Red Zone Son

Chapter 36

Solomon had never been happier about how slowly things shipped since the Great Splintering. He prayed daily that the truck the robot aid’s retractable arms were in would get delayed. He prayed that the truck would be pulled aside to be randomly searched by a militia, any militia, in whatever zone it was going through. He prayed whoever had placed the order had gotten the part numbers wrong and that they’d have to put in a new order for a new shipment.

In the meantime, he was a human garbage disposal. He ate seeds, peels, everything. The kitchen robot commented through its speakers on how environmentally friendly he was and how with Solomon’s help it was able to better meet its objective to avoid food waste. In just a week there was a difference in how he looked. Wilson could tell too. He told him dryly on their way down to confession, “Try to look a little less alive.” Between the disinfection pod, getting to warm up for four hours a day, and having enough to eat, Solomon was able to think almost half as clearly and easily as he used to.

One of the things he thought about was how impossible the mission that Wilson had given him was. Find the camera map in a computer somewhere in the hotel. Somehow he was supposed to manage that when he wasn’t even allowed to set foot outside the kitchen during his four hours there. He didn’t sweat it, though; everything Wilson had told him to do so far in his life had been impossible right up until the moment he pulled it off.

He started by taking the mop out of the kitchen. It took him a few tries, as the robot noticed the first few times he turned to leave with it in his hand. Solomon always surrendered it immediately. He didn’t know whether or not the robot was sophisticated enough to get suspicious, but he knew there was no point in arguing with it, it wasn’t going to deviate from its programming because of anything he said to it. The one day he did manage to take the mop without it noticing Solomon decided to consider it a miracle, and wasted no time in starting to mop the corridor that connected the service door to the kitchen. He’d done maybe a two-by-five-foot rectangle when the service door opened. He glanced up, as if confused. “I was told to do the floor out here.”

The counselor standing at the end of the corridor looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. He closed the door. Five minutes later, he opened the door again to check on him. Solomon was about halfway done. He decided the polished concrete floor was clean enough and that it was more important to hide the mop so he placed it into a utility closet set in the wall filled with shelves of face masks, first aid kits, safety signs, and other personal protective equipment: things like gloves and goggles, and even fire extinguishers.

Seeing so many potential weapons gave him hope. Not that Solomon was for sure going to use any of them, but the fact that they had heavy blunt objects just sitting behind an unlocked door accessible to a prisoner like him meant this hotel wasn’t designed with security in mind. At the very least, it wasn’t tailored to handle prisoners coming and going regularly, which meant things weren’t always going to be locked up.

He shoved the mop in behind the row of fire extinguishers. Just in time. The counselor opened up the service door as he was walking toward it. He searched him like normal but didn’t say anything, and when Solomon returned the next day the mop was still hidden behind the extinguishers.

He began adding a minute each night to condition the counselor into waiting just a little bit longer. After eighteen days, the counselor was no longer opening the door to check on him and he’d stretched out the time to fifteen minutes. Time to take a risk: Solomon began leaving the corridor to go to other parts of the hotel, mop in hand, so that people could get used to seeing him around. Everybody would probably assume that someone else was in charge of him. It still felt as if he were holding his breath the entire fifteen minutes he wasn’t in the corridor but nobody stopped him.

Slowly, Solomon was able to fill out a map in his head of which hotel rooms were being used as sleeping quarters for the counselors and which had been converted into offices. Most of the offices were used by non-uniformed contractors who worked through the night. Their conversations were what he focused on while mopping. “I’m going in to process today’s family reports,” he heard one woman tell another in front of the elevators, and he watched the screen above the elevator to see which floor she went to afterward. “The projector is down for maintenance, you’ll have to go to the security monitoring room if you want to watch the feeds live,” he heard from another woman while cleaning the corridor behind her.

That woman he watched out for very carefully, and a few weeks later he was able to follow her up the stairs after she came out for coffee at the lobby cafe. Deliberately staying several paces behind, he barely caught a glimpse of her going into a second floor room whose normal hinge doors had been replaced by a heavy metal sliding security door that closed and locked automatically.

