by Rayna Friedman
I had reached the
gate after about an hour of driving; that’s how far the gate is from the Times
Building. After the
second one was burned (which had been much closer to Downtown), they decided to
rebuild the new one as far away as they could from the gate. They didn’t want
another article causing a riot. Now that I think about it, this might
cause a riot, but now the Up-towners will be the ones rebelling.
The gate was as
closely guarded as always and, for any normal civilian, it would probably take
at least twenty minutes to convince the men on post that they could, in fact,
get through the gate and go on Downtown. But I can’t claim to be any simple
civilian.
With my Elle
parked on the northern side of the gate, I grabbed my bag of materials and got
outside. The sky was clear but I could see right over the gate that the sky was
almost as black as night. Smoke and air pollution poured out of the many
factories, creating the illusion of night south of the gate. The sky on my side
of the gate was as clear and bright as could be. That was thanks to the smoke
clearers; those little spheres that always flew across the sky, picking up all
the dirt in the air.
“Nade… good to see you my friend,” Nade, who had been turned away from me,
suddenly spun around, dropping his Sixer in the process.
Nade was one of
two guards finishing up his shift by the gate. I had first met him at training
when I had written a piece on Chicago
police corruption. We were both rookies, young and fresh-faced, eager to make
our bosses proud. The kid was a goody-two-shoes; not corrupted by his peers at
the time. To tell the truth, he really hadn’t ever been turned over to the dark
side, which is pretty odd in this day and age. I remember asking him where
exactly all of the money given to the police department goes. “To cleaning up
the streets,” he had said. I, of course, found evidence to the contrary, but we
chatted it up and I found him to be a nice guy, so I kept his number,
occasionally meeting him at his post, getting inside answers for reports. We’ve
been more-than-acquaintances since. The funny thing was my piece was never even
published. It was just pure luck that Nade had recently been put on gate duty.
I couldn’t help but laugh at the poor guy. For a gate guard, he was pretty
pathetic. Actually for any kind of a cop, he was just plain pathetic. If I
wasn’t so afraid of guns, I’d make a better cop than him… which makes him just
about the worst cop this country has to offer.
He struggled to grab his knife off of the ground, which consequently caused the
gun that was strapped around his shoulder to fall in front of his face, which
he had to push behind him, finally getting the knife and standing up like a
normal person. He took a deep breath in and out, draining the bright red from
his face.
“That nervous from the sound of my voice, huh?” I laughed again.
“Damn it Clay! What do you want?” he whined.
“I gotta get to the other side of the gate,” I said, giving him a massive
smile.
“No Clay, my shift’s over and I-”
“Nade, come on. Just scribble me in on that little pad of yours,” I said,
taking his sign-in pad.
“Clay.”
“Listen Nade; you and I both know how this is going to end, so you might as
well save us both a lot of time and whining and put your finger on that pad and
open up the gate for me.”
It’s been years and the guy still wants to follow protocol. I’ve never
understood people like Nade.
He glared at me for a good five seconds and finally sighed. The battle was won.
He put his thumb on the electronic pad and typed a few keys. A small pedestrian
door opened from the bottom up and I was unofficially, officially allowed to
enter Downtown.
“Now was that so hard?”
I felt through my pants pocket for my ID card and satisfied, walked through the
door.
“Yeah… whatever.”
We both rolled our
eyes
“See you later, Nade,” I said as a waved to the poor guy.
Well, now he could
go home to his wife and kid and not have to worry about me for the rest of the
day.
CHAPTER 2:
Downtown, my
childhood home. Nothing had changed, not a thing; which was to be expected. I
remember the adults always saying that “nothing ever changes.” That was, and
probably still is, a sort of mantra Downtown. But things do change, and that was what I believed despite what everyone said.
That was why I always wanted to leave that place. How can you raise a kid who
sees everything in a good light to think that things don’t change? The fact
that I was told that I would never amount to anything must have made me want to
show them that they were wrong about me. It made me want to change, even if it
was just one kid getting out of Downtown and making a name for himself.
The place smelled like smoke…heavy, gray, cancer-inducing smoke. And it was no
surprise. I had grown up smelling and inhaling the stuff until I got myself out
of there. Unlike the few people who have to cross the gate and feel the need to
wear gas-masks, I was relatively comfortable with the air. Although it did
somewhat burn my lungs to breath it all in.
