The Locked and The Lost by Julia Finch (reading in the dark TXT) 📕

Chapter 1: Sunset                               Pg. 3

Chapter 2: Lost Country                       Pg. 12

Chapter 3: 1:00, Matt's                        Pg. 22

Chapter 4: Choosing Day                     Pg. 30

The sunset is blinding through the thick glass windows. The bright oranges and pinks bounce around the sky gleefully, but the dark purple black bruise of the night sky eats away the edges of the beautiful colors. I press my hand against the glass as if I could push through it and run into the sunset... but the glass is too thick, and I am stuck behind it.

I sit on the large gray couch for several minutes, tired after the long day of school. "Ava!" My brother calls me from the kitchen, on the way to the fields. I get up with a sigh, and follow him through the dull brown dining room and into the cream colored kitchen. Since the closing of the factories, all of the paints are made with plants. I wasn't alive (nor was anyone alive today) when we had factories pumping out colorful paints, but I can imagine the bright red and yellow walls I would have painted; just like the sunset.

It's time to pick crops now that it's dark outside. In the day time, it's too warm to do anything in window rooms. Besides, the radiation from the sun would be too great. The windows don't act as another atmosphere, but they can protect us and the crops from the toxins well enough to keep us alive.

Into the elevator I follow my brother, and up we go. They don't make elevators anymore because there are no longer factories to make them, but my family is lucky because our house is old, but is still considered safe by The Counsel, and therefore not closed down. The robotic female voice tells us we have reached the second floor. I've always found that irritating. Of course I'm on the second floor, where else could I be? There are only two stories in my house, and I just left the first by pressing the button for the second floor. I don't mention it to Colin because he probably wouldn't be interested. He's never interested. Not even about the outside, or the sunset.

We step out of the elevator, and as I gaze out over the corn fields I can imagine the huge glass walls melting away, and I can nearly feel a breeze rubbing against my skin, cool, and free of toxins. Then Colin walks into the field, making the tall corn stalks sway, and the moment is gone. I am once again sealed in. I pick corn for a good half of an hour, but I manage to sneak off to a far corner of the indoor crops which is different than the rest of the field. It has a hollow log sitting in it.

The log has been preserved but it is not any less real, and it is not any less from the outside. I crawl inside the log, which is about two inches shorter than me, making it about five and a half feet tall. It feels small even though the textbooks at school say that most trees never got bigger than having a diameter of three feet before being cut down and either being burned, or turned into paper. Now we use reed paper, that people make by hand. It takes a little longer, but it is much better than burning the atmosphere.

I sit in the log and close my eyes. I pretend I am sitting on a hill top, surrounded by green trees covered in needles. They are big trees, the ones of legend called redwoods. It is sunset, like it always is in my daydreams, because I think it is the most beautiful time of day. The dying sunlight warms my cheeks, but the chill of the night wind licks my shoulders. I often think that my only wish is to go outside, but that isn't true. It is to be outside in the olden times, when the air was clean, and plants and animals were plentiful. I imagine them now, the rustle of the bushes, the screeching of an owl, and the chattering of a squirrel. All of these sounds, I will never hear except in a recording. I suppose I am lucky though. I have heard of townships that are so isolated, all of their tech has broken, and no one is near enough to give them spare parts. The students can only see a picture of a bird until it has ripped or lost its color. They will never hear the sound of a woodpecker chipping away at bugs in a tree, because they no longer have CD's. I smile softly as the imaginary wind tickles my chin, but then, for a sad moment I realize I might not be envisioning everything right.

When the people moved inside, and all the farms came too, the people took the advantage of not having the natural annoyances of weather, and animal pests. That meant no rain, no wind, and no birds or bugs. They manually polinate plants now because the bees stung people, and the other bugs ate too much of the crops. It seemed like a shame to me, because I have never experienced the so called pests. I will never know if they are as wonderful as they are in my imagination, or as frustrating as my family and teachers have told me time and time again. Whenever I bring up the idea of going outside, or even just the place itself, my parents tell me to keep my mind focused on school so that The Counsel chooses a good job for me when the time comes. My parents seem to think we still live in the 60's. The people protested and won their rights, we get to choose our own jobs! The Counsel only tells us our job description.

I doze off in the log, and it's early morning when I wake up. I'm surprised, because normally I only sleep a few hours when I come up here, but I estimate I came here at 9:00 since that's when it's usually cool enough to pick, and now the sun has risen just above the horizon, so it has to be 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning already. I watch the huge ball of gass as it climbs higher and higher into the sky, and the darkness return to light. The sun seems to get smaller as it distant's itself from the ground. I get up and run back to the elevator. It tells me I'm going to the first floor in its annoying monotone voice, and I wish it would be quieter even though my parents probably can't hear it through the steel doors. My parents don't know that I come up to the log to think. They think my aspirations are silly, and that I shouldn't get my hopes up about going outside. Still, I don't give up hope, and I confront anyone who I think can help me. Sometimes this helps, but most of the time I get distainful looks and lectures on politeness for being so up front about everything. Mostly, they just don't want me to talk about going outside, but that doesn't seem like a valid reason, so they come up with others.

I get out of the elevator and slip into my room. From the elevator, I have to go through the kitchen, the dining room, and the living room (which is connected to my parent's room) in order to get to my room, so I have to be very quiet not to wake anyone. I pull the covers up to my neck, and let my head hang to one side as though I were asleep. Soon enough, I hear my mom's soft footsteps, and she opens the door. "Wake up Ava" she says, "time to get ready for school." I yawn, and make the groaning sounds of a waking teen. I sit up slowly, and greet my mom with a grunted good morning. Then I pull out a pair of shorts (all organic materials of course) and a purple/blue t-shirt died with a berry mixture. As I enter the dining room, my dad greets me with a howdy. He is from the Austen township, in the Texas region and has a slight accent. When breakfast is served, I eat quickly, say my goodbyes, grab my lunchbag, and run out the door. I leave before Colin so that I don't have to walk with him. Colin and I are very different. He is perfect for our community, quiet and disinterested. I on the other hand, am up front and very curious.

Our township is built in what used to be called Michigan. Now the famous lakes have disappeared, dried to dust. As far as the United States knows, every country in the world is like that; withered, and dying.

We lost communication with most countries. We get reports from Canada and Mexico sometimes, but it's a long journey through the tunnels to get here. The tunnels are underground passages which are the paths to get from one place to another. It was Germany's idea to create them, but the telephones and radios died shortly after this suggestion. The last we heard from South Korea was that North Korea had used the traveling tunnels as an excuse to dig and was invading South Korea from underneath. Once again, radio signals died quickly after this, all though we still don't know why. 

In order to get the necessary oxygen for people to live, The Counsel built vents into every building and tunnel. The oxygen from the crops in the farming homes is pumped around the township continuously, making the air breathable. Extra CO2 was vented out of the buildings and into the outside. Although we did have a way to protect ourselves from the greenhouse gasses, we still didn't have factories because someday we hoped to move outside again. The Counsel gives weekly updates of fume levels through the newspapers that are passed out to each family. They predict at least another 75-150 years. Because the technology isn't very good any more, the estimates aren't very exact and change every few years in dramatic numbers. I probably won't be alive in 75 to 150 years, or in the time span of the next random guess, but I still hope the numbers will go down someday, preferably before my death. 

The hall that the door leads to gets rapidly steeper. Once it goes down for about 50 yards, it flattens out, and I am 130 feet under the soil. Most of the tunnels are parts of old subway systems (an ancient mode of transportation) or underground walkways from many, many years ago. I run down the tunnel until there