Although he was excited about the progress he was making, it was still hard knowing that Wilson was starving and freezing while he was eating and warm. It was March now, but it was still cold, especially at night, so Solomon tried to give him his windbreaker, telling him he’d run to stay warm. Wilson shoved it back, angrier than Solomon had seen him be in a long time. “Do you see any other prisoners here running?” he hissed. “Don’t screw this up by not thinking, Solo!”

Solomon pushed it back to him. “I won’t do anything to stand out, but I’m not going to eat all night in a warm kitchen while you freeze and starve to death out here.” He left the windbreaker behind when he went to the hotel. Wilson was wearing it when he returned. As always, he stirred when he entered. Solomon gave him a progress update, he asked questions, then handed the windbreaker back to him. Solomon slept until Wilson woke him up a few hours later for breakfast and the rest of the day proceeded like normal, drowsily attending morning lectures and the confession circle. Wilson usually wanted him to rest during the daytime and so he did, only waking for the evening meal, which he discreetly slipped to him, passing on all of his rations.

But it wasn’t enough. Even with Solomon sneaking him his camp rations, Wilson was fading. Maybe the last bit of winter had broken him down, maybe his four years in the camps had set him up to be weaker this time around, maybe he’d gotten infected with something, but whatever it was Solomon was getting worried. Wilson had told him not to sneak out food, but he’d noticed that while the counselor searched him pretty much everywhere, he wasn’t a dentist, he didn’t tell Solomon to go “Ah”, so one day he put the top section of a carrot into his mouth and held it on his tongue while the counselor finished patting him down.

Wilson scolded him when he spit it out to give it to him, when he realized in the darkness of the stairwell what Solomon had just handed to him. But his fingers closed around it even so. Solomon heard him put it into his mouth, but then after a minute realized that he was struggling to break down the carrot, that he couldn’t even chew it. That wasn’t good. Was Wilson that far gone? From gum disease? Or maybe it was straight up malnutrition.

They’d been relying on each other so much that Solomon’s first instinct was to chew it for him. Which he knew Wilson would hate, because Solomon would hate it too, if it were him. “Give it back to me,” he said. “I’ll make it smaller.” He spat it back out, and Solomon used his stronger jaw muscles to break the carrot crown down until it was like toddler food, easy to swallow. He carefully scraped it off his tongue with his fingers, then transferred the bits of carrot into Wilson’s hand.

In a way, it was good they couldn’t see each other. It would have made it harder for both of them. Solomon felt bad enough for him already that he needed this kind of help. But he did. So after that, Solomon always brought him back something that wouldn’t dissolve in his mouth on the way home, and he chewed it for him, too, all the while wondering what it said about how much time Wilson had left…

Solomon’s nightly fifteen minutes of mopping around the hotel and overhearing more snatches of conversation finally convinced him that it was the room behind the sliding metal door that he wanted to break into, that there was a computer in there he wanted access to. But fifteen minutes wasn’t enough time, and he wasn’t sure he could push the counselor to wait any longer without triggering his suspicions.

Time to tackle the robot, then, so he could leave the kitchen earlier. He didn’t want to destroy it because he was sure that would trigger an alarm or send out an automatic alert, so instead he was going to disable its ability to charge. A dead battery wouldn’t immediately show signs of sabotage the way a ripped-off arm might. Solomon wished he could hack into its admin settings instead, but the kitchen aid wasn’t going to hold nice and still for him if he started tapping on its screen. It did have a solar panel array on its back, however, and while it was folded up, there were seams Solomon could drop chemicals into when he was returning cleaning supplies to or taking them from its body.

He asked Wilson if he knew what chemicals to use, but he didn’t. “I never finished high school,” he reminded him. Technically Solomon never had either, but from Wilson’s stories about when he was young it was pretty clear Solomon had been more into school than he’d been. He tricked the robot into helping him, asking whether the ammonia-based cleaner in his hand was safe to use on the burners; the robot corrected him and told him that he wasn’t holding the ammonia-based cleaner, but the muriatic-acid-based cleaner. Muriatic acid is the same as hydrochloric acid, he remembered learning. And it’s extremely damaging to electrical components.

One April night, almost May, the first warm night of the year, he was searched by the counselor with an apple core tucked into his mouth. He’d gotten lazier about it so after a few pats he told Solomon to go. It only took him the time from when he left the hotel service door to when he walked past the defunct ferry station to realize he was being closed in on. To his right was the chain-link fence along the edge of the Queens side of the river, to his left was the old baseball field, in front of him was leftover scaffolding that choked the path he was in down to a single lane, and behind him his path was blocked off by two men whom he immediately suspected were part of a gang.

