Red Zone Son

Chapter 10

Inside the visitor control center at the entrance of the base, Solomon waited with Rithvik and some other soldiers in the reception room. An officer had told the soldiers to arrange it so that they were spread apart, each soldier in a folding chair with a small folding table in front of them, and two more folding chairs on the other side of the table. Only two guests were allowed during this visit. Not that it mattered for Solomon, but Rithvik had said only his parents were coming since his grandmother and younger brother couldn’t join them.

Solomon flicked his thumb toward the cast on Rithvik’s leg. “How is it?” Apparently at some point during the Field Training Exercise he’d developed a stress fracture, which meant he’d been marching on a broken leg for that last stretch back. And this on top of his lung inflammation, which he’d had to get medevac’d for as soon as they’d arrived back at the base camp. Rithvik had told him when he’d woken up at the hospital he’d been surprised to still be alive. I get it, Solomon had replied. I’m kind of surprised you are too.

“It’s fine,” Rithvik said. “My parents are going to flip out, though, when they see it. I wasn’t very specific in my letters about what it was like here. They were upset enough when I got drafted.”

“As long as they don’t try to complain to anyone about it.”

Rithvik gave a soft laugh. “They know better than that, by now. We all do.”

Solomon knew what Rithvik meant. They both knew their parents had chosen a red zone to live in for a reason, but that didn’t mean they liked how authoritarian it was here. Checkpoints everywhere, barely any due process, severe restrictions on speech, ruled by a stratocracy… Umma and Dad’s stories of pre-Splintering America always made it sound so much freer.

At least they didn’t live in a blue zone. From the classes they’d taken during boot camp, blue zoners seemed to live under even more restrictions. That matched what Solomon remembered reading once: in communist regimes, you couldn’t live your life normally – you always had to be political – while in fascist regimes, you could live more freely as long as you stayed out of politics. In Westsylvania, it felt more like the latter.

Unless you were a soldier, of course. Their lives belonged to the militia. They had no right to demand anything. Not even a pass to go home for a little, despite having a week-long break before being sent out either to sentry duty on the border or into advanced training. It sucked. Thirty minutes to talk to Adah across a table didn’t feel like enough after eight weeks of only letters.

“I wish they’d given us a few days of leave,” Solomon said. “But I guess they’re still afraid we’ll run off and go into hiding.”

Rithvik laughed again. “Even I probably would, to be honest.” He shook his head. “Feel more like a prisoner than a soldier, sometimes.”

I guess we all remember the old America enough to feel like we should at least have done something wrong for our choices to be taken away from us, Solomon wanted to say. But the conversation had gone far enough into the danger zone. The visitor control center was almost certainly bugged, or so he suspected.

Before Solomon could come up with something else to say, the door to the waiting room opened. He could tell the first visitors were Rithvik’s parents from the way their frantic gazes zeroed in on him. His mother was crying. Watching her embrace Rithvik made something sharp twist inside Solomon. Umma used to joke with him that after he got married and left the house she’d still visit him all the time until he grew sick of her. She used to tell him that she’d always be there to listen to him even if nobody else was. If you’re lonely, or sad, or stressed, call me, she’d said. I’ll always pick up for you.

Solomon took a deep breath and forced his gaze back to the door. Adah! Beaming at him as if he were the Second Coming or something. He felt a huge smile spread across his face. Her sheer joy was like a burst of sunshine. When she bounded up to his table, he stood to give her a hug. She grabbed him around the waist and buried her face in his chest. It felt like a full five minutes before she let go. Then she looked up at him. “Solo, you got huge!” she squealed. She poked his upper arm. “You used to be skinny!”

By now Solomon was grinning his head off. “They made us eat a lot if we came in underweight.”

They held each other, still standing, still grinning. He was happy just to be looking at her, but he told her to sit down. She looked tired, actually, now that he’d had a few minutes to examine her. “Are you doing okay?” he asked.

Adah hesitated. “I just miss you so much,” she finally said. “I’m okay, though, I really am, I don’t want you to worry. Alice’s mom found out that you were at basic training and that I was alone, so she’s been having me over for dinner and helping me out. Alice’s brother got drafted too, a year ago I think, so I guess she felt bad for me.”

Alice was one of Adah’s friends at school, the one with all the freckles. He’d met her once. “Tell her I said thank you,” he said.

Solomon could tell Adah was blinking back tears. “Will they ever let you come back home?”

He reached over the table to take her hands. He knew he shouldn’t promise her that he’d come back. With Umma and Dad’s absence pressing like a boot on his throat, he knew that he couldn’t keep that promise. But something had changed since he’d left for basic. He didn’t know what it was exactly. Maybe he felt more confident. Yeah, that was it. He did feel more confident. The militia had taken a lot from him, and it was going to take a lot from him still, maybe even his life, but they’d given him something too. He now knew he could handle a whole lot more than he’d thought he could. He was a whole lot stronger than he’d used to be, stronger than he’d ever thought he could be.

