Red Zone Son

Chapter 42

A knot tightened in Solomon’s stomach as he followed Wilson through the already-crowded streets of Manhattan. He couldn’t help but dart glances at the passersby. Their soaked clothes, tattered and clinging to them, Wilson’s hollow cheeks, and his own hand wrapped in a stained bandage… they looked like re-education camp escapees.

If we were in the red zone, we’d be picked up by the milita’s police force in T minus two seconds for being so ragged out in public, he thought. All the more so since he couldn’t seem to get his hacking cough under control. He was trying, but a dull ache gripped his chest with every breath, as if his lungs had been squeezed too tight by the river.

He was so anxious about getting caught that he was still able to steadily put one foot in front of the other despite not having slept in twenty-four hours. He could tell, though, that he was going to crash if he didn’t get a chance to close his eyes soon. Wilson, too, was stumbling. They both needed to eat, at least, if they were going to be able to keep going. “Hey, where can we find food?”

“This way,” Wilson nodded, and they ducked around a parked water delivery truck to cross a street that was busier than the others, and busier than Solomon had anticipated this early in the morning. Pittsburgh had a decent downtown, but this place felt as if it was a downtown replicated in every direction for miles on end. An army of delivery drones buzzed overhead, and an entire parking-lot-worth of cars honked at every intersection. After a few blocks of this, he started to notice Korean lettering on the building signs around him. Wilson stopped in front of a set of sliding glass doors. “Go in and help yourself.”

“I don’t have any money,” Solomon replied.

Wilson shrugged. “It would be racist to call the police on you, so nobody’s going to stop you, especially if you’re just taking food. It’s just a property crime anyway, it doesn’t actually hurt anyone. Don’t get into a fight with someone or try to rape anyone, that’s all.”

Wilson had to be kidding him. Then again, he didn’t look like he had the energy to joke. Still, Solomon’s shoulders were tense as he entered the grocery store through the sliding glass doors. There were quite a few people inside already. It was surreal when their gazes slid right over him. He was dripping water everywhere and almost slipped and fell next to a stacked row of egg cartons.

He couldn’t find a plastic bag, so he took a mesh laundry bag laid flat on a shelf next to ceramic pans for sale, used his right hand to twist it so that it was upright, then moved back to the produce section and started filling it with strawberries, spinach, oranges, anything that could be eaten raw. In the freezer section, he found a packet of pre-cooked shrimp, which he added to the laundry bag. There were no water bottles for sale, so he took bottles of juice instead.

He wanted to take some cans too, but then he’d have to also take a can opener, and he was nervous enough about stealing like this. He’d stick to Wilson’s instructions and just get food. He was too tired to be able to think independently anymore anyway.

Finally Solomon finished loading up and was ready to leave. Would they really just let him walk out of there? He started making his way back to the sliding glass doors, avoiding eye contact with anyone. His left hand had been throbbing the entire time, but he was getting better at ignoring it, using his right hand only for everything. He was ten steps away, then nine, then eight. Was anybody going to say anything to him? Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the one cashier overlooking the robotic checkout centers rolling his eyes, but that was it. He knew Wilson wouldn’t send him anywhere to get caught, but this experience felt the most different from the red zone out of everything Solomon had seen so far.

He went through the sliding glass doors and was outside on the sidewalk again with Wilson. Wilson didn’t even look at him; he looked at the laundry bag of stolen food and reached out to pick up one of the handles. There was no way it was okay to start eating right outside the store he had just robbed, and for once Solomon’s instincts about the blue zone were correct, as Wilson told him they should move down the street.

Up ahead, built into the sidewalk, was a set of stairs going down underground. A girl was sitting halfway down the stairs, throwing up. They navigated around her. Wilson directed him to hop over a turnstile at the bottom of the steps, and he did so and walked onto an open tunnel platform with train tracks running along below it. The benches were filled with blue zone civilians, so it was the floor for them, which was fine. Solomon didn’t want to be near anyone else and accidentally catch their attention.

Wilson’s hands were shaking as he reached into the laundry bag. Solomon’s mouth was watering too, even though he had been getting enough in the kitchen to not feel hungry all the time. Neither of them said anything as they ate through almost everything he had taken until the laundry bag felt light again. They didn’t eat the orange peels, although Solomon did save them; he had been in the camp for too long to be able to throw out anything technically digestible.

Several times while they were eating, low rumbles reverberated through the ground, the sounds growing louder as faint glows emerged from deeper in the tunnel. Solomon had seen trains before, but the wind tugging at his hair and clothes while he was only a few feet away from headlights bearing down on him was new. Faces appeared in the windows of the train; some got off, and others standing around them got on. Wilson ignored them all. He was focused on the food.

