Red Zone Son

Chapter 37

Solomon was mopping the polished concrete around a hallway rug beside the room with the heavy metal sliding security door when it opened and a woman stepped out of it. He kept mopping but he had it in his peripheral vision. It would take ten seconds to close, he’d timed it before. 10. 9. 8. The woman was walking down the hallway. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3.

She was gone. Around a corner. Solomon wanted to jam his mop handle into the space but it was already too narrow and he had one second left. He did the only thing he could do: he thrust his left hand into the crack. The door was trying to seal on him, it was trying to get through his hand, it was crushing it. But he didn’t move. One time in basic when Wilson decided the bolt on his rifle was too dirty, he’d told Solomon not to move then began drilling it into his stomach. Even though he’d started bleeding and it had hurt like hell, he hadn’t moved a muscle until Wilson had told him he could. If Solomon could go through that, he could go through this. He didn’t care if all the bones in his left hand broke, he’d type with his right.

The door kept on grinding away when suddenly, it felt as if his hand had shattered like glass. He could barely see. There were nothing but white spots in his vision, nothing in the world at all but his hand screaming at him.

He was inside the room. Somehow. He’d used the mop handle. He’d levered the door. He’d pushed it open and squeezed his body inside. Computer was there. Display dimmed slightly. He threw the mop at the mouse. It brightened! He followed it. Frantic. God, the pain! He had to close his eyes. Had to stop himself from crying out. Even his fingertips were on fire. But he was here, he was in, the display was still logged in. Taskbar and icons. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to sit and guess the woman’s password. But he thought: maybe she lets her display time out on its own. Maybe God will give me my Red Sea miracle.

My hand my hand my hand my hand my hand

God had said no to so many of Solomon’s prayer requests for the past several years that he could barely believe it. His mop had actually managed to move the mouse in time before the login timed out. But he wasn’t done. He couldn’t move the fingers on his left hand. It was holding a live coal. He gritted his teeth, hoping the adrenaline surging through him would get him through before he started to feel it even more intensely.

With his right hand, he reached for the mouse. After about thirty seconds of clicking on random applications, he stumbled on one that revealed a multi-page interface. The initial page unveiled a detailed map of the camp’s outer edge, with embedded links that, when clicked, led to live camera feeds. His heart sank. They were placed a few feet away from each other all along the barbed wire, tightly encircling the camp with their unblinking gaze. There was no part of the prison perimeter they didn’t cover.

It’s hurting, it’s hurting, I can feel it, I can see it, red when I blink, red from my hand, red dots for each camera on the map of this prison that’s been drowning me for months and months and months, its hands around my throat, and now around my shattered hand, tightening, tightening –

Solomon had to focus. He had to find a way out. He clicked on a red dot and then saw a black screen. A broken feed. Oh! They still hadn’t gotten the parts to fix the robotic maid. Maybe the broken feeds were coming from non-functional cameras that nobody had been able to replace yet? Yes, must be, had to be, please, let it be. He pushed the pain out and started drawing in his head a map of the cameras all around the island, mentally marking the blind spots in his visualization, crossing out in his brain all the cameras that were duds.

Finally, he had it in his mind. He wanted to keep the aching in his hand at bay though, so while he knew Wilson said they could watch to see if any guard changes happened in a blind spot, he decided to look up the guard schedule. He used the keyboard – right hand only – to search through the files, then double-checked, then triple-checked to make sure the date he was looking at matched the date he wanted: May 1. Then he was done. He had everything memorized. He turned to go and saw the ID scanner next to the shut and sealed door.

He was locked in.

Solomon took a deep breath. His left hand was hanging by his side. It was throbbing, each pulse of pain echoing up his arm like a relentless drumbeat. He picked up the mop with his right hand. His instinct was to go back to the display to see if he couldn’t find anything else useful, but he didn’t want the door to open with him sitting at the desk typing away. He walked over to examine the ID scanner, but there was no way out. He tried to swallow back his frustration. Finally he had the information he needed, and he couldn’t get out to use it?

