Heyama City

In Heyama, they say no one has ever seen the ground.

The real ground.

Heyama City was a sprawling, towering concrete jungle of a city with fingering, tunneled labyrinths for roads that stretched in every direction. The city builders over the years kept building new buildings on top of old ones, burying forgotten architecture under new bright and shiny neon signs. They say no one alive has ever seen the ground, if it even still existed beneath layered foundations of parking decks, service tunnels, and chain fast food restaurants. The dark, filthy streets of Heyama wind through the towering infrastructure like tentacles of an octopus. If you weren’t an expert at navigating the city like me, you just might get lost.

My name is Oliver James, and I love getting lost.

The sky in Heyama, if you were lucky or rich enough to live closer to the top to see it, was a permanent dusty grey color. Not a storm grey, more like a thick muted haze that blocked out all sunlight. Artificial “sunlight generators” around the city made up for that, giving citizens their necessary doses of vitamin D. Residents of Heyama told the time not by the changes of the seasons or the setting of the sun, but by the ever present hum of machines beneath their feet clicking off for the day and the alarm bells signaling the end of another work day.

I was sitting on a concrete bench, waiting for Her and listening to the buzzing drones of air filters in concrete tubes over my head. Below me, Heyama Circle buzzed with grey suits as people left their shifts at the HVAC facility or the generator company or the efficiency department, where my parents worked.

Her, the most beautiful and passionate girl in the world, lived close to the top. She only ever came down this far to see me.

And here she comes now, flaming red hair tied up in a black bandanna and practical work overalls rolled up at the ankles to show off her pink Kuromi socks. She had forgotten to take off her work badge and her nametag sparkled in the dusty afternoon haze. Hazel Axejelo.

“Well, if it isn’t the scruffiest kid this side of the trench,” she said.

I blushed but tried to play it off cool. “If it isn’t the corniest jokester this close to the ground.”

Hazel plopped down on the bench next to me, her sigh giving away the aches in her back from another grueling shift. She was working too hard at the food packaging plant, her body aching too much for a person so young. Like everyone else in Heyama she would grey too early, complain too much, and be in a government issued back brace by forty. But in this moment, Hazel and I had each other.

For a moment, we sat on the edge of the concrete ledge together and just watched the people go by below, not saying a word. I took in everything about her; her smell, the way her heavy breathing made the chest of her overalls rise and fall, and the tar covered scuffs of her shoes.

“Do you know what I want more than anything in this world?” Hazel asked.

“What’s that?” I asked. For someone who lived close to the top, what could I possibly offer her? She had everything; cleaner air, less grimy walkways, and even on occasion, she told me, she could see glimpses of plants above her! Real, living, green plants that someone was growing on their balcony somewhere! I had never seen a plant before, but I wanted too. One day. The way Hazel described them, they sounded wonderful.

“I want to see the ground,” Hazel said.

This caught me by surprise. “The ground?” I said. “Like… all the way down there?” I pointed down towards Heyama Circle.

Hazel nodded. “The real ground. Past the circle and the concrete floors and everything else! The bottom. No one’s ever seen it before, and I want to know what’s down there!”

“There’s nothing down there but rats and mountains of trash and dangerous radioactive waste,” I said.

“No, that’s what they tell us in school. I want to see it for myself.”

“Why?”

“Aren’t you curious?”

“No.”

“Not even a little?”

“It’s dangerous and filthy and we could get in big trouble for even trying!”

Hazel looked at me with that look of hers, like she was challenging me.

I sighed. “I don’t even know how to get down there.”

“I do,” she said mischievously. “Meet me behind Huang’s Diner tonight. Midnight. And bring a flashlight.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Oliver James, have I ever steered you wrong before?” Hazel laughed.

That night, I waited until my parents were asleep before I carefully slunk out of the apartment. I quietly shut the front door behind me as I stepped outside. The apartment building that my parents lived in was five stories high, and set into the side of another, much older concrete building. It looked down, down, down onto a shopping center circle below me. Everything was shut down for the night, and the only sounds around me were the hum of the air filters above and the ever present drone of distant machines. I couldn’t remember a time that I had ever seen Heyama City so quiet. I shivered and raced down the steps toward Huang’s.

Huang’s Diner was one of the most popular greasy eateries in Heyama. You could get everything from spring roll muffins to pineapple and ham curry to my personal favorite dish, twice fried crab legs. The thought of twice fried crab legs made my mouth water, but I ignored my crawling hunger and walked around the back of the restaurant to the dark alley behind.

“Hazel?” I called into the darkness. “Are you here?” I hoped I had timed it right and I wasn’t to early. The dark, humid alleyway was starting to creep me out.

Suddenly, something jumped out in front of me. I squealed, and it hissed sharply at me. It was only a mangy cat, which slunk off into the darkness as fast as it had appeared.

“Oliver?” Hazel said, coming around the corner behind me.

“Hazel? That you?” My heart was thumping loud in my chest, although whether it was from the sight of the most beautiful girl in the world or the cat, I wasn’t sure.

She stepped towards me. “I know a way to get to the bottom,” she said. “Do you trust me?” She had that look on her face again, a challenge I could not resist. I would follow her anywhere.

“Let’s go,” I said.

For a moment or two, we walked single file down the alleyway behind Huang’s as Hazel told me how she had figured it out.

“My big brother Charley,” she said. “His friend Ricky’s dad went to the bottom once. Said there’s something down there the government doesn’t want us to see. There’s something they’re hiding from us down there. Ricky told Charley how to do it, and now Charley told me.”

“What could they possibly be hiding from us down there?” I asked.

“Dunno,” she said. “But aren’t you curious?”

We reached the end of the alleyway and a tall brick pillar stood before us.

