The Knock
In an ominous future, a lonely farmer finds a group of ragged fugitives at his door. They need help desperately. But the farmer has his own family to worry about...
The Knock
by Samuel Sullins
-
The first knock came that evening.
The farmer had just finished the day’s planting. He was washing his hands over the little metal sink, scrubbing the dirt away with a wet towel.
His wife’s gentle voice drifted out the open bedroom door. She was telling a story to the baby.
The knock came again.
In the next room, his wife’s voice stopped.
He put the towel down on the counter and turned off the water. He looked across the room at the front door. It was a thick door, a dark medieval shape from a thousand years ago, a guardian that watched over the house with a hundred iron nail-eyes. There had once been a window beside the door, but it had been fastened shut and boarded up long ago.
Water dripped from the towel, drip, drip, plinking dully against the steel sink.
No sound from the bedroom. He knew his wife would remain as still as possible, as silent as possible, until it was over. She’d be ready for anything—and by now she’d have armed herself.
On the side table there was a polished white vase, a family heirloom belonging to his wife. It was embellished with fine golden patterns of seashells and fishes and quiet water things that told of a distant place and an equally distant past.
Two hundred years old, his wife said.
It was beautiful, but not without its practical uses: twenty years ago it had been modified to suit the needs of its owners.
He tilted the vase over, carefully pressed the hidden trigger. The black velvet bottom of the vase tilted open, spilling a fountain of gold onto the oaken table.
Bullets. Valuable beyond measure in these times. Even the Guard didn’t often use bullets.
He dropped the bullets into his pocket and closed the vase with a tiny click. In a drawer below the vase was the gun, always loaded. He put it into his other pocket and soundlessly crossed the room and stood, waiting, by the door.
The knock came again, less sharply, and distinctly feeble.
The farmer was worried. The Guard had only come twice before—and both times they had shaken the door so hard he’d thought it would break.
The farmer slid back the bolt and opened the door in a single instant of motion, using it to shield his body.
There was a man there. His clothing was torn and ragged, a faded orange graveyard color with all the color drained away to brownness. His face above the orange collar was dark—a dry, seamed face, an aged face that could have belonged to a young man or an old man. His eyes stared out, eyes that belied the face, for they were fiery and alive.
Long black hair was tied back out of his face.
Behind him, there were four more men. All were dressed alike in the dying orange clothes.
The man tugged at the collar of the shirt as if conscious of the contrast between his clothes and the farmer’s. On the back of his hand, the farmer caught a glimpse of a black number tattooed there.
State prisoners. Fugitives from the Guard. Dangerous.
He didn’t know how far they had traveled or where they had come from. Their eyes stared at back him, a wordless plea for help.
He couldn’t just leave them here. The Guard would certainly arrive in minutes. He’d be suspected of aiding the prisoners, even if he did nothing.
At the very least, the prisoners needed to get off his porch. And fast. Even now the Guard would be on its way.
The farmer stepped out onto the porch and clicked the door shut quietly behind him.
“Follow me,” he said.
The men moved silently aside as he came down the steps, hollow footstep sounds on the ancient wooden planking of the deck. They stared at him almost hungrily, silently, and full of fear.
They followed him, wordless, silent, afraid of their shadows. So frail, thought the farmer. And yet with a thin, tenuous strength about them. The kind of thin strength that held you up over the years and brought you to escape a system few had ever escaped from.
The farmer knew he’d have to hide the men. There wasn’t anything else to do. And he couldn’t just let the Guard capture them.
He couldn’t hide them in the house, of course. Or the tractor shed. They have to be hidden in one of the fields.
The tractor was parked behind the house. A massive machine, the most valuable tool on his farm. Once, some fifty years ago, it had been painted bright orange, but the color had faded and flaked away and all that was left was a thick coat of rust, pockmarked and filthy. The farmer couldn’t afford to maintain the tractor properly, and it was deteriorating.
One day the tractor would stop working.
