Las Fincas
I woke up in a dream. This is it:
A train zoomed by me and I was confused because I don't know how I got there. The blast of wind from the force of the train lifted up some debris that looked like it had been there for decades, and with that blast a newspaper came up into my hands. The newspaper had a date on it, but it was only the year, 2255, that stood out to me. As the train left the station I noticed that a thick concrete wall shut behind it blocking the tunnel, and me from seeing into it after it was gone. Less than a minute later I was surrounded by 12 kids that seemed confused as to how I go there, almost as confused as I. I forgot to mention that while the train was zooming by I could see myself in the reflection of its tinted windows, and that my reflections was that of a twelve year old Cyrus.
The name of the train station read WASHINGTON HEIGHTS. I found out from the kids that they lived there, and that no adults could live below the tunnels that went into the Hudson Valley because adults were feared to cause revolutions. I asked for a cell phone from someone so that I can google something, and the chubby boy, who was about 7 or 8 told me that cell phones, books, libraries and all information were gone for over 100 years, and that he only knew all of this from the stories passed on to him by his older brothers who had eventually been killed or enslaved themselves. I thought for a brief second that I was in hell.
When I began wandering around inside that train station, and then going outside of it, I noticed that Manhattan was a poverty stricken war zone. Abandoned buildings that had almost been burned down to the ground, kids in filthy clothes playing with ancient junk in the streets, and soldiers that seemed to be half man and half machine, and the only reason I could not tell if they were either, or both, is because they were covered in black armor from head to toe. I decided to meet up again with the kids I first met back at the tunnels because they seemed more out of place than everything I was looking at up on the surface, so I made my way back down to the train station.
There, I learned some other things from the newspapers that they had kept throughout the years. Apparently these newspapers would fall out of the trains that zoomed by and never stopped. These trains would transport the rich daily from the Financial District to their mansions in the valley. I learned that the air quality of the world had gone bad more than a century and a half ago, and that New York had built a giant wall on the Northern side of the Tappan Zee Bridge that would filter that bad air and give fresh air down to where everyone else was.
I asked these kids if they had ever slipped out of the tunnel right after the train passed by, and they all looked at me as if I had a third head, and then quickly replied hell no! So, I timed the train passing through the tunnel and then the wall that cut us off, and we would end up getting out one day.
We slipped through the tunnel and kept walking, going unnoticed by anyone. We would make it up by the Tappan Zee Bridge before realizing that we would not make it over it because it looked like a complete war zone: dogs, soldiers, tanks, helicopters, the works. It was the border crossing of the future and not even a mouse could slip by, so we stayed in that area for two weeks until we got caught. One of the soldier-cops that caught us spoke the word execution until a three-striped soldier-cop forcefully told him that this was not the protocol, and that no one under the age of 18 could be executed, so that by law they had to return us to our zone. As we walked back into the station, after they dropped us off in our zone, we were greeted by about 50 or more other kids who had heard of our escapades. They said nothing to us looking at us as if they had seen a ghost, and then one girl walked up towards us and saluted us in soldier form. It was then that we realized that our curiosity had incited something bigger, so we plotted to figure out a way to get on the train some day.
28 of us would make it onto the train with not a single passenger noticing. We rode the train until the first stop and got off. We walked fast, not even knowing where we were going, but making sure that we could see one another. We didn't walk together so that no one got suspicious. We were in awe of what we would see.
Streets that looked like they had never been touched by a tire or a foot, in the most pristine condition as if the asphalt had just been laid down, yet this wasn't asphalt, and the snow that was falling wouldn't stick. Houses made of beautiful glass that all had vegetables and flowers on their lawns, even with the cold air that tried to bite it. On the roofs were the hybrid roller cars that could fly or drive with beautiful detail of the likes not one of us had ever seen. As we walked and walked we saw a grey area in the distance, so we headed that way. The grey area turned out to be a poor zone because the domestic help that worked in these mansion could not live inside the homes or on the same streets according to law, so everyday they had to walk back into the grey zones, which were evidently much poorer; we fit right in, there.
I woke up in the middle of the night, and then went back to sleep, and somehow my dream would continue:
I was tying a knot on my tie in front of a mirror and wearing a navy blue suit with a white button down. My tie was red, white and navy blue, and as I looked over at the other boys they too had on ties and suits, except that we were all much older now. I learned, while in my dream, that we had been in this town and living in the grey zone for about five years, and that within those five years we managed to sneak ourselves into that district's school system. We would walk to school together and I found it weird that no one had any book bags. I would also learn and remember that books had been abolished, so everything we learned in school was by word of mouth.
The teacher was telling a story, and as she was about to end the story, she wanted us to finish the story for her, so she said:
And then, those designed to keep the system running on the low end were put into: ______. She wanted us to answer: The Grey Zone!, but those of us that had not been brought up there, as the domestic help, answered: Las Fincas, to which our teacher and the entire rest of the class looked shockingly at us. We had given ourselves up after five years, and now, we had to run.
Security!, she yelled.
Cyrus Pavel