Red Zone Son

Chapter 47

In the end, getting across to the red zone with Manal orchestrating it was the easiest thing in the world. They got into a car, and after several hours of driving north into upstate New York, their driver was waved on by presumably bribed border guards. The driver left them at that point, but before he did, he handed them two coach tickets and programmed the AI to take over driving them to a nearby bus stop where they would catch an overnight bus to Pittsburgh.

Not straight there, of course; the bus would stick to the northern counties near the Great Lakes and come down south only when they were well west of the Susquehanna, but as far as zones were considered, they were back in the red.

Outside, the weather was crisp and cool. Wilson had taken a long time to recover, the rest of the summer and half the fall. Solomon was enjoying being outside for the first time in months, and he thought Wilson was too. For a while, they both gazed out the window at the trees decked in red and gold before sleeping through the rest of the bus ride to the station in downtown Pittsburgh.

It was when they got off that the trouble started. Solomon had no money on him, so he couldn’t buy a city bus pass, but that was okay, he could walk the two hours it took to get from downtown to his neighborhood. But Wilson didn’t want to let him. “We have to return to the militia base,” he said.

Solomon laughed. “I’m not doing that. I’m going to see Adah.”

“No, you’re not,” Wilson said. “You’re coming with me.”

They were standing in the parking lot of the bus depot. A line of trees with their leaves turning orange and red grew next to the sidewalk Solomon had been headed to before Wilson had stopped him. He looked at Wilson, incredulous. The man thought after a year and a half of being gone with no contact with Adah whatsoever that Solomon was going to go back to the militia base first? So what, they could detain him indefinitely while they interrogated him about his time in the blue zone camps? Or worse, accuse him of only having escaped by agreeing to become a double agent?

No thanks. They had been away for long enough. Solomon could see Adah first, and then think about the best way to face the music.

But Wilson was standing in front of him. He didn’t say anything, but it was clear from the way he’d positioned himself that he wasn’t going to let Solomon just walk past him. Looking at Wilson, all Solomon could think about was how naive the man was to believe the red zone militia would just accept him back, no questions asked, no problems raised.

Wilson must have felt the same way about Solomon in the transit prison, watching him take every aspect of re-education so seriously. Solomon had been defenseless at first against their lies. But not here. He had grown up in the red zone and knew exactly how they lied on this side of the river.

Solomon tried to move around him, but Wilson actually shoved him back. He was furious at once. Was he actually going to have to fight him about this? Because he would. It was a cool pre-dawn, and once the rest of the passengers from the bus left the depot, there wouldn’t be anyone around to call the militia’s police line. It would have to be fast as the red zone didn’t tolerate even half a percent as much disorder as the blue zone seemed to, but that was fine, he could take him down fast. Wilson wasn’t on death’s door anymore, but he was still not even close to 100%. Most of the fall had been Solomon reading books and doing stationary exercises inside the apartment while Wilson slept. Wilson had had to come back from a much worse position than Solomon.

Remembering that gave Solomon pause. They hadn’t been able to keep the robotic nurse, so it had been Solomon caring for Wilson, helping him eat, helping him to the bathroom, helping him wash until he was strong enough to do it by himself. Maybe Wilson was remembering that too, because Solomon could see his stance softening.

Neither one of them wanted to fight each other. They both owed each other too much.

“I just want to tell Adah I’m alive,” Solomon found himself saying. “I’ll go back to the base with you after that.”

Wilson still didn’t like it, Solomon could tell, but he finally shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go get my car, then.”

“You have a car?”

“Yes, I bought it after I joined the militia. There’s a parking garage the militia took over that I was allowed to keep it in. Hopefully they didn’t remove it when I went missing.”

Solomon doubted it. From Wilson’s stories about the militia’s administrative problems, he bet nobody had even noticed Wilson’s car sitting there gathering dust for over a year. And he was right. It was a very old car, pre-AI, but not so old that it didn’t have a passcode option to unlock and start up. They did have to wait for it to charge a little, but once it had enough juice, Wilson got into the driver’s seat, and Solomon got in front next to him. Instead of having to walk two hours, it took them less than fifteen minutes to go from the faster commercial streets to the sleepier residential ones.

Solomon didn’t talk to Wilson on the way other than to tell him how to get there. He was extremely eager to see Adah, to reassure her, to make sure she was okay. He knew he had told Wilson he would go back to the base with him after speaking to her, but he wanted to see if there was a way he could delay it further. He doubted Wilson would listen to anything he had to say about how they couldn’t trust the red zone militia to do right by them, though.

It was still pretty early in the morning when they finally got there, and there was nobody else outside when Solomon was finally standing on the sidewalk in front of his house. Every inch of it looked achingly familiar. There was the little lawn he used to mow with a push mower. There was the tree out front that he would take dead branches down from with a rope. There was Adah’s bedroom window up above the garage.