The giant seeding machine was still attached to the back of the tractor, a flat brown hulk with a row of empty metal seed hoppers along the top.
“Get on,” said the farmer, gesturing to the men.
One by one they clambered onto the seeder. None of them wore shoes, and their feet were filthy and caked with blood. They sat down between the seed hoppers, their brown clothes blending somberly with the rusted metal. They sat there at didn’t move and looked at the farmer, watching him.
Most likely afraid of what he was going to do. People were afraid of the Guard and even more afraid of fugitives from the Guard, and they knew it.
In the distance, a faint buzz of aircraft. They’d have to hurry.
“Don’t move,” the farmer added. If a Guard search-craft came over, there was less chance of being spotted.
He wondered how far they’d walked, but they probably didn’t know themselves.
The farmer climbed the failing ladder into the rotten-cloth smell of the skeleton cab. The windows had been broken out by thieves a decade ago, and the farmer hadn’t been able to replace any of them.
He made the best of it, of course, happy at least to have the roof over his head to keep out the rain.
The engine started on the third try.
Didn’t bode well, he thought. It may be that this tractor dies soon. What then? What would he do? They wouldn’t be able to run the farm without the tractor. Would he have to take his family and leave?
He didn’t like the answers to those questions.
He knew his wife would hear the tractor and wonder what was happening. She’d be suffering with fear—wondering if he was safe, where he was, who had knocked. She might think it was another visit from the Inquisitor. State visits terrified her.
But there was no time to tell her. Nothing he could do about that right now. All of their lives depended on his concealment of the fugitives.
The tractor rumbled along the muddy wheel ruts that let out to the cornfields. The first fields were still unplanted, endless brown expanses combed into neat rows by the plow.
Some of the fields had young corn in them, a gentle sprinkling of green shoots that dragged long sunset shadows behind them
In the cracked mirror he could see the men behind him, a ragged bunch on a strange metal wagon, an ancient fairy-tale picture from a haunted mind.
It took about two minutes to get to the farthest cornfields, where the corn was already ripening. Too long. The Guard would be here any second now.
He stopped at the first of the ripening fields, the tall stalks brushing against the tractor. The great green stalks dipped and bobbed like an ocean of flowing water in the last remnants of the red twilight. It reminded him of the fish on the vase.
Someday, he thought, he’d like to see the ocean.
The farmer climbed down from the tractor into a road that was shut out by great shadowy walls of corn, fading darkly into the deepening shadows of the twilight.
A buzz of aircraft again, this time closer.
The men climbed down, their clothes and skin a uniform shade of brown from the journey’s dust. Good, thought the farmer. The better to hide from the Guard.
The men stood in a silent file, staring at him.
He pointed into the dark forest of the corn. “Go in,” he said. “A hundred paces. Lay down. Don’t move until dark. If you are hungry, eat the corn.”
Silently, the men walked past him, vanishing one by one into the corn, strange scarecrow men in loose-hanging brown rags. They knew the danger of the Guard far better than he could.
The last of the men stopped. He looked at the farmer a moment, his eyes dark and close, buried in his face under darker hair.
His face was hard, leathern. A dried caricature of a face with all the expression long worn out of it. Even in the gathering night, the farmer could read gratitude in the eyes.
The man broke the silence. “Thank you.” He spoke heavily accented English through cracked, dry lips.
They’d need water soon, thought the farmer. He nodded his head to the man and watched him melt away into the corn, a night shadow, one with the darkness.
The sound of aircraft again. This time he could see it: a sparkling of red lights drifting through the air near the house.
A Guard search-craft. It began to move in his direction.
He got the tractor turned around as fast as he could. There wasn’t time to get back to the house, so it would have to appear that he was still working in the fields.
He drove the tractor to an empty field and went down the dry dirt rows, making great clouds of dust that swirled in the yellow headlights.
The search-craft passed overhead about a minute later. A great beam of white light cut down through the darkness and the dry swirling of the dust and mingled with the tractor’s headlights.