So he held Adah’s hands, and met her eyes. “As long as I’m alive, I’ll come home to you,” he said. And from the way she relaxed a little, from the slight easing of her shoulders, Solomon could tell that she believed him.

***

After that life settled into a pattern. Sentry duty for three months, then a week off, during which Adah came and visited him at the base, and then back to sentry duty for another three months. Other than the hazing he went through for being new, the first ninety days he was stationed alongside the Susquehanna River all blended into each other. He spent most of his free time reading.

Not just for fun, though. If there was one thing Solomon had learned from his eight weeks at boot camp, it was that he’d been stupidly unprepared for it. He’d already kicked himself during basic for not having spent every second between getting his draft notice and showing up to the base asking the bot search agent for tips. Now that he was out, he was finding almost everything he’d gone through had been described online already. His conclusion: he couldn’t predict what was going to happen to him, but he could read every InfoVerse ebook available on military history.

Things got a little more exciting when he got shifted to the western side of the zone. When the Great Splintering happened, the Columbus and Cleveland blue zones managed to link up, but a good chunk of what used to be southeastern Ohio and a bit of West Virginia joined in with the Westsylvania red zone militias. Maybe it was because there wasn’t a river clearly marking the boundary as there was in the east, but there were more firefights on this side. It was still mostly just sitting on a hilltop behind a parapet, staring at a blue zone squad sitting behind their parapet on another hilltop half a mile away, but one night there were loud bangs and everyone started running around. Nobody seemed to know what was happening, though, and in the end, he never found out.

When he returned to base after his three months in Ohio, he got good news. If a soldier agreed to wear an electronic ankle shackle, he could go home during his week off. Solomon was literally the first in line to get one. He didn’t tell Adah in advance in case they changed their minds at the last second. The look on her face when he showed up at home was priceless – her surprise and joy hit him right in the chest, making the moment feel even more rewarding than he had imagined.

It felt good to be out of the barracks. Over the past few years, they had steadily filled with new draftees; the ranks, once manageable, were now swelling to the point of bursting. Solomon bet that was why the militia had decided to set up the ankle shackle program in the first place, to clear the seasoned soldiers out and get some space back.

He spent most of his time at home sleeping, charging his shackle, eating whatever Adah made, and fixing things around the house. He found out that the bathroom faucet had been leaking since he’d left for boot camp when Adah showed him the pan she’d been using to collect the water. “I tried to tighten the connections, I found a video online about it and the bot search agent gave me the steps, but I just couldn’t apply enough pressure.” The front door also: he adjusted its hinges so that it didn’t scrape on the floor anymore.

By the time Solomon’s week was done, he’d tightened and screwed and wrenched back together everything that had come loose while he’d been gone. Adah was very happy about all the fixes. She kept opening and closing the front door and exclaiming about how smooth it was. He was glad she was happy. He was glad he’d been able to come back, even though leaving again was hard. He really didn’t like her being alone. At least the neighborhood seemed to be filling up again, with refugees from blue zones taking over the houses abandoned by those who’d fled. The refugees had come with nothing, so he was sure they were glad to be handed homes already fully furnished, especially the families with kids.

On his way back to base, Solomon kept thinking about kids, and realized that he eventually had to figure out Adah’s future. He was getting paid more now than he was during boot camp, but it still wasn’t much, not enough to pay for college tuition. Did Adah really need to go to college, though? The red zones didn’t look down on a girl getting educated past high school, but they didn’t encourage it either.

Solomon remembered Umma saying once that one good thing about the red zone was that they didn’t sneer at girls who wanted a domestic life. In basic he’d been taught that blue zoners didn’t even have marriage at all as blue zones didn’t require government approval for committed relationships.

In Westsylvania, there’d been a big political argument over divorce, abortion, and sex when the Great Splintering first happened, and it had taken forever for the red zone secularist and Christian military leaders to agree to a coalition compromise. Solomon wasn’t sure how other red zones ran things, but in the Westsylvania zone they ended up banning abortion completely. They also split marriages into two types, secular and Christian, with the latter being undissolvable.

You could still have sex with anybody who would have you. The secularists refused to back down on that one.

But he didn’t really want to think about that, didn’t want to think about Adah getting married. She was only fourteen. He didn’t even want to think about him getting married. What, so he could have a son and then disappear on him, leaving him to figure things out by himself? No thanks. Taking care of Adah was enough for him.

And so Solomon did. Another three months along the river, and then a week off at home, and then another three months in Ohio, and then a week at home, and then he was not quite nineteen and a half when he got the order to come in to train for a mission into a blue zone.