There was far too much noise as Tagan walked along the edge of the woods just far enough away to be out of sight from the bridge. He didn’t make a habit of coming out this far, but he could hardly have said that to the man who had ordered him to do so. He kept trying to remind himself that it would be over soon. The other man would leave along with the crew that had come to complete a supply trade, and Tagan would be left back to his quiet and his (mostly) solitude.
He could still hear the sounds of the shifting of parcels not so very far off behind him, but the majority of the noise that was disrupting the morning was what he was making himself. He was walking far more loudly than necessary -- sort of stomping if he was being honest. It wasn’t as though it mattered. It provided a further way to vent some of his irritation with the day, his superiors, and life in general. He was too far away for anyone to be aware of how he was walking, and it wasn’t as though security training (at least the type that he had been through) included lessons on stealth. Guards and officers were supposed to be seen. They were supposed to be heard. There was no net effect of intimidation if no one knew you were there.
His voice was causing an additional layer of noise even though he was keeping his volume to a minimum in case the sound carried. He shouldn’t be saying the words out loud at all (what with the object of some of his mutterings so close at hand), but that was part of why he put so much effort into staying at the bridge in the first place. He was supposed to be out from under their scrutiny all of the time.
If someone was going to start showing up unannounced and unscheduled for random inspections, then the comfortable little life that he had built for himself here wasn’t going to be so comfortable. He had gotten too used to not having to look over his shoulder all of the time, and the realization that he might not be so far out of their view as he had thought was leaving him in as near to a fit of temper as he ever got. If chattering away at the trees and whatever animals were scurrying away from the noise he was making kept the words in check after he got back to the bridge, then he was going to chatter away.
“No good, lousy . . .,” the words faded in and out of volume. Anyone listening in would have been hard pressed to try to follow the conversation that Tagan was having with himself, but that was part of the point -- no one else was supposed to be hearing it. “Do a perimeter sweep. Like I don’t know how to do my job.” He muttered too caught up in his frustration to recognize the irony of that sentence. He might know how to do his job, but Tagan rarely did it in the officially sanctioned manner.
His version of a perimeter sweep involved stepping out of the front door of his cottage and letting his eyes scan across the countryside for a couple of moments. The man who oversaw the bridge guards likely knew that. He would huff and puff at Tagan while he was there because it was the expected thing to do. He would make Tagan do the normal work plus extra while he was around to see it, but he wouldn’t be around for long. He wouldn’t have any expectations of Tagan reforming and doing better after he was gone. That wasn’t what had Tagan worried. The general laziness would be allowed to slide. Tagan was too valuable as a bridge guard who never asked questions and didn’t seem to care much for anything but himself to let a little fact like him being lax in his duties get in the way of keeping him around.
Perimeter sweeps and monitoring actually didn’t really matter, and the people actually making the decisions knew that. The only way across the river was to use one of the bridges. You didn’t need to go looking for people trying to cross because the people trying to cross came to you. The important functions of a bridge guard were the ability to be trusted to pass messages without any curiosity as to what they were or meant, and the ability to get rid of the people who did appear to try to cross the bridge.
It was the latter that had Tagan troubled. If they were going to be checking up on him unexpectedly, then he might be in real trouble. He would have to shoot anyone who had the misfortune to show up at the bridge while his supervisor was there. He wouldn’t be taking any stands that got himself removed from his position (or shot in his turn). Tagan looked out for Tagan, and if that meant doing some shooting, then he would be doing some shooting. The necessity still didn’t make it anything other than awfully inconvenient. He had deals in place, and he had his life the way that he liked it. They just had to go and ruin everything and make his life all complicated again.
It was all so very unnecessary. What did they care, after all, if someone wanted to run away to the world on the other side of the bridge? They were just going to shoot them anyway, so it wasn’t like they were losing the work of someone that they could have kept otherwise. They couldn’t ever come back, so it wasn’t like they could go and tell others that the authorities had let them go. Besides, the type that did the running weren’t the type that made good citizens anyway. They were the question askers and the argue with authority types -- the ones who didn’t know how to keep their heads down and mind their own business. As long as everyone else thought they took a bullet to the head, what did it matter where they really went? Tagan could only chalk it up to some messed up sense of pride on the part of the authorities. They didn’t like to be defied, and they preferred that the deviant be erased from existence. They preferred that a lot of things that didn’t match up with the way that they wanted things to be be erased from existence. Tagan wouldn’t have cared if it didn’t cause added heaps of inconvenience to his life.