A thick thrumming of engines as the craft stopped above him, examining the tractor. Then it moved away ahead of him, headed back toward the house.
He knew he’d have to head back to the house now. He followed the crude roadway in a tunnel of his own light.
He stopped the tractor behind the house. When he got down he realized it had started to rain softly.
The air was thick with the smell of it.
The rain smell and the pattering of the droplets on his shoulders brought glad thoughts. The fields needed the rain. And it would erase any evidence that the fugitives might have left in the mud.
He heard engine noises and broke into a run.
In front of the house, he found the Guard.
Red lights flashed in ominous circular rhythm against the darkness, making each raindrop sparkle with a tiny unnatural candle flame of red light.
It was a nightmare scene, a shifting, flashing world. It was like trying to find your way in the blackness of a stormy night, waiting for the lightning to flash so you could see where you were.
Flash. Two police trucks silhouetted in glaring red.
Flash. Men with long weapons standing motionless among the trucks.
Flash. A man in a Guard helmet climbing the front steps of the house.
The engines of the search-craft thrummed overhead. A shattering brightness overpowered the red lights and plunged them into insignificance as the searchlights cut down from the craft.
He was between two of the police trucks. They were giant square vehicles, worn and failing, like his tractor. Some of the windows were missing. Rust stains ran down the sides.
Even the State equipment was dying, he thought. Soon, along with his tractor, it too would be gone.
On the porch he could see his wife, holding the baby in her arms. The Guard man was speaking to her. She didn’t know about the fugitives, he thought. All the better. Her answers would be truthful.
On the back of his coat there was a large red diamond, marking him as a ranking officer. He could hear the rising and falling of her voice, a sound bitten through with cold fear.
He ran toward his wife. He knew there were weapons pointed at him, but he did not care.
“Stop.” A commanding voice, from the man on the porch.
Two long rifles barred his way. He stopped, panting for breath.
The man approached him and stopped about two paces away. He was a tall man with a ragged steel-gray beard and steel-gray eyes to match. He wore Guard armor and weapons, equipment that showed its age. Patches of rust on the helmet. A cloth wrapping where a bit of steel armor was missing.
The man was new to him. The farmer hadn’t seen him here last time the Guard came.
The officer met his eyes. The farmer met his gaze unflinchingly but without defiance. He’d made that mistake once.
The officer still held his gaze. Daring the farmer to speak first.
The farmer remained quiet, looking into his eyes. Something familiar haunted him. Something about the man’s eyes.
He couldn’t place it.
The officer’s expression flickered slightly, hardened again into something strange, almost respectful, and faded back into the Guard brutality.
Still the farmer was silent.
The officer’s hand moved slowly behind his back.
Best to get it over with. “Why are you here?” Asked the farmer.
The man stared at him another moment, almost as if he was going to answer. Then he stepped aside and pulled down a panel on the side of the truck.
A tangle of wires and equipment unfolded. A mess of technology, crudely repaired.
The officer clicked a switch.
A blue-purple light flashed out onto the side of the truck. Five faces glowed there.
Five faces that he’d seen only moments ago.
Raindrops plinked on the officer’s helmet. The storm was catching up with them.
“Have you seen these men?” The officer was watching his face again.
He’d have to lie. There was simply no other way.
“No,” said the farmer, with flat finality.
“There’s a reward,” said the officer. “One thousand dollars.”
One thousand dollars! No use telling the officer that that amount of money would almost be more dangerous than beneficial to him.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” said the farmer, slowly.
The officer ran fingers through his beard, and said nothing, and watched the farmer’s face.
The farmer wondered at the man. All the Guard men he’d ever seen had been far more threatening, more aggressive. This man simply looked at him.
He’s not cut out for it, the farmer thought. He won’t be with the Guard for long.
Yet his men deferred to him.
And there was still that vaguely familiar something he hadn’t been able to place.
The officer raised his voice to cut above the thrumming of the search-craft. “Search the house!”