He was anticipating what she was going to say to him, he was anticipating seeing her joy, he was anticipating getting to eat some childhood meal with her. How old was she now? Sixteen, almost seventeen? He went up to the front door, rang the doorbell, and stepped back, relishing the moment she would appear.

But she didn’t. Instead of Adah’s head peering out around the door, there was a man opening it, a White man. Solomon stared at him, confused. This was his house. This was where he last left Adah. What was this man doing inside it?

“Can I help you?” the man asked.

“Who are you?” Solomon demanded. “What are you doing in my house? Where’s my sister?”

A look of incredible fear flashed across the man’s face. He tried to close the door on Solomon, but Solomon moved faster and shoved it open even farther with his shoulder. The man stepped backward, trying to get away, and Solomon saw all the furniture he’d grown up with was still there in the living room: the off-white couches, the rugs, the dining table farther back. A White woman was sitting at the table, her left hand frozen around a coffee mug that she was apparently drinking from, her right hand gripping her phone.

What was going on? Where was Adah?

“It’s the militia’s reclamation policy,” the man was babbling, backing away from Solomon. “To take over empty houses, houses left empty by those who fled to the blue zones.”

“This house wasn’t empty,” Solomon told him, still unable to understand what was going on. “My sister was living in it. Where is she?”

He could hear Wilson stepping in through the front door behind him. He didn’t turn around to look at him. He wanted to know where Adah was. He wanted to know what happened to her. Had this man done something to her? Solomon moved toward him, wanting to shake an answer out of him.

The man blanched. “We thought you were dead!” he squealed. “She got a letter saying you were dead!”

At that, Solomon reached for him with both hands. “What did you do to her?” he snarled. The man was backing away from him, the dining table stopping him from escaping any farther. Then he felt Wilson at his side, pulling him back, putting himself between Solomon and this man who he couldn’t look at without seeing shafts of red coloring the air.

“He just wants to know where his sister is,” Solomon heard Wilson say. “If you tell us that, we’ll leave you and never come back. We just want to know where she is.”

“We didn’t hurt her. We dropped her off at the nunnery, the new one, the one the church just opened,” the man was saying. “She’s fine, we didn’t hurt her, we helped her, we took care of her, we –”

Before he knew it, Solomon was cursing at the man in a way he’d never done before, not in boot camp, not out on mission, not even in the re-education camp. He knew the man was lying. You don’t kick a girl out of her own home because you’re taking care of her. Solomon could already tell what had happened. They’d seen his house, they’d liked it, they’d stolen it, and they’d thrown Adah out.

And he was going to kill them for it.

He could do it. He didn’t need a weapon. He could kill them both right now, he could do it so quickly and so easily. He shifted to move around Wilson, but Wilson had turned around and was facing him now, putting his arms out. That was fine, there was no way he could stop Solomon. But then Wilson put his arms around him and his face in his, speaking in low but clear tones.

“We are not in the blue zone anymore, Solo. That lady is on the phone with the police right now, and they will come, and they will arrest you. Come out to the car with me so we can go get your sister.” Then he added, a little louder, “We can always come back and kill them later.”

Solomon’s chest was heaving. Only the thought of Adah still out there allowed him to let Wilson pull him away. Wilson took him back to his car, which he had parked out front. He was standing by the driver’s seat, unlocking it, and Solomon was about to get into the passenger’s seat again when Wilson looked past him, behind him, and snapped, “Get in the back and get down.”

Solomon didn’t hesitate. He was too tall to lie down straight, so after he threw himself in and pulled the door shut, he folded himself on his side while Wilson took off. Solomon saw him looking in the rearview mirror several times, but he guessed the police or whoever it was that had shown up wasn’t following them because after several uphill turns, Wilson relaxed.

“What’s a nunnery?” he asked Solomon.

“I don’t know,” Solomon replied, his jaw clenched. He was still seething. “He said the church set it up, so go get on the parkway; the church is on the north side of the Allegheny River.”

Wilson did, and Solomon told him where to turn when he needed to. It was a Tuesday morning, so the church parking lot was empty enough to pull into easily. They got out, and Solomon caught a glimpse of Wilson’s face. It was troubled. “He said your sister got a letter saying you were dead?”

Solomon could still barely manage to keep his voice steady. “I guess.”

“A letter from the militia?”

“Maybe.”

Wilson closed his door. He didn’t speak to Solomon as they crossed the parking lot to enter the church. Solomon wasn’t thinking about him, though, he was focused on one thing. If he didn’t find Adah safe and unharmed, nothing would save that couple from his fury.