HolLow. Part 1: The plan

      She was tall and slim, she moved with a sort of confident sway, it hardly looked graceful to me but Andy stood, drooling, next to me. She smiled a little smile that said "oh yeah, I know, but you're not getting me, I'm just messing with you". She walked right between us, barely looking down to watch her step on the dirty snow that covered the square. Andy shook his head, as if trying to get out of a day-dreaming state.
_"Right, let's get to it." he said, suddenly back to his business-like self.
He started marching forwards, his heavy boots sending snow flying around him.
The square, unlike most squares in New Goesstow, was square. There was five ways out of it, two to the north, Emperor Avenue and King Avenue, that both joined with a way off to the east, once called Grand street by the locals, leading towards the busy center of the city. The last way out was more of a way into the Horgun complex, at the west of the square. That side of the square was bordered by the Horgun East Wall. It was roughly 20m high, topped with glass and barbed wire and, at 10m intervals along it, automatic turrets with no blind spots. The gate was the only way in. It was about a meter thick, basically made of 10cm of metal, 80cm of reinforced concrete and another 10cm of metal. It was half as high as the wall and about as wide as a house. It opened inwards, taking 6 minutes and 34 seconds to be opened fully and another 7 minutes and 22 seconds to be closed and locked again.

      Andy pressed the stop button on his watch.
_"We got about 12 minutes between the time the gap is wide enough for me to get through and the time it's too narrow to get back out." he said.
I jotted that down on my notepad. He turned to me and I nodded. We could do it.
We were standing in the center of the square, just behind the old, ruined fountain. We turned around and headed towards Kings Avenue. There was no traffic, there hadn't been any for 4 years. We crossed the road and I kicked down the door of the empty house that stood directly in front of the Horgun complex gate. Andy followed me into the darkness, propping the door back onto it's hinges.

      The inside of the house brought back memories. Terrible memories. Beyond the door was a hallway, the brown wallpaper was peeling off. Half of the hallway was occupied by a wooden staircase. At the far end a back door lay hanging crooked, I knew that if I looked closely I would find burn marks around the hinges and the handle.

      That's how they took people. They smashed down your door and just grabbed you. For experiments they said. They took half of the population, using them to build their complexes. They gave the slaves who died back to the city, just dumping them in the parks, creating piles of rotting corpses that crazed survivors would climb into, looking for their dead loved ones. They locked the whole city up, erecting their barriers around it. The remaining city-folk lived off whatever food they could find, often rats and sometimes human flesh. Loys river still run through the city, sweeping through the complex walls in a controlled flow. Once a week they would float some packets of rice and dried meat across the city on a boat, along with one peice of paper with a number on it. The week after that they expected to find that many people on the foodboat when they drew it back into the complex. The punishment for unfulfillment was to double the next number. The choosing was never easy, though at first some brave and desperate ones volunteered, to find their friends and families again, or to fight from the inside. No one had ever come out of there.

      I carefully took the stairs to the next floor, treading as lightly as I could, barely disturbing the dust that lay thick under my feet. Once I was up, Andy clomped up behind me. I crossed the room towards the windows, I tried to open one of them, but to no avail. I picked up a chair and smashed the glass with it, breaking one of the legs off of it in the process. I peered through the hole, I could clearly see the gate.  I moved and Andy squinted through. He grinned at me and we made our way downstairs again.

      We were all set.