He would have to talk to the girl. That was his best option. She wouldn’t take it well, but it would be less trouble for him if she understood up front the way things were going to be. He had no intention of losing the comforts and perks he had become accustomed to while being stationed at the bridge just because Jaeli got all huffy over him doing what he had to do. She seemed the type -- she was gushy and sentimental about stuff. He would just have to make her understand that not shooting a runner (she always called them refugees which just went to show how needlessly sentimental she got about things) when there was a supervisor around to see would just get both the runner and himself shot. Tagan Keller did not get shot -- not if he could help it.
With the noise that his feet and mouth were making (and the internal focus on his bad mood that was leaving him preoccupied), it took a couple of minutes for him to realize that he was hearing another sound that wasn’t coming from the activity at the bridge or from himself. There was a scrunching noise coming from the woods. There was something moving around in there (and it was far too big to be one of the rabbits that he periodically saw bounding around the area). He thought about the tale that a colleague had once told him about seeing a bear come out of the woods. He thought about his supervisor who was back up at the bridge. He couldn’t go back yet; it was too soon. The man would know that he had shorted his rounds. He wasn’t about to walk into the woods and get eaten by a bear. Of course, it wasn’t likely that it was a bear. He had certainly never seen one, but he had never actually walked into the woods either.
The scrunching noise ended with a thump as if something had fallen. Tagan waited, but the scrunching noise didn’t continue. If there was a runner in there, this had the potential to be a colossally bad day. The scrunching hadn’t really sounded like footsteps though -- it had been more of a dragging sort of a sound. He heard some rustling in the tall grass that filled the area followed by another thump. This time he made out another sound. It was a voice, but it was soft enough that the actual words spoken hadn’t carried to Tagan’s location.
It was a runner then. That was just great. There hadn’t been a runner for well over a month, and it would, of course, have to be this day that another one would show. He was going to have to think fast. If he could convince the runner to just stay out of sight in the woods until the extra people at the bridge went away, then he could salvage the situation. The problem was that his uniform wasn’t going to do him any favors with a runner (it never did).
/> He usually just held runners at gunpoint until he could signal Jaeli to come over and get them out of his hair. She wasn’t always best pleased about that, but it was a system that worked (which meant that he saw no reason to modify it). The problem with his usual approach to things was that that occurred in the open field next to the bridge where there was nowhere to go. Inside the woods (with cover available), someone might get the bright idea to make a run for it.
He sighed. He was going to have to hope that the person in there was worn out enough that running wasn’t an initial thought. Then, he was going to have to do some quick talking. Jaeli was going to owe him way more than the usual fee for this one. He was having to plot and do some convincing as well as going out of his way to try to keep someone from getting shot. Plus, he was going to have to go into the woods. There were all kinds of bugs in there in addition to snakes and other kinds of unpleasantness. Having to go into the woods was worth an extra fee all by itself.
It took him a few minutes to find the source of the sound. He realized quickly that he wasn’t going to have to worry about there being any running. The man in front of him was obviously not in any kind of shape for that. It was pretty clear that he had fallen as Tagan watched him try to get back on his feet (again he would assume based on the second thump he had heard before he came into the woods in the first place) only to lose his balance and tumble back to the ground. He might have had more luck if he wasn’t trying to get himself back up and balanced with the extra weight of the kid throwing him.
Jaeli would be spastic. She always was when there was a kid (and they were few and far between). The prospect of the fee he would be receiving jumped from really great to absolutely excellent. Jaeli fell all over herself when there was a kid involved. Now, he just had to convince the guy to keep himself and the kid hidden and quiet for a few hours. He wasn’t thrilled with the prospect, but there was the potential for pie at stake (and that was motivation enough for him).