Red Zone Son

Chapter 8

As expected, Solomon simply got up and walked out of the medical hut while the nurse was tending to another patient. Evidently its one-track mind was not up to the challenge of stopping him. And after sleeping for a whole day straight on a bed he didn’t have to make, he felt good enough to return to duty. If he could avoid running into a smoke session on the way, he could sleep for another full night on top of that. With that rest and the antibiotics still working in his system, maybe he would manage to survive another week.

He made it. Soon enough, he was lying on top of his covers reading one of Adah’s letters while the other guys around him made crude jokes and boasted about their sex lives. The only people not participating were him, Hyeon-Ju, who he’d known before from church, and one or two others whose reasons were less clear to him.

Brandon, another friend from church, wasn’t there. He’d come down with something serious enough to warrant a hospital stay off base. Kevin, who Solomon knew from school, had gone to sick bay the day before Solomon and hadn’t come back yet.

Solomon didn’t have any locker room stories to share. Not that he would’ve shared any even if he had them. Both would go against his faith. Sometimes he wished he’d ended up in one of the militia training camps further north where the culture was more religious, but then again, those camps were a lot more White.

Almost everyone at this base had been pulled from the city of Pittsburgh itself. Almost all of them had been drafted. On average, they were more like him than draftees in any out camp could be. Even so, many of them seemed to be adjusting to basic training better than Solomon had. He wished they’d keep it down, though. If they annoyed the duty drill sergeant, the man would force them outside to roll around in the frozen mud before sending them back to bed all dirty.

“Hey battle,” someone called to him from across the aisle.

He glanced up at the recruit. “What?”

“Did you hear about what happened to Rithvik?”

Solomon shook his head as casually as he could. He didn’t want to reveal that Rithvik had confided in him. The recruit continued, “I saw the drills giving him some wall-to-wall counseling in a holding cell earlier today. I guess he tried to run, and they caught him.” He snorted. “Wouldn’t want to be him right now.”

He didn’t know what response to give, but he was saved by the barracks door opening. Putting Adah’s letter down, he mentally prepared himself to be yelled at to go outside into the cold when he saw Rithvik in the entranceway. He could tell at once from Rithvik’s limp and the way he was holding himself that he was badly hurt.

The barracks fell silent. Rithvik didn’t say anything either. He just crawled into his rack next to Solomon. The racks were close enough together that he could see Rithvik’s left eye was swollen shut. Solomon had gotten a black eye the first time he’d gone out to the firing range and underestimated the recoil of his rifle. But Rithvik’s looked worse, and it was just one of the many bruises lining his face.

Solomon had spent the last several weeks despising him, but it all washed away in a sudden rush of pity. I’m sorry, he wanted to tell him. They broke me too. You’re not alone.

Nobody spoke as the lights out taps began playing. Everyone else was either asleep or pretending to be, so Solomon rolled over as quietly as he could and put his hand on Rithvik’s shoulder. And in the silence, Rithvik started to sob. He cut himself off almost immediately, but Solomon waited until he thought his battle buddy was asleep before he pulled back into his own bed to catch whatever shut-eye the drills would let them have.

***

You weren’t supposed to talk during fireguard duty. But there was nothing to guard against except the actual firewatch drone sneaking up on you to make sure you weren’t asleep, so when Rithvik and Solomon got assigned together, he asked him what happened. It wasn’t much of an escape. Rithvik told him he’d climbed over the fence and gotten down to the other side only to get caught right away by a smart camera that had flagged his movement.

“Then they took me to a holding cell. They showed me a video someone filmed at a prison labor camp and told me they were going to let me experience what being there was like.”

He fell silent. Solomon waited a few minutes to make sure there were no drones around, then replied, “Well, that was nice of them.”

Rithvik shot him a you’re crazy look. But Solomon hadn’t been kidding. “They could’ve just sent you to a prison camp instead of showing you what it was going to be like, and gotten another soldier via the draft lottery. One who doesn’t suck as much as you do.” He knew he was being harsh, but he kept going. “They must want you to make it.”

Rithvik turned away from him. “I’m going to die in here.”

