The First Riddle

The sky had reached its darkest point outside the rundown warehouse as the two men stood checking their hand terminals, rereading the incoming message. They had meant to be home much earlier, but Piotr and Wyatt never managed to have evenings go as planned anymore. They had been studying the Inners’ scouting party for weeks in efforts to discover if they were simply Outriders or a grand Strider incursion, and the search had only grown stranger over time. For years the Inners had focused their expansion efforts on the southern regions, but slowly more and more scouting parties kept popping throughout the Frontier. The word coming from Boise was multiple Outriders were making routine trips into town day after day. Similar rumblings had come from Missoula to the north.

Despite the Inners having outposts in Cheyenne and Spokane for over a decade, though, they had yet to push any further. Everyone throughout the Frontier was accustomed to seeing the occasional Outrider from time to time. They were always nice enough at the onset, humble travelers venturing through the wastelands to see what was left of humanity outside their Castle walls. Outriders merely were the facade of silver-tongued diplomats of the Inners’ cloak-and-dagger methods. Word had long since spread throughout the Frontier of the horrors that followed when the Inners truly made an excursion, though. Piotr and Wyatt both remembered what it was like when the Striders moved on Cheyenne. They had fled the horrifying scene and continued fleeing west until they reached the pass and settled in the safety of Idaho Falls. Once there, they met other refugees who told them similar stories of what happened in Spokane, Reno, even a couple from as far as St. George and others.

They had all managed to survive the Fall and were somehow able to find a way to survive in the fractured new world. It hadn’t taken long before Piotr and Wyatt had seen the direction said world was headed. Seemingly overnight new tribes formed, and different structures were put in place of the old for the strong to prey upon the weak. Strangers before the Fall, their lives were changed in an instance when they both moved to stop a local shop in their neighborhood from being robbed. When they realized no one else around had stepped in to help, it was evident they were no longer men meant for that world. The two had made their escape together and never looked back. It wasn’t until Idaho Falls that they had met others like themselves, and their ragtag group of silent protectors had formed.

It was nothing major initially, merely a neighborhood watch for the townsfolk of the Frontier. There was no formal structure, no shifts, or straightforward procedures. They simply operated by a code; do no harm. Wyatt, Piotr, and those like them only stepped in to stop anyone from breaking that code. The towns had established their courts to try any perpetrators of the handful of laws that still existed. Piotr and Wyatt had no interest in that, though. The townsfolk could handle their legal matters however they saw fit once the perpetrators were apprehended. Wyatt and Piotr sought only to be peacekeepers.

That’s how it had started, at least, and for a time, it worked well. Years passed as they went about their daily lives, stopping to help those in need when their paths crossed, but nothing lasts forever. As the Inners began creeping steadily further into the Frontier, that role began to change. In short order, Wyatt and Piotr became as much of a reconnaissance team as they were a peacekeeping unit. Everyone in their circle knew all too well what the presence of the Inners meant, and they quickly made to overhaul their unkempt group. They repurposed a back room at the local range and supply store as a makeshift meeting room and operations center where they could discuss the developing threat and strategize against it and began spreading their thin numbers out through the Frontier to keep watch. Months went by, though, with no significant developments. It was nothing like Cheyenne. Then, within weeks the city had been taken over, but these Outriders scouting runs had been few and far between. The pattern and pacing had been completely disheveled as if the Inners were uncertain of how to expand further.

It had been more than a year since the group first began tracking the situation before the sudden increase in Outrider presence happened. All at once, the reports starting coming in from across their barebones network of sightings. It wasn’t until a small group of Inners made it to Idaho Falls, though, that Wyatt and Piotr were fully pulled into the fray. The weeks passed as the duo tracked the group, noting their every movement on their hand terminals and syncing the data with their server back at the range. It was all the usual tactics of Outriders; trading with the town’s merchants, getting to know the local hierarchy, slowly working to gain the good graces of the most influential people and groups. Every report they’d had from any town that had fallen went the same. The Outriders would steadily build trust with the locals, convincing them that the Inners could be trustworthy trade partners, even offering aid when they could, all so that when the Striders made their move, the town would be completely caught off guard.

Piotr and Wyatt had vowed not to let that happen again, though. Idaho Falls would not become another Cheyenne, they swore. So they stalked the group, making note of their every move. For the most part, the Inners stayed in the town. They were lodging at a local Inn, and the majority of the people with whom the Inners needed to connect were within the city. Eventually, though, a stray member of the group would randomly slip away. Wyatt and Piotr missed it the first couple of times. The Inners were good at their craft. Finally, though, they managed to catch one of the stealthy exits and followed the individual to the rundown warehouse along the Snake River outside the southside of town. When the individual disappeared inside, the duo scaled the side to reach a row of windows from where they could catch a glimpse of what was happening inside.