Men scrambled to follow as the officer led the way inside. Steel-toed boots rang out against the wooden deck. The door slammed behind them.
Two men remained outside, their weapons at the ready. The farmer saw his wife moving toward one of the painted wooden chairs on the porch. The chair creaked gently as she sat down.
They waited, unmoving.
The farmer watched the faces of the fugitives flickering on the side of the Guard truck. They had little chance of escaping discovery, he knew. They might remain hidden if they remained motionless.
The search-craft remained motionless above them, the lights so bright that the farmer couldn’t look up at them.
Loud thumping and knocking sounds from inside the house.
A tinkle of shattering glass. The sound of a harsh command.
On the porch, his wife gasped. They both knew that it could only have been the vase. He thought again of the golden fish on the vase, and the waters of the distant ocean. His wife would be heartbroken. At least he’d taken the bullets out this morning.
The rain grew heavier. It sparkled in the glaring lights and soaked his clothes and his hair, but still he remained motionless.
The door opened with a slam. The Guard poured heavily out down the porch steps. Some of the men were laughing, but a glare from the officer made them stop laughing and look down at their boots.
The officer stopped before the farmer. His face was grim. “You lie,” he said.
A memory swam before him: a day more than twenty years gone. The day he’d gone and waited in the interminable line at the bank for his pittance of money. It had taken him five hours to get to the front of the line.
A man behind the counter had looked at his claim slip. The man was tired, beaten down by the weight of the hopelessness he’d been forced to inflict on the thousands of people in the line. A man with steel-gray eyes, and brown hair only flecked with gray.
The same face that was before him now, with an entirely different expression on it.
He couldn’t tell if the officer recognized him. It was unlikely.
He’d expected violence to follow the accusation of lying. But the officer just turned away and climbed into his truck.
“Move out!” He shouted.
Men rushed past the farmer. Boots splashed in the mud and left dripping stains on the metal ladders of the trucks. Weapons clanked.
The search-craft above shut off the searchlights and faded into the rain. The trucks coughed to life and roared away along the muddy night roads.
The farmer was left alone in the darkness and the cold rain and the smell of the rain mixed with the exhaust of the engines.
The rain trickled to a stop.
He walked slowly through the mud toward his house, his ragged boots making prints in the mud that mingled with the ones the Guard had left only moments ago.
He climbed the porch steps, a soft wooden sound in the rain-drenched silence.
His wife was shivering, holding the baby close. Gently, he took the child from her arms. The baby was warm, even through his jacket.
“Let’s get inside.” His own voice sounded strange to him in the silence.
Inside the house they were met by pitch darkness. His wife went into the kitchen and fumbled with the matches and lit the candles in the stand on the kitchen table and blew out the match.
The vase was shattered, as they had feared. The pieces were strewn across the floor, a thousand white shards that stared guiltily up at them.
His wife crouched down beside the mess and picked up one of the pieces. She stared for a long moment at the delicate golden traceries on the white shard, watching them flicker in the candlelight.
The memories of days long buried sparkled in her eyes.
She set the piece down again. When she stood up the farmer saw tears glistening in her eyes.
Nothing else in the house seemed amiss. They went through all the rooms, but everything was exactly as they had left it.
Strange.
“Why did they come?” His wife’s voice was tremulous, shaken. Flickering shadows danced on her face to match the candle-flames in her dark eyes.
He didn’t want to worry her, but he knew he had to tell her about the fugitives.
“They’re looking for someone.”
“I know,” said his wife. “They told me. Five men.” She knew there was something he hadn’t told her. He could see it in her eyes and she in his.
“Those men are here, aren’t they.” There was flat finality in her tone.
The farmer nodded. “They knocked. I took them…”
“To the cornfield.” Her voice was disbelief.
The farmer nodded again.
“Why? Why would you do this to us?” Her voice was filled with a quiet clarity of growing anger.
“I had to do it,” the farmer said. “They would have been caught. Right here! On our doorstep!”
