Keys so many keys in my pocket. Every step I take I jingle and jangle. The weight of the keys were always weighing me down but the weight of the purpose was heavier. My purpose, a allotted task handed down through generations and those before me. My father and grandfather and so on were all key masters. A task so great that several of my relatives tried to change but got banished instead.

See the key master didn’t just hold all the keys to newcropolis they also held the very heavy task of keeping the gates locked and unlocked when needed. The people of newcropolis’s only way of survival was outside of the safety walls. Every day multiple crews left to forage and harvest food . The gates were immediately shut behind them. That was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out when to open the gates to let them in before the void took hold.

The void was a mysterious cloud that descended at random times of day. If the crews working had time to see it coming they could easily escape back to the village but if they were too late, well let’s just say their bodies were changed and not for the good. It wasn’t immediately noticeable when you are infected. That’s why the task is so important one second to late and people die ,somewhat. And leave that gate open to long everyone could be infected. That’s what happened at ceropolis a neighboring village we traded with.

We heard the warning bells go off then suddenly a loud boom. The whole place up in flames, gone. The chief sacrificed himself to contain the spred. And probably saved us and the other neighboring villages

You see the infection takes hours sometimes days to fully infect you and when it does you are no longer yourself but a lifeless clone. Feeding off of everything and everyone. A zombie as some would say. Everyone who goes out and forages must come back through a contamination sector. Where you are put under rigorous tests and confinement for many days up to weeks until you are given a all clear by all the people in the chain of command. The process is very taxing and long lasting and if there are any signs what so ever that you are contaminated you will be ejected from the village and forced to fend for yourself. If you weren’t already a zombie you soon would be one.

So yes I take my “job” very seriously because if I fail and let one infected person in, loosing my job is the least of my worries. If the subject is contained or deleted before anything has spread to others. I might keep my life. … maybe not.

Sorry if it’s too long the story kind of ran away with me.