Solomon, on the other hand, was getting extremely sleepy. He was still coughing, but it was a little better. He watched another train come and go, this time exchanging only a few passengers. There was nobody around them anymore. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, but he found himself reviewing each step he'd taken that had led them to escaping, as if he wasn’t sure they had actually happened. I went to the kitchen and the robot maid was shut down, I went up to the office with my mop, I broke my left hand to get inside, I memorized the guard schedule and camera map, I realized I was locked in, I found a Bible and a photograph of blue zone political leaders attending a Racial Justice Prayer Conference –

He stopped. “Sam.”

“Hm?”

There was nobody around them. He thought they could talk. Still, he lowered his voice to tell Wilson what he’d seen inside the office with the automatically sealing door. Wilson was listening, but Solomon could tell he wasn’t that interested, that his mind wasn’t on politics.

Solomon cared though. A lot. He’d always known that the power behind the throne in the red zone was Christians. And now he was wondering, was it the same in the blue zone? Maybe they were closeted Christians the way Manal had described, maybe they only talked about things like racial justice and not about abortion, but there was no other explanation for why there’d been a Bible in that woman’s office.

Solomon’s words were trailing off. His chest was tight. It had been such a long time since he had thought about anything other than either surviving or escaping the re-education camp that he didn’t even recognize at first how upset he was. Then the words burst out. “Why are we doing this to each other?”

“Doing what?” Wilson asked.

“We’re supposed to be the same family, the same body. Why are we fighting each other?”

He wanted to say more but he couldn’t think; he was about to lose it from lack of sleep. He wanted to find a way to tell Wilson, tell anyone who would listen, that this was wrong, that they shouldn’t have allied themselves with anyone but each other, that they should have picked each other first in any conflict. He wanted to cry out against the fact that they hadn’t.

Wilson gave him an extremely confused look. “Who are you talking about?”

“Christians,” Solomon responded.

Wilson glanced around and confirmed, again, that nobody was near enough to overhear them talking. “Why would they be different?”

Another train was coming, and it was too loud when they roared in to hear anyone say anything, so Solomon had a few minutes to try to come up with a response to Wilson’s question. It was hard when he was this tired. All he could feel was this searing sense of wrongness, this conviction that it shouldn’t be this way. But when the train left, Wilson was still looking at him, as if he was actually curious – maybe he felt better having eaten and drunk – so Solomon struggled for the words, struggled to put into shape what Umma and Dad had taught him about identity and self-worth and the love of God.

“The whole point of being Christian is that you believe God found you good enough to die for, even though you’re not. You believe that God loved you enough to die for you even though you didn’t deserve it. And that changes everything. You don’t have to prove yourself anymore, you don’t have to be better than anyone else anymore, don’t have to be more righteous, richer, don’t have to be smarter, don’t have to be more successful, more powerful, higher status because who you are is good enough by God’s grace.

“You’re supposed to be secure in that, secure enough to be free to let go of having to be enough, because you already are enough. You’re supposed to be able to love people because you have the space to, having been freed from having to spend your life in pursuit of being enough.”

There was more he wanted to say. He wanted to tell Wilson that there had been many kings who had required their people to die for them, but rare was the king who had died for his people. That gratitude, not conditioning, undergirded the obedience Christians owed to God. Yet they were so terrible at it! And God wasn’t even stupid the way the militia was! Maybe the Church needed a boot camp to learn how to obey the most basic of commands: love one another.

But when he opened his mouth to continue, Wilson cut him off. “I didn’t realize you were going to give me a sermon. Now is not the time. You almost drowned, you need to sleep, and I need to fix the bandage on your hand. Let’s get on the next train.”

The next train was already pulling up into the tunnel, the wind tugging at Solomon's clothes as he got to his feet. He was still upset, but he followed Wilson into a nearly empty car. Wilson had them sit down in a corner where there were only two seats next to each other. Their clothes were still wet from the river. The bandage on Solomon’s hand was also waterlogged. He had to grit his teeth when Wilson untied it, and it was even worse when Wilson wrapped it back onto his hand after wringing it out. He wanted to close his eyes, escape from the pain as best as he could, but when he looked at Wilson he thought Wilson should take his turn first. The man looked like death.

“You sleep,” Solomon said.

Wilson shook his head. “You’ve been up for a lot longer.”

Solomon was too tired to argue with him. “Fifteen minutes,” he told Wilson. And then he closed his eyes, and was out.