He began looking through the office for a misplaced ID, a tool, anything. He knew it used to be a hotel room, so he looked for a window too, only to find it had been permanently sealed with what appeared to be a layer of some thick, opaque material. He went into the closet, the bathroom. Maybe if he unscrewed the vent cover, he could use it to wedge the door open. Probably not though. Besides, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to; his left hand felt as if it was trapped in a vise.

Solomon started repeating the guard schedule to himself while he continued to look, this time through the shelves that had been installed on the wall beside the door. Then he blinked. There was a Bible there between several other books on the shelf. And not just that. A framed picture, maybe 5” by 8”, was propped up next to the books. The words “Racial Justice Prayer Conference” were stamped across the bottom. He recognized some of the faces from boot camp classes, fairly high up in terms of the political leaders of the blue zones.

He heard it before he saw it. The door was starting to open. His right hand was gripping the mop already; he forced his left hand into position above it, using every ounce of self-control he had to stop himself from cursing. His eyes were already on the floor. He began pushing the mop across the polished concrete at his feet. Even the slight pressure on his left hand felt as if someone was stabbing it.

“Who – what – what are you doing in here?”

He looked up, as if he hadn’t already heard her coming in. Her face stood out to him, from the photograph on the shelf. “Uh, someone told me to clean in here,” he said.

“Who?” she demanded.

“I don’t know. Someone told me to, so I did.”

She stared at him. He could tell she was suspicious. The pain in his left hand was getting so bad that he felt as if it was contorting his face, even though he was trying with all his effort to keep it blank. Hopefully he looked pathetic with his ripped and worn-out clothing that wasn’t going to last much longer. Hopefully she dismissed him as a threat. She had to have seen him before. Maybe she had only glanced at him mopping, but Solomon was familiar to her subconscious if nothing else.

At least, that’s what he was telling himself as she continued to stare at him…

Then abruptly she shook her head. “Get out,” she told him. Solomon was only too happy to obey. His body felt as if it was on the verge of shaking uncontrollably; he needed to do something about his hand. He went straight to the double doors outside the kitchen. He saw a clock on his way down. It had been three and a half hours since he had arrived, which was not too early for him to leave, especially as leaving early meant he might be able to avoid not having a knife in his mouth to deliver to the gang. He put the mop into the utility closet, then opened the service door as he usually did. The counselor glanced at his watch when he came through. “Finished early?”

“There wasn’t as much to clean today.”

“The maid didn’t send me an alert,” he commented as he started searching Solomon. Solomon shrugged, and bit down on his tongue, hard, when the counselor brushed his left hand. He forced his thoughts toward the guard schedule, running through it in his mind again, comparing it against the camera map he was still holding in his head. There was a shift change at 0400 hours in the southern end of the island by the ruins, and it was happening at one of the blind spots. It was 0330 now. Solomon was so close to getting out of this camp he could taste it. If the counselor tried to detain him, he would kill him.

The counselor didn’t try to detain him. As soon as he was out of the man’s sight, Solomon began running. The gang that had picked him out probably didn’t get together until closer to when he was usually done with his shift because he was able to make it back to Wilson without anyone stopping him. His left hand was howling at him the entire time. With his right hand, he hauled Wilson to his feet and started dragging him down the stairs. From Wilson’s shout it took him a second to realize he wasn’t being attacked. He didn’t demand an explanation, though, even after he recognized it was Solomon.

“Did you hurt your hand?” was the only thing Wilson asked him. Probably Wilson could tell he was favoring it.

“Yes,” Solomon said. “I had to break it.”

He had been leading Wilson along the western side of the prison to the blind spot he had picked out. It was very early in the morning, so nobody was around as they followed the river path south, past the cherry blossom trees, past the hilltop park filled with tents and sleeping prisoners. There wasn’t much moon to see by, but Wilson stopped him beside a low stone wall that surrounded the base of the hilltop and pulled a worn compression bandage out of his pocket.

After a moment, Solomon recognized it as the one he had come into the prison with. He had forgotten about it. Wilson must have taken it off him after his ankle healed. Wilson looped it around Solomon’s forearm, just above his wrist, and wrapped it tightly around his hand, securing it in place. Then he pulled it taut and tied it off. The pain was still there, but Solomon was able to be less distracted by it.