“Okay, reach the brick pillar and go right down the stairs…”

We turned right and started the descent down pitch black concrete stairs. Remnants of yellow safety tape chipped away under our feet as we walked.

“Turn on your flashlight, I can’t see a thing,” she said.

I did, but it did little to cut through the blackness before us. I had been using the old support rail on the wall to keep myself from tumbling head over feet down the stairs, when something sharp cut into my hand.

“Ouch!” I said. I felt hot blood begin to trickle down my hand.

“Oliver!” Hazel said, turning around and grabbing my hand. “What happened?”

A broken piece of the metal bar that I had not seen in the darkness had sliced across my hand.

“Maybe we should go back…” Hazel started to say.

Suddenly, a new voice cut through the darkness below. “You’re not trying to go to the bottom are you?”

We both jumped.

“Hello? Whose there?” I called to the voice.

“Come closer child, let’s have a look at you. You’ll need to clean up that cut of yours quickly.” Said the voice.

Hazel and I looked at each other. We could do that sometimes, communicate without words. Carefully, we walked down to the landing at the bottom of the stairs. I cradled my throbbing hand.

There was one dim yellow light hanging off the tunnel wall above us, which illuminated the figure that had spoken. It was an old woman in a dirty brown dress. Her grey hair was tied up in a thick bun on her head and her watery eyes studied them as they approached.

“Follow me,” the old woman said.

“Wait a minute, who are you? Did you say something about the bottom?” Hazel asked, but the woman was already disappearing into the dark tunnel beyond. We followed after her.

For an old woman, she moved very fast around corners and up rusty ladders. We were out of breath when she finally stopped in a narrow alley way, so narrow we had to press our backs against the filthy wall to squeeze through. The old woman opened a door at the end of the hallway.

“Quickly now, children. Come inside,” she said.

Hazel and I followed the old woman through the door and she slammed it shut behind us. She slid four or five chain locks into place before flicking on a lamp light.

“Sit,” she said.

The room we were in was very neatly furnished. There were two battered arm chairs sitting against one wall, where Hazel and I took a seat. There was a dining table for four against the other wall under some homemade art work. One ancient food cooler hummed quietly in the corner, next to a travel stove and a ceiling-high stack of dusty books. It smelled like lavender and artificial sunlight lamps. I realized that was what was inside the lamp, a sunlight bulb.

The old women returned from what I would later find out was a bathroom with a bottle of disinfectant and a bandage. Quickly she began to heal my wounds as we talked.

“Did you mention something about the bottom?” Hazel asked.

“I did indeed, child,” The old woman said. “Was that where you were headed this evening?”

“We were just trying to…” I started to say.

“You know nothing about the bottom,” the old woman said.

“Who are you?” Hazel asked.

“Inez Frinity. You can call me Inez,” she said. “If you were trying to go to the bottom, I would strongly advise against it.”

“Why?” Hazel asked, on the edge of her seat. “What’s down there?”

“The edge of the world,” Inez said. “And the answer to everything. The way out of this concrete jungle. You see this scar on my arm?” She pointed to a long, angry white scar that trailed from her shoulder to her elbow. “I tried to go to the bottom. I made it, actually. We made it. But I paid the price. As did my poor Marcus.”

“Whose Marcus? What happened?” Hazel asked. “What did you see down there?”

“Marcus was… the love of my life,” Inez said as memories trailed across her face like shadows. “We were dreamers, him and I. We wanted a better life, a fuller life. We had heard that if you could make it to the bottom that there was a way out, that there were other cities out there different than Heyama City. Fields of green grasses and trees, houses so spread out you can’t touch them, oceans bigger than the sky…”

“So what happened?” Hazel interrupted.

“We got caught,” Inez said, a tear sliding down her cheek. “By Heyama City guards. We got so close to something, maybe it was the way out, maybe it wasn’t. They took Marcus away. I never saw him again. I escaped, came back up here, and I have been in hiding ever since. I have never tried again.”

“So there’s another world out there?” I asked. “With grass and trees and ocean? What’s an ocean?”

Inez smiled. She had finished wrapping up my hand, which hurt a lot less now. She stood up and walked over to the stack of books and selected one from the middle. She kept one hand on the stack to keep it from falling over and yanked a book out. It was small and green and bound in thick leather. It looked impossibly old.

“Read this,” Inez said, handing it to me. “But don’t tell anyone you have it. And don’t tell anyone where you got it, okay?”

I held the book to my chest with my good hand. “We’ll keep it safe.”

Hazel and I left Inez’s house that night and made our way back up towards Huang’s Diner. It was open now, with the early morning crowd just beginning to wake. I figured we had about an hour or so before anyone came down this way.

We climbed into a sticky booth at Huang’s, the familiar smell of fried grease and baking bread washed over us. We ordered spring roll muffins and two big glasses of Gritz, a bubbling, cotton candy flavored drink that was one of my favorites, before carefully cracking open the book. Hazel took a big swig of Gritz as she watched me open it. Dust flew up around me as I read the title on the front page.

Encyclopedia of the World.

We had read encyclopedias at school before, but those ones were all about HVAC mechanics and food efficiency production. This book was different. As I flipped through the pages I saw big, color pictures of places I had never seen before in books. The ocean, we found out, was a big area of water, so big you couldn’t even see the other side. Fish and many other creatures lived in the ocean. There were also forests, big fields of trees so wide they covered miles of land. I watched Hazel’s face light up with excitement as we read through the book together.

We eventually lost track of time. The alarm bell rang signaling the start of the work day.

Hazel jumped up out of her booth. “Oh crap, I’m late! Hang on to that book Oliver, we’ll talk more about it tonight okay?” she said as she ran out the door.

I stuffed the book into my shirt and ran for home.