Miller's Tool and Die
Night Guard
Admiral Biscuit
As buildings go, there’s not much to it. Four walls and a roof, all of them simple corrugated iron.
Inside, a single desk lamp glows, only sixty watts. There’s a table, laminated pressboard with chips on the edges and stains of the surface. The chair is similarly industrial chic; duct tape has been used to repair the torn spots on the armrests.
Upon the table is half a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup, one sugar, two creams. It’s cold.
There is also an open can, edges jagged from a cheap can opener. Del Monte diced mangoes.
Several black and white CRTs glow nearly as brightly as the single overhead lamp. Blurry images of the yard, everything ghosted in infrared.
A telephone completes the picture, an old Western Electric model. Obsolete, but fitting given the overall appearance of the shack. Money that could have been used to improve it was not, and yet it serves its function well enough.
In a movie, there would have been a heavyset guard as well, for this is beyond any doubt a guard shack.
There is not.
The chair is empty.
If the telephone were to ring it would go unanswered; it would be a call into the void.
•••
It is said that criminals do not appreciate the finer details. Criminal acts are rarely subtle. They are bold and brazen.
In any Hollywood movie, the antagonists would case the joint, they would be watching from a distance with binoculars. They would have, over the course of days or perhaps weeks, gotten to know the routine of the guards.
This was not a Hollywood movie. The antagonists, such as they were, looked no further than the apparently abandoned guard shack. They did not give consideration to the fact that that guard might have simply stepped out for a moment to use the restroom, and that said guard might return and witness the crime in progress in any one of the Panasonic CRTs. They simply saw that the guard shack was empty and to them that was proof positive that there was no guard, and therefore the soon to be crime scene was ripe for picking.
Much like the mangoes which remained in the can.
They seized the moment. There was an attempt at subtlety; they drove into the back alley with only the running lights turned on, and they’d long since removed the bulb from the dome light. They were wearing black clothes and did not make the mistake of illuminating their way with flashlights.
They had not actually checked the guard shack beyond what they could see while driving by. In any Hollywood movie, they would have, but they instead went over the fence in the back, where everything was cast in shadows by the distant harsh light of arc sodium fixtures.
Their voices are naught but whispers, practically unhearable above the noise of a nearby factory which works three shifts.
Up above them, the all-seeing eye of a camera records their every movement, and although there were currently no eyes to watch in the guard shack, it did not occur to the intrepid criminals that various recording mediums do exist, and that after a robbery, it would be a simple matter to rewind the tape and watch it.
In the heat of the moment, that does not come into play. The guard is on patrol. The guard does not trust the flattened ghostly images displayed on obsolete Panasonic monitors. They lie about depth and they blur things which should be clear.
•••
Darknight Moonwing wears no uniform. White button-down shirts look quite official, and stand out in the darkness, whereas her shadow-colored fur does not. Her authority and her duty are not summed up by a neat white shirt nor a shiny badge, not in her opinion. She’d been hired to guard, a duty she would fulfill to the best of her abilities. Everything else was secondary to that, even her lunch.
The guard shack had an antique telephone and ancient CRTs and blurry cameras and a prime location right near the front gate which was fine during ordinary business hours, but she knew full well that in the night, criminals would not come calling at the front gate.
The day guard was a glorified receptionist, mostly directing traffic and inquiries as required.
She is the night guard. She is Gandalf facing the Balrog, and none shall pass.
Her ears move; the breaching of the outer fence was not as silent as the criminals had imagined. As they climb, it makes a distinct rhythmic rattle, different than the ambient noise.
Against the still night air, her wings are practically silent. If anyone had looked up, her shadow might have briefly covered the moon.
The previous night guard had been content to perform his duties in the comfort of the guard shack, knowing only what he could see on the fuzzy televisions. She was not. She knows the storage lot like the back of her hoof; she knows how it changes on a rainy night. She knows the smells and sounds of it, and she knows the criminals as soon as they crossed the boundary fence, the outer border of her fiefdom.
As they move across the concrete, her training manual suggested that she should hunker down and call the police. She does not; she glides to a rooftop perch where she can watch them, where she can understand their motive.
They have a rough idea of what they’re looking for, and eventually stumble upon the aluminum ingots. Stacks of them, waiting to be worked, and valuable in their current form to a scrapyard that doesn’t ask too many questions.
Her training manual advised hunkering down and calling the police, but she does not. Her cat-like eyes glow softly in the reflected arc sodium light as she observed.
They lacked the foresight to bring bolt cutters or even a pair of dykes, instead tossing the ingots over the border fence. This is theft; this is actionable.
She glides through the dark night, practically invisible. Her forehooves are stretched out, elbows locked. She is not entirely conversant in human anatomy, but she knows full well that a strike to the head is often incapacitating.
The first man falls, still cradling his ill-gotten goods.
She swoops up, trading speed for altitude, and returns to her perch on top of the non-ferrous metals storeroom. Watching and waiting, wondering if there is honor among criminals.
•••
There is not.
The second man chucks the ingot he’s carrying over the fence, his mind only focused on the task at hand.
She watches. The cameras also blindly watch, dutifully recording to an overused videotape.
One, two, three, four ingots sail over the fence and she stays in her position, unmoving, unseen, a flesh-and-blood gargoyle on the roof. Suspect number two has no awareness or care for his fellow man, lying unconscious mere feet from where he casually tosses his stolen aluminum ingots.
He’s regular enough she could set a watch to him, if she cared to. Five, six, seven, eight ingots go over the fence.
•••
The ingots are heavy and he moves in a weird crouched run. He’s aware of the need for speed, but hampered by the blocks. It’s not fair at all as she silently swoops down from a rooftop, not fair as she strikes.
Maybe at the very last second he noticed her, a shadow-shape in the near darkness.
Or maybe he didn’t; maybe his mind was on the reward.
Either way, it made no difference. Her hooves struck home and he crumpled to the ground.
There was no celebration, no counting coup. Darknight glided most of the way back up to the roof, only flapping a few times to make up for the momentum she’d lost with a hoof-strike.
It was not her duty to pick up the lost ingots, but she did, carrying them back to the pile from whence they’d come.
She also checked on her two victims, who were both out cold.
As far as she was concerned, her duty was not what the employee handbook said, but instead what she understood. Keep the tool and die works safe through the night, and she had done it once again.
Now that the criminals were out of it, she flew back to the guard shack. Progress, if any, could be observed on the black and white televisions. If they were smart, they would have learned their lesson, they would climb back over the fence and drive away empty-handed.
If they were not, she was ready.
•••
She could have picked up the telephone; she could have easily dialed the number for the police. Even if there was no provable case for theft—and there likely was; the cameras saw all—they were both on the wrong side of the fence, and that was trespassing.
Instead, she took her plastic fork in her mouth and stabbed it into the can, spearing a defenseless mango chunk.