LOCKED (2 page)

A
GENESIS IN CHAOS

"Leo, why do you like
these?"

On the aging TV screen was
an old monster movie, probably from the 1970s. The ancient VCR underneath it
was hacking and coughing, struggling to produce the mediocre image and sound.
Two dinosaurs with peculiarly rubbery skin wrestled on the screen. A glimpse of
the actual production set could be seen occasionally behind the cardboard
background. Danni watched the movie with fatigued eyes, which was a stark
contrast to myself. I couldn't get enough of it, and couldn't tell if it was an
achievement or pathetic that my entire movie case was filled with such
treasures. I personally found it impressive that I was able to find them all,
between one junk shop, this tag sale, that dusty attic...

"They're fun! Sure,
it's an hour and forty-five minutes of listening to Japanese guys with poor
dubs, but then you get half-an-hour of THIS." I stretched out my hand to
the absolute masterpiece of cinema on the screen. Danni rolled her deep green
eyes, adjusted her glasses, rested her chin in her hands, and kept watching.

"Oh no! The monsters
have escaped! What can we do?!" the words of the man on the fading screen
didn't match his lips. I've known for a long time that it was self-parody, but
it was still good fun. One rubber suit was thrown into a massive body of water,
and the movie started to give a half-hearted attempt to fill all of its plot
holes. By the time the credits started rolling, Danni was practically climbing
the walls.

"Geez, about
time!" she grinned, "You're lucky I let you make me watch
these." I ignored her remark and started fumbling around with the relic
some more. Every time I pulled a wire or pressed a button, the screen was
either blank, a mess of pixels and colors, or a sad combination of both.

"Problem, techie?"
Danni teased. I showed her a smug smirk of approval when I finally got the
image to display.

"Blurry like
hell." she nodded.

"Oh, quit your whining."

"Not whining!" she
raised her hands in defense. I got the old, creaky remote and started flipping
through channels.

A cartoon in Spanish;
something about a purple elephant and a duck. I could vaguely understand every
few words.

The weather. It was going to
rain later today.

Commercials. What in God's
name is a "
Cuddlie
"?

One of the many news
stations... bold text rolled across the screen as various politicians and
newsmen were arguing, just as they had been since the conception of politics.

"NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN
DISEASE RUNNING RAMPANT IN EUROPE- WHO'S TO BLAME?"

A variety of flags adorned
the conference room; every nationality in the world was represented in one way
or another.

"I'd like to recall the
disaster in Germany, if I may..." the Indian representative spoke in his
native tongue. It didn’t help our understanding very much that Danni and I
dropped into the report in the middle of things.

"And, if WE
may..." the German representative butted in, "…WE would like to
recall how we clearly stated that the incident regarding the return of the
shuttle was completely exaggerated."

The entire room was
completely quiet. Nobody dared to make a single sound until one poor soul from
off-camera shouted out, "They're all extremists, you can't trust
them!" An uproar started, papers flying everywhere, everybody talking at
once. Only one loud-mouthed British representative was able to quiet the rowdy
politicians, and only because of his booming voice.

"QUIET! We're... in
almost the same position we were in almost exactly one hundred years ago. The
disease is new, but the situation of bitter rivalry is not. If we let this
disease plunge us into war, we'll never climb out. Science has advanced far
enough that I'm confident we'll find a cure soon enough, and it's also evolved
far enough to make weapons far beyond what any of us have seen in use yet. I
shouldn’t need to give you a history lesson on the past few years. We've all
been weakened due to years of this... stagnant economy, as well as guerilla
warfare worldwide... there are no true world powers left. There are no dominant
governments. Some of you are communist, some of you are fascist, France and
Britain are the only democracies. Even the U.S. is relying on what is
practically a feudalist system, with anarchists running free all o—“

"Then give us a
solution instead of more of your crap!" another off-camera voice called
out.

More chaos. Papers flying
everywhere, every language in the world being shouted at once until the screen
twitched with its black and white static once more.

"So? What do you
think?" I couldn't help but ask Danni.

"
Hm
?"

"On the TV. The
problems in Europe."

"Eh, it'll fix itself.
It always does. Besides, that's across the ocean. The U.S. is safe, we’ll be
fine." she shrugged.

Danni stood up, stretched
herself out, and walked over to the window. Her platinum blonde hair, sharing a
tone with white sand, fell slightly below her shoulders when she leaned over to
take a look outside. I got up too, just for the sake of it, and took a glance
out the window, my own dark hair falling at my shoulders. I didn't have much of
a problem squeezing in against her average-sized figure, considering she was so
short. Then again, I was only an inch or two taller...

"I'm just
kinda
bored." she answered before I could ask.

"
Wanna
go out?" I asked. She whipped her head around so fast that she smacked her
nose right into mine, and we both stumbled back. Clutching my thin, sore nose,
I realized my mistake.

"...Outside?"

"Oh!" she blinked.

Without another embarrassing
word, down the stairs we went, two steps at a time. In the apartment hallway,
all the lights were either out or flickering. Danni swung the door leading
outside open, letting hazy light into the dusty space. I took a deep breath of
the beautiful, polluted air of a small city. The sky was a chalky gray, and
proved to be an interesting background to the dozens of humble, crumbling shops
on the street, only to be overshadowed by goliath business buildings even
further on down. The arcade, the meat shop, t-

"C'mon, I thought you
said you were
gonna
DO something outside!" She
pleaded. I rolled my eyes with exaggeration, and followed along.

"Stop rushing me!"
I defended myself.

"Better keep me
entertained!" she snapped playfully.

"Why's that?"

"Because I'm the only
one who wants to spend time with you,
emo
boy."
she ruffled my hair.