“Probably a 30% chance you die in here, yeah,” Solomon replied. He was making up the numbers, but they seemed close enough. If this were the old US military he’d have said, OK, a million guys have made it through before, we probably will too. Solomon should be at least tough enough for that. But the Westsylvania Zone Militia wasn’t even a year old, and it didn’t publish its training death stats.

Not only that, it was clear from all the trash talk floating around that everyone here was highly motivated to prove they were tougher than the blue zone antifas. Rithvik was smart enough to have picked up on that.

“But it’s what, a 90% chance you die in a prison labor camp? And a 100% chance you die if you kill yourself. So you pick. The math is simple.” Rithvik didn’t say anything, so Solomon continued and hoped he was listening. “As for the drills? Maybe they think you can make it through boot camp if you could climb a twelve-foot fence after getting smoked for three hours.”

Rithvik still didn’t say anything. He stayed silent for the rest of fireguard duty, which was probably better anyway since they really weren’t supposed to talk anyway. At the end of it though, when they were turning in, he suddenly looked Solomon right in the eyes. “Thanks,” he said. “And for what it’s worth, if you made it this far despite getting smoked all the time because of me, I think that means you can make it to the end too.”

***

Solomon wasn’t sure Rithvik was right about his chances. The physical training was going better since he’d gotten the robot nurse’s medicine, and he was even learning to let all the shouting just wash over him. But he still couldn’t handle it when they made him do anything embarrassing. Being ordered to climb in and out of a dumpster as fast as he could for an hour felt humiliating, especially since it was punishment for pissing himself. After being forced to down a full canteen and denied a bathroom break for the rest of the day, what else was his body going to do? When Solomon wrote to Adah about what boot camp was like, he always left those stories out.

Some of the other guys didn’t seem to care. Solomon would hear them laugh about being told to sing showtunes while crab-walking in their underwear around the barracks, but he burned up inside whenever he was ordered to do anything like that. The worst part was that every drill instructor seemed to have a sixth sense for exactly how much he hated it. One of the All-White drills nicknamed him Uppity. He was just doing that because Solomon was half-Black, but when it caught on with all the other instructors something inside him hesitated, and he started to wonder if it might be true. Did he really think he was above being punished like everyone else?

Wilson never called him Uppity, but out of all the instructors he was the most creative when it came to punishments. He was the one who’d had Solomon and several other recruits in and out of the dumpster until he thought he was going to puke from the stench. “Focus, maggot! Focus!” Wilson would yell at him. Even though basic training was brutal for everyone, regardless of the drill instructor or recruit, Solomon couldn’t shake the feeling that Wilson was using the general harshness as a cover for payback. Solomon hadn’t told anyone yet but there were times when he got so angry that he wanted to let everyone know just how easy it was to fool Wilson by pretending to be a girl online.

Still, Solomon couldn’t forget how Wilson, despite not owing him anything, had stayed out late in the cold to answer all his questions by the Schenley Oval Tent. Wilson might be his enemy now, but he hadn’t been then. Enduring whatever punishment Wilson threw at him while keeping quiet about their initial encounter was the only honorable thing Solomon could do.

Solomon didn’t really know Wilson, nor did he understand what had been going through the man’s head when they first met, but a strategy of patience had worked with Rithvik, hadn’t it? He’d tough it out with Wilson too, no matter how hard it got.

At least Adah hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said she’d write to him every day. Thank God. Her letters were the only thing getting him through. Sometimes the mail drones were delayed, and he got no letters one day and two the next. But he’d never gone longer than two days without getting called up for mail. By this point he banged out the twenty push-ups required for each letter. Solomon knew now the drills would find literally any excuse to smoke them, and at least the letters made it worth it.

But one day, Wilson called him up from where he was sitting on the barracks floor with everyone else, only to hand him a package. Solomon’s heart sank. All packages had to be opened and searched during mail call so nobody could sneak in any contraband. It was a slim package, not much thicker than the manila envelope that held the single-use screen that had gotten him into the mess he was in now. Wilson told him to open it and dump everything inside onto the floor. Solomon complied, and out tumbled an oversize bag of sour gummy worms along with several pages of a letter.

“Pick it up, private,” Wilson said.