He didn’t run even though the half-destroyed building he and Wilson had been using was only five hundred yards ahead of him. He didn’t want to lead anyone to where they’d been sleeping, especially as they’d managed to avoid attention so far, and he was pretty sure that no matter what this was going to end up in a fight. Or more likely, Solomon was going to get his ass handed to him from the movement he was seeing all around him. Better to stop while he was still beside the baseball field. Whatever was going to happen, he didn’t want it to happen inside an enclosed area – like under the scaffolding above.

It ended up not mattering. He was surrounded in a matter of moments. Instead of a wall, they threw him against the chain-link fence. They were brown like him but speaking a language he didn’t understand. One of them had him by the throat, the others were searching his pockets, his clothing, every part of him that the counselor hadn’t bothered to check. Solomon tried not to choke on the apple core in his mouth as the pressure on his throat increased. Then he felt fingers on his face, prying his jaws open, and the core was gone.

They were laughing as if they’d discovered something great, but he didn’t know why, they all looked well-fed enough to him. It was just people like Wilson and him who had been doing the re-education camp in hard mode, without packages or any help from the outside. Then one of them turned to him. “What else can you bring out? From the hotel?”

Solomon didn’t want to reply, but they hadn’t released him yet, they were still holding him back against the chain-link fence. So he thought very carefully about his next words. “The counselor searches me very carefully, searches me everywhere but my mouth.”

The one who’d spoken to him first gave his cheek a light slap. “Put it in your mouth, then.”

Solomon was beginning to see why Wilson had them try to survive the winter in an unheated building alone rather than bump into any of the gangs here. “Okay,” he said. “All I can take out is leftover food.” He waited as they talked amongst themselves and then abruptly he found his arms were free, and that they were backing away from him. Nobody said anything to him as they left but they didn’t need to; they’d clearly been watching him for long enough that they’d be able to find him tomorrow when they wanted to.

Solomon took his time returning to the stairwell, wanting to make sure that nobody was following him. Wilson was asleep when he came in but woke up when Solomon touched his shoulder. Expecting food, no doubt. Angry that he didn’t have anything to give him, Solomon told him what happened. Wilson got to his feet. He was furious, cursing, and for a second Solomon thought he might actually try to hit him. Instead, he grabbed him by the arms with both hands, and Solomon couldn’t tell if he was ordering him or pleading with him when he said, “Get the camera map tomorrow.”

But Solomon couldn’t. The nights went on, and the robot aid was still watching him in the kitchen, it was still alive despite all the drops of acid he’d surreptitiously leaked into its solar panel creases. With all the pressure he was facing he wanted to move faster, but if he moved too fast he could wipe out all his efforts to date. He had to move at exactly the right speed but there was no way to know whether he was. Dear God, please help me… He started praying every time he dipped his rag into the acid and brushed it against the robot on the right spot. The gang was searching him every night, the shipment for the robot’s retractable arms could arrive any day now, summer was coming and they were going to be shipped to hard labor soon, discovery was still possible, the counselor he’d built up a fifteen-minute buffer around could be shifted to a different position, Wilson was wasting away…

It was the gang that was causing him the most immediate trouble. It’d been a week now and he hadn’t been able to get anything for Wilson. And just last night, they’d told him to bring them a knife. What was he supposed to do, swallow a blade?

He was beginning to lose hope. Wilson had said he would get him out of the camp, but Solomon asked him the other day if he’d tried to escape last time and he’d said no, that it had taken him three years to get over being confused that his imprisonment was actually happening to him and then his last year it had taken all he had to simply survive. So Wilson had never even tried to get out of a camp before. Without every piece Solomon had put into place so far working perfectly together – without a-part-the-Red-Sea level miracle, in other words – he was beginning to think they weren’t going to get out either.

Then he walked into the kitchen and the robot aid was slumped, shut down, in its corner.

Solomon didn’t hesitate. He turned on his heel, grabbed the mop out of the utility closet and headed straight for the stairs. He had four, maybe four and a half hours. It was tonight or it was never.