His wife realized the implications. “We would have been taken too.”
“Yes.” The farmer’s voice was low, almost a whisper. “You should have seen them.”
“Why,” his wife whispered, sinking down onto one of the chairs, her eyes on the ground. “Why us? Why does it have to happen to us?”
The farmer couldn’t answer her. He looked down at the baby, fast asleep in his arms.
“I couldn’t let them die,” he said, softly. “I just couldn’t.”
⁂
When he brought water out to the fugitives the next morning one of them was sick.
His name, they said, was Carlo. The farmer recognized him as the man that had stopped to thank him the night before.
He couldn’t stop coughing.
He knew he’d have to bring the man to the house, dangerous as it was. He’d die without help. The farmer’s wife had been a doctor once, a long time ago. She might be able to do something.
The men sat on the tractor again and held the sick man. The farmer drove slowly to keep from shaking him. He kept an eye on the sky as he drove, but he didn’t see any sign of a Guard craft.
He brought the men into the tractor shed behind the house. They laid the sick man, sleeping, on a tattered blanket in the dirt.
His wife felt the man’s forehead. “He’s got a fever,” she said. She peered into his mouth and held his wrist.
Then she said what the farmer had feared she would. “We’ll need the medicine.”
The medicine was one of their most valuable treasures, a life-preserving secret, a hoard they had treasured for nearly ten years. The stash was so well hidden that even after three visits, the Guard still had not found it.
The farmer knew better than to argue. “Yes,” he said. “I will get it.”
When he came back with the medicine chest the man, Carlo, was awake. His lips moved indistinctly.
“He’s trying to speak,” said his wife.
The farmer set down the medicine chest, leaned close to the man. The man tried to speak again. His voice was faint and rasping, a long-gone ghost voice from the utter depths of sickness and peril. “Thank you…..help…..me…” he muttered. “You…..good man.” He broke off into violent coughing.
Carlo, with much struggling, managed to swallow two pills. His face was bone-white, his eyes yellowing.
He spoke for the last time, his voice as cracked and dry as his lips. “Take me…see sun.” It was clearly all he could do to form the words, and he lay back panting.
Carlo died watching the red sun go down that evening, his dark, closed face aglow with its last sunset. One of the other men sat with him, watching him to the last, with tears sliding down his harsh, wrinkled cheeks.
The farmer watched the scene with a sinking heart. What would they do now? The Guard could return again, any minute, though he doubted it. But even so…the officer had thought he was lying….
His wife turned away from the dead man with tired eyes and dampened cheeks. “What do we do now?” She looked up into his eyes, trying to smile. “They have to get away. Soon.”
“I know.” He tried to sound strong, certain of the future, but—he wasn’t. The evening was gathering into night. A faint smell of rain mingled with the smell of the dust and the oily machine smells from the tractor shed behind him.
Clouds moved thickly in the sky. It would rain again tonight, he thought.
A kind of plan began to form in his mind. What if he stopped wondering when the Guard would come…what if he controlled, orchestrated, their arrival. The men might be able to escape if they planned it well.
“You’ll have to call the Guard,” he said. The officer hadn’t trusted him, but if his wife called…it might even make sense to them. Maybe they would even be expecting the call.
“Call them?” Disbelief rang in her voice.
“It’s our only chance,” he said. “If we call them—”
The men had come closer, listening with frightened eyes.
One of them spoke. “You call…Guard?” His voice was nothing but fear.
“Listen,” said the farmer. “Can any of you drive?”
For a moment, the men spoke amongst themselves, quick guttural sounds in their native language. Then one of them stepped forward.
“I drive,” he said, pointing to the tractor.
“Good,” said the farmer. “Come in here.”
He led the way into the tractor shed, his wife by his side, the men following. He didn’t think they were being watched, but…it was always better to be safe.
“Listen,” he said again.
He explained his idea. A dangerous idea, to be sure, but no more dangerous than pure inaction.
