The Riftkeepers | Completed

"Shock and awe, Stogie," uttered a pale-skinned boy wearing a pink beanie and bright blue jeans to his friend who wore similar clothing as they walked down the street, Haven High School looming on the right-hand side like a forgotten dream. "Shock and awe."

It was a Saturday, a week after Sam and Jordan had last been together, and the entire school was empty, save for the janitors who were there in the morning hours, cleaning out dirt and dusting surfaces.

Just as Mr. Svensson—a middle-aged Swedish man with thinning white hair and stubble on his beard, which itched every so often—who'd made Haven his home some twenty years ago and had served as the school janitor for fifteen of those—finished up work on that day at approximately 11:46 a.m. As Svensson packed up his equipment into the janitor's closet and made his way to the front door, keys knocking on each other in his hand like hockey pucks against the wall of an ice rink, two uninvited guests made their way into the building.

He would have turned back and accosted them in the way that he usually did—it would have been like talking to truant students who were in the habit of running along the hallway, especially when the floor was wet and had just been cleaned: Stop running on the hall or I'm taking you to the Principal's office—if he had been able to see them come in.

Svensson locked the front door and ran the length of the chain through the handles, securing it with a large padlock. Within the building, the two intruders clicked and clacked their way across the tiling on the floors. They walked ahead, gurgling and chuckling as they did, bodies scraping against the walls and long toes sliding against the sleek flooring. One of them stopped in front of the door to the chemistry lab and jumped up with eerie glee to look into the room through the square glass window positioned high up on the door's frame.

The second intruder smacked the first when he got down, like a mother disciplining her child for running around and playing too much in a playground. They both scurried onward to the staircase, jumping down and scraping tiles with each landing until they got to the basement. The walls were painted a light blue and yellow—blue above and yellow below, both colors separated in the middle by a white line—and the hallway led in only one direction: towards the red door that led into the boiler room.

It had been installed with the school when it was built and was used to house mechanical equipment for regulating the hot water that ran through the building. The entire sub-basement had been locked down completely, and no one, not even janitors, had been down there in years.

They saw the red door ahead and scurried along the ground as fast as they could, which wasn't very fast because they weren't very large. Stacked on top of each other, they weren't even three feet tall. The more joyful one who wanted to look into the chemistry lab had skin that looked like that of a shark; it was yellow, scaly, and slick, glistening against every light source.

As they got to the door, they walked on, dematerializing through it like it wasn't there. There was a gentle ripple like water against the surface of the door as they moved until their bodies were fully through. The other intruder had black, hard skin like an armadillo. Its head was smaller than its body, and it ambled forward, its scaly talons making contact with the ground.

On the inside of the boiler room, everything was relatively the same as it had been for years. Junction boxes and hot water pipes ran the entire length and height of the room. An overhead incandescent bulb flickered in the middle of the room, casting occasional shadows across surfaces.

But if someone had looked just a little bit more closely, they would have definitely seen those two interesting specimens standing in front of the door, gazing around. And they would have seen hundreds of them. They were everywhere—some were hanging off of pipes and swinging around like delinquent kindergartners, others were sitting around and getting into the occasional push and shove when one inadvertently bumped into another one; it was a cramped space and bumping was inevitable—and these two only added to the number.