for its return.”
“Well,” Grady said, “Someone thought hiding it here was the best course of action. Do you know how to activate it?”
“Of course not. Having such knowledge would be the same as committing planetcide,” Claire declared.
“Ah, death of a planet in Latin? Then, the device is safe here, where no one knows how it got here. Can we put it in the burn barrel and destroy it?”
“Please do not say such things, sir. Applying heat could activate it. After all, it is meant to burrow into a sun.” Claire walked over to the chair at the desk and sat down. “I can already identify a dozen objects, sir, and all of them are destructive. I fear your world could be hosting an abandoned weapons depot. Weapons are not necessarily stable, and the more powerful a weapon is, the more unstable it may be.”
“Some of this stuff has been parked here for decades,” Grady said. “Nothing has blown up. The good news is this room is organized enough to see what is here. The next one is the true disaster. Let’s go.”
They walked over to the barn under a blaze of stars. The skies were clear, and the moon was barely a sliver. In the far south, the lights of Clinton were hardly visible. All the universe above his head felt alien and dangerous for the first time he could remember. He had feared monsters in the closet when he was five, but this dread was more piercing.
Grady showed Claire how to release the top and bottom pieces of wood to reveal the staircase. When Claire saw the mess, she moaned in despair. She kept repeating herself as she walked from one small, cleared space to another, “This is bad. This is bad.”
“I have a burn barrel,” Grady volunteered. “I’ve already burned to ash a lot of moldy clothes and fabrics.”
“Some fabrics will become toxic in fire,” Clair said, carefully opening a sack. “There are different types of combustion, and burning by using organic compounds may not be the solution each time. We don’t want to poison your atmosphere or leave telltales for others to find.”
“What do you suggest?” Grady asked.
“This will be days and weeks of merely cleaning and sorting,” Claire said, shaking her head in a most human manner. “We are far away from preparing an inventory and even further from determining how to address these objects.”
“We don’t have the ranch to ourselves, Claire. We can only work safely at night.” Grady opened a bag and closed it after a brief survey. “Let’s say we work on this mess six hours a night. Then we get some sleep and get our daytime duties done.”
“I don’t need you every night, sir,” Claire said. “You have a more important task. We are going to need a new repository, something more substantial and secure. I do not mean to alarm you, but we need a building that can contain a detonation.”
“How the hell are we going to build that without drawing hordes of attention?” Grady said, not expecting an answer. “The biggest contractor in town is a lying, cheating, scumbag with no scruples who wants to screw teenagers.”
“I believe you have a saying, ‘first things first,’ sir,” Claire said with an odd tone. “If you could get me some of those black trash bags from the kitchen, I will start separating out what can be burned in a wood fire.”
Grady ran for the bags, bringing back an entire roll. “Have you ever heard of such an inventory from a gateway before?”
“Not as such, sir,” Claire said as she directed him to a pile of safe-to-burn material. “There are certain popular gateways where merchants exchange goods on a relatively consistent basis. Time dilatation and universe mechanics are obstacles but with patience and good logistics, most durable goods are possible. Bananas, not so much.”
“I’m not worried about shipping bananas,” Grady said.
Claire hooted. “A good number of successes in my business are gateway transfers when worlds are under threats of violence. Smart people move their precious tidbits of heritage out of harm’s way. They can retrieve their objects when the threats are gone, for a fee, of course.”
Grady shook his head with disbelief, “Some things don’t change from one intelligence to another.”
“I understand your disappointment, but the standardization of business practices is what makes commerce between the gateways possible.” Clair hoisted a second bag. “This one is full and ready for burning. At one time, some of these fabrics were quite valuable, pity.”
By the time Grady made it to his bed, he was beyond exhausted. He slept late, struggling to rise from his bed in the middle of the morning. Groaning as he stared at his visage in the mirror, his brain was already signaling he was late, late, late.
He made it to the kitchen, where he opened his precious box of Captain Crunch™ cereal. He poured half the box into a bowl, slopped in the milk, and pulled a soup spoon out of the drawer for his dining delight. “Thank you, Jesus,” he uttered as he chewed through the first bite, well aware he was thanking his God for these corporate overlords who cheated him out of precious ounces of his cereal to line their pockets. “Off topic,” he shouted in his head.
When he turned around, he realized that Jessica was sitting at the kitchen table with a phone pressed against her ear and a yellow pad in front of her. “Slow down, Burak,” she said to the person on the other end. “How do I spell that? It’s Italian. Good, how do I spell it?”
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