Something terrible was going to happen when Solomon picked it up. He just knew it. It was hard to hold back his dread. Wilson held out his hand and Solomon started to hand him the candy but he knocked it to the side; it fell down to the ground again. “The letter.”

Solomon handed him the pages. They were from Adah, they had to be, there was nobody else who would write to him. And when Wilson started to read it out loud, he barely managed to keep from flinching.

“Dear Solo,” Wilson read, his voice rising into a mocking female tone. “I prayed for you like you asked me to that you wouldn’t get injured or sick again. Aw, that’s real nice, Solo, you asked your girlfriend to pray that you wouldn’t get an ouchie?”

Solomon’s face was flushing. “Yes, sir,” he said. He could sense amusement from the other recruits sitting on the floor in front of them but he forced himself to hold still.

Wilson kept on reading it. “I know you’re going to tell me I shouldn’t have bought the candy, that we don’t have enough money for it, but it’s not from your pay, so don’t worry. One of my friends really liked the way I did her nails so she told her older sister about me, and her older sister told her friends, and one of them asked me to do her nails for her and I told her I’d do them for twenty dollars. She actually paid! And before you tell me not to spend it all, I didn’t. I bought your candy and that’s it, I promise. I needed the rest anyway to finish paying the water bill. But I know sour gummy worms are your favorite so I got you a big pack to last the rest of basic training.”

Wilson looked at him, eyebrows raised. It took all of Solomon’s studied resolve not to hit him. Having everyone hear about how much Adah was struggling because he was getting paid barely nothing to climb in and out of dumpsters was even worse than getting smoked all day. But Wilson didn’t stop. “I’m doing great, though. You shouldn’t worry so much about me. The only thing that’s annoying is having to take the bus everywhere. I wish I had my driver’s license so I could use the car. Only two more years! I’ll drive you around then.”

At that, Wilson paused. “Your girlfriend sounds kind of young, private.”

“No, sir,” Solomon replied.

“What?”

“She’s not my girlfriend, sir.”

“Then who the hell is she?”

“My sister, sir.”

“Is she hot?”

Solomon didn’t reply. He was barely able to hold himself back. His fists were clenched; he saw Wilson’s eyes glance down at his balled-up hands. Wilson took a step closer to him and asked, real quiet, “Are you angry, private?”

What was Solomon supposed to say to that? Lie and say no, sir, when his rage was plain to see? Or confess to being angry to Wilson’s face?

“Yes, sir,” he whispered.

Wilson reached out and smacked him across the face with Adah’s letter. “Pick up your candy, private.”

Solomon obeyed.

“Open it.”

He did.

“Eat it.”

Solomon’s insides were quivering but he pulled a gummy worm out of the bag and ate it. “Faster!” Wilson barked at him. “Faster!” Solomon started shoving handfuls into his mouth. He thought about Adah painting some girl’s nails so she could buy him this extra-large bag of his favorite candy and he knew that he would never tell her about what had happened as a result. He would take this story to his grave.

By the time Solomon was done choking down the bag, he already felt nauseous, but then Wilson ordered him to drink two full canteens of water. He chugged them down with Wilson yelling in his ear. Then it was push-up time, twenty for the letter and another forty for the package. Even while he was doing them he could tell he was going to be sick, that it was only a matter of time before everything was going to come back up again, but he desperately hoped his body would wait until mail call was over and Wilson was gone.

And for once, God answered this prayer with an outright “yes.” Literally the second the barracks door closed Solomon was sprinting for the bathroom and heaving up acidic chunks of gummy worms and water. It was a miracle he made it to a toilet on time. Thank God. He didn’t think he could have borne having Wilson force everyone else to clean up his puke knowing how they would all mock him for it.

Once Solomon was done, he knelt on the tiled floor next to the toilet. He felt as if he’d run a mile while getting punched in the stomach. There were no stalls or doors so the other guys who were coming in to use the head passed by him and his vomit-filled bowl. He sensed someone behind him. He turned his head to see Rithvik. “You dropped your letter,” Rithvik told him, and held out the pages that Wilson had handed back to him after he’d drank the canteens.

Solomon pulled himself to his feet. He managed to thank Rithvik and to take the letter back. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then stared at Adah’s neat handwriting filling up the pages. He’d have to find a way to tell her not to send him any more packages.