The warehouse was obscured in darkness but seemed to be nearly empty from what they had seen. The only thing of note inside had been a small, makeshift communications center surrounded by an equally small bunk and impromptu galley, the Inners’ mobile base of operations. It was expertly designed for function. Even in the dimly lit room, Wyatt and Piotr could tell that everything in the room could be set up and broken down within minutes to allow the Inners ultimate mobility as they moved through the Frontier. In the middle of the comms center, a heavily geared woman leaned over a tac-table studying the intel, radiating the militant efficiency of hardened commander, a Strider.

Piotr and Wyatt’s worst fears had risen in their throats at the sight. Outriders were something they were prepared to handle, but a Strider meant a much more harrowing truth; invasion. Striders were the daggers hidden within the robes of the Inners’ outwardly pleasant demeanor, and the presence of one meant the Frontier was in far more danger than the duo had realized. She hadn’t even acknowledged the entrance of the other individual who had merely approached the tac-table, gave the Strider a hand terminal Piotr and Wyatt could only assume contained the latest batch of intel, and grabbed a new hand terminal before departing.

The Strider had watched the door for a brief moment after the individual left before docking the hand terminal in the tac-table and walking over to her bunk. Upon reaching it, she had slid her footlocker from under the bed, opening it and taking out a large box wrapped in brown paper. Wyatt and Piotr had watched in confusion as the Strider placed the box on her bed and sat down beside it. With legs crossed and fingers steeped together, the indexes touching her lips, she had sat and stared at the box. Minutes had passed as the duo studied the woman studying the box in silence. Then, as if resolved in some way, the woman stood, returning the package to her footlocker and sliding it back under the bunk before returning the tac-table to study the newly uploaded data.

That would not be the last time Piotr and Wyatt would witness the strange scene. Each day a random member of the Outriders had slipped away to the rundown warehouse, leaving the newly acquired data with the Strider before returning the group. After every swap, the Strider would watch the door for a time after the Outrider departed before returning to the neatly wrapped box stashed away in her footlocker. Piotr and Wyatt constantly wondered what must have been in the box for the woman not to have studied it with such fervor yet never opened it. Each day they would watch the enigmatic woman executing her ritual before returning to her strategical routine and search for what could be at hand.

A week of such activities had passed as Wyatt and Piotr had continued to study the group in turn, hoping that the intel they had been collecting on the Inners was half as valuable as whatever the Strider was collecting on the townsfolk of Idaho Falls. The two men had been following the Outriders, patiently awaiting the random departure of the day, but it never came. It had been nearing nightfall when the entire group suddenly checked out of their local hotel and bid farewell to the host before heading out of town towards the warehouse. Anxiety had swelled in the two men, fearing that the Inners’ final move was at hand.

Wyatt and Piotr had raced ahead to reach the rundown warehouse ahead of the Inners, expecting to see a final strategical meeting between the Strider and Outriders, but what they had found instead was even more perplexing. Inside the warehouse, there was no sign of the Strider. All the equipment had still been in place, but it was powered down and sat dormant. Stranger still was that when the Outriders arrived, they had made no move even to enter. The group had walked directly around to the back of the warehouse, revealing an undercover carport. A carport that had housed cruisers that the Outriders quickly mounted and rode out of town.

Confusion had swirled in the two men’s minds, completely lost as to what exactly they had found themselves in the midst of. Quickly they had made their way inside to search the abandoned equipment only to find that all the hand terminals and backup datapads had been pulled. Then they had turned to the one other thing they knew the room had contained; the footlocker with the mysterious box. Pulling the footlocker from under the bed, the two men had paused to quell their rising fear, but when they had opened the footlocker, they found it was empty. The neatly wrapped brown paper box which they had watched the Strider study so fervently day after day was gone, and at that exact moment, their hand terminals had chimed with an incoming message. A message Wyatt and Piotr still stood reading again and again.

I am filled with boxes, yet none arrive or ever leave.

These days I am a sight many must see to believe.

Within one of my boxes lies a parcel you must find,

If indeed you truly wish to leave this world behind.

For those whom this life has broken and can take no more,

The power to take it back rests just beyond my door.

But take heed, weary soul, this future is not for the novice.

Should you fail at your post, there will be no solace.

~Marshal