I rolled my eyes a second
time and let her go on ahead of me. Even though I was far behind her, I could
just tell from her body language that she was scanning the small town square we
were now in, looking for anything that would keep the attention of someone who
was as impatient as she was.

As we casually proceeded
down the street with little deliberation, one site caught our eye, and then
jolted our senses: Shakespeare’s was shutting down!

Shakespeare’s was an ancient
book shop that was established
here
way back in the
1930s, when our
Burybury
was but a budding town. The
family that had owned the shop ever since its inception took advantage of the
lucrative name they just so happened to share with the renowned playwright,
only further attracting attention to their little store. It’s quaint, wooden
structure always was quite a contrast to the dull bleakness of the gray
surrounding it. Of course, this dreariness hadn’t always existed around it, but
sprung up with the fall of old shops and the rise of new. There it stood
though, proud and fearless of the advance of time.

Unfortunately, all of its
folk-like charm was gone. Closing signs were plastered on every window, every
bevel, every edge, until it looked like one giant closing sign that happened to
have a wooden door.

Danni and I let out a
collective sigh of disappointment; the very same kind that one breathes when
you see something that you’ve always taken for granted taken away. We hadn’t
visited the shop too often, and obviously enough, we were feeling a little
guilty of this now.

I was the first to reach
forward and turn the door knob, always carefully, as I never knew when it would
fall off in my hand.

Inside, the shop was dusty
and decrepit, spider webs lining the ceiling. They were the kind that came with
age rather than neglect, specifically in a small store which saw decades,
centuries, millennia of knowledge resting comfortably upon the shelves.

At the front of the shop was
an old man sitting at a mahogany desk, scrawling away at a few documents. His
white hair retreated to the back of his head, showing his many age spots. He
wore the very same old-fashioned, dusty brown attire that Danni and I had seen him
wear on a consistent basis; it became a trademark of sorts.

 Though he looked like
he was old enough to be the founder of the shop some 110 years ago, his wit and
physical abilities were retained. He had a quick eye, acute hearing, and a mind
sharper than a butcher’s knife. However, his hands couldn’t quite keep still
when he wrote, seemingly the only thing that the onslaught of years had against
him; between his family name and trembling tendency, he had earned the nickname
of…

“Shakes!” I called from the
back of the store. He looked up, and gave a quivering motion for us to go see
him.

“What’re you doing? You’re
shutting down?” Danni asked with concern, saving any form of greeting for
later.

He looked up at us with
depressed eyes, empty of any glimmer, his joy robbed by a nameless rot.

“Well…I am…” he sighed,
pushing himself up off of his desk and taking a step around it, the floorboards
moaning loudly.

“I have to leave, it
wouldn’t be right for me to stay here. It’s not safe for an old man like me anyway
…” he mused, narrowing his eyes. As Danni and I tried to figure out what he
could mean by that, he continued.

“I need to go somewhere
quiet, somewhere safe…” he muttered, now lightly tapping at the glass at the
front of his shop.

“This isn’t a ghetto,
Shakes. You act like you’re
gonna
get stabbed for
walking outside.” Danni finally spoke up with a tone of annoyance. How could
someone who has lived here so long have such a sudden change of heart? He
turned quickly and stared her down, forcing her to retreat with a small step
backwards and a drooping of her shoulders.

“It’s
gonna
GET nasty! You don’t get it, you haven’t seen what I have! You don’t PAY
ATTENTION like I have!” he pointed a bony finger at us, his temper flaring and
his wrath shown.

“Just calm down, calm down.
Why are you so scared? You’re being paranoid.” I spoke softly, trying to stay
on Shakes’ good side. He let out a hack, a wheeze, and finally sat down in a
wooden chair across from us.

“They’re all gone.
Everybody’s gone. In…you have to have seen it by now. In Europe…!” he started
taking shorter breaths, looking at everything in the room besides us. For the
longest second of my life, he stared at the floor, and then he immediately shot
up from his chair, and darted to us from across the room. He laid his spidery
fingers upon my shoulders, staring into my eyes with his own, glazed and
trembling.

“Boy, all the Europeans are
gone! Everybody I talked to and loved! They’re all gone! Nobody else wants to
talk about it! Everybody’s scared, everybody’s GONE!” his ancient voice filled
the room at once. He now clutched his head in his hands, once again finding
solace by speaking to everything else in the room.

“Nobody wants to talk about
it! WHY does nobody want to talk about it?! They talk and talk and talk but
don’t COMMUNICATE!” he was shouting at the floor. Danni and I took a few steps
back, sweat forming on both our brows.

“How do they not see what’s
happening? How can they not see?!” his eyes darted to us once more, now furious
and vengeful.

“
GET OUT OF MY SHOP!
”

That was all we needed.
Danni and I flew past Shakes to get to the door. We didn’t look back, nor did
we even close the door behind us. Once we were far out of sight, we slumped up
against a brick wall, panting and tired from our little escape.

“What…the hell…was
that?
”
I had to ask, my breathing now becoming more regular.

“Well don’t ask me!” she
retorted.

“He was always so friendly…”
I looked around, seemingly asking the skies above for answers.

“Maybe he finally lost it. He’s
so old, it wouldn’t surprise me.” Danni suggested, although her tone seemed to
be a bit more of an attempt at comfort than her true belief.

“Maybe his family wanted to
sell the place and he just couldn’t handle that.” I chipped in.

“Then why did he talk about
the Europeans never answering him anymore?” she responded, her lack of
assurance starting to show through again. I stopped for a moment, trying to
find some excuse in the recesses of my mind, but I didn’t need to look that far
back.