There were guards lining the gate on the Downtown side. They all had the usual
black shirt, black pants and black bullet-proof vest get-up. They stood with
their legs hip-width apart and hands on their Sixer strapped around their
shoulders. Their protective head and face gear covered their entire faces but
I’m sure that they all had the same blank expression beneath. They were all
looking straight ahead, awaiting the occasional crazy old beggar running up to
the gate, crying and screaming to get into Uptown.
But of course, the guards would just keep their straight faces, staring ahead
of them, locking arms so that the Downtowner wouldn’t get through the gate.
They would wait until he or she would tire themselves out or just give up. They
wouldn’t let a crazy old Downtowner just walk through the gate to Uptown. That
wasn’t how things worked in the Empire.
Anyway, I walked past the line of about ten or so guards on duty and into the
Down itself. I walked through the streets and thought that I should be feeling
some sort of nostalgia for the place. I thought that maybe I should be
remembering the good old days when I used to roam the barely paved streets and
play some game that involved getting muddy with my friends. I thought I should
remember my mother talking with me after her job and my school day and the
meals that we had together. But I just couldn’t. I had no love for this place
and walking deeper into the Down made me almost… angry.
The deeper one walked into the Down, the worse it seemed. And one thing that
Uptowners don’t know is that from the outside, the Down always looks better
than it actually is.
The sky was that gray-black color it always is and the smell of smoke pervaded
the air as usual. The streets were bumpy, with massive ruts in the pavement.
Some patches of dirt even peeked out from the old and crumbling concrete.
People walked on every inch of available space; three minutes into my journey,
I was swallowed by the hordes of people walking to wherever it was they were
going. The poorest of the poor were sitting by the rows and rows of buildings
forming the border of the wide streets. They held out their hands, asking for
money or food or drink. Kids were running around. A man was thrown out of a bar
and into an alleyway the crowd passed.
Most of the people
surrounding me were wearing baggy and dirty clothes; no doubt fifty percent of
them were living on the streets or in homes which they were months behind rent
on. And you couldn’t hear a single conversation. The amount of talking and
screaming and noises from the factories was too much to even hear yourself
think.
But I was lucky; I
had lived this way during my entire childhood. I was somewhat used to this
lifestyle and could bear it. I laughed for a second, thinking if some of the
writers for the Emp Times would come here. They would walk through the gate,
most likely dreading it for at least an hour before entering, take a few steps
past the guards and into the streets, gasp and run back to the gate. This was
why I was here and not one of those other journalists. I was here for a purpose
that I knew only I could handle, and handle the right way.
Finally, I found
the building which I was looking for. I had only heard of the place from an
inside source, but from what they had said…
About two years
ago I had gone into the Down to visit my old home. It had been the anniversary
of my mother’s death and I made it my business to get myself over there once
every year in memory of the woman. I didn’t have the best of relationships with
her (not many children do in the Down), but she was the person who had raised
me, so I felt it my responsibility, as her only child, to do something in her
memory. Besides, it was slightly nice to go back to my roots and visit my
childhood town.
And so, I walked
to my old apartment building, which was in even worse condition than I had left
it in, looked up at its tall walls and turned right around. I walked about ten
steps when I noticed an unusually suspicious man in a tattered trench coat run
out of my old building and into the building next door. I would have just
shrugged off any ideas of suspicious activity had it not been for the young boy
who walked out of my building a few seconds later and casually strolled into
the same building that the man had gone into. Being a journalist, my curiosity
got the better of me and I followed the path of the two men before me. Into the
apartment I went. I walked into the lobby and saw neither a man in a trench
coat nor a young boy strolling around. I walked through the lobby and found a
rusting metal door being closed. I ran to the door, grabbed the metal handle
and pulled it towards me so as not to let it close. I pulled it enough to see
the face of the person behind it… it was that kid. We struggled for a while
until I pulled so hard that I sent the poor kid flying down the stairs.
I ran down the
stairs after the boy and was met by a group of about thirty or so, some sitting
around a table, some sitting on chairs, some standing in corners, like the man
in the trench coat. They stared at me, then the boy, then me again.
Well, I found out
that they were a group of underground anarchists. They didn’t like our
government, they didn’t like the gate and the Down and they didn’t like The
Wall. They organized the occasional bombings (which usually failed) and viruses
among computers both in the Down and Up. I allowed myself to be integrated into
their group, but not as a full member because I don’t have that much against
the government. I let them control the big and important things like wars and
taxes and I just report the news to their citizens. I promised the underground
I wouldn’t do any reporting, not to the authorities and not in the newspaper,
as long as they let me come in and listen to some of their meetings.