Ten minutes later, he walked out of the tractor shed with his wife. Their shoes crunched on the gravel as they walked to the house.
When they were inside, his wife entered the dreaded number into the dying State telephone on the wall.
Four. Zero. Four. The official Guard number.
She held the phone to her ear, listened for a moment as the other end spoke.
“We’ve found a dead man,” she said.
Indecipherable speech, harsh and menacing to the farmer’s ears.
“Yes,” she said, the fear evident in her voice. “He’s one of them.”
She listened for a moment and put the phone down. “They’re coming,” she said. “Now.”
⁂
A pounding knock on the door. The farmer blew out the single candle in the room, plunging it into darkness. He went slowly toward the door. He felt the reassuring pressure of the gun in his back pocket.
He opened the door. A man in Guard armor stood there, silhouetted against the flashing lights of a single Guard truck. Beside the truck, weapon ready, stood another Guardsman.
He’d only brought one other Guard man.
“You’ve found one of them.” The voice was hard and commanding.
The farmer recognized the voice. The officer he’d met before.
“What do you mean?” He said, letting surprise slip into his voice. “I haven't found anything.”
The man shoved past him into the darkened house. “Where is the man?” His voice was almost angry.
In a flash, the farmer had the door shut. His wife uncovered a candle just as the farmer put his gun to the officer's head.
The man stiffened, his muscles tense.
“Drop your weapons,” commanded the farmer.
A brief hesitation—then a dull clang as the long rifle hit the ground.
The officer’s face was wooden, expressionless. Even so, the farmer thought he could almost make out the tiniest hint of a smile in the steel eyes.
“Don’t move,” said the farmer. He held down the fear in his mind. Anything could go wrong. The man could shout.
But he didn’t.
His wife raised her own weapon, her face a mask of worry, her eyes darting from him to the officer.
The farmer stepped forward and took the officer’s sidearm from its holster. He bent down and picked up the rifle from the floor.
He crossed to the back door and opened it and handed the weapons to a pair of waiting hands.
“Sit down,” commanded the farmer. The officer instinctively looked about for a chair and then knelt slowly on the wood floor. His gaze flicked in the direction of the side table, where the vase had stood. For a second his eyes rested on the broken shards.
For a moment, silence.
Then a sudden muffled crash from outside. A ripple of rapid gunfire. A sickening thudding as bullets slammed into the door just above the floor.
In the next room, the baby began to cry.
The officer’s face remained unflinchingly wooden.
Outside, men shouted indistinctly. A loud roar of an engine starting. The loud crunching of the tires twisting against the gravel.
The engine sound increased for a moment, then, quietly, faded away.
Once more there was silence.
Had it worked?
“Your man out there,” said the farmer. “He’s fine.”
The officer said nothing. He was making an odd face—almost amused.
“You’re going to report this,” said the farmer’s wife.
“No.” The officer spoke almost before she’d finished.
The officer rose from the ground, coldly ignoring the weapons aimed at him. It occurred to the farmer that they were nearly powerless over this man, that he could have escaped at any time he chose.
He gave a nod to the farmer’s wife.
Then he was gone, closing the door behind him.
The farmer looked at the door, still holding his weapon. Then he carefully fit it back into his pocket and turned and looked at his wife.
“We’ll have to leave,” she said, her eyes upon his face. “Won’t we.” She looked down at the floor, at the broken pieces of the vase that still lay there, the golden patterns shattered and broken.
“Yes,” said the farmer. He looked around at his home, wooden warmth flickering in the candlelight. “We’ll have to leave.”
-
THE END
I was following a prompt when I wrote this one. The story had to include 3 things: some corn, a goldfish, and a deception.
Can you spot them all? I may have stretched it a little with the fish—but I think it worked out ok.
Now I want to hear what you think. Were there slow parts? Confusing parts?
If you have a moment, I’d love to hear about it. ↓
Thanks for reading. Have a great week!
- Samuel