Which was a good thing because now they had to wait at a pile of rubble that used to be a pre-modern insane asylum, or so someone in their confession circle had told them once. They crouched between the shadows and the stones. Hopefully they were in time for the guard change. Solomon focused on the light about twenty feet away, hanging off the barbed wire fence. A guard was beneath it. He moved cautiously, his gaze scanning the surroundings. When he drew nearer, he held his breath, praying that the guard wouldn’t notice them.

He didn’t. He walked right past them, and relief washed over Solomon like a wave. He and Wilson remained hidden, watching as another guard approached, as the guard change occurred under the low hum of the electrified wires. He was glad Wilson had wrapped his hand because he thought he could do it now. He could pull off a blood choke. The new guard’s back was to him, and he was small. And better him than Wilson; even with his broken hand, he was still stronger than Wilson from months of eating better.

He touched Wilson’s arm, then pointed at himself and made a gesture pointing forward. Wilson nodded, then mouthed, “Now.”

Solomon went. In a few minutes, he was done; the guard’s body was dead in his arms. It was suspiciously easy… why was the guard so weak? Although he supposed he didn’t really care why, as long as it worked. Wilson came out from among the rocks and helped him place the body on his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Four hours until the next guard came. Without this blind spot, they would probably already have been caught by a smart camera trained to pick out the difference between a guard patrolling in front of a fence and prisoners climbing it. Especially as Solomon wasn’t even able to climb that quickly. Eating food waste in the kitchen wasn’t the same as getting full rations. His body was straining against the weight of the guard’s body, and his bandaged left hand could barely cling to the chain links without sending stabbing sensations up his arm each time it moved up.

Thankfully, Wilson was already at the top, and he hoisted the guard up and over the electrified barbed wires so that they could use the body as a bridge. It was much easier to climb without carrying anything, so he was pretty much already on the ground when Wilson pulled the guard’s body back over the fence and sent it flying down to the cement.

There was a loud crack as the guard’s head hit the pavement; Solomon winced at how loud it was. But there were no alarms, no signs that anyone had noticed them, and so he agreed with Wilson when he whispered that they needed to hide the body. He moved to pick up an arm with his right hand so they could toss the body into the river when a broken shaft of moonlight lit up the guard’s face and for a heart-stopping moment, he thought it was Umma.

But no, it wasn’t her, he saw that at once. It was someone else’s mother Solomon had killed. And as he looked down the length of her body, he saw that she had an ankle shackle on, just like the one he’d worn when he’d wanted to go back to Adah during his leave.

“Pick her up,” Wilson whispered.

“We can’t put her in the water,” Solomon whispered back. “She’s wearing an ankle shackle. Water will damage it and it’ll send out an alert.”

“Can you disable it?”

“I never tried to mess with mine, so I don’t know.”

Wilson was searching through the guard’s weapons as he spoke. When he found a serrated knife, he pulled it out and started hacking at her leg right above the ankle shackle. When he was done, he tucked the leg behind one of the rocks lining the island’s edge, then started dragging her body into the water below. Solomon helped him. It was about ten feet down into the black river. “Our turn,” Wilson said.

He stared at the dark waters. The body was already bobbing away. Nobody gets out of the camps clean, Wilson had told him on his very first day there.

“Solo, move.”

At his command, Solomon half-slid, half-crawled feet first down the ten-foot slope until he was at the water’s edge. Wilson signaled for him to follow. He did. They were headed toward the city lights on the Queens side of the island, toward the ferry station he had seen from inside the prison, the one he estimated was not too far away, maybe a thousand yards. Wilson had said it was called Long Island City, and that they were going to steal a ride on a ferry from there to Manhattan, all the way back across the river, to the west, where they would work their way north to a red zone.

Solomon braced himself as the water crept into his shoes. With each step, he felt the chill seeping through his bones, a stabbing cold that intensified as he went deeper into the murky depths until he finally dived headlong into the bitter brine that surrounded them.