And that’s exactly
what I did. I came in whenever I could and listened to them talk about the new
trouble they were planning. I occasionally put in a word or two once I got
comfortable with the group. I can’t say they ever got comfortable with me,
considering they were anarchists and probably hated everything I stood for as
an Uptowner, but that didn’t matter to me, what did was that I was
getting to hear the side of a story that no one else I knew ever would.
Anyway, there was
one conversation that piqued my interest as of late and that was one of the
possibility of regular people (not Ills) living on the other side of The Wall.
I personally didn’t fully believe it, I actually barely believed it at all, but
the thought that it was possible struck me as interesting. And so that was how
I became interested in doing this escapade of mine over The Wall. But I told
this story for a different reason, and that was how I got to the building which
I was standing in front of.
I explained my
interest in The Wall to one of the men that I had become semi-close to in the
anarchist group, a man by the name of Serge. He told me to go to another
building in which similar meetings took place. He pointed me in the direction
of the apartment complex which I was now entering.
I walked through
the rusting metal doors of the building, into the lobby, and found another
metal door, probably leading down to a basement that held the meetings as in
“my” secret meeting house. I walked up to the door as instructed and knocked, bum
bum, bum bum, like the beating of a heart and waited. Two minutes
later, I heard footsteps tread lightly close to the door.
“If you wrong us
shall we not seek revenge?” I muttered with my lips close to the edge of the
door.
“Name,” someone on
the other side demanded.
“Burnam, Clay. I
was sent by Serge.”
And with that, the
door opened just wide enough for me to squeeze in. The man, a tall, skinny and
mostly bald man in a long black coat hurried me down the stairs, cautiously
closing the door before he followed me down.
“Left at the
bottom, first door on the right.”
At the bottom of
the stairs, I made the left and found a wooden door to my right. I walked
through and was met by a massive hallway buzzing with printers and old
electronics and murmuring people. Men and women were running everywhere, up and
down the dimly lit hallways, into doorways left and right.
“Clay!” There was Serge,
looking up at me from behind someone’s shoulder.
“Come over here,”
he motioned for me to come to him with a swish of his head.
I walked over to
my anarchist friend and he greeted me warmly, which was quite uncharacteristic
of him. Serge was usually a serious and stern man; he didn’t take crap from
anyone and didn’t hand it out; he was a straightforward man and that was why I
liked him. I hated people who say they’ll do things that they won’t. Although,
I guessed that half of the things he always wanted to do would never come into
effect. But he never told people that he would do something that couldn’t be
done; he only dreamed of the impossible things, confining them all to his head
and his head alone.
“If it isn’t the
man of the hour; we were just making sure that your escape route is going to go
without a problem. Here,” Serge took a paper from the man he was standing
behind and showed it to me.
“We finalized
everything, pretty much down to your estimated step count. We would like this
journey of yours to go off well and without harm. So let me show you how things
will proceed tomorrow.”
The plan was
tomorrow night, I would go to a spot in The Wall, about two miles from the
building I was in, and get over it. The anarchists had a relationship with one
of the Wall Guards and paid him off to allow me over. They also paid off the
two guards on either side of him. But the guards’ two posts away from my
leaving point would still likely be able to see me. That was why I would be
wearing a guard’s uniform so that the other guards wouldn’t be suspicious. The
two guns near the area and the sirens would be turned off for three minutes and
thirty seconds. That’s how much time I had to get myself over The Wall. To
physically get over The Wall, I would climb the closest ladder that the guards
usually used to get up to their posts and run fifty feet south, away from The
Wall. By then, I would be in the South; the real, live South.
The first fifty
feet of running (to the Northern side of The Wall) would take what the
anarchists estimated to be fifteen seconds. Then climbing the ladder should
take one minute, maybe one minute and fifteen seconds. Then down the ladder
should take about the same time, maybe fifteen to thirty seconds more, then
that would give me at least thirty seconds to run the next fifty feet on the
southern side. It should work. It had to work. Besides, I decided I would make
it work, anyway. I was going to get over that Wall and if that meant being out
of breath for a few minutes, then so be it.
I was looking intently at the paper which Serge had given me, my eyebrows
knitted. I wanted to do this… I needed to do this. And although I had gone to
war zones and the Down dozens of times, this was different. I was going to go
over The Wall; a place no one had been in over 300 years; and I thought that I
was going to live through it? As much as I wanted to go over, I still valued my
life. But I had gone through this mental war many a time in the past year and I
had decided that I was going to do it and now I was going to stick to that
plan.
To Be Continued...
